The Perfect Mother(19)

“Obsess about the babies. Look adoringly upon the babies. Obsess more about the babies.”

Hoyt smiles. “Ms. Ross come to all of these meetings?”

“A lot of them. Mostly in the beginning.” Nell pictures Winnie walking toward the circle, usually fifteen minutes late, taking her seat, enveloping them in the scent of soft, expensive perfume—exactly the way one would imagine a woman who looks like her would smell.

“Did she talk much about herself?”

“Not really.”

Hoyt grins. “You know she was an actress?”

Nell stops the mug inches from her mouth. “She’s an actress?”

“She was. Star of a big cult television show twenty-some years ago. Bluebird?”

“I had no idea.”

“You ever watch it?”

She remembers the girls at her high school talking about that show, always gushing about how cutting-edge it was, the risks it took—a gay character, a teenage pregnancy. “I heard of it, but I never watched it. More into math than TV at that age, to be honest.”

Schwartz steps forward for another cookie. “And you’re the one who hired Alma Romero to babysit that night.”

It hadn’t come out as a question. “Yes.”

Hoyt takes a sip of his coffee and nods at Sebastian, who has returned with Nell’s water. “Very good, thanks.” He keeps the mug in his hands. “You insisted Mrs. Romero watch Midas so Ms. Ross could go out?”

“I don’t know if I insisted—”

“Couldn’t she have found her own sitter?”

“Yes, but—”

“And also, in an e-mail you sent, you offered to pay Alma, if Winnie agreed to come out?”

Nell takes the water and swallows half of it. “It’s silly now,” she says. “But at the time, none of us knew about Winnie’s money.”

“Uh-huh. Where did you find Mrs. Romero?”

“I got her name in the classified section of The Village.”

“And how long did you know her before offering her the job of caring for your baby?”

Nell thought the interview would last no more than an hour—Alma was, in fact, the sixth potential nanny Nell had spoken to. None of the other women were right, and then Alma arrived, all sunshine and laughter. She stayed nearly the entire afternoon, sitting with Nell in the living room, drinking tea, sharing the big bag of M&Ms Alma kept in her purse, passing Beatrice back and forth. Alma told Nell about her village in Honduras, where she’d been a midwife, delivering her first baby at the age of twelve. About coming to the United States three years earlier, slipping alone into the United States, across a shallow stretch of the Rio Grande, six months pregnant, doing whatever it would take to give her son a better life.

Before leaving, Alma offered to take Beatrice while Nell showered and enjoyed a few minutes to herself. When Nell lay down on the bed, her legs clean-shaven for the first time since giving birth, she could hear Alma over the monitor, singing to the baby in Spanish. She woke with a start two hours later and rushed down the hall to the nursery. Beatrice was fast asleep on Alma’s chest, her tiny fingers grasping Alma’s thumb, Alma’s romance novel forgotten on her knee. “Five hours or so,” Nell says to Hoyt.

“Did you check her references?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Run a criminal background check?”

“No.”

“No? That’s a little surprising.”

“Is it?”

“My wife thought about hiring a nanny once.” He shoots Schwartz a haughty look. “Man, she did so many background checks on those women, I told her I should stay home and she should go to work for the FBI.” He looks back at Nell. “But who can blame her? It can be terrifying. The things you read.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Nell says. “I’ve never known a criminal to perform ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ in two languages. But maybe that’s just me.”

“And what is your understanding of her immigration status?” Hoyt asks.

“Her immigration status?” Nell pauses, careful to keep her eyes off Sebastian. “We didn’t discuss it.”

Sebastian takes a seat beside Nell on the sofa, and the movement of the cushion sets off a wave of nausea. “I don’t understand,” Sebastian says, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Why are you asking these questions? You can’t think Alma had anything to do with this.”

“Just trying to dot our t’s. Cross our eyes.” Hoyt chuckles at the blunder and consults his notebook. “What about when you got to the bar? Notice anything strange? People coming or going that seemed out of the ordinary?”

“No, we mostly kept to ourselves. We were out back, on the patio.”

“And Winnie stayed with the group the whole time?”

Suddenly, Nell sees herself. She’s standing at the sink of the women’s bathroom, breathing in the fetid smell of urine and bleach, drinking water from her cupped hands, her vision cloudy. Darkness crosses behind her in the mirror.

“Ms. Mackey?”

“We’d been there for about an hour, I think, when Winnie went to the bar.” The words echo in her ears. “Token went with her. That was the last anyone saw of her.”