What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,18

door. “Are you from Heaven, then? That’s the first time he’s stopped crying all day.”

“I’m from not from Heaven or New York,” I said. “I’m just a local, like you.”

The baby smiled up at me, all gums and soft cheeks.

After that it was a whirlwind of re-introductions and explanations. Grandma was Teresa Kaminski; the young woman was Tessa Kaminski-Cryer. Tessa met her husband when they were little kids; both their families spent summers in Two Harbors. Tessa’s husband sold insurance to hospitals. He was on the road a lot, and she was freaking out because she was going to start doing two midnight shifts on top of a class and needed someone to babysit from eleven to six, when her mother (who had just started doing private duty) got off work and came to stay with the baby. Tessa finished with an exhausted “I’m desperate. I only have a week to find somebody.”

“I’m a good babysitter,” I lied.

The truth was, I was already smitten with Tavish. I had taken care of Angie before. But taking care of your own siblings requires no skill, only the willingness to follow through on your threat to punch a cute little Chinese girl with an arm the circumference of a broomstick. I had never changed a diaper. I assumed there were package directions for the diaper and a quick manual of sorts you could get for the baby, with the parts labeled.

“You can ask anyone at the hospital about me,” I added.

We had a cup of tea. The baby never stopped smiling and cooing at me as I told Tessa about the hot spots in Iron Harbor. She knew about most of them, including Gitchee Pizza. She showed me around the apartment: the décor was exquisite, very sparse and Pottery Barn. “This is a great place,” I said, in a voice that clearly signaled, how can you own a place like this if you’re thirty at most and working the midnight shift?

“It belongs to my husband’s family friend, Steve. The whole building does. Dr. Tabor? Steve Tabor?” Tessa said.

I nodded. Of course I knew Dr. Steve, although not as well as Dr. Andrew, obviously. I didn’t hang around accidents and crime scenes and examined deaths of any kind. But I felt a warm rush of relief. Mentally, I slapped myself. I was a paranoid idiot. Juliet was right. It would take someone even dumber than me to use this property as a private crime den: the medical examiner’s property.

“So, Allie, can you start next week?” Tessa asked. “Or for a practice, paid of course, on, like, Sunday? How about … ten, no eleven dollars an hour—if you do a little cleaning?”

I had been thinking she’d offer me six or seven. Life brightened. I began to see visions of my own car. Lime green. A Beetle. I said goodbye to young Tavish, who immediately burst into tears again. “One-year molars,” Tessa said wearily. “They start six months after six-month molars.”

WHEN I REACHED the parking lot, it was full dark, no moon—but I saw him right away.

Blondie hopped out of a little red sports car and slammed the door.

I froze in the dull light of the foyer. It was the same car that had nearly sideswiped me. I stared, petrified, as he yanked a large sack from his trunk and hobbled over to the edge of the parking lot, disappearing over the bluff to the lawn at the water’s edge. In the shadows, it looked like a sailboat’s canvass, rolled up like a rug. So I did the only thing I could think of. I ran to mom’s car and grabbed my Maglite.

When I returned to the parking lot’s edge—and aimed the spotlight at the spongy grass below—I saw nothing.

Since that night, many times, I’ve tried to imagine this moment from an outside perspective. You’ve seen a guy (whom you’ve suspected of doing something horrible). You’ve seen him carry a suspicious looking package over a bluff. And when you’ve decided to chase him down, he’s gone. No rolled-up sail. Nothing except the lake demanding softly, “Now? Now?”

So what do you do?

You drive seventy in a thirty, all the way home.

We did go to Duluth.

Both Rob and Juliet apologized again for blowing me off. The excuse? They were just concerned given how skittish I’d been at Tabor Oaks. As if they hadn’t been skittish! (Well, Juliet hadn’t, but still.…) And yet, I let it go. I figured that if I accepted their apology and thought of us