The Empty Cradle

by Jill Nojack

  Her mother’s body was still warm, but no life beat within it. Jenny’s knees gave up the effort to keep her upright. She collapsed across the body of the woman who had been her port in every storm. She couldn’t respond to the cries of her children; there was nothing she could feel but loss as her own screams drowned the infants out.

  4

  William, in his official capacity as the newest member of the Giles police force, waved away the small crowd of neighbors who were standing on the sidewalk trying to see into the open doorway of the white, wood-sided one story. Three of the town’s cruisers, including the one he’d just exited, sat at the curb with their sirens off but the red lights spinning.

  “Let’s move it along, folks. Go on home and let us do our jobs. Unless you heard or saw something. In that case, step up and let me know.”

  An ambulance pulled to the curb, and as the crew hurried out and opened the back door, he added, “If anyone’s still on that sidewalk when these nice fellas from the hospital need to get through, I’m taking names.” William reached for the pad and pen he kept in his shirt pocket. “And then we’ll be seeing you downtown. And gosh…I’ve seen people wait for hours on those hard wooden benches until someone was ready to talk to them.”

  The crowd moved off briskly then, although some of the them stayed outside on their own front porches to keep an eye on things. That was fine. As long as they didn’t interfere. Obviously there’d be no stopping the gossip. It had always been the town’s favorite pastime.

  His head bobbed in greeting to the force’s youngest officer, Ben Rogers, only eight months out of the police academy up in Boston, who bobbed his own in return as William entered through the open doorway to the victim’s house with the hospital crew behind him.

  The victim had already been taken to the morgue, leaving only the dark stain spreading across the carpet where it should have been tan. He reviewed the scene quickly with a glance from one side of the room to the other and decided the paramedics were here for the unconscious blond male tied up by the fireplace and maybe also the sobbing, dark-haired young woman on the couch. His eyes lingered there for a moment. Rogers ushered the EMTs to the hearth, so the young woman was probably okay.

  Chief Denton was with her, one hand patting her shoulder, making little headway in the victim-soothing department. His booming bass voice didn’t lend itself to gentle overtures. In the month since William had started working with him, Denton had earned his respect as a fair and dedicated law enforcement professional, but there was no doubt the chief was a lot better suited to handling perpetrators than victims.

  He panned past the couch to the other wall where there were three cradles lined up in a row near a dark wood buffet and book shelf that had been shoved into a corner to accommodate them. A flash of movement caught his eyes as a snuffling gurgle sounded from one of them and a small fist flashed up and then back below the cradle’s side.

  Triplets. And Denton had said the victim’s name was Maureen Oliver. It hit him hard when he realized Maureen was the beaming grandmother he’d held the door for at Cat’s Magical Shoppe only two days before.

  The rush of recognition weighed him down; William had seen more than enough of both life and the afterlife to know that neither one was fair, but this—this seemed excessively cruel.

  He moved into Denton’s line of sight silently. He didn’t want to interrupt, but Denton would want to know he was there. Crime scene investigation was his supposed area of expertise after all—that’s what Robert Andrews, the mayor of Giles, had sold William to Denton with, at least. He didn’t want to think about the lies, but both Natalie and Robert had agreed that it seemed like a natural fit for a genius loci. According to what Natalie had discovered in Robert’s old books, he’d been transformed to protect the town. And now he was also its only detective.

  Neither he nor Robert had thought the town would need his made-up expertise. There had only been twelve suspicious deaths in Giles in fifty years, and seven of them had been committed by the same killer. With that investigation recently wrapped up, no one would have thought there’d be another one to investigate so soon.

  Denton’s head jerked to summon him, and he walked to the couch.

  “Jenny, this is Bill Bailey.” It always took a beat for William to remember his new name. He supposed it would get easier eventually. And he liked the joke about “coming home” that the new name implied. It had even made Natalie smile when he’d suggested it. He obviously couldn’t use his own name—William Stanford had been one of Giles’s twelve murder victims, and all traces of the Stanford family legacy had been wiped away when his spinster sister, Lettie, passed years ago. He had no choice but to start again.

  The chief continued, “I’m going to leave you with Bill for a while, Mrs. Holgerson. But I’ll need to talk to him alone for a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  Denton led him down the hall and stood close as he spoke, struggling to keep his big voice at low volume as he filled William in. “She was sleeping and came out to find her husband—that was him in the corner—standing over her mother’s body. She was still on her knees wailing like a banshee when I got here. One of the neighbors called us. Heard her through the open windows.”

  William asked, “What about the husband? Who tied him up?”

  “Unknown. I’d like you to see if you can make some sense out of it. Everything I ask just sets her off on a fresh crying jag. At least the kids have settled down. I couldn’t take the wailing from all directions.” He shook his head, apologetic. “I don’t mean to sound unfeeling. But every minute she spends sobbing instead of answering questions is another minute we lose chasing down the killer if it turns out the husband wasn’t involved. I’ve got Horace meeting the ambulance up to the hospital to take him into custody just in case.”

  “Well, Chief, I’ll…”

  A formless cry rang down the hall. They both bolted back into the living room, where Jenny stood over the center cradle, tears rolling anew down her face.

  William touched her arm lightly and she turned to him, her eyes wild.

  When his brown irises flashed blue to send the girl a wave of calm and trust through his fingertips, he really hoped Denton was looking at the girl instead of him. She’d probably seen the flash before his eyes faded again to a light brown, but it wouldn’t confuse her the way it would Denton; the minute he’d touched her, he knew she had magic of her own.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said.

  “Dahlia’s gone. Daisy and Delphinium are here, but Dahlia…”

  William’s eyes moved to the cradles. Two of them held gurgling babies, but the center one revealed something different. The lump of blanket he’d registered from a distance as a sleeping child had been pulled away to reveal only a stuffed toy wearing an infant’s bonnet.

  How was it possible no one had checked on the children before this?

  Jenny’s breath grew ragged again and he risked another flash of magic to help her gain control. He held her eyes with his. “You need to focus, Jenny. It’s important. What was she wearing?”

  “A pink blanket sleeper with snaps up the front.”

  “Hair color? Eye color?”

  “She’s blond like Butch, just a fuzz of hair…she’s so young. And amber eyes. They’re unusual. She’s…unique. I’ve never seen eyes like hers before. And she likes to be swaddled, it helps her sleep, so my mom would have wrapped her up tight in her pink blanket with the bunnies on it. And…” She covered her face with her hands. “Just, please…please find her.”

  He heard Denton swear and move away, then say something to Rogers. The front door opened immediately after. The sound of Denton’s hurried footsteps moved through the archway to the rooms in the back of the house. He heard cupboard doors hastily opened and closed and pans rattling as they did.

  He took both of Jenny’s hands in his and kept eye contact as he squeezed them gently. “We’re going to find her. I know we are.” And he meant it. Because whatever power
had brought him back to life as the town’s guardian djinn was wasted if he couldn’t find a vulnerable child who desperately needed his protection.

  ***

  Chief Karl Denton didn’t have time for recrimination. But how in the name of all that’s holy had he missed noticing that one of the triplets had been replaced with a stuffed frog?

  He took a pair of thin plastic gloves out of his back pocket and slipped them on before he touched anything, then made a rapid-fire sweep of the small family room, bedrooms, dining room, and finally, the kitchen that still smelled of someone’s fish dinner. He opened all doors, all drawers, all cupboards. Anywhere a child could be hidden.

  Nothing seemed out of place until he arrived at the sliding glass door in the family room that exited to a small concrete patio. It was open a fraction. This could be an intruder’s point of ingress.

  Just outside of the door there were two perfectly round spots of blood, like the killer had paused there while the murder weapon dripped. Stopped to pull the door shut, maybe. But why bother?

  It couldn’t be easy, could it? He’d hoped having the husband in custody would tie it up quickly, that it would be a simple case of domestic violence, not the act of a raging wacko like the last time. He was still smarting from having had an experienced detective pushed on him by the mayor after that fiasco. It felt like a vote of no-confidence after all his years of loyal service despite Officer Bailey’s apparently genuine humility and willingness to help with anything he was asked to take on.

  No one could afford to miss anything this time. Not with a child’s life at stake. Maybe there was an accomplice in this thing; the husband could have taken care of the mother-in-law while his helper snatched the baby to make it look like an outside job. If Holgerson had hit the road before the victim was discovered, it probably would have worked out fine for him unless it came out during the investigation that there was trouble in the marriage. He made a mental note; he needed to find out how the young couple had been getting on.

  With the missing child, it could even be a black-market baby scheme and the mother-in-law had just gotten in the way. But still, a man selling off one of his own kids?

  Or maybe he was trying to take off with all of them because he was leaving his wife. Also not likely. Even though he didn’t know Butch Holgerson well, he couldn’t see him taking on the care of infants. Another woman waiting in the wings, maybe?

  He took a picture of the patio so they’d have a record of where the furniture had been. Next, he put a patio chair over the blood spots to preserve them just in case someone else walked out back before he had time to close off the area with tape.

  There’d been no door into the garage from the house, so the one he found off the flower-lined walk that led around the side to the garage told him the the garage must have been added on after the house had already been built. The door was locked, so he gave it a healthy kick. No time to wait for a locksmith if a killer could be hiding inside. The flimsy door jam split in two with a loud crack on the first try.

  He walked around the car, peering in the windows, but there was nothing to see there. He rushed back into the house and grabbed the car keys that hung in the kitchen and opened the trunk when he returned. Empty. Just a spare.

  He paused in front of the big tool chest that sat at the left side of the back door before he squatted down to open it. The lungful of air he’d been holding in rushed out when it contained only tools.

  There was nowhere else on the premises itself to hide the small body of a newborn, and he was glad of that. But this wasn’t the time to relax. Rogers had already had a look in the cab of the truck for a weapon, and it was unlikely he’d miss an infant, so if the husband was involved, a second party had removed the child. He exited the garage and squatted on the sidewalk, looking across the lawn for signs of the killer’s path. Broken flowers, trampled-down blades of grass, broken branches through the hedge that ran along the edges of the yard, or…

  Yes, that’s what it was. A pink baby blanket with bunnies. He rushed to the sparse hedge that fenced the yard off from the neighbor’s and took a picture with his phone before untangling the blanket from the branches.

  The red splashes on the capering rabbits weren’t part of the printed pattern.

  ***

  When the chief coughed from the kitchen archway, William’s eyes darted to him, and the other man’s head jerked in a small, beckoning spasm. William put one hand over Jenny’s as he told her, “I have to talk to the chief for a minute. But I’ll be right back.”

  Jenny nodded, tightening her grip on the baby she held firmly as she rocked her upper body, shushing the child and whispering over and over that it would be all right. William peeked at the other infant as he stood up; she was awake but silent, her eyes drawn to the dimmed spotlight in the ceiling above her cradle.

  How could anyone ever think about harming something so small and helpless? He had to push the thought out of his mind or he wouldn’t be able to focus on the job. He took a deep breath as he followed Denton through the arch and into the far end of the kitchen.

  His boss held out a folded square of pink fabric.

  “Where’d you find it?” William asked.

  Denton leaned close, attempting a whisper, “Near the hedge in the back. There’s blood on it. We’ll have to get the doc to test it for a match. To see if it’s Maureen’s or if it’s…”

  “Yes,” William said.

  “Let’s keep this from her for now. There’s no point making things worse when we haven’t got answers.”

  William nodded his agreement. “Look, I asked if there’s anywhere she can stay, but she says there’s no one left in town she was close to.”

  The chief rubbed a thumb along the dark stubble on his chin. “From what I’ve seen, there’s no landline here, so there’s nothing to set up a trace on. If she gets a call from the kidnapper, it’ll be on her cell. So she can’t stay here. With a kid missing, I need you to process this scene without it ending up any more disturbed then it already has been. I didn’t like moving the body, but with Doc up to Boston for a conference, I couldn’t just let her lay there until he got back. And every minute that ticks by, the chance of us finding that kid goes down. I didn’t think this town would ever need your skills when the mayor pressed me to bring you onto the force, but we need ‘em now. It’s time you got to work.” The chief sighed and looked down at the blanket in his left hand, then looked up and said, “So, what do we do with the mother and her babies, Big City Bailey? We got no victim support options. The town doesn’t have the resources to put her up in a hotel. Not to mention she hasn’t been ruled out as a suspect yet.”

  William’s mouth pursed briefly and he stroked his smooth chin before he replied, “I’ve got an idea. I’ll make a call.”

  “Let me know what you come up with. I’ll be out front with Rogers. I need an evidence bag, and I want him to go over that truck cab with a fine tooth comb. Holgerson’s still our best suspect.”

  William nodded as Denton headed for the front door, then he took out the cell phone he had adjusted to using over the past few months. His last phone had been the family’s massive black metal jobbie with a dial and a handset. He thought of the cell as a wonderful toy, better even than a slinky, and he could watch a slinky go down a set of stairs for hours on end.

  It was almost as good as popping back and forth from place to place with magic; plus, it was a lot less disorienting for the people he needed to talk to. And he obviously couldn’t risk getting caught phasing in and out of existence anywhere near his fellow officers. Despite the town of Giles making part of its living from its magically-oriented tourism, many of its residents had their own near-supernatural ability to avoid knowing that their eccentric neighbors were the real thing.

  He got the arrangements for Jenny started, then placed the phone carefully back in his front pocket and returned to the living room to wait with her. He hoped he’d guessed right about Natalie’s friends being happy to help
.

  And right now? The second infant had joined her sibling in making a ruckus. He could lend a hand with that. He picked her up gently, cradling her against his shoulder, making a silent promise that her missing sister would come home soon.

  5

  Denton opened the cruiser’s trunk and pulled the toolbox closer. Setting aside the top tray full of the basic tools of the policing trade in Giles—a slim jim and a couple of extra sets of handcuffs that saw almost no use except when the Toadstone Tavern did some especially swift trade during the Witching Fair—he revealed the bottom compartment. In it, he found pepper spray, latex gloves, a couple of small but effective flashlights, and a stack of plastic evidence bags of various sizes.

  He tucked the pink blanket into one of the larger ones as he filled Rogers in on the plan. “Bailey’ll work the crime scene once we get the family out of range. You and I are going to start on the cab of the husband’s truck. Grab a set of gloves and keep an eagle eye out. Nobody gets a pass for missing a detail. Especially not me. I let the presence of a body distract me, and that should never have happened.”

  He’d leave it up to the mayor to decide his fate over the missed kidnapping. From here on, he was focused. That child was coming home.

  As they walked to the rig, Denton scanned the neighborhood. They’d go door to door to see if anyone had heard or seen anything. He glared at the older couple sitting on the porch across the street several doors down. The woman had a small telescope trained on the officers.

  His glare didn’t faze the gawker. The scope stayed where it was. So when Rogers exited the cab with a pair of lacy black panties held between two fingers and a furious blush spreading across his cheeks, the sound of raucous laughter filled the air.

  ***