Cradle and All (7 page)

“Don’t believe it, Anne,” he said.

She looked over at him and realized he had been watching her. “What?”

“Whatever it was about me that suddenly put that frown on your face,” Tom answered.

The man was also a little too perceptive for comfort.

“Let me take Tommy for a while and give you a chance to stretch out,” Tom offered.

Carefully, as though afraid to break the blessed spell of quiet, Anne handed Tom the sleeping baby. She lay on her side and watched the gentle way Tom cradled the baby to him, how he smiled as he tenderly stroked his son’s hair.

Then Tommy stirred and stretched, opened his eyes, took one look at Tom and let out a wail. “Well, it was a nice twenty seconds while it lasted,” Tom said good-naturedly.

He went about the business of changing the little boy’s diaper, and Tommy continued to wail throughout the entire process.

“Maybe he does have colic,” Anne said.

“He just wants you to hold him,” Tom said.

“How can you be so sure?”

He scooted over to Anne and handed her the freshly diapered baby. Tommy immediately snuggled close within her arms and stopped crying.

“I rest my case, Judge.”

Humor shone in Tom’s eyes as the sun streaked gold through his hair. He suddenly reminded Anne of a blond Lucifer—the brightest and best of all the angels, before his fall.

Tom was close beside her—so close that she could smell the clean, woodsy scent of him mixed with that enticing spice of incense.

“The boy knows where he wants to be,” Tom’s deep voice said. “I don’t blame him.”

She could feel his breath against her hair as he spoke, the warmth of his long, lean body. Slowly, with focused intent, Tom’s eyes caressed her light copper bangs, her high cheekbones, her too-short nose, her too-wide mouth. Only, when his eyes touched them, her features no longer felt flawed, but beautiful.

Anne had never been made love to with just a look before. Her face felt hot at the same time that chills raced up her spine.

“I promised my mother I’d never get involved with a Porsche man,” she said, hoping Tom couldn’t hear the hint of panic in her voice.

His eyes brushed the pink rising in her cheeks. “I’ll put it up for sale tomorrow.”

Suddenly Anne was finding it very difficult to draw in a steady breath.

“What will you ask for it?” she said.

His eyes focused intently on her lips. “Thinking of making me an offer?”

“Maybe I’d best check out the mileage first,” she said, acutely aware that they were no longer talking about a car.

His eyes rose to hers. “Keep in mind, Anne. A little mileage often makes an engine run smoother and handle better around the curves.”

His voice was way too warm and she felt way too hot.

“No need to worry,” he said, as though reading her mind once again. “As much as I’m tempted to offer you a test drive, they’re not in keeping with the policy of the management.”

With one swift, fluid movement, he shifted back to the other side of the blanket.

Anne’s heart pounded in her ears.

She was used to fending off physical advances. Hell, she could handle them in her sleep. But she hadn’t been prepared for Tom’s restraint. And she knew from every sizzling nerve ending in her body that it was a great deal more dangerous.

When she met Tom’s eyes across the blanket, there was no mistaking the heat still in them. Or how perfectly he con-trolled it.

She had never met a man like him. She was beginning to think that might be because there were no other men like him.

Anne’s cell phone screeched, distracting her thoughts. She sat up, dug the phone out of her shoulder bag, flipped it open and said hello.

“It’s Fred,” her friend’s voice said in her ear. “I’ve got a possible sighting on that old rusty-red VW Beetle you were looking for.”

“Great,” Anne said, suddenly wondering if it really were. “Where?”

“One of the guys who came on shift a few minutes ago says he saw it going into a campground north of here the night before last. Ready for the directions?”

Anne dug out a pen and paper from her shoulder bag and jotted down the information Fred gave her. She thanked her friend and flipped the phone shut.

“The VW?” Tom asked.

“About forty minutes from here,” Anne said, as she began to rise, the baby still in her arms.

Tom shot to his feet. He wore the look of a different man.

“You get the baby in the car. I’ll take care of this stuff.”

Then, with an efficiency that amazed her, he gathered the remnants of their picnic lunch and beat her to the car.

* * *

T
OM
DROVE
THE
Porsche into the campground thirty-two minutes later. They met no other cars on the road. It was late in the season for skiers and early for campers. All the trailer hookups they drove past were empty.

“You realize the sighting was the night before last,” Anne said. “She may have come and gone.”

“Let’s see if there’s anyone around,” Tom said. “Hiking in this area is popular year-round. Someone might have seen her.”

Anne sensed a focused intensity in Tom. Whatever his relation to the mother of his child, it was clear to Anne that he really wanted to find her.

The area was heavily wooded, and trees blocked out the warmth of the sun.

They saw an RV pulled off onto a side road and stopped. Anne felt the cold when Tom got out of the car to go knock on its door. She was glad she was staying within the warmth of the vehicle.

A thin, dark man wearing a noisy yellow shirt answered Tom’s knock. From the shake of his head, Anne knew before Tom returned to the car that he hadn’t seen the old VW Beetle.

Tom took the winding road farther up into the hills. They climbed slowly, looking out the windows for any sign of the rusty-red car. They stopped once more for Tom to ask questions at the door of another RV on the other side of the campground. But no one answered Tom’s knock.

When the Porsche started to slide on the icy road, Tom turned the car around and headed back.

“It was a long shot that she’d still be here,” Anne said after a moment.

“Yes,” Tom agreed.

“Fred will call if there are any more sightings,” she added.

“Yes.”

Anne knew Tom was disappointed, and her words weren’t helping. She gave up, settled back and let the quiet grow between them as she gazed out the window.

White pines and spruce, thick with age, lined the road. They were majestic in their grandeur, silent sentries to thousands of sunrises. Beneath their dense canopy of green, the forest floor was covered in a white sheet of frost.

Birds flittered in and out of the branches. Soon they’d be building nests. This was Anne’s favorite time of year in the Berkshires—when new life boldly asserted itself, transforming the bareness of winter into the vibrant green and gold of spring.

She wasn’t looking for it. Which was why when she saw it, she wasn’t sure she had.

Anne came forward in her seat. “Stop!”

Tom’s reflexes were instantaneous. The car came to a halt before Anne had time to take another breath.

He turned to face her. “What is it?”

“Back there. Between the trees. I saw a flash of something red.”

Tom slowly backed up the car, following Anne’s pointing hand. She peered out the window, waiting once again to glimpse that flash of red. But when they reached the spot where she thought she had seen it, there was nothing there.

She shook her head. “I could have sworn...”

Tom shifted the car into neutral and set the brake. “Wait here,” he said as he slipped out of the driver’s seat.

She watched as he walked over to the edge of the road. He peered into the thick underbrush, then dropped to his knees. A minute later he got up, walked a few paces down the road, then squatted again to survey the terrain.

He was trying to approximate the height range of her vision out of the passenger window, she realized. When he suddenly stiffened, she knew he had seen it. Without hesitation, he started down the steep slope.

Anne was out of the car in a flash.

By the time she had reached the spot where Tom had gone over the side, he was already pushing through the frosty underbrush in the deep gully below. She made a mental note to add mountain goat to Tom’s growing list of talents.

Anne was freezing in the icy air, but she stood rooted to her spot on the road. About fifty feet in, Tom came to a stop and started clearing away fallen branches and debris. A moment later the fender of a rusty-red VW Beetle came into view.

Red Sox Rule, its bumper sticker read.

The vehicle was on its side. It took several minutes for Tom to clear away enough of the thick underbrush to be able to pry open the driver’s door.

When he leaned inside, Anne held her breath. A moment later he straightened, drew out a cross from his pocket and bowed his head in prayer.

The breath in Anne’s chest came out in a deep, sad sigh.

Up the road, inside the Porsche, a motherless baby began to cry.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
NNE
STOOD
NEXT
to State Trooper Frederica Ferguson, watching the other state troopers and Tom climb up the steep gully, carrying the draped stretcher.

It was almost dusk, and the tall trees blocked out the last of the light like the closing lid of a coffin. A wind had come up and was whistling down the open road.

Frederica took off her parka and draped it around Anne’s shoulders. “Why don’t you wait in my car? Heater’s on.”

Anne shook her head. Tommy was wrapped in a blanket nestled next to her heart, sleeping soundly, warm and secure. “We’re fine, Fred.”

Her friend nodded. Frederica seemed personally oblivious to the cold. At six-three and weighing in at two hundred twelve pounds, Fred was the epitome of an Amazon woman. Next to her, Anne always felt like she was standing in a hole. But Anne knew that despite Fred’s size and sometimes gruff manner, she had a gentle heart.

Anne had first met State Trooper Frederica Ferguson three years before, when Fred had offered to drive Anne through a heavy snowstorm to a fund-raiser. On the way to the benefit, a doe had dashed out in front of Fred’s patrol car. She hadn’t been able to brake in time.

Fred had gotten out of the car, knelt down in the snow and held the doe in her arms until it died. Then Anne had held Fred in her arms as they both cried. Anne learned that night that Fred was the oldest of four kids. She had been supporting them and her mother ever since her dad skipped out on the family when Fred was sixteen.

Anne also learned that Fred’s youngest brother was headed for juvenile hall after having been caught stealing. Anne convinced a fellow justice to give him a second chance. The boy had been put on probation and was doing well.

She’d never told Fred that she had intervened. But somehow Fred had found out. Fred quietly made it her business to locate and serve Anne’s court orders on the county’s deadbeat dads. The gruff state trooper’s success rate in getting those guys to pay was impressive. Word soon got around that if you brought your case to the bad-ass munchkin’s court, your kids were going to get their child support.

Anne knew Fred would do anything for her. The feeling was mutual.

“How did it happen?” she asked her friend.

“The accident reconstruction specialists will have to determine the details,” Fred said. “But I can tell you that she was going way too fast when she hit the curve. That VW had to have flown off this road to have landed so far down the gully.”

“Was she...did she die quickly?” Anne asked.

“No seat belt,” Fred said. “Never knew what hit her.”

It was quick. At least that’s something to be thankful for,
Anne thought.

“Who was she, Anne?”

“Someone Tom knew.”

“Tom?”

“The priest.”

“Ah, so that’s why he’s here. What’s the story with you two?”

“Story?”

“You ask me to keep a lookout for an old rusty-red VW Beetle and it turns up crashed in a gully,” Fred said. “You must have known something like this was going to happen.”

“I had no idea.”

“Then why did you ask me to pass the word to watch for her vehicle?”

“It’s...complicated,” Anne said, wondering what else to say. Wondering what else she could say.

“Does it have anything to do with the fact that she didn’t have any ID on her?”

“Her purse must have gotten thrown from the car during the crash,” Anne said.

“It was right beside her on the seat,” Fred corrected. “It just didn’t have any ID in it.”

“Why wouldn’t she have ID?” Anne wondered aloud.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Fred said, and then looked pointedly at the baby in Anne’s arms. “There were diapers and baby bottles in the back seat.”

Anne did not meet her friend’s eyes. “What about the vehicle?” she asked. “Can’t you trace her through it?”

“Its plates were stolen off a junked Ford Ranger over in Springfield. The vehicle identification number wasn’t legible. At the moment, we’ve got zilch.”

Questions raced through Anne’s mind, but there were no answers. Just a great deal of confusion and growing concern.

She turned to see the stretcher being hauled out of the gully onto the road. The state troopers thanked Tom for his help and proceeded to carry the stretcher toward the medical examiner’s van.

Anne saw Tom’s face in the dwindling light as he followed their progress. There was a grimness to his features that she had never seen before. And a sadness in his eyes.

A patrol car pulled up, lights flashing but no siren. A tall man with coffee-colored hair got out. Anne recognized Scott Hunter immediately. He went over to the stretcher. Before it was put in the van, Hunter unzipped the black body bag. Anne caught sight of a thin arm and waist-length, curly red hair before Hunter zipped it back up again.

A chill ran down her spine. Tommy whimpered in his sleep. She hugged him to her more closely.

“Hunter knows about our being on the lookout for this vehicle,” Fred said, her voice now a whisper beside Anne’s ear. “He also knows the driver had no identification. He’ll be over here soon to talk to you and he’s not going to take ‘it’s complicated’ for an answer—not even from a judge.”

Anne understood that Fred was trying to warn her. And with good reason. Scott Hunter’s reputation for being thorough was well deserved. She braced herself as he started toward her.

But before Hunter had gone two steps, Tom cut him off and held out his hand. They spoke for a few minutes before they approached Anne together.

“Evening, Your Honor,” Hunter said, nodding his head toward Anne.

She acknowledged his greeting with a returning nod.

“Who was the driver?” Hunter asked her, drawing out a pad and pen. He was not a man who beat around the bush.

“Her name was Lindy,” Tom answered before Anne could.

Hunter turned toward him. “And her last name?”

“Can’t help you there.”

“Address?”

Tom shook his head.

Hunter turned back to Anne. “She was a friend of yours?”

“Never met her,” Anne replied.

“Odd then that you were looking for her,” Hunter said.

“Anne was doing me a favor,” Tom said quickly. “I was concerned about Lindy’s welfare.”

Hunter turned back to Tom. “Why were you concerned?”

“It’s part of my job to be concerned about church members,” Tom said, as though that should go without saying.

“So she was from Cooper’s Corner?” Hunter asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” Tom said.

“You just said she was a member of your church.”

“Anyone who visits the Church of the Good Shepherd is welcome.”

“You must have had a special reason for being concerned about this visitor,” Hunter said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been trying to locate her.”

“It was a private matter between a priest and a parishioner,” Tom said.

Tom’s expression was serene—and very secure. His tone had held no hint of apology. Or of the need to elaborate further.

Hunter looked from Tom to Anne, as though he suspected collusion between them. His eyes came to rest on Anne and the baby.

“I didn’t know you had a child.”

“I’m taking care of him for a friend,” Anne said. “It’s very chilly, Lieutenant. The baby shouldn’t be out in this air. So if you don’t have any more questions...”

“No more questions,” Hunter said. “For now.”

But as he turned away, Anne called out to him, “I would like to know exactly how this accident happened.”

There was no mistaking the official tone of Anne’s voice. A moment before, she might have been just another witness to be interrogated. But now she was a judge using the full power of her office.

Hunter turned back to face her. “Father Christen has already made the same request. I’ll contact your office as soon as we know anything more.”

“I’m on vacation. I’d appreciate it if you’d call my cell number.”

Anne gave Hunter the number and he jotted it down.

As soon as the state trooper had walked away, Tom turned to Fred and offered his hand. “Thank you for your quick response. I’m Tom.”

Fred took his offered hand and gave it a shake. “Everybody calls me Fred.”

“So you’re Fred,” Tom said, a different note in his voice.

Fred looked questioningly at him but didn’t say anything. Instead she turned to Anne.

“You need me, you call,” she said.

“Thanks, Fred.” Anne slipped Fred’s parka from around her shoulders and returned it to the state trooper. “For everything.”

Taking Anne’s arm, Tom started to lead her toward the Porsche. But before he had gone a step, Fred’s fingers were digging a groove in his biceps.

Fred’s whisper was fierce against Tom’s ear. “If I find you’ve involved Anne in any trouble, that priest’s collar isn’t going to protect you. I can take you, Christen, and don’t think I won’t.”

* * *

B
Y
THE
TIME
Tom drove into the church’s parking lot, it was dark. He cut the engine but made no move to get out.

He had been lost in his thoughts on the silent trip home. Knowing that life was eternal helped him to accept death, but it never made it easy. Especially since he had known Lindy—and failed her.

Now the baby’s future rested solely in his hands. The responsibility weighed heavy on his mind and heart.

“Words are completely inadequate at a time like this,” Anne said from the passenger seat, “but for what they’re worth, I’m sorry about Lindy.”

Her voice was a blend of softness and sincerity.

Tom turned to her. “Your words are worth a lot, Anne. Thanks.”

The parking lot was not well lit. The light barely penetrated the interior of the car. But Tom could feel her eyes, intent on his face.

“I’d like to ask you something,” she said after a moment.

Tom knew she had given him time to make peace with his thoughts on their ride home. He appreciated her sensitivity. Now he braced himself for the questions that he knew would come.

“Go ahead.”

“What did Fred whisper to you back there?” Anne asked.

Tom hadn’t expected that question. He had to hold back a grin as he remembered the threat from the large state trooper. “She just wanted to let me know that she is a very good friend of yours.”

Anne seemed puzzled at his response, but didn’t pursue it further. He figured she had something else on her mind. But once again she surprised him with what it was.

“I’ll see the baby inside before I walk up to the B and B.”

“It’s not safe walking in the dark,” Tom said. “I’ll drive you there when it’s time.”

“What do you mean, when it’s time?”

“Come on inside, Anne. We’ll talk about it over pizza and rice pudding.”

She hesitated.

“You don’t have to worry,” Tom assured her. “I didn’t make either of them.”

She was still thinking about it when the baby began to cry, coming to Tom’s aid once again. “All right,” she agreed. “But I can’t stay long.”

* * *

A
NNE
HAD
TO
ADMIT
the pop-in-the-oven pizza wasn’t half-bad, and the rice pudding was wonderful—a gift from a parishioner. Tom had the baby fed and changed before they retired to the study.

After settling the little boy on her lap, Anne curled her feet beneath her on the soft sofa. Tommy sat up, each of his tiny hands grasping one of Anne’s fingers. She was immensely relieved to see him looking so much better than he had that morning, when she had rescued him from his inconsolable crying.

Tom took a seat across from them on a lounge chair. The room was warm as toast from the wood stove, the glow from its fire the only light. A soothing instrumental piece played on the stereo.

“If you’d like to talk about Lindy, I’m listening,” Anne offered.

“Not necessary, but thanks,” Tom said.

Anne had held her questions to give Tom space and time to deal with his loss. But there were some hard things to face. And she could put them off no longer.

“What are you going to do about the baby?” she asked.

Tom knew what he had to do. He just hadn’t yet worked out how he was going to do it. “I’ll take care of him.”

“Alone?” Anne asked.

“For the present.”

“It’s not going to be easy.”

He smiled. “If that’s an offer to help, it’s accepted.”

Anne decided she’d better let that pass for the moment. “Will you contact Lindy’s family?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know where they are,” Tom said.

“Why didn’t you give Hunter her last name so that he could find them?” Anne asked.

Tom’s eyes rested on Tommy in Anne’s lap. Nothing of what he was thinking was reflected in the calm on his face.

“I never knew Lindy’s last name,” he finally said.

Anne came forward in her seat. “Excuse me?”

“She never told me her last name,” Tom said, his voice perfectly even.

“Are you telling me it was just a one-night stand?” Anne asked.

Tom’s eyes met hers. “One-night stands are not and never have been who I am.”

The sincerity on his face was hard to doubt.

“What was it then?” Anne asked. “You can tell me.”

“That’s just it, Anne. I can’t.”

The doorbell rang. Tom left the room to answer it.

Not for the first time Anne wished she knew what was going on. Why was Tom being so secretive about his relationship with Lindy?

She heard the door to the rectory open, then a woman crying. Alarmed, she rose and carried Tommy down the hall. Just inside the front door was Betty, the woman from the hospital that afternoon. She was weeping in Tom’s arms.

“Joe died an hour ago, Father,” Betty sobbed. “I don’t know what to do.”

Tom’s voice was strong and gentle. “I’ll drive you back and we’ll take care of things together.”

Anne had no idea how Tom could face another death tonight. When he turned toward her a moment later, she didn’t wait for him to ask.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll take care of Tommy.”

Tom flashed her a look of thanks and was gone.

Returning to the study, she sat down and rocked the sweet little boy in her arms. “I thought being a judge had its rough times. But between you and me, Tommy, I’d take it over being a priest any day.”