The Night Visitors(76)

This time I wasn’t able to hide my gasp. I’d never heard anyone call her baby a bitch! I really didn’t know what to say to that, but then she was already taking long-legged strides across the asphalt toward the keening cry of the baby, calling, “Here I am, here’s Mommy—” And then, in an altogether different voice, to the babysitter, “Has she been crying this whole time? Why didn’t you come get me?”

“She only started when she heard your voice,” said the girl, a wide-eyed na?f who looked all of sixteen, looking nervously between me and her employer.

“Figures,” my new friend said. Then she swooped the baby up in the air, surprising her mid-cry into silence, and making my stomach drop as she held the wiggling baby at arm’s length over the hard pavement. “I’m Laurel, by the way, and this little imp”—she gave the startled baby a playful little shake—“is Chlo?.”

“That’s so funny,” I said, “my baby’s Chloe too.”

“Really,” she said, arching one perfectly plucked eyebrow (who has the time to pluck her eyebrows!), “I guess we’re fated to be friends then.”