Catledge Lowry met us at the door, his wide happy smile fixed in place. Catledge was a politician through and through. He had a good-sounding set of goals, he had a good campaign manager, and he'd done some worthwhile things. I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him, and given Catledge's six-foot-four frame, that wasn't an inch. I just enjoyed Catledge for what he was. "Hey, good lookin'!" he cried. "If your husband would just turn his back a minute, I'd give you a kiss to curl your toes, you beautiful thing!" "This beautiful thing would rather have a glass of wine, Catledge," I said, smiling. "Besides, I don't think you can bend down far enough." I'm four-eleven. "Honey, I'd amputate my legs for the chance," Catledge said dramatically, and I laughed.
"Ellen might not care for that," I said, handing him my coat. Martin reached past me to shake hands, and in a moment the men were deep in conversation about some yahoo's chance in the Georgia governor's race. I expected a flushed and harried Ellen to rush from the kitchen, but instead I saw her strolling through the garage door holding a brown paper bag containing, from its shape, a bottle of wine. She was groomed to a tee and in no great hurry, either. I had a moment of surprise and then Ellen was bending down to peck my cheek, and I was reconnecting with the bundle of nerves that was Ellen Dawson Lowry.
Ellen was maybe five-ten, as tall as Martin, and thin as a rail. She dressed beautifully, used minimal makeup, would be an unobtrusive blonde for the next twenty years with a little help, and had graduated with honors from Sophie Newcomb. She'd intended to be a CPA. Then she'd married Gatledge, and all her mild ambition had been consumed in Catledge's flashy brilliance. Ellen had told me she'd been happy when their sons had been young, and happy when she worked at the bank for a few years while the boys were in high school; but Catledge had wanted her to quit when he'd been elected mayor, and she had. At one time, when we'd had to work together on the board of a charity, we'd felt rather close. But after our year on the board was up, it had seemed harder and harder for us to meet, and our brief closeness faded. "Roe, you just get prettier and prettier!" Ellen gushed.
"Oh, Ellen," I mumbled, embarrassed at her strange manner. Ellen's eyes had a glaze to them, and her hands moved nervously up and down the skirt of the dark blue-and-gold dress. The colors were becoming, but Ellen had lost even more weight and looked almost painfully thin. "What do you hear from your boys?" I asked.
"Jefferson's tenth in the senior class at Georgia Tech, and Tally is ... working on a special study in Tennessee." Despite her hesitation over nineteen-year-old Tally's current occupation, Ellen was like most mothers in her pleasure in talking about her children, and my questions kept our conversation rolling along until Mrs. Esther came in to announce dinner. Martin and I exchanged discreet glances.
Lucinda Esther is a notable personality in Lawrenceton, and the fact that the Lowrys had hired her to produce this meal surprised us. This was not a dinner on which some important deal depended; this was not a crucial social event. Hiring Mrs. Esther always signaled that the meal was significant, perhaps when the parents of the bride entertained the parents of the groom for the first time, or when an important newcomer was welcomed into an affluent home. Maybe, in this instance, it meant the hostess was not capable of producing a suitable meal.
Standing with massive dignity in a starched gray uniform with a white apron, Mrs. Esther said, "Dinner is served." She did not meet our eyes or wait for a reaction, but strode back into the kitchen, her dark face still impassive, her chin proudly up. The heavy gold hoops in her pierced ears swayed as she walked. Mrs. Esther didn't serve. She placed the food ready on the table and remained in the kitchen until it was time to clean up. And she almost always prepared a menu she'd decided on herself. Tonight she'd picked chicken baked in a white sauce, green beans, homemade rolls, sweet potato casserole, and a tossed salad. Calories and cholesterol were not considerations in Mrs. Esther's catering business.
After we'd all passed the dishes around, which was a pretty effective icebreaker, Martin asked me to tell Catledge what had happened in our backyard that afternoon.
As I turned it into an amusing vignette, without the element of anxiety that had given the incident its edge, naturally I glanced from Gatledge to Ellen and back. Catledge was at the end of the table to my left and Ellen was opposite me. Their reactions were more intriguing than the story. Catledge was shaken, visibly upset; Ellen thought the whole episode was vastly amusing. I'd have sworn Catledge would laugh and Ellen would worry. This reversal was very interesting.
To my further fascination, Catledge cut the ensuing discussion off at the knees. I was just sure as sure can be that ordinarily Catledge would spend a good fifteen minutes speculating about who'd "spiked" Darius Quattermain's acetaminophen. Yet here he was, trying to shunt the conversation into the ongoing battle between two factions of the library board. I shot a significant look at Martin while Ellen was fetching more tea from the kitchen and Catledge had excused himself.
I can't let puzzling behavior go by without picking it apart to discover its cause. Suddenly I wondered if Ellen had been the unnamed woman who'd been sabotaged by the medicine switcher.
I was pleased with the idea, the more I hammered it out. Twitchy Ellen was very likely to have tranquilizers in her purse. She was certainly abnormally serene tonight. Perhaps Catledge feared staying on the subject of Darius Quattermain because he thought Ellen likely to reveal her own little episode of similarly bizarre behavior? He would hate it to be known Ellen took "nerve pills." The silence that had fallen over the dinner table was so awkward that Martin felt compelled to break it.
"We had a surprise visitor today," he said easily.
"Who was that?" Catledge asked, right on cue, relief easy to read in his voice.
"My niece came to visit, with her baby boy," Martin said. I cocked an eyebrow at him. We weren't going to mention Regina's visit, we'd decided.
"A boy," Ellen said. "I miss our boys. They were adorable babies. But all cute babies grow up and leave home, don't they?" That should have been said in a light tone, but it wasn't. Ellen's voice grew more and more edgy with every word. Once again, an uneasy silence fell over the table. Ellen pushed her chair back and rose, maybe a little unsteadily. "Excuse me, please," she said, managing to sound almost normal. "I'm being a bad hostess. I feel unwell." And walking quickly, her backbone stiff, she was out of the room and going up the stairs, face carefully turned away. "I'm so sorry Ellen is ill," I said instantly. "She should have canceled. We would have understood. Bless her heart, she worked so hard when she should have been in bed." I hoped my chatter would fill the silence and smooth things over, and to some extent it did.
"Ellen never knows when to take things easy," Catledge said gratefully. "We'd love to have you back when she's well."
"Oh, no, it's our turn," Martin contributed. He was already up and retrieving my coat. "We enjoyed the evening, I'm just sorry it ended this way." As Martin and Catledge kept up the social end of the evening, I stepped into the kitchen to tell Mrs. Esther that I'd enjoyed the food and that she could clear the table. Mrs. Esther was sitting at the small breakfast table in the bay window in the kitchen, reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Just as I opened my mouth to speak, I saw that the kitchen door to the garage was being pulled shut, and I understood that Ellen had gone down the back stairs, stepped silently through the kitchen, and - this I definitely heard - was starting up the car in the garage.
When I looked from the garage door back to Mrs. Esther, I saw that she was regarding me with an absolutely neutral expression. As clearly as if she'd spoken it, her face said, "This is none of my business and I don't want to know."
"Thanks for the delicious supper, Mrs. Esther," I said. I picked a dish at random. "The chicken was especially good."
"Thank you, Mrs. Bartell." Another one who didn't call me Ms. Teagarden. But it was not an issue I was going to fight over. It had never made any difference to me what people called me, as long as I knew who I was. We exchanged good-byes, and I turned back to the dining room to find Martin and Gatledge shaking hands. But then Catledge mentioned the Wednesday meeting of the zoning commission, and Martin remembered that Pan-Am Agra had bought some land adjacent to the plant that needed to be re-zoned, and they started up all over again.
I couldn't fiddle with the table, not with Mrs. Esther in the kitchen waiting to take care of it, and I couldn't wander around the house because that would be rude. So I fished around in my purse for a mint and surreptitiously popped it in my mouth, I got all my hair freed from the collar of my coat, and then I gently patted Martin's arm.
"You and Catledge will just have to call each other tomorrow, honey. We need to get home."
Martin smiled down at me fondly. "You're right, Roe. We need to check on Regina and the baby before we turn in."
So, finally, finally, we were out the door and on our way. Even then, we had to stop to get gas, because Martin was low and didn't want to have to fill up on the way to work in the morning.
We'd had Ellen's wine with our meal, and a somewhat trying day, so we were quiet and (speaking for myself) sleepy on the drive home. Though I was still mildly concerned about Regina's visit and the unexplained baby, I was willing to put off worrying about it until the next morning. But I could tell from Martin's frown that he was brooding over it again.
As we turned up our long driveway, my pleasant drowsiness evaporated. Though I couldn't tell much about it, there was a strange car parked in front of the garage. And Regina's car was gone.
The automatic security light at the back of the house showed, also, that someone had taken Darius's truck and trailer. I hoped it was one of his children. We didn't have an automatic security light at the front of the house because it had shone in our bedroom window; we'd had it switched to manual, and we'd forgotten to leave it on when we'd left for the Lowrys' dinner. The brilliant light in the backyard gave the front some illumination, but it was faint and full of shadows.
So the front of the house and garage was relatively dark... but aside from the strange car and absence of Regina's, there was plenty visible to alarm us. I could see, and so could Martin by his grunt, that there was something lying on the stairs that mounted to the garage apartment. Most worrying of all was the irregular fan of dark spots on the white siding of the garage.
"Martin," I said sharply, as if he hadn't already noticed all these things for himself. We looked at each other as he switched off the Mercedes's engine. "Stay here," he said firmly, and opened his door. "No," I said, and opened mine. The cat was crouched in the azaleas staring at the thing on the stairs. Madeleine didn't acknowledge our presence; she remained fixed and alert in her chosen spot. Somehow that made my skin crawl, and for the first time I was convinced this might be something bad, very bad. It wasn't just very bad. It was absolutely horrible. The dark stain on the white siding was a spray of blood. As I stared at it, one drop moved. Not completely dry.
The blood had shot from the long limp thing on the stairs, a man.
A hatchet had cleaved through his forehead. It was still embedded in his head. Blood had soaked into the dark hair. I thought about Regina and the baby, and if your heart could actually move within your body mine would have fallen to the pit of my stomach. I suspected the dead man was Craig, Regina's husband. Martin was looking up the stairs to the apartment door. There was a line of black where it should have met the frame. The door was ajar. That realization was enough to propel me over to my husband. In the dim light, I could see that he looked old and ill, all the lines time had ironed into his face seeming deeper in the shadows. And since I knew him, I knew he was thinking he had to go up those stairs and find out what was in that apartment. But he was afraid of what he'd find. Regina and her baby were his family. A light rain began to pelt down.
Wordlessly, I laid my hand on Martin's shoulder and squeezed it, before edging by the dead thing sprawled on the stairs. I tried not to look down as I sidled up with my back to the railing. I didn't want to touch the blood on the wall, either. Once past the body, I went faster, but still my legs were heavy with reluctance and quivering with fear. It seemed an hour before I faced the door. There was a little sound inside the apartment.
I bit down hard on my lip. I poked the door open with one fingertip. Reaching in, I flipped up the light switch by the door. A brilliant glare illuminated the apartment. I spent a long moment scanning for Regina's body, bloodstains, signs of a struggle.
Nothing.
The little sound went on and on.
Finally I stepped in, looking repeatedly from side to side. Martin called from below, but I didn't answer. My breath was coming too unevenly. The rain began to fall more heavily and the drumming of the raindrops on the stairs made the little apartment feel more isolated.
The closet door was open. Clothes, I assumed Regina's, had been hung inside. Her suitcase was on the dining table, open. Clothes that appeared to have been tossed in rather than packed were flowing over the sides. The bathroom door was flung wide and I could see a jumble of makeup and toiletries on the counter by the sink.
The only area not visible from my position by the door was the floor on the far side of the bed. And that was where the sound was coming from. I went around the bed, reasoning with one part of my mind that nothing could be worse than what I had already seen.
The floor was empty, but the folds of the quilted paisley bedspread were moving, down at the carpet level. I dropped to my knees and bent over. Holding my breath, I lifted the skirt of the bedspread.
Under the bed, kicking his legs and waving his hands, was the baby. He was just beginning to get upset that his mother hadn't picked him up after his nap. He looked perfectly all right, and his red sleeper was pristine. So Regina's car was missing, and Regina wasn't anywhere in the apartment.
I was certainly thinking without clarity. At first, I thought the baby's presence and wellness were good news. And they were good news, of course, but they were only part of Martin's concern. When I came to the top of the stairs and called down to him that the baby was fine but Regina was gone, the look on his face reminded me that someone had murdered the young man on the stairs, and the vanished Regina was by far the most likely person to have wielded the hatchet. Martin was standing passively, leaning against the garage, his arms crossed over his chest. His hair and his coat were dark with rain. His alien behavior struck me like a fist to the chest.
"You have to call the police," I reminded him, and I saw the anger flare in my husband's face. He didn't like being told to do that. My presence obliged him to do the right thing. He'd been thinking of concealing this, somehow, I could tell. It was the pirate side of him coming out. There was something stuck under the windshield wiper blade of the strange car, which I noticed had Ohio tags. I could hardly get much wetter, so I carefully eased down the stairs and over to the car. I touched the sodden mass with a finger. It was a folded piece of paper, a note. I could see the streaks that had been blue ink. A note: to whom, about what, I'd never know. The baby began to scream. His cries carried on the chilly night air. I expected someone to pick him up and tend to his needs, and when that didn't happen, I had what Lizanne calls a Real Moment. Hayden's mother had vanished; Hayden's father Craig (and I was pretty sure the corpse was Craig, though I'd only met him once at the wedding) was lying before me dead. The baby's grandmother, who ought to be willing to take charge, was on a cruise with her boyfriend. I, Aurora Teagarden, was (at least temporarily) responsible for this baby, unless Martin acted. Staring at my husband, I saw how unlikely that was. Instead of feeling elation - finally, a baby! - I felt an almost bottom less dismay. The rain pattered to a halt.
I turned and once again mounted the stairs to the garage apartment. I squatted and eased Hayden out from under the bed. With effort, I rose from the floor holding him. It was shocking how much he could wiggle, how hard it was to hold on to him, especially when he arched his body with rage. I was trembling, and it wasn't for the dead man on the stairs. Somehow, I made it down the stairs and across the walkway, passing a still-silent Martin without saying anything. After unlocking our house, I reached for the security pad, only to find that it had been turned off. Of course, we hadn't told Regina how to set it... at least, I hadn't. I called 911 from our kitchen telephone. I jiggled Hayden with one damp arm while I dialed with my free hand. I could barely hold him, but I couldn't put him on the kitchen floor. He was screaming so loudly by now that I had to repeat myself twice. At least Doris wasn't still on duty, and the dispatcher didn't seem to know that I'd already had county police at my house that day. After I hung up, I could put off tending to Hayden no longer. I had no idea what to do.
As Hayden's need, whatever it was, wasn't met, he screamed more. Too frightened and uncertain to leave him by himself, I staggered back out into the night, toting the increasingly heavy baby, and edged once again past the awful thing on the stairs. Its horror was actually paling in comparison to my frenzied desire for Hayden to shut up.
I wished Martin would stir himself to help me, but he was standing with his hands on the Mercedes hood, looking out into the night, that odd introspective look still on his face.
The baby's diaper bag, feeling considerably lighter, was lying on its side in the middle of the floor. I was glad to see it. I looped the strap over my shoulder and carried the shrieking Hayden on yet another trek into our house. I was utterly unable to think of what to do next. But Hayden wouldn't stop crying.
I tried to reason through all the noise. He must be wet, or hungry, right? Or both. Wasn't that generally what was wrong with babies? I opened his diaper bag and pulled out one of the disposable diapers Regina used. Then I had to figure it out, since I'd never even examined such an item, much less put one on a baby.
When I thought I understood the thing, I ripped a paper towel off the roll and spread it on the kitchen table where we ate most of our meals. I plopped Hayden down on the middle of the towel and began to unsnap his sleeper, which seemed incredibly complicated. I extricated his kicking legs with great difficulty, peeled open the tabs holding the diaper shut.
Whew. He did need a fresh one.
I had to clean him off. What with? I couldn't take my hands off him. What if he rolled off the table? This problem absorbed me so thoroughly that the sirens of the arriving cars were only background noise. My free hand found a plastic box in the diaper bag. I flipped it open and found premoistened towelettes inside. Yahoo!
After a few more strenuous minutes, Hayden was clean and rediapered... more or less. He was whimpering now, and I knew he'd break out into screaming again if I didn't solve whatever other problems he had. Hunger seemed the most likely, and I remembered Regina preparing the bottles that afternoon. God bless her, I thought. If she left me bottles for this baby I'll forgive her, no matter what else she has done.
There were four bottles in the refrigerator. I heated one up in the microwave as Regina had shown me, and I wondered if she had foreseen her departure when she made such a point of telling me how to prepare the bottles, how to test them for temperature.
The idea that Regina might have known she'd be leaving was so unpleasant I was sorry I'd thought of it. I put Hayden in his infant seat, which I found in the living room and carried back into the kitchen, and held his bottle to his mouth. Hayden did the rest. I slumped in a chair, my forehead resting on my hand, my other hand holding the bottle in the right position (I hoped). I heard feet tramping up the steps to the kitchen door, and I knew it was time to answer questions. I looked down at Hayden who was pulling on the bottle as if it were the answer to all the troubles of the universe. I wished I could have one.