The small bundle rests quietly in the crook of his right arm.
Hank careens through town in his pickup truck - drives to the hospital with one hand on the wheel. The closest ambulance is in Morden today - a good twenty minutes away. He wraps the tiny boy in a clean rag and phones the hospital to tell them what has happened. He fears it may be too late to help her anyway. No one man could move Baby Frouten, not even Hank the Bear.
Hank cuts the cord with his pocket knife.
No one knew she was that fat under her cotton shifts. And he can’t tell if the buzzing sound he hears is in his brain or if it comes from the flies lighting on the crimson pool that seeps out from under the door.īaby! he roars and kicks the door down with one go. He follows them outside to the washroom at the side of the garage.Ī dizziness comes over Hank. He also sees the bright red spots on the cement and thinks for a second that they’re petals. It’s more than an hour later when Hank rolls out from beneath Dick Wilson’s nearly new ’62 Ford and sees that Baby isn’t there. Hank can’t always be there.Ĭramps start up in her belly, worse than the ones that come when she bleeds. Hank is her only friend he looks out for her, tries to keep the bad boys away. He lets her sit on a bench and watch him while he works. She goes to see her friend, Hank the Bear - the burly man who owns the gas station. Sweat sluices between her fat thighs as she struggles against the white heat of the July afternoon. Read moreīaby Frouten trudges the quarter mile from her home on the edge of town to the Texaco station on the highway. Except maybe that nice Inspector Frank Foote. But she can't even make the call, for the crimes taking place in her yard - someone has been deadheading her lobelia and someone has put a pretty little collar on her cat - will just make the police think she's crazy. Beryl hadn't been of much help to the police in the case of the first dead woman-she'd only tripped over the body, after all - but when things begin happening around her own home, she wishes they could be of some help to her. As she follows the horrific discoveries in The Winnipeg Free Press, Beryl thinks she sees a pattern emerging. It isn't long, however, before another body turns up and then another. A badly shaken Beryl is questioned and escorted home. Among the many officers who arrive on the scene is Inspector Frank Foote, whom she has seen around her neighborhood. In a panic, Beryl struggles out to the main road and manages to hail a cellphone-toting passerby who notifies the police. It's a dead woman with mushrooms sprouting in her mouth. Beryl Kyte, a letter carrier who lives in the Winnipeg neighbourhood of Norwood Flats, goes out for a hike one beautiful spring Sunday and literally trips over a body in the woods of the St.
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