By the time he got back to the motel it was dark out. The sky was littered with stars, the moon was huge and there wasn't a cloud in sight but despite the brightness, Dean was still having trouble unlocking the door. He was holding a six pack, a box with a pie in it, a bag of donuts and the key to the room. Not to mention the donut in his mouth preventing him from calling out to Sam. He shifted the weight of everything onto one hand and quickly slid the key through the hole only to discover by the sound of one of the beers shattering onto the cement that he hadn't been fast enough. And to make matters worse he yelled "Shit" without thinking and dropped the Boston Crème out of his mouth and onto the puddle of beer and broken glass.
Groaning he nudged the door open with his toe and finally walked in. Sam was asleep on the bed with his shoes still on and his laptop open. Not wanting to wake him up, Dean put the beer and donuts on the table in the kitchenette as quietly as possible, crept over to the table by the crappy TV, sat, put the pie down and started untying his shoes. By the time he got them off he realized that he needed a fork for his pie and Sam was awake and sitting up.
"So who were you today?" Sam turned on the light and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "Lead singer of Metallica?"
"Original bassist from The Who." He walked back to the kitchenette, grabbed two beers, tossed one at Sam, sat back down and looked at his pie longingly. He'd forgotten a fork again.
"Officer Entwistle, nice. So what'd you find out?" Sam walked over and sat at the table with Dean, grabbing his laptop on the way.
"What, you mean besides that this whole town is obsessed with Ducks?" He twisted the cap off of the beer and flicked it onto the table. "Get this, the bridge supposedly floods, takes off with a baby and then dries up before the cops get there. Almost makes it looks like the parents chucked their kids off the bridge or something."
"Funny you should say that, check this out," Sam opened his laptop and pushed it towards Dean. "Now, there's a lot of old folklore and urban legends involving bridges but when I went through the archives of the town's local newspaper I came across this. Back in late thirties this guy, Robert Patterson, lived near that bridge. He had a wife named Claire. He was a nice, normal guy or so it seemed. He was in the paper a few times for winning pumpkin growing contests and stuff like that."
"Get to the point Sam, how does this connect to our missing babies?" Dean took a swig of his beer impatiently.
"I'm getting there. So anyways there's an article in January of 1939 announcing Claire's pregnancy. Later on there's pictures of her at the town fair that summer with a swollen belly. She gave birth on September first, and it was a girl, Madeline. But then randomly eight months later, Mr. Patterson flips out. The neighbors hear him yelling at Claire one day that he suddenly thinks she cheated on him and that Madeline isn't really his daughter. The neighbors contacted the police when it had been quiet for awhile and when the police got there they found Claire stabbed to death on the kitchen floor. Later they found Mr. Patterson on the bridge just staring over the edge. He told them that he killed his wife and threw his baby off the bridge. Then look at this, May 1950, four babies mysteriously vanished off of Beaver Bridge. Then the next May, five babies. All in freak rainstorms or random flooding."
"So are you saying crazy fathers are throwing their babies off of bridges and what, the mothers are just going along with it?" Dean asked.
"No, I think there's more to it than that. I'm not sure exactly how it connects but look," he pulled up the calendar on his computer. "May 20th is in three days so odds are we don't have much time to figure it out. At least one more baby is going to disappear on that bridge."
"Well the sheriff gave me the names of the families that lost their babies already this month and their addresses. We'll have to check them out tomorrow. And talk to the teenagers around here too." He put his empty bottle on the table, peeled off his long sleeve shirt and then the tee under it and headed toward his bed.
"Why the teenagers?" Sam asked untying his shoes.
"Because," Dean pulled the map from his pocket and tossed it to Sam who caught it with one hand. "There has to be a reason or a ghost story that they would have passed around about this bridge. There's gotta be a reason that they changed its name to Crybaby."
