“I understand, Cass,” Mickey said in a tone that reeked of empathy. “You think the fact that I won’t help you with this case is directed at you personally.”
“That when you say people are selling babies, you mean I’m selling babies,” I cut in, my voice ragged. “Yeah, I’m hearing that,” I said, parodying the self-help jargon I associated with social workers. “I guess I’m feeling attacked here.”
“Cass, I’m not accusing you of selling babies,” Mickey said in a tone so reasonable I wanted to rip her face off. “I am accusing you of choosing to become part of a system that treats white infants like commodities.”
She paused, took a deep breath, and fixed me with eyes that pleaded for understanding.
“I have my own baby growing in here,” she said, touching her belly with reverent fingers. “I know you have conflicted feelings about my pregnancy. But one of the things it’s doing for me is making me sensitive—maybe too sensitive—”
I nodded fervently, but it didn’t stop the flow of words.
“—to the whole issue of birth and babies. I can’t help but think of the other ones,” she went on, and so help me, her eyes filled with tears. I tried to dismiss them as the too-ready tears of the very pregnant, but it wasn’t easy.
“I can’t help but think of all the babies I used to see when I worked for BCW,” she went on, naming her first employer, the Bureau of Child Welfare, the agency responsible for all the unwanted and abused babies born to people unable to care for them. “How can we continue to let those babies rot in foster homes while at the same time we reward white parents for making babies by the most artificial means?”
“Are you saying you’d help me if Josh and Ellie Greenspan were adopting a crack baby?” I demanded. “Mickey, this doesn’t make sense.”
“It does to me,” she said with quiet stubbornness. Again her hands caressed the bulge around her middle. Again her eyes dropped to caress the unborn child with a look seen on Madonnas in Italian paintings. Again I was shut out—the barren woman who could never understand the feminine mysteries.
The worse-than-barren woman: the woman who could have given birth but chose not to.
I rose, picked up the coffee mugs, and slammed them down on my kitchen counter with a force that broke the handle off one of them.
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About the Author
Carolyn Wheat is an attorney, editor, and award-winning author. She has worked on both sides of the legal fence, defending indigents accused of crime for the Brooklyn office of the Legal Aid Society and giving legal advice to the New York City Police Department. Wheat’s short stories have won the Anthony, Agatha, Shamus, and Macavity Awards, and two of her six Cass Jameson Mysteries have been nominated for Edgar Awards.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem for permission to reprint lines from “Isn’t It Grand Boys?” arranged by Pat Clancy, Tom Clancy, Liam Clancy, and T. Makem Copyright © 1966, 1969 by Tiparm Music Publishers, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 1986 by Carolyn Wheat
Cover design by Barbara Brown
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0232-5
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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