like you just ate a lemon."
"What if she didn't plan to keep the baby?"
"You mean, give it up for adoption?"
"Maybe. But I was thinking ..." I just hated to voice the thought, and I couldn't even formulate why I found it so loathesome. Margaret was looking down at me expectantly. "What?" "What if she was carrying the baby for someone else?" "You mean, got pregnant on purpose? On commission, like?"
"Or got inseminated with someone else's sperm, so the baby would be the true child of half the couple." At least Margaret seemed to be able to follow my sometimes fractured thinking process. She was nodding. "You may have something there, Aurora," she said. "But I find it makes me think much less of Regina, that she would exploit someone's infertility for her own support."
She began to clear the few dishes off the table, and I began running hot water to wash them. As we washed, rinsed, and dried, Margaret told me about an art exhibit she and Luke had driven into Pittsburgh to see the week before, but I was still thinking about Regina.
Chapter Nine
The surrogate mother theory explained a great deal. Why Regina had stayed out of sight while she was pregnant. She wouldn't have wanted to answer a lot of questions.
Why she had money in the diaper bag. She would have been paid for her pregnancy, and presumably she would've received money for expenses during it. That would be why she and Craig had been able to afford to live without government aid, even though neither she nor Craig held a steady job. "I'd been thinking," I said slowly, "that Craig had gotten involved with some drug deal or some scam of his that had gone wrong. But that didn't explain all the facts."
Margaret shrugged. "I've had a month or two to wonder about it. Regina's attitude seemed so strange."
"But why would someone kill Craig? And take Regina?"
"Maybe nobody took Regina. Maybe she went."
"Leaving her baby?"
"People leave babies all the time," Margaret said, her face grim. "Luke and I lived in Pittsburgh before we moved back here so Luke could help his mother out during her last illness. The first year we were married, before we were trying to have our own child, this woman in our apartment building left her baby right outside our door. She was thinking since we didn't have kids, we would be ecstatic, I guess."
"Oh my gosh! What did you do?"
"Of course we called the police, and they called the child welfare people. They had to take the baby to a foster home."
"That's so sad! What happened to the mother?"
Margaret shrugged. "Jail time, I think."
It had certainly become a morning of mysteries to ponder. Why a woman would have a baby she didn't want... why she'd leave that baby's life to chance... and where was the father of the baby, all this time, huh? Why did his responsibility get to be voluntary, while the mother's was mandatory? I thought of my father, who'd never sent child support; Regina's father, who had vanished the minute the divorce was final.
Boy, in a minute I was going to be spitting fire because I wasn't allowed in combat. I shook myself briskly, and asked Margaret Granberry if she'd seen the latest Harrison Ford movie.
Our husbands lurched up the driveway in their separate vehicles. We had quite a convention in front of the house now, with Margaret's dark green pickup, Martin's (leased, rented, or borrowed) Jeep, and Luke's battered sort-of-white Bronco.
Luke hopped out of the Bronco and hurried to the front door, his face reddened by the cold. He was wearing a rugged coat that looked like sheepskin or some other animal hide, and he'd gone without a hat or gloves. Martin, who hated headgear - I suspected because it messed up his hair - was impressed enough by the cold to have put on a sort of Russian hat he'd had for years, and he'd worn the leather driving gloves I'd given him last Christmas. His arms were full of bags from the grocery.
"I got your message," Luke told Margaret breathlessly. "Is everything okay here?"
"Yes, honey," she said. "I didn't mean to scare you. I left Luke a note about why I'd come over here," she explained to me in an aside. "I didn't want Luke to think I'd just ducked out on the firewood we were supposed to split this morning!"
"Oh, I'm so sorry I interrupted your chores!" I had assumed that because it had