Where is my baby now? Sondra wondered in despair. She’d been in agony since yesterday. As soon as she checked into the hotel, she had phoned the rectory and said she was a reporter following up on the story of the baby who had been left on the stoop of the rectory on December 3rd, seven years ago.

The astonishment in the secretary’s voice had warned her of what was to come. “A baby left at St. Clement’s?! I’m afraid you’re wrong. I’ve been here twenty years, and nothing like that has ever happened.”

The cab turned onto Central Park South. I used to daydream that maybe the people who adopted the baby were pushing her in her carriage here, along the park, Sondra thought, where the baby could see the horses and carriages.

Late yesterday afternoon she had gone to the public library and called up the microfilm of the New York newspapers of December 4th, seven years ago. The only reference to St. Clement’s that day was an article about a theft there, stating that the chalice of Bishop Santori, the founding pastor to whom many of the devout prayed, had been stolen.

That’s probably why the police were there when I called that night; that’s why the monsignor was outside, Sondra thought, her distress growing. And I believed it was because they’d found the baby.

Then who had taken the baby? She had left her in a paper shopping bag for added warmth. Maybe some kids had come by and pushed the stroller away and abandoned it, without ever realizing she was there. Suppose the baby had died of exposure. I’d go to prison, Sondra thought. What would that do to Granddad? He keeps telling me that all the sacrifices he’s made over the years have been worthwhile because of what I’ve become. He’s so proud that I’ll be playing a concert at Carnegie Hall on December 23rd. It’s what he always dreamed of-first for himself, and then for me.