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Marla Pickens lived in a small one-story house on Cherry Street. From what I knew, her parents—Aunt Agnes and her husband, Gill—owned the house and paid the mortgage on it, but Marla struggled to pay the property taxes and utilities with what money she brought in. Having spent a career in newspapers, and still having some regard for truth and accuracy, I didn’t have much regard for how Marla made her money these days. She’d been hired by some Web firm to write bogus online reviews. A renovation company seeking to rehabilitate and bolster its Internet reputation would engage the services of Surf-Rep, which had hundreds of freelancers who went online to write fictitious laudatory reviews.
Marla had once shown me one she’d written for a roofing company in Austin, Texas. “A tree hit our house and put a good-size hole in the roof. Marchelli Roofing came within the hour, fixed the roof, and reshingled it, and all for a very reasonable cost. I cannot recommend them highly enough.”
Marla had never been to Austin, did not know anyone at Marchelli Roofing, and had never, in her life, hired a contractor of any kind to do anything.
“Pretty good, huh?” she’d said. “It’s kind of like writing a really, really short story.”
I didn’t have the energy to get into it with her at the time.
I took the bypass to get from one side of town to the other, passing under the shadow of the Promise Falls water tower, a ten-story structure that looked like an alien mother ship on stilts.
When I got to Marla’s, I pulled into the driveway beside her faded red, rusting, mid-nineties Mustang. I opened the rear hatch of my Mazda 3 and grabbed two reusable grocery bags Mom had filled with frozen dinners. I felt a little embarrassed doing it, wondering whether Marla would be insulted that her aunt seemed to believe she was too helpless to make her own meals, but what the hell. If it made Mom happy . . .
Heading up the walk, I noticed weeds and grass coming up between the cracks in the stone.
I mounted the three steps to the door, switched all the bags to my left hand, and, as I rapped on it with my fist, noticed a smudge on the door frame.
The whole house needed painting or, failing that, a good power-washing, so the smudge, which was at shoulder height and looked like a handprint, wasn’t that out of place. But something about it caught my eye.
It looked like smeared blood. As if someone had swatted the world’s biggest mosquito there.
I touched it tentatively with my index finger and found it dry.
When Marla didn’t answer the door after ten seconds, I knocked again. Five seconds after that, I tried turning the knob.
Unlocked.
I swung it wide enough to step inside and called out, “Marla? It’s Cousin David!”
Nothing.
“Marla? Aunt Arlene wanted me to drop off a few things. Homemade chili, some other stuff. Where are you?”
I stepped into the L-shaped main room. The front half of the house was a cramped living room with a weathered couch, a couple of faded easy chairs, a flat-screen TV, and a coffee table supporting an open laptop in sleep mode that Marla had probably been using to say some nice things about a plumber in Poughkeepsie. The back part of the house, to the right, was the kitchen. Off to the left was a short hallway with a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom.
As I closed the door behind me, I noticed a fold-up baby stroller tucked behind it, in the closed position.
“What the hell?” I said under my breath.
I thought I heard something. Down the hall. A kind of . . . mewing? A gurgling sound?
A baby. It sounded like a baby. You might think, seeing a stroller by the door, that wouldn’t be all that shocking.
But here, at this time, you’d be wrong.
“Marla?”
I set the bags down on the floor and moved across the room. Started down the hall.
At the first door I stopped and peeked inside. This was probably supposed to be a bedroom, but Marla had turned it into a landfill site—disused furniture, empty cardboard boxes, rolls of carpet, old magazines, outdated stereo components. Marla appeared to be an aspiring hoarder.
I moved on to the next door, which was closed. I turned the knob and pushed. “Marla, you in here? You okay?”
The sound I’d heard earlier became louder.
It was, in fact, a baby. Nine months to a year old, I guessed. Not sure whether it was a boy or girl, although it was wrapped in a blue blanket.
What I’d heard were feeding noises. The baby was sucking contentedly on a rubber nipple, its tiny fingers attempting to grip the plastic feeding bottle.
Marla held the bottle in one hand, cradling the infant in her other arm. She was seated in a cushioned chair in the corner of the bedroom. On the bed, bags of diapers, baby clothes, a container of wipes.
“Marla?”
She studied my face and whispered, “I heard you call out, but I couldn’t come to the door. And I didn’t want to shout. I think Matthew’s nearly asleep.”