Easy Loving

by Sheryl Lynn

  Some of the fire drained from her face and her rigid shoulders relaxed. Her brow furrowed in an expression of uncertainty. “My parents sent me to Arizona to live with my grandmother. They couldn’t stand to have me around, causing talk. I never got any letters.”

  Easy remembered Catherine’s parents. Stiff, unsmiling people who never spoke to him and rarely said a word to their daughter. Mr. St. Clair was a hotshot lawyer—Mr. Perfect with plenty of big bucks and a high society lifestyle. Easy wondered how many of his rich clients and golfing buddies knew St. Clair had a vicious temper and a habit of smacking his daughter around. A lump lodged in his throat.

  “I didn’t know, Catherine. I swear.”

  She turned her face away, gazing distantly. A light breeze ruffled the ends of her hair. He remembered its softness and how she used to swing it in his face, tickling him.

  “I tried to tell you at the dance. Do you remember? But your friends wouldn’t leave us alone and then you said all those mean things and you were laughing at me. I was so scared, so ashamed, and when you laughed at me I couldn’t face you anymore.”

  He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

  She gave herself a shake. Lifting her chin, her expression now cool and unreadable, she met his gaze. Those deep blue depths held a coldness Easy had never suspected she could reach. She inhaled deeply and the corners of her mouth tipped in a strained smile. “It was a long time ago. I’m over it now.”

  And he was the Pillsbury Doughboy’s evil twin. “So where’s the—”

  “Excuse me,” she interrupted. “As fun as old home week could be, I’m sure you understand why I don’t feel like strolling down memory lane. I’d like you to leave. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t contact me anymore.”

  “Where’s the kid, Catherine?” He looked about, seeking bicycles, roller skates or toys. He couldn’t do a thing about what happened twelve years ago, nor could he make up for the time they’d lost. Despite her accusations, though, he’d never shirked a responsibility in his life.

  “There is no kid.”

  Horrified, he pushed away from the railing. “The baby died?”

  “I put her up for adoption.” Her rounded chin lifted another notch, defiant. “It was a girl. Six pounds, twelve ounces, perfectly healthy. She had hair. Black hair, just like yours. I signed the papers when she was twenty-four hours old. I held her once.” Her chin trembled and her voice cracked. Unfallen tears glazed her eyes. “I named her Elizabeth, after your mom, because she was always so nice to me. On the birth certificate I listed the father as unknown.”

  He closed his eyes, trying to picture Catherine in labor, little more than a baby herself—alone, banished from home, deserted. He saw instead her face when they’d made love, her softly curved cheeks aglow without a trace of shyness or self-consciousness. Loving her had made him a better person. He hadn’t known it then, but he knew it now. She’d never disguised her intelligence or played games or treated him with anything other than respect. He’d lived for her admiration, sought her approval, strove to measure up to her standards.

  He had a child. A funny piece of information. He held it in his thoughts as if it were a strange bug he’d never seen before.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear, I didn’t know.”

  Her belligerence faded, leaving her face naked with pain. “Now you do. So go away. I’m not in the mood for a class reunion.” She turned for the door, reaching for the handle.

  “Catherine.” He took a step toward her. “Tink. We need to talk about this.”

  She shook her head. Her blond-streaked hair shone with glimmering lights. “We have nothing to discuss.”

  “Wrong answer. Where’s the kid? Where does she live?”

  She turned about, her expression now bemused. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You’re her mother.”

  “Her mother is the woman raising her. She isn’t mine anymore, and she certainly isn’t yours.”

  “I never gave up my parental rights.”

  “Rights? How dare you?” She clamped her fists on her hips and leaned forward. “The only person who had any rights was Elizabeth. She had a right to be raised by adults.”

  “So you gave her away like a puppy.”

  Catherine flinched as if he’d slapped her. Hot color flushed her cheeks and her big eyes grew bigger. So low he barely caught the words, she said, “Giving up my baby was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life.”

  Her sorrow touched him. He clamped his mouth shut.

  “I regret being irresponsible, for having sex without being old enough to know what I was doing. I regret not using birth control. I regret not being able to give her a home. But I made the right decision, and that I don’t regret. Wherever she is, she has two parents who love her.”

  At least a fourth of his cases involved missing persons. Many of those clients were adoptees seeking birth parents. A few were parents seeking children they regretted giving away. He had never understood why they couldn’t leave the past alone. Now he felt a glimmer of that urgency to know.

  Did his daughter hate him? Did she believe he’d discarded her like unwanted garbage?

  “I can find her.” He nodded eagerly. “Give me the date she was born. The hospital, the doctor and the name of the adoption agency. We can find her.”

  Catherine cocked her head. “Are you nuts?”

  “I’m serious. I can do it. That’s how I—”

  “Why would you want to? She has a family, a life, people who love her. We can’t pop into her life and mess things up.”

  “If,” he said slowly, “I had known you were pregnant, I’d have married you. You never gave me a chance—or a choice.”

  She snorted in derision. “I wouldn’t have married you. Not after what you said at the dance.”

  Taken aback, he glared down his nose at her. She had changed more than her appearance. Catherine St. Clair had grown a backbone. One made of pure steel, if he were any judge. His temper flared. The more he struggled to control it, the hotter his blood boiled. “So you got even with me and threw away the kid. Why didn’t you just kill her?”

  Bad words, fighting words. He regretted them as soon as they popped out of his mouth.

  “Good grief!” She threw up her hands and turned her gaze to the heavens. “Ten minutes ago, you claim you didn’t even know I was pregnant. Now you want to play daddy of the year. Get lost, Easy. Just go away.” She entered the house and slammed the door. The clunk of a dead bolt sounded like a pistol shot.

  Easy wavered. He hadn’t accomplished what he set out to do. He didn’t know any more about her involvement with Jeffrey Livman than when he’d arrived. He breathed hard, trying to get back to the present problem.

  John Tupper had told a chilling story. After a whirlwind courtship, Roberta Tupper had married Jeffrey Livman. In the year they were married, Roberta had severed contact with her family. Six months ago Roberta had fallen from a rock formation in Garden of the Gods, and died from massive head injuries. There were no witnesses and no physical evidence of foul play. The coroner had declared Roberta’s death accidental.

  Except, Roberta had been asthmatic and shunned physical activity such as hiking or rock climbing.

  Except, a few weeks before her death, John Tupper had confronted his sister at her place of work, demanding to know why she refused to visit him or his family. He had come away with the impression that Roberta was terrified of her husband.

  Except, Livman never notified the family of her death. Livman had Roberta’s body cremated without so much as a funeral or a memorial service. John had learned of the tragedy from the newspaper.

  Except, Livman had collected on an insurance policy to the tune of five hundred thousand dollars. In John’s words: “I sell insurance. A childless woman whose husband is young, healthy and employed does not need half a million in life insurance.”

  In Easy’s mind, all those excepts added up to murder.
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  He had hoped, because of their former relationship, Catherine would cooperate. Through her he might obtain a confession of murder, or discover some basis for John to proceed with a wrongful-death suit against his former brother-in-law.

  At the moment he considered himself lucky she didn’t shoot him on sight. Stunned by how much her revelation about the baby hurt, he mounted his motorcycle and rode away.

  CATHERINE RESTED with her back against the wall until the motorcycle noise faded in the distance. She breathed deeply through her mouth, her chest aching.

  On wooden legs, she walked downstairs to her bedroom. From the bedside table she picked up a polished silver frame. It contained a photograph of a little girl with dark hair, dark eyes and a gap-toothed smile. Catherine had clipped the photograph from a magazine and did not know the girl’s name. Over the years, she’d changed the anonymous photographs from baby pictures to this present child.

  Not for the first time, she wondered if her insistence on pretending to have a photograph of Elizabeth was a sign of insanity. A means of punishing herself for a guilt she couldn’t shake.

  She accepted her action. She knew she’d done the right thing for Elizabeth. At the time, she’d been sixteen years old, little more than a baby herself. She had no right to destroy Elizabeth’s life. Still, the hurt, guilt and shame lingered.

  Catherine traced the smiling child’s jawline with a fingertip. Seeing Easy again hurt most of all. The pain of learning he’d joined the army remained burned into her memory. He’d left without so much as a goodbye. He’d left her alone to deal with her pregnancy and her parents and the shame.

  Closing her eyes, she remembered vividly the feel of Easy’s skin. He’d been a breathtakingly beautiful boy. She’d filled notebooks with sketches of his face and hands and the alluring musculature of his arms. Tall, slender and graceful, he’d always been ready with a joke and a laugh. A smart aleck, the class clown and captain of the football team—she’d loved him desperately.

  A scratching noise startled her. The greyhounds waited at the French doors leading to the lower patio. Oscar lifted a paw and patted gently at the glass.

  With a trembling hand, she opened the door for the dogs. “I can’t believe I yelled at him,” she told them. “I never yell.”

  She trudged upstairs to the studio. With the shock of seeing Easy fading, she was appalled at how she’d reacted. The rage had erupted within her like a volcano lain dormant for all these years.

  She glanced at the telephone. She wanted to call Jeffrey, but what could she say? She’d never told him about her high school love affair or the child she’d given up for adoption. Now that Grandma had passed away, she never talked about it at all.

  As much as she longed to put the past behind her, it affected every aspect of her life. Her relationship with her parents remained strained. Although they lived in the house where she’d grown up, she saw them less than once a month. Visiting them remained a chore. She supposed she waited for them to say they were sorry for the way they had treated her.

  She remained terrified of pregnancy, terrified of losing yet another child. She didn’t trust birth control devices or drugs. She couldn’t trust fate. No sex until marriage, she’d vowed, and stuck to it all these years.

  She couldn’t marry anyone, or even fall in love, unless she trusted him enough to tell him about the baby. How was she supposed to tell anyone when she could not bear to speak of it?

  At a worktable, she frowned at a painting for a beginning reader’s book about spiders. In painstaking detail she’d depicted hatchlings bursting from an egg sac. Babies. It occurred to her that the projects that excited her the most dealt with babies in one form or another.

  She kept seeing the look of astonishment on Easy’s face. All these years she’d assuaged some of her guilt by blaming him for deserting her. She was rotten, but she always had the comfort of knowing he was more rotten.

  He hadn’t known.

  How could he have known? She slumped on a stool and rested her chin on her fist. The day after she told her parents about the pregnancy, they’d shipped her off to Arizona. She’d been too humiliated to tell anyone at school. No one had known.

  For the first time in twelve years, she faced the hard truth that Easy wasn’t to blame for Elizabeth’s loss. She believed he’d written letters and called; she didn’t put it past her parents to “protect” her. She also believed him impulsive enough to join the army on a romantic whim. Maybe they should talk. Maybe they—

  “No!” The dogs lifted their heads to see if she was speaking to them. “I refuse. The past is over. I don’t want to see him or talk to him. I won’t.”

  As much as she wanted to drop the matter, pass it off as an unpleasant blip in an otherwise placid life, Easy wore on her mind. He lurked like a shadow while she finished the painting.

  The velvet ring box perched atop the fireplace mantel kept drawing her attention. Easy was the long-ago past; Jeffrey represented the future. She called Jeffrey and reached his voice mail. At the tone, Catherine left the message that she needed to see him.

  After she hung up, she marched resolutely to the fireplace and opened the ring box. The sapphire seemed to wink at her.

  She had a career and a neatly ordered life. She always imagined she didn’t need anything else. Easy’s startling reemergence made her see the lie. She did want a husband and children, but she was afraid, simple as that. Afraid to love, afraid to lose again, afraid of a broken heart.

  Bearing an illegitimate child didn’t brand her as a fallen woman. She’d been sixteen, a child who made a mistake. She rubbed her flat belly, dismayed by the emptiness she felt inside.

  She slid the ring onto her finger. It was weighty, flashy, alien.

  Certainly Jeffrey would understand. What’s more, she felt, he would still love her.

  INSIDE THE PEAK CAFÉ, Easy looked toward the booth where he and Trish usually sat. The small café off Academy Boulevard sat halfway between his office and hers, so they often met here for lunch. Trish waggled her fingers at him. He joined her.

  “I ordered you a Peak burger,” she said.

  “Thanks.” He wondered if he’d be able to eat it.

  She searched his face. “Oh God, Catherine doesn’t believe you about Jeffrey Livman.”

  A waitress arrived with two iced teas. She smiled at Easy. He tried to smile back at her, but failed. His gut ached as if he’d been kicked.

  “We never talked about Livman.”

  Trish’s face twisted in a puzzled frown. She dumped Sweet’n Low into her iced tea. “She wasn’t home?”

  “She was there all right.” He huffed a long breath, staring at the iced tea, repulsed. He’d been a confirmed soda drinker until Catherine introduced him to the pleasure of a glass of icy cold sun-brewed tea.

  “What happened, Easy? Was Livman there? He’s not supposed to see you. You’ll spook him.” She launched into a diatribe about how Easy was supposed to operate. John had tried to convince the police to investigate Roberta’s death, but they’d found no evidence of foul play and there had been no witnesses. Romoco Insurance, which had carried the life insurance policy, had worked with John, but despite the large benefit, they had turned up nothing to suggest Roberta’s death was anything other than an accident. When the coroner declared the death accidental and closed the file, the insurance company had been forced to pay out, and John’s hope for a police in-? vestigation had died. They needed a confession. The only way to get it would be to lull Livman into believing he’d gotten away with his crime.

  Easy waited until his sister ran out of steam. “Livman wasn’t there. Remember when she left town?”

  “Yeah, junior year. She moved.”

  “Her parents threw her out. She was pregnant.”

  Eyes wide, mouth opened, Trish stared at him.

  “I didn’t know. We had that big fight before she could tell me. I can’t believe how stupid I was. I should’ve known.”

  “I’m an aunt?�
�� A slow smile brightened Trish’s face. Her eyes glowed. “Boy or girl? Name? Did—”

  “She gave the baby up for adoption.”

  Her smile winked out like a blown lightbulb. “Oh no. How could she do that? It’s your baby, too. Why didn’t she ever tell you? You guys were so much in love. You’d have married her, right? I know you would have.”

  “Why don’t you use a bullhorn? I think some of the people in the parking lot didn’t hear you.” Embarrassed as if he were eighteen again, caught doing something nasty, he glanced around the small restaurant to see if anyone paid attention.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. She leaned over the table and lowered her voice. “I thought she was so smart. Why didn’t she tell you?”

  He shook his head. “I was mean to her. When I joined the army, she thought I ran out on her.”

  The waitress arrived with their lunch. She set a steaming burger covered with onions, mushrooms and Jack cheese in front of Easy. The knots in his belly jerked tighter. He averted his gaze.

  Trish stole the dill pickles off his plate, arranged them on her burger, then sliced the sandwich in half. “You better not tell Mom and Dad.” Her voice reverberated with dire warning.

  Their parents bemoaned the single status of their children. They wanted them married, and the house filled with grandchildren to spoil. News of a lost grandchild would crush them.

  Trish bit into her burger, chewed and swallowed. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “You can find your kid. You find adopted kids all the time. Shoot, it’s so easy, I could do it.”

  Tempting, very tempting. He imagined his daughter looking like a miniature version of Catherine. She probably insisted on being called Elizabeth, never Lizzy or Beth or Betsy. Maybe she was artistic, she was definitely a brain, pulling straight As.