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

It was for damn sure he couldn’t keep him another day. Miz Dudley would just as soon kick him out as look at him, and he didn’t have enough money left to find another place. He had to give some thought to what he was going to do now.

The woman on the beach surely had to be the kid’s mother. And she undoubtedly was staying in one of the cottages behind where she was sunbathing. Maybe if he found her and returned the kid, saying he’d found him on the beach and had seen him with her yesterday, she’d be so grateful she’d give him a reward. That not only seemed the best way to get rid of the kid but the only way.

He held the baby on his left hip as he went down the steps so Miz Dudley couldn’t see him. It was too early in the day for anyone to be sunning on the beach, so he stopped at a McDonald’s and got an Egg McMuffin, giving the kid part of the egg. All told, it was a pretty good kid. He only cried when he wanted something or was bothered by something.

Brody walked down the beach slowly, the kid on his shoulders again. By now, the beach was filling up, bright towels and umbrellas and skimpy bathing suits, the men’s as skimpy as the women’s. Might as well be naked, he thought as he looked at the bulges of both sexes.

When he reached the spot where the kid’s mother had been yesterday, he saw he was in luck. He wasn’t going to have to go from cottage to cottage looking for her, she was right where she had been, purple bikini and Confederate towel.

“Uh — miss...” He didn’t know what else to call her.

She looked up at him and then at the kid. Strangely, she did not jump up screaming, “My baby! You’ve found him!” as he had expected her to do.

“I saw this kid with you yesterday, and today I saw him crawling down the beach quite a ways from here. I brought him back to you.”

“That kid?” She looked at Brody indifferently. “Not mine. I never saw him before.”

“What?” Brody stared at her, all but speechless. After a minute he said, “I know he’s your kid. He was beside you yesterday while you were lying exactly where you are today. I remember noticing both you and the kid.”

“I tell you he’s NOT mine. Never saw him before in my life.”

She was lying. She had to be. The kid had been on the towel with her and then had toddled down toward the water.

“This IS your kid, or a kid you were keeping for somebody. Don’t tell me you never saw him before because I saw you with him.”

“If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to call the police and charge you with harassment.”

Brody looked at her, giving her the severest frown he could muster. “You don’t have to do that.” He was about to say, “I’ll go to the cops myself and tell them you won’t take this kid,” but he thought better of it. The cops were not his first choice for help in any situation.

What could he do? He could put the kid down beside her and take off. That seemed the only way. So he took the kid off his shoulders and the kid puckered up and let out the now familiar “Wah! Wah!”

“You see,” the woman said. “He doesn’t know me from Adam... or Eve.” She stood up, put the Confederate flag over her shoulder, and headed for the cottage immediately behind them.

Now what? It was the most numbing experience Brody could remember. He didn’t know what to do, what to think. And he was stuck with this bawling baby.

“Okay, up you go.” He put the baby back on his shoulders, all the time watching the woman as she went inside the cottage.

He could leave the kid on the cottage porch, but would the woman take him in? Maybe she hadn’t planned on a baby and didn’t want one and would like to get rid of him. She’d let him crawl back to the water and drown. He couldn’t let that happen.

“Well, buster,” he said. “I can’t think of a thing to do with you but deposit you with the cops. Maybe leave you in front of the station or something. Let them worry about what to do with you.”

He went back down the beach and up to the boardwalk. This was a first: He inquired about how to find the police station.

It was a block from the boardwalk, a little brick building that looked squashed between a discount store and a restaurant. Brody hesitated in front of it. He couldn’t just put the baby down and take off. There were too many people passing by who would stop, look, and know exactly what he was doing. He’d either have to go somewhere else with the kid or go inside and...

Was he out of his freakin’ mind, going to the cops? They might think he took the damn kid. Which he had. But he was trying to give it back.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Well, here goes nothing.

He opened the door. There were two rooms, the large one he entered and a smaller one right behind it with the door open. In the large room was a desk where a cop sat with his feet up, and another cop leaning against the side of the desk. Both were laughing, but both all but came to attention when Brody went in.

“Help you?” asked the one sitting, the older one, his feet now on the floor.

“I hope so,” Brody said. He noticed they were both looking at the kid on his shoulders. “Yesterday I was walking down the beach and saw this kid playing on a beach towel beside his mother. Today, I found the kid way down the beach, in the surf, about to go even deeper and nobody was around watching him. I picked him up and took him back to where I’d seen him yesterday with his mother and... and she claimed she’d never seen the kid before. She refused to take him, so now I don’t know what to do with him.”

There was a long, long silence as both cops looked at him, one with his mouth agape, the other scratching his bald head. It was obvious to him they didn’t believe a word he’d said. That was cops for you!

“It’s the God’s truth,” he declared, saying what Nathan always said when trying to convince someone of the seriousness of a matter. “I can take you to the cottage where the mother is.”

“What’s your name?” This time it was the younger one, the one with glasses and a face that had recently known acne intimately.

Omigod! Wouldn’t you know! All he had to do was give them his name, they’d run it through a machine, and he’d be right back at Rocky River Camp for Boys.

“I’m Walter Havington the third.” It came trippingly off his tongue as though he were accustomed to saying it.

“Well, Mr. Havington the third, why don’t you just take me to the mother of this little tot,” the older one said. “Les, take care of things while I’m gone.”

So there was Brody, sitting in the back of a cop car, screen between him and the front seat, no door handles on the inside. He should have felt right at home, but all he felt was miserable and uncomfortable. The kid needed changing again and he’d run out of thick paper towels. He could only hope that with a cop along, the woman would take her kid. If he got out of this mess okay, he wouldn’t even gripe about not making any money.

He gave instructions for finding the cottage, but he spoke hesitantly, because Walter Havington the third would use good words and not street language. Brody had quit all that school jazz at the end of the seventh grade, preferring money to schooling.

“This is the place,” he said near the end of Ocean Boulevard. “And look, there she is, packing her car. She’s fixing to leave without the kid!”

The bald cop stopped instantly and pulled in the slatted driveway, blocking the car parked beside the cottage. The blond woman in red sunback dress and sandals was indeed throwing things into an old Buick as fast as she could. Baldy opened the door for Brody and he jumped out, yelling, “Hold on there. You’re forgetting something.”