The Spring Cleaning Murders by Dorothy Cannell Page A

and never let him out of my arms until he was forty. Coupled with the urge to kill my own child. I was also torn between wishing I’d asked Clarice Whitcombe to phone Ben at the restaurant and being glad he was spared the panic gripping me.
    It started to rain lightly, and I shivered in my thin cardigan. Thank heavens there wasn’t any thunder to drown out my voice as I continued to shout Tam’s name. A seagull answered with a wild screech that set my heart pounding, but as I blundered on down the road I fastened on the hope that somehow, miraculously, Tam was already safely home waiting for me. Please let the only thing seriously wrong be my lurid imagination!
    But what if Tam had wandered too close to the cliff edge? His fall might have been broken by one of the jutting rocks. I could picture his small battered body trapped in a crevice. Even more agonizing was the thought that he might have gone tumbling straight down onto the narrow strip of pebbled beach that separated the cliffs from the sea. I was moving at what seemed like a snail’s pace along the road; but surely if Tam were ahead of me I should have caught sight of him by now. He couldn’t have left Crabapple Tree Cottage more than a few minutes before me; he wasn’t usually an enthusiastic walker. In fact, he, far more often than Abbey, demanded to be carried.
    I was a hundred yards or so beyond the church and hoarse from shouting when I heard someone come up behind me—but not my son. It was Madrid Miller, who with her sister had recently moved into Tall Chimneys.
    “Mrs. Haskell! I was on my way to your house to ask if your gardener would come along some time to take a look at one of the trees in our garden. It needs pruning, but I’m afraid to start lopping willy-nilly.” She was now trotting alongside me. Seemingly unaware of my preoccupation, she reminded me that she and her sister were hosting the Hearthside Guild meeting on the following Tuesday morning. And she suggested that I might like to bring Jonas along with me that day in the car, as she’d heard he was getting up in years.
    I barely slowed to give her a glance. On first meeting Madrid Miller some six weeks earlier, I had thought unkindly that she resembled an aging wood nymph. Her brown hair hung almost waist-length from a middle parting, and she had watery green eyes that peered uncertainly out at the world from behind granny glasses. The free spirit was abundantly evident in her long sack-colored frock, ropes of dried rosebud necklace, and thonged sandals. I sputtered a high-pitched explanation of why I couldn’t stop to talk, the only semi-coherent words of which were Tam’s name and “lost.”
    “You must be out of mind with fright.” Madrid Miller managed to keep pace with me despite her flip-flopping sandals. “Poor you! I remember being sick with worry one day when the postman left the front gate open and my darling Jessica got out on the road. She was only quite tiny at the time and the thought of her being abducted or run over or—
    “But you found her?” I stopped walking, forcing myself to peer over the cliff edge.
    “A neighbor saw her and brought her back.”
    “That’s good!” I took a small measure of comfort in Jessica’s safe return. I needed to be reminded and wanted most desperately to believe that most often there is the sort of happy ending that leaves a mother saying years later with a roll of the eyes and a mock sigh: “How well I remember the time you scared me half to death ...”
    “Yes, we were lucky that time.” Madrid Miller flapped after me as I turned away from the cliff
    "That time?” Suddenly I couldn’t move; it was as though I had been visited by Doom in human guise.
    “We lost our darling when she was only three.”
    “Lost?”
    “She died.”
    “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Numbly I watched the rain, or it might have been tears, drip down her face.
    “It’s been thirteen years.” She adjusted the granny glasses. “Yet it seems like