The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

by Elizabeth Sims

  “What happened to the baby, Genie?”

  “Somehow...it died.”

  “How?”

  “It was crying.”

  “The baby cried—”

  “And I was scared. It cried. It didn’t even look at me when it cried.”

  “What made him stop crying?”

  “A pillow.”

  “A pillow made him stop crying.”

  “We were in a motel.”

  “And there were pillows,” I said. “The baby was crying, and there was a pillow. And Dom—”

  “And Dom went out.”

  “Why did you smother the baby, Genie?”

  “I was afraid...”

  “What were you afraid of?”

  “I was afraid it didn’t love me.”

  “Oh, my dear God.”

  “Dom was angry when he came back.”

  “Did you love the baby?”

  Genie’s gaze was utterly blank.

  I asked, “Where’s the baby now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know now, but you did know.”

  “I wrapped it in a towel. Dom had a box. He wanted a funeral.”

  “What did you tell Dom?”

  “That the baby died.”

  “He didn’t believe it died by itself, did he?”

  “I don’t know. I might not have been the one....He wanted a funeral, so we made a funeral. I thought he’d be happy then.”

  “Dom had a box—what kind of a box?”

  “For tools.”

  “It was a metal tool box?”

  “A box, a hard red box, and he dug a hole—we went down to the river and he dug a hole, and I put the baby in the box, and he put it in the hole and buried it.”

  “And he marked the grave somehow?”

  “At the end of the fence.”

  “The grave was at the end of the fence?”

  “Where it comes out from the parking lot. We sang a song.”

  “What did you sing?”

  “‘Puff, the Magic Dragon.’ It was May. It was a pretty night.”

  “You buried the baby at night.”

  “I had a candle. It was May.”

  “The child was your May child. You had your May child, and you killed it, and you took its name. Genie Maychild.”

  “I buried...”

  “Yes?”

  “Myself.”

  “Yes. Yes. Did you know that Dom took the baby’s fingerprints? That he marked ink from a pen onto his fingers, and pressed them down one by one onto a piece of paper?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No.”

  “The two of you buried that baby, and you buried yourselves, and you split up.”

  “He said he wanted to marry me.”

  “But you didn’t want that. And you didn’t want a baby.”

  “There was...Somewhere, there was more for me.”

  “‘More.’ And you found it. Coach Handy—she helped you find it.”

  Genie nodded slowly. “That’s right.”

  “And after you made it, and after he got cancer, Dengel showed up again. Wanting help from you. Wanting money.”

  “But...”

  “But you refused, and he started to terrorize you. He showed up in that dead bloody baby costume at Handy’s retirement.”

  “Yes, that was him.”

  “Then he threatened to tell about the baby. He threatened to dig it up.”

  “Unless...”

  “Unless you helped him. And he got people out here in California, those people in their little anti-abortion terror societies, to bug you, to harass you. And then he came out to get to you himself.”

  We didn’t speak for a while. Little sounds came to my ears: the refrigerator motor, a crinkle of newspaper from Todd’s room.

  Gradually, Genie came out of the past, back to herself. Back to Genie Maychild right now.

  She said, softly, “Lillian, you’ve got to try to understand.”

  “I helped you, and Coco helped you, and Coach Handy helped you. She’s in jail now. She’s your little Jack Ruby.”

  “No, no. She might have to stay overnight, but she’ll be out tomorrow. My lawyer’s taking care of her. They’re not going to charge a sixty-six-year-old woman with murder. She won’t ever tell anybody anything, and she won’t go to jail.”

  “You called on her, and she got a shovel and dug up that box and moved it to another place.”

  “It wasn’t safe where it was.”

  “You weren’t safe with the box where it was.”

  “Lillian. Marian understands. You’ve got to understand, too.”

  It was some time before I spoke again. “How do you justify it to yourself?”

  “I was young and I didn’t know. How much different is it from an abortion? You understand getting an abortion, don’t you?”

  “Actually, I have a hard time with that one. An abortion’s a brutal thing—there’s no way anybody can say it isn’t. But I guess a woman ought to be able to do what she wants, when it’s her body. But when there’s a baby, Genie, a breathing baby you’ve given birth to, that smells like you and came right from you and survived its first night on earth...that’s murder.”

  “I’m not saying it isn’t.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m saying you’ve got to understand. It’s not a simple thing.”

  “From the baby’s viewpoint it is. And from the law’s viewpoint, too.”

  “Can we stop talking about this?”

  “And just move on?”

  “Yes!”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Genie, you know you’re going to have to live with this, with all of this.”

  She looked at me impatiently. “I do live with it.”

  “How?”

  She had no answer.

  33

  The shuttle doors banged shut, and it lurched away. My car was just as I’d left it, albeit covered with a grimy film. I’d always taken good care of my geriatric Caprice, a former cop car, but at this point in its life I always held my breath when starting it after it’d sat parked for more than two days. But the old girl chugged right into action.

  The engine warmed up while I loaded in Todd and my mandolin and suitcase, and breathed deeply of the western Wayne County air, hanging there beneath a skaggy cloud cover. Spring had come.

  Yes, you could smell it for sure, that loamy wet fragrance, little seeds and roots and whatnot shifting in the soil, the earthworms poking out and rubbing their eyes, saying, Hey, it’s sort of warm!

  Was there a skim of green on the bare branches yet? Maybe not, but I could feel that photosynthesis would not long be denied hereabouts.

  “Ah!” I said, settling behind the wheel. I rolled down the window and Todd lifted his nose as we peeled out and headed for home.

  Going up Middlebelt I had to swerve to avoid a streaking squirrel. Here and there, furry carcasses littered the shoulder.

  Springtime in Detroit is squirrel carnage time. Every year the squirrels emerge from their nests up in the trees where they’ve hidden all winter, venturing out only to scrape around for the caches of acorns they absentmindedly buried last fall, and as we know, they’re not terribly adept at it. So come spring, thin and excited, they climb down to the thawing ground and start running around looking for new things to eat. They’re crazy with relief, and it takes them a while to get focused. On top of that, during the long winter they’ve forgotten what roads are and what cars are. Don’t they tell stories up in those nests during those long winter nights? Don’t they have legends? What do they talk about? They appear to pass on no lore whatsoever to their young.

  All this results in much needless loss of squirrel life.

  Mrs. McVittie was on the porch digging into a flowerpot with a trowel when I pulled up. I saw Mr. McVittie up the driveway near the garage, rinsing the winter’s worth of accumulated s
alt from the undercarriage and wheel wells of their station wagon. He’d made a special nozzle for the job from some PVC pipe and one of Mrs. McVittie’s support stockings.

  “I’ll do yours next!” he hollered as I came up to the house.

  “All right! Thank you!” I shouted back, in deference to his deafness.

  “Trip go okay?”

  “Yeah! Did you catch some fish up north?”

  “Hell yes I caught fish! Me and the boys—” He peered at me. “Lillian, did you get in a fight?”

  “Yeah. But you should see the other guy.”

  After I unpacked and hooked up my little washing machine in my kitchen, I smelled gingerbread baking in the kitchen below. I set my stovetop percolator to boil with a basketful of nice fresh Sumatran.

  Fifteen minutes later I heard Mrs. McVittie coming up the stairs in her hesitant, light-footed way. I opened the door for her. She carried a plateful of the steaming spicy cake, and I asked her to join me for some coffee.

  Being diabetic, she couldn’t eat the gingerbread, but she enjoyed watching me eat it, and she enjoyed her coffee.

  “It sure is good to be home,” I said with satisfaction. I’d stood a while on my balcony surveying the neighborhood and looking for Monty. You remember Mrs. Gagnon’s dog, Monty.

  “Did you see the crocuses in the backyard, dear?”

  “No! Are they up?”

  “Yes, and just as pretty as ever.”

  “This gingerbread is the whip, Mrs. McVittie.” Somehow I never could call her “Mildred,” nor Mr. McVittie “Emmett.”

  “Oh, it’s a pleasure, isn’t it? I just love how it smells.” She shifted in her chair and looked my face over carefully. “Did you get in trouble with the police in California?”

  “No, no, I just got into a little—it was more of an accident than anything. I’m just fine.”

  “Well, did you have a nice time, aside from that?”

  “I did have a bit of fun, yes. I spent some time in Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles is an interesting place.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Then where did you go?”

  “Oh, the desert area, you know.”

  “Oh. I bet it was nice there.”

  “Yes, very good weather.”

  Mr. and Mrs. McVittie were not golf fans, which I was glad for.

  I asked, “Have you gotten out on your bike yet?” She liked to ride that three-wheeler to hell and gone, making friends everywhere.

  “As a matter of fact, yes, dear, I have gotten out. And I think you’ll be glad to know something.” Her thin hand shook just a little as she lifted her cup to her lips.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I think that Monty won’t be bothering Todd and you anymore.”

  “Really? What happened? I didn’t see him outside. Would you like some more coffee?”

  “Yes, dear, it’s delicious. I can’t get mine to taste like this.” She drank it black, as I did. “Well, I was riding up and down the streets, you know how I do. And I thought—well, you know how dogs love rotten meat.”

  “I sure do.” I set the pot back on the stove.

  “Well, I took a plastic bag along with me the other day—spring came so fast! Doesn’t the air feel wonderful?”

  “Yes, it does. It feels swell.”

  “I expect we’ll get one more flurry before the warm weather sets in for good.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “And I had my plastic bag, and I picked up three dead squirrels—you know how they’re all over the place now...”

  “Yes!”

  “I picked up the rottenest ones I could find, with lots of maggots and ants, and also I got one little raccoon, too, although come to think of it, it might have been a cat—”

  “Yes!”

  “And I put them in a crate Emmett had, a plastic crate that he didn’t want anymore?”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s more of a tub. Anyway I dragged it out front, and Monty ran right over—”

  “Yes!”

  “And he jumped into that crate, and oh, dear, he had a wonderful time! Rolling back and forth in those rotten squirrels.”

  “Was Mrs. Gagnon—”

  “Oh, yes, Dolly was out planting petunias in her box, you know, yes. She saw him come over, but she couldn’t see what was in the crate. I pretended to shoo Monty away, and of course she just laughed, and Monty kept rolling and chewing and sniffing in that crate for the longest time. Then she held her door open and called him to come in, and I gave him—well, I gave him a little kick, and he ran right across the street and into the house, and I haven’t seen either of them since.”

  I looked at her, and she looked at me, and an atomic bomb couldn’t have set our smiles askew.

  “Mrs. McVittie,” I said, “you are a true friend.”

  “I bet she’ll keep Monty in the backyard from now on.”

  “I bet she will.”

  The next day as I was looking over my accumulated bills, it occurred to me that I hadn’t received my thousand dollars for wearing Ace-Tek’s chicken visor. For the hell of it, I called the company and actually got Jeff Evans on the line.

  “Hey!” he said on a falling note. “I’m really sorry, but the deal was you’d wear our visor for the whole round. Eighteen holes.”

  “But Jeff—”

  “Not seventeen and a half holes. That was the agreement you signed. I’m really sorry, but—”

  Cursing myself, I hung up on him as hard as I could.

  _____

  That night I received a phone call I hadn’t been expecting but was glad to get.

  “I am sorry I finaled out on you,” said Coco Nash. I’d tried without success to get ahold of her before flying back home.

  I said, “Never mind. Are you all right?”

  “I will be. You?”

  “I’m fine. What do you mean, you will be?”

  “I jerked up my wrist some on that two-iron to the metacarpals.”

  “I thought so. Is it broken?”

  “No.”

  “You’re getting therapy for it, then?”

  “Yes, I have the most righteous of therapists—infrared, everything.”

  “You know, Coco, Genie probably will never thank you, but I will. You saved me as much as you saved her. Thank you, Cornelia Nash.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “I wish there was something I could do for you.”

  Her voice went husky. “It would be nice to see you again.”

  “Oh! Uh, Coco. Whew, boy, um.”

  The line was silent.

  At last I said, “I hope you can understand that I kind of need to—”

  “You need to keep to yourself for now.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I believe you read some Bible to Genie.”

  “I did, and she didn’t like it.”

  “And when you left—”

  “She really didn’t like it.”

  “Well. I do not know everything I would like to know.”

  “Coco, I think you’re plenty hep to all of it. You do know. Hey, I’ll be watching you on TV next tournament, okay?”

  “That swings.”

  _____

  I went for a drive a few early brights later, taking along Todd, my mandolin, and a picnic lunch. I thought we’d ride around the Irish Hills, enjoy the sunny soft breezes and just have a good time.

  But I found myself forgetting the exits off I-94 and just driving through, past Ypsilanti, through Ann Arbor, Jackson, Albion.

  Me: You’re going out there, aren’t you?

  Me: Maybe.

  Me: Why?

  Me: I just want to.

  There was a good oldies station on the radio in western Michigan, but I turned it off as I kept the pedal down and talked to Todd about happiness and about achievement and about love.

  What the hell did I want? What the hell did I ever want? Who the hell cares?

  Truby wanted to know a c
ertain score, and she found it out. At least she learned as much as she needed to know now. When we’d said so long at LAX, she was looking a good bit better than she had when I’d seen her at the baggage claim a week and a half earlier. And I looked the worse, but no matter.

  I thought about Genie. Three people dead in her wake. The baby. Peaches. Dengel. I guessed I was lucky. I didn’t feel lucky, though.

  Was I a chump? I’d always seen trouble coming. But this time trouble saw me first, sneaked up behind me, and sapped me but good. Did I have it coming?

  After my talk with Coco on the phone, I got out one of her scrapbooks on Genie and leafed through it. Yes: I’d stuffed it into my suitcase and brought it home. Looking at the pictures, I thought, If only you’d done it differently. Don’t think I’m going soft, though. That scrapbook might be worth a bundle someday.

  It wasn’t all right with me that Genie was who she was. I understood that the making of Genie Maychild was the suffocation of her son, while she believed that the making of Genie Maychild was putting the killing behind her. And she was going to go on being who she was, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I could rent a billboard calling her poison and a murderer, and nothing would come of it, except possibly a libel suit.

  _____

  It was late afternoon when I hit the Pearl Center town line, having stopped outside of Benton Harbor to eat lunch and exercise Todd. The Illinois prairie sky was mottled with gray clouds that were moving ahead of a westerly wind. I took the river road and parked the Caprice on the bluff overlooking the small series of rapids west of town. I watched the water for a while, then I walked the fence line to the end, where it jutted out from the oiled parking lot.

  The earth there had been disturbed. I saw loose clods, and spade marks on the wooden fence post. The hole had been carelessly filled in and stomped down, and the dirt had already sunk a few inches. I tried to make out footprints, but it had rained enough to obliterate any that had been there.

  I drove over to Coach Handy’s street and cruised down it slowly. The public works department had finished its job: The sewer line or water main, whatever had needed fixing, was fixed and the trench was filled, the broken concrete hauled away and new concrete poured.

  I pulled over and stared at that new concrete.