Angie reached for her coffee and sipped as she turned her attention to the huge brick hospital across the street. Through her own reflection on the window, she studied the building. Smeared and darkened with rain and nestled up against the ominous stone cathedral, it brought to mind some Dickensian structure, a rambling place filled with galleries and passages and terrible pain and secrets. The place where she’d been abandoned. Where her new life as Angie Pallorino had begun; where her old slate had been wiped clean of her memories. As she regarded the building, the rain outside turned into fat flakes of snow. They floated down like weightless silver leaves and settled fast on the roofs of parked cars and on the cold sidewalk.
A surreal sensation sank through her—she was on the cusp of two identities. The child before. And the Angie after. With the sense of surreality came fear. It unfurled from somewhere deep down in the basement of her soul, from her buried past, fingering upward like a stranger into her present. She shook it. Because there was only one way forward now.
Ironically, it meant going backward first.
CHAPTER 4
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 3
Angie drove over the Lions Gate suspension bridge, her wipers squeaking against the soft mist of winter rain. It was 11:30 a.m., and traffic flowed smoothly. Far below the bridge the waters of the Burrard Inlet gleamed gunmetal gray. To her left, off the beaches of Kitsilano and Spanish Banks, more than twelve tankers skulked in fog, awaiting their entry to the Port of Vancouver—delayed indefinitely thanks to a longshoremen’s union strike that was now into its second week. To her right, hidden from view on days like today, lay the hazy white wedge of Mount Baker in the States. But up ahead, on the opposite shores of the Burrard, the densely forested North Shore mountains were exposed in shafts of sunlight as skeins of cloud drifted over their green flanks. Above the snowline everything was pristine white.
The widow of deceased VPD detective Arnold Voight was expecting Angie up on the slopes of one of those mountains where she now lived in an in-law suite in her daughter’s home. Voight had been the lead detective on the ’86 cradle case.
CBC radio played softly in the background of her Nissan Altima rental as she turned onto the off-ramp that would lead her from the bridge down onto Marine Drive. Her MVPD Crown Vic was another thing she’d had to surrender while on administrative leave. She also had to call into the department on every day that she’d normally be working—she was still being paid. Still on the clock. A suspension was not a vacation, as her superior, Sergeant Matthew Vedder, had reminded her.
Anxiety crawled into her chest at the thought of the pending IIO review ruling. Not only could it kill her career entirely, but it could also give her a criminal record. Angie didn’t know how not to be a cop, let alone how to be a criminal.
In an effort to distract herself, she hit the hands-free phone icon on her dash and dialed Maddocks once more. He was the only one she’d told so far about her discovery that she was the angel’s cradle child, and she wanted to share with him what she’d learned from the nurse. She’d tried calling Maddocks from the hotel last night, but each time she’d gone straight to voicemail.
His phone rang, and yet again her call was shunted immediately to voicemail. Angie turned onto Marine Drive as she listened to Maddocks’s recorded voice. She stopped at a red light and left a message.
“Maddocks, it’s Angie. I . . . give me a call, will you? I’m on my way to see the widow of Detective Arnold Voight. She lives on the North Shore. VPD has no case files.” She ended the call, a hollow feeling in her gut. She missed him, dammit, and that frustrated her. She didn’t want to miss anyone. She did not want to need anyone. Her grip tightened on the wheel. The light turned green, and she hit the gas. She’d see him later tonight anyway—they had a reservation for dinner at the King’s Head to celebrate her so-called “birthday,” which was today. The farce of it dug deep after having seen the cradle. Because no one knew when she’d really been born, or to whom. The Pallorinos had simply picked today, January 3, because they’d felt it was the start of a new life for her at the commencement of a fresh year. And, her father had said, because the date was set just slightly apart from the actual New Year’s festivities, so she could still feel “special” on her own day.
As Angie took a left up Lonsdale, her thoughts turned to her adoptive parents—Miriam and Joseph Pallorino. They’d lived here on the North Shore while fostering her before the adoption had gone through. Her father had told her that a social worker and a child psychologist had visited them several times each week. A speech therapist had come, too, to help Angie learn to speak again, teaching her English, because by then they’d begun to suspect that she might have been raised in a foreign language before she’d been abandoned. Or not taught to speak much at all.
Uciekaj, uciekaj! . . . Wskakuj do srodka, szybko! . . . Siedz cicho!
She’d known instinctively that those words in her memory meant, Run, run! Get inside!
She believed now that she’d understood some Polish as a child, and that the voice yelling those words had possibly been her mother’s, or the voice of a female caregiver.
Angie took her vehicle up a steep hill. She rounded a corner, slowed, and checked the address on a pillar at the bottom of a precipitous driveway. The widow’s residence. She turned in, drove up to a rambling post-and-beam rancher painted pale gray, and parked outside the garage.
Nerves, anticipation shimmered through Angie as she looked up at the house. She was about to come face-to-face with the wife of the cop who’d hunted for her family three decades ago.
CHAPTER 5
“Please, come in. I’m Sharon Farraday. My mum’s expecting you.” The woman who’d opened the door to Angie was slender with dark hair scrunched up into an untidy but flattering ponytail that sent soft tendrils about her narrow features. “She’s through this way.”
Angie removed her boots and coat and followed Sharon Farraday through a living room with a wooden floor, vaulted ceiling, and a wall of glass that looked out toward the Burrard and the city down in the distance. The tops of city skyscrapers poked through a bank of dense cloud that had settled over land at sea level. A child playing on the floor amid a scattering of toys looked up as Angie entered the room—a cute tomboy of a girl around the age of three. She wore dungarees, a flannel shirt, and she sported strawberry-blonde braids.
“Hi,” the child said, her round blue eyes inspecting Angie intently.
“Kaylee, this is Angie Pallorino,” said Sharon. “She’s come to visit Gran.”
“Wanna see my dinosaur?” Kaylee thrust a plastic toy toward Angie. “It’s a bronnosaurus.”
“I see,” Angie said, bending down to take an obligatory look at the toy being offered to her.
“I got it for Christmas. What did you get for Christmas?”
Angie smiled as a memory washed through her—making love with Maddocks on Christmas Day, on his yacht in the wind. Rain beating against deck. “Well, I certainly didn’t get a dinosaur.”
“It’s vicious!” Kaylee said with a grin that scrunched her freckled nose.