Wednesday's Child

by Gayle Wilson

  As soon as he pulled the truck up behind the church, Susan opened the passenger door. He stayed in the cab as she walked across the browning grass, carrying the simple bouquet.

  Scattered across the cemetery were perhaps a hundred monuments, most of them timeworn, covered with lichen and darkened with age. The coroner had given them directions to the baby’s grave, but they wouldn’t have needed them. The gleam of its white marble and the statue of the cherub on top would have quickly distinguished it from the others.

  Taking a deep breath, he climbed down from the cab, feeling the strain of the last couple of days as he put weight on the damaged leg. It was always worse after the military sawbones got through with their prodding and poking. And the outcome was always the same.

  By the time he had rounded the front of the truck, Susan had bent to lay the flowers she’d brought against the base of the marker. Then she stepped back, looking down on the grave.

  As he limped nearer, he read the incised letters on the stone, their clarity undimmed by time like those on the other markers.

  Baby Doe

  Rest in Peace, Sweet Angel

  Below that, in much smaller script, was a Bible verse.

  “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do also unto Me.”

  He stood beside her a moment, looking down on the tiny plot, still slightly rounded above the flatness of the surrounding ground.

  “Nice stone.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say, and her continued stillness made him uneasy.

  Susan had said repeatedly this wasn’t Emma, but there was no way she could be certain of that until the DNA results came back. The possibility that she was standing beside her daughter’s grave had to be in her mind right now. Despite the fact that he didn’t want it there, it was certainly in his.

  “One of the articles said the people of the community collected money for it. They thought she shouldn’t be buried without some kind of monument.”

  He nodded, his eyes again tracing the words on the marble. There were no dates, not even the day she’d been buried. Under the circumstances, there was no way they could have known when this baby had been born or when she’d died.

  “How could anyone do that?”

  He turned at the question, but Susan wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were still directed at the contours of the small grave.

  “Kill a baby?”

  “And leave it…that way.”

  She stooped down beside the stone, reaching out, so that Jeb thought she was going to rearrange the flowers. Instead, she put her palm flat against the ground over the center of the grave plot. She let it rest there a few seconds, and then she straightened, getting to her feet in one smooth motion.

  “We can go.” This time she did look at him. Her face was colorless, but her eyes were defiantly dry.

  He nodded, but he didn’t move.

  “If this were Emma, don’t you think I’d know?” she asked. “Don’t you think I’d feel some connection?”

  There was nothing he could say to that. He didn’t believe she could put her hand on some dirt and tell whether or not her daughter was buried under it, but if it comforted her to think she could, what was the harm?

  He looked down one last time on the marker with its Bible verse and conventional platitude. He’d watched a lot of men die through the years, and none of those deaths had been peaceful.

  But at least they had chosen to be where they were. And they had had a fighting chance. Something this baby had never had. Maybe not in her entire short life.

  Aware of the sudden burn at the back of his eyes, he lifted them, blinking against the unexpected tears. As he did, he was conscious that Susan had moved closer.

  He looked down, seeing in her eyes the same sheen of moisture he fought in his own. Without stopping to think about what he was doing, or how she might interpret it, he moved his arm away from his body, inviting her to step into his embrace.

  She closed the distance between them to lean against his side, slipping her arm around his waist. He hugged her, knowing that the emotion he felt was only a fraction of what she must be feeling.

  Maybe this wasn’t Emma, but until they discovered what had happened to her, they couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t somewhere in a grave just like this. Or, even worse, somewhere without even this simple stone or those comforting words.

  Rest in Peace. Susan wouldn’t, and now, neither would he. Not until they knew.

  “I promise,” he said, putting his lips against the fragrance of her hair.

  The faint, now-familiar sweetness filled his senses. He closed his eyes, fighting the sharp tightening in his groin. An unexpected sexual response that had no place in what was happening here.

  “What?”

  “I won’t stop looking for Emma. Nothing’s going to happen to you, but…I wanted you to know that isn’t something you have to worry about.”

  She nodded, her head moving against his shoulder. For a long time neither of them said anything else. They stood together over that small grave, their arms around one another as if they both had some link to the child whose body rested inside its tiny, donated casket.

  Except the link wasn’t to this child, Jeb thought, but to another. Another little girl who had also had no choice about what had happened to her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “AND GET WHOEVER you used before, the private investigator in Atlanta, to track down the whereabouts of Travis Caffrey,” Jeb suggested over supper that night. “If by some chance Gladys really does remember Richard and Emma, we need to follow up and see if there’s any connection between that and Travis leaving town. We probably need to know the date he left in any case.”

  “His name is Nolan Harbinson,” Susan said, “and he’s already working on it. I’ll call him tomorrow and see if he’s found anything.”

  Jeb had warned her that most of what he would propose tonight was simply brainstorming. Everything he’d mentioned so far, in her opinion at least, was something that needed to be looked into. And if they waited for Adams to do any of it—

  “I’ll get back with Doc and see if he’ll take a look at the autopsy report. He’ll give us his honest opinion about that skull fracture, whether Adams likes it or not.”

  “Do you think that’s why the medical examiner changed his report. Because the sheriff brought pressure on him to be less definite about the cause of that injury?”

  “I think he probably told Doc what he really thought. He may have told Adams what he wanted to hear.”

  “Do you think Dr. Callaway might be a source of information about the children in town? I know he didn’t practice here, but some of the parents probably took their kids to him.”

  Jeb nodded, lifting another spoonful of Lorena’s squash casserole toward his mouth as he answered. “Maybe. If they were his patients, though, I don’t know how much he can tell us. There are bound to be confidentiality issues involved.”

  “Maybe you could just ask him if he knows any little girls in town who are adopted. Girls about the right age, I mean. When we talked to him before, he said something about knowing there were adopted children.”

  “Doc would know about that, all right,” Lorena said.

  Although she was sitting at the table with them, the old woman had not set a place for herself. Instead of eating, she had kept Jeb’s plate full and listened as they talked. This was the first time she’d joined the conversation.

  “What do you mean?” Jeb asked.

  “His daddy used to do that. ’Course, back then there was more call for that kind of thing than there is now.”

  “More call for what, Lorena?” Susan prodded.

  “Finding homes for unwanted babies.”

  Neither of them said anything for a moment, trying to digest the information that had just been dumped in their laps.

  “Are you saying Doc ran some kind of adoption service?”

  “Mostly his daddy, but I know for a fact about one child Doc helped find
a home for. When you practice medicine in a town like Linton, you get to know everybody’s secrets. And if you’re trusted to keep them, then folks come to you when they got a need for something that has to be kept quiet.”

  “Like a baby born out of wedlock,” Susan said.

  It was a term that wasn’t used anymore, but the world Lorena was talking about, the world in which Doc Callaway’s father had practiced medicine, had been an old-fashioned place. Fifty years ago an illegitimate birth in a community in the heart of the Bible Belt would have raised eyebrows. The girl who had made that kind of mistake would have found herself the center of a firestorm of gossip and probably a social outcast as well. If her secret had become known.

  “People didn’t believe in abortions back then,” Lorena went on. “Not here, anyway. ’Course they would have said they didn’t believe in premarital sex either, but things happened, no matter what the preachers said on Sunday mornings. Doc Callaway—old Doc, I mean—delivered ninety-five percent of the babies in Linton. And he treated the women who wanted children and couldn’t have ’em. Why wouldn’t he do some matching up? Just more of a good doctor taking care of his patients.”

  Would his son see that “matching up” in the same light? Susan wondered. After all, they had thought all along that the present-day Dr. Callaway was one of the people Richard might have detoured off the interstate to see.

  “But you said that this Doc Callaway did some of that, too?” she asked carefully.

  “In one case I know about.”

  “Recently?” Jeb asked.

  “That depends on whose perspective we’re looking at it from, doesn’t it?” the old lady said with a grin. “That particular baby just graduated from high school. I doubt more than half a dozen people in this town know about his adoption or that Doc had anything to do with it. ’Course, there’s not as much need now to be discreet about those kinds of things as there was in his daddy’s day.”

  “How did you know about this one?”

  “Somebody at church was involved. Somebody who trusted me, as well as Doc.”

  “Did you recommend they go to him?”

  “I might have. If I’d been asked. But none of that’s any of your concern, young man. Whatever happened with that has got nothing to do with Susan’s baby. Not all those years ago.”

  Lorena was right, of course, but the story was interesting. And something to keep in mind. If someone had approached Doc Callaway with the right story and asked him to place a baby, given the example of his father, would he have complied?

  She met Jeb’s eyes across the table. He tilted his head slightly, raising his eyebrows. He was obviously thinking the same thing. With his close relationship to Callaway, maybe he could find some way to ask the old man about that when he talked to him about the autopsy report.

  “Anything else?” Susan asked him.

  “One thing I thought about last night. We’ve been assuming all along that Richard turned off the interstate and ended up in Linton because something happened that diverted him from his intended destination. What if that wasn’t the case?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What if Linton was his destination all along?”

  The idea was so foreign to everything they had ever talked about that it took her a second or two to put it into context.

  “You think he came here deliberately?”

  “I think it’s a possibility we have to consider.”

  “But…that makes no sense. Why would he come here?”

  “Maybe for the same reason he left Atlanta.”

  And that was something she still didn’t know. Harbinson hadn’t turned up anything to indicate Richard was having an affair. Nor had he found evidence he was engaged in illegal activities. No gambling. No substance abuse. Nothing but a seemingly ordinary family man who had one day decided to disappear, taking the family bank account and his baby daughter with him.

  “You’re suggesting that Richard’s coming to Linton was connected to whatever made him leave home?”

  “I think we have to consider that a possibility.”

  “But why?”

  “Maybe if we find out why he left, we’ll know that, too.”

  It was the same vicious circle she’d been caught in seven years ago. If she’d known why Richard left, then maybe she would have known where he’d taken Emma. Now Susan believed she knew where Emma was—here in Linton—but Jeb was suggesting that they needed to understand why Richard had taken her with him before they could unravel the puzzle and locate her.

  “Believe me, I tried to figure out what happened that weekend. So did Harbinson. He kept coming back to it every time we talked.”

  “Because it’s the key to everything. If we knew why Richard took Emma and disappeared—”

  “Emma and the money,” Susan said bitterly. “Don’t forget the money. It’s not as if he were planning on coming back.”

  “That’s not to say he wasn’t planning on getting in touch.”

  “With me?”

  “We can assume he wasn’t meeting another woman. No man is going to take a toddler along if he’s walking away from his marriage. You’ll never make me believe Richard would, no matter how devoted a father he was. And according to your P.I., he wasn’t in debt. He wasn’t dealing or taking drugs. He hadn’t lost his job.” Jeb stopped, his mouth remaining open after the last item in his list, his eyes seeming to lose focus.

  “What is it?”

  “That picture you brought.”

  “The one of Richard?”

  “You told Doc it had been made to announce a promotion.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How soon before he disappeared?”

  “The promotion? Five or six months. Maybe less.”

  “More money involved?”

  “Some. Potentially a lot more. That’s what he said.”

  “And new clients.”

  That hadn’t been phrased as a question, but she answered it anyway. “Several. Some of the biggest accounts the firm had.”

  “Do you know who they were?”

  She shook her head, trying to remember. “I know he must have talked about them. At least when they first gave him the list, but…We were both so busy right then. My maternity leave was up, and I’d gone back to the graphics department full-time. I was trying to break into illustrating children’s books, juggling that and taking care of Emma and my job. Getting her to and from day care. Getting us all fed without buying takeout every night. We’d talked about finding some help, but I didn’t even have time to interview anyone.”

  “Is there any way you could find out?”

  “About the client list? I could ask Richard’s boss.”

  “He’s still there?”

  “I don’t know. Some of the company management stayed in touch for a while, but they were like everyone else. When everything came out, they didn’t know what to say.”

  “How about a co-worker? Someone he might have talked to.”

  “About…his new clients?” she asked, bewildered by his insistence.

  “Someone who would have known the names,” Jeb said patiently. “Someone who might remember. Maybe whoever took over his client list. You have any idea who that was?”

  She shook her head again, trying to come up with the name of someone at the company that Richard had been close to. “He hadn’t really been there that long. We were surprised by the quick promotion, but you don’t question something like that. You just assume they like you or your work and are grateful.”

  “And what was his work exactly?”

  “Powell is a regional accounting firm that audits in the Southeast. It wasn’t one of the Big Five, of course, but Richard liked the smaller size. He said that meant they knew who you were. The promotion seemed proof he was right.”

  “The Big Five,” Jeb repeated. “Who are now the Big Four, by the way. I wonder if that could possibly…”

  “Jeb?”

  “Too many clien
ts cooking the books while the accountants looked the other way.”

  She had heard the term, of course. Who hadn’t? But again her bewilderment with where he was headed with this must have been reflected in her face.

  “Creative bookkeeping to keep anyone from finding out how badly a company is doing,” he explained. “Probably a lot more companies were involved in that then than anyone was aware of.”

  There had been a ton of publicity about the practice, but she couldn’t remember that she and Richard had ever talked about it. Or maybe that had all happened after he’d disappeared.

  “You think Richard could have discovered something like that with one of his accounts?”

  “You didn’t recognize the names of any of his clients in the news during the next few years, did you?”

  She hadn’t, but then the years after Richard and Emma’s disappearance had been a blur. Still, if he’d found something illegal, she believed he would have mentioned it.

  Unless he’d discovered it that weekend. The weekend she’d been out of town. The weekend he’d disappeared.

  “I know the police talked to almost everyone at Powell. And they talked at length to Richard’s boss. Surely if there had been anything out of the ordinary he would have told them.”

  They’d been looking for evidence of a crime Richard might have committed. Embezzlement. Fraud. Insider trading. Anything. And nothing had shown up. Still, that interview would have been the ideal time for Sam Tribble to tell the investigators about anything suspicious with Richard’s clients.

  “If he’d known about it, he might have. But the climate was different back then, remember. Accounting firms weren’t playing watchdog like the public believed they were. After all, if you found too many problems with an account, you’d probably be replaced with someone more willing to look the other way.”

  Richard had said he had a lot of work to do that weekend. Somewhere in the bulging briefcase he’d brought home had he found something so incriminating that he’d immediately known something criminal was going on?

  “But if Richard discovered something suspicious, he would have called Sam. Surely Sam would have told the police that.”

  “Or maybe Richard asked for clarification from the client first,” Jeb suggested.