Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (22 page)

“Rory’s dead,” I said baldly.

“So you left the baby there?”

Just then Hayden began crying, and I looked down to the floorboard to make sure he was okay.

When I looked back to the window, Margaret had a gun in her hand.

“Oh shit,” I breathed. “Don’t shoot, Margaret.”

“I won’t if you’ll come without any trouble.”

“Sure,” I said instantly.

“Then you bend over and pick up my baby.”

I did, though it was difficult to maneuver both our bundled bodies in the cab of the pickup.

Margaret stepped back from the door. “Now, get out holding the baby. And don’t try anything like throwing him at me to get me to drop the gun.”

“I wouldn’t dream of that,” I said indignantly, and then told myself it would be a good thing to keep my mouth shut.

Margaret’s head was uncovered, and her red hair had caught a lot of snowflakes. She turned her head uneasily from side to side, like she was tracking movements invisible to me.

I slid down off the high seat, holding Hayden.

Margaret seemed to be thinking hard.

“Go get in my pickup,” she ordered. “You’re going to have to drive.”

So I struggled uphill to the road, praying for more traffic to come along. This wasn’t the day for my prayers to be answered the way I wanted them to be. The road was empty as far as I could see, north to south.

Following Margaret’s directions, I got in the driver’s seat, having slid Hayden over to the passenger side. The truck, still running, was older than Karl’s fancy pickup and it had seen harder usage. Before I could do more than formulate the thought that I could throw the truck in drive and take off, Margaret had grabbed Hayden and was getting in herself, the gun pointed at me.

“Go up to your driveway,” she instructed.

I drove slowly, still hoping someone else would come along and read something strange into the situation, call the police. I turned in when she told me to, only to reverse and back out into the road again, this time pointed south.

“We’ve already turned into your driveway twice, so that ought to account for our tracks,”

Margaret said. “With more snow falling, it’ll be hard to read the tracks anyway.”

I wondered what Martin had thought when he’d heard the truck, near the house. He’d probably thought help had come quicker than he’d expected. He’d have felt proud of me . . .

Instead, I’d been tricked, and I hadn’t gotten help.

Shame broke over me in a wave of blackness.

It was followed by a rage so overwhelming that I had trouble seeing the road ahead of me. I seldom lose my temper, and this was far beyond that, light years beyond. I knew I had blocked from my complete awareness, until this moment, just how bad Martin had looked, just how much he too needed a doctor.

Now this woman was keeping me from getting help for him, and Karl, too. I remembered Rory’s empty eyes and the pool of blood around his head; but Rory was beyond human assistance, and I had no more grief for him. My sense of urgency vied with my terrible rage for supremacy in the limited emotional room I had to spare.

I tugged at my ear on my left side, away from Margaret. My earring slid out, the back rolling down my collar and into my shirt. The small earring, just a little gold knot design, went down in the deep crack of the seat. Some policeman would find it and nail Margaret Granberry, I hoped most devoutly.

Aurora Was Here.

I pressed my fingers to the wheel, the steering column, the seat adjustor, the window, as unobtrusively as possible, hoping she’d overlook a print when she wiped down the truck. Maybe I’d seen too many movies and too many episodes
of America’s Most Wanted,
but I was doing the best I could for myself.

Margaret told me to turn into her driveway. It was the first time I’d seen the Granberry’s house. It was a farmhouse with extras added, in keeping with what Cindy had told me about their lifestyle. Gleaming white, with spanking green shutters and a hot tub in a sunroom to the south, it was farming deluxe.

Luke came running out the front door as we lurched to a stop, his face twisted with anxiety.

There was a rifle in his hands.

“What happened?” he cried.

“Look, honey!” Margaret called, holding up the baby so he could see it.

Luke’s face went slack with horror.

“What have you done, sweetheart?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, she was heading to town in Karl’s truck. He was parked down at the copse,”

Margaret explained. “But she was taking the baby with her, and I figured this might be our last chance.”

“But. . .”

“And sweetie, she says you hit Karl too,” Margaret interrupted.

“I only fired once,” he said, protesting.

“The bullet went through Rory,” I told them, hardly able to choke out the words through the rage.

“He’s dead,” Margaret said, relief clear in her voice. “So we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Luke’s shoulders slumped with the same relief. “Let’s get you all inside the house,” he said briskly.

“I can show Lucas his nursery,” Margaret said, delight coursing through her voice.

“Hayden,” I said.

“No, that’s the nasty name
she
gave him,” Margaret told Hayden’s scrunched little face. “His real name is Lucas.” , While her attention was riveted on the baby, I risked a glance at Luke. He, too, was looking at Hayden. If he hadn’t been armed, I would have had him, and at the moment I felt equal to a pro boxer. Nothing would have stopped me, if I hadn’t known I had to ask him for something.

“You have to call an ambulance and send it to the farm,” I said, sounding as reasonable as I could, considering I was in a frenzy.

“Why? Rory’s dead!”

“I realize he’s beyond consideration,” I said, hardly knowing what words were issuing from my mouth. “But Karl is very badly hurt and Martin is not well. I’m afraid he’s. . . I’m afraid he’s. . . really sick.” I was making a superhuman effort to sound calm and matter-of-fact.

The couple looked at each other, communing silently.

“Don’t think we can risk it,” Luke said.

Margaret started into the house. “No,” she threw over her shoulder, “I don’t see how we can.”

“You have to,” I said. I stood in the snow, looking up at Luke, whose brown eyes were clear and blank. “You can’t let my husband die. You can’t.”

“Margaret? Maybe we could send an ambulance?” he called to her, though he kept his guard on me.

“I’ll bet they can trace a nine-one-one call,” she said doubtfully. “Let’s get inside and think about it. I bet our baby is hungry.”

They weren’t going to help.

That was the final straw.

I jumped him, rifle and all.

I woke up on a floor, a cold concrete floor. It was in a windowless room lit by a bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the ceiling.

My mouth was dry as cotton and my head hurt like hell. I tried to lift it, and the effort left me shaken and nauseated. I satisfied myself with just shifting my eyes around. I thought of all the books I’d read, all the mysteries. Spenser wouldn’t have ended up this way. Neither would Kinsey Milhone. Or Henry O. Or Stephanie Plum. Well, yeah, maybe Stephanie Plum.

“Hey.”

I found the source of the voice. A young woman, dark haired, was sitting on a straight-backed chair against the wall.

“Aunt Roe, are you all right?”

I hadn’t realized I’d been sure Regina was dead until I saw her sitting there alive and well.

But it wasn’t possible for me to feel more shocked than I already did; I just accepted our niece’s presence with no more than dull surprise. “Regina,” I whispered.

“Yeah, it’s me!” she said cheerfully. “Hey, how are you feeling? And how’s the baby? I’ve been going nuts down here.”

“Where is here?”

Regina thought that one over for a second. “Oh, you mean, where are we right now?”

“Yes,” I said, without the energy to be exasperated.

“We’re in the Granberrys’ basement.”

I’d never had a basement. Not that many houses in Georgia do. I’d only opened the door to the basement in Martin’s old farmhouse, shuddered at the dark cold that rolled up the stairs, and shut the door with alacrity. Now here I was in a basement, a windowless, below-ground prison.

“How long have you been here?”

“Since that night at your place. Well, minus the trip back to Ohio, but I don’t remember much of that. Margaret gave me a bunch of sleeping pills.”

I knew anguish was waiting just around the corner. When Luke Granberry had knocked me out, he’d done me a favor. I tried to stave off the misery for a few minutes. “Tell me what happened,” I croaked.

“Oh, well, the Granberrys showed up,” Regina said, making a face as if Margaret and Luke were particularly undesirable party crashers.

“Why?”

“Well. . . you know ... to get the baby. But Craig beat them there.”

“Why?”

“Well... to get the baby.”

I felt a tear roll down my cheek sideways on its way to the floor. Martin, alone with the dying Karl Bagosian, waiting for the ambulance I was supposed to send, the help I was supposed to bring. . . “Tell me from the beginning,” I said, in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

“When I got pregnant, it was like, a big disaster. You can imagine!”

No, I couldn’t.

“I’d just married Craig. Well, it happened before we got married, if you can count you can figure that out, and you better believe the old ladies around here can count! Especially after my mother had that baby, you know, the big scandal.”

“Yes.”

“But we got married, so hey, everything was cool. But I still didn’t tell anybody, because frankly, I was thinking about getting rid of it. I mean, I’m just too young to have a baby. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And the idea of Craig as a daddy, well, that just didn’t feel right. But I wasn’t throwing up or anything, felt great, so I just decided to wait a while and see how I felt. A baby might be kind of neat. They love you, right?”

A tear flowed down my other cheek.

“So, anyway, I began showing. Craig and Rory thought that was just amazing. Feeling the baby move. But I still thought about getting rid of it. Then the Granberrys showed up one night and told us they’d been thinking.”

“And?”

“Well, they said they really really wanted a baby and they couldn’t have one, and they had noticed I was gonna have one, and they wondered since we were kind of strapped for money, if we would consider letting them adopt the kid? That seemed like a great idea the more we thought about it, Rory and Craig and me, so I told them, sure. They paid for me to go to the midwife, one in the next county so no one from Corinth would see me, and they asked me not to go to town, because they didn’t want anyone telling the baby where he’d come from until they decided it was time. That seemed right to me, too, so I just hung out at the farm. It was boring, let me tell you!”

“I’m sure,” I murmured, feeling the hair on either side of my face grow damp as the tears flowed. The basement was lined with shelves and crowded with odds and ends. I saw that Regina had made a sort of nest for herself in one corner. There was an ancient easy chair, a lamp, and a board across two cement blocks that served as a table beside the chair. It was piled high with magazines. A mattress topped with a sleeping bag was pushed against the wall. There was a cubicle that I suspected hid a toilet and maybe a shower, close to the base of the stairs.

“Have you tried to escape yet?” I asked, interrupting Regina’s account of the onset of her labor. She sounded exactly like she was the only woman in the world who’d ever had a baby.

Regina gaped at me. “Are you kidding?” she asked incredulously. “As soon as Craig and Rory show up with the baby, Margaret’ll let me go. I’m just, like, a hostage! If I tried to escape, they might hurt me!”

Ah-oh. She didn’t know. If I could have felt worse, I would have. “What do you think happened in Lawrenceton?”

“See, I had the baby,” Regina said, and I sighed. She was not going to edit her adventures.

“And when I saw him, I just thought I couldn’t give him up. And Craig got put in jail, so he couldn’t make me. I told Margaret and Luke I had to breastfeed for the first few days, that the midwife had told me so, but really I’d had the shot to dry my boobs up. I just said that so I could take him home with me. But I knew the Granberrys were dying for me to give him up; they’d been pestering me from the hour I had him.”

“So you ran?”

“Yeah, man, I just took off. I didn’t think that Craig and Rory would figure out where I’d gone. And I never thought they’d get out so quick. I mean, I missed them, Craig especially. But I couldn’t make up my mind. And I had really thought the Granberrys would be great for the baby, but then I began thinking Margaret was a little weird, and she could make Luke do anything. So maybe she wouldn’t be a good mother. And,” Regina’s voice lost its bounce, “I really loved the baby. I kind of wanted to keep him, even if we really needed the money. So one day when I knew the Granberrys had gone into the city for some art thing, I lit out.”

“The Granberrys had already paid you some?”

“Oh, yeah, they gave us half the cash when he was born. They were gonna give us the other half when we turned him over. I hid the money, except for some I took out for the trip.”

She’d hidden it in the crib mattress. Where Rory had found it.

“What about the legal part of it?”

“Margaret said she and Luke’d move as soon as the baby was old enough. She figured wherever she lived, no one would ask questions. She read a couple of books on how to get a birth certificate for him. You know you can get books that tell you how to do that? She was gonna change his name to Lucas. I just called him Hayden for my great-uncle on my father’s side. He was my favorite when I was a little girl.”