Рон Гуларт - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

Maybe a walk down the beach would clear his mind, give him some ideas. First, he had to go back to the store and haul in more food. He hadn’t been thinking too straight yesterday and had forgotten a lot of things.

When he returned with two bags of groceries, he counted his money. He figured he had enough to last another week, maybe ten days if he didn’t eat much. The big surprise was how much food cost now. Where he’d been, he hadn’t had to pay for it.

When he got to the beach, a big smile broke out. There were a lot of people, some under umbrellas, some spread out on beach towels, some in the water. His eyes went quickly to the girls in their bikinis. This was what he’d come for. Finally, he had died and gone to heaven!

But right now he had to think about raising money for this celestial holiday. Almost immediately an idea came to him. While people were in the water, their belongings were on the shore. He could lift a few wallets.

He began walking down the beach. There were several beach bags, unguarded, on towels or under umbrellas, but those on towels had people sunning nearby who would notice if he began opening the bags. He did look in a couple under umbrellas, but there was no money, only those little cards used for room keys, and of course, none of them had a room number, so there was no point in taking them.

He walked further down the beach, for the first time beginning to feel depressed. He had to have money. He looked more closely at the people, not just the buxom girls, and he was surprised at how many toddlers there were. Babies and little kids everywhere. They were building sand castles, throwing balls, floating on rubber rafts in the surf, and some of the tiniest ones were just crawling in the sand, near mothers who were burning their skins in the sun.

He stopped for a moment, gaping. Some of the mothers were watching their little kids, but some were not. For all they knew, their infants could have crawled out to the surf and been washed out to sea. Where there were fathers around, they seemed to be playing with the kids, but the mothers, some of them...

Jee-zuss! If somebody wanted a baby, this would be the place to pick one up. A kidnapping.

A kidnapping if you wanted money.

But such a thought had never entered his head before. He couldn’t imagine taking a child. What would you do with it until ransom was paid? Where would you keep it? How would you go about returning it without getting caught? Nosiree, not in a million years! That wasn’t his thing. Stealing was.

But wasn’t taking a child nothing but stealing?

He walked along the beach, his mind in an uproar. He needed money desperately. If he just borrowed a kid for a little while, say overnight, and returned it unharmed, was that really kidnapping? He could ask for some money for its safe return, and the parents would be grateful to him for keeping the child so well.

No, no, he couldn’t do it. It would be too risky. How would he know who the parents were or where they lived? How could he ask them for money if he knew nothing about them?

Easy! If he took a kid today, kept it overnight, the parents’ name would be in the morning paper with the story of the missing child. But could he pick up one off the beach without someone noticing and without the kid yelping its little head off?

He walked on and on, past the crowded part of the beach, now along a row of cottages. It was something to think about, but he still couldn’t imagine doing it.

And then he could.

There was one woman, youngish, probably early or middle thirties, dyed blond hair, purple bikini hugging a good figure, lying on a large Confederate-flag beach towel. There were no other people near her. Going toward the water at an unsteady gait was a little boy, not much over a year old. The woman appeared to be asleep.

He started to call out to her, to wake her, tell her to look after her son. But then he didn’t. Almost without realizing what he was doing, he went to the kid, picked him up, and said, “You shouldn’t go to the water like that.”

The kid just looked at him. Didn’t cry or utter a sound.

Then Brody did it. He started walking back the way he had come, riding the kid peacefully on his shoulders, the kid laughing all the time. He felt a little antsy when people looked at him, but apparently they thought he was a father playing with his kid. Finally, he got back to his garage room and put the kid down on the sofa, really looking at him for the first time. He wasn’t bad looking, kinda cute, in fact: brown curly hair, big blue eyes that were staring back at him, and then those eyes filled up, spilled over, and the kid was crying.

“Wah! Wah!” The little face now scrooched up in a frown that was like a thunderhead before a disastrous storm. “Wah! Wah!”

Godamighty, what did you do with a crying kid?

“Shh! Don’t cry! Please don’t cry. Here, ride on my shoulders again.” He picked the baby up and the crying stopped. The kid looked at him in a puzzled way. Then Brody smelled the smell.

Uh-oh! He’d never changed a diaper in his life, didn’t know how, didn’t even want to know how. But he’d have to learn pretty quick. He took off the stinky one, folded together some thick paper towels he’d bought, and used scotch tape he found in a drawer to hold them together. The kid still looked at him in an accusing way, but at least the yelling stopped.

Something else he hadn’t thought of was food. A kid that young couldn’t eat real food and he couldn’t risk going out to buy baby food. He looked at the groceries he bought that morning, picked up a banana and mashed half of it, eating the other half himself. The kid just looked at it. Then Brody realized the baby couldn’t feed himself so he got a spoon and shoveled the banana in. Now, the kid looked content, but when Brody put him back on the sofa the wah-wah ing started again, and before Brody could shush him there was a knock at the door.

“Mr. Brody, open up. I know you’re in there.”

And there was Miz Dudley, hands on hips, scowling at him. She looked past him into the room and said, “In case I forgot to tell you, I don’t allow children here, no children of any age.”

“Uh — this ain’t my kid. I’m just keeping him for a day for my sister so she can enjoy the beach.”

“Well, you be sure he’s out of here by nightfall. Or you can go too and forfeit the rent.”

“You can count on it.”

She thumped back down the steps and went into the house.

Now what? He had to keep the kid overnight so he could read in the morning paper who his parents were and their address. Right now, the kid was on the sofa, looking fairly peaceful, his eyes slowly closing. But the problem remained: what to feed him the rest of the time, and how to keep him quiet. He ended up mashing mixed vegetables from a can he had bought for himself, and giving him a few spoonfuls of beer, which the kid seemed to like. During the night when he began to cry, Brody walked the floor with him for a while, then put him back on the sofa.

The next quandary was what to do with him while Brody went for the morning paper, but that was solved when he stepped outside at six A.M. and saw the newspaper lying in Miz Dudley’s yard. He almost stumbled down the stairs in his eagerness to get it. He’d either put it back before she was up or let her think the delivery boy had missed her today. He looked on the front page, and there was nothing but political and war news. Least of his worries right now. Page two, nothing. And so on through the rest of the paper. Not one screaming word about a missing kid! He couldn’t believe it. Didn’t anybody care that the kid might have walked into the surf and drowned? Or wandered away? Or been kidnapped? Apparently not.