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    Unknown Baby Girl
    Unknown Baby Girl
    Unknown Baby Girl
    Ebook72 pages58 minutes

    Unknown Baby Girl

    By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A former LAPD homicide detective, Carolyn moved to Oregon to escape crime. Yet when she takes a job making houses energy efficient, she discovers a baby's skeleton in a crawl space.

    She can't ignore the forgotten bones; they speak to her. So, she uses her old skills to track down shocking family secrets, still reverberating from long, long ago.

    Gritty and powerful, Unknown Baby Girl is one of Edgar nominee Kristine Kathryn Rusch's most memorable stories.

    "Kristine Kathryn Rusch's crime stories are exceptional, both in plot and in style."

    —Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene Magazine

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWMG Publishing
    Release dateDec 30, 2016
    ISBN9781386038689
    Unknown Baby Girl
    Author

    Kristine Kathryn Rusch

    USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

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      Book preview

      Unknown Baby Girl - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      Unknown Baby Girl

      UNKNOWN BABY GIRL

      KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

      WMG Publishing, Inc.

      CONTENTS

      Unknown Baby Girl

      Newsletter sign-up

      About the Author

      Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      UNKNOWN BABY GIRL

      The bones were tiny. Carolyn eased them out of the old insulation, her gloved fingers brushing against newsprint and decaying fabric. She was wedged into a crawlspace, her legs hanging out, feet brushing against the basement wall. It was hot and close, and even through her breathing mask, she could smell mold.

      Coming back, she yelled, knowing her voice would sound muffled to Linda, her assistant. In an area this small, she had to let Linda know she was moving, or she might accidentally kick her.

      Carolyn cupped the bones between her hands. With them, she caught a bit of insulation, the newsprint, and some rotted material. Linda put her hands on Carolyn’s legs, and guided her down. When Carolyn reached the edge, she wriggled backwards, careful to keep her balance even though her hands were full.

      She didn’t realize, until the light from her helmet met the light from Linda’s in the glare of the single bulb the family had kept in the large rambling old basement, that the bones she held belonged to a small child.

      Tiny bones were part of her work. The walls of houses, particularly old houses, were filled with bones and burrows and nests. Most of the bones belonged to mice or rats, but Carolyn had found a few cats and more than her share of raccoons. She’d encountered a litter of puppies abandoned by their mother and, on one of the scariest afternoons of her new life, a live possum.

      The bones she now cradled had once been a living breathing child. She could tell that from the shape of the skull, the size of the pelvis (female), and the thickness of the bones. This wasn’t a stillborn baby. This child had been a few months old when someone had buried it in the crawlspace.

      Linda poked at the ribs. This isn’t a cat, she said, and that was when Carolyn looked up.

      Of course, Linda didn’t know. Linda had installed insulation her entire working career. She’d started out as a secretary to the jobs manager, and then had moved into the field, first as a volunteer, and then as an installer. She’d had to prove herself, like most women did in non-traditional professions, and what she had proven was that she could do better than most of the guys. Her size helped—she fit into the tiny spaces that most men couldn’t breach—but so did her sense of precision.

      Linda could install more bats per hour than anyone on the team.

      She was assisting Carolyn only because Carolyn couldn’t convince her to stay home. At the moment, Linda couldn’t fit into any crawl spaces. She was five months pregnant with her first child, and she didn’t seem to realize that she should be back at the desk. No matter how much Carolyn or Linda’s doctor or her friends argued that she shouldn’t be around the old insulation or the mold or the asbestos that filled the houses where the team worked, Linda refused to take time off.

      Carolyn glanced at Linda’s bulging belly, and then closed her eyes, not sure she wanted to say anything. But there was no way to keep this quiet.

      It’s a baby, isn’t it? Linda asked.

      Carolyn opened her eyes. Linda’s eyes, covered in goggles, peered at her over the breathing mask that Carolyn made her wear to every job.

      Yeah, Carolyn said.

      We have to report this, don’t we? Linda asked.

      Carolyn nodded.

      Christ on a crutch, Linda said with some annoyance. Why would anyone hire us if they’d hidden a baby in the crawl space?

      So much for maternal sensitivity. Carolyn sighed and set the tiny bones on top of an open plank.

      I don’t know, she said, but I suspect this child has been here for a long, long time.

      It took the local police a long, long time to come. Carolyn found some chairs behind the rusted wringer washer. She brought them out, dusted them off, and made Linda sit down.

      Then Carolyn poked at the bones, knowing she’d already ruined the crime scene.

      They were brittle and yellow with age. Some of the smaller bones were missing. She wasn’t sure if that meant an animal got at the corpse or if a baby that young didn’t have fully formed finger bones or if some of the tiniest bones had already decayed.

      When she’d worked homicide in Los Angeles, most of the corpses she saw were fresh. She’d worked some old deaths—skeletons found at building sites, or in the trunks of junkyard cars—but

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