Caught Redhanded (20 page)

“Did they tell you that?” I’d be very disappointed if I’d read Tug and Candy that wrong.

She shook her head. “They’d never say anything like that, but that’s the way it is. I’ve r-ruined Good Hands!”

Elise jumped at Bailey’s desolate cry and Bailey threw her hand across her mouth. We both waited to see if the baby’d waken. After a bit of moving about, she stilled and slept on.

I took Bailey’s hand again. “Honey, I want you to listen to me. Good Hands does not depend on you or your behavior. It’s a huge, wonderful God thing, not a Tug and Candy Mercer thing. It depends on the time and commitment of hundreds of men and women who want to help others. Sure, some may wonder why your mom and dad didn’t keep a better eye on their kid. Were they too busy helping others to give her the time she needed?”

“Yes, yes! That’s what they’ll think and that’s not true. It was all my fault. That’s why I tried to keep it from them. From everybody. So life could go on as usual. So Good Hands would go on as usual.”

“But people who know them will know that they did their best with you. They’ll understand that kids have minds of their own. And, believe it or not, most of the people who work with Good Hands won’t even know about Elise.”

She blinked, startled at this idea.

“She’s dominating your life, Bailey, but that doesn’t mean she’s dominating the lives of others.”

I put the gift bag on the bed.

Bailey looked at it, a genuine smile sliding briefly over her face. “For me?”

“For you and Elise.”

One by one she pulled out the sleepers, tearing the tissue paper off each and holding the little garment up to ooh and aah over it. She laughed at the jester suit as I’d hoped, holding it up so the sleeping Elise could see it.

“You’ll look so cute in this one, Elise. We’ll take your picture in it and when you grow up, we’ll show it to all your boyfriends so they can see how dorky but adorable you looked.”

I laughed. “Well, that’ll be better than the standard naked baby on a blanket picture. Definitely less embarrassing.”

When all the sleepers were strewn about the bed and the bag was empty, Bailey held out her arms. I slid Elise into them and began collecting all the tissue paper, jamming it into the wastebasket. As I folded the little sleepers and put them back in the bag, I watched Bailey slide the baby’s cap off and run her finger gently over the blond peach fuzz. She bent and kissed the top of her daughter’s head.

“I can’t believe I tried to give her away,” she whispered. “I love her so much.” She started to cry again. “How could any mother just abandon her baby like that? It just proves what a terrible person I am.”

I shook my head. “It proves what a desperate person you were.”

“I was that, all right. I still am, sort of. Do I keep her? Do I give her up for adoption? I don’t know if I could stand to give her up a second time. But at least I’m not all alone anymore. I’ve got Mom and Dad now.”

“How are they doing with everything?”

“As good as, I guess. When Mom’s not crying, she’s holding her, talking to her. Loving her. She wants the baby to call her Grandy because it rhymes with Candy. I mean, how lame is that?”

I had to laugh at her mortified expression.

“Dad has this I’ve-been-shot look, though he’s been so nice. I think he’s having a harder time than Mom.”

“Women seem to automatically respond to babies, so it probably is easier for your mom. But dads—” I thought about my father and how he’d have reacted if something like this had happened to me. “Dads have a hard time with the idea that their sweet baby girl went to bed with some stupid, hormonally crazed boy. It tears their guts out.”

She nodded. “Except Chaz wasn’t stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing. I was the stupid one. It was done before I even realized what was happening! How’s that for being an idiot?”

I looked at her skeptically.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “You can’t imagine how anyone could be quite that dumb. Well, me, neither, let me tell you. I knew all about guy-girl stuff. I even knew I wanted to be a virgin when I got married.”

She opened the front of Elise’s blanket and placed her forefinger against the palm of the baby’s hand. Immediately the little fist closed over her finger.

“I didn’t date much,” she said. “Too tall. Too fat. Too shy. Then Dad fixed me up with the son of the guy whose company is Good Hands’ biggest corporate donor.”

I wondered if she meant Strickland Architecture and Chaz Strickland.

She turned a tragic face to me. “What if Good Hands loses all that money because of me?”

“Because of you? Bailey, there were two of you involved. Why should the father withdraw the money when his son harmed you so badly?” I made a disgusted sound. “If anything he should up the ante as some sort of compensation. But that’s beside the point. I want to hear the rest of your story.”

She sighed. “It’s not very pretty. In fact it’s sort of pathetic. I’m pathetic. When I knew we were going out, I was thrilled because Chaz is this good-looking guy. I felt grateful that he was willing to spend time with me and be seen with me. Honored like if a king gives a peasant a coin or a kind person pets a lost pup. Pretty pitiful, huh?”

She looked at me, her face a mask of self-loathing and pain.

“We went to the movies. I was so shy I could hardly talk to him, but he didn’t seem to care. Then after the movie he didn’t drive me home. Instead he pulled into this narrow road by a cornfield and parked.”

Oh, kiddo. An old, old story made unique only by the personal pain of each girl hurt.

“I should have said, ‘Take me home.’ I should have said, ‘No!’ But he was so handsome and I was so not pretty. When he kissed me, there I was, feeling grateful again. Grateful! Then he was doing more than he should and I knew that I had to stop him, but I swear I didn’t know it could happen so fast. I thought it would just be all slow and romantic with lots of time to cut things off. I’d always dreamed of moonlight and roses, and violins and true love, you know? What I got was yuck! Get away from me! What have you done?” She shuddered at the memories.

I thought of Curt and how much I was looking forward to our being one. “When it’s the right time and the right person, it will be all those wonderful things, Bailey.”

She shrugged. Obviously she didn’t believe me, but maybe that was good for the time being. She could sort it all out in coming years.

“Not that it matters,” she said. “I’ve screwed up my life for good.”

“Well, I agree you’ve put a crimp in it, and plan A—high school, college, marriage as a virgin—has gone out the window. But plan B can be wonderful, too. Just different.”

“But God has a plan for our lives and I blew mine.” She sounded so defeated.

“Come on, Bailey.” I made my voice brusque. “One misstep and God’s hands are tied? You know better than that. We’re talking God here. He’s so much bigger than we could ever imagine. He’s creative. He’s full of possibilities. He’s not limited in any way, even by our mistakes and wrongdoings. He makes the evil that men do turn out for good, Genesis says. He can take your current mess and work wonders from it for you if you trust Him. Plan B, Bailey. Plan B. It can be every bit as exciting and fulfilling as plan A. Just different.”

TWENTY-FOUR

W
hen Elise started to whimper and her little mouth began moving, I knew it was feeding time. It was also time for me to go. I kissed both girls goodbye and went to join Curt, who was watching a baseball game on the silent TV in the waiting room.

We rode the elevator down and were walking across the lobby when Tug and Candy came through the doors, arms loaded with brightly wrapped gifts. Their own private baby shower? Candy thrust her armload into Tug’s already burdened arms and rushed me. She hugged me fiercely.

“Thank you! Thank you so much,” she whispered. She pulled back, her eyes shiny with tears. “I don’t know how we’re going to handle all this yet, but we’ll manage.”

Tug nodded. “She’s a great kid. She really is.” His tone was urgent, as if he were pressing an opinion he doubted others agreed with.

“You don’t have to convince us,” I said. “We know.”

“It breaks my heart that she put herself through this alone.” A single tear slid down Candy’s cheek, somehow more heartbreaking than a lachrymose flood. “I suspected she was pregnant, but every time I broached the topic, she always said, ‘Mom, how could you think such a thing?’ Never a direct answer or a direct lie. And because I didn’t want it to be true, I didn’t press.”

Poor Bailey, I thought, being careful of the letter of the law after she’d broken one of the Big Ten. “She thought she was protecting you and Good Hands.”

Tug closed his eyes as if in pain. “I’d give up Good Hands in a minute if it would make things better for her. Doesn’t she know that?”

“Sort of,” I said. “She doesn’t doubt your love, but she needs to hear over and over again how much you value her because right now she doesn’t value herself at all.”

We talked for a few more minutes, then Curt and I left.

“Boy, life can be hard sometimes,” I said as I climbed into Curt’s car. “Complicated.”

He slid behind the wheel. “Are you talking about the Mercers or yourself?”

A puff of air escaped as I saw what he meant. “I guess things are a bit weird for us, too. So let’s do what all good Americans do when things are tough. Let’s go shopping so I’ll at least have some clean underwear for tomorrow.”

We spent the rest of the day shopping for clothes to replace all those lost in the explosion and fire. We spent a frustrating evening filling out paperwork for insurance claims, license and credit card replacements, and all the other little things that have to be done after loss.

Monday I got to work bright and early with Doug as my chaperone and wrote a piece about Ken Mackey showing up Saturday night. I called his parents’ house and got him out of bed for a quote.

“Martha was great, especially to me,” he said. “I loved her because she stood by me when I got out of jail, when lots of other people wouldn’t give me the time of day. There aren’t many really kind people in this world and it is beyond sad that we have lost her.” He cleared his throat. “When they find him, I hope they hang him from the nearest lamppost. Uh, that last is not for publication.” And he hung up.

I’d barely sent my material to Mac for his edit and approval when the phone rang again.

“Merry Kramer,” I said into the receiver.

“This is Esther Colby.”

Martha’s mother!

“I told this to the police and I’m telling it to you. I want you to put it in your paper to help us catch—” Her voice broke.

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Colby,” I said into the emotionally fraught silence.

“Thanks,” she mumbled. “What’s so sad is that I just found her after all these years. Not that she’d gone anywhere, but I finally got smart enough to look her up. We’d been e-mailing back and forth for a couple of years now.”

I wondered if Steve and Nanette Colby knew and if they were bothered or pleased by Esther’s sudden reappearance in Martha’s life.

“I decided to come and see her,” Esther continued. “Up until now I thought it was better for her and less complicated for me if I remained on the edge of her life, but then she started talking about this wonderful new guy she was going with, this Mac. But there was something about the way she wrote about him sometimes, that made me edgy. I’d married the wrong guy for me, and I didn’t want her to make the same mistake. Of course, Steve is basically nice, just dull, dull, dull. Martha’s guy sounded—” Esther hesitated “—dangerous, I guess. That sounds extreme, but that’s how I felt. Dull’s bad enough. Dangerous is a whole different ball game. So I came.”

She fell silent. I waited for a minute, then asked, “Did you get to see her?”

She cleared her throat. “I did. Twice. I asked her point-blank about this guy. Was he hurting her? Physically, I mean.”

“Was he?”

“She tried to deny it, but her lip hadn’t healed from where he’d slugged her. And you know why? Because he found out she’d told me about him. It was supposed to be some sort of a special, secret romance. Give me a break.”

“Couldn’t have been too special to him if he didn’t want anyone to know,” I said.

“Tell me about it. He was just using her and she was too blind to see it. But she kept saying she loved him. She’d change him. She knew she would. Look at how Ken had changed. I tried to tell her that Ken had just grown up, seen how stupid it was to keep breaking the law. He’d never hurt her or anyone else.”

“Did you ever meet this new man?” I doubted she had for two reasons. One, it was a “secret” romance. And two, no one was trying to blow her up. Of course, I hadn’t seen him, either, and someone was still trying to blow me up.

“No, I never met him. But I want you to write about him. I want you to warn girls about men like him. I want you to save their lives. I want you to save nice people like Martha’s father and stepmother and her sisters from having broken hearts. I gotta leave town—can’t stand Amhearst. Gives me the creeps. I feel like I’m suffocating here—but you write about him, you hear?”

“I hear. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“About Martha?”

“Yes. Mrs. Wilson, her neighbor, says that there were two people at her condo the morning she was killed. One was the new boyfriend.”

“Mac.”

“Right. Mrs. Wilson thought the other was Ken, but we now know he wasn’t even in the state, let alone in Amhearst on that date. Do you have any idea who it might have been?”

“You mean, was it me? ’Cause it wasn’t. Not that I can prove it, but it wasn’t.”

“Okay. Second question—do you have any idea where this Mac lived or what he did for a job?”

“I wish I did, but I don’t. I don’t think Martha was ever at his place. He always came to hers. And she never mentioned his work to me. Probably afraid he’d slug her again.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Colby. Call me if you think of anything, okay?”

When she had hung up, I leaned back in my chair and thought about nice men and terrible men. Lots of times a terrible man was easy to spot, but lots of times he hid behind a nice-guy facade until some unfortunate woman was caught in his web. How could a young girl like Bailey spot a Chaz in time to save herself? Or a trusting, kind woman like Martha see a Mac for what he was? How were you guaranteed a Curt or a Doug Reeder or—I glanced toward the big picture window and the man seated there—or a Mac Carnuccio?