Light on Snow Read Online Free PDF Page A

says.
    “There’ll be fingerprints all over the place,” Warren says, “but none of them will do us any good unless one of them has a record—which I sincerely doubt.” The detective takes a handkerchief from his back pocket and blows his nose. “That tiny girl you found?” he asks. “She started life in this room. And then someone, most likely the father, went out that window there and tried to kill her. No one put that baby in a warm place where she’d be found. No one called in a tip. A man took that infant, minutes old, walked her out into the woods on a December night, temps in the single digits, and laid her naked in a sleeping bag. If you hadn’t found her, we’d have come across her, when? March? April? If even then. Most likely a dog would have gotten to her first.”
    I think about a dog dragging a bone across the snow with its teeth. My father stands near the detective while he confers with a technician. Chief Boyd is leaning against a wall, his lips pressed hard together. From where I’m standing he can’t see me. I try to picture what went on in this room. I don’t know much about giving birth, but I can feel hysteria in the walls, the wrinkled sheets, the clothes left behind. Did the woman know what the man would do with the infant? The sock is pearl gray, angora maybe, with a cable knit up the side. A woman’s sock to judge from the size of it. A technician picks it up and sticks it in a plastic bag.
    “In the fifteen years I’ve been with the state police,” Warren says, “I’ve seen maybe twenty-five cases of abandoned infants. Three months ago, in Lebanon, a woman left an infant in a trash barrel outside her house. She’d broken up with her boyfriend. The baby was dead when we found him. Had Campbell’s soup up its nose.”
    A technician interrupts Warren with a question.
    “Last year,” Warren continues, “a fourteen-year-old girl threw her baby out a second-story window. She’s charged with attempted murder.” Warren studies a drinking glass and a plastic bag on the bedside table. “In Newport we found a newborn girl, alive, on a shelf at Ames. Over to Conway they found a newborn boy in a trash bin in the back of a restaurant. The mother was twenty. It was freezing outside. She’s charged with attempted murder.” The detective squats down to look under the bed. “What else? Oh, in Manchester an eighteen-year-old mother abandoned her baby girl in a park. She left the child in a plastic bag, and two ten-year-old girls discovered the infant when they were biking through the park. Can you imagine? The mother’s charged with attempted murder and cruelty.” Warren stands. He points under the bed and asks a technician a question. “And listen to this one: Two years ago, a high school senior discovered she was pregnant. She said nothing. She hid it by wearing baggy sweatshirts and pants, hoping all the while that she’d miscarry. But she didn’t. In the fall she went off to college. The day before Thanksgiving, after everyone had gone home, she delivered a baby girl on the floor of her dormitory room. She wrapped the infant in a T-shirt and sweater, put her in a plastic grocery bag, and carried her down three flights of stairs. She laid her in a trash bin just outside the dorm.”
    Warren walks to the window and looks through it.
    “But College Girl had a conscience,” he says. “She called in an anonymous tip to campus security, and they came and found the baby. Didn’t take them long to find the mother either. She pled to endangerment and was sentenced to a year’s house arrest.”
    “How do you know it was a man who did this?” my father asks. “In all the other examples you’ve just mentioned, it was a woman who abandoned the baby.”
    “Come with me,” Warren says to my father. “I want you to see something.”
    The two men turn, and as they do they see me just outside the doorway.
    My father moves to stand in front of me, as if to block my view of the room, but