“And could have gotten you both shot up with those pellets,” I say.
Those pellets.
He was carrying a gun loaded with buckshot.
Like the weapon used to kill Ellen.
The weapon Lane swore he didn’t have.
Yet Lane also swore he murdered Ellen.
A flash of Tomas saying Lane had a friend who died last year. Then Felicity saying she and Sidra hung out with two kids from the Second Settlement.
Shit.
Questions and theories ping through my brain, and I squeeze my eyes shut and push them back. Gather more data. Work this through.
“Where is Sidra?” Felicity says.
“That’s what I’m asking you,” Baptiste says, as they lock glowers. “You took her back to your grandfather, didn’t you?”
“She’s missing?” Felicity’s eyes snap. “You lost your baby, and now you’ve lost Sidra?”
“I didn’t lose—”
“Enough,” Dalton says. “Felicity, go sit over there with Petra. Baptiste, you and Sidra have a baby?”
“Had,” Felicity says. “Had and lost—”
Baptiste swings on her,
and Dalton and I both raise our weapons, ready to order him back, but it’s only a warning lunge, accompanied by a snarl.
“Felicity?” I say. “Sit and be quiet, please. Even if he provokes you.”
“I’m not the one—” Baptiste begins.
“You don’t get along,” I say. “That appears to be an understatement. But we need answers, and we aren’t getting them with you two spitting at each other like bobcats.”
That is really what they look like, backing up, glaring at one another. It reminds me of Diana and Dalton, Diana convinced he’s keeping her from me, and Dalton hating the way she’s treated me. The lover and the friend as rivals. It doesn’t need to be that way, but sometimes it is, and as with Dalton and Diana, it goes deeper, to a fundamental personality clash that the competition only exacerbates. I suspect that’s the same here—that even without Sidra in the middle, these two never got along.
I walk to Baptiste’s other side, forcing him to turn away from Felicity.
“You have a baby,” I say.
He nods, and I see the struggle to remain calm, not to shout that his child is missing and his wife, too, and he doesn’t have time to stand around answering my questions. The fact that he’s trying suggests I was right—he’s not usually a hothead who threatens strangers with shotguns. He’s backed into a wall and acting out of character.
Is he? If he killed Ellen, then shooting Petra wouldn’t be “out of character.”
Tuck that aside. Focus.
“A girl or a boy?” I ask.
“A girl. Summer.”
“How old is she?”
“Thirty-eight days,” he says, so quickly that I suspect, if given a moment, he could tell me the number of hours, too.