A Fool and his Honey

They even searched Hayden, to make sure he wasn't packing heat in his diaper, I guess.

"Take me to my husband," I said, and I said it to every officer who came in the door.

It pleased me that they believed us pretty quickly, after they'd been down in the basement and seen the evidence of our imprisonment. But believing isn't the same as releasing, and it was all too long before the sheriff himself decided to drive me into the little hospital in Corinth.

"They're going to transfer Mr. Bartell to Pittsburgh when he's stable enough," the sheriff told me.

"He had a heart attack?" I asked.

"Yes," the sheriff confirmed, his wide Slavic face looking so sorry for me that my heart sank.

I made myself ask about Karl.

"He's in critical condition, but he lasted this long," Sheriff Brod told me. "Karl Bagosian is a tough bird. He hasn't been able to tell us exactly what happened. Would you like to tell me?"

"My husband and Karl were standing in the kitchen with my niece's friend, Rory," I said wearily, staring out the squad car window at the frozen fields. To me, it was an alien landscape. The cold sun made it gleam like the white linoleum in the Granberrys' kitchen. I saw the blood against it, heard Luke moaning again like an animal.

I got through the account of what had happened, yet again. I could tell the sheriff had a hard time believing I'd started Margaret down the stairs. I was a librarian, for God's sake. I reached up and touched the dreadful bruise and swelling on my forehead. I'd gotten a good look in the Granberrys' bathroom mirror. Even touching as delicately as possible, my head rang with pain.

"You need to get checked out at the hospital," the sheriff said. He was a big man, wide faced and heavy.

"After I see Martin," I said, and didn't speak again until we were there. "I just want you to know, ma'am, that the deputy that questioned the Granberrys last night... well, he won't go without an official reprimand." I shrugged. It didn't matter anymore.

Somehow I was in a wheelchair going down corridors freshly painted in a glossy beige. The rubberized flooring was a dark chocolate brown. The place smelled like a sure-enough hospital, the sharp odors of disinfectants and medicine and the bland smell of hospital food vying for supremacy. Through the doors marked ICU we went, the nurse pushing me not offering any comment no matter how many questions I asked her. The tiny ICU unit had room for six patients, and Martin and Karl were the only two. Cindy was in Martin's glass-sided room, and she stepped out when she saw me coming. She started to say something to me and then thought better of it. Her eyes were red.

The nurse wheeled me right up to Martin's bed. I looked at him in horror. His face had lost all its normal color, and everything that could be hooked up to a tube was. He looked twenty years older.

"He hasn't said much," the young man in the shadows of the room told me, and I saw that it was Barrett.

I knew then that Martin was going to die.

"Sweetheart," I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. "I'm here." I stood and took his hand.

His eyes flickered open. He took in the bruise. "You got hurt," he said faintly.

"That's why you didn't come."

"Yes."

"I knew it."

"Miss me?" I said, trying to smile, having no idea what to say.

"Oh, yes," he breathed, almost smiling.

"I missed you, too," I said, choking on the words. My eyes brimmed and welled over. I kissed him on his cheek, and wished with all my heart I was alone with him. But I couldn't tell his son to leave.

That meant Barrett was there when Martin gave a rattling breath five minutes later and alarms went off, and Barrett was there when the technicians hustled us out in the hall and worked over my husband, and Barrett was there when the old doctor came out minutes later to tell me that my husband had died.

I became a widow the same week as Regina, the same week Luke Granberry became a widower.

Regina had been deprived of both of the men she'd cared for; I'm not going to assume she loved them. Her mother had returned and promised to help her raise the baby, whom Barby claimed was the spitting image of a Bartell. I never held Hay-den in my arms again. Somehow I never wanted to. Regina faced only nominal charges in the death of Margaret Granberry, since Luke himself attested they had held Regina and me prisoner. Without Margaret, Luke seemed to lose all his resolve, to become indifferent to his own life. But he recovered from his bullet wound to face three charges of kidnapping (Regina, Hayden, and me), two counts of murder (Craig and Rory), one count of assault with a deadly weapon (Karl). Since Luke pled guilty, I didn't have to return to Corinth for the trial.

I would never go there again.

Two weeks after Craig's funeral, Craig's older brother Dylan charged Regina with being an unfit mother, citing her plan to sell her baby to the Granberrys. He and his wife Shondra wanted to raise Hayden along with their little girl. But Regina and Barby together had too much Bartell determination for the judge. He ruled the baby should stay with his mother, but the judge did order Regina to take parenting classes.

She met an older man at the first session, a divorced thirty-year-old ordered to take the class after he'd slapped his child in a grocery store, and the next thing I knew, they were married. Regina seemed to slip into marriage easily, not seeing it as so different from any other state of being.

Of course that was months after I had brought Martin back to Lawrenceton for the funeral. Cindy had hinted that there was room in Martin's parents' plot, and Barby had done more than hint. But I can be mighty deaf when I feel like it. It was none of Cindy's business; ex was ex. And Barby had never been a favorite of mine.

Poor Mother. She had to try to tone down her joy at her husband John's complete recovery from his heart attack, and he was twenty years older than Martin. I saw her efforts and pitied her in a remote way.

Poor John stood by the graveside trying not to look guilty. John was a rock to me, and his children, too. I'd always resented them a little, maybe, having been the sole child of my mother until she remarried, but his two sons and their wives were so kind and tactful that my petty irritation seeped away. I was still in the stu

I slit it open when I got into the house.

I glanced at the signature. It was from Luke Granberry. I dropped it as if it were a loathsome spider. But seconds later, I picked it back up.

Dear Mrs. Bartell,

I know you will never forgive me for what I have done but I wanted you to know why I even thought of it.

Margaret and I moved to Corinth because I had discovered my mother lived there.

At least for a while.

I think Margaret told you I was adopted. I was lucky to be adopted by wonderful people. Not only loving, but rich. My dad had made a lot of money in the tire business.

Like most adopted children, I always wondered who my real mother and father were. I didn't want to ask my mom and dad. I knew it would upset them. But I always felt that they knew my mother's name, that they had met her at the unwed mothers' home, from something Dad let fall once. After I married Margaret, she became as determined as I was to find out, and she was a lot smarter than me at thinking of ways to do it. When my mother died, Margaret went through all her papers, thinking she might find some trace, and sure enough she found a private detective's report on a Barbara Bartell Lampton. My mom had kept track of my birth mother that way. Why, I don't know. I guess she wanted to know how Barbara turned out. When Margaret read the old story about Barby, the story about my mother getting thrown out of her stepfather's church because of an illegitimate pregnancy, Margaret knew she'd found my birth mother. From the reports, we found out that Barbara didn't live in Corinth anymore, but my sister Regina did. So we bought the farm next to the one where Regina was living and set out to make friends with her. We'd always wanted a baby, and when we saw what a mess Regina was likely to make of her pregnancy, we felt like we had to take a hand. It seemed just exactly right since Margaret and I had tried so hard for so long. If we couldn't have one of our own, one that was partly ours by blood was next best. Margaret never got over that woman in our building thinking we would like to have her baby. She said she told you that story, about the woman leaving her baby at our door.