The Surrogate (11 page)

Jamie reached into her pocket for a tissue and handed it to Amanda. “I’m sure that Sonny loved you very much and was very proud of you.”

Jamie paused while Amanda dabbed at her eyes then asked, “What about your mother? Is she still alive?”

Amanda hesitated before saying, “My remarkable mother is no longer the guiding light in my life. But I have my dear brother, and the Lord sent me my darling Toby. And soon we will be parents. You can’t imagine how that knowledge fills my heart.”

Feeling a wave of discomfort at Amanda’s deceit, Jamie moved an inch or two away from her.

“I watched you on television last week,” Jamie said.

“I am so pleased,” Amanda said, smiling through her tears. “Did you pray with me? Did you accept our Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

“Not really,” Jamie admitted. “I just watched.”

Amanda took both of Jamie’s hands in hers. “You must look after your soul, child. I want you to pray with me now.”

Jamie dutifully bowed her head and listened while Amanda thanked God for the beautiful day, for the birds that gave Jamie such enjoyment. “And I ask your blessing on this young woman and the precious infant she carries. She is a good person and accepts that you are the one true God.”

Jamie joined her in saying “Amen.”

L
ENORA HAD NEVER
been to the Texas Panhandle before. Most of what she knew about the region came from weather reports on the evening news. The Panhandle had more winter storms and tornadoes than the rest of the state.

As their flight banked for a landing at the Amarillo airport, she was surprised to see the sprawl of a large city spread below them after flying over hundreds of miles of emptiness. “Why do so many people live down there?” she asked Bentley.

Bentley chuckled. “Amarillo is a major distribution center for oil and cattle,” he said, closing his briefcase. During the flight they had been going over his notes in preparation for the Marshall County commissioner’s meeting that he would be attending this afternoon.

“And there’s a huge facility for slaughtering cattle and a number of petrochemical plants,” he added.

Lenora made a face. “Sounds lovely,” she said.

Once they were on the ground, Lenora headed for the car-rental counter while Bentley made a few phone calls. Less than twenty minutes after landing, they were on their way. Lenora followed the signs that led her from the airport and soon was heading west on Interstate 40.

“Think you can light a fire under the county commissioners?” she asked.

“Actually, they really aren’t dragging their feet,” he admitted. “They’re having the motor rebuilt on their forty-year-old bulldozer. Your concern for Jamie Long has begun to rub off on me, though, and I took a certain perverse pleasure in prolonging Gus Hartmann’s irritation.”

“You know, either Gus Hartmann is getting more cantankerous or you’re suffering from burnout,” Lenora observed.

Bentley sighed. “Maybe it’s some of both. But the truth of the matter is I need Gus more than he needs me.”

“You signed the papers on the haunted house yet?” Lenora asked.

“Day after tomorrow. I’ve never seen Brenda more excited. She drives out there every single day, and yesterday I heard her
whistling.
I’ve been married to her for almost thirty-five years and never once heard my wife whistle.”

“So?”

“So I’m jealous of a goddamned house that would fall over if I leaned on it.”

“I’m sorry,” Lenora said.

“Me, too.”

Once they had left the outskirts of Amarillo, the landscape was unvaried but majestic in its vastness and loneliness. The drive to Alma took about an hour.

The most noticeable thing about Alma was the overpass that allowed motorists to sail over the town without even slowing down. Lenora parked in front of the Main Street Café, where they both ordered the blue-plate special—chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy.

After lunch, Bentley headed for the courthouse, and Lenora drove north. Within minutes she had left the town far behind her, with only an occasional lonely farmhouse and its cluster of outbuildings to break the monotony of the landscape. Lenora realized as she drove along that she hadn’t seen another vehicle for miles, which she found disconcerting. She was a city girl. What if she had a blowout? Did AAA send tow trucks to such remote places? And where did one go to the bathroom?

Her first indication that the ranch was near was a high fence posted with signs warning
DANGER
!
HIGH VOLTAGE
. Then she saw a stone tower rising above treetops. As she drove a bit farther, she could see that the tower was part of a very large stone house set about a half mile or so back from the road in a grove of trees. And some distance north of the ranch house, she could see other structures, including a water tower and a large silo.

She expected some sort of impressive sign to tell her she had arrived at Hartmann Ranch, but all that greeted her was a closed gate and a large sign that said
PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO HUNTING ALLOWED. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
.

She pulled up to an intercom speaker mounted beside the gate and pressed the button. Shortly a female voice said, “Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m here to visit Jamie Long.”

“Just a minute,” the voice said.

The minute proved to be a very long one. The house was not visible from this vantage point, just a curving drive lined with cedars. After five minutes, Lenora turned off the motor. After another fifteen minutes, she pressed the button again. This time a male voice responded.

“I am here to visit Jamie Long,” Lenora repeated. “I have come all the way from Austin for this purpose and have been waiting twenty minutes for the gate to open.”

“One minute, please.”

After several more minutes, Lenora once again pressed the button.

“Yes,” the same male voice said.

“I am here to see Jamie Long, and if you don’t open this gate, I plan to climb over it.”

“You would get quite a shock,” the man said. “And if you got inside, we would have to detain you.”

“Are you a policeman?”

“The ranch has a security force that has law-enforcement jurisdiction over ranch property.”

“Okay. Let’s start over. My name is Lenora Richardson. I work for Bentley Abernathy, who is the Hartmann family attorney in Austin. I have been trying to reach Jamie Long for months. She has not responded to my letters or phone calls. I am concerned about her and would really appreciate it if you told her that I am here to see her. If she does not want to see me, I want her to call me on my cell phone and tell me so in person. Now, pick up a pencil and write down this phone number.”

“Folks don’t have much luck with cell phones out here,” the man said.

“Then I want to speak to the person in charge.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

Lenora looked around for a tree or a bush. She really needed to go to the bathroom but was afraid to get too far from the intercom. Finally, she looked up and down the empty road to make sure no one was coming, then opened the door, pulled down her slacks, and squatted beside the car.

She had no sooner finished buckling her belt than she heard a woman’s voice saying, “Miss Richardson?”

“Yes,” she responded.

“This is Ann Montgomery,” a woman’s voice said pleasantly. “I am the head housekeeper here at the ranch and am so sorry you drove all the way out here to see Jamie Long. She no longer lives here.”

“Why is that?”

“I am not sure. She was with us for a time and then left.”

“Where did she go?”

“I have no idea. She had her car here at the ranch and simply packed up and left. Such a quiet young woman. I will let Miss Hartmann know that you came by. Perhaps she knows something about Miss Long’s plans.”

“I would appreciate that,” Lenora said. “Miss Hartmann can get in touch with me at the office of Mr. Bentley Abernathy in Austin.”

“Yes, I understand that. Again, I am sorry for your inconvenience.”

“You know, I have been trying to reach Jamie by telephone and by mail for some time now.”

“Perhaps she did not wish to respond,” the woman suggested.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Lenora uttered an obscenity and got into the car. She backed onto the road and drove north toward the water tower and silo. As she drew closer, she realized that an entire community was spread out below the two soaring structures.

She turned onto the gravel road and stopped at a building with gas pumps in front and went inside what proved to be an old-fashioned general store with a serve-yourself concession area. A young Hispanic woman stopped stocking a shelf with breakfast cereal and stepped behind the cash register.

Lenora poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup. “I think I’m lost,” Lenora told the woman as she paid for the coffee.

“Where do you want to go?” the woman asked in accented English.

“Alma,” Lenora said.

“That way,” the woman said, pointing south. “Turn left at first road. Soon there is a road sign for Alma.”

Lenora tried to look suitably relieved. “It seemed like I had been driving forever. I was afraid I’d gotten lost. So, what is this place called?”

“Hartmann City. Is part of big ranch.”

“I met a young woman in Austin who said she was going to live at the Hartmann Ranch. Her name is Jamie. Would you happen to know her?”

The woman shook her head.

“Well, thank you for the directions,” Lenora said, taking a sip from her Styrofoam cup.

Back in the car, she drove through the community, drawing stares from children in the school yard and from a man in a pickup truck. Obviously they did not have many visitors here.

She made a U-turn and headed back toward Hartmann Road.

Lenora pulled into a drive-in on the way out of town. Bentley ordered a milkshake, and she requested a Coke.

“What I really want is a martini,” Lenora said.

“No luck, I take it,” Bentley said as she backed out of the parking space.

“You first,” Lenora said.

“The commissioners will rent a bulldozer from Oldham County. They hope to start the project in a couple of weeks. Now, what happened at the ranch? Did you see Jamie?”

Lenora explained what had transpired and concluded her story by saying, “Boss, I’m really worried about Jamie.”

“Well,” Bentley said, “the contract specified that she would be paid for her time and dismissed if she didn’t become pregnant after three insemination procedures. Maybe she drove off in her grandmother’s car and is back in college or gone back to wherever she came from.”

“Mesquite,” Lenora said.

“Yeah, maybe she’s back in Mesquite.”

“Maybe so,” Lenora acknowledged. “The whole experience was spooky, though. The Hartmanns have a regular fiefdom out there, with a feudal village for the serfs. The ranch house looks like a castle complete with a turreted tower, and in lieu of a drawbridge and moat, there are miles of electric fences.”

“You know what a big issue privacy is with them.”

“More like an obsession, I’d say,” Lenora said.

“But if the whole insemination deal is off,” Bentley pondered, “it does seem strange that Amanda didn’t let us know and request that we find another girl. Maybe she and her husband have changed their minds.”

Bentley thought of Gus and Amanda’s impatience during the search for a surrogate. Which had made him nervous. The Hartmanns’ annual retainer accounted for more than half of Bentley’s income. Pleasing them was a condition of his life.

“I saw Amanda the other night on television,” Lenora said. “She really is remarkable. There were moments when I got tears in my eyes and other times when I wanted to jump up and down and yell ‘Hallelujah.’ Amanda Tutt Hartmann is either the genuine article or the world’s greatest con artist.”

“I think she is sincere,” Bentley said. “Gus Hartmann is more pragmatic.”

And more ruthless, he thought. Back in the days when Bentley was dealing with angry landowners who claimed Gus or his grandfather before him had swindled them out of their mineral rights, lawsuits would quietly be dropped for no apparent reason. Bentley had always wondered what sort of intimidation had been used.

He also had wondered if Gus had something to do with the death of Amanda’s ex-husband. Bentley had tried to persuade the man that it was in his best interest to accept the Hartmanns’ generous offer and get the hell out of Amanda and Sonny’s life, but Lenny Bradford joined AA, swore off gambling, hired a lawyer of his own, and sued for shared custody. Both sides were gearing up for a huge court battle when Bradford was shot while coming out of a restaurant by a still unidentified assailant.

And more recently, Bentley had been bothered by Gus’s determination to find someone to blame for Sonny’s tragic accident. The company that manufactured the all-terrain vehicle Sonny had been driving claimed that the rollover had caused a wheel to come off. Gus hired one of the best trial lawyers in the country to prove that just the opposite was true—that the wheel coming off was the cause of the accident. When the manufacturer offered a huge settlement, Gus turned it down. The next day the CEO was found hanging from the rafters of his horse barn. His death was ruled a suicide. At first his family had refuted that finding but soon withdrew their protest.

Not that Gus would harm Jamie Long, even if she tried to back out of her contract. The Hartmanns were powerful people and not to be trifled with, but they could always hire another surrogate mother.

Probably Jamie had miscarried or the insemination procedure had never worked in the first place and she had been dismissed.

Yes, something like that must have happened, Bentley assured himself. They had given her some money and sent her on her way. Any day now Gus probably would be calling to demand that he find another young woman to replace her.

I
T HAD BEEN CHILLY
when Jamie and Ralph began their walk, but now it was downright cold with a biting wind that cut right through her. And grayness had settled over the land, robbing it of beauty and making it seem inhospitable and cruel.

When she opened the door to her apartment, there were two boxes waiting for her—one of them quite large. True to her word, Amanda had sent her maternity clothes—jeans, knit shirts, sweaters, underwear, and two flannel nightgowns. In the smaller box was a pair of binoculars.

She went to a window and focused the binoculars on a lone red-tailed hawk circling near the road and watched with fascination as it suddenly dove with breathtaking speed. Just when it seemed as though it would crash into the ground, the bird swooped upward with a small creature—a field mouse, probably—firmly held in a grasping foot. The powerful do prey on the weak, she thought philosophically. She wondered if the field mouse struggled or simply accepted its inevitable fate.

She put away the clothing and wrote a thank-you note to Amanda and slipped it under Miss Montgomery’s door. Then, more out of boredom than fatigue, she decided to take a nap. “Just an hour or so,” she told Ralph, who curled up beside her on the sofa.

She dozed until her dinner tray arrived—at straight-up six o’clock, like always. She fed Ralph then turned on the television and decided which anchorperson she would have for a dinner companion. Other than Lester and Ralph, television people were her only friends. And Mary Millicent. Except that Amanda’s mother hadn’t made a middle-of-the-night visit since their songfest more than a month ago.

Jamie selected an Amarillo station, more to hear a weather report than from any desire to know what was going on in the Panhandle’s largest city, and removed the domed cover from her dinner plate. Tonight’s entrée was a baked chicken breast served with green beans and scalloped potatoes. Tonight’s weather, according to a perky brunette weatherperson, was scattered showers and intermittent sleet. Jamie didn’t mind her solitary breakfasts and lunches, but dinner was a meal she associated with companionship. At her grandmother’s house, dinnertime meant a cloth on the table, a blank screen on the television set, and a reporting of one’s day. In Austin, she usually had dinner in the residential-center cafeteria with one or more of her dorm mates.

After she’d put the dinner tray in the hall for pickup, Jamie curled up in bed to watch
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
She’d seen the 1960s movie before but was charmed all over again as she watched Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard fall in love. How lovely that would be, she thought, to fall in love with someone and have that someone love her in return. She didn’t even have anyone to daydream about. Except Joe Brammer. And he was probably married by now. He would have finished law school and most likely was ready to settle down and have a family.

When the film ended, Jamie turned out the light. But her mind refused to settle down.

Finally, she got up and paced up and down the living room, much to Ralph’s bewilderment. When the dog finally got so upset over her strange behavior that he began to whine, she stopped pacing and heated a cup of milk in the microwave. She had just taken the first sip when she heard a key in the lock. Ralph heard it, too. His crooked tail began to wag in expectation.

Mary Millicent had on the same black lace nightgown as before with a tattered quilt around her shoulders and men’s argyle socks on her feet. “You’re not in bed,” she noted.

“No, I’m having trouble sleeping,” Jamie explained.

“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

“What makes you ask?”

“I hear and see things,” Mary Millicent said with a girlish giggle. “The witch and the nurse talk in front of me sometimes. They think I’m just a crazy old woman and don’t pay me any mind. I always had trouble sleeping when I was pregnant. It gets your whole body out of whack.”

Mary Millicent placed a hand on Jamie’s abdomen. “Yep. Between four and five months, I’d say. Felt any quickening yet?”

“No,” Jamie said, moving away from the woman’s touch.
Quickening.
The nurse had asked her the same thing and then explained that the term meant a woman had reached the stage in pregnancy when she could feel the fetus move. Jamie had no choice but to talk to Nurse Freda about such things, but she didn’t have to discuss it with other people.

Or even to think about it.

“It’s time you met Sonny,” Mary Millicent declared, wrapping the quilt more tightly around her emaciated body.

“Sonny? I thought he was dead.”

“Might as well be,” Mary Millicent said.

“Where is he?” Jamie asked.

Mary Millicent shook her head and put a finger to her lips. Then she grabbed Jamie’s hand and pulled her along as she tiptoed across the room and carefully opened the door. Jamie closed the door behind them.

Hand in hand they walked down the long, silent corridor. When they reached the entrance to the tiny chapel, Mary Millicent pulled Jamie inside. For an instant, Jamie thought Mary Millicent was going to kneel in front of the softly lit altar. Instead the old woman pushed on one side of it.

Jamie watched in amazement as the altar and the wall behind it swung inward. Mary Millicent stepped inside and switched on a light, revealing a bare wooden staircase. She waved Jamie through the opening, pushed the hidden door back in place, and started up the stairs.

Jamie followed as Mary Millicent slowly climbed, pausing on each step. At the top of the staircase she found herself in an octagon-shaped room that smelled of disinfectant. Half of the room was cordoned off with heavy curtains, like those used in hospital rooms. This side of the room held a large reclining chair, a small table with a lamp, and a second flight of stairs that disappeared into an opening above.

Jamie held back, not sure she wanted to see what was behind the curtain, but Mary Millicent pulled it back, revealing a metal bed with railings. On the bed, lying on his back, was the slight form of a person with longish blond hair.

“Come meet Sonny,” Mary Millicent said.

Slowly Jamie approached the bed.

She stared down at the wasted body on the bed. His eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken, his chin covered with stubble, but his hair looked as though it had just been brushed. “Is he conscious?” she whispered.

“Sometimes he mumbles and moves his arms and legs,” Mary Millicent said, “and every once in a while he opens his eyes and looks at me, but I’m not sure he sees me.”

The man was little more than a skeleton. Like Mary Millicent. Fluids were dripping into a vein in his arm, and his urine was being drained into a large plastic bag that hung from the side of the bed.

Jamie thought of the pictures of the glorious young man with the unruly blond hair and wonderful smile that she’d seen on the wall of the library and felt overwhelming sadness that he was now reduced to such a state.

“Who takes care of him?”

“The nurse and the witch—and one of the Mexican men helps out some. They feed him through a tube, but he’s nothing but skin and bones. Once he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen. When he smiled at me, I felt like I had been given a wonderful gift. I loved this boy more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my entire life. More than I loved God. My heart loved him and my eyes and my ears and my fingertips and my soul.”

Jamie realized the old woman’s cheeks were awash with tears and put a comforting arm around her bony shoulders. “It must be wonderful to love someone like that,” she said.

“No, it’s not. It makes you weak when you love. It gives God a way to punish you,” Mary Millicent said, pulling away from Jamie’s embrace. “After the accident, Amanda brought Sonny here and spent weeks and weeks doing nothing but praying to God to save her son. Even Gus came and prayed, and I tried to. I really did. But all I could do was curse. Do you think that’s why God won’t let Sonny wake up—because I cursed at Him for not doing a better job watching over my darling boy?”

Mary Millicent picked up Sonny’s hand and kissed it. “He was a holy being from the moment he was born,” she continued, laying her cheek against her grandson’s hand. “We all knew it. And felt it. You could see it in his eyes. In his smile. He was a holy being, and I knew that he was going to save more souls than my daddy or me or Amanda ever even thought about. But he never got the chance. God isn’t ever going to let him wake up,” she wailed, “and it’s time to let the poor boy go. I thought since you were going to have his baby that Amanda would have let him go by now. The last time she was here, I thought that was why she came. She spent hours and hours sitting here by the bed and holding Sonny’s hand and kissing him and washing his body and talking to him.”

“What does my pregnancy have to do with Sonny?” Jamie asked, backing away from the bed, not sure if she really wanted to hear Mary Millicent’s answer.

The anguish vanished from Mary Millicent’s face and she emitted a lewd-sounding cackle. “He’s your lover,” she said and used her hands to mimic intercourse.

“I don’t have a lover,” Jamie said.

“Honey, you don’t have to pretend with me. I live right up there,” Mary Millicent said, pointing toward the ceiling. They think I don’t know what goes on down here, but I do. I heard Amanda tell Sonny that he was going to be a father. She said the mother of the baby was a pretty girl with blond hair and blue eyes, just like him. And she was tall and smart, just like him. And a good Christian, just like him.”

Jamie took another step back. She shouldn’t have come here. She didn’t want to know about this poor shell of a man who was more dead than alive. And she didn’t want to hear nonsense coming from the mouth of an addle-brained old woman.

“You want to go upstairs and see where I live?” Mary Millicent asked.

Jamie shook her head as she turned and walked shakily toward the stairs.

“Don’t you want to kiss him good night?” Mary Millicent asked.

“No,” Jamie said, grabbing hold of the banister and hurrying down the stairs. She could hear Mary Millicent singing in her quavering old-lady voice,

Frantically Jamie pulled open the door and crept into the chapel then pulled the altar back in place and, with a pounding heart, looked up and down the corridor, half expecting to see Miss Montgomery or Amanda Hartmann waiting to accost her.

But she had done nothing wrong. All she had done was befriend a lonely old woman. It wasn’t as though she had set out to discover what was apparently a carefully guarded secret, a secret being kept by an incredibly wealthy family that practiced power and subterfuge along with religion.

But maybe they kept Sonny hidden away because they didn’t want reporters to hover around like vultures. Maybe that was why Amanda and her brother were so security-conscious.

Back in her apartment, Jamie sank onto the sofa and buried her face against Ralph’s neck, who was pathetically glad to see her. Not that she had been gone long, but he was unaccustomed to being left alone in the middle of the night.

Jamie willed her heart to stop racing and took several deep breaths in an attempt to slow it and to control the troubling avalanche of thoughts tumbling through her mind. She placed a hand on her stomach in a rare acknowledgment of the pregnancy that was changing the contours of her body. Had Mary Millicent really overheard Amanda saying that Sonny was the father of this baby?

Jamie shook her head in denial. She wasn’t going to believe the raving of a crazy old woman. Toby Travis was the father of the baby. She had signed a contract agreeing to have a baby for him and Amanda. The nice fertility doctor in Austin had used Toby Travis’s semen to inseminate her.

Could someone have taken semen from poor Sonny Hartmann and had the doctor use it instead?

Jamie remembered reading about an Aberdeen-Angus bull in Canada that was thought to have fathered more offspring than any other bull ever. His semen was packed in dry ice and shipped all over the world. Which meant that human semen could surely be transported from Marshall County to Austin.

Did a man have to give his consent before his semen was used to conceive a child, she wondered. Of course, men became unwilling fathers all the time, but at least they had realized that was a possibility when they had unprotected sex with a woman.

Jamie recalled an old movie that she had watched late one night after her grandmother had gone to bed.
The World According to Garp.
An army nurse had crawled into a bed with an unconscious soldier and gotten herself pregnant.

If that was possible, then it might be possible for someone to masturbate an unconscious man to an orgasm.

Jamie shook her head to clear her mind of such an image.
No way,
she told herself.

Or Nurse Freda might have done some sort of surgical procedure.

Jamie touched her stomach. If she
had
been impregnated with Sonny’s semen, the baby inside her would be Amanda’s grandchild. But the birth certificate would say that Toby was the father and that Amanda was the baby’s
adopted
mother.

What about Amanda’s own pregnancy? Was she just pretending to be pregnant?

Maybe she was planning to raise Jamie’s child as her own flesh and blood, which it truly would be if Sonny was its father. But what could possibly be the reason for such deception? Whether Amanda was the baby’s grandmother or adopted mother, she would end up raising it.

Jamie groaned and put her hands to her head. It was too confusing. Too insane. She had gotten herself locked up in a loony bin. She needed to talk to someone on the outside, someone who could help her make sense of things.

She got up and went to the desk. She opened first one drawer and then another, searching for her address book.

It wasn’t there.

She looked in the bedside table. Between the sofa cushions. Under the bed. In every drawer. The top of the closet. Behind every book.