by AR Simmons
“I’m okay,” said Molly, staring solemnly at the EMT kneeling over the baby.
“No, let’s go get you something heavier. The wind’s terrible. Come on up to the house, dear,” said Lyla, trying to shepherd her toward the cabin.
The EMT suddenly scooped up the baby and wrapped her in the blanket.
“Ain’t you going to do CPR?” asked Molly in alarm.
“Got to get her in,” said the female EMT. “Jess, how you doing over there?”
“No good,” he replied.
“Then come on. It’s ALS for this one. Call in. Let’s go! Let’s go!”
As she turned toward the ambulance, the blanket slipped aside and the unresponsive child’s head lolled into view. Molly stumbled to follow, but Lyla caught her by the arm.
“Come on,” she said. “Let them do what they have to do. We shouldn’t interfere.”
Molly slapped her hand away. Catching up with the EMT, she craned her neck for a better look at the child.
Richard hurried to catch up with her.
“No!” she suddenly screamed. “Oh God—Oh no! No!”
“Keep her away!” barked the male paramedic as Richard caught up to them.
“She’s the mother,” he said.
“Keep her back,” said the EMT holding Mancie, as she stepped into the back of the ambulance. “I’ve got a job to do, and I don’t need the distraction.”
“Is she alive? Just tell me,” cried Molly plaintively.
“Maybe,” she said. Then to her partner, “You sure about the status of the other one?”
“Long gone,” he replied in the matter-of-fact tone that becomes second nature to first responders.
Richard put his arms around Molly. She clutched at him, twisting her hands into his cold shirt.
“You’re going to freeze,” she mumbled.
Disengaging, she picked up his jacket and draped it over his shoulders. Until she had called his attention to it, he hadn’t realized how cold he really was. His feet were numb, and his hands ached.
The male EMT opened the door. “Here,” he said, throwing him a blanket.
From inside came the sounds of muted communication.
“I should have figured it out sooner, Molly,” said Richard. “I just couldn’t see it in time.”
“But you—” she stopped abruptly as the ambulance door cracked open.
“We’re going to the hospital,” said the woman, “Someone’s on the way to pick up the … the other.”
“She’s going to be all right, ain’t she?” gasped Molly. “Mancie’s going to be all right?”
The paramedic met Richard’s eyes. You tell her, they seemed to say before she shut the door.
He looked away and saw Lyla surveying them coolly with her arms crossed. There were no tears, cold or otherwise.
Molly pulled the door open again. “You have to tell me something. Please,” she pled.
“There’s a faint heartbeat,” said the EMT reluctantly. “We’re doing what we can.”
The door closed and the ambulance started moving. Richard and Molly ran to the truck to follow.
“How did you know?” asked Molly as soon as they were inside.
“I just thought she might be here,” he said as he spun the truck in a circle, heedless of the gravel his spinning tires were throwing up. “I brought you, hoping we could get a look at the baby. I couldn’t tell you though because I wasn’t sure.”
“She tried to kill my baby,” said Molly numbly. Then more stridently, “She tried to kill Mancie! Why, Mr. Carter? Why?”
He knew. But there was no way to tell her.
“They wouldn’t be trying to save her if there wasn’t a chance,” said Molly. “She’s going to be all right, Mr. Carter. I know she is. She has to be. This wouldn’t have happened like this if she wasn’t going to be all right.”
Her words were so much whistling in the dark. Mancie couldn’t be all right. She was technically alive, but she had to have suffered severe hypoxia. How much brain damage had fifteen minutes without oxygen done? Richard looked straight ahead as he tried to catch up with the ambulance.
•••
Richard’s wet boots squeaked on the waxed floor as he stepped back into the hot waiting room after giving his statement to the deputy. The borrowed scrubs and jacket felt good, but he was still chilled. Shively had stood silently nearby, listening and watching intently. Richard had no idea what had been going through the sheriff’s mind, and wasn’t sure he cared. He wasn’t sure he cared about anything. Molly was with Mancie, and Lyla was on her way to the courthouse in custody. The last three hours were a blur. Snippets of conversation and images ran through his mind as if it were in fever mode.
“It was Bobby’s idea,” he heard Lyla telling the sheriff.
The paramedic bending intently but with cool efficiency over the baby.
‘He and Jerry set it up to get their hands on Rennie’s money.”
Lyla smoking calmly, throwing him a dead-eyed glance.
“He killed my baby and said we had to find another one.”
The dead weight of Mancie in his arms.
“He used me. I don’t know why he killed himself.”
Richard felt dead inside.
“You warm enough to go for a ride?”
Startled, he turned to see the Shively staring at him grimly. “Where are we going?”
“Out for coffee and a little talk if you’re up to it. I’ll have someone tell your friend where you’ve gone.”
“My wife’s coming.”
“I know. You called during the interview. She’s coming from James Mill, so she won’t be here for another hour or so. I’ll have you back by then. She knows you’re all right, doesn’t she?”
“I told her, but she won’t believe it until she sees me.”
“Sounds like my boss,” said Shively. “Come on. I got the cruiser idling, and we’ve got some things we need to talk about.”
“I gave a statement,” Richard objected.
“That was about what happened today. What I want to know is what happened before today.”
When Richard didn’t respond, Shively continued. “You know what she said to me when I asked her how she could kill an innocent child?”
“‘You can’t prove I did.’ That’s what she said.”
“She’s like some kind of reptile,” said Richard softly.
“Right,” said Shively distractedly. “Look, Mr. Carter. We’re going to have a high profile trial on our hands. I’d kind of like to have some idea of what in tarnation happened.”
Richard had a task. He focused on it. “Believe it or not, Lyla told you the truth—except for her part. I can tell you what happened, but your prosecutor and the one in James Mill will have to come up with more than me, or they’ll lose. She’s gonna get the best lawyer money can buy. Let’s go get that coffee, and we’ll talk about it.”
•••
Provisioned with coffee from the local McDonald’s, they drove out into the county.
“So after Mrs. Peele’s baby died, she got this McComb to steal her a substitute baby so that they could still get Peele’s money, and what? He started killing potential witnesses?”
“I make him good for the abduction,” said Richard. “But he may not have killed anyone, not even himself.”
“That little thing killed them all?”
“She killed the nanny and did her best to drown Mancie. Tell me she’s not capable.”
“Yeah. Well, our problem is that her version is more believable. The nanny slipped on the dock, hit her head, and fell in while holding the baby.”
“Not if you were there when we got them out,” said Richard.
“The jury won’t know anything about that,” said Shively. “Run me through it again—from the start.”
“Well, start with the fact that they needed another baby after Peele’s baby died. I don’t know if that was accidental homicide or not. They killed Wilson because he was familiar wi
th both babies and would have recognized the switch, or maybe because she called him over the night they did whatever they did to her baby. Unless she confesses, we’ll probably never know. Katie Nash probably saw McComb in the neighborhood that night.”
“That’s a lot of ‘probablies,’” said Shively. “And this McComb fellow?”
“He may have killed himself, but I doubt it. After Lyla knew she was getting a good chunk of Peele’s money, McComb lost his usefulness—became just a loose end. Maybe she just didn’t want to share the money with him. So she got rid of him. You know what happened out at the lake today.”
“How much of that can you prove?”
“None of it. DNA will prove who the babies are. Maybe that will be enough.”
“She just doesn’t look the part,” said the sheriff. “Ordinary people might have trouble believing that little thing could kill six people, including her own baby, just for what? A little money.”
“A lot of money,” Richard corrected. “But it wasn’t the money she was really after. It was ego gratification. She wanted to be country music star.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Lyla tried to kill Mancie in a way that could be useful to her. She wrote a song about the accidental drowning of her baby. I think she thought that sympathy would help make her a star.”
Shively shook his head. “No one will believe that she did it all just for that.”
“I don’t think it started out that way. Abducting Mancie might have just been an attempt to salvage the divorce settlement. Then she had to find a way to get rid of her before the switch was discovered. An accidental drowning and closed casket funeral, insisted on by the devastated mother, would take care of that.”
“If we can verify that she wrote a song about her baby drowning, it might prove premeditation.”
“She’ll say McComb wrote it. And, as you pointed out, a good defense lawyer will have a more believable explanation of the whole thing.”
“A woman without natural affection,” mused Shively.
“A psychopath,” Richard muttered.
“The contemporary word for it,” said the sheriff. “We used to just call it ‘evil.’ I’d tell you that we must be living in the last days, Mr. Carter, but I think we always have been.”
Richard understood that Shively was referring to a biblical passage, but didn’t quite get his point.
“I wonder about Mancie’s last days,” he said. “Fifteen minutes under water. What did that do to her?”
“I don’t know,” said Shively. “But maybe it wasn’t that long. The Peele woman would have had to put that Hispanic girl in there first. By the way, that poor girl’s name is Gertrudis Zamora. She was from Guatemala. Anyway, that would have taken some time, and then she probably went back to get the baby. So maybe she wasn’t in the water that long.”
Richard wanted to believe that it had happened like that. Suddenly, he was back on the dock, reliving the whole thing.
“She was dry,” he mumbled, dumbfounded by the sudden realization.
“Who?”
“Lyla. When we drove up, she was standing on the dock, just looking out over the lake. The wind was howling, so she didn’t hear us coming.”
“Suggestive but not probative,” said Shively. “A lawyer would say she was stunned by the tragedy.”
He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. Then he handed his cup to Richard.
“Bitter. Could you get a packet of sweetener from the glove compartment and put it in here for me?”
Richard found the pink packets, tore one open, and poured it into Shively’s cup. Watching it fall into the black liquid brought back the memory of the sweet taste he had experienced after pulling Mancie from the lake. Then he knew its source.
“Sheriff,” he said in a preoccupied tone. “You need the jumper the baby was in when I pulled her out. The EMT left it on the ground out there, I think.”
“I’ve got a deputy out there securing the place, but we haven’t processed it. Why do we need the jumper?”
“I tasted something sweet. I thought at the time that antifreeze had gotten into the lake, but it would take a tanker load to flavor the water. It was sugar.”
“Sugar in the water?”
“No. I think maybe Lyla weighted the jumper with it before she threw Mancie in. She expected it to dissolve by the time the body was recovered.”
“But the water was too cold and you got there too soon? Who would think of such a thing?”
“Someone who doesn’t know what real tears are,” said Richard. “Someone cold.”
Epilog
Maybe you believe in miracles. On the other hand, perhaps you think that once in a great while the random perversity of the universe just comes up three of a kind, making a lucky few winners for a brief moment. Mancie Allsop awoke with no apparent brain dysfunction. Maybe it was the cold water, her age, the quick arrival of the ambulance, the presence of a paramedic able to begin advanced life saving procedures in time, or the conjunction of all those factors. Whatever the reason, it firmly established Richard Carter as an official godsend in Molly Randolph’s mind and heart.
For Richard, the scales of judgment tilted more favorably, but the save-a-life-to-make-up-for-a-life-taken didn’t quite reach the balance that would allow him absolution. Then again, he never really thought it would.
Once the story was out, people demanded justice for Lyla Peele, forgetting that we have a “legal,” not a “justice” system. The Hawthorn and Greene County prosecutors wisely chose to begin what was sure to be a lengthy campaign to hold Lyla Peele to account for her crimes by concentrating on the death and disposal of her own baby and the abduction and attempted murder of Mancie. The DNA made some sort of conviction a slam dunk. The defense strategy was predictable: blame everything on Bobby McComb. Already her legal team was waging a press campaign to paint him as a Svengali. To anyone familiar with Lyla, it was laughable, but the jury would know only what she showed them in court. When she killed Gertrudis Zamora and tried to drown Mancie Allsop, he had been dead for over a week. Richard wanted to believe that no jury in the world would believe that McComb could control her from beyond the grave.
•••
The place was larger than he had expected, and in much better shape than he imagined considering the rent. They still wouldn’t have been able to afford it on Jill’s income had the landlord not reduced the price in return for Richard’s promise to do repairs, including an urgently needed reroofing job.
He carried the last of the boxes up the steep steps. The cabin, built as a summer home, was eight miles from town on a hard-surface road, but secluded. Jill had fallen in love with the view out back, but he worried about the drive she would have to make as well as the times when she would be home alone. Mostly, he worried that she wasn’t as happy with the community college job as she tried to assure him.
“Put that in the bedroom,” she said as he came into the kitchen where she was putting away things.
When he went into the bedroom, he saw that she had already made up the bed. There were no curtains yet, but the house, although still cold was on its way to becoming homey. Jill’s imprint was already apparent. She always made the best of what she had, which of course is what she was trying to do with him.
“That was the last of it,” he said, coming back into the kitchen.
“Good, could you build a fire in the fireplace? It’s a little chilly.”
Before he could answer, there was a knock at the door.
“Who could that be?” she asked as she went to see.
“Well, not a welcoming committee,” he replied. “Our nearest neighbor is a mile down the road.”
Jill opened the door to find a large man towering over her, his hat in his hand.
“Come in,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” asked Richard when he saw who it was.
“Nothing,” said the sheriff. “I just came to ask you if you still want to work for Hawthorn County.
”
Richard had given up on the job. He wanted it, but not if it was offered out of pity.
“As long as it’s not just charity,” he said.
“I spend my own money for charity, not the people’s.”
“Sorry. I do need the job.”
“Let’s go outside and talk about it then.”
They went out on the front porch.
“Mr. Shively, I appreciate your offer, but I wouldn’t want to take the job on false pretenses. I just got lucky finding the kid. I’m not all that experienced in police work.”
“I’ve got an investigator. You’ll run patrol.”
Richard felt foolish. He tried to recover by asking a question. “Night work mostly?”
Shively nodded. “The pay’s not good.”
“I do handyman work. Any rules against moonlighting?”
“Paul made tents on his off time. If it’s good enough for the Lord’s employees, I guess it’s good enough for the county.”
Being what amounted to an auxiliary officer was as close to real police work as Richard was likely to get, which was to say it was both too close and not close enough. Yet, pathetically, he wanted to take the position.
“When could I start?”
“Monday too soon?”
“No. Do I need to buy uniforms or are they supplied?”
“The county supplies two. You can either wash one every day or buy more out of your own pocket. I expect a good appearance. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
“No.”
“Oh. All equipment is provided, including a side arm. If you have a registered piece of your own, you can use it instead.”
“Something else. I don’t mind my people drinking on their own time, but you can’t do it in public.”
“That’s kind of hypocritical, isn’t it?”
“It’s my game, and I make the rules. You don’t have to play.”
“Given the culture, I don’t suppose it’s unreasonable.”
“Glad you condescend to approve.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Good. Then maybe the other rules will go down just as well. Conduct unbecoming a member of the department will not be tolerated.”
