It just had never come up.
Duckworth had never asked Bill Gaynor whether Matthew was adopted. There was no reason to, really. And suppose the baby was adopted? What difference would it have made, one way or another?
And yet now he had what he would call a “confluence of events.”
Marla Pickens’s baby died around the same time Rosemary Gaynor had hers. And now Duckworth knew that the Gaynor woman had not given birth to a child.
Marla ends up with the Gaynors’ baby.
Somehow.
She’d said it was her baby, although she’d backed away from that pretty quickly. Marla had never seriously argued that she’d given birth to Matthew. Matthew was, in effect, a substitute.
And besides, hadn’t Marla lost a girl?
Still . . .
He pushed himself back from his desk and went looking for Marla. She was being booked, and Natalie Bondurant was waiting for her to be finished.
“I need to talk to Ms. Pickens,” Duckworth said to the officer dealing with Marla. “Right now.”
“What’s going on?” Natalie asked. “You’re not talking to her without me there.”
“That’s fine,” Duckworth said. “Let’s go in here.”
He led them into an interrogation room, waved his arm at two empty chairs on one side of the table. “Please,” he said.
The two women sat down.
“You don’t have enough to charge my client,” Natalie said, “and even if you did, you couldn’t have picked a worse time. Ms. Pickens is in a very delicate state of mind, and if you do insist on keeping her here, you’d better have her on constant suicide watch, because only last night—”
Duckworth held up a hand. “I know. I wanted to ask Ms. Pickens about something that has nothing to do with her charges. Nothing to do with Rosemary Gaynor.”
“Like what?” Natalie said as Duckworth lowered himself into the chair across from them.
“Marla—is it okay if I call you Marla?”
The woman nodded weakly.
“I know this is hard, but I want to ask you about your child. The baby.”
Natalie said, “Really, this is too upsetting to get into.”
“Please,” Duckworth said gently. “Marla, when you were pregnant, did you ever give any thought to putting the child up for adoption?”
She blinked her eyes several times. “Adoption?”
“That’s right.”
Marla shook her head slowly from side to side. “Never, not for a second. I wanted to have a baby. I wanted it more than anything in the world.”
“So it never came up?”
Marla rolled her eyes slowly. “It came up all the time. My mother talked about it. She wanted me to do that. Well, at first she wanted me to have an abortion. But I wouldn’t do that, and then she talked about adoption, but I didn’t want to do that, either.”
Duckworth lightly strummed his fingers on the tabletop. “You didn’t have the baby in the hospital. Your mother’s hospital.”
“No,” she said. “We went to the cabin.”
“Isn’t that kind of strange? I mean, your mother’s in charge of the hospital, and she doesn’t want you to have the baby there?”
“There was a thing going around. C. diff or something.”
“But still. It seems odd to go so far away to have the child.”
“It was okay,” Marla said, “because Dr. Sturgess was there. Except . . .” She looked down at the table. “Except it wasn’t okay. The cord got wrapped around the baby’s neck, and they couldn’t save it.”
“It must have been . . . horrific,” he said.
Marla nodded slowly. “Yeah. Although I was kind of out of it when the baby was actually born. Dr. Sturgess gave me stuff to kill the pain.”
“Tell me about that.”
Marla shrugged. “That’s kind of all there is to say. I was in pain. It wasn’t that bad, but Dr. Sturgess and my mom said it would get a lot worse, so they gave me something. And I never felt it when the baby came out.”
“But you saw her after.”
Marla nodded. “I did. I don’t . . . I don’t actually remember it . . . but I did see her. I touched her fingers and kissed her head.”
“But if you don’t remember it, how do you know what happened?”
“My mom helped me to remember. Because it was so foggy for me. But she’s told me what happened over and over again, so it’s like I do remember it.”
“Tell me a little more about that.”
“Well, it’s kind of like . . . when I was a baby myself, about one and a half years old, and we were visiting some friends of my parents, and they had a big dog that ran up to me and knocked me down and was about to bite me, right in the face, when the owner kicked the dog away. I guess I was pretty scared, and cried a lot, but I don’t really remember it happening. But my mom and dad have told that story over the years, and I can see it all like a movie, you know? I see myself getting knocked down, the dog jumping on me. I can picture exactly what the dog looks like, even though I really don’t know. It’s a bit like that. Do you know what I mean?”
Duckworth smiled. “I think maybe I do.”
SIXTY-FOUR