The Baby Invasion (Destiny Bay-Baby Dreams) (13 page)

“The man’s car?” he asked Cathy.

She nodded and Scott made a quick stop to detach the distributor cap and toss it into the shrubbery.
 

“Okay Cathy Feenstra,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat of the van.
 
“Let’s get this traveling circus on the road.”

The van was old and battered, with peeling dark blue paint and a cracked back window. Cathy was used to its torn upholstery and the bench-style front seat, making getting to the rear of the vehicle when it was moving an athletic chore. But it was big and it could carry a lot, including kids and all their assorted toys, sports equipment, bicycles and everything else.
 

They’d had three vehicles when Cathy had been married to Joey. He’d taken the Maserati, sold the Mercedes and left her the old van. Others had sneered, but Cathy had always maintained he’d done her a favor. She needed the room. And now, with the three babies added to her brood, she was grateful she had it.

“Mr. Carrington is going with us, kids,” she said breathlessly as she sank into the passenger’s seat. She slipped on her seat belt, then looked back at the children and smiled. The three babies were asleep, but her own three were wide-eyed, watching every move.
 

“Here we go,” she told them. “Hang on.”

But they weren’t moving. She looked over at Scott and found him fumbling with the controls, searching for the brake, unsure of the clutch.

“How the hell do you work this thing?” he muttered impatiently.

“Do you want me to drive?” she asked. But she leaned over and pointed out the brake release.

He threw her a look and got the big vehicle moving at last. “Here we go,” he said, echoing her words. “Lake Tahoe, here we come.”

The engine roared to life, and they were off. Cathy glanced back at April’s house. There was no angry man running out into the street, no sign that anyone knew they were leaving. And then they were out of the development and on the ramp to the freeway, and she settled back. There was no way Robby Crockett would ever guess which way they’d gone. Was there?

CHAPTER SEVEN:

Racing Through the Night

Though the babies continued to sleep, lulled by the movement of the van, Cathy’s own children were too excited to close their eyes for the first hour of the trip. They chattered and sang songs and asked questions, until Cathy began looking at Scott covertly, wondering if they were driving him crazy.
 

If so, there were no obvious signs of it. He even broke into a chorus of “Clementine” now and then and ended up teaching them how to sing “Found a Peanut,” for which Cathy swore she would never forgive him.

“We’re going to have to go down to the desert and then up the back side of the Sierras,” he said.
 
“Tioga’s still closed.”

“Oh no.
 
Won’t that take a lot longer?”

He shrugged.
 
“We’ll see. I don’t think it’ll make that much difference.”

“Will we get to stay in a motel?” Beth asked.
 

“I don’t know.”
 
Cathy shivered.
 
She didn’t want to think about how much she really didn’t know about what they were getting themselves into.
 

“How much longer?” Beth asked four times in the next ten minutes.

“Are we there yet?” Barnaby chimed in.

A bit more of that and Cathy herself would be tearing her hair out.
 

“We’ve got a long way to go,” she told them. “You two should get some sleep.”

“Will we be there when we wake up?”

Cathy shook her head. “No, I’m afraid not.”

“We’ll be at breakfast when you wake up,” Scott interjected. “We ought to make Mammoth at about the right time, and I know someone who runs a restaurant there. How about it, you two? If you go to sleep now and don’t wake up until after dawn, we’ll stop for breakfast at Mammoth Lakes.”

“Breakfast at a real restaurant?” Beth said with awe. “Not a fast-food place?”

Scott nodded. “It’s a real restaurant, all right. With strawberry waffles and crepes and French toast with powdered sugar. Close your eyes and dream about it and when you open them, we’ll be there.”

Something was swelling in Cathy’s chest. She wasn’t sure what it was. Gratitude? Appreciation? Affection? She couldn’t say. But she did know she was so glad Scott was coming along. He was perfect with children. How could he claim not to like them when he seemed to know just what to say, just how to act? It was such a waste!

Funny—Robby Crockett claimed to hate kids and he was actually scary.
 
Scott said he didn’t like kids, but something in the way he dealt with them gave the lie to that statement—didn’t it?
 
Or was that just wishful thinking on her part?

The children began to settle down, though sleep was still going to take some time to achieve. Suddenly Barnaby leaned forward, toward his mother.

“Mommy,” he said in a stage whisper as the dark night flew past, “are we being kidnapped?”

“No!” She looked quickly at Scott, then back at her son. “No, honey. It’s nothing like that.” She laughed softly. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

Barnaby looked at Scott, then whispered again, “He’s not my daddy. Why is he driving?”

Cathy turned and took his face in her hands. “No, darling, he’s not your daddy. But he’s a good, good friend to our family. He’s helping us.” She kissed his nose. “He’s helping me. Without Scott, we wouldn’t be able to go to Lake Tahoe to find the babies’ mother. And I’m very grateful to him. Aren’t you?”

Barnaby didn’t say another word, but the look he threw Scott was anything but appreciative.

Scott was pondering something important, but he didn’t want to bring it up.
 
Still, his mind wouldn’t leave it alone, and finally, when he was sure all the children were asleep, he posed it to Cathy.

“You hit the Crockett guy with a frying pan, right?”

“Yes,” she answered, staring straight ahead.
 

“Hard?”

“Hard enough to put him out like a light.”

He nodded.
 
“Good.
 
But the one thing that’s bothering me—are you sure you didn’t kill him?”

“Kill him!”
 
She covered her mouth before her shriek was half finished, and she looked back to see if the children had heard her.
 
“No!” she hissed at Scott.
 
“Of course I didn’t kill him.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.
 
I looked at him.
 
He was breathing.”
 
I think, she thought to herself.

Scott chewed on his lip.
 
“Yeah, I thought so too at the time.
 
But I wish I’d done a better job of checking it out.”
 
He flashed her a quick smile.
 
“We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

She looked out the window into the darkness.
 
Now she had a new fear to worry about.
 
But no, she was almost positive.
 
He was breathing.

She glared at Scott.
 
“Just drive,” she said.
 

They found an all-night market in Mojave and Cathy went in to stock up on supplies. She did raise some eyebrows when she filled her cart with enough varieties of disposable diapers to service a medium-sized day care center. She also got juices, milk, formula, apples and crackers. That would have to hold them all until the promised breakfast in Mammoth.

Scott helped her load the supplies into the van and then they were off again, cruising along the almost empty highway, heading north through the Mojave Desert. Nothing but blackness for miles and miles with their headlights making a lonely, pathetic stab at lighting the road, splitting apart the darkness. It made Cathy shiver to think how solitary their journey was.

The children were all asleep now. She knew she should sleep herself and rest up for when it would be her turn to drive. But she was still too tense, still too full of adrenaline. This was quite an adventure they were on.

“Get some sleep,” Scott advised her.

She looked over at him and smiled. “I’d love to. But I can’t. Not yet.”

“What would help? Music?”

“No.” She settled back as comfortably as she could. “Talk to me. Tell me all about yourself.”

She could sense his grin rather than see it. “Oh, I see. And that will put you right to sleep, will it?”

She laughed. There was nothing better than a man with a sense of humor, a man who could joke about himself. Joey had always taken life so seriously. An outsider would have thought he was fun, always laughing and joking. What that person wouldn’t have realized was that the joke was always on someone else. Joey never joked about himself. His place in life, his niche in history, was much too important, and when others didn’t make the proper gestures of respect for that, his good humor quickly turned sour.

But why was she always comparing this man to Joey? She had to stop that. She knew her love for Joey was gone. The only part of it that survived lived on in these children. That she would never lose. But even the resentments had died by now. She felt sorry for Joey. He would never find what he was looking for. He didn’t realize that he was searching for self-respect, and only he could provide it, not the playmates and hangers-on he ran with.

Scott seemed very different. There was a core of self-confidence about him, a satisfaction with his own personal well-being. Surely he had problems. Who didn’t? But she had a feeling he was able to deal with them whenever they arose. There was a sweet calm to him, a readiness to handle all that life threw at him— even if it was a van full of babies.

But here she was, comparing them again. She had to stop it. There was no point in it. Scott wasn’t going to be a fixture in her life. He was helping now, and he would be gone next week. She was grateful. And she would have fun with him while he was around. But she had to keep in mind the fact that he would soon be gone. She had to face facts.

So she laughed again and turned to him and was glad they’d developed a comfortable relationship that allowed joking.
 

“No, silly, hearing you talk about yourself won’t put me to sleep. But it will relax me. Tell me where you were born. Tell me where you grew up, and what they called you when you were young.”

“They called me Scotty.” He looked at her and grinned. “That’s a shocker, isn’t it?” He looked back at the road and his grin faded. “And when you come right down to it, we’re headed back toward where I grew up over a lot of those years.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “I was born in Destiny Bay, but I was pretty much raised in Reno, Nevada. My father was the supervisor of a mining operation near there. Some of my family still lives in the area.”

She watched him in the dim light. “So your father dug into the earth,” she said softly, “and you soar in the sky. A psychologist could have a field day with that one.”

He looked almost startled, then his face relaxed into a slight smile. “I guess you’re right. I’d never really thought of it that way. But isn’t that the way it always goes? Don’t we always try for a life that’s the opposite of our parents’?”

“Maybe.” She was skeptical, but after all, they both were perfect examples of his theory. She’d had no family while growing up and was determined to have a wonderful one to make up for that. He’d had too much family and wanted none of it, ever again.
 

“I don’t know. I suppose if you have a happy childhood, you might want to repeat that pattern and might work to do just what your parents did to achieve it.”

“Maybe. But I have yet to see evidence of that.”

“You just don’t know anyone with a happy childhood.”

“Is that it?”

“Sure.” She took a deep breath. “You just watch me and my children,” she said firmly. “We’ll prove it to you.”

She almost made him believe it. He glanced at her, sitting so far away, and he had the urge to reach out and pull her close, so they could ride side by side like teenagers.
 
Bucket seats, however, made that hard to do.

But he could enjoy looking at her.
 
So she was aiming for a happy childhood. Yes, if anyone could give that to children, she probably could.

He thought of his mother. Had she started out sure that she would provide happy childhoods for all those kids? If so, something had happened along the way. He remembered her as tired and irritable all the time. The children seemed to be a tremendous burden. So why had she kept having them? That was the puzzle he would never have the answer to.

“Well, I think it’s great that we’ll be so near your family heritage,” Cathy was saying. “No matter what you say, you must have been a happy bunch. With so many kids in the family, how could it have been that bad?”

His laugh was humorless. “It was bad enough. My mother was sick most of the time, either with being pregnant or reactions to pregnancies. And the stress, financial and emotional, of having all those kids finally tore my parents’ marriage apart.”

“Oh.” Cathy felt hollow and sad. “Will you get a chance to see any of the ones who are still there?”

He was quiet for so long, she began to wonder if he’d heard her question.

“I don’t keep in touch with that part of my family,” he said at last. “In fact, most of them hate my guts.”

He said it calmly, but she could sense the underlying emotions. No matter what he might pretend, rifts in a family had to hurt.
 

“Oh no, Scott,” she said quickly. “Why?”

He glanced at her again. She looked pretty by moonlight; her hair silvery, her face pale and translucent, she seemed like a porcelain figurine. Why was it that he felt he could tell her things he’d never told anyone else? Was it because she seemed to care? Because she actually seemed to listen? Or was there something more to it?

It came to him in a flash—if he didn’t watch out, he could fall in love with this woman.