Madeline Mann (24 page)

“Did you tell them I saw Don Paul?”

“Yeah. They say they questioned him. He said they just had lunch together. He even let them search his house. They didn't find her.” Quinn's voice trembled slightly. I could tell he was holding himself together with an effort.

“Where are you, Quinn?”

“The Webley Arms. I'm gonna stay here until I know something. I don't suppose you have any leads?”

I tried to think back to what Fawn had told me. “I don't know why she was at city hall. She didn't tell me. But that might be the key to it all. I'm going to be at city hall tomorrow. I'm going to be snooping around anyway, if you want to know the truth, so I'll let you know if I find anything that might help. Try to be calm, okay? She seems like a resourceful young lady. I mean, to drive all the way out here on her own—”

“Without permission,” Quinn said darkly.

“Well, yeah, but that's just it. She was being independent, and bold. So wherever she is, she's looking out for herself. Maybe she's just hiding. Maybe she knows something about Logan's death and she needs to hide from someone who knows that she knows.”

I was just thinking out loud, but that idea was worth pursuing, I thought after I said it. “Do you think she knows anything about Logan, Quinn?”

He sighed. “I don't think so. I mean, I don't.”

“Okay. I'll check with you tomorrow. Um—take care, Quinn. Keep the faith.”

“Thanks,” he said.

I went to bed, and despite the strange and worrisome phone call, I fell asleep fairly quickly, tucked into Jack's warm arms. Friday hadn't been all that eventful, after all.

It was Saturday when everything hit the fan.

twenty-one

Saturday morning the
alarm woke me at six. I struggled through a fog of sleep, wrapped in a vague feeling that I should rebel against injustice. I remembered eventually that I'd promised to help Jamie pack from eight to eleven o'clock. I dragged myself out of bed and struggled toward the shower. I am not a morning person, another element to contrast with Jack, who sings in his morning spray and pastes encouraging slogans all over his bathroom in order that he might be inspired by the great positive thinkers of history. I admired the concept in spirit, but the flesh is weak. I liked complaining in the morning and moaning for coffee until I got it, at which point I liked to spend some time extolling the virtues of caffeine. Surely there are other people like me.

I stopped at Sunil's White Hen to get the jumbo coffee that I needed, but my friend Sunil, who had really started this whole mystery rolling, I thought idly, was again not present. Armed with my beverage and two Matchbox cars (there were no baby-appropriate toys), I drove to Jamie's apartment.

My mother was already there when Jamie buzzed me in. She was folding shirts into perfect rectangles and placing them in a box. Jamie was squatting on the floor with little Noah, helping him zip a tiny suitcase. Noah looked a bit red-eyed, which saddened me. I didn't think the children could be entirely spared from grief, but they were so little, after all, to have to cope with death.

Noah brightened at the sight of me, to my pleasure, and I handed him the little cars, still in their packages. “One's for your brother, but it's up to your mom when he gets it. He might try to bite the little tires off,” I said uncertainly, not sure what sorts of things babies attempted to choke on.

“Thanks!” Noah yelled. “I don't have too many cars like these. Can I put them in my suitcase, Mom?”

Jamie stood up, came over, and ruffled Noah's hair.

“Why don't you take them out of the packages and play with them awhile? Now that we have this room almost empty, you can pretend it's a racetrack. We'll definitely pack them before we leave, okay?”

Noah liked the idea, and I felt another surge of admiration for Jamie. What a good mom she was. Jamie turned to me. “Thanks a lot for coming, Madeline. Your mom is in charge of the clothes packing, and Linus and Wick are going to deal with the furniture. I'm not taking all of it. Anyway, if you don't mind, you could keep an eye on Cal for me while I go through the kitchen stuff. He's kind of running loose right now. I think he's in the boys’ room.”

I agreed hesitantly. I'd never babysat as a young woman, mainly because it seemed like too stressful a job. While my friends insisted that it was easy money earned while watching other people's televisions and eating their food, I had always felt it was several hours of worrying about what could potentially go wrong: children rebelling or running away or, worse yet, having seizures or requiring the Heimlich maneuver during their dinners were only some of the scenarios that had kept me from advertising my services. I felt some of the old fear as I walked through Jamie's hallway and peeked into the first of two rooms. This was obviously the room Jamie and Logan had shared, though now it was as bare and devoid of personality as a Motel 6 rental. It held a full-sized bed and two nightstands. Two lamps were on the floor by the door, their cords bundled for travel. A couple of framed prints were leaning against the opposite wall. The tears that I hadn't cried at the funeral threatened to emerge now, for no apparent reason.

I ducked out and walked toward the second room, which was pretty even in disarray. The walls were painted pale blue; at the junction of ceiling and walls was a matching nursery-rhyme border featuring tiny cows that jumped over smiling moons, Mother Goose with her storybook, Little Boy Blue in his haystack, and Miss Muffet with a grinning spider. It was a happy room, and judging by the boxes that were not yet sealed, I could see that the boys had beloved possessions that would help them in their transition to a new place. I was sure Wick would provide them with a wonderful space, probably much larger than what they'd had here.

A white wood crib stood against one wall, a twin bed against the opposite. Cal was leaning on the bed, a study of casualness, holding a stuffed giraffe and apparently feeding it imaginary food. It became apparent to me, quite soon after entering the room, that Cal had created something in his pants and perhaps had come here for the privacy to do that very thing.

Cal looked up, saw me, smiled. “Bee-bee?” he asked me, pointing at his giraffe. “Bee-bee?”

“Is that your baby?” I asked him.

He smiled uncertainly. It reminded me of my mother's brother Heinz, who came often from Germany to visit his only sister and her family. When he would say something in German, he would sit smiling, waiting for one of my parents to translate. Sometimes this took a while, which was especially frustrating when Heinz, who was a funny man, was trying to make a joke. Timing is everything. He would sit with that expectant look, as if saying, “Has the translation gone through?” He waited for the recognition on our faces.

Little Cal must often have been frustrated when his words were misinterpreted, I thought. I changed the subject. “Cal, do you have a poo-poo?”

“No,” Cal lied, continuing to feed the mysterious food to his giraffe. He was wearing little blue sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said “The Wiggles.” So far he remained shoeless. His feet didn't look flat; they were shaped more like little potatoes.

I went hesitantly toward him. I realized that there were people who had to do much braver things than this: soldiers facing battle, women like Jamie facing motherhood without a partner. It would be too wimpy and inappropriate to run down the hall and inform my mother that there was a job awaiting her in Cal's room. I did consider doing that, for about two minutes, while Cal silently fed his bee-bee. Then I screwed my courage to the stinky place (always Lady Macbeth intruded into my thoughts) and picked up the fragrant baby, giraffe and all.

It was the diaper change that changed everything, and it is still clearly etched in my mind. I carried him to the bathroom, which contained a changing table, still stocked. Jamie was wise about what to pack last. I had never had reason to use a changing table or any of the mysterious objects beneath it. I had never, I must confess it, diapered a baby at all, especially not a baby who seemed to have made a significant deposit in his little tiny pants. Cal was no newborn, after all.

Still, I managed, and without having to call my mother in. Jamie called down the hall that I should use something called a “diaper genie.” I glanced around for something resembling Barbara Eden and eventually found what Jamie was talking about. I also effectively cleaned, greased, and floured Cal, just like the cake pans I'd learned to handle with some efficiency in my 4-H cooking class.

After a few tries, I managed to secure Cal's new Velcro diaper in place. My respect for Jamie had grown to three times its original size, like the Grinch's heart.

Cal seemed in no hurry to leave. He chattered to me in his foreign tongue, holding up the giraffe for inspection, smiling, choking the giraffe. I sat him up and sprayed some air freshener in the pungent room. Cal pointed at a little shelf above the toilet and said, “Boo!”

“Boo to you too,” I said with a laugh.

Cal frowned. “Boo, boo, boo, boo,” he intoned, his tiny finger waving.

The shelf he indicated contained books. Even I wasn't so thick that I couldn't get the gist of his message. “You'd like a book, Cal?”

Cal smiled with relief and nodded. I grabbed a couple of things off the shelf, one of which was a cute little board book by Sandra Boynton. I'd thought she only wrote greeting cards. The other was the
Big Book of Baby Names
. I flicked idly through it and saw highlighted names in both the girls’ and boys’ sections. Both Noah and Calvin had been highlighted, though in different colors and probably years apart. Some of the girls’ names they'd favored included Sarah, Rose, and Madeline. A drop of water fell on Cal's fat leg, and I realized with surprise that it had come from my eye. This is how in touch I am with my emotions.

Cal was helping me turn the pages, which contained pictures of random cute babies. He liked those, but I couldn't seem to turn the pages fast enough for him, and then we ran out of book. “Here, Cal, let's start at the beginning again,” I instructed.

We opened the tome, which began with the names for girls. I saw every tenth name or so as I scanned, while Cal looked at the pictures. There were entries from every culture, of course. Abra, Acquilah, Adeline, et cetera. I wondered how people had the patience to go through every one.

We turned the page and, because the world is full of coincidence, there it was, the name I'd just heard on Thursday, the name that belonged to Detective Perez: Arcelia. Cal was ready to move on, his little fingers pulling at the paper. “Hang on, Cal,” I said. “I'd like to read this one. Why don't you feed the baby something for a minute?”

To my surprise, he took this suggestion, apparently feeling remiss that he'd ended the animal's feedings. He devotedly bent over his giraffe. I smiled and located the name again. Spanish in origin.
No surprise there
, I thought, and then my eyes widened and my mouth grew slack. “Treasure chest,” the book listed as its meaning. “A repository for treasure.”

I let it fall closed. Cal noticed something in my face and furrowed his little brow as though he might cry. I picked him up swiftly and gave him a kiss, then kissed his little giraffe, which he enjoyed.

We walked back down the hall toward his mother, and I heard Detective Perez's voice echoing in my head: “I'll hold on to this note, Madeline” and “Why don't you just lie low, and end the investigation?” And then, as I reached the kitchen, I remembered Linus looking darkly at the mistress I thought had been Pamela, saying, “You would think
she
would understand the term ‘conflict of interest’!” It was Perez he hadn't wanted at the funeral; it was Perez who had slept with his brother and was then given the job of investigating his death.

Hadn't Wick Lanford told me in those exact words when we'd discussed Logan's reasons for coming to town? “He said he was pursuing his ‘treasure chest,’” Wick had said. I'd thought it had to do with money, with Quinn Paley. But it was Perez, his “treasure chest,” that Logan had gone to Saugatuck to see, and he'd jokingly insinuated as much to his father in their last conversation together.

twenty-two

My mother knew
something was wrong instantly. “What is it, Madeline?” she asked, looking up from her folding task. Jamie stopped what she was doing too and gave me a curious glance.

“Oh—uh, nothing. Cal's all changed, should I put him here?” I set Cal on the floor, where he continued ministering to the giraffe.

“Sure,” said Jamie. My mother was still eyeing me suspiciously, and I shook my head ever so slightly to indicate that I didn't want to discuss it here. This she understood, and with raised eyebrows she went back to the baby shirt in her hand, which looked like a folded handkerchief.

“What else can I do for you, Jamie?” I asked. “Before we know it, it will be eleven o'clock and I'll have to run to my next appointment. I certainly want to say I helped in the time I was here,” I rambled.

“Madeline,” Jamie said gently, “I just packed that box.” I looked down to see that I'd been unloading kitchen utensils as I talked. Real smooth. I forced a laugh and put the things back in.

“Ha-ha. Sorry. Not enough coffee for me, I guess. What a space. Okay, what should I really do?”

Jamie sent me out to her car with a couple of boxes, then back again with some more. I ended up ferrying things up and down the stairs for the next hour; ultimately I did earn her gratitude.

When it was time for me to leave, I took little Noah aside. He was still, amazingly, playing with the two cars I'd brought. “I'm looking forward to visiting you in Michigan,” I said, holding him against my side. “My boyfriend and I would love to make a trip up there soon. Will you be sure to set aside some time to play with me?”

Noah nodded eagerly. “You might even want to bring some more cars,” he said with innocent desire.

“You can count on it. We'll have a race, okay?”

Noah agreed. I held his thin little body, and then I did the same to his plumper brother, who was being fed oatmeal by my ever-helpful mother. She gave me a look that said she wanted to know what was going on. “Mom,” I said brightly, “I'll see you at Fritz's debut. A few hours. Right?”