Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (9 page)

I now understood why the police beat people who wouldn’t confess. I knew somewhere in that cute, empty head lay the truth. And I wanted it badly enough to extract it with red-hot pincers, or at least so I told myself. I could tell by the way Martin was clenching his hands that he felt the same way, and I was willing to bet that under other circumstances Martin could make Rory talk.

“We’ll have to talk about this more, later,” I told them both.

I’ve never been trained to be a detective of any kind, but I’m a reasonably observant person, and this money was not the jumble of rumpled bills of all denominations you’d get if you robbed a convenience store. This was the kind of money you’d get at a bank, two one-hundred-dollar bills, the rest in twenties: a compact little bundle, smooth and flat.

Lunch that day was a real tense meal. I heated up soup and made grilled-cheese sandwiches, and we sat together at the kitchen table in uneasy silence. For once in my life, I wanted the phone to ring. Maybe the highway patrol would stop Regina’s car. Martin had asked Cindy to try to discover the name of the cruise line with which Barby had sailed, and getting Barby here would be a great relief. Or my mother might tell me more about John’s prognosis. I had so much to worry about my thoughts were running around inside my head like hamsters.

Just as I began the dishes, I heard Hayden stirring, and this time he woke up ready to raise the roof.

I put a bottle in the microwave before I left the kitchen. I was getting numb from the unaccustomed responsibility for this baby. I had never been so tired in my life, and every time I heard him tune up to cry, I leaped into action to stave off any more wailing. My stomach clenched every time he made a noise.

An hour later, I had changed Hayden, fed Hayden, burped Hayden—in short, fulfilled my part of the bargain. But he wouldn’t go back to sleep. In my opinion, he should be out of the picture until the next feeding-changing-burping cycle; but it was one he didn’t seem to share. Not knowing what else to do, I was holding the baby, sitting on the couch in the library, staring down at the round face with more than a little frustration. Furthermore, I had an awful feeling that the half-done dishes were still sitting on the counter in the kitchen.

“Listen, you need to give me a break,” I said. “Don’t you know I only have so many interior resources?” I definitely felt the cupboard was pretty bare in my interior resources closet.

Hayden regarded me wonderingly. He didn’t seem to be concerned that he was at the mercy of a totally inadequate caregiver. His arms waved around. He made little noises, “eh” and a kind of creaky grunt being the most popular. With my free finger I touched the round cheek. It was so soft. Through his thin down of fair hair, I could see the pulsing place on the top of his head where his skull had not yet joined, or so Lizanne had explained it to me. It made this small life seem incredibly vulnerable.

I had a sudden, strange impulse: I would call my friend and priest, Aubrey Scott, and have him baptize Hayden.

If my hands had been free, I’d have slapped myself after I ran that idea through my head a second time. Baptism wouldn’t put a protective candy coating on Hayden. He wasn’t an M&M.

And to assume the responsibility of having this child baptized would indicate I had given up on Regina bobbing to the surface to reclaim him, a terrible admission.

But I knew I would’ve felt a lot better if I could have just eased into the church and sort of casually had Aubrey sprinkle some water over this kid. I figured that Hayden Graham, son of Craig and Regina—if that was indeed who this child was— needed all the help he could get.

Confident that no one could hear me, I whispered, “You is booful baby.” Hayden’s hazy blue eyes focused on me. He smiled. My heart pounded suddenly, as if I’d just fallen in love. I beamed back at him as exaggeratedly as a children’s TV show host.

Sally Allison said, “Your lips are gonna fall off if you keep that up.”

I jumped. “Why’d you go and scare me like that, Sally? Good golly Miss Molly! You about made me jump out of my skin!”

“Sorry. You and Tiny Tim here just looked so cute.” Sally bent over to get a close look at my lapful.

“You heard about our predicament, I guess.”

“Mild-mannered reporter Sally Allison sees all, tells most.”

“Got any news?” Having had her look, Sally threw herself in Martin’s luxurious chair while my blood pressure finally settled back down to normal.

“Hmmm. Well, police found Regina’s car.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Sally was carefully patting her right hand against her bronze curls, a gentle sort of pat that wouldn’t disarrange the perfect arc they formed around her head. She was checking for holes. Next, she’d pull her compact out of her purse and powder her nose; then she’d rummage for a lipstick and redefine her mouth. This was Sally’s personal checklist. As she opened her compact, she said, “It was just across the state line in South Carolina.”

“Any sign of Regina?”

Sally shook her head. “No, honey, I’m sorry. But on the big plus side, no bloodstains.” Sally carefully crossed her legs, smoothing the skirt of her expensive green suit.

Hayden smiled at me again, and it dawned on me that he didn’t smell very good. In fact, that was putting it nicely.

“I can’t imagine what happened,” I said absently, wriggling forward on the couch so I could stand with the baby. I managed this, and took him to the living room, which I’d definitely settled on as the best place to keep the diaper bag and the rubberized pad that you put under Hayden before you took off his diaper. (Experience had taught me the use of the pad.) With scarcely a fumble and no missed snaps, I wiped Hayden’s bottom and changed him. I dropped the soiled wipes in the dirty diaper before I rolled it up and retaped it shut, a refinement of which I was extremely proud.

“Good job,” Sally said approvingly, taking the used diaper from me and marching through the dining room to dispose of it in the kitchen. I heard the gush of running water as she washed her hands.

“I take it Martin knows about the car?” I called.

Sally gave me a funny look. I caught the tail end of it as she rejoined me in the living room.

“Yes, the sheriff came to tell him. They’re out there talking in the yard.”

In the yard. Why would Martin talk to the sheriff outside? It was cold, and windy, and ... oh shit. Where was our unwanted houseguest? That was why Martin was keeping the sheriff outside.

“What’s wrong?” Sally was paying attention, as usual.

“Nothing!” I said brightly. I was darting little looks out to the hall, the dining room, the kitchen, to see if I could spy Rory. When I looked back at Sally, she was looking skeptical, to say the least.

“And you say,” she began, her. voice an extension of that skeptical look, “that you have no idea what happened out here? Excuse me, Roe, but that’s hardly like you.”

“Listen here, Sally Allison, I have a lapful of trouble without you adding to it,” I said, to my own surprise. Then I burst into tears. If I’d been able to choose, I could hardly have picked a more effective diversion. While Hayden lay on his back on the coffee table, looking around him with increasingly heavy eyes, Sally patted my shoulder vigorously.

I found myself Telling Sally All About It, which means I was telling her my singular emotional reaction to the whole day yesterday, culminating with the appearance of my mother in the kitchen this morning with her own terrible news.

Sally’s pats gradually grew less and less emphatic and more and more punitive.

“What?” I asked, when it dawned on me that she looked sour rather than sympathetic.

“Not about you, is it?” she asked brusquely.

“What?”

“All this. Your stepfather’s sick, so your mother is preoccupied with him, as she should be.

Your husband’s niece is missing and her husband is dead, so Martin’s thinking more about his family than he is about you, for once.”

I stared at Sally like a landed fish. Was I really that selfish? Or had Sally been so jealous of me all these years, and I hadn’t noticed? I felt like I’d been negotiating a minefield and the soldier behind me had started chucking rocks over my shoulder.

“You know, Sally, this maybe isn’t the best time to tell me about my character flaws,” I said in as even a voice as I could manage. “I had in mind something like you telling me, ‘There, there, you poor thing,’ rather than implying I’m a selfish bitch who thinks I’m the center of the universe.”

Of course, no matter what I said, I was wondering how much of what Sally had said was true.

Did everyone see me that way? Oh God, had all the friends I’d had all these years looked at me and thought, That Roe, she’s okay, but talk about egocentric!

Sally looked stricken, thank God. But my relief faded when she said, “Roe, my timing stinks, I apologize for that. But you’ve never known how lucky you’ve had it. Your mother does everything but wipe your rear for you, and your husband not only thinks he should protect and pamper you, but he has money!”

“And that’s my fault?”

“No!” she said. “No! But it’s your—responsibility!” She looked at her watch and gasped.

“City council meeting! I have to go now, Roe, I’ll see you soon.” And she grabbed her purse and flew out the door before I had a chance to respond.

I scooped up the sleeping Precious Burden, and watched through the window as Sally crossed the yard, pausing to talk to Martin and the sheriff. I was glad to see Martin was wearing his waterproof jacket, since the day was overcast and every now and then the sky spit some rain. The sheriff strolled away from Martin, and leaned on Sally’s car, talking to her through the partly open window for a moment before Sally gave a quick wave and swung her car around.

I picked and puzzled at the scene with Sally, which had upset me deeply. I felt like I hadn’t known the lion was within when I’d shut the village gates for the night. Gee whiz—Roe Teagarden, Monster of Selfishness?

I’d always thought of myself more as Roe Teagarden, the Incredibly Lucky. Well. . .

sometimes. Maybe not a few years ago, when my steady boyfriend had suddenly married the woman he’d gotten pregnant while he was dating me . . . but then again, I’d been lucky I hadn’t married him, right? And maybe I hadn’t been so lucky when my father and stepmother had moved my half brother out of state, making it almost impossible for me to see him . . . but then again, I’d saved his life, and I’d gotten to fly out to California to visit Phillip twice since then.

This “good luck” evaluation was just as helpful as opening the closet full of bridesmaids’

dresses I’d kept in my storage closet before I’d met Martin. Time to shuffle off this coil of introspection and deal with a here-and-now situation.

Hayden was asleep. His eyelids were so pale the veins stood out clearly, making his skin look almost translucent. I lowered my head to inhale his scent.

“I cheated you,” Martin said. He was standing in the archway to the dining room. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair was rumpled. The stubble on his cheeks was white, like his hair, not black, like his eyebrows.

I wasn’t in the mood for any more deep emotional scenes.

“How do you figure that?” I asked, my voice hushed and level because of the baby.

“We could have explored other options,” he said, his voice equally subdued. “Maybe your”—

he nodded toward my mid-section to indicate my malformed womb—“could have been corrected surgically, or something. We could have adopted privately; we have enough money.”

I looked at my husband for a long, wake-up moment before I said, “And these are new thoughts to you?”

I carried Hayden up the stairs, and laid him in his crib.

Then I marched downstairs. Martin was standing right where I’d left him. I said, “I shouldn’t hop on you with both feet because something was more important to me than it was to you.”

It was like my words didn’t register, as if Martin had become deaf to anything that didn’t resonate with some mysterious preoccupation. “We should start out tomorrow morning,” he said.

“We’ll have to drive. Given the circumstances. Maybe you should go to the store and get whatever the baby will need for the trip.”

Like I knew? I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. Sally’s observation had stung me where it hurt, had made me doubt my every impulse. I went to the desk to make a list of things I might need, but instead I sat with my hand on the telephone. Despite a nagging fear that somehow this conversation, too, would be dispiriting, I called the one person I could count on, my best friend, Amina.

Wife of a Houston lawyer, Amina was a mother (and I a godmother) of a lovely little girl, Megan. Amina, an only child, and her husband, oldest of two siblings, were happily indulging Megan (now a Terrible Two) and threatening her with a brother or sister.

“Amina,” I said, relief throbbing through my voice, when my friend answered the phone.

“Roe,” she said, in a curiously hushed voice. “I can’t talk long, Megan’s got the measles.”

Of course.

“Is she very sick?” I asked, trying to sound Deeply Concerned.

“Just the usual case, I guess.” Amina was trying to be brave, not doing a very good job of it.

“But she just needs me every minute, or at least she thinks she does. I’ve been taking her Popsicles and playing games with her all day. Do you think she’s a little spoiled? That’s what Hugh’s mom says.”

“Only as much as any only child,” I told Amina somewhat grimly. I had grown up as an only child.