He opened the door. There were two rooms, the large one he entered and a smaller one right behind it with the door open. In the large room was a desk where a cop sat with his feet up, and another cop leaning against the side of the desk. Both were laughing, but both all but came to attention when Brody went in.
“Help you?” asked the one sitting, the older one, his feet now on the floor.
“I hope so,” Brody said. He noticed they were both looking at the kid on his shoulders. “Yesterday I was walking down the beach and saw this kid playing on a beach towel beside his mother. Today, I found the kid way down the beach, in the surf, about to go even deeper and nobody was around watching him. I picked him up and took him back to where I’d seen him yesterday with his mother and... and she claimed she’d never seen the kid before. She refused to take him, so now I don’t know what to do with him.”
There was a long, long silence as both cops looked at him, one with his mouth agape, the other scratching his bald head. It was obvious to him they didn’t believe a word he’d said. That was cops for you!
“It’s the God’s truth,” he declared, saying what Nathan always said when trying to convince someone of the seriousness of a matter. “I can take you to the cottage where the mother is.”
“What’s your name?” This time it was the younger one, the one with glasses and a face that had recently known acne intimately.
Omigod! Wouldn’t you know! All he had to do was give them his name, they’d run it through a machine, and he’d be right back at Rocky River Camp for Boys.
“I’m Walter Havington the third.” It came trippingly off his tongue as though he were accustomed to saying it.
“Well, Mr. Havington the third, why don’t you just take me to the mother of this little tot,” the older one said. “Les, take care of things while I’m gone.”
So there was Brody, sitting in the back of a cop car, screen between him and the front seat, no door handles on the inside. He should have felt right at home, but all he felt was miserable and uncomfortable. The kid needed changing again and he’d run out of thick paper towels. He could only hope that with a cop along, the woman would take her kid. If he got out of this mess okay, he wouldn’t even gripe about not making any money.
He gave instructions for finding the cottage, but he spoke hesitantly, because Walter Havington the third would use good words and not street language. Brody had quit all that school jazz at the end of the seventh grade, preferring money to schooling.
“This is the place,” he said near the end of Ocean Boulevard. “And look, there she is, packing her car. She’s fixing to leave without the kid!”
The bald cop stopped instantly and pulled in the slatted driveway, blocking the car parked beside the cottage. The blond woman in red sunback dress and sandals was indeed throwing things into an old Buick as fast as she could. Baldy opened the door for Brody and he jumped out, yelling, “Hold on there. You’re forgetting something.”
“I’ll handle this,” Baldy said. “Er, miss, is this your child?” He pointed to the baby Brody was holding carefully away from him.
The woman, half inside the backseat, came out slowly, straightened up, and without even looking Brody’s way, said, “I told that man earlier I’d never seen that child before. I don’t know why he keeps pestering me.”
Baldy now looked from the woman to Brody, questioningly. But Brody spotted what she had been putting in the backseat. It looked to him suspiciously like a box of those disposable diapers, something he needed right now for the wet kid. “Where’s the baby that goes with those things?” He pointed.
“I’m... I’m going to visit my sister who has a baby and I’m taking them to her.”
Huh, Brody thought, I already used the one about my sister’s kid. She oughta come up with something better.
Suddenly, the kid, who obviously wanted to be back on Brody’s shoulders, held up his arms and yelled, “Wah! Wah!”
Now the cop’s attention was on the baby. “Didn’t he just say Ma-Ma and hold out his arms to you?”
“He sure did!” Brody was quick to agree. “He wants his mama.”
“What’s your name?” Baldy asked the woman.
Another hesitation, then, “Eliza Marvin.”
“Well, just hold everything, Eliza Marvin. We’ll see about that.” He went back to the cop car, picked up the radio, and said something into it.
Uh-huh, Brody thought, he’s telling the other cop to run the name through that machine, but it’s probably not her real name anyhow. Boy howdy! Suppose he’d run my fake name through!
Baldy stuck his head out the window. “You from Beckley, West Virginia?”
There was an almost imperceptible nod from the woman.
Baldy said a few more words in the car, then got out. “Eliza Marvin, you are under arrest for kidnapping.”
Jeez! The woman didn’t even have sense enough to give a fake name. Dumb broad!
“No, no! I was babysitting.” Even under her sunburn, she looked pale. “The McClendons asked me to keep their kid while they were in Europe for a month.”
“They’ve been back from Europe a week and found you and their baby gone. They’ve been trying to hunt you down. The message went across the country on Amber Alert. Now you come with me. And how come you said that wasn’t your child?”
“He isn’t my child.”
“She told me she’d never seen him before.” Brody put in his two cents’ worth.
She started blubbering. “I had to take him. The man I planned to marry wanted children and I can’t have any. I thought if I told him I already had a child by a former marriage... Anyway, he said he didn’t want somebody else’s kid.”
“So why didn’t you leave him with his folks?” Brody couldn’t resist asking.
“They’d already reported him missing. I’d have been arrested.”
“Which you are,” Baldy said, opening the back door of the cop car. “Get in. We’ll hold you until they come from West Virginia to get you.” He looked at Brody. “I don’t want to put you back there and it’s against rules for you to ride beside me.”
“I don’t mind walking in the least,” Brody assured him. “Nosiree, nothing I like better than a walk down the beach. But hooweee! Can you imagine taking somebody else’s kid? Worst thing I ever heard of.” He handed the kid to the cop. “Maybe you better get that box she put in the backseat of her car. You’re gonna need it.”
It was late afternoon when he got back to the city. He had slipped out of Miz Dudley’s without her seeing him, forfeiting the rest of the week’s rent but happy in the thought that she hadn’t got the extra five reduction she’d given him when she thought he would stay a month.
He also left the beach without making a nickel, spending his last few dollars on gas to get away.
He found Nathan in the kitchen at the Church of the Divine Word.
“Well,” Nathan said. “I thought you’d stay longer.”
“Ran out of money. You think I could stay here in the basement where you put up the homeless for a day or two until I can get my hands on a few bucks?”
“I’ll even help you find a job.”
“That ain’t necessary. I’ll find one myself. I’m good at that sort of thing.”
Nathan shook his head, a sad expression on his face. “Brody, Brody, what am I going to do with you? What am I going to do about you?”
“Just let me be,” Brody said. “Don’t preach me no sermon. I’ll be okay.” His mind was already busy with plots, schemes, and ripoffs. “You know, Nathan, I learned one thing while I was at the beach.”
Nathan looked hopeful. “What was that?”
“A day at the beach ain’t always a day at the beach.”
Copyright © 2006 Helen Tucker