Dab? Not Deb? “Hi, Dab,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
Dab ducked her head and muttered something too softly for me to make out.
“She’s shy,” Kerri said.
Ah.
“We have the quadrant next to yours. Same cross streets but south of Cabot. Do you want to do all of Cabot, or only the north side?”
I looked at Dr. Ben. He looked at me.
“We can do all of it,” I said, “if you prefer. Or you can take one side and work your way south, and we’ll take the other and work our way north.”
“That works,” Kerri said, since obviously it was what she’d been aiming for all along. “We’ll take the south side.”
“We’ll take the north.” Which would include Dr. Ben’s and Cora’s house, but not the Silvas’ big compound.
“We’ll see you in two hours.” They set out, presumably for the south side of Cabot, which was the closest point to us, as far as their quadrant was concerned.
Meanwhile, Dr. Ben and I were standing right smack-dab in the middle of our section, outside the church. North Street was two blocks in one direction, Fraser a block in the other.
I looked around, at the church, the rectory, and the graveyard. “Let’s start with the churchyard.” Before it got too late. Wandering among the old gravestones is creepy anytime it’s dark, but at least I wasn’t too cold and tired at the moment. Two hours from now, I definitely wouldn’t want to do it.
Dr. Ben nodded, so maybe he was thinking the same thing. We headed for the entrance to the graveyard, between two low stone walls.
“I’ll go this way,” he said when we were inside, gesturing left.
Fine with me. It was eerie either way. I went right, over to the corner of the stone wall, and started there: walking the paths between the graves, shining my flashlight back and forth, over and behind the leaning stones.
A few of the graves had been decorated for the season, with wreaths and candles and little lanterns. Aunt Inga was buried here, and I passed her grave: just blanketed with a couple inches of snow. I brushed the snow away from the top of the stone, making my mitten wet in the process, and stood for a second looking at it. Inga Marie Morton. Lived and died and left me her house and her cats, and gave me a new life with a new career and a new husband in the process. I made a mental note to come back with a wreath and a lantern just as soon as I could think again. Just let us find Miss Mamie and get through the Christmas Home Tour, and I’d be back with some greenery to make things look more festive.
From the other side of the graveyard, I could see Dr. Ben’s flashlight beam cut through the darkness. We weren’t very far apart at all, and when he raised his voice, I had no problem hearing him. “Anything?”
“Nothing. You?”
“No. I’m almost done with this side.”
I wasn’t, so I left Aunt Inga’s final resting place and hurried up. By the time I had searched my half of the graveyard with nothing to show for it, he was waiting for me by the front entrance. “Nothing here.”
I shook my head. “The church is closed, right?”
“I’m sure it is,” Dr. Ben said, “but we should check.” He made for the front double doors of the church, which—surprise—opened. We stuck our heads into the small narthex and looked around.
It was nice and warm, and would make a fine place for someone to curl up out of the wind and snow. That might have been why it was open: Barry or Judy had decided that if Miss Mamie needed shelter, she might find it in the church. I crossed the small space and tried the doors into the nave itself, but they were closed.
The narthex was empty, though, so we ducked back out and made our circuit of the church itself, shining our flashlights into the bushes growing around the old brick structure. We found a few items of trash, which we picked up and hauled back to the front and the trash cans, but there was no sign of Mamie.
We ended up back in front of the church, in front of the nativity scene.
“Ready to move on?” Dr. Ben asked.
I nodded. “Just a second.” The nativity was rather lovely, actually. It looked old, and was almost life-sized. The camels towered over me, and I could look Melchior—or maybe it was Caspar—right in the eye.
The sheep were about the size of Jemmy and Inky, covered with flaking white paint, and Mary and Joseph were kneeling behind the empty wooden trough that should have held the Baby Jesus.
I don’t think the trough was very historically accurate, because it looked like it would leak like a sieve. Any water or grain poured into it would trickle out through the cracks between the planks. But it looked appropriately rustic and atmospheric. It would have looked even better with a Baby Jesus inside, draped in swaddling cloths, but alas, such was not to be. The only thing there was a bunch of hay.
“The baby goes missing every year,” Dr. Ben said, coming up to stand beside me to look at the manger, too. “It usually comes back after a few days, though.”
I glanced at him. “How long has it been?”
“More than a few days. I think maybe we’re not getting it back this year.”
“Is it valuable?”
He shook his head. “The figures are old, certainly. They could use some work, too. Maybe Derek would like to take that on once the two of you are finished with the house. Get the figures ready for next year’s Christmas season.”
“Maybe.” He’d probably enjoy it. He likes doing restoration. “I’ll run it by him.”
Dr. Ben nodded. “But to answer your question, no. The figures are sixty or seventy years old and, as a set, might be interesting to someone collecting that type of thing. But they’re not antiques, and they’re not made by anyone of any importance. And there’s no reason at all why anyone would want just the baby.”
“Derek told me that this has been happening for a long time,” I said, turning away from the nativity scene. We had a big section of Waterfield Village to search, and no time to waste. I didn’t want to have to meet the others in—I checked my watch—an hour and forty-three minutes now, and tell them we hadn’t gotten to everything we were supposed to.
Dr. Ben fell into step with me as we set off down the sidewalk, flashing our lights over fences and into bushes. “That’s right. As long as I can remember anyway. Or at least I can’t remember a time when it didn’t happen. When Derek was ten or eleven or so, he and some friends made a plan to hide in the churchyard overnight to see who took the baby.”
“Really?” He hadn’t told me about that. “How did it go?”
There was a rustle in the bushes in the yard we were passing and I slowed down to flash my light in that direction. A pair of glowing eyes stared back at me for a second before they translated themselves into the sleek shape of a cat, slipping through the snow.
“Not well,” Dr. Ben said. “They scared themselves half to death being in the graveyard in the first place, and then it got late, and they got cold and uncomfortable. On top of that it began to snow. And because they hadn’t gotten permission to be out, we all got worried when they didn’t come home. The bottom line was that one of us found them and dragged them home before they could discover anything at all. I grounded Derek for a week.”
“Oops.” That was probably why he hadn’t told me.
“And if we’d only let them alone,” Dr. Ben said, “they would have seen who took the baby. It was gone by the next morning.”
“Did you think they took it?”
“The thought crossed my mind,” Dr. Ben said, “but there were five of them, and they all swore up and down they hadn’t.”
These were Derek’s childhood friends I had met a few months ago when one of them got married, I guessed. Ryan, Alex, and Zach. And Barry Norton, of course.
“He never told me about this.”
“Nothing much to tell,” Dr. Ben said, flashing his light into a Jeep parked at the curb. It was empty. “The baby was returned the next night. Same as always.”
“And no one has any idea who takes it a
nd brings it back?”
Dr. Ben shook his head. “We assume it’s some sort of joke. They don’t keep the baby. They just borrow it for a day or two.”
“Is it different when it comes back?”
“No,” Dr. Ben said and shone his flashlight into the bushes behind a mailbox. “It’s the same as it always is. It just goes away for twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and then it shows up in the manger again, just the same as it was when it left.”
We got to the corner. “Do you want to keep going straight down Cabot,” I asked, “or turn here?”
“Let’s go one more block before we turn. That way we can check my house.”
“Your house?” Why would Miss Mamie be there?
He glanced at me. “I’m the town doctor. She knows me.”
So she might decide to stop by, if she was out, wandering, and realized she needed help. “Were you alive when Baby Arthur went missing? In September of 1949?”
“Just barely,” Dr. Ben said. “But I heard stories when I got a little older. Every parent in Waterfield, including mine, was afraid to let their children play outside or sleep alone at night. Arthur Green was our Lindbergh baby, and Waterfield wasn’t the same afterwards.” He pushed open the gate into his own yard and held it for me. We headed up the walk to the front door.
While Dr. Ben went inside to tell Cora that we were here and that she didn’t have to worry about the dark figures skulking around her yard flashing beams of light into the bushes, I walked around the house looking for Mamie.
Cora was an avid amateur gardener, and in the summer, the yard was ablaze with colors and varieties of flowers and grasses. Now it was all hidden under a few inches of snow, and I did my best to remember where the beds were, so I didn’t accidentally stomp all over some rare variety of perennial.
The yard was empty of little old ladies. I stopped outside the potting shed in the back and flashed my light at the latch. There was a padlock hanging from it, but it was open.
I hesitated before reaching for it. I had a bad experience with a garden shed once. The one on Aunt Inga’s property specifically. It had gone up in flames with me inside it last summer, and I barely made it out with my skin intact. Ever since then, I’d been a little leery of sheds.
I looked around, and flashed the light around, too, for good measure. There was no one in sight. Nobody was likely to rush up and push me inside and then light the shed on fire.
With all the snow, it probably wouldn’t burn anyway. And my feelings were illogical; I knew that. Just residual fear. The chances that the same thing would happen again were slim to none.
Besides, I hadn’t upset anyone at all lately, so there was no reason why anyone would want to kill me.
Nonetheless, I had to force myself to unhook the padlock and pull the door open. “Hello?”
There was no answer. Of course not. I hadn’t expected one, but my heart was still beating double-time when I stepped forward into the doorway, shining my light into the interior of the shed.
It was small, and looked a lot like Aunt Inga’s shed used to before it was immolated. Shelves, pots, garden implements, bags of dirt.
Over in the corner was something that looked like a huddle of fabric, and my heart skipped a beat. “Miss Mamie?”
There was no answer, but if she were asleep, there wouldn’t be. I forced myself to step forward into the darkness.
I had only taken a couple of steps when the doorway darkened.
—12—
I jumped and squealed and dropped my flashlight. The beam bounced a couple of times, and then settled on the floor to illuminate a pair of sturdy brown boots, the soles and tips wet with slush.
“Goodness, Avery,” Dr. Ben’s voice said, “you scared me half to death.”
It took me several seconds to find my voice. “Likewise.”
“What are you doing?” He flashed his light around the interior of the shed.
I bent to pick up my own flashlight before I answered. “I saw this bundle of . . . stuff.” I pointed at it.
“Fertilizer,” Dr. Ben said, focusing his flashlight beam on it. “And Cora’s gardening coat.”
Of course. Now that I was standing closer, it was easy to see. A couple of big bags of fertilizer, with a coat on top; a coat whose sleeve had accidentally gotten hung up on a nail, so it looked like someone’s arm was inside it.
“There’s nobody here,” I said, stating the obvious.
Dr. Ben shook his head. “Let’s go.”
Our next focused stop was Miss Mamie’s old house, now Derek’s and my renovation object on North Street. On the way there, we shone our lights into cars and bushes, but saw no sign of Miss Mamie. And we discussed my brush with death in the garden shed in July, since Dr. Ben had obviously noticed that I was still jumpy.
“It’s normal,” he told me. “It’s only been a few months. You’ll be more comfortable in time. The more garden sheds you visit without incident, the better you’ll feel.”
Sure.
“Derek hasn’t built you a new one yet, has he?”
I shook my head. “We were busy with the TV crew when it burned, and then there was the condo to renovate, and the wedding, and by then it was too cold to start building. He told me he’d build me a new one when the weather gets warm again.”
Dr. Ben nodded. “That’ll help, too. Get involved in building it. It’ll be yours and you’ll feel more confident about it.”
Good advice.
“Feel free to come hang out in ours anytime you want,” Dr. Ben added.
“Thank you.” I smiled. “I might take you up on that when the weather gets a little better.”
We stopped on the sidewalk outside the house. It was dark and creepy, just as creepy as it had appeared that first night when Cora and I drove past.
“I don’t have the key,” I said. “And anyway, Derek and Brandon already checked here.”
Dr. Ben nodded. “Let’s just take a look around the yard. If they’ve already checked the inside, there’s no sense in doing it again. This is taking more time than I thought.”
It was. We had already used up half our allotted time, and we hadn’t patrolled anything even close to half our section. Hopefully the others were making better time. I kept hoping my phone would ring with a report that someone had found Miss Mamie, but so far, no luck.
“I’ll go this way,” Dr. Ben said, and headed left, across the snowy grass in front of the house. I went straight, down the driveway and around the Dumpster to the opening.
There was nothing inside it that shouldn’t be there, at least as far as I could determine in the beam from the flashlight. And Derek was right; the baby carriage was gone. We had parked it between the house and the Dumpster, and now the space was empty. I shone the light on the ground to see if I could determine which way it had gone—it couldn’t have flown, after all; someone had had to wheel it away—but between the hard-packed snow from before and the new dusting over top, I had no idea.
I continued down alongside the house, flashing my light to and fro.
It was dark back here, the only sounds my footsteps crunching on the snow. A square of light shone on the ground up ahead, out of the basement window. Derek and Brandon must have forgotten to turn it off when they searched the house earlier.
I squatted in front of it and peered down, just in case it wasn’t Derek’s or Brandon’s doing, but Miss Mamie’s. There was no reason to think she’d be in the basement—if she were inside the house, it was more likely she was upstairs in her old room again. Not that she was in the house, because Derek and Brandon had checked.
Anyway, I squatted and peered in. And saw nothing. Everything looked empty and quiet, just as it should.
But just in case, I pulled out my phone and dialed Derek. A few seconds passed and then I heard his voice. “Avery?”
“Did you check the basement when you were over here at the house earlier?”
“Hello to you, too,” Derek said. “Yes, we did.”
/>
“Is it possible that you forgot to turn off the light?”
There was a beat. “I don’t think so,” Derek said.
“Not the big ceiling light. The small one under the stairs. The bulb hanging on the string.”
“Oh.” He sounded relieved. “Yes, we might have forgotten to turn that off. I don’t recall turning it on, but Brandon may have, and I may not have realized it.”
Good enough. “I just wanted to check. It’s on now, and I wanted to make sure we didn’t have to go back inside. I don’t have the key, so it would involve breaking a window.”
“Don’t do that,” Derek said. “I take it you haven’t found her yet.”
“Afraid not. I guess you haven’t, either.”
“No,” Derek said. “No sign of her down here.”
“No sign of her up here, either. We’ll keep looking.”
“Us, too,” Derek said. “See you at the church in an hour.”
I told him we’d be there and continued on my way into the backyard. From the other side of the property, I could hear Dr. Ben’s footsteps crunching and see the beam of his flashlight moving to and fro.
It wasn’t a terribly big backyard. Smaller than Aunt Inga’s, and about the same size as Dr. Ben’s and Cora’s. But where Cora kept her yard in immaculate shape, and where Derek and I had slowly but surely managed to tame Aunt Inga’s mess, the Green sisters’ yard was a nightmare. It was a good thing it was winter and there were no leaves or grass, because we wouldn’t have been able to get around during the warm season. The backyard would have been a jungle. As it was, I kept brushing against snow-covered bushes and trees, making my pants and my mittens wet.
I found Dr. Ben standing outside a small, rickety structure that looked more like an outhouse than a potting shed. It leaned. It was built from what looked like driftwood—and I know I’d once said that about Aunt Inga’s kitchen cabinets, but this really did look that way. There was evidence that the planks might at one point have been painted a dark green, but all that was left now were a few flecks here and there; the rest was a silvery gray. It had small windows with small window boxes underneath, and a small door that showed evidence of red paint, and the whole thing was, in a word, small.
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