Hallowed Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  “Fear isn’t necessary,” Doreen said. “As you can see, I’m perfectly fine. The sheriff was quite the gentleman.”

  “We hired a detective. We have to get you out of jail.” The sister looked around with dismay. “I can’t believe this is happening. I told you not to come here. The past holds no answers for you. There’s only trouble here. I told Sister Mary Grace not to tell you about any of this. I—”

  Doreen broke the riptide of the sister’s words with an introduction of Tinkie and me.

  “I’m sorry,” Sister Mary Magdalen said breathlessly. She struggled to regain her composure. “It’s just hard to see Doreen in a place like this. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Really. For them to say that she killed her baby is preposterous. She’s a healer, not a killer.” She flung a tear from her cheek with a gesture of frustration. “As if the loss of that dear child wasn’t enough to bear. Now this!”

  Doreen reached through the bars and lightly grasped the sister’s shoulder. “I’m fine, Sister. It’s a misunderstanding. Ms. Richmond and Ms. Delaney will straighten it all out for us. You can’t get excited like this. It isn’t good for you.”

  Sister Mary Magdalen took a deep breath, her gaze locked with Doreen’s. Age lifted from her face. “Of course,” she said. “Things will be just fine. I gave myself over to worry for a little bit there.” She took another breath and smiled at us. “Okay, now what are we going to do to help Doreen?”

  4

  TINKIE AND I PONDERED A STRATEGY TO HELP DOREEN AS WE LEFT the courthouse and drove to the health department to see if there was an actual birth certificate for Lillith Lucas’s daughter. It wasn’t particularly relevant to our case, but I just wanted some confirmation that Lillith Lucas had indeed had a daughter.

  It was a perfect fall day, the light clear and golden, with just a bit of a nip. Tinkie snuggled deeper into her sweater since I refused to roll up the window of her car. For the four months of summer my hair had been a ball of frizz. Now I gloried in the feel of the wind lifting it off my neck. The fairy godmother of low humidity had turned dross into silk.

  “She didn’t do it,” Tinkie said as we parked in the shade of a pecan tree. The nuts had begun to fall and several crackled beneath the tires. Three squirrels gave us murderous looks.

  “How can you be so certain?” I was puzzled by Tinkie’s defense of a woman she hardly knew. Tinkie wasn’t a pushover. Most people had to earn her trust.

  “I just know,” she said. “Female intuition.”

  “Because you could never hurt an infant,” I pointed out. “We always find it hard to believe someone could do something we wouldn’t. But someone killed that baby.”

  “Maybe it was a mistake,” she said, getting out of the car. She looked over the top at me, her face as serious as I’d ever seen it. “Mistakes happen. I mean, it’s been three weeks since the baby died. There could have been a mix-up in the lab or something. The blood they tested might not even belong to Doreen’s baby.”

  I didn’t argue. Instead I took the five cement steps into the cinder-block–walled health department. At the door I was ambushed by a wave of memories. I’d come here as a child, a preschooler getting lined up for first grade. Vaccinations were mandatory, even though my mother had staged a first-class protest against the shots. She wasn’t certain if the vaccinations were safe or even necessary, but she was damn positive that anything mandatory couldn’t be a good thing. She protested and I ran. Nonetheless, they got me. Three employees had cornered me on the scuffed yellow linoleum and held me while the nurse pumped me full of immunities. It was a nightmare memory.

  Walking into the smell of disinfectant and alcohol, I was glad Tinkie was beside me. I could tell that she was having a case of negative déjà vu as well. The reception desk was empty, so we walked down the silent corridor. In my memory, the clinic was always jammed with screaming, terrified children. Now there was no one around. Except the white-clad figure that stepped out to block our path.

  Penny McAdams had not changed a whit in the twenty-something years since I’d been dragged into her office kicking and screaming. She wore the same white nurse’s uniform and bat-wing hat. Her shoes were white and soundless on white-hosed feet and legs. She eyed me with a cold recognition.

  “Sarah Booth Delaney,” she said, nodding to herself. “I remember you. You kicked me in the shins once. Your mama should have tanned your hide, but she didn’t. She took your part in acting like a spoiled brat.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said, wondering if I should apologize, but not feeling sincere about it.

  “We keep impeccable records.” The hint of a threat rode under her words.

  I smiled. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. We’re on official business and we need a copy of the birth certificate for a child born to Lillith Lucas.”

  “Why don’t you wait in my office?” she suggested. “I’ll be right back.”

  We took a seat and Penny went to the front office and stayed there for over fifteen minutes. When she returned, she carried several file folders. She tossed one on the desk in front of me.

  “You never came back for your diphtheria booster,” she said, drilling me with her gaze. “Roll up your sleeve. My record on school vaccinations is perfect, except for you.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “I’d like your cooperation,” Penny said with a smile. She was going to play hardball. To get what I wanted, I was going to have to give her what she wanted—a piece of my hide.

  “Sarah Booth had the rest of her vaccinations at Bible camp in Jackson,” Tinkie said with complete authority. “We can have them fax you the transcript.”

  I could have kissed Tinkie.

  Penny pushed my folder aside and picked up another. “Tinkie Richmond,” she mused. “You married well.” She gave me another malevolent glare. My matrimonial failure was undoubtedly inked into my health department chart. I just wondered under what illness it would fall. Female disorders. Charm deficit. High levels of expectation. Absorbed in my own thoughts, I didn’t hear what the nurse said, but I saw the reaction on Tinkie’s face. She drew back in her chair. “What?” she asked. “What did you say?”

  “Were you ever checked for worms?” Penny smiled.

  “I’ve never had worms in my life. What would make you ask such a thing?”

  “There’s no test in your chart.” Penny took on a concerned look. “Worms can be quite serious. It’s a simple test. We could arrange—”

  “I don’t have worms and I’m not being tested for anything.” Tinkie was completely taken aback. Normally Tinkie loved medical attention—from the proper physician, who would be male, handsome, solicitous, and comforting.

  Penny was not to be deterred. “I’ve seen cases you wouldn’t believe. Left untreated, worms can thread the digestive track and intestines, weakening the entire system until there’s a blowout of the intestinal wall. This could happen at a formal dinner at The Club, or while you’re shopping, or lunching with your friends.”

  “Tinkie doesn’t have worms,” I said, realizing that my earlier fear of the clinic was totally justified. Nurse McAdams was a sadist. “Do you have birth records for Lillith Lucas or not?” I asked in a no-nonsense voice. “Doc Sawyer sent us over here.”

  Doc was retired from private practice, but he was the emergency room physician and tended a few old-time patients. Some old gossip I’d retained in the back of my brain came into play. Penny McAdams had once had a crush on Doc. It was a trump card that produced amazing results.

  “I can call Doc and check to make sure he sent you,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  “Be my guest. He said to ask you ‘pretty please’ to help us.”

  She cleared her throat and reached for the stack of files. “Yes, well, there were three births registered to Lillith Lucas, though we had to send someone to the home and demand that she give us the information. All three babies were delivered by the mother, at home, without even the assistance of a midwife. It’s
remarkable that under those conditions only one of them died.”

  “Three?” Tinkie and I echoed each other.

  Nurse McAdams assessed us. “Measles can sometimes cause deafness. I need to check your mothers’ vaccination records and see about this.”

  “We can hear,” I assured her, “we just didn’t expect three births. We knew of only one.”

  “Even though you make it a point to poke into everyone’s business, Ms. Delaney, you don’t know everything.” She muttered something under her breath that sounded like “Should have been immunized for nosiness.”

  “May we have the children’s birth dates?” I asked, deciding that I’d rather be stuck in the butt with a needle than have to talk to this woman much longer.

  She handed us the birth certificates with some reluctance. “If Doc hadn’t sent you, I wouldn’t show you these. I’m under no legal obligation to show you anything, you know.”

  I scanned the documents. The first was a baby boy born two years before I was. There was no name, no birth weight or height, no attending physician, no time of birth. No father’s name. It was only listed as Baby Lucas, with just the gender and date of birth.

  The second certificate was for a female. The age approximately matched Doreen’s. Again, no father or other details. Another Baby Lucas.

  The third was a boy born the next year. The certificate contained his birth day and the note that he’d died only hours after birth. He didn’t live long enough to even be called Baby Lucas.

  “Is there any way to tell why this baby died?” I asked the nurse.

  “Sure, hire a psychic.”

  Tinkie, recovered from a momentary imaginary journey into the hellish possibility of worms, rose up to her full five-two height. “There’s no need for such rudeness,” she said. “We’re not trying to hurt anyone and we’re not asking you to do anything except your job. You can’t jab us with a needle, so you’re doing your best to make us suffer some other way. Well, it’s not working. I’m marking the health department off the list of worthy projects from my civic clubs.” Her eyes gleamed. “And I belong to every single one of them. You won’t get another dime for renovation.”

  I zipped my lip. Tinkie had gotten Penny’s attention.

  “I remember the death of the baby clearly,” Penny said. She wasn’t friendlier, but she was more forthcoming. “It was a perfect baby in appearance, but it simply stopped breathing. That’s according to Lillith.”

  “There wasn’t an autopsy?” I asked.

  “Hardly. Folks never considered that a mother could kill her own child back then. SIDS was a reality, of course, though we didn’t call it that. Some babies just stopped breathing. It was a risk everyone knew about.”

  “The infant girl was left at a Catholic convent,” I continued. “What happened to the first boy?”

  Penny shrugged. “That, I couldn’t tell you. Public health has no jurisdiction. Back then, not even the welfare department really jumped on that kind of case. I do remember that someone asked Lillith about the children, and she said they’d been given to good homes.”

  “‘She said’?” Tinkie didn’t hide her incredulity. “Like, my dog had a litter of puppies and I found good homes for them.”

  Penny actually smiled. “Exactly like that. I don’t know if you recall Lillith, but she was crazy. Today she’d be locked up. She wandered around town like an escapee from Bedlam, her hair in rattails, yelling and shaking a Bible at anyone who passed by her. Any home away from her had to be an improvement for a child. Folks like her should be sterilized by the state.”

  I stood up. We’d gotten everything she was going to give us. “Thanks for your time, Nurse McAdams.”

  “Tell Doc next time he needs my help, he should call me himself,” she said.

  “I’ll be sure to deliver the message,” I promised. With quick steps, Tinkie and I walked out into the October sunshine.

  “That’s incredible,” Tinkie said with mounting indignation. “Those children could have been sold. Any kind of predator could have gotten hold of them.”

  “The past is over and done. There’s nothing we can do. If the boy is still alive, he’s older than either of us.”

  She leaned down to pick up a handful of pecans. Cracking them in her hand, she fished out the succulent meat and offered me a half. “Do you ever wonder why we ended up with the parents we got?” she asked.

  I hadn’t. Not until that moment. But it was a question that wasn’t easily dismissed. Why had I gotten loving parents and Doreen was born to Lillith Lucas?

  On the drive to Dahlia House, I slipped into a pensive mood. After Tinkie drove away with Chablis riding with her little paws on the steering wheel like she was driving, I walked across the sweep of front lawn.

  When I was fifty yards away, I turned and looked at the old plantation house with fresh eyes. She was a beauty. Time had been kind to her—there was nothing wrong that a little paint wouldn’t fix right up. My forefathers had built a house that endured. What role did I play in the Delaney line? It was a question I’d expect more from Jitty than myself.

  I couldn’t help but contrast Doreen with my memory of her mother. There was a sense of peace and serenity about Doreen that even I had to acknowledge. Lillith had been frightening. Integral to my case for Doreen would be the father of infant Rebekah. But I couldn’t help but wonder who Doreen’s father was and how he happened to get involved with Lillith, a woman whose sole religious ministry seemed to focus on the sins of sexual pleasure. What combination of genes had created a woman as physically lovely as Doreen from the raw material of Lillith?

  Doreen Mallory had opened the door on a lot of questions that, in all likelihood, I would never know the answers to. But they were questions that also impacted me. How did it happen that I’d been born into the Delaney family? Was it just a random combination of chromosomes and molecular chemistry or was there something else at work?

  Where Tinkie had found Doreen believable, I found her troubling. She’d accepted her baby’s death with the serenity of the insane. And if she was crazy, she may have killed her own child and not even be aware of it.

  Sweetie Pie, my wonderful red tic hound, greeted me from the porch, her tail beating a fast rhythm against the balustrade. We entered the house together, both of us thinking about food.

  “Is she a baby killer?” Jitty asked from a corner of the parlor. She stood up, her hair tucked under a cloche hat and her body seemingly robbed of all its curves by a dress banded at her hips.

  “I don’t know.” I couldn’t help staring at Jitty. She frequently jumped decades, and she’d obviously found the stash of old Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue dress patterns from the 1920’s.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? If you’re gonna save her, you have to know that she didn’t kill her own baby. Sarah Booth, you can’t be runnin’ around the county defending baby killers.”

  “Tinkie doesn’t think she did it.”

  “Tinkie wants to build hair sculptures. Can you trust her judgment?”

  “Can I trust my own?” I countered, passing through the parlor and dining room and into the kitchen. I went straight to the refrigerator and found some cold fried chicken in a deli take-out box from the Piggly Wiggly. I peeled the meat off the bone and gave it to Sweetie. She smacked it down and eyed the bone, which I carefully threw away.

  “You’d better be able to trust your own judgment. Tinkie’s got her a rich husband to fall back on if she screws up. You got a fat hound dog and a mortgage.”

  “Thanks for the reminder,” I said sarcastically. In the back of the refrigerator I found some boiled eggs. An egg salad sandwich would be perfect.

  “Is she a healer?” Jitty pressed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice echoing a little in the refrigerator as I searched for bread-and-butter pickles.

  “I don’t believe in magic. Sounds to me like it’s some kind of New Or-leans hocus-pocus.”

  I looked over the door
at Jitty. “Very interesting. A skeptical ghost. Most folks wouldn’t believe in you, either.”

  “Most folks never get a chance to meet someone like me,” Jitty sniffed. “I know things that would curl your toes.”

  “I get the impression that Doreen Mallory does, too. She says her baby wasn’t murdered. And she’s so calm and certain about it.” I stared into Jitty’s eyes, hoping for some insight. “Which means that if she really didn’t do it, someone else did. I need to make her talk about the father of her child.”

  “The daddy would be the next logical choice,” Jitty agreed, “especially if he didn’t want to be no daddy.” She frowned at the mess I was making on the table. I’d peeled the eggs, chopped them up with the pickles, and now I was adding mayo, salt, and pepper.

  I paused in my culinary preparation. “Don’t you think it’s a little odd that no one has mentioned the father yet, and that he isn’t here, trying to help Doreen?”

  Jitty rolled her eyes at me. “Like sperm donation requires any future commitment from a man.”

  I was shocked. Jitty had become as cynical as I. It was a disturbing thought. Especially when it came to fatherhood, which was her one constant theme of harping at me. “Wait, so just any man won’t make a good father?” I pressed, amazed that she’d given me such an advantage.

  “The duties of fatherhood aren’t for the faint of heart, missy. Not all daddies are like your daddy was. Some are no account. They got nothin’ for the children that spring from their loins.” She paced the kitchen, the short skirt of her dress swinging against her well-formed thighs.

  “What’s eating you?” I asked.

  “Sometimes a baby is just a trap.”

  My heart squeezed painfully. Jitty hit where it hurt—and where it hurt was Coleman. “When a man dances the tune, shouldn’t he pay the fiddler?” I asked.

  “As long as he knows what tune he’s dancing to,” Jitty pointed out. “Sometimes a man is told he’s dancing a waltz and it’s really a bop.”