Worth More Dead

that Roland phoned her late in the evening to tell her that he’d suffered a blackout and couldn’t remember what he had done for several hours. He had had blackouts and “spells” before, which he attributed to his stroke; nevertheless, Della found this sudden loss of memory a little too convenient.
    Roland had been late picking Bébé up earlier in the day, arriving at noon rather than at 10:30 as he’d promised. They hadn’t spent very much time together. He told her then that he promised she would babysit for Beth Bixler’s children.
    When Bébé got home late Sunday night, she found the house in an uproar. Of course, it wasn’t the first time she experienced some kind of emergency in her family. Over the years she had known any number of traumatic times: she witnessed her parents’ violent fights, her mother’s fear, her parents’ divorce, and her mother’s disappearance, which proved to be her kidnapping and murder. There was the theft of the family safe, the time her father said he’d been beaten so badly he had to go to the hospital, his fights with Tim, and all the times Della and Roland broke up.
    Rather than becoming accustomed to unexpected events, it was natural that Bébé was sensitized to danger and particularly fearful. In the month since her father had been out of the house, it had been almost serene, at least compared with what it was like when he lived there.
    Now everyone in his family tried to reassure Tim that he didn’t need to worry anymore. The police knew what had happened, the family was all together now (with the exception of Roland), and the doors were locked. Eventually Tim calmed down and Bébé headed upstairs.
    She was startled to see that there were two carryall bags in Tim’s room. She recognized them. One belonged to her. It was a white canvas bag with “Slumberjack” printed on the side and her name written in pen in small letters. She had kept her old sleeping bag in it, but lately she used it to carry things to school. The other was a blue nylon bag with “Mum’s” embroidered on the side with red thread. It was a laundry bag from a local firm. Both bags had been around for a long time, a familiar sight in the household.
    But Bébé had seen those bags earlier in the day, and they weren’t in her adoptive mother’s home at that time. They had been in Roland’s green van when he picked her up at noon. She was positive of that. Her dad’s van was cluttered with a whole bunch of stuff, and she had moved the bags out of the way to make room for her little brother, André, to sit down.
    Now, here they were back in the house, in Tim’s bedroom. They were full of items, but she didn’t check to see what was inside. When Bébé told Della what she had found, Della called the police and asked that the officers return. “I want to report a suspect, too,” she said.
    She told the police officers that her estranged husband, Roland, was quite capable of either committing or orchestrating a crime like burglarizing his family’s home and threatening her son. She also showed them the two bags, explaining that Bébé had seen those bags in Roland’s van earlier in the day. She believed that he must have brought them back into her house at the time her son was assaulted. He knew the alarm code, she said; she hadn’t bothered to change it. She allowed him to do his laundry in her house, and he still came to visit André. Still, even though she knew Roland to be a liar and a cheat, she hadn’t considered him a real danger to any of them. Now she wasn’t so sure.
    Bogen and Emm took the suspect bags and logged them into evidence.
    Bébé Pitre had a really bad feeling. Her father had acted out of character all day. After he picked her up at noon, he actually asked her how Tim was doing and made a number of positive comments about her stepbrother. He never said anything nice about Tim. She knew that her father and Tim hadn’t gotten along for years, and it was weird that all of a sudden her dad talked about Tim in such a solicitous and complimentary way.
    “How’s Tim doing?” Roland had asked her. “I’d like to spend more time with him, sit down and talk with him and become pals.”
    That caught her off guard. The two had hated each other for as far back as she could remember. Why was her father suddenly doing this about-face?
    Bébé Pitre was 15, a very intelligent 15, and she was no longer the easily manipulated little girl who always did what her father