Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

10:30 P.M.

Hampton Junction

It was snowing again, the flakes coming at the windshield like tracer bullets. Mark sat hunched forward over the wheel to see better as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “Nell told me recently about a friend of hers who had a baby at the home,” he said.

“Oh?” Lucy paused in her attempt to direct a blast of hot air from the heater so it would defog the glass.

“The woman had said how she and other expectant mothers wanted to make a garden as a way to lessen the dreariness of the place, but were refused. Not only that, she complained they only had a half-finished lawn to walk on, even though the place was big as a park. And when I went out there, it seemed that lawn never did get completed. It had gone to seed of course, but I could make out the shape. It looked irregular, the bordering undergrowth from the forest having intruded on areas where the grass should have been. Hard to imagine fat cats like the Bradens unable to spring for a bag of seed or more than a few rolls of sod at a time. Unless someone needed an area that was constantly in a state of being dug up, so he could bury what he didn’t want found, then cover it with grass so it stayed put.”

Lucy rode with a hand over her mouth, as if trying not to throw up.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“No, I’m not.”

“Do you want me to stop the car?”

“Won’t do any good. I got like this in the camps. All objective when I found the bodies on paper, but ready to upchuck when the reality of them sank in.”

They rode in silence.

“Why would he do it?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Who knows? Money maybe?”

“But I thought he was already richer than God.”

“He is now. But back then? Sometimes these dynasty families have trouble coming up with the inheritance taxes to pass their goodies from one generation to the next.”

She gave a shudder and huddled deeper into her coat.

He thought of the books in Charles’s library that chronicled all the times and ways humankind had attempted to rid itself of others and protect sameness . “Or it could be a new variant of an old disease,” he said.

“An old disease?”

“Think about the atrocities you’ve seen these last seven years. Aren’t they committed so that the position of one tribe or group or race might be enhanced over the rest?”

“Pretty much.”

“The factions always seem to share the same pretenses, right? Protecting culture, spreading religion, getting an economic edge, creating a nation of superior beings, righting old wrongs – then they outshout each other trying to proclaim their unique benefit to the world, thereby justifying their own entitlement. ”

“It’s sounds like you’re quoting a sociology text.”

“It’s by one of my favorite journalists. He writes for the Herald , and I spotted some of his articles glancing through one of Braden’s books last night. That particular line came from a series that won a Pulitzer. It always stuck with me.”

“Well, it describes a few drunken warlords I met in Serbia to a T .”

“I probably still have clippings of the piece at home. It suggests that while primitives use genocide to eliminate outside threats, the sophisticated supremacist prefers eugenics, because that offers the possibility of strengthening the desirable traits of the tribe and weeding out its weaknesses all from within. In other words, improving the species.”

“That’s Nazi drivel.”

“ ‘Marry your own kind’ still holds sway among a lot of non-Nazis.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m just trying to crawl inside his head to answer your question, ‘Why?’ ”

“You spend too much time inside that creepy place, and you’re going to have to hose out your own brain.”

“If Braden believes in smotherings, maybe he’s also an advocate of other twisted beliefs in that hall of shame of his. He and his cronies are as arrogant a bunch of elitists who think they are the chosen ones to rule their patch – a sizable chunk of corporate Manhattan – as any tribe you ever came across on your travels, and a hundred times more powerful.”

“So?”

“So maybe Charles Braden made sure they had more than their fair share of healthy offspring.”

“What?”

“Probably some crazy idea to assure their succession – hand off their life works to a generation free of flaws.”

“But that’s nuts. Sick. Loony!”

“Of course it is. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“But if he wanted healthy kids for all his crowd, why not just help the parents adopt? He didn’t have to risk committing murder.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t go the official route, but I’m almost certain he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think the parents knew. At least not the mothers.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not necessarily. I think I may have already talked to a woman who had her baby switched.”

“No way!”

“Someone who gave birth at his maternity center. Nell suggested I get in touch with her. She blew me off – thinks Charles Braden is a god – but a lot of little details add up.”

“Such as?”

“She said the baby ‘wouldn’t breathe when he came out.’ What else might have been wrong, I’ve no idea. But Braden, instead of trying to resuscitate the kid on the spot, ran from the delivery room, giving the infant mouth-to-mouth respirations, and get this, jumped in his car and supposedly raced to the hospital himself.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Except a week later he placed a healthy baby boy back in that mother’s arms.”

“And she thought it was her own?”

“From the description of what happened in the delivery room, I don’t think she or anyone else got a good look at the newborn. And Nell told me how both at the maternity center and the home, they never let the same staff work more than a few days a week. I’ll bet that was so he could ‘return’ babies when different people were on duty, and he also timed it so the mother went home the next day.”

They rode in silence again.

“I can’t believe the parents knew about the smotherings,” she said eventually.

“Neither can I.”

She remained huddled up in the corner of the cab, apparently lost in thought.

He peered into the storm, the downpour having grown so thick he was driving through white streamers.

“Do you think there’ll be too much snow once we get there?” she asked.

“Don’t know. But I doubt this will keep up. It’s too heavy to last long.”

“Why would he bury them on the grounds, and not off in the woods, someplace far from any connection to him?”

“Ever try to dig a hole in the forest floor? Around here it’s full of rocks and roots. Whenever murderers have made that mistake, even if they managed to scratch out a shallow grave for their victim’s body, animals usually dug it up. I know infants are much smaller, but hunters still might spot the remains, or someone’s pet might start bringing in the bones.”

She fell silent again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

He’d certainly sewn up Charles Braden, all right. Taken threads of the man’s life and tied them together into a nice tight story. Even managed to get him with his own words, quoting from that odd book collection of his. Clever, and no holes. He had an answer for every question or objection Lucy could throw at him, coming up with motive, means, and opportunity.

Yet it almost seemed too neat. Other less macabre explanations were possible. Braden could have been switching babies in secret, but not killing the deformed ones. He might have been turning them over to other orphanages farther afield so the paperwork wouldn’t appear locally. That would require documents he wouldn’t have, but maybe he’d simply forged the signatures, given fictitious names for the mother, listed the father as unknown. If Braden had been switching babies, phony paperwork was much more plausible than infanticide. Yet after seeing those books he had, and hearing what he said about smotherings…