There’s just one mystery left.
Kidnap victim Carlina White, who amazingly tracked down her real parents after living a 23-year lie, desperately wants to know what drove her abductor to snatch her away from her family.
“What possessed you — what drove you to take someone else’s child?” White, 23, wondered about her Aug. 4, 1987, kidnap from Harlem Hospital by a woman posing as a nurse.
White said the “mother” who raised her as her own, Ann Pettway, lied for 16 years about White’s birth — finally confessing but never revealing what motivated the cruel ruse.
It wasn’t until earlier this month that White’s relentless search located parents Joy White and Carl Tyson.
But even as Carlina — raised as Nejdra Nance in Bridgeport, Conn., just 45 miles from her real family in The Bronx — becomes reacquainted with her biological parents, a kidnap motive remains murky.
“I always felt like [Pettway] took me from my parents,” Carlina told The Post in an exclusive interview at the Essex House, where she’s been visiting with her family since Wednesday.
“She gave me too many different stories.”
First Pettway told Carlina that her original name was Natasha, and that she’d been born sometime between June and July 1987, the young woman said. Then, she changed the name and date of her birthday, Carlina said.
Confronted with the lies, Pettway just shrugged, “I don’t remember nothing,” Carlina quoted her saying.
Carlina said “relatives” had always talked of Pettway’s pregnancy in the summer of 1987.
“Everyone just thought I was the baby, and she came back with me,” Carlina said.
But what happened with the pregnancy is as big a mystery as why Carlina was taken away as a 19-day-old infant nursing a 104-degree fever.
Investigators are looking to question Pettway in the case; she hasn’t yet been charged.
But looking at a police mug shot — and a 1987 sketch of a suspect in the kidnapping — Carlina was disgusted and angry.
“Turn it over — I don’t want to look at that!” she told her dad.
“It just brings back everything,” she said, bolting briefly from the room, adding, “I want to be in court — I want to hear what she has to say.”
Her real mom agreed that the mug shot — and an eerily exact suspect sketch of Carlina’s kidnapper — “gives me the creeps.”
“I remember her — that’s the woman who took my daughter,” Joy White said of the 1987 police sketch.
Now Carlina and her real family are just trying to move on from the long-ago horror.
“I want to be my own person,” said Carlina, who lives with her 6-year-old daughter in Georgia.
“I want to have my own future. I want to have my own career. I have big dreams.”
Though she’s done some modeling, Carlina said she’s in school now to become a professional photographer, and wants to open her own studio.
Finding her real family, she said, “doesn’t change my future; it just makes it more focused.”
Her mom and dad agreed.
“Whatever I have planned for the future, she’s a part of it,” Joy said. “It makes my future better, because now we can do things together as mother and daughter.”
There’s also time now for Carlina to meet her half-siblings: Sheena, 18, who has 2-year-old twin girls, and Sydney, 21.
Tyson has three other children, ages 19, 13 and 8.
As the mom and daughter parted ways last night after a day of talking, laughing, eating and even enjoying pedicures, Joy looked into the eyes of the little girl who grew up to look so much like her, and asked:
“Are you gonna miss me, Nina?”
Her grown-up little girl smiled back and said, “Yeah, I’m gonna miss you, Mama.”