Dark of the Moon

I’m either his second or third ex-wife, I forget which.”
    “Be nice,” Virgil said. He looked her over and she did look okay: prosperous, even. “Still in real estate?”
    She rolled her eyes: “Yes. Shouldn’t admit it, the way it’s fallen out of bed, but…nothing like selling a house. Makes me feel good.”
    So they chatted awhile, and he started remembering some of the better times they’d had, and then she patted him on the chest and said, “Guess what? I might get married again.”
    “Hey…great, man,” Virgil said. “Anybody I know?”
    “No, no. He’s at Wells Fargo, a vice president in the mortgage department. Known him for years.”
    “And he’s available because…”
    She shrugged. “His marriage broke up. Same old stuff. Everybody works, nobody talks.”
    “He got kids?” Virgil asked.
    “Two; but he’d like a couple more.”
    “Does he dance?”
    She laughed: “Not like you, Virgil. He does, but like a banker.”
    “Ouch.”
    Pretty good time, all in all, and he danced with the girlfriend a couple of times, and at one o’clock in the morning, a little drunk, rolled into bed at the hotel, all alone.
    Thought about God for a while.
    Sunday
    N OT EXACTLY HUNGOVER, but a little lonely. He got cleaned up, got breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and drove over to the Historical Society. The library was closed. He called around, and the duty officer, which was not her title, but what she did, led him to the microfilm machines, and got him the missing roll of microfilm.
    He spooled through it, found the paper that came out on July 24, the first one after the man-on-the-moon party, and there it was.
    A “miracle baby” was delivered to a twenty-nine-year-old Minneapolis woman moments before she died at the Bluestem Memorial Hospital emergency room Sunday night after an automobile accident on Buffalo Ridge.
    Margaret (Maggie) Lane of 604 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis, apparently lost control of her car as she was leaving a “man on the moon” party at the home of William Judd Sr. Witnesses say the car plunged over the Buffalo Jump bluff after leaving the driveway fifty yards below the Judd house.
    An autopsy revealed .07 percent blood alcohol, below the legal limit, and Judd said that “Maggie had only a glass of wine or two during the party.”
    “This is an awful tragedy,” Judd said. “She was a warm, interesting woman and nobody ever had a thing bad to say about her.”
    Stark County sheriff Roman Schmidt said that deputies interviewed all the partygoers, and were satisfied that Lane’s death was accidental. “She’d only been to the Judd house a couple of times. She wasn’t legally drunk, but she may have had enough that she became confused as she was leaving, and turned the wrong way as she came over the shoulder of the hill,” Schmidt said.
    A witness called the volunteer fire department, and a rescue squad reached the car within ten minutes. Lane was taken to the emergency room, where Dr. Russell Gleason delivered a healthy 7-pound, 4-ounce full-term baby even as the boy’s mother was dying of extensive and what Gleason called “surely fatal” brain injuries.
    The baby will be remanded to the care of Minnesota child-protective services…
    There was one bad photograph of the wrecked car sitting at the base of the bluff. The picture had been taken with a flash of some kind—were flashbulbs still used by news photographers in 1969? There were a few white faces in the background, unrecognizable, and three cops close to the car. One of them was a young Big Curly.
     
    T HE NEXT PAPER came out on July 31, and oddly, Virgil thought, there was no mention of the Miracle Baby. Not a single word. In his hometown, he thought, there would have been recurring stories for a month.
    He went to the dailies at Worthington and Sioux Falls, and found stories similar to that from the Bluestem Record. But the dailies were farther away, and the death happened the same day of the first manned landing on the moon, and so was tucked away in the back of the papers.
    He thought about it for a while, then called Stryker, and told him about the story. “You know, I’ve never heard that,” Stryker said. “You would have thought I’d have heard it. I mean, it’d be something that people talked about.”
    “Got drowned out by the noise from the moon landing,” Virgil said. “So go over to the hospital, and find out what happened to the kid. I mean, kick somebody’s ass off the