She nodded. It was an apology of sorts, and somehow made her feel a little less used.
He drew long and hard on the fire. “Those thugs who broke into your place think you have whatever it was that nurse was going to hand over to us in the alley. They know I don’t have it. Ten to one they searched my things at the hospital while I was getting patched up.”
“But how could they—” she started.
He blew smoke out his nostrils. “You got in, didn’t you?’
She sank back into her chair like a deflating balloon. “But they wouldn’t know my—”
“That little appearance you made on TV, even if you didn’t say anything. Always better to keep a low profile. Stay away from cameras. You get a person’s face, you can find out who they are.”
She sat stunned, her heart beating almost as fast as it had in the alley. All along she’d felt there was a connection between what had happened in the alley and the break-in at her apartment, but she’d tried to shrug it off, tried to pretend it was all over with, that whoever had done it was satisfied and gone. Only Johnny wouldn’t let her. He thought she was still in danger, and he wasn’t about to let her forget it.
“You better stick with me, see this through,” he told her. “I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”
He wasn’t the only one.
He reached into a side drawer of the desk, and she half expected him to pull out a fifth of bourbon. Instead he came up with a small pistol. “I’d feel better if you kept this with you for a while.” He offered her the gun.
She stared at it. Her fictional detective Maxie Malone carried a gun; so did Jolene Arizona, a character she’d prefer to forget she ever created. Still, for Jennifer, guns inspired terror, almost as much terror as the people who carried them. They were too loud, too deadly. She shoved it back toward Johnny Z. “No thanks. I’ll take my chances.”
She licked her lips. Seeing the gun had brought it all home to her. No more pretending. She’d really done it this time. Like it or not, whatever was going on, it was dangerous, and she was right in the middle of it.
“So what do we do next?” Jennifer asked.
“You? Nothin’. Stay low. Write your little books. I’m going to do some more snooping around this clinic. The nurse promises to give me some information; she winds up dead. Stands to reason it’s because of someone she told or someone who seen what she was up to.”
Maybe Johnny was more competent than his reputation would suggest. He had, after all, dragged himself out of that hospital bed even if the clause in Diane’s contract would have allowed him to continue to collect his fee while he healed. Assuming he ever collected a fee. As long as he was watching out after Diane, she ought to be all right.
And maybe, if she told herself that often enough, she might even begin to believe it.
Chapter 11
“Nice of you to call back,” Teri chided. Her perfectly plucked eyebrows arched above her half-lidded eyes, lending her cocoa face an exotic air. Her lean, athletic body was hidden beneath a huge T-shirt and baggy shorts. She sat in a lotus position, with her back leaning against Monique’s sofa, her palms resting upright on her knees, chanting ohms.
Jennifer, still rattled from her session with Johnny Z, stepped over Teri and pointed out, “If you were doing that right, you wouldn’t even notice I was here.”
She settled next to Leigh Ann on part of the sectional. She’d come to her weekly writers’ meeting in hopes that, for at least two hours, she could lose herself in her secure world of writing and forget all about threats and untimely death—except fictional ones, of course.
“Now, you be nice,” petite, green-eyed Leigh Ann chastised Teri, who gave up all pretense at meditation to glare back at her.
Leigh Ann reminded Jennifer of a china doll, with her ivory skin and dark hair, but only in looks. There was nothing fragile about Leigh Ann.
“Our Jen’s been through a lot,” Leigh Ann went on, patting Jennifer on the knee. “She was shot at, you know, and that’s not to be taken lightly. We could just as easily be meeting at the funeral home right now.” Her gaze drifted wistfully toward the ceiling, and it seemed as though she were having a vision. “Poor Jennifer. Cut flowers and wreaths everywhere, lightly scenting the air, candles creating a halo effect against burgundy velvet drapes in some dim little parlor. The four of us, our bodies wracked with sobs, passing tissues back and forth, all wondering what Sam was going to do without our dear Jennifer and who he was going to do it with. And Jen, herself, tucked snugly in the pink satin of a dark mahogany—”
”Pink?” Teri interrupted. “Blue, maybe—”
“I was thinking lilac,” April threw in.
Monique, firmly planted in her rocking chair, loudly cleared her throat, and both Teri and Leigh Ann looked up, startled, as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t, which, as far as Jennifer was concerned, they had. Monique was fortyish, just enough older to inspire some respect. But it was the fact that she had a real-life published book to her credit that made her the undisputed leader of the group. When she spoke, they didn’t.
April shifted on the opposite couch, her long blonde curls framing her sweet, round face. She looked ready to pop, more pregnant than Jennifer had ever seen anybody ever. And she’d watched April, week by week, grow through her first pregnancy to produce a nine-pound baby boy. This one promised to be even bigger, as April munched on a piece of peanut-butter-stuffed celery, one of her favorite and more healthy snacks.
“I brought some peanut butter muffins, too, one for everybody,” she offered, obviously hoping to break the tension.
Last week’s peanut butter pie had been truly unique. Looked like month nine had a theme.
“How about you, Jennifer? You probably need some protein after last night.” April held the Baggie in her direction.
Jennifer shook her head. She didn’t need anything sticking to the roof of her mouth. She had enough stuck in her craw.
“So, you going to tell us about it?” Teri fixed her again with her dark eyes.
“Okay.” Jennifer sighed. She had to say something. They’d never leave her alone until she did. At least the break-in at her apartment was so unnewsworthy it wouldn’t be mentioned in the newspaper. “I was doing research—for my new Serena Callas mystery.”
Teri clucked her tongue. “The girl never learns. Haven’t you heard of Google?”
“Don’t interrupt. I want to hear this.” Leigh Ann leaned forward.
“Shots were fired, someone got killed, and I just happened to be there. That’s all I’m going to say, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t discuss my death, at least not in my presence, that is, while I’m still alive. Not that I plan to die anytime soon...”
They all turned to her as if she were crazy and the one who had brought up the subject in the first place.
“You left out one little detail—Johnny Zeeman was shot,” Teri said. “Not cool. You two were in that alley alone together.” She raised one eyebrow at Jennifer. “You got something going with him?”
Now this was a direction she hadn’t expected, but she should have. Teri wrote romantic suspense. As far as she was concerned, danger and romance were one word. But Jennifer and Johnny Z? An involuntary shudder shook her shoulders. “Teri...” she warned.
Teri shrugged. “Had to ask.”
“Oh, Johnny’s not so bad,” Leigh Ann threw in.
Now it was Leigh Ann’s turn to be stared at. Of course. Johnny was single. Jennifer had long suspected Leigh Ann knew every available man in Macon. Now she was sure of it.
“What?” Leigh Ann asked defensively.
A picture was forming in Jennifer’s mind, and it wasn’t pretty. “Geez, Leigh Ann. Please don’t tell me you dated him?”
“Only once. He kind of reminded me of someone, but I never figured out who it was.”
Yeah, Humphrey Bogart. But only Bogie could pull off looking like that and make it sexy.
Fortunately Monique f
elt moved to speak. Whatever else anyone could say about Monique’s reign of terror, it did come in handy on occasion, especially when they strayed to subjects like Leigh Ann’s love life.
“Anyone hear anything this past week?” It was the dreaded question, the weekly rejection update. It sent Jennifer’s stomach aflutter every time she heard it, with both anticipation and dread.
They all had manuscripts or at least query letters out there sitting on some agent’s or editor’s desk. Once again Jennifer had sent out the first three chapters of Maxie Malone’s second adventure, the one she’d come so close to selling, the one for which two editors had actually asked to see the whole manuscript. It had promise; they both said so. So why wouldn’t one of them just buy it?
It’d been gone a good three months this time, a fact that could be very good or very bad. If it were good, that meant some editorial assistant had probably read it, liked it, and bumped it up to an editor before making the request for the rest of it. If it were bad, it meant her chapters were probably languishing in the great black hole known as the unsoliciteds. Over the holidays, some minimum-wage college student would most likely clear out the stack, stuffing them back into their self-addressed-stamped envelopes. They made such nice Christmas presents.
April cleared her throat. “Remember my series proposal about Billy and his sidekick, Barney, the Flying Squirrel?”
How could she forget? She was the one who’d suggested that April change Barney from a bat with possibly rabid tendencies to a squirrel, and that she make Billy older, eight rather than four. Early readers would surely respond better to simple mysteries than the picture book group.
“Well, it may be nothing, but I have some interest in it. They liked the proposal and want to see the first book, The Case of the Missing Nuts.”
“That’s wonderful,” Jennifer blurted out, a stupid-looking smile frozen on her face. Half of her was truly and unconditionally excited for April, but she couldn’t deny the pang of unwanted, low-down, mean, unjustified jealousy that swept through her. What a wretched creature she was. She wished, however briefly, that she could be the one saying those words. Of course, not about the squirrel book. She didn’t want to write about nuts.
“Excellent,” Monique was saying. “Let us know the minute you hear anything.”
Jennifer suspected somewhere under that beam of approval lay another jealous heart.
Monique went straight to the night’s business. “I believe Teri has something she wants to discuss. Go ahead.”
“Yeah. I need some help brainstorming. I’m starting a new book.”
“Another romantic suspense?” Monique asked.
What else?
Teri nodded. “I thought I’d do something with a baby in it.”
Leigh Ann nodded “An old tried and true.”
April looked a little confused.
“Oh, you know the list of favorite romance plots,” Leigh Ann explained. “Marriage of convenience, lost love, weddings, amnesia, second chance, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, anything with a cowboy. Were you thinking of a variation on secret baby?”
“Something like that,” Teri agreed. “I’m thinking she’s in her mid-twenties, a successful career woman who’s sublimated her sexuality to the point of sainthood. Her one true love, her college sweetheart, split when he found out she was pregnant, and—”
”This is your hero?” Leigh Ann broke in. “A deserter?”
“You can’t have a secret baby without a father, at least not any way I’ve figured out,” Teri insisted. “Besides, he’s been in the service—a Navy SEAL—”
“They are so cool,” Leigh Ann interrupted. “And those wet suits...” She licked her lips.
Teri rolled her eyes. “Anyway, he’s been out at sea on some kind of three-year tour—”
“They never keep them out longer than six months or so,” Leigh Ann corrected her.
No one argued with Leigh Ann about servicemen.
“Okay. I’ll work that out later. But he hasn’t gone one day without thinking of her and their child. He’s got his head on straight, and he’s come back to claim them as soon as he can.”
“Okay, but where’s the conflict?” Jennifer asked. “Not that I know much about romance.” She had to get that in before one of them pointed it out to her. “But it seems to me you could write this one as a short story.”
Teri looked at her through half-lidded eyes. “It’s emotional, Jennifer. She has to forgive him, learn to trust again.”
“Fine. But I don’t see how you can write three hundred pages about it,” Jennifer insisted, crossing her arms.
“Excuse me,” April said. “What about the baby?”
“The baby’s a device,” Teri said. “You know, like the children you see on soap operas.”
“Yeah,” Leigh Ann said, tossing her hair. “When I have a child, I want one like that. No diapers, no midnight feedings. They’re always at the park with grandma or the nanny. Then they disappear and come back all grown up.”
Sort of like Diane.
“That’s not right.” April shifted again, a living, breathing example of what motherhood was really all about. “Children are people, too, you know.”
Monique leaned forward. “We need more. You can’t go on chapter after chapter with him waiting patiently while she resolves her feelings for him. He’s got to be in conflict, too.”
Teri knitted her brow. “Okay, then. It hasn’t been too long since baby switches were all over the news. What if the child she’s been raising is not really their baby? What if it was swapped and neither one of them knows it? They have to discover together what happened to their child.”
What happened to their child. The words echoed in Jennifer’s ears.
But Jennifer didn’t have long to think. April had shifted into crisis mode. Her eyes were huge, her face red, and she’d started rapidly blowing little puffs of air. Jennifer had seen something like that once on PBS before she’d been able to find the remote and switch the channel. Something akin to panic was attacking her gut. If Teri sent April into labor...
“You all right?” Jennifer soothed.
April shook her head between puffs. “I can’t listen to this.” She stuck her fingers in her ears and started lalaing loudly.
Jennifer jabbed Teri. “Are you crazy? You can’t start talking about baby switches around a woman who’s about to go into labor. What if she refuses to go to the hospital, and we have to deliver the baby right here?” She jabbed Teri again.
“Sorry, Miss Scarlett, but I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies. Looks like you’ll have to do it yourself.”
She folded her arms and leaned back against the sofa, refusing any responsibility for the crisis she’d started.
Monique glowered, using the same death stare her main character employed in Double Sun, Double Trouble. Fortunately, none of them keeled over. She reached over and pulled April’s fingers out of her ears. “Stop that,” she ordered.
April stopped but her face remained red. She picked up some manuscript pages, rapidly fanned herself, and swallowed hard. “I’m fine. Really. But I want to go home.”
It took the three of them—Leigh Ann’s featherweight didn’t count—to get April up.
She was truly shaken, and she had every right to be. When a woman gives birth, she shouldn’t have to worry about whether the baby she takes home is her own.
And the baby?
The baby shouldn’t have to worry about who she is and what happened to her real parents.
Chapter 12
Jennifer spent the drive from Monique’s house to Sam’s apartment staring into the darkness and wondering how she’d wound up in the eighth ring of Dante’s Hell, the one reserved for singles trying to define their relationships.
She had to talk to Sam if they were going to share an apartment for even a short time. There was only one bed, one bedroom, and no real couch, which meant sleeping arrangements, at the very least, promised to be interes
ting.
She’d successfully kept their relationship in limbo for months, a fine dance of denial. She hadn’t been looking for anything when Sam dropped into her life. Actually, she’d been actively avoiding it, but he’d charmed her with his unjaded, almost naive belief in his work and with his understanding of her dream to become a published author. He’d seen her vision and he hadn’t laughed. He’d admired her for it and paid her the highest compliment someone can pay an aspiring writer: he believed she could do it.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was cute, could be most endearing when he wasn’t actively irritating her, and had a way of seeing straight into her soul. A mixed blessing. She was afraid she’d fall in love with him before she was ready.
This morning she’d been too confused, too worried, too scared to consider the implications of staying at Sam’s. Now they were flashing at her like yellow warning lights around a BRIDGE OUT sign. And she saw no way to turn back. If she went over the edge...
She could hear him fussing in the kitchen as she let herself in the front door.
“That you?” he called out.
“Yeah,” she answered. “Where’s Muffy?”
“She’s having ice cream in the bathroom.”
He’d put up the dog. And gone to the grocery, at least to get ice cream, a necessary staple of her life.
She glanced around the living room. He’d picked up. He must have been having the same conversation with himself that she’d been having on the way over, only she spied evidence that he’d already come to a conclusion.
A single red rose stood in a vase next to a liter of ginger ale and four glasses.
Her head snapped back. Four?
Diane poked her nose out of the kitchen nook. “Sam says you like the mild salsa.” She wrinkled her nose.
Jennifer nodded automatically, and Diane disappeared back around the corner. Had she missed something? What the heck was Diane Robbins doing at Sam’s apartment? She thought she’d made it clear last night she had nothing to offer the girl. And besides, how did Diane know where to find her?
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