In the Bleak Midwinter

“About Katie?” An enormous woman lumbered up the hall. “What about my little girl?” She looked like her daughters, blown up to Macy’s parade size, their rounded cheeks and soft chins expanded into a fleshy mask through which once-pretty eyes peered at him suspiciously.

Get to the worst of it fast, he thought. “I have very bad news for you folks. Your daughter, Katie McWhorter, was found dead out past Payson’s Park last Friday night.” Darrell McWhorter stared at him blankly. Brenda McWhorter screamed.

“My baby! My baby!” She staggered around like an elephant with a tranquillizer dart before slipping to the floor. Her husband caught her under her arms and hefted her onto an elaborately carved Victorian sofa. A man would have to be pretty damn strong to help get that woman up. Russ wondered what sort of disability kept him from working.

“How did it happen?” Darrell McWhorter asked.

Russ recounted what the coroner had found out about Katie’s death. Brenda McWhorter continued wailing, punctuating her cries with, “My poor baby! My poor little girl!” Her husband listened without comment, frowning.

“There’s one more important thing I have to tell you,” Russ concluded. “Katie had a child within a week or so of her death. DHS has custody of the baby right now.”

Brenda’s wails cut off abruptly. Darrell looked as if he were trying to get the final Jeopardy! answer within thirty seconds. “A baby?” he said.

“A little boy. Did either of you know or suspect she was pregnant?”

Brenda shook her head, her mouth still half open.

“Do either of you know what connection Katie might have had to Saint Alban’s church?”

“Saint Alban’s?” Darrell still looked as if he wasn’t going to make the buzzer before Alex Trebeck called time. “What’s that? The fancy looking church across from the old bandstand?”

The small park at the end of Church Street was a popular summer spot. The town still put on dances and concerts there, just like when Russ was a young man. “That’s the one.”

Darrell thought for a few seconds more. “A baby,” he said. Then, “No, I don’t know nothing that Katie would of been up to involving a church. How come?”

“Katie, or someone, left the baby on the back steps of St. Alban’s, with a note directing that the boy go to the Burnses, a couple from the church that’ve been looking to adopt for several years. Would you or Katie have known them some other way? They’re lawyers here in town.”

The McWhorters looked at each other.

“A lawyer?” Brenda said. “We don’t know no lawyers. ’Cept that one who settled my dad’s estate, but that was ten years back, and he was old then. He wouldn’t be looking for no baby.”

Darrell reached for a pack of cigarettes lying atop a Soap Opera Digest magazine. “These lawyers go to that fancy church?” he asked.

“Yes sir, they do.”

“But they don’t got the baby yet?”

“No. There are several legal issues to sort out, from what I understand. For instance, we don’t know who the father of the child is.” Russ fixed Darrell with a level stare. “I had a long talk with her sister this morning, who told me Katie broke up with her boyfriend in her senior year. Kristen hadn’t heard of anyone else who might have been going out with Katie.”

Darrell lit his cigarette and took a drag. “Can’t put much store by what Kristen says. We wouldn’t help her out with money she wanted after she was out of school, and since then, she’s been bad-mouthing us something awful.”

“Never comes to see us,” his wife chimed in. “Not in almost two years. It was like we lost her. And now Katie . . .” She started wailing anew.

Russ was tempted, sorely tempted, to ask Darrell to come to the hospital right now for a blood test and cell scraping. But he didn’t want anything questioned and possibly thrown out if it went to court.

“Had either of you seen Katie recently?”

“Nope,” Darrell said. Brenda shook her head.

“Where were you two last Friday?”

“Why?” Darrell frowned. “You asking if we had anything to do with it?”

Damn right I am, thought Russ. “I’m trying to get a fix on Katie’s movements, to see where she might have gone and who she might have seen.”

“We went out to that new Long John Silver’s at the County Road shopping center,” Brenda said. “We had coupons.”

“Then we went to the Dew Drop for a few. Met up with some friends. We must of been there until eleven o’clock.”

“We come straight home after that. I remember, ’cause it was awful cold and I was worried I had left the bathroom window cracked open and things would start freezing in the bath.”

Russ never trusted people who could recall and retell their every movement without having to stop and think about it. Most folks’ lives weren’t that memorable. On the other hand, first Friday of the month, after the social security check had come in, it might be their big night out.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember the names of the friends you were with, would you?” He tried to make his question as inoffensive as possible.