The Surrogate (26 page)

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Just hungry and thirsty,” she said. “And I desperately need a bath.”

Joe fished a water bottle and a small bag of peanuts out of one of the Harley’s saddlebags and watched while she wolfed down the peanuts and drank the entire bottle of water.

He helped her put the baby in a cloth contrivance she wore across her stomach, then held her arm as she slung a leg over the Harley. When he climbed on, she grabbed hold of his belt. “Don’t go fast,” she said. “I’m feeling kind of dizzy.”

He drove at a very sedate pace back into Brenham, enveloped in a cloud of disappointment. He had expected more from finally seeing Jamie once again. A great deal more.

He pulled into the same motel, wondering if he should find someplace nicer. But Jamie felt pretty limp behind him, and the baby was crying. He helped her off and took her into the room. “I’ll go get you something to eat. What sounds good?”

“Anything. And I need diapers. And I’d really like to see a newspaper.”

“What about some milk for him?” he asked, nodding toward the baby.

She shook her head. “I’m nursing him.”

“So, he’s
your
baby?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Oh, yes. He’s
my
baby.”

When he arrived back at the motel, Joe knocked on the door. There was no answer.

He unlocked the door and peeked inside. He could hear the water running in the bathroom. The baby was lying in the middle of one of the double beds. Joe put his purchases on the table, iced the beer, then stood looking down at the baby. He was quite small and had big eyes and was waving his arms about aimlessly. “I’m sure you are a nice enough baby,” Joe said, “but I must admit that I’m not very happy about you.”

Jamie came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her body and another around her head.

“Do you have any extra clothes?” she asked, heading for the table. “And I need to borrow a comb,” she added as she picked up one of the milkshakes, took off the lid and gulped some down. Then she ate a handful of fries and unwrapped a hamburger.

Joe produced a pair of gym shorts, a T-shirt, and a comb. Jamie went back into the bathroom. When she emerged again, her wet hair was combed, and she was wearing his clothes. She picked up the phone and called the office to ask if there were laundry facilities.

When she hung up she covered the now sleeping baby with a corner of the bedspread, picked up the newspaper, and glanced at the headlines on the front page. Apparently she found what she looking for on page two. She read the story and ate the rest of the hamburger. “You have any quarters?” she asked.

While she was in the laundry room, Joe read the article on page two. A baby girl kidnapped from an Oklahoma City apartment house had been left in a hospital waiting room apparently unharmed and was returned to her mother’s arms. A woman named Janet Wisdom had been caring for the baby in her apartment. Wisdom was now missing, along with her own child. There were no signs of violence in the apartment, but there was a dead dog on the bed. Police were searching for Wisdom and her infant son.

When Jamie returned, she glanced at the baby, then sat across the table from Joe and reached for his hand. “Thank you,” she said and burst into tears.

Joe knelt in front of her and took her in his arms. Then he helped her to the empty bed and stretched out beside her, cradling her, stroking her damp hair, her arms, her back. His shoulder grew wet with her tears. At one point he went to the bathroom for the box of tissues. She blew her nose and tried to regain control. But she couldn’t. Not yet. She said something about a dog named Ralph. And being so afraid. So very afraid.

Finally, she was cried out. She blew her nose again then went to splash water on her face. When she returned the baby was starting to thrash about. Jamie picked him up, leaned against the headboard, propped a pillow under her left arm.

Joe carefully looked away as she placed the baby at her breast. He felt jealous of a very small baby.

He wanted to ask who the father was—and if she had loved the man. If she had been married to him. Or maybe he should turn on the television. He couldn’t just sit here not watching her nurse a baby. He offered to get her clothes from the drier.

He took his time, jogging around the block several times before searching for the motel laundry room. When he returned, Jamie was curled on the bed. The baby was asleep in a dresser drawer with a folded blanket for a mattress. Jamie opened her eyes and offered a small smile. “I’m in terrible trouble,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I figured out that much on my own.” He covered her limp body with a blanket then sat beside her and stroked her shoulder.

“They killed my dog so he wouldn’t bark while they stole my baby, but they took the wrong baby. Then they came back to kill me.”

He could hear the utter exhaustion in her voice. “You go ahead and sleep,” he said with more gallantry than he felt. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“This isn’t how I thought it would be when we first saw each other again,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed.

“Have you thought about that—about us seeing each other again?”

“Yeah. What about you?”

“Me, too,” he said. He ran a finger along her jawline, then briefly touched her lower lip. She had a beautiful mouth. As a sixteen-year-old boy he had felt like a dirty old man because he thought that ten-year-old Jamie Long had the most beautiful mouth he had ever seen.

She kissed the tip of his finger, then gave herself over to sleep.

He understood that she was exhausted, but he felt cheated. And a little regretful that he was here at all. Maybe more than a little.

He drank two cans of beer then took a shower and crawled into the empty bed.

T
HE SOUND OF HER
baby crying pulled Jamie back to wakefulness. It took her a few seconds to remember where she was, but in the darkness she felt disoriented.

The only light in the room came through a tiny opening between the heavy draperies that covered the room’s one window. Not daylight. She made the opening wider to admit more light and picked up her baby. She made soft shushing sounds as she pulled a diaper from the open package beside the drawer-turned-bed, then groped around for the package of baby wipes. The baby continued to vocalize his hunger as she changed his diaper.

“I’m sorry,” she said into the darkness.

“It’s okay,” Joe said. “Obviously the kid is starving to death.”

Jamie felt herself smiling. “Yes, he does have a good appetite.”

She propped pillows up for an armrest and got the baby situated. Silence immediately descended over the room, the only sounds coming from an occasional vehicle driving by.

“Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to talk now?”

Even in the dim light, she could see him stretching under the covers. And noted the empty beer cans on the bedside table.

She sensed Joe’s disappointment. He had expected something more dramatic and rewarding for his efforts. Deservedly so.

She had known all along that trying to involve him in her troubles had been a selfish act. If her need had been for herself alone, she would not have tried to contact him, and she was not without guilt. At some level, she had always wanted Joe to be the man in her life. But now she had lured him into her fight for survival. He could lose everything. His parents could lose their only child, his grandparents their only grandson. It was more than her not wanting to die. It was because she wanted to be the one who raised this baby. She had acted as a mother, not as a lovesick female.

Poor Joe.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

He said nothing.

She closed her eyes and began.

Her story sounded unbelievable even to her own ears as she explained how she was deeply in debt and had entered into a contract with a televangelist and her young husband and found herself a virtual prisoner at the Hartmann Ranch with the formidable Miss Montgomery as her jailer. How Miss Montgomery and everyone else at the ranch idolized Amanda Hartmann. How she herself had fallen under the woman’s spell.

When she got to the part about the crazy old woman and Amanda’s brain-dead son locked up in a tower, her story sounded even more far-fetched. Joe interrupted her, saying she must be mistaken. He had read about Sonny Hartmann’s death in a London newspaper months before Jamie would have arrived at the ranch.

“Well, he wasn’t dead,” she said. “I saw him. The poor boy had been raised to follow in his mother’s footsteps, and his mother kept him alive so she could get herself another heir. Being raised by Amanda Hartmann wasn’t the sort of life I would want for any kid. And I was afraid for myself. Mary Millicent said that I would be murdered after the baby was born. And you know what? I could understand why they would do that. I would be the living proof that Amanda’s claim to some sort of miracle birth was not true.”

Jamie paused in her story to put Billy back in his makeshift bed. Joe closed the draperies, turned on the lamp, and sat on the side of his bed.

“At first I thought all the things that Mary Millicent told me were just the ramblings of a crazy, paranoid old woman,” Jamie continued, leaning against the headboard. “Then, over the months, I began to realize that there was truth in everything she said. I’m not sure how much Amanda had actually planned what was going to happen to me. Apparently she relied on her brother to take care of things for her, like having her first husband murdered.”

Joe was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands folded. “But you don’t know any of this for sure,” he said, staring down at his hands. “Just because some senile old woman said these things doesn’t mean they are so. Maybe these people did misrepresent themselves in the contractual arrangement they made with you, but that doesn’t mean they planned to kill you.”

Jamie heard the disbelief in his voice. She saw it in his body language. And it made her angry.

“Gus Hartmann’s henchmen poisoned my dog so he wouldn’t bark when they stole my baby and then came back to murder me. I was looking after my neighbor’s baby that night and had put her in Billy’s bed. They took the wrong baby! That’s the only reason I still have Billy. And I’m still alive because I grabbed him and got the hell out of there.”

Joe retrieved the newspaper from the trash can and opened it to the second page. “Is that what this article is about?”

Jamie nodded, remembering the horror of that night. She had been so relieved to learn that Lynette had her baby back.

Joe ran a hand through his hair. “Okay, I need for you to back up a bit. You said you were held prisoner. Why couldn’t you just leave?”

Jamie was feeling very tired. A few hours of sleep had not been enough to revive her. And the telling of her story was making her stomach twist into knots. She asked if he would get her a Coke.

Joe gathered up some change and shortly returned with two cans.

Jamie took a long swig then attempted to describe the enormous ranch in the middle of vast, empty Marshall County. She told him about the ranch-house compound with its electric fences and security system. And how she was not allowed to leave the house without a guard following her, not allowed to make phone calls, not allowed to send or receive mail. How the servants avoided her like the plague.

“I would have gone crazy if it weren’t for Ralph,” she told him and had to cry for a time. Joe came to sit beside her and took her in his arms.

“I think this is enough for now,” Joe said, stroking her back. “Why don’t you sleep some and you can tell me the rest in the morning.”

“No,” Jamie said. She got up, blew her nose, and used the bathroom. When she returned, Joe had moved to a chair. She took another swallow of her drink then described how she had memorized the security code and threatened a hunger strike if her car wasn’t brought over to the ranch-house garage. How she and Ralph had crept out in the night and how surprised she had been that her escape had actually worked.

She said very little about Billy’s birth except that she was alone and it was difficult. Perhaps someday she would tell him more, but for now that was all she could manage.

“The weeks I was in Oklahoma City, I found myself wondering if it was overkill to go to all that trouble to make sure that every phone call with your mother was made from a different location, but at some level I
knew
that Gus Hartmann’s people were trying to find me. Even when there were stories on television and in the newspaper about Amanda giving birth, I knew that wasn’t the end of it. And I couldn’t think of anyone else to turn to except you.” Jamie paused before adding, “I knew that I could trust you. You were always so good to Granny and me, and I guess I was always a little in love with you.”

“Just a little?” he teased.

“Well, maybe more than just a little,” she allowed.

“The older you got, the more eager I was to spend part of my summer in Mesquite,” Joe admitted. “No matter how old you got, though, it seemed like I was still too old for you.”

At first, Joe had tried to play devil’s advocate with Jamie’s story. As far-fetched as it seemed, however, there was no questioning the fact that someone had marshaled impressive forces to track her down. People with official-looking badges had come to his grandparents’ home in Georgia to ask about her, and they interviewed people in Mesquite. And apparently there were taps on his parents’ and grandparents’ phones. He did not doubt that her fear was warranted.

“This Hartmann guy must be a very powerful man to be able to launch an illegal investigation like that,” Joe acknowledged. “And close your bank account. The people who broke into your apartment were probably paid henchmen, but the others involved in the search must be some sort of government agents. It’s just so hard to accept that it’s possible for someone to abuse power like that.”

Jamie didn’t so much as finish telling her story as run out of steam. She would think of things she had not told him, and he would quiz her in search of more details. But what he needed to do now was get them some breakfast and let her sleep for a few hours. He had two last questions, however. Did she still have a copy of the contract she had signed? And what was the name of the attorney in Austin who had arranged for her to enter into a surrogate-mother contract with Amanda Hartmann and her husband?

Jamie explained that when she was packing up her possessions at the ranch, she realized that the contract was gone. “I’m sure that Miss Montgomery took it, but by that time, I knew I was leaving and wasn’t about to raise any more issues with her.”

While he was waiting at the pancake house for their carry-out breakfast, he placed a call to one of his former law professors at the University of Texas. Franklin Billingsley had served two terms as state attorney general and knew just about everything there was to know about the Texas legal system.

“I understand that you’ve applied for a job with the FBI,” Professor Billingsley said.

“What makes you say that?” Joe asked.

“A woman from the agency showed up at the law school asking questions about you. She said you’d put in an application with them, and the agency was conducting a background check.”

“That’s very interesting,” Joe said, “but I’m calling about something else. I wonder if you know an Austin attorney named Bentley Abernathy.”

“Abernathy? I’ve met him. He’s given a couple of guest lectures at the law school. He made quite a name for himself sorting out the mess left by old Buck Hartmann, who founded Palo Duro Oil and Gas and acquired a mountain of mineral rights through hook or crook. The bulk of Abernathy’s practice continues to deal with Palo Duro and handling in-state affairs for the Hartmann family.”

“What sort of person is he?”

“In what way?”

“Shady or not shady?”

“I think he’s managed to keep things on the right side of the law. Old Buck’s grandson runs Palo Duro now and maybe the whole damned country if you believe some of the rumors.”

The professor paused a second then added, “But don’t you go around asking questions about Gus Hartmann, Joe. I hear things from time to time. Hartmann is not someone with whom you want to get at cross-purposes. And reconsider this FBI business. You belong in a courtroom, son.”