Present Danger (29 page)

He instructed Bobby to find a scenic route home and then settled back in the plush seat with Aunie tucked up against his side. He couldn’t seem to get a handle on his emotions. He’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t tell her how he felt until some of her problems were resolved. Dammit, he hadn’t been blowing smoke when he’d said expressing his emotions wasn’t a magic cure-all. Simply saying the words , wasn’t going to alleviate this mess she was in; it was, in fact, more likely to complicate matters when he insisted on continuing the self-defense sessions.

On the other hand, just once, he was going to revel in the freedom of making love to her without choking back the words.

For the remainder of the weekend, Aunie walked on air. She had convinced herself it was a feeling destined to last.

Sunday provided some excitement of its own. She and James, along with Mary and Otis’s sister Leeanne, helped the Jacksons put the finishing touches on their nursery. The men assembled a changing table. Mary and Leeanne washed the window and hung the balloon shade. Aunie and Lola stenciled little white rabbits as a border where walls met ceiling.

When the phone rang, the women had finished cleaning up and were attaching the frothy skirt to
the bassinet. James was holding three separate parts of the changing table together while Otis tried to thread the screw through the aligned holes. When it rang a second time, Lola said, “Otis!” in exasperation. At the same time he looked up in frustration and called, “Lola, will you get the damn phone? I’m up to my armpits in the parts for this table.”

Lola trotted off to answer it, and Leeanne moved to stand over her flustered brother. “If you think putting that thing together is tough, just wait,” she advised him with a knowing grin. “Every bike, trike, big wheel that you buy the kid is going to say, some assembly required. They tell you it’s so simple a four-year-old could put it together, but they always neglect to send along the four-year-old to give you a hand.”

“Otis!” Everyone stilled at the urgency in Lola’s voice, heads turning toward the door. Otis surged to his feet and Leeanne gripped his arm. “Oh, God, is it Mama?” she whispered, moving with her brother toward the doorway. “Has something happened to Mama?”

They could hear Lola murmuring into the phone, and then the sound of it being replaced in the hook. She poked her head around the wall. “Muriel is fine, Leeanne. I’m sorry if I gave you a scare,” she apologized. She turned to Otis and a beatific smile spread across her face. “We’re parents, mon.”

“What!”

“We’re parents! To a baby girl, a little premature but healthy. Five pounds, four ounces, nineteen inches long. She was born at 2:19
P.M.”
She laughed and executed a little dance step. “Otis, we’re parents!”

“A daughter? We’ve got us a daughter?” Otis stared at his wife in stunned silence for a moment, then
suddenly whooped. He picked up Lola and whirled her around. “When can we see her?”

“Right now.” And within minutes, they had floated out of their apartment on a cloud of parental bliss and excited congratulations.

Three days later the proud new parents brought Greta-Leigh Jackson home. It was a day of extreme emotions for Aunie, for reality had intruded by then, splintering her too-brief euphoric state beyond repair.

Dammit, she hadn’t even had a tiny grace period. At school on Monday, the distressing reality of her situation had once again reared its ugly head.

Okay, so she shouldn’t have been taken by surprise, shouldn’t have allowed her expectations to climb to unrealistic heights. James had been warning of this very thing when he’d admonished her not to expect all her problems suddenly to vanish just because she’d heard a few words from him that she had so longed to hear.

That didn’t make it overwhelmingly easier to accept when she once again felt the weight of someone’s eyes watching her. The crash back to earth was merely that much harder in the wake of the too-few hours that she’d flown so high. Her immediate gut reaction was anger and—as much as she hated to admit to it—self-pity. Dammit, why her? What had she ever done to deserve all this negative attention? Other women got to fall in love and act young, be carefree; why were things always so difficult for her? It was so unfair.

Well, all right, so nobody had ever actually promised her life would be fair. In a perfect world it would be; but face it, she’d known for a long time now that this world was far from perfect.

Having conceded that much, she forced herself to
take it one step further and to relinquish the dubious comfort of feeling sorry for herself. Instead, she applied some rational thought to the matter. And the first thing she thought to do was go to a pay phone.

She dug a fistful of change out of her purse and placed a long distance call. The instant she was put through to Wesley, she replaced the receiver back on its hook and slumped back against the warm brick wall, her heart beating heavily.

Very well, then.
She pressed a fist to her breast and took several deep breaths.
Get a grip and review the facts.
Fact one: It wasn’t Wesley who was watching her. That didn’t eliminate the possibility that it might be one of his private investigators, of course; but it was comforting to know that at this moment, at least, Wesley himself was nowhere in the vicinity.

Fact two: She never felt under observation when she was in class. She didn’t know if she should consider that significant, but she rather thought she should. Of course she also rather thought that in order to cause the fine hairs, on her nape to stand on end the way they did, a person would necessarily have to stare rather long and hard at her. And realistically, that would be somewhat difficult to achieve with a minimum of discretion in a classroom. So where did that leave her? With fact three, she supposed: It was only during lunch breaks on
the
plaza that she’d felt she was being watched.

By the time Otis picked her up that Monday afternoon, brimming with excitement and Polaroid snaps of his newborn daughter, Aunie had reconciled herself to the truth of her situation. As much as she might wish otherwise, her life wasn’t going to progress with fairy-tale smoothness, so she might as well learn to live with it. The knowledge had upset her; she’d
held her pity party, and then she had applied herself to searching for an answer and had moved on.

It was the fight she had with James after school on Wednesday, just before Otis and Lola were due home with their new baby, that did the most damage to her wildly vacillating emotions.

Someone meant her harm, and she couldn’t deny it was frightening. But the truth was, it didn’t possess half the power to upset her as did the resulting tension it produced between her and James. They were living with an ever-present stress, a constant pressure that caused them to snap and snarl with cruel thoughtlessness at the first wrong word or misinterpreted look. Jimmy could fight really dirty when the mood struck him. If she were to be honest, she supposed she’d have to admit that she could, too. But it hurt when she was the recipient of his anger. It hurt a lot.

Wednesday’s fight seemed to her to blow up out of nowhere. And the culprit on which it hinged, apparently, was her ability to shelve unpleasant realities for short intervals. If he could have given her just two damn seconds to explain …

Her adeptness at setting aside problems was a measure of how truly screwed up her life had been for a long time now. She wasn’t stupid; she didn’t believe trouble would simply go away if she ignored it.

But a person could only live on the edge of her emotions for so long without precipitating a crisis. To avoid emotional meltdown, she had learned long ago to temporarily set aside the problem and concentrate on the minutiae of day-to-day living. It was an unhappy fact of life that once she was strong enough to face it again, the nastiness would be right there where she had left it; but the trick was to give herself a moment in which to collect a bit of stamina. It was
a delay-and-address system she had employed for the past few years to defuse and compartmentalize the chaos of her life.

She
hadn’t
deliberately been withholding information from James when she’d failed to mention her suspicions that she was once again being watched. She had forgotten, dammit. She had simply forgotten. She’d worked past her own feelings on the subject, had taken some preliminary steps to identify or eliminate possibilities, and then she’d set the problem aside for a while to be considered later. She’d meant to tell him about it, but once she was at home, other matters had arisen to drive it from her mind.

God, the way he’d acted when she had remembered to tell him, you would’ve thought she was a one-woman commando squad charging blindly into booby-trapped enemy territory. And
that
was when he wasn’t accusing her of being just plain blind. To personal danger. To reality. To the most meager ration of intelligence, to hear him tell it.

All of which was downright mild compared to his reaction when he learned that not only had she kept this information to herself for two whole days, but she’d also called Wesley to verify his whereabouts.

She had given up attempting an explanation by that point. Perhaps she should have persisted, if only to cool him down a little, but she hadn’t. Frankly, she had been too busy reacting, quite poorly she’d admit, to his tone, his words, his attitude. How dare he yell at her, swear at her, talk to her as if she were a brain-damaged infant who lacked the intelligence to be left on her own for an unguarded instant? She didn’t have to take such treatment from anyone.

She couldn’t say with any authority afterward what the exact words had been that had triggered it, but
somehow, their furious verbal exchange had segued into equally furious lovemaking up against the refrigerator door. God, what a mess! She didn’t know about James, but when her gripping legs had gone lax and he had slid her to her feet, when he had stepped back, arranged his clothes, and slammed out of the apartment, she knew that she for one didn’t feel any better. Only marginally satisfied physically, and emotionally she was a wreck.

The clamor of James’s furious exit rang in her ears. Her back slid down the fridge door until she was in a gangly heap on the floor, head hanging, short skirt bunched around her waist, panties dangling from one ankle. What had she said? Gawd, what on earth had she said to set him off that way? That wasn’t lovemaking, that was … it was … She didn’t know what it was, but it hadn’t been lovemaking. She bawled her eyes out.

When Lola called a short while later and invited her down to meet the newest member of the Jackson household, she tried to disguise the damage to her puffy eyes and swollen mouth with a hastily applied ice pack. Apparently her remedy was less than successful. Lola took one look at her and silently handed her the baby to hold.

“Ooh, Gawd,” Aunie whispered and cuddled the infant to her breast, absorbing comfort from her warmth and sweet baby aroma. She collapsed onto the couch and looked down at the child in her arms. “She’s beautiful, y’all. Absolutely beautiful.”

Greta-Leigh’s complexion fell somewhere between Lola’s shade of cafe au lait and Otis’s ebony. She had a full head of hair already a good inch long, and it
stood out statically around her tiny head like a dark dandelion in full bloom. “Oh, look at her little lips. They’re so sweet.” Greta-Leigh’s mouth was pursed, causing the middle of her top lip to point over the bottom lip like a tiny bird’s.

Aunie’s finger brushed a soft, dusky cheek and she looked up at Lola and Otis. “You must be so proud.” To her eternal mortification, her voice cracked on the last word and tears rolled down her cheeks.

Otis and Lola made sounds of concern and she felt like an absolute fool. “I’m sorry,” she whispered and wiped at her cheeks with her free hand. She gave them a wobbly smile. “Please, ignore it. I must be premenstrual or somethin’.”

But that wasn’t it at all. She had just remembered that for the first time ever, James hadn’t used one of his ever-present condoms this afternoon. Great. Wouldn’t it be just her luck to get pregnant the first time they failed to use birth control?

She wouldn’t mind so much, except her life was such a mess right now that the last thing she had any right to do was drag a child into it. Not to mention she’d always dreamed of conceiving a child in love, not anger. And, Lord, wouldn’t Jimmy just be thrilled to pieces? She was pretty sure he was already regretting the fact he’d gotten tangled up with
her.
If he learned he might be a daddy on top of it he’d probably open up a vein.

“I’ve gotta go get some formula,” Otis said. He squatted down to kiss Greta-Leigh on the crown of her head. As he stood, he rubbed an affectionate hand over Aunie’s hair. Kissing Lola, he let himself out of the apartment.

Lola sat down beside Aunie on the couch. “You
want me to take her?” she asked, tipping her head at the baby with a soft smile.

“Oh, no, please. May I hold her just a little while longer?”

“Sure.” Lola watched in silence for a few moments. Finally, she said, “So, what’s goin’ on wid you, woo-mon? And don’t tell me PMS. You been fightin’ wid James?”

Aunie nodded.

“Want to talk ‘bout it?”

Prickles at the back of her nose warned Aunie of an imminent renewal of tears. “Can’t.”

Lola stroked Aunie’s hair away from her face. “Just tell me this: You gonna be all right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She hoped.

“Okay, good. I s’pose then that you’d like me to change
the
subject?”

“Please.” Her eyes on Lola, Aunie rubbed the side of her face against Greta-Leigh’s head. “I’ll tell you about it later, when I’ve got a little more control, okay?”

“Fine wid me. You interested in seein’ my sweet baby girl’s fingers and toes?”

“Yeah,” Aunie said. “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”

The light was blinking on her answering machine when she let herself into the apartment a short while later. There was a message requesting she call Detective Garet Bell at the Seattle police department. Oh, God, what now? With hands that were not quite steady, she punched out the number he’d left.