On the Doorstep Page 7

  The honorable mayor, or dishonorable in this case, was also a major player in his investigation. If not for the philandering former prosecutor seducing and getting a young woman pregnant, and then stealing her baby, there wouldn’t be a case at all.

  “Got any other questions?” Zach prodded.

  Plenty, but several that he couldn’t ask right away, so he turned the subject back to the detective. “What’s the story about the baby?”

  Zach stiffened for a few seconds and blew out a frustrated breath. “We have a few leads about the mother, but nothing has panned out. That little guy is still without a mother.” He indicated with his head toward the portable crib.

  Ross choked on his swallow of lemonade. “That’s the baby?”

  Zach nodded, staring at the baby, his expression grim. “The Frasers are licensed foster parents.”

  “And the Hispanic woman you were talking to earlier. Who was she?”

  “She’s the Tiny Blessings employee who discovered the baby. I’ve questioned her a few times about the case.”

  Somehow Ross managed not to chuckle. He’d looked at women a few times the way Zach had been staring at the black-haired woman.

  “I need to find the baby’s mother, and soon.” Zach shook his head and turned back to him. “But you were asking questions about your case.”

  “Like I said, I just do the boring stuff.” Too bad he wasn’t ready to talk about his case yet. Detective Fletcher could have been a valuable resource.

  “Something tells me I wouldn’t be bored with it.”

  Ross shrugged. “And some people have a high tolerance for boredom.”

  Zach smiled. He didn’t believe him for a minute.

  They were at an impasse, and both of them knew it. The only problem was one of them was a Chestnut Grove police detective who could make it plenty difficult for the other one to get the answers he needed. Ross’s reticence had probably only piqued Zach’s interest about what he was investigating, and it wouldn’t do to have the police following him around, looking under every stone he turned over.

  An olive branch was in order.

  “Look, I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot. I’ll just get the answers in my boring little investigation and be on my way.”

  Zach nodded. “If you come up with anything in your boring little investigation that you can’t handle, you’ll be in touch, right?” He pulled out his wallet and handed Ross his card.

  “Will do.”

  “I could probably help you find some of the answers.”

  “I know you could, detective, but you’ve got a more critical case on your hands right now.” Ross looked pointedly at the baby beginning to fuss in the crib.

  Zach swallowed hard as he watched the baby, giving the clue that the detective was closer to this investigation than a professional distance required. Ross was almost sorry he’d played on the police officer’s emotions to get what he wanted, but he had a job to do.

  “You’ll turn anything that gets too dangerous over to the authorities. Do I have your word?”

  Ross flashed him a thumbs-up, and Zach shook his head. At least they both knew he was lying. He’d never shied away from danger, and he’d never accepted—or needed—help from anyone before, so he wasn’t about to start now.

  Mayor Gerald Morrow caught his wife looking at him suspiciously again as he lay on the sofa Monday evening, so he coughed into his hand and blew his nose for her benefit.

  “You still don’t look that sick to me,” Lindsay sniffed in the hateful way she always spoke to him when no one was around. The acid barely burned anymore.

  She sat stretched on the chaise lounge, looking like a bad waif-model wanna-be in crepe slacks, a silk sweater and open-toe Ferragamos. She would have worn the getup, purchased during one of her weekly jaunts into Richmond’s most exclusive boutiques, to impress the crowd at the Labor Day picnic.

  Would have, not had, since he’d shown up in his robe and slippers, claiming a fever that she could have ruled out if she’d touched him. Good thing for him she never touched him except during photo ops. She was also too worried about appearances to show up without him, so she’d stayed home, questioning whether he was really sick. Anyway, he was sick, just in a different way than he’d told her.

  “I feel lousy, I told you.” He coughed good and hard to prove it. “My head aches, my chest aches and my ears ache. Everyone will understand. The last thing I needed was to be out there in that wind just to give a five-minute welcoming speech.”

  Lindsay played with her black hair, but it only fell back into the perfect pageboy shape that she’d always worn. Her steely blue eyes trained on him, though.

  “That welcoming speech was a perfect opportunity for you to secure votes in the next election, and you’re a fool if you don’t court every single vote.”

  “You know as well as I do, I’ve had a great first term so far. Unless city council turns against me or Chestnut Grove faces a natural disaster, reelection should be a cakewalk.”

  Anxiety had him shoving his hand back through the hair that seemed to have turned white and receded overnight, just before his sixty-fifth birthday. He was more worried about a not-so-natural disaster of horrific proportions if the truth about him and Sandra Lange came to light.

  “Unless,” Lindsay repeated.

  His intake of breath was so automatic that Gerald had to cough again to cover it. He carefully adjusted the blanket over his lap. Did his wife know anything? She couldn’t. He’d covered his tracks so well. Only three people knew the truth: One was dead and the other two had kept mum. At least until now.

  But Lindsay didn’t point her finger at him and shout that he was an adulterer, so he let himself breathe again. He had no doubt if she ever found out, he’d find himself sitting in the middle of Main Street with nothing but the suitcase and the cheap suits he’d brought to his advantageous marriage.

  His wife continued as if she didn’t notice the heart attack she’d nearly given him. “Sitting back on your lazy laurels isn’t going to get you a second term. How are you ever going to get me—us—into the governor’s mansion before you die of old age if you can’t even earn a second term here?”

  How was he going to get them into the governor’s mansion if he couldn’t keep the skeleton in his closet quietly hanging in the back?

  “I’ve stood beside you an awfully long time waiting for that inauguration. I’ve given up a lot for you. The least you could do is give me the Richmond mansion.” She opened her hardcover book and popped her nose inside, a signal that their conversation was finished.

  He lifted his newspaper and continued the pretense that was their marriage. She didn’t even have to list the sacrifices she’d made anymore because he’d memorized them.

  Lindsay Chastain Morrow of the Richmond Chastains had given up her chance to be the real First Lady by selecting the wrong ambitious politician to champion toward the White House. By her choice, she’d given up any additions to the family fortune, which had been accruing since the Belle Air, the Evelynton and the Shirley plantations were still just starter farms in Charles City. And she’d given up the chance to produce an heir by selecting what she considered an infertile sire. If she only knew.

  With just one case of infidelity in nearly thirty-eight years of marriage to Lindsay, Gerald figured he should have earned a medal, instead of standing on the brink of professional ruin. Unfortunately, elected officials’ personal indiscretions were no longer being handled with kid gloves as they had been in the past.

  His only choice was to somehow convince Sandra to keep quiet about their age-old affair and the child resulting from it. Guilt that he thought he’d finally mastered through thirty-some years of practice reared its ugly head again.

  He wasn’t the ogre Sandra believed him to be. He’d even cared for her in his own way and had felt badly about the child she’d lost, and about the emergency hysterectomy that prevented her from having other children.

  He couldn’t
go further than that, though. Had she really expected him to give up everything—his foursome at the golf club, the convertible that always got him to court on time and the contacts that would one day translate into campaign donations—for poor domesticity with her?

  Sandra had to understand that some secrets were too important not to be kept—then and now. That couldn’t change just because of her unfortunate health circumstances. Some secrets simply should be taken to the grave. He’d thought he’d made that perfectly clear to her before. Apparently, she was going to require more convincing.

  Pilar couldn’t remember feeling more alone than that Tuesday morning while she sat in the hospital waiting room. She couldn’t seem to breathe deeply enough to relieve her tight lungs, and her heart beat at an unsure rhythm that patterned her thoughts.

  The organs in her abdomen ached by turns to compete for her attention. The sharp pains on her left side seemed more intense and more frequent this morning, enough to bring tears to her eyes, but then everything this morning made her feel like crying. The pain itself was probably just her body’s reaction to the stress. It didn’t help that she’d just consumed more water in the last forty-five minutes than was necessary to sustain a small country, and all she could do was hold her bladder and wait.

  Lord, please let everything be okay, she repeated again and again, though it felt wrong to pray now when she should have been entrusting her worries into God’s capable hands all along. She felt like a disobedient child running to a parent only after the trouble she’d caused came chasing at her heels.

  She’d been so afraid to tell them before, but now she wished her family and friends were there to support her, at least lifting her up in prayer. Everyone except Kelly expected her to be at work this morning, and even her boss hadn’t pressed for information when Pilar had told her she needed to be away for a few days after Labor Day. Kelly, of anyone, knew how much she’d needed a break.

  At least the office staff wouldn’t be shorthanded in her absence. Phone calls from prospective adoptive parents, or from pregnant women considering adoption, had only been trickling in even before the child abandonment story hit the newspaper. She doubted the phone would ring this morning at all, except from panicked adoptive parents wondering whether their adoptions were legal. Kelly had planned to field those calls herself.

  Pilar shifted in her chair as another pain, still sharper than before, shot through her left side. Just how long were the hospital personnel going to leave her sitting there, hurting and not knowing? She wished someone would call her name, but at the same time, she hoped they would skip her altogether. Then she could hold on to her blissful ignorance just a while longer.

  She felt the pain again, this time so intense that it seemed to radiate from her midsection all the way to the insteps of her feet. Squeezing her eyes shut, she waited for it to deaden. Could all of this be in her head, just a product of an overactive imagination and a bit of medical information?

  “Pilar Estes,” the nurse in the doorway called. She wore a bright smile to go with her bright blue scrubs.

  Pilar followed the nurse down a fluorescent-lit hallway to a room where she was asked to change into a cloth gown. Soon she rested on a table next to a television monitor. A cold, sticky jelly had been smeared over her abdomen. Other women probably had lain in this same position hundreds of times, getting ready for happy introductions to their unborn babies. She didn’t even want to think about what the ultrasound would tell her.

  “Miss Estes, I’m going to press this against your abdomen now, so we can take a look at what’s going on inside,” the ultrasound technician explained.

  All Pilar could make out on the screen was a series of lights and shadows, with a black void where she could only guess a baby would grow. The technician gave nothing away with her expression, but took some measurements and typed in some notes. Finally the woman pulled her instrument away from Pilar’s abdomen.

  “Can you tell me if everything’s all right?”

  The technician shook her head. “I can’t give test results. Those come only from your gynecologist. But if you’ll wait here a moment, I’ll give her a call.”

  Chapter Seven

  Pilar awoke with a start, but no matter how many times she blinked her eyes, a heavy cloud of fog kept her surroundings from coming into focus. Her head pounded, and her mouth tasted like bile. Where was she, and why couldn’t she get this weight off her chest?

  She wrestled whatever held her until a warm hand squeezed hers. “Everything’s fine, Pilar. Do you know where you are?”

  At first she shook her head, but then in pillowy layers, pieces of her memory settled back into place. The remaining pieces tumbled over each other as bright lights and the IV stand next to her bed came into focus.

  A ruptured cyst. Emergency laparoscopic surgery. No answers. As Pilar jerked to lift her head and shoulders up from the bed, dizziness and nausea entwined to press her back against the mattress.

  The nurse had just stepped away, but she rushed back to the bed. “Miss Estes, you need to lie down.”

  Pilar shook her head, though she didn’t lift it off the pillow. “I need to talk to my doctor.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be in as soon as—”

  “I need to see her now.” Even she could hear the panic in her voice.

  The nurse patted her hand and left the room but returned a few minutes later along with Pilar’s gynecologist.

  “Can you tell me what you found?”

  The pretty young doctor smiled, but her expression held a sadness that wasn’t usually there. It was all Pilar could do not to say that whatever it was, she didn’t really need to know.

  “Pilar, you understood the complication when we went into surgery, right? With a ruptured ovarian cyst, we had to go and attempt to save the ovary. Unfortunately…”

  Whatever the doctor said after that came out like a cell phone call in a thunderstorm—the static and the rain itself distorting the message. Torsion of the ovary, she’d called it. Something about the large cyst causing the ovary to twist to give it more room to grow. The blood supply to the ovary had been cut off. Whether she’d understood the medical explanation or not, she’d gotten the most important part: one of her ovaries had died and was gone now.

  Somehow she managed to nod when the doctor reminded her that plenty of women with only one ovary became pregnant. And she shook her head when the nurse asked if they could call someone to be with her.

  Finally, she was alone in her recovery area, enclosed by four curtains of white, turned yellow by the lowered lights. Numbness inside her seeped to her extremities, leaving her hands without the strength to even pull up her blanket. This was what it felt like on the day your dreams died. So cold. So final.

  She wanted to cry, but what would it accomplish? Futile tears for a pointless cause. So she lay there, her eyes dry, rocking herself gently, uncertainty smothering all her hope.

  Her eyes closed for what felt like only a few more seconds, but when she opened them again, the lights were bright. The nurse was above her, wrapping a machine-operated blood pressure cuff around her arm.

  “Are you feeling better now?” she asked with a smile. She handed her a cup with pills and helped her take them, telling her it was for the discomfort.

  “Just a little while longer to let the anesthesia wear off, and you’ll be able to get dressed and go home.”

  “Home. Are you serious?”

  “Sure. Your doctor plans to release you today.”

  “But I didn’t know…”

  The nurse stepped over to check Pilar’s IV bag.

  “Even your surgery today, though an emergency, was still an outpatient procedure, barring complications.”

  If she hadn’t been feeling everything before, she made up for it now. How was she supposed to go home like this? Could she even drive? Could she care for herself once she got there? The nurse was still talking when Pilar found her way back to the conversation.

  “Now
all you need to tell me is who I can call to bring you home from the hospital. You read, of course, in the paperwork regarding diagnostic laparoscopic surgery, that someone else would be required to drive you home.”

  She hadn’t read it, of course. She’d barely been able to digest the idea of the ultrasound, so she’d only skimmed the material on laparoscopic procedures, hoping she wouldn’t have to deal with that.

  The nurse stood at the foot of her bed, a pen poised above her pad, a perplexed expression on her face.

  “Can I wait until I’m released to call? My friend is very busy, and I don’t want to bother her until I know for sure I’m being sent home. It’s still going to be a few hours, isn’t it?”

  The nurse quirked her eyebrow and then nodded. “At least another hour.” She studied Pilar suspiciously, probably the veteran of other cases where patients had kept too many secrets for their own good. “That’s fine. We’ll wait. But remember, we won’t be able to release you until someone comes to drive you home.”

  Pilar thanked the nurse, who collected her chart and left the cubicle. One hour. What was she going to do? She had only sixty minutes not only to produce a driver but also to find a way to speak aloud words she’d mostly avoided repeating even in her thoughts. Only an hour to explain why she hadn’t trusted her friends and family with the questions that had been tearing her apart.

  Eventually, she would have to tell each of them. At least now she could admit that she needed to surround herself with people who loved her. But that was in the next few days, a week max. Right now, she had only one question on her mind: Who would she tell first?

  Zach followed the sound of two feminine voices down the corridor of Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital. His heart tapped out a staccato beat that outpaced his steps on the floor. He didn’t know what was wrong with Pilar, but he did know that finally, after a few well-placed calls and a few favors that were tough to call in, given hospital privacy laws, he’d located her.