The Strange Case of Baby H by Kathryn Reiss Read Free Book Online Page A

quiet now, staring up at Clara with dark, puzzled eyes.

C HAPTER 6
    N OISES IN THE N IGHT

    Helen starts with H,” murmured Clara.
    â€œSo do Hester and Hannah and Hope … and Hepzibah!” Mother frowned at Clara. “It doesn’t mean anything. I thank you, Clara, for helping to get rid of that pushy girl, but don’t start thinking her story makes sense. She admitted she lied about being Henrietta’s mother, and she’s lying about being her nursemaid, mark my words. Henrietta is staying with us. I’m not letting her out of my sight for one single second.” Mother took the baby from Clara and marched up the steps to the front door. “Now there’s work to do.” She went into the house and shut the door firmly.
    â€œFather? What do you think?” Clara felt uneasy. The young woman had seemed so afraid. Not just scared of the earthquake and fire, but scared of something else. Something worse.
    Something still to happen?
    Father shook his head and spread his hands. “Mother knows best,” he said quietly, and Clara sighed. That had been Father’s refrain ever since the accident. Mother hadn’t wanted Gideon going on the steamship run; she thought he was too young for such hard work. Father had only laughed and said she babied him. Gideon was big, strong, and very nearly a man—and he wanted to go with Father. So they had gone off together on that last, disastrous voyage. Mother never said “I told you so,” but the accusation was in every glance at Father, in every movement.
    Clara pushed Father’s wheelchair into the backyard, thinking about the woman in the red dress. Who was she really—nanny, or something else? Had she left the baby on the doorstep—or had someone else? And why?
    Clara left Father sitting with the lady lodgers and their children and went indoors after Mother. She spent the rest of the day beating plaster dust from rugs, making up beds with fresh linens, and sweeping broken crockery into trash bins. She arranged books onto shelves and repotted tumbled houseplants. And as she worked, the puzzle of Baby H receded. Instead, memories of Gideon played behind her eyes like pictures on a stereoscope: The two of them sitting here in the front parlor, doing their school-work at the table by the fireplace. The two of them running upstairs and sliding down the banister. The two of them riding the tram to Ocean Beach at Lands End. The two of them swimming at the Sutro Baths, that incredible crystal palace where pools were filled by the tides and swimmers slid down slides or dropped from trapezes or leapt from springboards into the water. She remembered the two of them poised on the high dive, listening to voices below shouting up to them—“The girl is too young! Bring her safely down the ladder at once!”—before Clara launched into her perfect swan dive, followed by Gideon, slicing through the cold deep water. Gideon had taught her well.
    While Baby H napped in her wooden drawer, the lodgers ventured indoors to ask Mother whether they might risk sleeping in the house tonight. Mother said that only a few rooms had been cleaned, but unless another quake brought the house down on top of them, she did not mind who slept where.
    Despite the dust still hanging in the air and the grit underfoot, Clara was glad to crawl into bed that night and lie between clean sheets. Sleeping on a soft mattress on the floor of her parents’ room beat sleeping in a dusty bedroll outdoors on the grass, poked by roots. Baby H snoozed at Clara’s side, tucked into the drawer. The lodgers, including Mrs. Grissinger and Mrs. Hansen and their children, bedded down throughout the house wherever they found a clean spot to lay their blankets.
    Clara listened to the creaks and groans of the house and to the shouts in the distance. She pictured the people in the park, settling down in their tents. She wondered where Emmeline and her family