There's No Cure for Impossible

By Carolyn Summer Quinn

Selena had long realized her old school friend Mila was quite a toxic character and was becoming increasingly worse.   When two incidents that can't be ignored take place in a row, Selena decides she has no choice but to write Mila off, once and for all.  Yet when, months later, Mila goes so far as to kidnap a baby girl to pretend it's her own child, done as a way of trying to hold on to one of her inappropriate boyfriends, Selena, now working at a television news station, fears she's going to be found out and exposed as an old friend of Mila's.  She wants nothing more than to remain uninvolved, but of course, that doesn't work.  Then the situation explodes in a whole different direction, Mila is dead, and the baby is nowhere to be found.  Or is she?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Topaz Ocean Enterprises
• Release date: Jul 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227941008

Carolyn Summer Quinn

CAROLYN SUMMER QUINN, Author and Fine Art Photographer, grew up singing show tunes in Roselle and Scotch Plains, NJ, a member of an outrageous and rollicking extended family.  She has a B.A. in English and Theater/Media from Kean University and now delights in living in New York City.  She is the Author of 10 books (so far!) and they've garnered 17 writing awards!

Book preview

Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say, 'I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.

—Ann Landers

Common sense is a flower that doesn't grow in everyone's garden.

—Unknown

"Decision making is easy when your values are clear.’

—Roy Disney

Chapter One

Ihadn’t been on the new job for a full month when it happened.

I’d just started an administrative job at a television news station when I found out the biggest crime story in the whole New York City area involved one of my very own friends.

A former friend, actually.  I had to amend that to myself immediately when I heard about what was going on. Former friend.

Several months earlier I had decided that where my old grade school buddy Mila was concerned, I had put up with enough of her craziness and drama to last me more than one lifetime, thank you very much, and I didn’t wish to be associated with her any further.  Not even as someone to occasionally meet for lunch. 

Especially when her latest choice of a boyfriend turned out to be a convicted felon.

But still. 

She was someone I had known since childhood, and here she was, at the moment, the subject of a Tri-State Area all-points police bulletin.

It was staggering, though maybe not entirely surprising, to hear the rudiments of what Mila Gannon had gone and done.

Or maybe I should say what she’d done this time.  There was always something going on with Mila, and it usually wasn’t exactly what you could ever call delightful, either.  It was more like wacky, or stupid, or even, in an instance like this one, quite well and truly sick, although this was the worst situation she’d managed to engineer her way into yet, and I’d known her since I was twelve years old. 

We were both now twenty-four.

The newsroom was in an uproar.

Amber alert, the head of crime stories, Rolf Jansson, who happened to be my immediate boss, was scurrying around from one reporter or assistant or technician to another and was frantically clarifying.  He was frazzled to the point that his blond shock of hair was practically standing on end on his head, quite a sight.  This isn’t just an all-points bulletin!  It’s a goddamned Amber Alert case!  We should interrupt regularly scheduled programming and announce it at once or that baby could be done for.

His second in command, Yvette Levy, always in a cocktail dress like she was ready for tea with the queen even though there had never been any royalty in power in America, was agreeing with him at the top of her considerable lungs.  Yvette was yelling to him from across the room, which by the way took up the entire floor of the building, Yes!  Yes!  We have to interrupt the stupid soap opera that’s on in favor of the real one taking place up in the Bronx!  Suspect’s name is Mila Noreen Gannon!  Cops just sent over her license photo.  Twenty-four, white, brown and blue.  Where’s Jessup?

Jessup Pine was one of the newscasters.  They wanted to put him on the air with the announcement, that’s if they could find him.  He liked to nap in his dressing room before he was usually put on the air for the five o’clock news.  It was only three thirty, so he was probably sleeping off a three-martini lunch in there on his sofa.  Again.

I was sitting in a double cubicle with my co-worker, Ellie Gandalfi. Both of us were publicity assistants for the station.  Flunkies, in other words.  We were underpaid and spent our days doing whatever needed to be done, even lowly personal stuff like picking up Jessup’s laundry from the cleaners.  We were, in effect, gophers.

I was only starting on the bottom rung at this station because my last company had gone belly-up.  And while I may have been grateful to have this job, I didn’t enjoy working here very much, either.  I just didn’t like this place.

I said nothing about Mila to Ellie, a gossipy type that I didn’t really care for enough to confide in even on a good day, let alone about this, but I was supremely alarmed at what I had just heard.  Mila Noreen Gannon, twenty-four, brown and blue?  There couldn’t be two. Not with a middle name like that in between the Mila and the Gannon, and Noreen was Mila’s middle name. 

That whole combination of those three names, Mila Noreen Gannon, had always struck me as rather odd, since they didn’t seem to flow together too well, or sound all that great when spoken out loud, either.  The G of Gannon coming after the Mila and the Noreen always seemed to get stuck in people’s throats.  But still and all, how many Mila Noreen Gannons could there possibly be in New York City, especially ones who were the right age, twenty-four years old, and with brown hair and blue eyes? 

And, good Lord, the age and the coloring description of her hair and eyes matched the girl I’d known all these years as well, back since the days when she was an awkward kid.

It had to be her.

Oh, God.  Mila...

What on earth had she done for there to be a freaking Amber Alert out on her?  That was for missing children. 

Ones in danger.

And Mila Noreen Gannon didn’t have any kids. 

I’d heard through the grapevine that she had recently miscarried the baby she had been pregnant with from the latest guy, Ajax, in her string of unsuitable boyfriends, this one past forty and out on parole after committing armed robbery.  Only Mila, of all of my friends, would have ever even considered speaking to a man with such a background, let alone shacking up with one, but she had. 

I’d heard from a mutual friend, Alanna Andrews, that Mila had contacted her a few weeks earlier when the miscarriage had happened.  Mila was looking for a loan over it.  Mila had had a job as a file clerk in a Manhattan law firm, but she’d lost it for being late and absent too many times.  Probably she didn’t have health insurance and needed to pay a doctor or a hospital bill after the miscarriage.  Who knew?  With Mila it was always something. 

Alanna told me she had said no to her.  She told her to approach the baby’s father for it.  Failing that, Mila’s parents were partners in a major-league Connecticut law firm that handled international conglomerates, for heaven’s sake.  They were loaded with money. 

Alanna wasn’t.  She managed a cosmetics store in Mystic.  So, having grown fed up with Mila’s begging, she told Mila to stop trying to hit her up for cash and to go and approach her rich parents if she needed money so badly over losing the baby...

You, Rolf barked at me, interrupting my thoughts, Selena, go find Jessup right now!  Or if he’s indisposed, as usual, for God’s sake find Lana.

Lana Linderman was another newscaster, one who pranced around as if she considered herself to be God’s gift of beauty to the world.  She, at least, was usually sober when we needed her.

I scurried through the newsroom, noticing that a photo of Mila, probably taken from her license, was up on several computer screens.  The cops had probably sent it to us, knowing we’d broadcast it.  As I went running down the carpeted hallway to Jessup’s dressing room, I heard Yvette Levy saying, or rather bellowing, That’s the kidnapping of that baby, and it’s a federal offense!

Kidnapping?

Of a baby?

What baby?

Good God almighty! 

Mila Gannon must have gone out and snatched one.

I could have fallen over.  Mila had always wanted a baby, though I could never quite figure out why, since she wasn’t exactly what anybody could call the most stable of personalities to begin with and that meant she was hardly maternal material. She was more like the sort of woman who’d leave the kid locked in the car on a stifling hot day, and forget the child was in there, while she nabbed into a bar for a quick cocktail. 

Sad but true. 

Mila was a scatterbrain without a shred of common sense, and that was perhaps the best thing I could say about her.  She was also forever desperate, absolutely desperate, to have a boyfriend. 

Any boyfriend.

Even one like Ajax Morrison, real first name Albert, who had pulled a gun on an elderly eighty-seven-year-old man decades earlier and robbed him at a cash machine.  He was caught, since he was too stupid to realize he’d committed the armed robbery in front of a security camera and spent fifteen years in a jail cell over it.  He came out wanting any woman he could get his hands on, and the first one he met who was willing to get involved with such a creature as him was, of course, Mila.  

I thought of the day, ten months earlier and right after Christmas, when I finally decided I’d had enough of Mila as a friend, as I knocked on Jessup’s dressing room door and called out his name. 

I though back to the day I met Ajax while waiting for Jessup to answer the knock.  One look at Ajax, six foot three inches tall, almost as wide, and with his head shaved in the manner of incarcerated neo-Nazis, and I was appalled beyond all recognition, and that was even before I caught him with his hand in my purse, hoping to steal one of my credit cards.  I had never chosen to let violent people like Ajax into my life, or my circle of friends, ever, and since Mila did, I simply could not take being around her any longer. 

Besides, that had happened right after one other hideous Mila incident.

The worst one of them all. 

The one with the package that had come to my parents’ house in the mail, addressed not to anyone in my family, but to her friend, Phineas, the other alleged love of her life.  It came addressed in care of the Lawrence Family. 

Complete with a crude little smiley face drawn after the zip code, yet.

Mila first thought she’d found true love at long last when she met that Phineas jerk.  Mila always thought it was true love with any guy she ever met, but Ajax was the worst one of the whole motley lot, and by a mile. 

The incident with the package regarding her other loser, Phineas, happened right before the day when I went to Mila’s apartment to meet the less-than-delightful Ajax.  I didn’t go over there with the purpose of meeting that Ajax, although that was Mila’s intention when she invited me.  There was the package problem that Mila and Phineas had caused to deal with first.  I had to confront her with it.

It was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back where our friendship was concerned, and that had been even before the next, subsequent incident, with Ajax.

The package delivery had happened right around Thanksgiving.  I was already living in my Brooklyn apartment but went home to Mystic for the holiday weekend.  I took the Wednesday before Thanksgiving off from my former job and arrived around noon that day, right as the mailman came by.

My mother was a respected high school teacher, and my dad was a district attorney.  They were both decent-living, hardworking people. 

Mila knew that.  Heck, everybody who knew us knew that, even Phineas Marquez, but he and Mila kind of lived in their own strange world and didn’t care.

On that awful day, Phineas, of all people, received a small, square package at my parents’ house.  It was addressed to Phineas Marquez, c/o The Lawrence Family, smiley face and all.

What the hell is this?  Dad roared.  Then he turned on me.  "Did you tell that idiot he could get his mail here?"

Not at all!  I exclaimed.  Of course not!  I haven’t even talked to him in ages, and I’ve been trying to distance myself a bit from Mila as well.  There’s always just too much drama that she creates.

That’s one way of putting it.  Where does Phineas get off having his mail sent here, then?  Dad continued.

Dad, of course, couldn’t abide Phineas any more than I could, and he didn’t like the idea of him directing a package of God-knows-what to our house.  So, even though it was supposed to be illegal to open other people’s mail, since this particular small box was misdirected to our house in the first place, and Phineas didn’t live there, Dad took the liberty of slitting it open.

Inside he found exactly what he had been afraid he would see.

The cardboard box inside the brown wrapper contained another box, this one made of turquoise blue plastic.  It had a top that automatically locked.

Coffee grounds were inside of the turquoise box, which appeared to be a small Tupperware container.  When Dad sifted through it, he found something more than just the coffee.

There were four small ziplock baggies of white powder hidden inside of the coffee grounds.

Cocaine?

Heroin?

Dad wasn’t initially sure which, but he knew coffee grounds were often used to hide the scent of drugs. 

And not just any drugs.  The worst kind of drugs imaginable, like heroin. 

Dad hit the ceiling like I’d never seen him hit it before.  "I’m a district attorney!  I’m a man of law, of order!  How dare this ridiculous animal and that stupid idiot of a girl send something like this to my house?"

We went flying in the car to the post office to let the manager over there know that nothing, absolutely not one single thing, not a package, not a letter, not anything, should come to our house again addressed to one Phineas Marquez.  Ever!  Phineas didn’t live there.

I thought we would stop at the police station next, but Dad didn’t want to do that.  It might have caused a major uproar, given my father’s job and all, if he went on the record that someone had used our house as a