Charlaine Harris - A Fool and His Honey

“You don’t know the rest of the story?”

“No. Martin was hazy on that part, because he had left for boot camp. I never had the nerve to ask Barby. She and I aren’t good friends. Besides which, I know that had to have been terribly painful.”

“Giving up your baby? I can’t imagine that.”

“But then, what kind of childhood would that baby have had in a household run by Joseph Flocken? Mothered by a sixteen-year-old?”

“Good points. Ones I should’ve considered, since my own husband was an adopted child. His parents were just great.”

“I’m glad for him. It must be a consolation, to know you were wanted enough to be selected over others.”

Margaret shrugged.

“Where do you think the footprints lead?” I asked, standing up to look out the side window. I hadn’t wanted to frighten Margaret, but it would have been wrong to ask her to come over because I was anxious without telling her why.

“Unless they go across the fields all the way to our farm, I think they’ll end in that little grove of trees in that hollow,” she said. She’d gotten up with Hayden propped upright on her shoulder, and she was patting him so he’d burp.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the only place big enough to hide a truck or car,” Margaret said practically.

I hadn’t thought about it, but if a prowler didn’t want to freeze his booty off, he’d have to have come in a vehicle, and that vehicle would have had to be parked somewhere unobtrusive. My neighbor was right.

“So how did the car, if there was one, get to the grove?”

“There’s a little turnoff from the highway there, and a dirt lane runs between the fields.”

“Oh,” I said lamely. Margaret knew her local geography. “Is that your land?”

“That’s the boundary between the farms. Regina would walk from there and back to the house every day. I guess she was exercising because she was pregnant.”

“And you really didn’t suspect?”

Margaret looked embarrassed. “I never said I didn’t know, exactly. I guess I did think she was expecting. But I had no idea she was as far along as she was.” Margaret wrinkled her classic nose. “I guess now… I should have asked her about it. But I didn’t think it was any of my business. The past three months, I didn’t see her to talk to that often. Where shall I put the baby?” Hayden had fallen asleep.

“I’ll carry him up.” Margaret eased the baby over to me, and I carefully navigated the stairs with his heavy little body clutched to my chest. My guest had helped herself to another cup of coffee by the time I came back down. She was looking out the window of the living room, and I joined her. The Granberry’s dark green Dodge pickup was parked to one side of the front door, and we stood side by side contemplating it. Margaret was about eight inches taller than I, and broad shouldered, but there was an air of feyness, of frailty, about her.

“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!”