Ellen McKenzie 04-Murder Half-Baked (16 page)

“Is she all right?” Aunt Mary looked a little puzzled. “This is her first. She’s got a long way to go, so unless
—
”

“Is who hurt?” Marilee’s labor pains weren’t going to hurt anybody but her. Something else was happening, something that had calm, collected, Anne completely unnerved.

“Marilee’s fine. At least, she would be if
…
it’s Grady. Somehow he found out she was being admitted and he showed up, demanding to see her. He’s there right now, threatening to beat up anyone who gets in his way. He’s already punched a male nurse.”

“Where’s Marilee?” This was beginning to seem all too familiar.

“They got her into an elevator and upstairs right about the time Grady was attacking the nurse. So far they’ve kept him from storming up the stairs and the police are on the way. Poor kid. She’s scared to death. That was Gina on the phone. She sounds pretty scared as well. She says Marilee’s having mild hysterics in between pains. They’re trying to sedate her but she’s having none of it.”

She probably wanted to make sure she didn’t do
z
e off and wake up to find Grady in her room. Under the circumstances, a good decision but, even though it had been almost twenty years since I’d had Susannah, I remembered vividly how wonderful even a little bit of painkiller felt. Or kept me from feeling. I’d never met Grady, but he’d just earned one more black mark in my book.

“And, just to make everything perfect, Leona’s there. She wants to be in the labor room with Marilee. So far, Gina’s been able to keep her out, but she says for me to hurry. So I’d better
… W
here are my car keys? I know
…
oh.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I came with you. Ellen, would you mind?”

“Taking you to the hospital? Of course not. But, where’s her mother?”

I knew that was none of my business, but I couldn’t help it. My mother had been with me, feeding me ice and telling me to push. She might be a little flighty and a rotten cook, but she’d never let me down when it counted. Brian had. He’d stuck his head in a couple of times, told me I was doing fine, and went off to “do rounds.” I never knew “rounds” took twelve hours.

“Marilee doesn’t want either of them there. She told us not to call them.” Anne’s face was closed. There would be no discussion about Marilee’s parents. But she must have seen how upset I was, because her face softened. “She’s not alone, Ellen. Gina’s there and I’m on my way. We won’t leave her.”

She wouldn’t either. She’d stay with her the whole time, and she wouldn’t let Grady, or Leona, near her. Marilee might just be in luck after all.

“You two go get in the car. I’ll finish locking up.”

“We’ll help.”

Aunt Mary started checking windows, doors, the stove, with Anne right behind her. I gathered up the papers still on the kitchen drain board, locked the back door, made sure I had all of the keys ready to go back into the lockbox, and followed them both out to the car. I watched Anne crawl into the backseat and thought, once more, how lucky Grace House was to have her.
Every
moment since I’d met her had been
fraught
with turmoil of some sort. She’d been great with Janice, keeping the children calm, keeping us all calm as she made sure their escape was organized and orderly. I was
certain
she was still overseeing their new life
even though they were now out of range
. She had been firm when Leona had her tantrum
over
whisking Marilee off to an apartment, but she’d also been kind. I would have hit her.
If not for her,
Leona just might have bullied Marilee into accepting her idiotic plan.
Now Leona was trying to worm her way into the labor room, Grady Wilcox right behind her. Neither
was
there to hold Marilee’s hand and tell her to breathe. How was Anne going to deal with them? It was obvious she wasn’t going to be at my office this afternoon. But maybe that was just as well. Somebody needed to tell me how they planned to pay for this new house. I’d find out soon enough, but first, we were going to have a baby. I climbed in the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“Hold on,” I told them.

“Ellen, not too fast. That baby’s not
…”

Whatever else Aunt Mary said was lost in the roar of the engine as I took off, tires squealing as I headed for the freeway. Nascar Margaret? Haw! She was nothing compared to Indy Ellen.

“S
o you just drove away and left Anne there?” Dan wiped the last bite of pizza off his mouth and reached for his beer mug.

“There wasn’t much else I could do. Two of your cars were there. Then someone ran out of the emergency exit to grab Anne. She kept telling me to leave, take Aunt Mary and leave. That she’d call as soon as she knew something.”

“She was right. Grady made quite a scene.”

“How do you know? Were you there?”

“I do get reports.”

Dan smiled down on me. We were half
-
sitting, half
-
lying on his living room carpet. Boxes, some packed, some half full, were clustered around us. An empty pizza box sat on the coffee table along with an empty beer can and an almost empty wineglass. It wasn’t until we sat down to eat that we started to talk about something other than what went into storage, what went to my house, and what got thrown out. Not much got thrown out. Not even his chipped beer mugs. I hoped they would be happy living next to my mismatched wineglasses.

“So, what happened?” I sat up a little and reached for my wine glass.

“You mean after Grady punched the nurse? Dropped the guy like a stone. One of the other nurses and a security guy jumped Grady and held him down until my guys got there. Grady went to jail, the nurse went into one of those little rooms and got two stitches in his lip, and Marilee went upstairs to the labor room. Last I heard she was still there, but no baby.”

“What about Leona? Did you arrest her also?”

“You don’t arrest someone just because they want to be with a friend.”

“There’s a lot more to it than that. Leona wants the baby.”

“That’s what you keep saying. My guys said she was worried about her friend, kept saying she didn’t have anyone to be with her, she needed someone.”

“Anne was the someone she wanted, not Leona.”

“And when they explained that to this Leona—does she have a last name?—she backed right off.”

“Really?” Somehow that was not what I would have expected. “Last name? I think it’s Wilson, but I’m not sure. Listen, I’ve heard her in action. I can’t imagine her just smiling at everybody and saying
…
what did she say?”

“Not much, I guess. She went down the hall to the waiting room with that other woman from Grace House. They never saw her again.”

“That must be Gina. Remember? I told you about her. She works for Sal and Rose at the bakery. I wonder if they’ll spend the night there. According to Aunt Mary, it’s going to be a long one. Poor Marilee.” I thought back to Susannah’s birth. Most of that very long ordeal was a blur, but the part I wouldn’t mind forgetting, wasn’t. I took a big sip of my wine. “How long can you keep Grady in jail?”

“Long enough to keep him out of the labor room.” Dan stretched. “If she hurries up. He’ll be out by morning, if he can make bail. We charged him with aggravated assault and got a restraining order forbidding him to come within one hundred feet of her or the hospital, but once he
’
s bailed out, he’ll go back.” Dan picked up his beer can, shook it gently, then crumpled it in his hand. “I don’t know why he’s so determined to see that girl, but he’s half wild to get at her. A little thing like a restraining order won’t keep him out of the hospital. If all he’d done was make a damn fool nuisance of himself, he’d already be out, but assault’s a lot more serious than disturbing the peace. We managed to throw in interfering with a police officer and a couple of other things. Raises the ante a little.”

“But why did he show up? He doesn’t want the baby
;
that’s supposedly why he kicked Marilee out. Why all this sudden need to find her, be with her?”

“He’s not saying. But he sure said a lot of other things. Over and over. His vocabulary of four letter words isn’t extensive, but it’s colorful. Let’s go home.”

Home. We were sitting in Dan’s condo, surrounded by all his stuff, and he talked about going
home
. Our collective home. This was taking some getting used to, but I liked it.

He yawned. “I’m bushed. Let’s go. Here.” He hauled me to my feet. “If you’ll clean up all this,” he waved vaguely at the pizza box, napkins, and the crushed beer can, “I’ll carry the boxes out to the car.”

I’d finished stuffing the trash into a large black trash bag, put
ting
the dishes in the dishwasher, and was doing a little yawning of my own, when I felt arms slide around my waist. A mustache brushed my ear. Warm breath was on my neck. “Good thing you had the foresight to get a king-sized bed.”

“I got it so Jake would have lots of room.”
I was somewhat distracted. Dan’s bed in the condo was only a double and the mattress was hard. I had to get undistracted or we wouldn’t make it to my
—
our—king-size bed. “Let’s go.”

“You got it for a cat? Funny. All this time I thought it was because you were waiting for me.”

“I got it before I had any idea you, too, had returned to our mutual hometown. At the time, the cat was the only
being
I plann
ed
on letting sleep on
—
or in
—
my bed.”

“And now?” One eyebrow went up and the grin was more like a leer.

“And now, sharing seems like a good idea.”

“But selectively.”

“Definitely, selectively.”

The leer got bigger. “Let’s get a move on.”

I tucked my purse under my arm and turned off the light on the lamp table in front of the window. A phone sat on it, silent. I stared at it for a moment.

“Dan.”

“Umm? Come on, Ellie, let’s go.”

“Wait. As chief of police, you’re always on call, aren’t you
?
”

“Sort of. If something big happens, like a murder, I get called. You know that. I’ve always turned up when you’ve found a body. A habit I hope you discontinue after we’re married.”

“It’s not like I plan on finding them. They find me. But that’s not what I wanted to
…
Dan, do you give dispatch the phone number of where you’ll be? You know, at night?”

He looked at me for a minute, as if he had no idea of what I was talking about, and then he got it. Laughter started in his eyes, spread down his face, and ended up coming out in great waves. He didn’t stop until tears ran down his face.

“Are you asking if I gave dispatch your phone number? If they know that’s where I spend my nights? I didn’t have to. If they want me, they’ll call my cell, but Ellie, they all know where I am. And no one seemed the least bit surprised.” He laughed some more then gathered me to him. “Good thing I’m making an honest woman of you, isn’t it.”

I kicked him on the shin. “It’s not funny.”

“Ouch.” He let me go and rubbed his shin. “You kick hard for a girl.”

“Don’t forget it. Honest woman, my foot. How about, I’m making an honest man of you?”

“I’ve never heard it put quite like that before, but I guess it does work both ways. Can we go home now and be
…
honest?” The grin I got was irresistible.

“You do sometimes come up with good ideas.” I looked around the darkened room at the phone sitting so innocently on the lamp table. At least the one beside my bed wasn’t ringing off the hook, looking for Dan Dunham, Chief of Police, in a place he was not officially supposed to be, but where everyone in town knew he was.
Did I care? I thought about it for a second. No.
Not one bit. “Let’s go home.”