And at that moment they heard the cry of a baby. Ellen and Milo Scott stared at each other unbelievingly.
“It’s Patricia! She’s alive. Oh, my God!”
They found the baby near a clump of bushes. By some miracle she was unhurt.
Milo picked her up gently and held her close. “Shh! It’s all right, darling,” he whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Ellen was standing at his side, a look of shock on her face. “You—you said she was dead.”
“She must have been knocked unconscious.”
Ellen stared at the baby a long time. “She should have been killed with the others,” she said in a strangled voice.
Milo looked up at her, shocked. “What are you saying?”
“Byron’s will leaves everything to Patricia. You can look forward to spending the next twenty years being her caretaker so that when she grows up she can treat you as shabbily as her father did. Is that what you want?”
He was silent.
“We’ll never have a chance like this again.” She was staring at the baby, and there was a wild look in her eyes that Milo had never seen before. It was almost as though she wanted to—
She’s not herself. She’s suffering from a concussion. “For God’s sake, Ellen, what are you thinking?”
She looked at her husband for a long moment, and the wild light faded from her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said calmly. After a pause she said, “There’s something we can do. We can leave her somewhere, Milo. The pilot said we were near Ávila. There should be plenty of tourists there. There’s no reason for anyone to connect the baby with the plane crash.”
He shook his head. “Their friends know that Byron and Susan took Patricia with them.”
Ellen looked at the burning plane. “That’s no problem. They all burned up in the crash. We’ll have a private memorial service here.”
“Ellen,” he protested. “We can’t do this. We’d never get away with it.”
“God did it for us. We have gotten away with it.”
Milo looked at the baby. “But she’s so—”
“She’ll be fine,” Ellen said soothingly. “We’ll drop her off at a nice farmhouse outside of town. Someone will adopt her and she’ll grow up to have a lovely life here.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do it. No.”
“If you love me you’ll do this for us. You have to choose, Milo. You can either have me, or you can spend the rest of your life working for your brother’s child.”
“Please, I—”
“Do you love me?”
“More than my life,” he said simply.
“Then prove it.”
They made their way carefully down the mountainside in the dark, whipped by the wind. Because the plane had crashed in a high wooded area, the sound was muffled, so the townspeople were unaware as yet of what had happened.
Three hours later, in the outskirts of Ávila, Ellen and Milo reached a small farmhouse. It was not yet dawn.
“We’ll leave her here,” Ellen whispered.
Milo made one last try. “Ellen, couldn’t we—?”
“Do it!” she said fiercely.
Without another word he turned and carried the baby to the door of the farmhouse. She was wearing only a torn pink nightgown and had a blanket wrapped around her.
Milo looked at Patricia for a long moment, his eyes filled with tears, then laid her gently down.
He whispered, “Have a good life, darling.”
The crying awakened Asunción Moras. For a sleepy moment she thought it was the bleating of a goat or a lamb. How had it gotten out of its pen?
Grumbling, she rose from her warm bed, put on an old faded robe, and walked to the door.
When she saw the infant lying on the ground screaming and kicking, she said, “¡Madre de Dios!” and yelled for her husband.
They brought the child inside and stared at it. It would not stop crying, and it seemed to be turning blue.
“We’ve got to get her to the hospital.”
They hurriedly wrapped another blanket around the baby, carried her to their pickup truck, and drove her to the hospital. They sat on a bench in the long corridor waiting for someone to attend to them, and thirty minutes later a doctor came and took the baby away to examine her.