“How long ago was that?” Kate asked, looking at the stovetop clock.
“An hour or so,” Johnny said, clearing his throat.
“And you’re still here?” Kate asked.
“Honey,” Beverly said, pouring Kate a cup of coffee, “Johnny’s going to have to ask you a few questions about the discovery down on the beach this morning.”
Kate took a long sip, careful to steady her shaking hands. “What kinds of questions?”
“You seemed to recognize her, is all,” Johnny said slowly. “Well, that’s not quite all. You seemed to know the baby was there. Neither of us had seen it, until you pulled her dress away.”
Johnny waited for Kate’s response to the question he didn’t pose. She looked at him, and then from one parent to the other, but said nothing.
“Do you know any more about this, Katie?” Johnny asked, finally. “Are you mixed up in this thing in any way?” Johnny scratched his head and fidgeted in his chair.
Kate looked around the room at these faces she’d known all her life. They knew, just like everyone in town knew, she’d been having a rough time of it lately. She had moved back into her parents’ house because Kevin, her husband of five years, had had an affair. With a much younger woman in the newspaper office where they all worked. The cliché of it would have been enough to make Kate gag if the devastation of it all hadn’t imploded her world.
She had left Kevin and their house and everything in it—except her beloved Alaskan malamute—and come home to regroup and get her life back together. The whole sordid mess was common knowledge. Nobody had escaped hearing about—or just plain hearing—the loud confrontation between Kevin, Kate, and Valerie—the other woman—at the Jackpine Tavern on the night of Kate’s birthday. A thing like that kept the gossip mill running for months in a small town.
What had Johnny just asked her? “I’m sorry, John. What?”
“I asked what you knew about this, Kate, if anything,” Johnny said, and the gentleness in his voice was enough to break her heart.
What could she say? She couldn’t very well tell the sheriff that she had been dreaming about the woman who had washed up on the beach—she’d sound like a lunatic. And she was certainly not going to talk about what had really happened out on the beach, that she had looked at the dead woman and seen herself lying there. It was as though she had stumbled across her own dead body on the beach, and more horrifying than that, her baby’s.
She wasn’t going to tell them she nearly died of grief at seeing the baby’s sweet face, so silent, so lifeless. Had she not fainted, she surely would’ve snatched the baby out of the dead woman’s arms and held it close to her chest, the way a mother would. No, it was better not to tell anyone about that.
But she had to say something. The three of them sat there, looking at her, waiting. Kate opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again.
“I’m going to lay this right on the table for you folks,” Johnny said. “Traffic tickets, DUI arrests, minor offenses—those are the kinds of things I can make go away. But something like this? A woman and her baby, dead?”
“Now, John, you’re not insinuating Katie’s involved in this,” Beverly broke in, much to Kate’s relief.
Now she had a minute to think. This was insane, all of it. How could she explain what she had done on the beach, that she had been grasping for the baby when she shouldn’t have known—didn’t know—there was a baby?
“I’m not insinuating anything,” Johnny said, watching Kate intently. “It’s just, the way you went after her like that. We had to drag you off her, before you fainted. My people are going to be investigating this thing, Katie. Better that I know now if there’s anything more to know. I’m on your side, here, honey. If you are involved in this in any way, if you know this woman or have ever seen her before, you need to tell me now.”
Johnny went on, “Just so that we’re clear. You are not making a statement here. We’re just old friends talking over coffee at the kitchen table. Nothing you say right now can or will be used against you. But if you know anything, anything, tell me now. I do not want to find out about it days or weeks down the road. If you’d like to call a lawyer, though, we can do this by the book.”
Kate finally found her voice. “I don’t need a lawyer. If I could be of any help to you, I would. But I really don’t know anything more than what I saw, what we all saw. I was in the house doing the crossword puzzle. I heard Sadie barking. I knew Dad had taken her with him that morning, and I got worried. Sadie doesn’t bark like that for no reason. So I went down to the beach to see if he was okay.”
Fred smiled at his daughter.
“And that’s the first time you saw the body?” John led her.
“Yes, that’s the first time I saw the body,” Kate stumbled over her words. “I’d never seen the woman before.” The lie stung on her lips.
“And the baby?” Johnny took a sip of his coffee.
“I can’t explain that,” Kate said, shaking her head. “It was something about the way the woman’s arm was hidden under the folds of her dress. I saw . . . I noticed . . . I don’t know. A lump or something. I was really upset by the sight of her and I had this feeling. I guess you’d call it intuition. My instincts took over. I had the feeling something else—someone else—was there. I can’t explain how or why.”
It was mostly the truth. She looked around at the three concerned faces, all nodding.
“That’s really all there was to it,” she concluded.
Johnny put down his coffee cup with a sense of finality. “I’m going to leave it at that for now,” he said to Kate. “But I’ve got a dead woman and her baby on their way to the morgue, and it’s my job to find out who they are and what happened to them. Just so you know, I am going to need to get a formal statement from both of you, Kate and Fred, but we don’t need to do that now. You’ve all been through quite an ordeal today.”
“Thanks, John.” Fred patted his old friend on the back. Such are the perks of raising a family in the small town where you, your parents, and your grandparents were raised, he thought.
Fred and Johnny had grown up together, played on the same Little League baseball teams, vied for the same girls in high school. If they’d lived in another place, a bigger city, Kate certainly would have been hauled to the police station and questioned because of her peculiar behavior on the beach that morning. That’s all she’d need.
“All right, then. I’ve got to get back down to the station to see if they’ve ID’d her,” Johnny said. “I don’t recall any missing persons reports about a woman and a baby from around these parts, but we don’t know where this lady might have come from.”
Kate’s mother reached across the table and squeezed her daughter’s hand.
“And Kate”—Johnny turned to her as he was on his way out the door—“this goes without saying, but don’t leave town.”
“Am I in trouble here?” Kate asked him, standing up. “I mean, seriously, John. This is crazy. I faint at the sight of a dead body, and now I can’t leave town?”