A Witch In Time (19 page)

Were we back to discussing Mel’s petite uterus? Oy.

“I would have stopped in earlier, had I known it was you,” she continued. “Honestly, I thought you were pregnant with just one. Gosh, I feel bad now. I’ll be going home this evening.”

“You two know each other, I take it?” I asked, trying to keep my sense of humor.

“From Baby Bellies,” Mel confirmed. “My fitness class. I was going until Dr. Jonas ordered me on bed rest.”

“Twin girls?”

Mel nodded. “Sophie June and Isabella Rose. You?”

“A little boy. Harry the third. That was pretty important to my husband. Not Harold, though. I put my foot down about that. I thought two Harolds in a row were enough.” She laughed a little self-consciously. “Speaking of the baby, I’d better be getting back. H3 is going to be wanting to eat. That’s what I’ve decided for a nickname for him, you see. H1 will be grandpa, H2 his dad, and he’ll be H3. How else are you supposed to keep them apart? Besides, Harry is waiting for me. My Harry. My husband, I mean.” She groaned and shook her head. “See what I mean? It’s self-defense.”

Mel laughed politely.

Frannie glanced at me. “Well . . . I don’t mean to be rude . . . But if you have those magazines handy?”

“Magazines?” Mel asked, looking at me now, too.

“Mom must have picked up one that had been left in the waiting room by the Watkinses when she brought in the stack for you to flip through earlier,” I explained. Embarrassed because I wasn’t going to be much help in my somewhat incapacitated state, I was forced to point to the stack of magazines on the floor. “I would help, but . . .”

“That’s okay.” Frannie crouched down in her bathrobe and slippers and began to flip through the stack swiftly. “Oh, thank goodness!” Finding what she wanted, she straightened the stack.

I caught sight of the magazine as she rose carefully to her feet. It looked like a men’s sporting magazine, like one my grandfather would have enjoyed. She caught me looking and blushed.

“I scratched down some personal thoughts in it while I was in labor,” she quickly explained, waving it slightly in my direction. I thought I saw something fall from it, but it happened so fast and when I looked around her feet, there was nothing there. Oh well. It was probably just one of those annoying inserts anyway. “It’s my husband’s magazine, really, but I wanted to capture what I had recorded there before it ends up getting lost in his bathroom reading stash.” She turned to leave, pausing at the door. “Congratulations, Mel, on the babies.”

“You too, Frannie.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me that Margo and Jane had been uncharacteristically silent throughout the bulk of this exchange between the two new moms. But now that Frannie had gone, Jane got up quietly behind her, passed the baby she’d been holding over to Mel, then tiptoed stealthily over to the door to watch Frannie retreating down the hall with her prize. She closed the door just as quietly on its pneumatic hinges, then turned back to face the rest of us.

“What’s up, Jane?” Mel asked, her face betraying a bright curiosity. The baby had awakened in midshuffle and was now making snuffly noises. On mommy autopilot in the way only very experienced mothers can be, Mel reached for the recently prepared bottle and plopped it in her mouth. “There you go, Isabella.”

Jane’s face displayed an avid excitement known to gossipmongers everywhere. “I know her, too. She and her husband are clients of the firm.” Jane “worked” at her husband’s law firm on a part-time basis. Mel had told me once that Jane did it gratis, solely for the benefit of having easy access to private information she might not otherwise be privy to. In other words, Prime Scoopage. “Greg might even have been the partner to handle their case last year,” she told Mel, “if I remember correctly.”

“Case?” Mel echoed.

My intuition kicked in. I had a sudden feeling as to where this was heading.

“Their
divorce
case.”

Yup, that’s what I thought. Greg was a divorce lawyer, a partner at the firm of Turnbow, Whitehouse, Churchill, and Craven, along with Jane’s husband, Phil. Young, smart, and very savvy, Greg had risen quickly through the ranks of the midsized law firm and made partner by virtue of his seemingly effortless ability to see his clients through one of the most emotionally difficult times of their lives without losing their shirts in the process.

The Watkins family had struck me as being very simple, down-to-earth people. Not the kind who would be overly worried about preserving all in a divorce case, because fairness and equity were a way of life to them. Not Greg’s usual type of client, surely.

“Divorce!” Mel exclaimed. Her eyes lit up at the scoop. “But how—”

“Obviously they didn’t go through with it,” Jane said. “Harry Jr. backed down soon enough when Frannie found out she was pregnant. By all accounts, his desperation to have a child played into the dissatisfaction with the marriage, so when that was taken out of the equation . . .” She let her voice trail off meaningfully and shrugged, leaving everyone to come up with their own conclusions.

Not so much of a scoop after all. I could see Mel’s interest waning.

And so could Jane. But her information wasn’t quite spent after all. She stood at the end of Mel’s bed, her hands clasped ever so piously before her. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “he wouldn’t have been quite so hasty if the private investigator’s report had been forwarded to him.”

Two pairs of eyebrows rose in response to Jane’s revelation: one set Mel‘s, the other’s, Margo’s. I was trying to remain neutral, rather than play into their need for scandal . . . but I will admit, I was paying attention. The only difference between me and Mel? Her interest in gossip and intrigue was purely for the titillation factor. Mine was to further my understanding of human nature. At least that’s what I told myself. The need to understand was strong within me; it always had been. Why people did the crazy, mixed-up, sometimes completely nonsensical things that they did. Inquiring minds (mine) want to know.

“He hired a private investigator?” Margo asked. The twin in her arms was beginning to snuffle and shift around, too.

“No,” Jane said. “We hired the private investigator. It is standard operating procedure in divorce cases at the firm for, shall we say, families of extended means. Since the Watkinses own all the gas stations in town, they have a significant amount of cash, property, and investments in their portfolio that needed to be protected.”

So the down-to-earth Watkins family was rolling in it . . . who knew? They certainly didn’t flaunt it. Unlike some people I knew. Case in point? I rolled my gaze dispassionately toward Margo, who had a brand-new Vera Bradley satchel purse at her feet, an expensively maintained manipedi, shoes and clothes that probably cost as much as a week’s pay for me, and who sported a fresh blow-out for her
(cough,
bleached,
cough)
blond hair.

“So, Jane,” Mel prodded, “what did the investigator find?”

Jane sat down again, stretching out her moment in the spotlight for as long as possible. “Well, I don’t know if I should say. It is privileged information, you understand.”

“You know us, Jane. It absolutely goes no farther than this room,” Margo told her solemnly.

I tried very hard not to roll my eyes. Trust me, it was a supreme effort.

Mel shot me a look.
“Right,
Maggie?” she demanded.

But I couldn’t help it when my eyebrows stretched upward in disbelief. “You’re worried about
me?”

She forced me to agree to those terms before she would allow Jane to continue.

“What they found,” Jane said in a voice that quivered with the excitement of the moment, “was that she had been having an affair.”

Mel sucked in her breath in delight. “And the husband didn’t know?”

“Not a clue. Evidently that wasn’t a contributing factor to their divorcing.”

Mel and Margo exchanged a glance, as though they were sharing thoughts telepathically. And maybe they were. There was almost an electric back-and-forth telegraphing of energy hanging in the air.

“Why
were
they getting a divorce?” Margo asked.

Jane hesitated—not because she was having second thoughts, but for effect. “Because he wanted a family and they were having trouble and he thought she was taking measures to avoid getting pregnant.”

The entire conversation was making me feel slimy by default . . . but there was a hint of something important lurking there.

“When was this, Jane?” Mel asked her.

“Hm. No more than a year ago, certainly.”

There was a moment of silence as four women, yes, including me, began counting backward. Because if a standard pregnancy lasted for forty weeks, that was ten months of the “no more than a year” right there.

“He called it off because they’d reconciled,” Jane said simply.

They’d reconciled . . . and all of a sudden, poof, baby. What fortuitous timing.

Or was it baby, then reconciliation?

“And someone at the firm made the unilateral decision to just file the private investigator’s report in his file for future reference. Just in case it ever came back to that, the report would be there.” She laughed. “The whole situation was so notable because of how it suddenly came to light, and because of how it just as quickly was tucked away into the closet again. It always bothered me, that the husband never had a chance to make that decision for himself... but that’s family law for you.”

Mel’s brow furrowed. “Well, I wouldn’t want anyone making that decision for me,” she said decisively.

Margo and Jane said nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a single murmur of agreement.

And all of a sudden I was hit by a strong, heavy feeling that completely distracted me from the gossip about poor Frannie and Harry Watkins. Completely unrelated . . . but not, somehow.

And that made no sense whatsoever.

Sometimes intuition can be frustrating. Visions, symbols, feelings—the “sign” language of Spirit—all are often given via a type of metaphysical shorthand. It would be much easier if one’s spirit guide could just make it standard operating procedure to appear before them and either speak in complete sentences, or hand them a scroll or even a computer printout or something. Instead, a message from beyond might come in any form and often must be interpreted according to the belief system and experiences of the recipient. Which made it a very tenuous process at best. Still, for every message that went undeciphered, the ones that made a real difference could not be discounted. I was grateful for every last one of them.

Of course that didn’t help me to understand how Mel’s situation could be in the least bit tied to Frannie Watkins. The two were shirttail acquaintances at best.

“I wonder who she was having an affair with,” Margo mused.

The rest of us seemed to be wondering the same thing.

“Oh my God!”

Melanie had slapped her hand to her forehead, jarring baby Isabella awake. The baby began drawing again at the almost empty bottle, forestalling any squalling that might have been about to erupt.

“What?” Jane asked, breathless.

“I had completely forgotten this,” Melanie said. “You remember I told you all I had met Frannie at Baby Bellies? Back before I had been relegated to bed rest?”

Margo and Jane nodded encouragement. I pretended not to be listening too closely, but I totally was.

Isabella had actually finished her small bottle. Mel turned the baby up onto her shoulder and began to gently pat and rub her back. “Well,” she began importantly, her eyes flashing, “a guy came early to pick her up one night. While the rest of us were in the middle of our mom-ified lunges and hippo squats, I could see her in the coatroom with him, thanks to the mirrors on the wall. They were arguing. He grabbed her arm, she pushed him away.” She paused then, a mischievous glint in her eye. “Cute guy, too. Dark and dangerous. Motorcycle hottie in a black leather jacket. Not my type, but Maggie here would like him well enough.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Margo surveying me with a sudden renewed interest. “Really? But I thought Maggie was seeing, oh, what’s his name? That bland sheriff’s deputy?”

Bland? I was insulted, on Tom’s behalf.

“Tom Fielding,” Melanie supplied, ever so helpfully, as she patted her daughter’s back. “But that’s over.”

That would be Special Task Force Investigator Tom Fielding to you.
And why was she helping Margo out with my business, anyway?

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Margo said.

A little unkindly, I thought.

All the things I would like to say to her but shouldn’t started boiling in my brain. I stared at her. I fumed.

Perhaps sensing my supreme annoyance, Mel handed Isabella off to me—I accepted, gratefully, happy for the distraction—and then motioned to Margo to bring Sophie to her.

“So. Maggie.” Margo straightened in her chair and smoothed her now wrinkled linen capris, the light in her eyes making her resemble a viper on the make. “Who are we seeing now?”

“Marcus Quinn,” Mel supplied, laughing when I gave her the Evil Eye. “Quite the hunk-o’-honey. Tall, dark, very good-looking. A little bit of the bad boy, I think, though. The last time I saw him, he was wearing his hair tied back at his neck and a pair of black leather pants.” She nodded at their horrified faces. “Seriously.”

And who should choose that very moment to knock on Mel’s closed door? Your favorite bad boy and mine, although I sometimes had a hard time thinking of him that way these days: Marcus, of course.

He popped his head in, a hand covering his eyes just in case. “Okay for me to come in?”

I can barely express how happy I was to see him just then. All the events of the day came crashing in on me at once, and they expanded outward in one great big bang worth of emotion. “Marcus!” I squeaked. I didn’t even care that Mel and her cronies were watching on in amusement. I was holding Isabella, so I couldn’t roll my wheelchair over to greet him properly. I had to wait until he found his way over to me.