Barbara knocked once, then again, on the classroom door. When there was no answer, she opened it and slid quietly inside. She was just going to drop off the curriculum materials for Rhea and then slip back out. Barbara wanted to do it now, while there was time for her to stop at the dry cleaners and get back in time for Cole’s role as butterfly in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He was so excited about wearing the wings Barbara had made for him. So she’d leave the pages for Rhea with a Post-it: Something to consider? She didn’t want to seem confrontational. It was only an educated suggestion, not a criticism.
Because Barbara liked Rhea. She was a perfectly nice woman and clearly a committed teacher. Otherwise, Rhea never would have spent all her spare time supervising the Outreach Tutoring at the high school. A little strange, if Barbara was completely honest, that Rhea didn’t have children of her own. She was married and had to be pushing forty. But that oddity notwithstanding, Rhea was consistently kind and supportive and warm, at least according to Barbara’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Hannah, one of Outreach’s volunteer tutors.
Barbara kept smiling—a smile could head off so many misunderstandings—as she watched Rhea and the assistant teacher at the far back of the room, surrounded by the children. Rhea’s long white-blond hair swung back and forth as she explained how they could put on their own coats by placing them on the floor, putting their arms inside, and pulling them capelike over their heads. As usual, Rhea was dressed in black leggings and a snug knit top that accentuated her toned, curvy figure and very muscular thighs.
Rhea loved to exercise. And she loved to talk about it with the children—the miles logged, the races registered for. Cole had told Barbara all about it. It was cute and inspirational for the children, if a tiny bit funny to hear Cole sounding as though he were Rhea’s workout partner instead of her student.
Barbara turned back to the children, with their puffy faces and awkward bodies, wide eyes locked on Rhea as though she were performing a magic trick. Barbara felt weepy watching them. She’d been that way ever since Steve had called to tell her about that poor baby. He didn’t know much yet, only that there was a baby. A little girl. Her tiny body left out there in the woods to rot away with the mulching leaves.
Steve had made clear there was no reason to suspect it was some random thing, a killer on the loose. There were no reports of missing pregnant women in the area, which meant the baby’s mother must—Barbara’s words, not his—be responsible. And in a place like Ridgedale, with all that money and all those endless options? Disgusting, really. Never mind that there was one surefire way to make sure you didn’t have a baby you couldn’t care for: Don’t have sex. Or, for heaven’s sake, why not use birth control?
Barbara thought of Hannah and Cole. How light they’d been as newborns. How breakable. The thought of a little baby like that out there alone, crying and crying until it could cry no more. Worse yet, what if someone had stopped her from crying on purpose? The thought made Barbara positively nauseated.
“Was she born alive?” Barbara had asked. “I mean, she wasn’t killed, was she?”
“We don’t know yet,” Steve had said, his voice rough.
“You mean it’s possible someone could have—”
“I sure hope not,” Steve said. “But with the condition of the body—let’s just say I think the medical examiner will have his work cut out for him.”
He was sparing her the most gruesome details. Ironic, given that, between the two of them, Steve was the far more sensitive.
“What do you mean, the condition of the body?” she asked.
“I don’t think—”
“Steve, please. I need to know.”
He was quiet for a minute. “The water and the cold, I guess they complicate things. Looks like the baby started out buried, and then the creek gave way in the rain. There’s a lot of damage to the body. Some of the bruising and lacerations look postmortem, that’s the one bit the ME could say for sure. But the broken bones and the fractured skull could be the cause of death. On that, the ME wouldn’t make a guess yet. Made clear he might never know. Sounds like that’s the way it can be with real little babies.”
Barbara winced. Newborn heads were so very soft. How many times had she feared crushing her own children’s heads, slipping down the stairs as she held them, and now someone could have done that on purpose?
There was a loud round of giggles at the back of the room. Barbara wiped her eyes, fully teary when she smiled up at the children. So precious. So little. So fleeting. They were kindergartners, but soon they’d have lengthened, lost their babylike lisps. They’d be full-fledged children with opinions and well-formed arguments, and they’d spend more time rushing away than snuggling close.
Barbara had already been through that with Hannah. It had been bittersweet, but healthy in its way. Especially for Hannah, who’d always needed to be a little more independent. Barbara still missed her daughter being a little girl, of course, would have kept her that way forever if she could have. Seventeen already, with friends Barbara didn’t love and fashion choices she would never understand—did Hannah really have to dress every day in yet another sweatshirt? She’d even be driving soon. But such was the nature of motherhood, holding them tight in order to let them go.
At least Barbara had time left with Cole, a good deal because of the gap between the children. After that early miscarriage before Hannah and then the years of trying to conceive again after she was born, Barbara had resigned herself to the reality that she would never have another baby. But then there she was, pregnant again. It had been something of a shock to have a newborn and a twelve-year-old, but Cole was always so easy. Food, sleep, cuddling, and he was the picture of contentment. So much easier than Hannah had ever been with all her “sensitivities”—the temperature, the tags in her Tshirts, the slightest change in Barbara’s tone of voice. With Hannah, Barbara could never do anything right.