Mystery Dance: Three Novels by Scott Nicholson

psychological spewing would purge the poison from her system. “I’d just got off the phone with my mother. Christine was down for her afternoon nap, she was as steady as a clock, naps at ten and three. I had soup on. I was trying to save money then, figuring with two children we had a lot of college to pay for one day. The soup was boiling over–”
    “She called me at work that morning to gripe,” Jacob said. “Said she was tired of cutting her fingers to get rid of leftover vegetable scraps and why couldn’t she just put some groceries on the credit card–”
    “Let her finish, Jacob.”
    Renee felt a sick but grateful smile slide across her face. Rheinsfeldt was as tough as any prison warden, and she seemed to be on Renee’s side. “I burned my fingers,” Renee said. “That’s what the medics said when they arrived. I don’t remember much after that, but I took the pot off and then went to check on Christine because it was nearly four and about time for Mattie to get home from school.”
    “That’s when she found her,” Jacob said.
    “What did you see?” Rheinsfeldt asked Renee.
    “You have to keep it a secret, don’t you? I mean, patient-doctor privilege or whatever?”
    “Yes. Everything you say in this room stays in this room. Except the parts you take with you.”
    Renee looked at Jacob, expecting to see hatred in those stranger’s eyes, but he only nodded in resignation. She would tell it the way he wanted. She’d once promised in front of God to honor and obey him.
    “I went in, and Mattie was standing over the crib. I didn’t hear her, but she must have come through the sliding glass doors in back and up the stairs. She was pale and her lips moved but she wasn’t making a sound. And neither was Christine. You have any children? No? Then you probably don’t know babies are never absolutely quiet, no matter what. Even when they’re asleep, they twitch or sigh or wheeze or kick the blankies.”
    “Christine was way too quiet,” Jacob said. “Blue.”
    “It was the blankies,” Renee said, and the words came easy, just as they had when she talked to the rescue squad and then the doctors and then the police. She’s said them so often that the words were a recitation. “There’s this new thing where you’re not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs, so I had blankies in there to prop her up on her back. But somehow she turned and got under them. She–”
    “Mattie knew something was wrong right away,” Jacob said. “It was Mattie who called 9-1-1 while Renee tried to revive Christine.”
    “How terrible,” Rheinsfeldt said, and the wrinkled troll-doll face looked almost sad. “Where were you?” she asked Jacob.
    “On a job site. We were clearing for a subdivision. If it wasn’t for the cell phone–”
    “You mean Mattie didn’t call you first?”
    “I told Mattie to call 9-1-1,” Renee said. “What the hell is this? We had enough of that stuff from the police. We’re the victims, remember?”
    “I’m just trying to understand,” Rheinsfeldt said, her eyes seeming to grow a shade darker and more obscure.
    “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Jacob said. “The ME fixed the time of death at around 3:15. Christine must have smothered shortly after Renee put her down.”
    “You know the only thing that’s kept me from losing my mind?” Renee saw that Jacob was paying attention now. If only he’d paid that much attention in the immediate aftermath, when depression crushed her like God snuffing a cigarette.
    “What?” Rheinsfeldt asked. The woman didn’t take any kind of notes. Maybe she was arrogant enough to count on memory, but Renee knew that memory could lie. Memory told you all the lies you wanted to hear. You could count on it to deceive you.
    “Because it seems like it happened to somebody else. I mean, I know I was there, I know I had the baby, but she was gone so fast, I can tell myself she was never born. And don’t preach to me about