The Searing

by John Coyne

  Peggy’s behavior frightened Sara. She was manic, rushing around the kitchen, talking incessantly. The woman was seriously ill. Sara could see it in the tension on her face, in the odd look in her blue eyes.

  “There!” Peggy stepped back from the bowl of veal stew. “It’s done.” She was perspiring from her effort, from the rush of talking and work.

  “Would you two please put this on the dining room table for me?” Peggy forced a quick smile. “I’m going to run upstairs to change my clothes—I just can’t sit down to dinner feeling so sweaty and overheated.” Her words came all in a rush as she turned abruptly and almost ran from the kitchen.

  Upstairs Peggy called Kevin and Neil, then went back to the guest room and locked the door behind her. Over the last few days she had moved all her clothes and toilet items there, separating her private life from Kevin’s. There was a bathroom adjoining the guest room, and she let Kevin have the big one off the master bedroom. This room and the nursery were her sanctuaries. Kevin didn’t even venture down the hall any more.

  Peggy took off her blouse and sprayed on deodorant and perfume. She would have liked to take a bath. To just forget about Kevin’s guests downstairs and soak. The baby suddenly began to stir in her crib. Peggy had become so accustomed to the child’s sound that even when she was asleep Amy’s slightest noise would wake her.

  She went through the bedroom and into the dark nursery, her footsteps softened by the deep carpet, to where the small crib was situated away from the windows and against the inside bedroom wall.

  It was not a real baby crib, but part of a hayrack that Kevin had bought from the old barn. He had wanted it for his workshop, but Peggy had taken it for the baby. With the farmer’s help, she had cut the rack down into a crib, and then packed the high sides with quilts.

  Peggy bent over and looked closely at her daughter. The child seemed so vulnerable when asleep, her eyes squeezed shut, her delicate fingers clutching the air above her. She lay on her stomach, a tiny bundle wrapped snugly in her pajamas.

  Peggy placed her open palm before Amy’s mouth and felt the puff of breath, warm against her skin. The helplessness of the infant, Amy’s total dependence on her, frightened Peggy. Whatever happened to her now, she was no longer alone. She could leave Kevin, but not Amy. Amy had changed her life irrevocably.

  She had to go. She had already been upstairs fifteen minutes, and Kevin would soon be summoning her as if she were an errant child. Peggy sighed and, calling up her reserves of willpower, went downstairs to have the last normal meal of her life. It was almost ten o’clock, and one-month-old Amy Volt had less than an hour to live.

  Amy slept peacefully, her mind a white cloud of unconsciousness. She knew nothing beyond a few simple sensations, the gratification and warmth of being cuddled, the hours of peaceful sleep. She was fed and changed and lay softly in her bed. The world beyond her crib was a fog of the unknown. She knew only the smells and touches of the one woman in her life.

  Amy woke abruptly. Her blue eyes were not yet able to focus, nor did she see the shadow of the figure, or understand the threat to her life. She felt only the presence of a strange sensation and, fearing it, cried out instantly. But her voice was muffled and her tiny body made immediately a victim. In a moment she was unconscious. She gasped for air as her body shook and stretched out rigid in the hayrack crib. A small bubble of blood broke in her nostril and then her short life was consumed by incomprehensible pain. It ripped like an electric bolt through her mind and destroyed her brain.

  Her tiny arms and legs jerked and stiffened and her eyelids popped open, as if she were only a child’s toy doll. Peggy found her rammed against the crib’s high quilted side, her eyes frozen open and her round, pink-cheeked face marked with her violent death.

  THREE

  “Mrs. Volt, I know this is a terrible time for you, but please understand we have to ask certain questions.” The young Virginia detective spoke carefully. He had never before handled a child’s death and it was all very new to him, like an exercise in his police training course.

  Peggy did not respond. She sat in the living room chair, staring ahead. She seemed to be shrinking away, disappearing into the chair. He wondered if he should stop his questioning for the moment, but then he asked, “At what time did you find the baby?”

  “Amy! Her name is Amy!” Peggy shouted.

  “Easy, darling.” Kevin came over and sat on the arm of her chair, but when he tried to put his arm around her, she brushed his hand aside.

  Joe Santucci watched them both, his eyes jumping back and forth from the husband to the wife. There was trouble here, he saw, but it might be just the reaction to the baby’s death. He had to be careful; he couldn’t let his imagination take over. Still, the palms of his hands were sweaty and that was always a good sign. He was getting close to some answers.

  “Mrs. Volt, would you mind telling me how you found Amy?” He tried again, this time lowering his voice, keeping her calm. Interrogating her the way he had been taught.

  “We were having dinner,” she began, whispering her reply. “We were having dinner … we had just sat down, and I had this strange feeling that something was wrong with Amy.” There were tears in her eyes. She had been crying continually since the child was discovered.

  “Did you move Amy?” the detective asked. He was matching her soft voice, listening to her response, and the room had quieted down. There were others present. The Volts’ dinner guests, several policemen, the crime lab people from Alexandria, and a reporter from The Washington Post.

  “She was on her side,” Peggy Volt answered slowly, “… as if she were sleeping on her side. But she couldn’t: She wasn’t able to turn over; she was too young.” Peggy looked up and stared at the detective.

  She knew now, he realized, and there was terror in her eyes. The look on her face was so frightening that he glanced at his notes to break her hold on him.

  “You said you left the table around ten o’clock and went upstairs. Could you be more precise on the time?”

  She was shaking her head, unable to continue.

  “Officer, how much longer are we going to be subjected to these questions?” Kevin Volt stood, as if to make his objection more forceful. “You can see my wife’s condition. This has been a terrible, terrible thing …”

  Santucci did not immediately respond. He had been watching Volt, and the husband’s behavior had been peculiar. In the midst of the tragedy, when his wife was hysterical with grief, Volt had appeared to physically withdraw from her. It was as if this had happened to someone else’s family and he was not involved.

  “They killed my baby,” Peggy whispered. She kept staring ahead, not seeing anything, only remembering how Amy had looked in the crib, her face pressed against the quilting. She could not breathe; she wasn’t able to move herself. And she hadn’t been dead for long. The body was still warm when she lifted Amy from the deep hayrack. For just a moment, Peggy thought everything was all right, and then Amy’s tiny head flopped over and the blood ran out of her nose.

  “We’re going to request an autopsy,” Santucci continued, still speaking softly, addressing himself to the wife. “If what you say is correct, we might have a homicide here.”

  “Wait a minute! Wait a goddamned minute!” Kevin Volt moved toward the detective. “You’re not doing an autopsy on that baby. No one killed my child. What are you talking about?” He glanced at the other police officers, as if trying to gain support, and then focused on Neil Cohoe. “Tell them, Neil. We were together all evening. Tell this cop!”

  “Mr. Volt, would you please sit down?” Santucci asked.

  “This is my house, Lieutenant. Don’t go telling me what to do!”

  Two of the uniformed policemen at the doorway straightened up, but the detective motioned them to be still. Then he looked up at the husband towering over his chair.

  Volt was not a big man, but he had the slight, compact body of a natural welterweight. Santucci wondered what Volt did
for a living, and why was he in such fine physical shape. The army, he thought; the man had the look of the military.

  “I apologize, Mr. Volt. Yes, this is your home, but I am conducting a police investigation, and it’s possible your daughter was murdered.”

  “We were the only ones in this house!” Kevin Volt shouted. He was leaning over the detective. “Are you accusing me of murdering my own child?” Volt was almost out of control. His shaven scalp was flushed with excitement, the blood vessels standing out and visible.

  The detective was a big man, a former Virginia Tech basketball player, and his body filled the leather chair. He said quietly to Volt, “It is possible, perhaps likely, your daughter died of natural causes. Or at least the causes surrounding a crib death. I don’t know the answer to that question, and that is why an autopsy is necessary. We have to find out why she died. But I want you to know it is possible your daughter was killed.”

  “By whom?” Volt shouted.

  “By the person who broke the glass door on the basement entrance and tracked mud across the floor and up your kitchen steps.” Santucci stopped to let his statement register. The husband was unprepared for that reply and it surprised him. He stepped away from the detective, unsteady on his feet as he turned, confused by the sudden news.

  “Here, Kevin, sit down for a moment.” Neil Cohoe moved to make room for Volt on the couch. He took him by the elbow and made him sit, then he asked the detective, “You mean someone broke in here last night while we were eating and killed the baby?” He sounded relieved, as if any suspicion of him and the others was over.

  “Please be quiet, Mr. Cohoe, and we’ll straighten everything out in a few minutes. I just have a couple more questions.” Santucci smiled. For the time being, he would be nice to all of them.

  In the kitchen Tom Dine stretched. He had been leaning over, looking through the alcove into the crowded living room, watching Joe Santucci question the five people. It had been a long night for him, too, and he was tired.

  Santucci had telephoned after midnight, calling to say he had a murder at the new village development on the Potomac. For two months Dine had been following Santucci, researching how a young detective learned his job. It was to be a series of articles for the Post, and he had everything he needed except a murder case, a focal point around which to build his story. Now he had it--the murder of a one-month-old child. It was exactly what he needed to make his series dramatic, and the realization nauseated him.

  Earlier that night, upstairs in the nursery, Joe had pulled back the tiny blanket and showed him the child, saying, “I thought it might just be a crib death, you know, but see the neck? It looks twisted. I think someone tried to twist the kid’s goddamned head off.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Tom turned his face away. He had a brief image of someone creeping through the dark room and grabbing the helpless baby, muffling her mouth, and strangling her with the ease of an adult’s strength.

  “One of them?” he asked. He glanced back at the child. She made such a tiny mound at the bottom of the crib.

  “No, not them. There’s muddy tracks all over the basement floor, and the back door has been jimmied. It seems someone came into the house and snuck upstairs while they were all having dinner.”

  Tom Dine took out his notebook and jotted down details of the nursery. It was an odd-shaped crib, and it took him a moment to realize what it really was, a hayrack cut down to a child’s size.

  “Look, Tom, you got to be careful about what you write. It’s gonna cause me trouble, you know, if we go to court and too much of this case is in print. Whoever it is will say he couldn’t get a fair trial.”

  “I understand. And I appreciate that you’re letting me get this close to a case. I’ll protect you, I promise. But you’ve got to remember. This is a hot ticket.”

  Joe Santucci nodded and looked satisfied. He wanted Dine to do the story about him. If handled carefully, it could help his career, but he still had to keep the reporter under control.

  “Okay, let’s go interview these dinner guests. It’s shitty, ain’t it, to have a kid killed while you’re sitting at the dinner table? I don’t know why this Volt woman isn’t out of her fuckin’ mind.”

  Santucci led the other police officers out of the nursery and down the hallway to the stairs. The detective was too big for the house. He had to stoop because of the low ceiling, and his frame darkened the passageway, like a huge rock closing off the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Tom Dine hung back. The crime lab people were still working in the nursery, and the police ambulance had arrived to take away the body. He stepped aside to let them into the room, but he did not want to go downstairs right away. This would be the last time he’d be upstairs in the Volt house, and he wanted to see how they lived their private lives.

  He crossed the hall and looked into one of the bedrooms. There were women’s clothes in the closet, perfume and a jewelry box on the dresser. The room had twin beds, but only one was being used; the sheets were wrinkled and the bed was carelessly made.

  Tom turned and went to the front of the house and into the master bedroom. It was twice the size of the other rooms, and had its own bathroom and dressing area. The room was lovely, painted in soft pastel colors and carpeted wall-to-wall with a deep brown rug.

  Tom was envious. It was the kind of place he’d like to have if he could ever afford to get out of his city apartment. The bedroom had a fireplace and a fire had been lit earlier in the evening. Now only a small pile of embers glowed in the dark, and the large room was lit softly by the lamps of the village streets.

  Tom thought of how perfect these people’s lives had been: a new house in the country, a new child. Then the sight of the infant came back to him. He couldn’t get over her small, perfect hand, the miniature fingers squeezed into a tiny fist.

  The light was on in the bathroom, and he crossed to it through the dressing room. The police had probably left it on when they searched the house, and he wanted to see what they had seen, however insignificant.

  It was a large bathroom, bright with mirrors and lights. The room had two sinks, and both a glass shower stall and a deep, wide tub. Tom stepped inside and heard his own footsteps for the first time, unmuffled by the deep rugs that covered all the other floorboards.

  Looking around, he was impressed by the orderliness of the bathroom. Above one sink were two bottles of aftershave lotion, shaving cream, sticks of deodorant, Q-tips, mouth wash, talcum powder, and a brown leather manicure set.

  The articles almost seemed coordinated, each of the colors, shapes, and shades complementing the others. Compared to the jumble of his own medicine cabinet, this one seemed as carefully composed as a still life by Vermeer. A neat bathroom was a woman’s touch, he thought—but none of these toilet articles were for a woman.

  Peggy Volt did not use this bathroom, he suddenly realized. Her husband used it alone, and the bottles and jars were arranged with a military precision. The Volts did not share a bedroom, nor did they sleep together. The wife, he now understood, slept in the back of the house, next to the nursery, and for some reason that fact struck him as important. Flipping off the bathroom light, he went downstairs to hear Joe Santucci interrogate the guests.

  And in his haste, he never saw the girl crouched into the tight corner of the shower stall. Her long legs were drawn up tightly, and her beautiful, dark eyes were wide open. A truly exquisite child who stared blankly ahead as if she were looking toward and listening to some faraway world.

  In his reporter’s notebook, Tom Dine scribbled: “Peggy Volt was too small for the leather chair. She sank into the deep cushions like a weight. In the crowded, intense room, she was lost. The investigation left her untouched, as if it were being conducted in some foreign language.”

  Tom glanced once more at Doctor Sara Marks. All night he had kept watching her, all the while pretending to be intent on the dynamics of the investigation. He had rarely seen a woman so beautiful. Her blond hair swept
to her shoulders in thick, cascading curls, and her wide, flashing eyes were as bright as blue Limoges. But her mouth captivated him. It was wide and wet-lipped, and when she smiled, even sadly, the smile crossed her face like a silent explosion, leaving him stunned by his awkward longing.

  Tom flipped his notebook closed, unable to concentrate. Santucci was finishing, giving instructions to the dinner guests. He stood, and again his height and build dwarfed the room.

  Men built like Santucci did not threaten Tom. He was six feet tall himself, but his body was stocky and square, and it gave him the appearance of a shorter man. And he looked tough as well. His face was flat and blunt, like a punk fighter’s. His nose was too thick and his mouth too large, but his smile and gray eyes softened his look. He seemed younger when he smiled. The smile disarmed people and made them trust him. He had learned to use his smile to get ahead on his job, and with women. He used it the way other people used family money.

  There was something else that made Tom attractive to women, a certain suggestion of danger. He was not sure why, but women said he frightened them. “There’s something low-class and sleazy about you,” one lover had said. “It implies you’re up to no good. I think you’re going to take advantage of me.” Then she had shrugged and confessed, “But I like it. I know what to expect from you.”

  Tom slipped his notebook into his jacket pocket and went out of the house, pausing on the front stoop in the cold morning. He stood a moment looking across the cul-de-sac. Lights were on in several houses. He saw people at the front windows, staring across the street.

  What a terrible thing to happen in a neighborhood. Once they learned of the death, all of them would be frightened--for themselves and their children. He couldn’t blame anyone. Most of them were strangers to each other. And half of the houses were still under construction. He wondered what this bizarre baby murder would do to the real estate value.

  The Washington Post had called the new people arriving to fill government positions the best and the brightest since the Kennedy years. A group of these political types had purchased the land and built the co-op that they called Renaissance Village. It was a novel undertaking, and the smartest money in Washington thought it would succeed.