Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (19 page)

“I just can’t understand why Regina wouldn’t tell everyone she was pregnant,” Margaret said, her head moving gently from side to side in an amazed negative.

According to Margaret, Regina
had
been pregnant... so if the baby I was calling Hayden was indeed Regina’s child, he hadn’t been kidnapped, and at least that was a crime I could wipe off Regina’s slate in my mind.

“Why indeed,” I murmured, mostly to myself. The only reason I could think of... Oh, ew, no.

I winced.

“You had a thought?” Margaret asked. “You look like you just ate a lemon.”

“What if she didn’t plan to keep the baby?”

“You mean, give it up for adoption?”

“Maybe. But I was thinking ...” I just hated to voice the thought, and I couldn’t even formulate why I found it so loathesome.

Margaret was looking down at me expectantly. “What?” “What if she was carrying the baby for someone else?” “You mean, got pregnant on purpose? On commission, like?”

“Or got inseminated with someone else’s sperm, so the baby would be the true child of half the couple.” At least Margaret seemed to be able to follow my sometimes fractured thinking process. She was nodding.

“You may have something there, Aurora,” she said. “But I find it makes me think much less of Regina, that she would exploit someone’s infertility for her own support.”

She began to clear the few dishes off the table, and I began running hot water to wash them.

As we washed, rinsed, and dried, Margaret told me about an art exhibit she and Luke had driven into Pittsburgh to see the week before, but I was still thinking about Regina.

The surrogate mother theory explained a great deal.

Why Regina had stayed out of sight while she was pregnant. She wouldn’t have wanted to answer a lot of questions.

Why she had money in the diaper bag. She would have been paid for her pregnancy, and presumably she would’ve received money for expenses during it. That would be why she and Craig had been able to afford to live without government aid, even though neither she nor Craig held a steady job.

“I’d been thinking,” I said slowly, “that Craig had gotten involved with some drug deal or some scam of his that had gone wrong. But that didn’t explain all the facts.”

Margaret shrugged. “I’ve had a month or two to wonder about it. Regina’s attitude seemed so strange.”

“But why would someone kill Craig? And take Regina?”

“Maybe nobody took Regina. Maybe she went.”

“Leaving her baby?”

“People leave babies all the time,” Margaret said, her face grim. “Luke and I lived in Pittsburgh before we moved back here so Luke could help his mother out during her last illness.

The first year we were married, before we were trying to have our own child, this woman in our apartment building left her baby right outside our door. She was thinking since we didn’t have kids, we would be ecstatic, I guess.”

“Oh my gosh! What did you do?”

“Of course we called the police, and they called the child welfare people. They had to take the baby to a foster home.”

“That’s so sad! What happened to the mother?”

Margaret shrugged. “Jail time, I think.”

It had certainly become a morning of mysteries to ponder. Why a woman would have a baby she didn’t want. . . why she’d leave that baby’s life to chance . . . and where was the father of the baby, all this time, huh? Why did his responsibility get to be voluntary, while the mother’s was mandatory? I thought of my father, who’d never sent child support; Regina’s father, who had vanished the minute the divorce was final.

Boy, in a minute I was going to be spitting fire because I wasn’t allowed in combat. I shook myself briskly, and asked Margaret Granberry if she’d seen the latest Harrison Ford movie.

Our husbands lurched up the driveway in their separate vehicles. We had quite a convention in front of the house now, with Margaret’s dark green pickup, Martin’s (leased, rented, or borrowed) Jeep, and Luke’s battered sort-of-white Bronco.

Luke hopped out of the Bronco and hurried to the front door, his face reddened by the cold.

He was wearing a rugged coat that looked like sheepskin or some other animal hide, and he’d gone without a hat or gloves. Martin, who hated headgear—I suspected because it messed up his hair—was impressed enough by the cold to have put on a sort of Russian hat he’d had for years, and he’d worn the leather driving gloves I’d given him last Christmas. His arms were full of bags from the grocery.

“I got your message,” Luke told Margaret breathlessly. “Is everything okay here?”

“Yes, honey,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I left Luke a note about why I’d come over here,” she explained to me in an aside. “I didn’t want Luke to think I’d just ducked out on the firewood we were supposed to split this morning!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry I interrupted your chores!” I had assumed that because it had snowed, everyone was on holiday, I realized. A legacy of my southern upbringing.

“No, no. We can just as well do it this afternoon. I’ve enjoyed the break in routine.”

Luke said to Martin, “My wife tells me you’ve had a prowler.”

“You wouldn’t think this was the weather for it, would you?”

“Mighty brave guy,” Luke commented in agreement.

“Or desperate.”

Martin went to put the groceries in the kitchen, leaving this little chilling statement hanging in the air behind him like an icicle from the eaves.

I smiled at the Granberrys, but I felt it was an anxious sort of smile. “I’ll go see if we can find some hot chocolate,” I murmured, and scooted into the kitchen after Martin.

“What are you in such a snit about?” I breathed at him. He was standing in his “I’m mad”

pose, shoulders hunched up, hands in his pockets, staring out the window.

“I can’t track down that slippery little bastard,” Martin growled back. I assumed he meant Rory Brown.

I started to point out that this was no big surprise, but my better sense came to my rescue.

“We’ll talk about it later. Let’s serve the Granberrys some hot chocolate. After all, they came to help when we needed it.” »

Martin carried the tray with the four mugs out to the living room and set it on the battered table in front of the couch. The tray was clearly one of Regina and Craig’s wedding presents, probably from Pier 1, a rattan and iron construction that would have looked charming in more congruent surroundings.

“Do you have any idea how long you’ll stay?” Luke asked, taking a mug of chocolate and dropping some miniature marsh-mallows on top. He seemed like a different person now that he was sure his wife was safe—relaxed and secure, even physically larger somehow.

I let Martin field that one.

“We have no idea,” he confessed. “If Regina is found, and under what circumstances... if we can track down my sister Barby and her fiancé ... if we can find out if the baby is really Regina’s

... All that will have a bearing.”

“What a terrible set of circumstances,” Margaret said. She didn’t seem inclined to repeat the ideas she’d voiced to me when we were alone, and I thought that was wise. I’d try to tell Martin when the Granberrys left.

Luke was the first to hear yet another vehicle coming up the driveway.

“Expecting anyone?” he asked Martin.

“No.” Martin went to the front window. “Blue Dodge pickup.”

To my astonishment, our newest set of callers consisted of the hunky Dennis Stinson, Cindy Bartell, and our erstwhile trip companion, Rory.

This house
had
seemed isolated. Now it was beginning to feel like a social center. We should have charged for parking and hot beverages. I went to the kitchen to put some more water in the pot, found some cookies in the bags Martin had carried into the house, and put them on a plate.

“The shop’s closed on Saturday afternoons, so we thought we’d come out to check on you,”

Dennis said. He looked even larger in the layers of cold-weather wear. Cindy looked like one of Santa’s elves next to him, with her pixie-cut hair and narrow face. She was in a red-and-green sweater, which heightened the impression. Rory wasn’t smiling, or even wearing his usual look of amiable stupidity. On the contrary, he seemed sullen and stubborn. He didn’t speak, but grabbed a cookie and ate it in one bite.

I sidled over next to him, since all the other people in the room were talking to each other and I had a little time on my own.

“How come you’re here?”

“That Stinson guy grabbed me,” Rory said. He looked down at me, ran his tongue around his teeth to clean off the cookie remnants, and summoned back up his charm. “I oughta call the police,” he said, all naughty. “I was just walking around downtown, minding my own business.

Then I cross in front of Cindy’s Flowers, and out comes this Stinson guy, and he grabs me, and tells me your husband is looking for me, and I gotta go with him. Then Mrs. Bartell, she says I got to go, too. Since it was her, I came without giving them no trouble.”

“Thanks, Rory. We really do need to find out more about what happened to Craig and why.”

“I told you everything I know!”

“That’s hard to believe,” I told him, surprised at my own directness. “You were living out here with Craig and Regina, weren’t you? Isn’t that your stuff up there, in one of the extra bedrooms?”

Rory gave me a fleeting look: bright eyed, hard. “What we did here isn’t any of your business,” he told me, with some justification.

“Don’t speak to my wife like that,” Martin said coldly. He had appeared by my side with his usual silence. “We don’t care about your love life. We just want to find out where Regina is, and whose baby this is.”

“Whose?” Rory looked down at his feet. He didn’t seem to understand what Martin meant, and I thought, That could mean two things. “Well, as long as that baby is here, anyone could claim it, couldn’t they? Anyone could say anything about that baby, who’s gonna say no?

Nobody knows nothing except me.”

That was a real conversation stopper, and it got the attention of almost everyone in the room.

The silence was broken by Karl Bagosian’s entrance through the kitchen porch. I was so surprised to see him, I involuntarily said, “Where’d you come from, Karl?” Then, shaking my head at my own rudeness, I said, “Excuse me! It’s good to see you again so soon! Would you like some coffee or hot chocolate?” I registered the fact that Karl wasn’t wearing his prosperous midwestern car-salesman clothing anymore, but some very practical cold-weather wear.

Karl was looking at Rory Brown with the coldest, most assessing look I’d ever seen. If I’d been on the receiving end of it, I’d have been as silent as Rory, and just as scared.

“Hey, Mr. Bagosian,” Rory said finally. “How you doing? How’s Therese?”

“Don’t speak her name.” How theatrical the words sounded, and yet none of us even thought of laughing. Karl was deadly serious.

Therese? I searched around the corners of my brain, finally remembered Therese was Karl’s middle daughter.

“I need to talk to you for a minute, Martin,” Karl said. “In the kitchen.”

Talk about your social challenges.

“Rory,” I said brightly, “wouldn’t you like to go upstairs and gather your things together?

Then you wouldn’t have to make another trip out here!”

To my relief, he took the verbal shove and went up the steps. Somehow, Rory looked much more at home in the house than I did. I fetched a baggy old sweater with big pockets I’d draped over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Karl and Martin were deep in conversation, so I didn’t speak to them. I’d had the sweater on under my coat this morning when I’d gone out in the snow and seen the tracks, and the nursery monitor was still in the left-hand pocket.

I glanced back through the doorway at our uninvited guests, who took the hint and began making small talk. Hayden, who’d been up for a few minutes, had been deposited in his infant seat by Martin, and of course he came in for a share of the conversation. The nightfall of snow was another hot topic, and after that, odds and ends of town gossip that were as boring to me as Lawrenceton gossip would be to any of these people. I was able to gather from the snips I caught as I refreshed mugs and fetched napkins that Margaret had once been a schoolteacher, Dennis Stinson supported the Dallas Cowboys, and more snow was expected today.

The hoot of a horn attracted my attention, and I went to the front door to see an old black pickup with an attachable sign that said U.S. MAIL sitting on the roof. The mail carrier was leaning out of the passenger window, a box and some envelopes in her hand.

“Hello,” I called, and stepped out with only my sweater for warmth. The receiver for the nursery monitor, stuffed down in one of the big pockets, banged as I walked. I was glad I had my boots on. I crossed my arms over my chest as the breathtaking cold dove into my lungs.

“You the new people?” the woman asked. She was round all over and had a very misguided haircut, kind of a poorly done old-fashioned shag. She reeked of cigarette smoke.

“We’re staying here temporarily. We’re the owners,” I said, close enough to the windows to lower my voice. The chug of the engine was loud in the snow-induced hush.

“Just wanted to check. I have a package here for the renter. You want to accept it? You want me to hold it until she comes back?”

It was a box from Victoria’s Secret. Good Lord.

“I’ll keep it for her,” I said reluctantly, and tucked the box under my arm. The mail carrier had thoughtfully put a rubber band around the package to hold the envelopes to it.

“What’s your name?” the carrier bellowed.