hand, the kid’s head in the other. It was over in seconds.
Now, a few quiet steps back to the window, pull the plastic out behind him and relatch with a piece of waxed dental floss. In the morning, or whenever, they would discover the tragic crib death. The water on the sheet, on the baby’s head, from Roger’s rain-wet hands, would have dried. And no one would ever know.
Except, of course, the one who was supposed to know. That, however, wasn’t Roger’s department. All he had to do now was go back to his other life and await further orders.
PART ONE
Chapter One
SHE WOULD HAVE HAD more fun if she’d gone to the funeral.
Not, of course, that the funeral wouldn’t have been gruesome enough. God knew the other ones had. Weeping mothers. And fathers. Regina had been shocked and disappointed in herself to discover that a weeping man upset her much more than a weeping woman. A minister of God telling the mourners, as if he thought they didn’t already know, what a tragedy it was for a life to be snuffed out so young, with so much ahead of it. Back in May, the minister at the service for Keith Smith had told everyone to take comfort in the knowledge that God knows what he’s doing but that it is not always given to man to understand. He also assured them that God Never Tries Us Beyond Our Strength, and that Faith Would See Us Through. The priest at the services for Lou Symczyk had been much simpler about it—Lou was in heaven, and for that we should be happy.
Maybe so, Regina thought. It was hard, though, to be happy for someone whose head had been crushed by a ’77 Firebird slipping off a jack onto his head. Heaven had also been problematical, considering the number of speeding tickets and public scalps Lou had managed to accumulate with a succession of faster and faster cars in the three years between his reaching driving age and his death. He had even had the nerve to ask Regina to “go for a ride” with him once. She had, of course, refused. It would have been ridiculous. Regina was aware, though, that if she had been Lou’s age or younger, instead of four and a half years older, she might have been tempted.
Regina had spent an August morning sweltering in black at the side of Lou’s soon-to-be grave, hating every minute of it, as she had hated the glorious late-spring day she’d spent with the box containing little Keith Smith. She’d gone because, as her mother said, the Hudson Group was more than just a publishing concern. To the millions of people its two-hundred-odd local newspapers, radio and TV stations and cable systems reached, it was a spokesman, a teacher, and a goad. It informed them, spoke up for them, challenged them. To the readers of Worldwatch it was a fresh and different look at each week’s national and international news.
To the people of Kirkester, especially to those who had given up Manhattan or Chicago to come work here in the boonies at the home office, the Hudson Group was family.
Regina grinned. Speaking about the billion-dollar business Father and she (mostly she) had built, Mother had a tendency to sound like a rough draft of the introduction to the annual report.
But she meant every word of it, including the business about family. When tragedy struck, the Hudsons had to be there. It made no difference if the employee involved was top management, like Fred Smith, or a janitor, like Kasimir Symczyk. Duty called; Regina went.
But not today. Today they were burying a baby.
Clara Bloyd, age nine months, daughter of Tina Bloyd, typesetter. Sudden infant death syndrome. Crib death. Parents awoke to find perfectly healthy infants dead. Regina remembered it had been one of the first Worldwatch cover stories.
Regina had decided enough was enough. Yes, a journalist should be inured to all sorts of suffering and tragedy, and yes, Regina was going to be a first-rate journalist in spite of her name and connections. But she was damned if she was going to spend a beautiful, cool, October Thursday, with the sky bright blue and the trees trying to make up in a week for a year of single-color drabness, listening to sermons and lamentations over a small white wooden box. She’d stay in the office instead. Go over circulation reports. Relay her mother’s instructions to writers and artists and researchers. Wait for late-breaking