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do…” And then, “Time to go to sleep, baby. Bulls-eye marks the spot.”
    I looked closer at the white satin ribbon that joined the eleven heart-shaped cutouts with photos. On the third photo it was clear that the ribbon had been cut and retaped to the next photo. Could she have simply run out of ribbon? Maybe. But knowing how perfectionists operate, she would have been more likely to redo the entire display to avoid an interruption in the design. But if something changed in the design — if a photo had been removed, for example — it would easier to cut the ribbon like she did and join it to the next photo in the line.
    I started to get a sick feeling right about then. It came on faster than food poisoning from bad tuna. I checked to make sure Christy was still occupied leading the afternoon songfest with her off-key pack of kids. And indeed she was. I opened the door that held the calendar and cutouts and was greeted by a set of steep stairs that led into a basement. The door creaked as I closed it and pulled the cord on the overhead light to illuminate my descent into the musty, dirtfloored habitat. As my feet hit the bottom, I was immediately struck by the dampness of the area. Moist conditions tend to accentuate other odors, such as feces and blood and death.
    I turned on another light at the foot of the stairs. The walls were brick with cracked mortar.
    And then I felt it.
    I saw the desperation in the child’s eyes.
    I felt the fear spreading across the dank space.
    I sensed the suffocating torture of dying slowly at the hands of a crazy woman.

    Fletcher told me, “Bulls-eye marks the spot.” I canvassed the small basement and saw a large dartboard hanging on the far wall, near the corner. The center of the dartboard had a red dot…a bulls-eye. I quickly crossed to the spot and removed the dartboard. Behind it, I found a section of bricks about eighteen inches tall and twelve inches wide that had obviously been removed and put back in place. Finding a crowbar nearby, I easily lifted the bricks away from the dirt. The smell of death gave it away long before my fingers touched the fingers of the baby.
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    It’s taken me several weeks to process all this. I learned fairly quickly that Christy killed the baby before the two teenage girls went to work for her. I also found out that Social Services hadn’t been making regular checks at her home because, after all, she was a multi-award-winning, thoughtful, cheerful, church-going, Christian woman who had been given the moniker of “saint.” Nobody could have guessed that Christy was on high doses of four strong drugs to fight severe bipolar disorder and depression and that she’d stopped taking two of them, which pushed her into a cascading psychotic break. At the moment when her mind splintered, she was holding the baby who wouldn’t stop screaming and that’s when she probably said, “Time to go to sleep, baby,” and proceeded to suffocate it before burying it half-alive in the wall of her basement. The problem was that Christy was so out of it, she didn’t see Fletcher watching the whole thing as he hid in the basement behind the water heater.
    I don’t question how a woman can do that to a baby. I know that evil lingers in the minds of everyone. It just takes the right fuse to ignite it. I know that people looked at my own father and thought he was a great man. I also know that I didn’t have a chance in hell of convincing anyone that he
was a monster and that my brother and I were at his mercy. You can’t judge a book by its cover.
    And I don’t question how a fourteen-year-old boy can emerge from the bowels of hell with only a small part of his brain functioning and be able to speak to me with his mind. I don’t question the “coincidence” of being chosen that day to speak at Fletcher’s school or the “synchronicity” that he “just