sorry. You seem like a natural with Tommy, too.”
His kind words enabled her to smile back. “Thank you.” But a glance up to the man seated beside her indicated that answers were the only thing that was going to soften that empirical focus zeroed in on her. He was this baby’s champion, and nothing short of the entire truth was going to satisfy him. “I think... Tommy...” She stroked her fingertip over his tiny lips, and they instinctively moved to latch on, even though he was asleep. “I have no idea who the father is. But I think he belongs to my foster daughter, Diana Kozlow.”
Niall’s posture relaxed a fraction, although that stern focus remained. “The woman whose name you kept calling out.”
Lucy nodded. “Technically, she’s my former foster daughter. Diana was with me for six years until she aged out of the system. She’s twenty now. We kept in touch for a year or so. But I lost contact with her after that. She changed her number, changed her job. I had no idea she’d gotten pregnant.” She nodded toward the screwdriver on the coffee table. “I gave that to her in a tool set one Christmas. I guess she broke into my apartment to leave the baby with me. Probably took the twenty I had stashed in my knitting basket. She called me out of the blue yesterday—said she had something she wanted to show me. I invited her for lunch today, but she never came. I tried calling the number she used, but the phone went straight to voice mail.”
She rocked back and forth, ever so subtly, soothing the infant as he began to stir. “I went to my office to look up her most recent address and phone number to make sure I had it right—and discovered she’d left me a pretty disturbing message on my answering machine there. I’ve been out looking for her ever since. One of the neighbors at the last address where I knew her to live said Diana had a boyfriend move in with her about six months ago. She never knew his name, so that was a dead end. Shortly after that they moved to Carmody Street, she thought—”
“Carmody?” The elder Watson muttered a curse under his breath. “That’s not a good part of town. You didn’t go there to look for her by yourself, did you? At the police department, we call that part of town no-man’s-land.”
“I can believe it.” The two men exchanged a grim look. “No one there recognized Diana, and they couldn’t tell me the boyfriend’s name, either. I wasn’t sure where to look after that. How does a young woman just...disappear?” Lucy’s thoughts drifted to all the morbid possibilities that had driven her to search for Diana. “Why wouldn’t she keep Tommy with her? Why wouldn’t she stay at my place with him if she was in trouble?”
“If she’s the mother,” Niall cautioned. “We’d have to blood-type him and run DNA on both mother and son to be certain.”
A DNA test couldn’t tell Lucy what she already knew in her heart. “He looks like her—the shape of his face, the thick dark hair. What color are his eyes?”
Thomas shrugged. “You know, I don’t remem—”
“Brown,” Niall answered.
Lucy glanced up when he reached around her to tuck in the tiny fist that had pushed free of the blanket. She didn’t mind Niall’s unvarnished tone quite so much this time. He’d put his clinical eye for detail to work on doing whatever was best for this baby. “Diana has brown eyes.”
Niall’s startling blue gaze shifted to hers for a moment before he blinked and rose from the couch. He paced to the kitchen archway before turning to ask, “Did you save that message?”
Lucy nodded.
The two men exchanged a suspicious sort of glance before Thomas picked up a notepad and pen from the table beside the recliner. Niall adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose before splaying his fingers at his waist and facing her. “Maybe you’d better tell me more about your friend Diana. And why you thought she might be dead.”
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