The Tilted World by Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly Read Free Book Online Page B

have any kin?” Ingersoll asked the blue back walking away.
    “Consult a crystal ball,” the officer threw over his shoulder. “We’re a little busy here.”
    The reenactment was still going on behind Ingersoll so he joined the rear of the circle, beside some reporters waggling their pencils along their pocket notebooks. It seemed the dead Scottish clerk hadn’t been alone at the store after all—he’d been out back, helping a deliveryman unload crates of ginger ale. The driver was saying how the clerk had been backing into the storeroom when he surprised the looters, who must have figured they had the place to themselves. So the clerk shot at the looters and they shot back and the driver went to get help.
    The driver didn’t mention the baby at all, and Ingersoll figured he probably took off as soon as he heard the shooting. Switching the baby to his other arm, Ingersoll thought how sad that Junior would grow up in a world lousy with cowards and fakes.
    A door opened from the rear of the station and a clerk poked his head through. “Coroner says he’s done with the gyp corpses!”
    The deliveryman snapped his fingers. “Hot diggity! Let’s go look! Come on, boys.”
    The group scrummed away like a many-tentacled creature. Ingersoll could hear them chattering through the door and down the steps. He bet neither the driver nor those others had served. If they had, they’d have seen enough bodies to last a lifetime. Many lifetimes.
    When he looked up, he was standing alone in the middle of the room. The dark-haired receptionist was studying him.
    “You look lost, big fella,” she said.
    “I suppose I am.”
    “What’re you looking for?”
    “I guess I’m done here”—he glanced around as if expecting to be contradicted—“so now I gotta find some officer to give this baby to.”
    “Judson!” she called out, swiveling on her chair, but Judson was punching his arms into his rain slicker. “Mrs. Allen, I’m heading to the coroner’s,” he said, and slipped out the door.
    “Hmmph,” she said, swiveling back around. “Well, I guess it just needs to get to the orphanage. It ain’t far. I could take it when I get off. ’Course that’s not till five.”
    Ingersoll raised his eyes to the clock, quarter past three. “I can take it there,” he said.
    A man walked by and dumped some heavy folders on the receptionist’s desk, and Ingersoll looked to see if the thump had woken the baby. It had but he didn’t cry, just blinked and turned his head.
    The receptionist rose from her chair. “Girl or boy?”
    “Boy.”
    “Can I hold him?”
    Ingersoll shrugged. “Sure.” She began walking around her desk, but then he felt a warmth on his thigh, a strange warmth that began cooling and he looked down and saw a dark wet patch on his slightly less wet dungarees.
    When he looked up, the receptionist was grinning. “I believe you’ve been baptized.”
    “I gave him a fresh diddie,” he said, a touch of defensiveness in his voice.
    “Sure you did, sugar.” She lifted the baby from his arms and held him away from her crisp green dress. “But you didn’t pin it on tight enough to keep anything in it. Now, let’s see what we can do.”
    Ingersoll said he’d fetch a diddie from his saddlebag and trotted to get it, and when he came back she was kneeling beside a bench and had the baby naked on a blanket. She took the diddie and cooed to the baby as she lifted his heels in one hand and with the other wound the cloth. Ingersoll tried to memorize the dance of her fingers. When he was a child at St. Mary’s Foundling Home for Boys he’d diapered the occasional baby, but he had since forgotten the ins and outs.
    Now Mrs. Allen was nimbly pinning the cloth. “Poor baby,” she said to Junior. “This big silly man didn’t get you near secure enough.” She gave Ingersoll a wink and then sat the baby on the blanket. “Now then,” she told Junior, peering into his face, which was dirty. She must have thought