Read Online Vital Signs by Bobby Hutchinson - Free Book Online

the fact that they often got stuck in front of the TV because the nurses were busy. Many parents spent the end of their workday with their sick kids, but there were a number of kids on the ward whose parents lived far away or had other children at home to care for and so couldn’t make it to St. Joe’s.
    They were the ones Hailey spoiled a little with balloons and stories and, if their diets permitted, special snacks and little treats from the kitchen.
    She picked up David and took him with her to the playroom, where she sat in a rocking chair and read the kids a couple of chapters from a Harry Potter book. Of course the story was way beyond David’s level, and he kept looking up at her, a puzzled expression on his face. Once, he reached up and took hold of a fistful of hair.
    She smiled at him, and there was the tiniest movement of his mouth, not quite a smile, but close. The other kids demanded equal time on her lap, so she strapped David in a wheelchair. He didn’t object. He watched the others, but most of all, he watched Hailey.
    A full hour after her shift had ended, she carriedhim back to his crib and settled him for the night. She bent and kissed his cheek, and a dangerous thought flickered through her mind.
    It was probably impossible, but if Roy couldn’t find any relatives who wanted him, was there any chance that she could take this little boy home with her?
    Â 
    R OY WAS FRUSTRATED . Four days had passed since he’d first visited David in St. Joe’s, and so far, all his attempts to find Shannon Riggs or anyone who could tell him where she was had come to nothing. First he’d checked her personnel file on the computer, getting whatever details were available about previous investigations. Then he’d located Tonya Cabral, the volunteer street worker who’d taken Shannon under her wing and helped her get off drugs. Tonya was somewhere in her sixties, a tiny, birdlike woman with deep lines in her face and dark, sad eyes. She’d put a wrinkled hand over her mouth and started to cry when he told her that Shannon had disappeared, leaving David alone.
    â€œI feel so responsible,” she sobbed. “I usually go over and visit her Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I came down with a bad migraine and was knocked out for a few days.”
    Shannon had gone through a drug-rehab program prior to David’s birth, and she seemed to have stayed clean, because there was no record of a complaint regarding her care of David. He’d called the social worker who’d been involved at that time, and she confirmed that Shannon took good care of her baby.She was attending parenting classes and working at getting her high-school diploma.
    The troubling thing was that Shannon had never revealed who the baby’s father was or given any information about her own background, other than saying she’d grown up in Port Hardy, a coastal village on Vancouver Island. Her file listed her mother and father as deceased, with no other close relatives and no siblings, but from experience, Roy knew that teenagers often did that on their forms. If they were from troubled homes, they didn’t want their parents involved in their lives. The social worker had talked to street kids who knew Shannon, and they’d said she was often seen with a man named Murphy. None of them knew much about him or where he lived. The file wasn’t much help to Roy in finding Shannon. Tracing relatives would be difficult, if not impossible. He called the RCMP in Port Hardy and asked them to locate any families by the name of Riggs, but he strongly suspected that Shannon wasn’t using her real name.
    He was also doing his best to locate her. He’d given her description to the people he knew who drove around downtown Vancouver in vans, distributing clean needles and condoms. He knew several of the firefighters who worked the downtown east side, and he’d asked them to be on the lookout for her.