A faint baking smell hung in the air, but it curdled his stomach even to contemplate eating. “Think I’ll have a wash first.”
She hesitated then. “Perce, before you do,” she said, “there’s something... Come with me.”
He followed her along the hallway and outside down the path that led to the coach house. A hair-width strip of dull light was coming through the closed curtains. That was surprising; since his mother’s death, they hadn’t had much use for the small building. Percy couldn’t think when he’d last set foot inside.
Meg opened the door. The room was empty. Just the bed the two of them had shared long ago, and the elegant cedar settler’s chest of drawers they’d restored when they were young. The bottom drawer, he noticed, was missing. Meg walked to the other side of the bed and beckoned him, motioning that he should proceed quietly.
Later, he was to see that the sherry should have been the tip-off. Meg didn’t touch alcohol—hadn’t for as long as he’d known her.
He joined her at the far side of the bed. On the floor near the wall, beneath the curtain-cloaked window, illuminated by a warm circle of soft lamplight, was the missing drawer, and in it, swaddled in white cotton, a sleeping baby.
A thousand words presented themselves, but each slipped awaybefore it could be uttered. “Who?” he managed at last, even though of course he knew full well.
Meg didn’t answer the question. “She’s sleeping so soundly. You wouldn’t know any of it had happened.”
“How?” he said. “How did she get here?”
“I found her.”
Percy couldn’t understand how it was possible. “When? Where?”
“The water hole. I was out walking.”
Fragmented images flashed like cards in a dealer’s deck: the family on the picnic blanket, the wicker basket in the tree, ants crawling across the little girl’s wrist. It wasn’t possible that Meg had been there, had seen it all, that she’d taken the baby from the crib.
“I couldn’t just leave her. Anything might have happened.”
“The boys?”
She shook her head.
That was something, at least. “Meg,” he began, his thoughts starting to come into line. “Meg, we have to—”
“She’s safe here. Look how soundly she’s sleeping.”
His wife had gone mad, he realized. The shock of what she’d seen had driven her mad. “We have to give her back,” he said. “We have to take her home right now.”
Meg looked at him as if he’d spoken a different language.
Even as he said it, he knew they couldn’t just give the baby back. The knowledge made him tired. Bone-weary. He sank onto the end of the bed.
What he wanted was to pick up the telephone, to call the police officer in charge and tell him to come at once, that the baby had been found. But to do so would turn the spotlight of investigation onto them, onto Meg. She would be implicated. How could she explain how she came to be in possession of Thea in the first place? Anything that took her near the picnic site was going to be trouble. Four people were dead. Percy had already been interviewed, there’d been interestin Kurt. God only knew what someone else in town might volunteer about the connections between the Summers and Turner families. And now, for police to learn that Meg had been there, had found the child and brought her home, all without reporting the scene?
Why on earth had she done it?
Percy stood up suddenly. He ran his hands through his hair.Jesus.
“Will they find her, Perce?” said Meg. “Will they figure out what happened?”
Percy noticed an element of panic in her voice, and it struck him that it was the first such note he’d heard. Before that, when she was showing him the baby, she’d sounded almost excited. Adrenaline, he supposed; wasn’t that what happened when a person was in shock? He considered her question: What were the chances that the search would lead them here? It depended on how careful she’d been. “There’s no finer tracker out there than Jimmy,” he said cautiously. “Young Eric Jerosch is no slouch, either. But this weather will make things difficult. That’s serious rain, and it looks like setting in.”
“Perhaps someone saw something?”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. God knew, she was best placed to answer that one. Why had she been out walking anyway, with so much to do? But anxiety had started to knot her features and, because it had been his life’s role to smooth them, he said only, “Though you have to think they’d have come forward by now.”
“I’m so worried, Perce. I’m so very frightened.”
In the half-light, he saw the little girl from the disused mine all those years ago, when he’d told her he was leaving and she’d tried to look brave.
