“You had no right.”
“Neither did they.”
Carla exhaled shakily.
“You don’t understand what you’re dealing with.”
“Then help us understand.”
She refused to talk by phone but agreed to meet us at a diner outside town.
Carla arrived wearing a baseball cap and oversized sunglasses. She chose a booth in the back and kept looking toward the entrance.
“I never should have taken that job,” she said.
“You mean ours?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What happened in our house?”
“Nothing at first.”
Her hands tightened around her coffee cup.
“Sophie was lovely. You were both kind. I thought it would be an easy placement.”
“Then why did you leave?”
Carla looked directly at me.
“Your mother.”
I frowned.
“My mother died when Sophie was a baby.”
Carla’s face changed.
“The woman called herself Sophie’s grandmother.”
I knew immediately who she meant.
Ben did too.
“My mother,” he said.
His mother, Diane, lived 20 minutes away. She visited often, but never while a sitter was working, at least not that we knew.
“What did she do?” Ben asked.
“She came every afternoon.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “The cameras would have recorded her.”
“She knew where they were.”
Carla explained that Diane entered through the side door, stayed close to the blind spots near the laundry room, and asked each nanny to join her in the guest bedroom, the only room without a camera.
