Charlaine Harris - A Fool and His Honey

As best I remembered, there were three ground-floor doors: the front, covered by a tiny roof, the kitchen door to the side, and the back door, which led onto a small porch-cum laundry room that was now glassed in. Martin had the door keys on his key ring-another surprise. I found it interesting and strange that the keys to the old farmhouse were always by his hand.

“Is there a phone?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I should’ve called Karl before we left town. He’d know. I’ve always got the cell phone if we have to use it.”

I waited at the bottom of the kitchen steps, Hayden a bundle of blankets in my arms, while Martin fumbled with the key. Finally the door yielded, and we stepped into the house.

“How long has it been since you were here?” I asked cautiously, looking around at the room. The kitchen had been scrubbed and repainted and the counters had new surfaces since I’d toured it so briefly years before. The overhead light was on, and there was a plate on the table. It still held food. It had been there for days. The glass beside it was half full of Coke, or one of the other dark cola drinks.

“Not since it was finished. I came to look at it once, when I had to be in Pittsburgh for business. And I got the cleaners and contractors out here to tell them what to do, though it was Karl who checked on their work for me. I haven’t been in here since then, and I think that was at least a year and a half ago. I told Regina when she married Craig that the house was sitting empty and since they were going to be in Corinth for a while, they might as well use it. Barby had been hinting how hard up they were going to be.”

I wandered slowly through the downstairs, deciding the house was even older than ours in Georgia. The old window coverings-I remembered them as ragged blinds-had been thrown away, and Regina hadn’t replaced them. The gray sky outside seemed to fill the rooms with gloom. While Martin brought in the rest of our things, I walked around with Hayden.

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.