As I closed the door behind me, I noticed a fold-up baby stroller tucked behind it, in the closed position.
“What the hell?” I said under my breath.
I thought I heard something. Down the hall. A kind of... mewing? A gurgling sound?
A baby. It sounded like a baby. You might think, seeing a stroller by the door, that wouldn’t be all that shocking.
But here, at this time, you’d be wrong.
“Marla?”
I set the bags down on the floor and moved across the room. Started down the hall.
At the first door I stopped and peeked inside. This was probably supposed to be a bedroom, but Marla had turned it into a landfill site — disused furniture, empty cardboard boxes, rolls of carpet, old magazines, outdated stereo components. Marla appeared to be an aspiring hoarder.
I moved on to the next door, which was closed. I turned the knob and pushed. “Marla, you in here? You okay?”
The sound I’d heard earlier became louder.
It was, in fact, a baby. Nine months to a year old, I guessed. Not sure whether it was a boy or girl, although it was wrapped in a blue blanket.
What I’d heard were feeding noises. The baby was sucking contentedly on a rubber nipple, its tiny fingers attempting to grip the plastic feeding bottle.
Marla held the bottle in one hand, cradling the infant in her other arm. She was seated in a cushioned chair in the corner of the bedroom. On the bed, bags of diapers, baby clothes, a container of wipes.
“Marla?”
She studied my face and whispered, “I heard you call out, but I couldn’t come to the door. And I didn’t want to shout. I think Matthew’s nearly asleep.”
I stepped tentatively into the room. “Matthew?”
Marla smiled, nodded. “Isn’t he beautiful?”
Slowly, I said, “Yes. He is.” A pause, then: “Who’s Matthew, Marla?”
“What do you mean?” Marla said, cocking her head in puzzlement. “Matthew is Matthew.”
“What I mean... Who does Matthew belong to? Are you doing some babysitting for someone?”
Marla blinked. “Matthew belongs to me, David. Matthew’s my baby.”
I cleared a spot and sat on the edge of the bed, close to my cousin. “And when did Matthew arrive, Marla?”
“Ten months ago,” she said without hesitation. “On the twelfth of July.”
“But... I’ve been over here a few times in the last ten months, and this is the first chance I’ve had to meet him. So I guess I’m a little puzzled.”
“It’s hard... to explain,” Marla said. “An angel brought him to me.”
“I need a little more than that,” I said softly.
“That’s all I can say. It’s like a miracle.”
“Marla, your baby—”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she whispered, turning her head away from me, studying the baby’s face.
I pressed on gently, as if I were slowly driving onto a rickety bridge I feared would give way beneath me. “Marla, what happened to you... and your baby... was a tragedy. We all felt so terrible for you.”
Ten months ago. It had been a sad time for everyone, but for Marla it had been devastating.
She lightly touched a finger to Matthew’s button nose. “You are so adorable,” she said.
“Marla, I need you to tell me whose baby this really is.” I hesitated. “And why there’s blood on your front door.”
Three
Detective Barry Duckworth, on this, the twentieth anniversary of his joining the Promise Falls Police Department, was thinking he was facing the greatest challenge of his career.
Would he be able to drive past the doughnut shop on his way to the station without hitting the drive-through for a coffee and a chocolate frosted?
After all, if there was ever a day where he felt entitled to a treat, this was it. Twenty years with the department, nearly fourteen of them as a detective. Wasn’t that a cause for celebration?
Except this was only the second week of his latest attempt to lose weight. He’d tipped the scales at two hundred and eighty pounds in the past month and decided maybe it was time to finally do something about it. Maureen, bless her, had stopped nagging him about his size, figuring the choice to cut back had to be his. So, two weeks earlier, he decided the first step would be to forgo the doughnut he inhaled every morning. According to the doughnut chain’s Web site, his favorite pastry was about three hundred calories. Jesus. So if you cut out that doughnut, over five days you were eliminating fifteen hundred calories from your diet. Over a year, that was seventy-two thousand calories.
It would be like going without food for something on the order of three weeks.
It wasn’t the only step he was trying to take. He’d cut out dessert. Okay, that wasn’t exactly right. He’d cut out his second dessert. Whenever Maureen made a pie — especially if it was lemon meringue — he could never limit himself to one slice. He’d have one regular wedge after dinner, then go back and tidy up the edge of the last cut. That was usually just a sliver, and how many calories could there be in a sliver? So he would have a second sliver.
He’d been making a concerted effort to give up the slivers.
He was a block away from the doughnut place.
I won’t pull in.
But Duckworth still wanted a coffee. He could drive through and just order a beverage, couldn’t he? Was there any harm in that? He could drink it black, no sugar, no cream. The question would be, once he was in the line for the coffee, would he be able to resist the—
His cell phone rang.
This car was equipped with Bluetooth, so he didn’t have to go reaching into his jacket pocket for the phone. All he had to do was touch a button on the dash. Another bonus was that the name of the caller came up on the screen.
Randall Finley.
“Shit,” Duckworth said under his breath.
The former mayor of Promise Falls. Make that the former disgraced mayor of Promise Falls. A few years back, when he was making a run for a Senate seat, it came out that he had, on at least one occasion, engaged the services of an underage prostitute.
That didn’t play so well with the electorate.
Not only did he lose his bid to move up the political food chain, he got turfed as mayor in the next election. Didn’t take it well, either. He made his concession speech after downing the better part of a bottle of Dewar’s, and referred to those who had abandoned him as “a cabal of cocksuckers.” The local news stations couldn’t broadcast what he said, but the uncensored YouTube version went viral.
Finley vanished from public view for a time, nursed his wounds, then started up a water-bottling company after discovering a spring on a tract of land he owned north of Promise Falls. While not quite as big as Evian — he had named it, with typical Randall Finley modesty, Finley Springs Water — it was one of the few around here that was doing any hiring, mainly because they did a strong export business. The town was in economic free fall of late. The Standard had gone out of business, throwing about fifty people out of work. The amusement park, Five Mountains, had gone bankrupt, the Ferris wheel and roller coasters standing like the relics of some strange, abandoned civilization.
Thackeray College, hit by a drop in enrollment, had laid off younger teaching staff who’d yet to make tenure. Kids finishing school were leaving town in droves to find work elsewhere, and those who stayed behind could be found hanging around local bars most nights of the week, getting into fights, spray-painting mailboxes, knocking over gravestones.