I had another thought. “If you’d like to set your clothes out the bathroom door, I’ll throw ‘em in the washer,” I offered. I rose to go upstairs to check on Hayden. “I’ll put a robe in the bathroom first.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, smiling shyly.
Martin was staring at Rory as if he were an alien wearing an ill-fitting human suit. I padded out of the room and began taking the stairs at my usual pace, and then realized I’d have to go slower. The night before had taken its toll, and toting the baby around had already made my arms trembly. I was in no shape to be thrown into the role of mother.
It wasn’t any trouble finding a robe for Rory to use, since when people can’t think of anything to give Martin, they give him bathrobes. Some men get gloves, some men get ties; my husband gets bathrobes. Last year, my seldom-seen father had sent us matching green terry ones (which made us look like walking bundles of Astroturf). Martin’s son Barrett had sent him a silk paisley, and my mother had given him a blue flannel. The year before that, Barby had presented him with the nicest one of all, gray polished cotton with his monogram in maroon.
I hung the green terry robe in the downstairs bathroom and Rory scooted in. A few minutes later, his clothes were deposited discreetly outside the bathroom door, and I went to the washer and dryer closet at the rear of the house in the kitchen to start a load. There was always something in the laundry basket I could throw in with a small bundle of clothes.
Martin had gotten the portable phone and was punching in a series of numbers, peering at a page in his personal address book. He looked up at the kitchen wall clock as he listened to the ringing at the other end.
“Hello,” he said. I thought he sounded uncertain, which was rare for Martin. “Cindy Bartell, please.”
I began to load dishes into the dishwasher-anything to stay in the room and keep working without making it obvious I was determined to listen to this conversation.
“Cindy? This is Martin. Have you been doing well? Barrett told me you’d taken a partner on… yes, he called me at work last week.”
Barrett hated to call here because I might answer the phone.
“I’m glad you’re finally getting some free time. Who’d you…?”
Martin’s face underwent the oddest change.
“Dennis Stinson,” he said. “Hmmm.” He looked as if he was restraining all kinds of comments. I gathered Dennis Stinson was not unknown to Martin; but frankly, Cindy’s business dealings were not my prime concern at this point in time.
I just barely heard Hayden whimper upstairs, and I cringed. I went up the stairs so fast I wished I’d had Martin clocking me. I stood by the portable crib and held my hands up in a soothing gesture, as if that would calm the baby back into sleep. I noticed that my hands were shaking, and I was saying, “Sshhhh! Sshhhh!” in a kind of frantic way. Hayden’s blue-veined eyelids fluttered once more before he settled back into sleep.
Feeling as though I’d just avoided a herd of stampeding buffalo, I shambled back down, the stairs and collapsed into the chair across from Martin. I slumped over the table, burying my face in my folded arms. After a moment, I felt Martin’s fingers in my hair. He stroked my head the way a man absently pats a dog, but I was so tired by my unusually prolonged turn at being the strong one that I found even an offhand caress comforting.
“So, have you seen Regina lately?” Martin said into the telephone.
I could hear a tinny buzz that was Cindy’s answer.
“Not in five months? Did you notice, the last time you saw her, that she’d gained some weight?”
Buzz, buzz.
“She had a baby,” Martin said.
I heard a kind of shriek coming from the other end.
“Yes, really.”
I raised my head to look at Martin, but he was scowling at the stove while Cindy kept talking.
“I can imagine you’d want to talk to her, but the fact is… she’s disappeared.”
Buzz.
“Well, no, I can’t contact Craig to ask him where she is because Craig is here. I guess the sheriffs department here will have arranged to tell his brother and the Harbors by now. This is bad news, Cindy. Craig is dead, murdered.”
Buzz, buzz.
“No, it wasn’t over drugs.” Martin raised his eyebrows to me, indicating that we had learned another fact about the deceased Craig. “We don’t know what happened, exactly, but Regina is gone, Craig is dead, and we have the baby.”
Then Martin had to tell Cindy that Barby was out of touch on a cruise, and that we didn’t know what to do with Hayden.
“Yes, I guess we could,” Martin said cautiously. Cindy was offering some advice, I gathered. “Yes, I guess we could do that. Well, we’ll talk about it, and if we decide to come, I’ll give you a call when we get there.”
He hung up a moment later. “Before Rory gets out of the shower,” he said, keeping his voice low, “Cindy says she had no idea Regina was pregnant, and she bets no one in Corinth knew about it. Cindy said Craig had been in jail for one or two things: possession of marijuana, bad checks, that kind of stuff. His friend Rory was almost always involved with Craig’s law problems, too.”
“Are we going to call the sheriff about him?” I asked, tilting my head toward the bathroom door as if Martin had a choice of subjects. We could hear the pipes groan as hot water gushed out of the showerhead. The downstairs bathroom was the noisy one.
Martin stared across the hall to the door as if it could give him an answer.
“You’re really thinking about not calling the sheriff,” I said, my voice full of incredulity.
“Cindy suggested we bring Hayden to Craig’s aunt and uncle in Corinth, the ones who raised him,” Martin said. “We might as well take Rory with us. Do you think he knows anything more than he told us?”
“I have no idea.” I drew myself upright in my chair, trying not to breathe fire at the stranger sitting across from me. “But I don’t think we’re the best judges of that. I think we’ve been as kind as possible, feeding him and giving him a chance to clean up, but I think now he needs to go face the music.”
“You amaze me,” Martin said with no evident amazement.
“You’re giving me a surprise or two yourself,” I said with equal grimness.
“Do you think that boy has brains enough to lie?”
“Just because he’s stupid and sweet doesn’t mean he’s good,” I countered.
“But, Roe, if we turn him over, it’ll make things that much worse for Regina.”
“How so?” If my eyebrows could’ve crawled up any higher they would have been in Maine.
“Because he knows why Craig came to Lawrenceton,” Martin pointed out. “And he’s the only one.”
I gaped at him. I honestly tried to think that one through. Finally, I shook my head. “I’m not following you at all,” I admitted.
The water had stopped in the bathroom.
“He’s going to tell the police whatever puts him in the best light,” Martin said. He’d also noticed the water had quit pounding through the pipes. “By his own admission, Rory’s been in trouble with the law, in a minor way, for years. His dad and granddad before him have done jail time. I recognized his dad’s name as soon as he told me. The Thurlkills, the mother’s family, is just as bad if not worse. Rory isn’t going to tell anyone anything he doesn’t want to.”
“So what’s the profit in taking him with us?”
“He may tell us. We may be able to tell, once we get on Craig and Regina’s home ground, what they were doing. Find some way through this without Regina ending up in any more trouble than she’s already…” His voice trailed off, as he realized it would be pretty hard to find more trouble for Regina.
“Why would he tell us?”
“I can only hope he will. Now that Craig’s dead, why not? We can’t revoke his parole or punish him for whatever he’s done. Maybe if we leave him out of this as far as the law is concerned, he’ll reciprocate with information.”
I could think of one word for this theory, and it wasn’t a polite one.
What had happened to my incisive, figure-all-the-angles husband? He could only be this gullible because it concerned his family. Had Martin ever been foolish about me? I thought not. Did that mean he loved his sister and niece more? His son? What about his first wife? I had a moment of sheer irrational rage as I stared at Martin. Then, once again, I took a deep breath and made myself recall that he had had a terrible shock the night before, that he
