CHAPTER NINE

      “Jamie, Taylor. Can you move forward, please?”

      Lauritzia Velez got the kids’ attention as they waited for the elevator on the third floor of the Westchester Mall.

      Not her kids, actually. The Bachmans’. Lauritzia had only taken care of them these past two years. Taylor was nine, and was texting her friend Cameron, all excited about running into Michael Goldberg at the Apple store in the mall, and Jamie, eleven, was already completely obsessed with the new PlayStation 3 game he had just bought with a birthday gift certificate.

      “You know, when we get back home, that game is on the shelf until you finish your homework.”

      “But it’s Peyton Manning,” Jamie muttered, his eyes still glued to the box.

      “And you too, Miss Fancy Fingers.” She pushed Taylor forward, the girl’s fingers continuing to text at warp speed.

      A heavyset woman carrying two shopping bags next to Lauritzia smiled at her sympathetically, as if to say, It’s no use. I’ve got my own.

      Lauritzia was twenty-four, dark-haired, with pretty dark-brown eyes that were the color of the hills at dusk where she was from, and she had worked for Harold and Roxanne Bachman since she had moved here from Mexico two years earlier. For the first time, she’d been able to put the hardships of the past few years behind her. She loved Mr. and Mrs. B; they’d been so good to her. They treated her like part of their family. They took her on vacations, encouraged her to call them by their first names, which she still wasn’t comfortable with. They even paid her tuition at the community college where she was taking classes. Maybe one day she would have a degree. In retail merchandising. Perhaps she’d even open her own store. In the meantime, she looked at Taylor and Jamie as if they were her own. Like her younger cousins, whom she had always taken care of back home. With what had happened to her own family, they were practically all she had now. For the first time since everything started, she actually felt she had a new life. A life she trusted. Not to mention a home.

      The elevator door had opened, but the kids just stood there.

      “Let’s go, Jamie, please.” Lauritzia pushed them forward. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a Hispanic-looking man in sunglasses leaning against a railing. She thought he seemed to be watching them. Things like that always gave her a shudder. “Taylor, take my hand.”

      They stepped inside, along with the woman with the shopping