Robards, Karen (40 page)

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night I went to a party and got so drunk I passed out. In the morning, when I came to, I was sprawled in the backseat of somebody’s car, with no idea whose, or of how I got there. My clothes were all messed up, and I realized-I realized that someone had had sex with me while I was unconscious. I didn’t remember anything about It, didn’t know who or even how many. It bothered me enough so that I never got drunk again after that-but there was worse to come. It took a while-I was young and dumb in those days-but after about four months I realized I was pregnant.”

Grace took a deep breath. “The truth is, if I had figured it out any sooner, I probably would have had an abortion. But it was too late. I was scared to death. Terrified. I knew my father would probably beat me half to death-he believed strongly in physical discipline, especially for me and then disown me. My stepmother would gloat. All her predictions about the way I would end up had come true. I couldn’t face them. When I was almost seven months pregnant and couldn’t hide it any longer, I ran away. It was about a month before Christmas.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Needless to say, I had a rude awakening into what life without a family was like. I had just what money I’d been able to save, a couple of hundred dollars, and nowhere to go. I couldn’t face my friends. Their parents would have called my parents in any case. I walked the malls, looking at all the lights and decorations and crying because it was Christmas and I was all alone-I slept in cheap hotels for a while, and ate as little as I could, and still I got down to my last twenty dollars unbelievably fast. When I was almost at the end of my

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rope, I saw an ad for abortion alternatives in the newspaper, and I called it. They told me to come on in. I did, and they gave me a place to stay and, when the time came, delivered my baby.” Grace stopped, swallowing. When she continued, her voice was low. “I never even held him. He was born, and they took him away. I signed papers consenting to his adoption, and that was that. The only reason I know he was a boy is because of something I overheard one of the nurses say.

She stopped again, and Tony’s arms tightened around her. He didn’t say anything, just held her close. After a moment she was able to go on.

“I went back home. I had nowhere else to go. I went back home and took my father’s punishment for running away and finished high school-I only had a few months to go. I didn’t want to party anymore, not ever again. I applied for loans, and got them, and went to college. I concentrated on studying and made top grades. I met Craig when I was a junior and married him the summer between my junior and senior years. Then Jessica was born. When I held her in my arms for the first time, that’s when I really understood what I had done. I lovedJessica so much. I hadn’t understood how much I would love a baby. Before Jessica, my son was-I guess you’d say an abstraction. He didn’t seem real. There was so much fear and shame and pain surrounding his birth that I had just wanted to make it all go away. But after Jessica-after Jessica, I knew. From the moment they put her into my arms, I loved her from the bottom of my heart, and I knew what I had done in throwing away my son.” She shuddered. “If I

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could do one thing over again in my life, it would be that. I would not have given away my child.”

Her voice broke, and her eyes closed. Her throat ached with the pain of unshed tears, but still she did not cry. All the tears in the world could not wash away the pain she felt. She did not deserve the heart’s ease of tears.

“Grace.” Tony’s voice was low, his arms warm and strong around her. She curled more tightly into his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck, ashamed of needing him so desperately but unable to help it. He knew the worst of her now, was seeing her emotionally naked, and she was terrified that he would find her ugly. If Tony wanted nothing more to do with her now that he knew, she would not blame him. He had loved his own daughter so, only to have her wrenched from his arms by fate. She had deliberately walked away from her son.

“Grace,” he said again, when she did not respond. “I want you to think about this: What would have happened if you had kept your son? Realistically, now. What would you have done? Would you have gone back home?”

Grace shuddered. “No. I could never have gone home again. My father and stepmother would not have let me in the door.”

“So you would have been on your own with an infant, right? You, a teenager without a home or anyone to support you or even a high school diploma. Where would you have taken the baby? Back to one of those cheap hotel rooms? No, you were out of money. A homeless shelter? Maybe you could have applied for

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welfare and gotten it, although it takes awhile to get on the rolls. There you would have been: an unwed teenage mother without a high school diploma, surviving on welfare. And that’s absolute best-case scenario.”

His hand came up to stroke her cheek, and then a finger tilted up her chin. “Open your eyes, Grace, and look at me.”

Unwillingly she did as he said. His eyes were warin with tenderness for her. Tenderness she did not deserve.

-f almost backed out of marrying Glenna, you know. I got cold feet at the last second and almost left her at the altar. If I hadn’t married her, we wouldn’t have had Rachel, and I would have been spared the pain of watching a child die by degrees. Rachel would have been spared all the agony that damnable disease put her through. But she-and I-also would have missed the greatest joy.” He was looking at her intently. “The point is, we all come to forks in the road, and we all make our choices and live with them, for good or 111. If you had chosen to keep your son, you would not have had Jessica. You wouldn’t be the woman you are today. You came to a fork in the road, and you made the best choice you could at the time, under the circumstances you were faced with and using the information you had. You have nothing to beat yourself up over.”

“Oh, God, Tony, what kind of mother gives a baby up for adoption?” It was a cry from the heart. Callused fingertips stroked the underside of herjaw.

“A very young and frightened one, in your case. Grace, do you know what first attracted me to your I

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loved the way you were with Jessica. I loved the way you were ready to take on the whole world, including me and the whole clainned police bureaucracy, for her. I loved the way you loved her, so fierce and protective and yet, gentle, too. You’re a great mother, Grace. A wonderful mother. just because you made a hard choice when you weren’t much older than JessIca is now doesn’t take away from that. You did the best you could, and that’s all any of us can do.”

Grace looked deep into his eyes and was comforted by what she saw there. The hurip in her throat was still present and still painful, But the horrible ache in her chest was easing, slowly, by infinitesimal degrees.

“I love you, Tony Marino,” she said clearly. And then, to her own surprise, she burst into tears.

4

T

WAS PROVING HARDER to track down Grace’s T

(/son than Tony had anticipated. He was at his desk in the squad room later that afternoon, squinting at his blinking computer screen and coming up with zilch. The fact that the baby had been born in a private clinic was slowing things down. Tony could find no record of his birth. There was, simply, no baby boy Douglas, which was Grace’s maiden name, listed as being born on the correct date in Franklin County, where Grace said he had been born.

Tony didn’t even consider the possibility that Grace had gotten some of the vital information wrong. The events surrounding the birth of the child were seared into her soul.

He would find the kid, though. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it was just a matter of doing a little police work. Since he’d come up dry with the birth certificate, his next stop would be adoption records. Sooner or later, he would hit pay dirt.

The question was, what would he do with the kid

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when he found hirn? Grace would not prosecute the boy, Tony knew. In fact, she was likely to prostrate herself at his feet, begging for forgiveness.

The kid had to have some major problems to have done the things he had done, from breaking into Grace’s house to kdlingjessica’s hamster. And he was probably harbormig a malor resentment against Grace as well.

As he thought of the hell Grace had been through, not just recently but during years of condemning herself for what she had done, Tony felt a slow-building anger start to burn inside hirn. If the kid gave Grace any more grief, his first inclination would be to throttle him, poor abandoned baby or not.

Tony foresaw trouble with a capital T when the kid was found. Grace would be in anguish, Jessica-who would have to be told-would be thrown into even more turmoil, and the kid himself sounded like the next Ted Bundy.

He meant to pay a call on Grace’s son and do his best to put the fear of God in the kid, before ever telling Grace where he was. Terroristic threatening was the least of the charges he would threaten the kid with, if he didn’t behave.

Funny enough, he never even considered the fact that, once the criminal aspect of the case was over, it was really not his problem. If it affected Grace and Jessica, it affected hirri.

My girls.

His mouth quirked into an ironic half-smile. That’s what they were to him, he realized. His girls, mother

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and daughter. His. Funny how his life seemed to be coming full circle.

Grace had told him she loved him. After that, she’d been too busy crying and he’d been too busy mopping up her tears to have any rational discussion at all. With her sense of duty, Grace had of course insisted on keeping that damned one o’clock deadline.

Tonight they were going to have quite a talk. “How’s it coming?” Gary Sandifer was standing beside his desk, looking down at the computer screen, which was trolling automatically through adoption records looking for a baby boy adopted in Franklin County within a year of the birth date of Grace’s son. The child had been born in Franklin County and obviously still lived here, or he would not be able to prey on Grace as he had been doing. It was not much of a stretch to assume the adoption had taken place in Franklin County, so Tony included that in the parameters he had typed into the search program.

“It’s coming,” Tony said noncommittally. Without even really thinking about it, he came to the lightning decision that Grace’s secret was going to stay just that: a secret, at least as far as the department was concerned. He would locate the kid, put the fear of God into him, haul him off to counseling, do whatever it took to make things easier for Grace. As far as the department was concerned, the investigation would be wound up with a “perp unknown” designation.

Nobody would care. The department had bigger fish to fry than the hamster-murdering stalker of a local judge and her daughter.

“I can give you maybe another week, at best,”

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Sandifer said, shaking his head apologetically. “Then I’m going to have to pull you guys off.”

“You already working on Voss?” Tony asked. Tied up with this investigation, he felt like a kid in a school classroom, sitting impatiently as he waited for the disnussal bell to ring so he would be free to do what he really wanted to do. In this case, that was to get Voss. “We’re getting started.”

Tony grimaced. Knowing how he felt about Voss, Sandifer patted him on the shoulder.

“I don’t think we’ll get him in a week,” he said consolingly, and headed for his office.

Fifty-five baby boys of approximately the right age had been adopted in Franklin County during the time frame Tony was looking at. He had not expected that there would be so many. Printing out the list, he folded it, tucked it into his pocket, and then stood up. Grunt work was what it would take to run all those kids down, but then, grunt work was, by and large, what he did.

But not right now. It was four-thirty and he had to be heading home.

There were four or five girls playing basketball in the driveway when, having parked his car in its customary spot two streets over, he let himself in through the side gate. They did not notice him as he walked across the yard, which was ankle deep in fallen leaves. To Tony’s surprise, he saw that Jessica was not among them. He was still pondering the implications of that as he entered the house.

Jessica and Gloria Baer were in the kitchen. Gloria was standing with both hands flat on the countertop,

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looking at Jessica with concern, while Jessica, face abnormally pale, sat on a bar stool sipping orange juice. The dogs were sprawled at her feet. They came toward Tony, toenails clicking, tails wagging.

“Hi, Tony.” Gloria looked around at him almost with relief Hers was a tough job, babysitting Jessica during the day. With an inward grin, Tony conceded that he would far rather have his own task of babysitting Jessica’s mother.

Of course, even if Gloria had been assigned to watch over Grace, she would not have gotten nearly as much enjoyment out of it as he was getting.

“Is there a problem?” Tony patted both dogs and looked at Jessica.

Jessica made a face. Her eyes met his and then slid away. “Nothing major. I just forgot to take my insulin this morning. My blood sugar got a little low.”

“She looked like she was going to faint out there playing basketball,” Gloria said severely.

“Did you call her mother?” Tony asked Gloria. “No! No!” Jessica’s reply was sharp. “I told her not to call my mother, and you’re not to either, Tony, do you hear? I took my insulin, and I’ll drink this orange juice, and I’ll be fine. just leave my mother out of it.”

Tony said nothing for a moment. The ridiculous colored streak in her hair was time green today, he saw, which had the effect of making her eyes seem very blue. She really looked an awful lot like her mother, Tony thought, which would have endeared Jessica to him even if he had not grown to appreciate her for herself