Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (15 page)

I had very little memory of the house, but today I discovered that in that memory I had minimized the size of the rooms and maximized the height of the ceiling. Martin’s childhood home was an old two-story farmhouse, with three large rooms downstairs and three up; a decent bathroom on each floor that had obviously been created from a small bedroom or large closet; a large original pantry off the kitchen; and a washer and dryer crammed on the added glassed-in back porch. I was betting that had first been called a mudroom.

If Joseph Flocken had left anything in the house, Martin had had it cleaned out.

The plaid couch and matching armchair in the family room were surely out of someone’s attic, probably Barby’s, and the lone bed upstairs with its matching night tables and chest of drawers had been Barby’s wedding gift to the couple, I recalled. I opened the closet door.

Clothes, not many. Mostly flannel shirts and blue jeans, for both Craig and Regina.

I wondered where Regina was now. It made me shiver, seeing those clothes hanging there.

But I shoved them over to one side of the closet, making room for our hanging bag.

Awkwardly, one-handed due to Hayden, I stripped the sheets off the bed. I tossed them down the stairs, so I could pick them up and wash them later.

I heard Martin rumbling around on the ground floor, doing God knows what. I thought of calling to him, but instead I wandered into the second bedroom upstairs, across the little landing.

There was a sleeping bag on the floor, with a pile of clothes beside it. More blue jeans and flannel shirts, and T-shirts, socks, underwear. A pair of heavy boots. There was a door between this bedroom and the next.

“Hmmm,” I said. “Whose are those, Hayden?” Hayden made one of his favorite “eh!” sounds in response, and waved his hands. Martin was standing beside me suddenly, but I was used to his quiet approaches and wasn’t too startled. He had a box under his arm.

“Rory stayed here, I’ll bet,” he said, and we exchanged looks. Hugh Harbor’s remark about not knowing whether Regina would marry Craig or Rory had stuck with both of us. And while she and I were alone, Cindy had hinted pretty heavily that Craig and Rory did everything together. I saw no need to pass that little tidbit along to my husband.

“It probably wouldn’t have done any good, but we should have asked him more questions when we had him,” I commented, and then bit my lip. I was getting mighty close to losing my new glasses.

“Yes,” said Martin heavily. “We should. I’m going to try to track him down tomorrow, if Dylan doesn’t bring him out this afternoon.”

When we moved on to the next room, which also opened onto the common landing as well as connecting with this bedroom, we found it contained a battered, aged crib (cadged from the Salvation Army or some garage sale, I was willing to bet) and an equally dilapidated rocking chair. There were none of the accouterments I’d seen in my friends’ nurseries: no bumper pads, no mobile, no changing table, no diaper pail. There was an old plastic garbage can, cracked and dirty, still with rolled-up dirty diapers inside. The sheet in the crib appeared to be a regular twin flat, sloppily folded and tucked to fit the small mattress.

“She didn’t really plan on keeping a baby here.” I turned to face Martin. With reluctance, he met my eyes.

“There aren’t any presents,” I said mercilessly. “You always get presents when you have a baby. Even kids living on the poverty edge get presents when they have a baby—maybe just a crib sheet or a receiving blanket from the dollar store, but they get something pretty. This, this is
nothing.
There’s no way on earth she planned on keeping this baby. I’ll bet she wasn’t ever really pregnant.”

“What about the things she brought to our house?”

“The diaper bag and the portable crib?” I took a deep breath. “The tags were still on. I think on her way to our house, she stopped at the first discount store she came to and charged them or wrote a bad check for them,” I said. “Or maybe she took those things from whoever she took this baby from.”

Martin flinched.

“We have to talk about it, Martin. No one knew she was pregnant. She didn’t go the hospital.

Rory just says Craig took her to a midwife. Did you notice how reluctant Shondra was to tell us what the midwife’s name was? I’ll bet if we ask this Bobbye Sunday, she’ll tell us that Regina was never a patient. How do we know this baby is even Regina’s? What if—well, what if the money in the diaper bag was ransom money?”

“Rory knew the birth weight,” Martin said. “You remember, in the restaurant, when the waitress asked?”

I nodded. “I also know Rory’s a liar.” Hayden raised his head off my shoulder and goggled at the room. I turned my head slightly, and kissed his cheek. His face wobbled around to mine. He banged his skull against my shoulder, and then came up again to look at me. We rubbed noses.

His eyelids fluttered, and he laid his head down on my shoulder again.

“I don’t know who bore this baby,” Martin said, his fingers brushing Hayden’s wisp of hair.

“But I think Rory was around when it happened.”

“So, we need to talk to the midwife. And we need to find out if Craig’s big brother knew more about it than his wife did.” I was swaying gently from side to side, assisting Hayden’s slide into sleep. I eased over to the crib, glared down at the sheet, certain it was dirty. In a whisper, I asked Martin to lay one of our receiving blankets over it. When he’d done that I eased the baby into the crib, propping him on his side with a small firm pillow at his back, and covering him with one of the blankets Ellen had given me.

I’d been aware Martin was still in the room, and I stepped quietly over to see what he was doing squatting on the floor.

Martin was plugging in a brand-new nursery monitor he’d extracted from the box he’d had under his arm. He untwisted the tie around the cord and moved the transmitter close to the crib.

Wordlessly, he handed me the receiver. He’d already put batteries inside. I looked up at him, and his face told me clearly I better not comment on his acquisition. He must have bought it on his trip to K-Mart this morning.

Martin and I left the room on tiptoe, and half closed the door behind us. The house had been cold when we entered. Since Craig and Regina had been paying their own gas bill, they’d kept the heat turned down, or maybe his friend Karl had lowered the thermostat, but Martin had gone straight to it and moved it up. He stood in the nearly bare living room, looking around him at the gleaming wood of the floors and the soft white of the walls. I knew the memories must be flooding in. As I watched him, I saw him change, the years erase. There were traces in his face of things I never saw on the man I’d married: uncertainty, unhappiness, doubt.

In three quick steps I’d reached him and put my arms around him. I wished I were taller so he could rest his head against my chest and feel protected, just for a moment. It was an awful thing, being a man, I thought; and I pitied Martin for the first time since I’d known him.

With Hayden asleep, we were able to explore the house a little more thoroughly. I opened cabinets and drawers, feeling like the worst kind of snoop, since Regina had arranged all these things in her own system. But I couldn’t see a way around it. We’d be here for at least a few days, and we might as well use what was there; it was Martin’s house, after all, and Regina’s child was with us. Well, a child, maybe Regina’s.

Craig and Regina’s belongings fell into two categories, like most young married couples‘.

They had old things given them by relatives and friends who no longer wanted them, like the couch and chair in the living room and some rather battered pots and pans; and they had brand spanking new things they’d gotten for wedding presents. Regina’s engraved thank you notes were still sitting underneath an address book in the kitchen drawer that held the phone book and quick-phone list.

While Martin wandered around checking out the renovation job, and probably reminiscing, I located kitchen things I might need, figured out the stove, and started lunch. Corinth didn’t have much in the way of restaurants, and I didn’t feel like coping with Hayden in a public place again.

Besides, I like to cook, especially when no one else is in the kitchen. I planned a large meal since we’d missed breakfast. When Martin saw me deboning chicken breasts, he pulled on his coat and scarf and went outside to take a walk. He returned with the welcome news that in case we needed it, there was a rack of firewood that looked dry.

I thought about Darius Quattermain when Martin mentioned the firewood. I wondered if he was all right, if he would ever feel like delivering wood to my house again. Maybe no one had told him he’d stripped in front of me, but he might remember all on his own. I didn’t know what drug he’d taken, or what its aftereffects would be. As I waited for the cooking oil to heat in the electric skillet, I wondered what kind of person would drug another; it was a kind of poisoning, wasn’t it? Poisoners were supposed to be sly and patient, I recalled. Anyone could pick up a baseball bat and swing it out of frustration. Well, maybe not anyone, but many people. I was sure the number of potential poisoners in the population must be much lower.

“What are you thinking of?” Martin asked, and I jumped, dropping the chicken breast into the hot oil, which popped me. When he’d apologized and I’d taken my hand out from under the cold running water, I said, “I was just thinking about Darius.”

“You were shaking your head, raising your eyebrows in this kind of amazed look, and got this
ew
expression on your face.”

I shook my head, feeling silly. I didn’t want to explain my train of thought to Martin. A knock at the front door made me jump again. Martin went to answer it, and a second later a tall young man came with him into the kitchen. I had only to look at his face for a moment to know this was Craig’s brother.

I wiped my hands on a dish towel, and took Dylan’s hand, telling him how sorry I was.

Dylan, who was wearing a John Deere green shirt and some khakis, was dark like his brother, but his build wasn’t reedy like Craig’s had been. Dylan was more bull-like, solid and stolid, a man who saw his way from Point A to Point B and took the most direct route.

“I would sure like to see the baby,” he told me, and seemed surprised when Martin volunteered to take him upstairs to the makeshift nursery.

When they came back, Dylan looked like a man with a puzzle in front of him.

He accepted a seat at the old kitchen table, folded his hands on it, and began to say what he’d come to say.

“I couldn’t set my hands on Rory to bring him with me. Shondra told me you wanted to talk to him.”

Since he said this primarily to Martin, Martin nodded. I kept on pottering around the kitchen, feeling this would make the younger man relax a little more. I opened a can of green beans, put them in a very nice saucepan, and began to cook the rice in the microwave (chipped Corningware casserole, aged small microwave).

“My brother Craig,” Dylan began, and came to a difficult silence. We both kept our eyes down, waiting patiently. “My brother Craig was not always a good man.”

Martin made a gesture that could be interpreted as “Who is?” and I made a little noise that was meant to be commiserating. This seemed to encourage Dylan.

“Craig likes—liked—things to be easy. But being married and earning a living—being an adult—those aren’t easy things.”

I nodded to myself. That was the absolute truth.

“I’m the last person Craig would have told, if he’d had plans to somehow make money off that poor little baby. But I can’t help fearing somehow that .was the case. Whatever Craig’s plans were, Rory knows them. I hate to speak bad about my wife’s brother, just like she didn’t like to speak bad about Craig, but the fact is, Rory and Craig are two of a kind, and they deserved each other, just the way I hope Shondra and I deserve each other. If you had Rory in the car with you all the way here, I guess that was your best chance to find out what he knew. I don’t pretend to understand why you let him go. Why didn’t you turn him over to the police?”

Oooh, good question. I raised my eyebrows inquiringly and transferred my attention to Martin.

“At the time,” Martin answered, thinking as he spoke, “I was sure that bringing him here would make things go easier on Regina if the police picked her up. I think—I know—I was sure Regina had killed Craig, and I didn’t want to see her in jail, see her stand trial. Particularly since I couldn’t understand why. Why she would do that, how she would do that. Regina is the most important thing in my sister’s life, she’s. . .” My husband seemed to run out of words.

“But letting her get away with murder ain’t doing her a favor,” Dylan said.

Martin and I blinked and looked at him.

There was not a thing to say.

He was absolutely right.

We had more company that evening. After a quiet afternoon we’d had a light supper. I’d just washed the supper dishes. Martin, in between trying to get in touch with the midwife and with Rory Brown (we’d found a working phone), had boiled a used batch of bottles and nipples and set them out to drain on a clean towel. I’d put a load of linens and a few clothes through the washing-and-drying cycle. The isolated position of the farmhouse had begun to make me think of us as cut off from the world, a not-unpleasant idea; so the sound of the car and the knock at the front door came as something of a jolt.

Martin walked through the living room to the front door and switched on the outside light.