Thoughts before reading:
This sounds fairly terrible, but we'll see. It depends on how the whole abandoned baby thing is actually handled, of course.
The basics:
When Abby arrives home from school one afternoon, there's a baby on her porch all alone. He's tucked into a car seat with a bag of supplies, and appears well cared for, but there's no note or any indication of who he is. Abby calls Kristy, since her mom isn't home, and Kristy comes over with Nannie. Once they arrive, Kristy takes charge, like always, and calls Sgt. Johnson. He comes over to file a report. When Abby's mom gets home from work, everyone decides that the little guy will stay with them until his family is found.
Abby adores the baby, who they start calling Eli. Her mom is good with him too, and watching them together, Abby gets the feeling that her mom knows more about this than she's saying. She tries looking around outside for additional clues, but doesn't find anything. Mallory and Jessi have been doing a writing group at the library though, and they tell her that there's a woman in their group who wrote a story about abandoning a baby.
Meanwhile, the BSC is having a "writing month" for their charges, to give them a chance to write and share stories with each other. All the kids are smitten with Eli and his story, and end up writing about him. Abby finds a clue in Maria Kilbourne's story: she was home sick that day and saw someone in a green car, probably a woman, dropping off the baby at Abby's.
Mrs. Stevenson starts looking for a nanny to help out with Eli during the day. A woman named Erin Amesely drops by to apply, but she's really nervous and timid, which makes Abby suspicious. Her mom seems to have no such reservations, and hires her on the spot. That same night, Abby's grandparents call to chat, but they carefully avoid discussing the baby, and don't seem interested in him at all, which leaves Abby feeling more confused.
Erin turns out to be a good nanny, but Abby finds some of her behavior to be odd. Kristy thinks Erin is somehow involved in the Eli mystery. Mal and Jessi start trying to tail the woman from their writing group, but they never see her doing anything strange. Once they overhear someone ask her about her little boy, but she just says they must have her confused with someone else. Then Kristy hears Erin call the baby EJ and confronts her about it... she says she has a nephew with that name.
Abby's throwing a BSC sleepover, and she calls her mom at work to ask permission to rent some videos. A temp at her office tells Abby that her mom is out on family business... which is weird, because she never mentioned anything about it. Later on Abby asks her mom about it, and she denies it.
Frustrated by her mom's obvious lie, Abby decides to snoop around in her study. She finds a post-it note with "Miriam" written on it. Abby knows that's her mom's younger sister, but no one in the family has spoken to her for years. She tells Anna about it, and together they look through old family photo albums, trying to find her. It looks like she's been cut out of more recent photos, but there is one of her as a little girl... clutching the same blanket Eli came wrapped in. Abby hits the redial on her mom's phone, which calls a hospital in NYC, where she's able to confirm Miriam is a patient. Knowing her mom won't tell her anything, Abby decides to go to NYC right then, alone, to get some answers.
When Abby reaches the hospital and finds Miriam's room, her mom is already there, crying. Mrs. S finally explains that Miriam has diabetes, but hadn't been able to afford to take good care of herself. No one in the family knew she'd even had a baby, but she'd broken down and decided to ask for help. When she arrived at the Stevenson's with her son (Daniel is his real name) she felt faint, so she left him on the porch with a note because she was no longer thinking clearly. Mrs. S suspected who the baby was right away, and the police were helping her look for Miriam, who had ended up in a diabetic coma.
The family reconciles, and Miriam and Daniel will be going to Florida to stay with her parents for awhile to get help.
Timeline:
It's February.
Misc. thoughts:
*They're still only having 1 sitter for the Pikes, despite the fact that the triplets are still causing problems with the younger kids instead of helping out.
*Remember when the girls going to NYC was a huge deal? Now it's constantly done.
*Ghostwritten by Ellen Miles.
*Out of all the things that could have been wrong with Miriam, they had to use diabetes, again? Not to mention it makes no sense that she could get to the house, but then was out of her mind, so she left her baby there alone with a note (which no one found anyway)? Wouldn't diabetic shock and weakness have caused her to pass out, not roam around? Why didn't she just go to the hospital with the baby?
Books mentioned:
None
My rating:
2 stars. This was a lot more readable than some of the mysteries, but the explanation for everything was just so bad... and didn't even make sense. Why wouldn't their mom just have explained some of the basics to the twins and avoid this whole scenario?
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