She rose from the wooden bench outside the court clerk's window where her ex-boyfriend had posted her bail before leaving as quickly as he could. Spencer Yates was moving very slowly.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"No, I am not all right," the lawyer snapped. His wisp of a moustache underscored how young he was, as though he couldn't yet grow decent facial hair. He put up a hand. "Sorry. It's just that this stomach thing has hit me pretty hard. So let's get down to it."

He indicated that she should precede him into a meeting room not much larger than the jail cell where she'd spent a sleepless Sunday night on a hard cot, counting down the hours until Monday's arraignment. He moved to pull the heavy door shut and last night's claustrophobia came rushing back.

"Please, can we leave the door open?" she asked, her voice cracking.

His hand dropped to his side. "Makes no difference to me."

He sat down heavily on one of the upholstered chairs alongside a meeting table with a laminate wood top and swiped a hand over his damp brow.

"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked.

"I'm fine," he said, unconvincingly. "Even if I wasn't, we need to go over a few things."

He opened her file and removed some sheets of paper he'd only had time to glance at before the hearing. Kelly sat silently, trying to be patient. Yates had explained the district judge was interested in getting through his heavy load of arraignments rather than correcting mistakes. But once the young lawyer looked over the specifics of her case, surely he'd see to it that justice was served.

In short order he put aside the papers, his head lolling slightly as though he had to put forth an effort to keep it up. "My suggestion is to see if the district attorney will go for a plea bargain. I'll try to get you a deal where you won't have to serve more than one year."

"One year! No!" She shook her head vigorously. Like mother, like daughter, she thought before her mind rebelled. "I can't go to prison. I won't."

He looked at her through tired eyes shadowed with heavy, dark circles. "You should have thought of that before the police found that baby at your place."

"But there's a perfectly good reason he was there." Kelly leaned forward, desperate to make him understand. She'd already told the story a dozen times in hours and hours of interrogation. "A woman I met on the playground asked me to baby-sit."

"Where is this woman?"

"I don't know where she is. I don't know anything about her except her name is Amanda."

"So you agreed to baby-sit for a perfect stranger?" Spencer Yates put one elbow on the table and tiredly rested his chin in his hand. "The police aren't buying that story."

"It's the truth. Amanda has to be the one who kidnapped Corey."

"The baby's name is Eric, and the police think you kidnapped him. Right now you're facing charges of second degree kidnapping, which is a felony. If the DA agrees, I might be able to get the charge reduced to endangering the welfare of a child. That's a misdemeanor."

Misdemeanor sounded better than felony, but the words still sent dread coursing through her. If she pleaded guilty to either of those charges, she'd have a permanent criminal record and the repercussions that came with it. "If I'm convicted, nobody will ever hire me to teach again!"

He stared at her out of his shadowed eyes as though it was of little importance to him whether she lost her job as a first-grade teacher.

"You don't understand," she said. "Teaching children is all I've ever wanted to do."

"Yeah, well, maybe you're not the sort of person who should be around kids."

It took a few seconds for his meaning to sink in. A shudder raked her from head to toe. "You think I'm guilty, don't you?"

"I shouldn't have said that." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But it doesn't matter whether I think you're guilty or not. What matters is whether there's enough here to win at trial. And there's not."

"I don't believe you," she said.

He opened his eyes the rest of the way and straightened his backbone. "If you're not satisfied with my counsel, you can request to be reassigned to another lawyer. But with the overwhelming evidence against you, another lawyer will tell you the same thing."

"What overwhelming evidence?"

"Besides the kidnapped baby the police found in your townhouse? The report says you spend hours watching children at the playground."

"I don't go alone," she countered. "My next-door neighbor runs a business out of her home. I take her son to the playground to help her out."

"Okay, then. How about the fact that the person who called the police after hearing the Amber alert said you're unhappy you can't have children of your own?"

"Of course I am! What woman wouldn't be?" she cried. She was sorry she'd ever shared that sad information with any of the women at the playground. "That's not proof."

"The baby was taken from a stroller outside a grocery store in Utica on Friday night." He named a town in New York about an hour away and tapped her file folder, which he'd already closed. He gave her a direct look. "On Sunday the police found that baby with you."

"I wasn't in Utica!"

A spark of interest lit his eyes. "Can anyone verify that?"

Kelly thought back to the thriller that had kept her reading Friday night until the last page. Too bad fictional characters couldn't give alibis. "No," she admitted.