But Jacy had spent the past several years of her life fighting to uncover and report on the truth. She was no good at avoiding or concealing it.
God help her, she would have to tell him.
“Ms. James?”
“Give me a few days,” she managed. “I’ll get his medical history, or have him come in and fill out some of your forms. Just give me a few days.”
When she left Dr. Nordstrom’s office fifteen minutes later she had a prescription for vitamins, an appointment in another month and a couple of colorful brochures.
It was August, it was Houston, and it was hot. By the time she crossed the parking lot, sweat dampened the nape of her neck beneath the heavy fall of her hair. She slid into the cherry red ’65 Mustang she’d finished having restored last year, leaving the door open to let some of the sunbaked air out. The humidity was high that day, and the car’s interior felt like a sauna. The white leather seat burned the back of her legs through the crinkled cotton of her skirt.
Jacy welcomed the heat. It made her feel more real.
She started the car to get the air-conditioning going, and then she just sat there with her door open, listening to the radio. The sound of the Beach Boys praising California girls rolled over her comfortingly.
Jacy loved old rock music, especially the soppy, sentimental songs of the fifties. Few people were aware that she had an equal weakness for old TV shows like “Lassie,” “My Friend Flicka” and “Leave It to Beaver.”
When Jacy was seven and a half, Sister Mary Elizabeth had moved her to the top bunk in the room she shared with three other girls, right above the newly arrived Seraphina Pfeister. Seraphina’s nightmares had lasted for months, long past the time it took for her arm to come out of the cast, her bruises to heal and her mother to start serving her sentence for child abuse.
Jacy used to lie in that upper bunk and plan her marriage to Beaver’s big brother, Wally. The lavish wedding. A wedding dress so full-skirted no ordinary human could have walked down the aisle in it. The two-story house they would live in afterward and the pets she and Wally would have.... Oh, yes, that had been a favorite daydream. Even after Sera stopped crying at bedtime, Jacy had liked to lie in bed and think up names for the dogs she and Wally would have.
She had known then that her “plans” were fantasy, just like the old sitcoms. It hadn’t mattered. Those fantasies had nourished something in her.
Jacy sat now in her gradually cooling car and tried to remember if she had ever fantasized about having a baby. A puppy, yes. She’d longed quite hopelessly for a puppy to take care of. But another whole, entire human being? Had she ever thought she could be responsible for anything as helpless and endlessly important as a baby?
When she shivered, it wasn’t from any outside chill.
Jacy closed her car door at last and slipped her seat belt into place. She picked up the cellular phone she kept in her car for calling in stories or getting answers while trapped in traffic, and punched in a number she knew by heart.
Tabor answered his own phone for once. She told him she’d be out the rest of the day, doing research.
She would be, too. Jacy only knew one way to approach a problem—head-on. She intended to get a grip on her situation the same way she explored a story on any unfamiliar topic. She’d look up what the experts had written on the subject before she tried to figure her particular angle. There were bound to be plenty of experts on a subject as important as motherhood.
She just regretted the half-truth she’d told her boss. Tabor would have to know about her pregnancy soon, of course. He wasn’t just her boss, after all. He was her friend.
But she wouldn’t tell him quite yet, she thought as she pushed in the clutch and shifted into Reverse. Another man had to hear the news first However much the idea turned her stomach, however little consideration he rated otherwise, Tom would have to know he was going to be a father.
Her baby deserved a father.
But that, too, would have to wait. Jacy felt lost in the suddenly altered landscape of her life. She was too unsteady to face the man who’d walked out on her. Friday, she decided as she shifted gears and pulled out into traffic. She’d tell him on Friday, four days from now.
In the meantime, she had some research to do.
Four days later
The carpet on the fourth-floor office of the Houston police headquarters building was gray. So were the battered metal file cabinets lining one wall of one of the offices in the Special Investigations section. Late-afternoon sunlight streaked through the blinds of the office’s single window to land in hot bars on the gray carpet, the corner of one file cabinet and the left shoulder of the man who sat at the big metal desk.
It was a broad shoulder, covered in white cotton with thin blue stripes. On that Friday afternoon the desk was full but orderly, with a black Stetson hat placed brim-up on one corner and the usual office paraphernalia neatly arranged. An extension to one side held a computer. The credenza behind the man held nine neat piles of papers and miscellany, and four family photos in brass frames.
Another photograph, larger than the rest, sat on the corner of his desk. Those pictures provided the only color in the office.
Tom Rasmussin seldom chained himself to the desk for the entire day, but he’d arrived before the sun this morning and stayed in the office all day, trying to clear away enough paperwork to go to the family beach cottage at San Padre Island with his brother this weekend.
His early arrival that morning was nothing unusual, though. He normally came in early and left late. There was no one to object to the hours he kept. Not anymore.
He was working on the last report when his office door opened. When he glanced that way, one corner of his mouth turned up. “Aren’t they checking IDs downstairs anymore?”
The man who sauntered into Tom’s immaculate office wore torn jeans, a three-day beard and a faded black T-shirt with an obscene suggestion printed in Spanish on the front. A greasy bandanna tied Indian-style across his forehead held shaggy light brown hair out of his eyes. “Hey, you got a problem with how I look, man?” He stopped and glanced up and down his grungy body. “I don’t see anything wrong. I even changed my underwear this morning.”
Tom leaned back in his chair. “I’m surprised you’re wearing any. Maybe you should run by Mom and Dad’s place and get her opinion on your wardrobe.”
“Think she’d give me hell, don’t you?” Tom’s only brother grinned, turned one of the wooden chairs around backward and straddled it. “If there’s any woman who would understand, it’s Mom.”
Raz had a point. After being married to a cop for forty-one years, Lydia Rasmussin understood the necessities of police work, including undercover assignments. “Even the shirt?” Tom said, raising both eyebrows.
“Hey,” Raz said, “you’re conservative enough for both of us. Do you even own any shirts that aren’t white?”
Tom grunted. “Run along and get some coffee, why don’t you, and quit bothering the grown-ups.”
“Are
