Everett’s been stealing dead babies?”
Henry nodded. “Been doin’ it for years.”
“What for?” I asked.
Henry shrugged and started to say he didn’t know, but he didn’t have the words out when Allie asked, “Did he kill my baby? So he could take her?”
Henry blinked at her like a startled owl.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never thought about it.”
I hadn’t thought about it either, never would have thought of it, but once Allie asked that I saw how it might be, the doc wanting dead babies for God knows what, and there’s our baby right in his own house, no one around to see if he just loops the cord over and tugs…
I felt sick.
“Come on,” I told Allie, “we’re gonna go see the sheriff.”
“No, we aren’t,” she said.
“Why the hell not?” I wanted to know. “Stealing dead babies is a crime!”
“Of course it is,” she said, “but who do you think the sheriff’s gonna believe, a nineteen-year-old farm kid and his hysterical wife, or the doctor who’s been lookin’ after this town for the past twenty years?”
I could see how she had a point, but I wan’t too sure it was that important—there’d be evidence, wouldn’t there?
“So what do you want to do about it?” I asked.
“We’re going to Doc Everett’s house, and we’re going to get our baby back,” she said. “And Henry, I swear to God, if you call to warn him we’re coming, I’m going to shoot you dead if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
I was beginning to regret ever teaching Allie how to shoot, about then, but it was done, and she was the one with the gun, and I hadn’t even left my .22 in the pick-up’s gun rack.
“Nobody’s gonna do any shooting,” I said. “We’ll get this straightened out. Come on.”
She headed for the door, and I paused just long enough to tell Henry, “All the same, don’t you call that son of a bitch.”
I drove, and Allie sat there with the .38 in her lap. I wished she’d put it away, but she didn’t and I wan’t about to argue with her. We’d been married long enough that I knew better than to mess with her when she was in a mood like that.
The whole way down Main Street I was thinking about what Doc Everett might want with dead babies. Did he do some sort of experiments on them? Did he sell ’em for parts? I’d heard there was cosmetics made out of unborn babies; maybe newborns were close enough.
It made me feel sick again, thinking about it.
It was getting on to five o’clock when we pulled up in front of the Everett house, but I saw there wasn’t a car in the driveway.
“He’s not home yet,” I said, pointing.
“Then we wait,” Allie said.
I was almost ready to argue about it when I heard a car coming, slow, and I looked up and there was Doc Everett’s blue Olds coming down Main Street.
The doc saw us there and waved, and when he pulled into the driveway he got out and came over toward us. Allie kept the gun down out of sight, and we tried to look like nothing was troubling us.
Then when he was about to lean in the window, when he was saying, “What can I do for you folks?” Allie stuck the gun in his face.
“You can give me back my baby, you bastard,” she said.
He got this astonished look on his face and took a step back. “Your baby’s dead, Mrs. Sellers,” he said. He turned to me. “You tell her, Bill.”
“We know the baby’s dead, Doc,” I said, “but we want the body.”
“Well, it’s at Tuchman’s Funeral Home…”
“No, t’ain’t,” Allie said, pulling back the hammer on the revolver. “You kept her. And if you don’t start telling us why, I might just think you killed her.”
Doc Everett threw up his hands—guess that’s something everyone’s picked up from TV or something. “I didn’t kill her!” he said.
“Then why’d you take the body?”
“For my sister!”
Allie lowered the gun a little. “What?” she said. She sounded mighty puzzled, which was about how I felt.
Doc Everett took that as a good sign, that she’d lowered the gun, though to me all it meant was she was pointing at his gut instead of between his eyes and I wan’t sure I wouldn’t rather have it over quick than get gut-shot, but he lowered his hands a bit, too. “For my sister,” he said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “What the hell would your sister want with our baby? She’s got her own, don’t she? And alive?”
Allie threw me a surprised glance at that, and the doc shook his head. “No,” he said. “She don’t. Doesn’t.”
“Bill, Miss Everett ain’t married,” Allie said, “and I never heard tell she had a baby.”
I was beginning to wonder if I was going crazy. This was all so weird. “She said she did,” I insisted.
Doc Everett nodded. “She thinks she does,” he said. “Laura…Laura’s not right.”
“First I’ve heard of it,” Allie said.
“Well, it’s true,” Doc said. “Not for five years. Not since the baby died.”
“So there was a baby?” I asked.
He nodded.
“There was?” Allie was pretty startled by that. She’d been keeping up on the gossip around Dawsonville since she was thirteen, but I guess she’d never heard this one.
“Stillborn,” Doc said. “Never had a chance. Probably just as well. But Laura couldn’t take it.”
I glanced at Allie, but if she thought Doc was saying anything about her, she didn’t pay any mind to it.
“We’d managed to keep it all quiet—she never went out much, and she carried small, and I performed the delivery right here at home, so no one ever knew,” Doc explained. “When he was born dead, I figured it was a blessing, and I buried him in the back yard and thought that was an end to it.”
“It wasn’t?”
He shook his head. “Laura dug him up,” he said.
Allie’s mouth came open at that, and the gun drooped a bit further.
“She brought the
