12 The Family Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

girl?”
    “There’s no hurry,” I said. “I want someone who’ll be just right. I’d rather wait.”
    “Of course you would.”
    “So did you already place Hettie Black, Mrs. Hartmann?” Sarah asked.
    “Oh, yes. Snapped up instantly. She would have been good,” Mrs. Hartmann said. She had me write down my name and address. “I’ll have a note sent to you the moment I find a suitable girl,” she said.
    We were about to leave when it occurred to me that Mrs. Hartmann was the perfect person to ask about Maureen O’Byrne.
    “You keep a list of past clients, presumably?” I started to say when there came a scream from the street below.
    “My baby! Someone has taken my baby!”

 
    Three
    We rushed over to the window. Below us we could see a young woman, fair-haired and attired in the usual white shirtwaist and cotton skirt of the Lower East Side, looking around desperately, her light eyes wide with terror.
    “My baby!” She screamed again. “She was here. In her carriage. I left her for a second while I went into the butcher’s and now she’s gone.”
    Instantly there was chaos as the crowd closed in around her. We didn’t wait a second longer but went down the stairs as fast as we could, then were caught up in the crowd and swept across the street to the young woman. She was gesturing to a battered baby carriage that was now empty, apart from a crudely made cloth rabbit and one knitted bootie.
    Older women had already come to her side to calm her screams. One of the nuns we had seen was first to reach her, patting her shoulder with a comforting meaty hand. “Don’t fret, my dear,” she said in a strong Irish accent. “Perhaps someone from your family picked the baby up. Perhaps she was crying and one of your other children is carrying her around.”
    “I don’t have other children. She’s my only child.” Her eyes continued to dart up and down the street. “Who can have done this? Where have they taken her? My baby. Somebody find my baby for me.”
    I felt a wave of terror, of almost physical sickness, come over me and as if in response my own baby gave an almighty kick. I clutched at a lamppost to steady myself. Sarah had gone ahead of me, pushing through to the center of the little group. “Somebody go and find the constable,” she said. “And you children—spread out. Go and look to see if you spot anybody running away with a baby. They can’t have gone too far with her.”
    “Does anyone have smelling salts?” the nun demanded. “This poor woman is about to pass out.”
    Sarah rummaged in her delicate little purse and produced hers. The nun proceeded to wave them under the woman’s nose. For once I could almost have used them myself. But I got a grip on myself and stepped forward. “Did anybody see a person near the baby carriage? Did anyone see someone carrying a baby away?”
    Heads were shaken.
    “You see people carrying babies all the time,” a small girl answered. She spoke with a trace of Italian accent and had the black hair and big dark eyes that betrayed her ancestry and the fact that this quarter was known as Little Italy. She looked no older than seven or eight but she herself had a squirming toddler on her hip. “We have to take the babies out and look after them so mother can clean up the apartment. Stop it, Guido,” she added as the toddler wriggled even harder. “You’re not getting down.”
    The woman was no longer screaming but sobbing, her thin body shaking with great gulps.
    “It’s another of those kidnappings they’re talking about,” a woman next to me muttered.
    I turned to ask her what she meant when the crowd parted and two constables pushed their way toward the distraught woman.
    “Stand aside please!” one of them bellowed. “Move back now. Go on, about your business, all of you.” The crowd backed up a little as his bully club was brought out. He reached the woman. “Now, what’s happened here?”
    Fifty people tried to talk at once,