Free Fatal Deduction by Gayle Roper

days?”
    I looked at the baby doll she still held cradled in her arm. “Yeah.” It came out a whisper. There was no way I could explain the anguish of Eddie, the baby, the trial, and the family. All I knew was that I wanted to stay in bed with the quilt pulled over my head for about ten years. Then maybe I’d come out for something to eat. Maybe. Mom and Nan were so caught up in their own misery they’d never miss me.
    Mom and Nan hadn’t asked me a single question when Tori told them I was expecting, just looked at me with disgust, disbelief, and finally resignation. There wasn’t much they could say anyway. They’d both been pregnant when they got married. But at least they got married.
    Madge—the neighbor they mocked all the time because she didn’t smoke or drink, went to church, and had a neighborhood Bible study she’d actually had the nerve to invite them to—was the only one who ever asked.
    “But I’m okay.” I tried to grin like I didn’t feel absolutely alonein the world.
Change the topic, Lib! Change the topic before the pain kills you!
    I noticed the pin she wore on her collar, and I grabbed on to it. “Did you get that cute pin at an estate sale too?”
    She reached up and fingered the little silver replica of a pair of tiny feet. “No. This is a pin that shows the size of a baby’s feet at ten weeks after conception.”
    I felt like someone had shoved me hard in the chest, and I could barely draw a breath. My hand went to my stomach. My baby’s feet looked like that? I sort of thought it was just a blob.
    “Your baby’s feet are larger by now but just as well formed,” Madge said as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. “To me it’s one of the great God-mysteries, how a baby with a beating heart and a functioning brain and perfectly formed little feet can grow from almost nothing.” She took my cold hands in hers. “I know you are in circumstances you don’t like, Libby, but you are growing a little person in there. I applaud you for sticking it out, for getting up every day and eating and doing things to care for this child.”
    I blinked. Was I doing that? I hadn’t even been to a doctor.
    “Are you interested in a part-time job, by the way?”
    When I’d had my life-changing conversation with Madge, I thought she was so old and mature, but she was only about thirty then, my age now. Little by little she’d taught me everything she knew, taking me along to seminars and workshops at her expense, showing me how to strip an abused piece of furniture, training my eye to recognize the fine from the merely good, the true antiques from the collectibles.
    But mostly she loved me, showed me a healthy family, and modeled Jesus before me.
    I sat in Aunt Stella’s living room and wished I was in Madge’s shop or workroom or even at the eBay store, mailing one of our online sales to somewhere on the other side of the country or world. It was not an exaggeration to say that I—and Chloe—owed my life to her.
    “I didn’t get to the Hutchinson estate sale today,” I told Madge when she picked up her phone. “I found a dead body instead.”
    “What?”
    I could just picture her, eyes wide with disbelief and curiosity as she danced around the room. Madge was a fidgeter of immense proportion. Bill seemed to find her constant movement amusing, and her boys, ages nineteen, seventeen, and fifteen, took it for granted. Since Bill always looked rested, I took it to mean that she somehow stayed still when she slept.
    “I found a dead body,” I repeated and gave her a rundown of the morning. I pulled myself out of the recliner as we talked and wandered into the kitchen for a glass of sweet tea.
    “That note with Tori’s name on it is troubling.”
    “Tell me about it.” As I passed Tori’s
Times
puzzle book resting haphazardly on the counter, my elbow caught it, and it tumbled to the floor. A piece of folded paper that I had earlier thought was a torn page fluttered