Some of the baby books were well-worn standards from the Nishnabotna Public Library, and some were slick new handouts obtained from the Child Development Department. Clyde had once, furtively, picked up a document while sitting on the pot and begun to peruse it. The language was clear enough (especially to one accustomed to the Victorian complexities of Sherlock), and you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to get the basic ideas. He scanned through to the end of the book with renewed confidence. By spending a little bit more time than usual sitting on the pot and reading these books, he might, in the fullness of time, surprise and delight his spouse by suddenly displaying a hitherto unsuspected grasp of parentology.
Then he picked up another one and discovered that it contradicted the first one directly. He understood why Desiree spent so much time on this: you had to get a few hundred of these things under your belt so that you could sort out the nonsense from the wisdom.
When the little one took to waking up in the middle of the night and crying, he found that many wee hours that normally would have been lost to wasteful sleep could now be spent improving his mind, reading the works of several august Ph.D.’s in Baby Science. All of them held diametrically opposed opinions about how to get your baby to sleep at night, and all of them had blindingly impressive academic credentials, so sorting out truth from fiction was not a simple task.
He had one small advantage: namely, that in the course of his work he routinely came into contact with Ph.D.’s from the university. Ph.D.’s, he had found, did not seem so intimidating after you had jump-started their cars, got their cats out of trees, and arrested a few of them for beating up their Ph.D. wives. So he went directly to the content.
It seemed like a good bet that if the writer of such a book was a fool, this fact would be bound to come out somewhere in its several hundred pages. Like a feckless student shoplifting his way through an academic year at EIU, a fool writing a book would be bound to screw up somewhere along the line. Clyde read the books with the relentless penetrating scrutiny of a detective, not looking for information so much as evidence. The presence of a screaming baby in his near vicinity concentrated his mind and gave him a kind of judicial clarity of thought; finding an internal contradiction or even a badly written sentence, he would snap it shut, with a popping noise like the bang of a gavel, and Frisbee it across the carpet into the reject pile. Finally he was beginning to find his niche in this parenting thing. Desiree was too soft and accepting; she read all of this contradicting stuff and tried to give all of it a fair hearing. But he had more of an unyielding Old Testament approach and did not hesitate to cast suspect materials into the Lake of Fire.
Over the course of many such nocturnal research sessions he was able to narrow the field of baby-sleep experts down to one guy, a Ph.D. from back East. Clyde liked this guy because he seemed clearheaded and was not overly sentimental. He got the sense that this guy was giving it to him straight. What the guy said was that babies had to learn how to go to sleep on their own, and that if you rocked them or bottled them to sleep, they’d never learn how. In other words: let the baby cry. Sooner or later it’ll figure out how to go to sleep on its own.
This was a good theory. There was only one problem: the guy said you weren’t supposed to let them cry until they were four months old. Maggie had been born in March.
That was why Clyde spent a lot of April and May driving around with Maggie in the Murder Car at three and four o’clock in the morning. Driving in the car was the only way he had yet found to calm the kid down; and if it didn’t work, at least his neighbors wouldn’t know about it.
It was useful in another way, too: it gave him plenty of time to think about the last hours of Marwan Habibi’s life.
The Rotary had finally spat Habibi’s body out last week, badly decomposed and half-eaten by fish. He was still wearing a leather jacket, whose pockets had been filled with gravel from the boat ramp, but his body had bloated to the point where it floated in spite of this improvised attempt to weigh it down. Clyde had, naturally, been given the job of hauling the remains out of the spillway box while Kevin Mullowney stood on top of the dam in a nimbus of TV light, looking tough but concerned. Clyde had accompanied the body bag down to the office of the Forks County coroner, Barnabas Klopf, M.D., who had stirred through the remains while Clyde loitered in the background, trying to find something else to look at. Clyde had seen a few bodies but never anything like what was left of Marwan Habibi.
“Aw, damn,” Clyde said, reading a label on a drawer. “What’s Kathy Jacobson doing here?”
“She’s dead,” Barney Klopf said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mrs. Jacobson had been a fixture at the Lutheran church that Clyde had attended until his marriage to Desiree had forced him to become a papist. “When did she pass away?”
“Just yesterday. Had a heart attack in the kitchen while she was making lutefisk.”
Clyde didn’t say anything, but he felt some satisfaction at this; if Kathy Jacobson could have picked a time and a place to die, it would certainly be in her kitchen making lutefisk.
“Mallory Brown,” Clyde said, continuing to browse the drawers. Mallory was a black Korean War vet who always carried the flag in the Veteran’s Day parade.
“Two days ago. Stasis Asthmaticus.”
“Who’s Rod Weller?” Clyde asked, coming to another drawer.