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?
