Chapter 9: Thirty-One Babies

I stood in the floodlights and made myself breathe.

Two hours. Two working trucks. Thirty-one rooms.

Wilma came out in her slippers and looked at the tires and said a word I had never heard her say.

"The gate log," I said.

"Nobody used the gate. The fence by the river is cut."

Whoever it was had walked in from the riverbank while we slept fifty feet away.

I didn't need a camera to know who sent them.

I called Jubal.

He answered on the first ring, wide awake.

"How many flatbeds do you have?"

"Three. And a cousin with a stake truck."

"I need all of them at the hospital by six thirty."

"Haddie. What happened?"

"Somebody cut every tire on the new trucks."

"I'm already putting my boots on," he said.

I called the church next.

"Ma'am, it's Haddie Kitt. You bought a piano from me for a dollar."

"I remember, honey."

"I need to borrow your van."

At six twenty-eight, a convoy came up the hospital drive.

Two Kitt trucks. Three flatbeds from a barn past Ashland City. A stake truck.

And a white church van with a choir lady at the wheel and the back seats taken out.

The charge nurse stood at the loading dock with her hand over her mouth.

"We're on time," I said.

We worked.

One crew built ahead on the new floor. One crew cleared behind on the old.

Every rack Jubal's daughter had numbered went to its room, and every room got checked twice.

Then the charge nurse radioed the transport team, and they brought a baby.

It happened thirty-one times.

The parents walked beside the incubators down the old hallway to the ambulance bay.

Some of them held on to the plastic. One father held his daughter's foot through the port hole the whole way.

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