Present Danger

by Susan Andersen

  When Lola called a short while later and invited her down to meet the newest member of the Jackson household, she tried to disguise the damage to her puffy eyes and swollen mouth with a hastily applied ice pack. Apparently her remedy was less than successful. Lola took one look at her and silently handed her the baby to hold.

  “Ooh, Gawd,” Aunie whispered and cuddled the infant to her breast, absorbing comfort from her warmth and sweet baby aroma. She collapsed onto the couch and looked down at the child in her arms. “She’s beautiful, y’all. Absolutely beautiful.”

  Greta-Leigh’s complexion fell somewhere between Lola’s shade of cafe au lait and Otis’s ebony. She had a full head of hair already a good inch long, and it stood out statically around her tiny head like a dark dandelion in full bloom. “Oh, look at her little lips. They’re so sweet.” Greta-Leigh’s mouth was pursed, causing the middle of her top lip to point over the bottom lip like a tiny bird’s.

  Aunie’s finger brushed a soft, dusky cheek and she looked up at Lola and Otis. “You must be so proud.” To her eternal mortification, her voice cracked on the last word and tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Otis and Lola made sounds of concern and she felt like an absolute fool. “I’m sorry,” she whispered and wiped at her cheeks with her free hand. She gave them a wobbly smile. “Please, ignore it. I must be premenstrual or somethin’.”

  But that wasn’t it at all. She had just remembered that for the first time ever, James hadn’t used one of his ever-present condoms this afternoon. Great. Wouldn’t it be just her luck to get pregnant the first time they failed to use birth control?

  She wouldn’t mind so much, except her life was such a mess right now that the last thing she had any right to do was drag a child into it. Not to mention she’d always dreamed of conceiving a child in love, not anger. And, Lord, wouldn’t Jimmy just be thrilled to pieces? She was pretty sure he was already regretting the fact he’d gotten tangled up with her. If he learned he might be a daddy on top of it he’d probably open up a vein.

  “I’ve gotta go get some formula,” Otis said. He squatted down to kiss Greta-Leigh on the crown of her head. As he stood, he rubbed an affectionate hand over Aunie’s hair. Kissing Lola, he let himself out of the apartment.

  Lola sat down beside Aunie on the couch. “You want me to take her?” she asked, tipping her head at the baby with a soft smile.

  “Oh, no, please. May I hold her just a little while longer?”

  “Sure.” Lola watched in silence for a few moments. Finally, she said, “So, what’s goin’ on wid you, woo-mon? And don’t tell me PMS. You been fightin’ wid James?”

  Aunie nodded.

  “Want to talk ‘bout it?”

  Prickles at the back of her nose warned Aunie of an imminent renewal of tears. “Can’t.”

  Lola stroked Aunie’s hair away from her face. “Just tell me this: You gonna be all right?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She hoped.

  “Okay, good. I s’pose then that you’d like me to change the subject?”

  “Please.” Her eyes on Lola, Aunie rubbed the side of her face against Greta-Leigh’s head. “I’ll tell you about it later, when I’ve got a little more control, okay?”

  “Fine wid me. You interested in seein’ my sweet baby girl’s fingers and toes?”

  “Yeah,” Aunie said. “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”

  The light was blinking on her answering machine when she let herself into the apartment a short while later. There was a message requesting she call Detective Garet Bell at the Seattle police department. Oh, God, what now? With hands that were not quite steady, she punched out the number he’d left.

  “This is Bell,” a clipped voice answered.

  “Detective Bell, my name is Aunie Franklin,” she identified herself in a barely audible voice. She cleared her throat. “Uh, you left a message for me to call you?” She clutched the receiver in slippery palms.

  “Franklin, Franklin. Oh, yeah, here it is. Miss Franklin, I called to let you know we’ve apprehended the person responsible for the rash of harrassment calls that you and several other students from your college have been receiving. According to the time and date sheets you submitted to the telephone company a few weeks ago, the number of origin on several of your calls tallies with that of the woman whose list finally nailed him.”

  “Oh, my God,” Aunie whispered in shock. “Who was it?”

  The answer was anticlimatic as she didn’t recognize the name. Perhaps Mary would. Almost to herself she murmured, “I don’t understand this. I’ve heard about the calls he’d made to other students. Why were my calls so different?”

  “Interesting you should ask that,” Detective Bell replied. “Ordinarily the answer would probably remain one of life’s little mysteries, but this guy turned out to be one of those chatty little individuals who likes to brag about his deeds. Your name was mentioned specifically.” Aunie’s stomach turned over.

  “He gained access to his victims’ telephone numbers through a part-time job he held with Ma Bell,” the detective explained. “And, miss, he took it quite to heart when your unlisted number was virtually the only information he could get on you.

  “Physically, he’s fairly nondescript,” the detective continued, “average build, average coloring, nothing outstanding about him. He found it simple enough to blend into just about any crowd, where he’d glean details of his victims’ lives through overheard gossip and conversations. Apparently, though, you don’t talk about yourself at school. He was rather put out that although there is some gossip about you, no one seemed to possess any concrete facts. There was no personal knowledge available, none of the little details that he used to unnerve his victims. Rather than leave you alone entirely, he settled for calling and hanging up; but apparently the message on your machine took a great deal of fun out of even that. I approve of that message, by the way. He also mentioned something about bodyguards?”

  Aunie gave him a thumbnail sketch of James’s escort service, including a brief description of the physical characteristics of her sentries, and the detective laughed. They talked for a short while longer and then disconnected. The instant Aunie replaced the receiver, she was out the door and down the hall, pounding on James’s door.

  He opened it and she launched herself at his chest.

  His arms tightened around her convulsively. “Aunie?” Holding her, he stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him. To say he was surprised to see her was an understatement.

  Somehow, though, he intuitively knew her being here now was something separate from the fight they’d had earlier. Trying to see her face, he asked, “What? What is it, baby? Are you all right?” At least her instincts still had her running to him with whatever it was, instead of taking it to Otis or Lola.

  “It wasn’t Wesley, James,” she said into his chest. “It was some boy I don’t even know.”

  “What wasn’t Wesley, baby?” Then it clicked. “The phone calls? They caught the caller?” When she nodded, he picked her up and carried her down the hall to her apartment. Once inside, he set her on her feet and held her at arm’s length so he could see her face. “Tell me.”

  She looked around with some confusion. Hadn’t they been in front of his apartment? Why were they in hers when his had been closer?

  “Tell me, Aunie.”

  She shook her head to clear it and then told him. “Detective Bell said it took longer to track him than it usually would because he used public phones almost exclusively. They would get a number on the trace, but they didn’t have the manpower to stake out all the various phone booths he used. Then, two or three weeks ago, he began placing the calls from his home. They picked him up today.”

  “Christ.” James tugged on his ponytail. “This is kind of hard to take in. After assuming all this time it was Cunningham.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But this is good,” he said, rapidly assimilating and shifting facts in his
fertile brain. A slow smile slashed lines from the corners of his eyes, deepened the three shallow grooves next to his mouth. “It’s excellent, in fact. Y know what this means, Magnolia?”

  She wasn’t thinking as speedily as he, but the facts were slowly sinking in nevertheless. “It’s all over, isn’t it, James?”

  “Yes.” He looked down at her and noticed signs that she’d been crying. His smile slowly faded. “Yes,” he repeated. “It’s really all over.”

  CHAPTER 17

  It was doubtful much work was accomplished on campus the following day. It was abuzz with news of the arrest as bands of students formed and broke up … constantly shifting and rearranging themselves into new groups as they milled about dissecting every snippet of information available. Voices rose and fell as everyone vied to relate their individual reactions to the news. A party atmosphere pervaded the halls, classrooms, and grounds.

  As Aunie had suspected she might, Mary had a working knowledge of the young man arrested. She described him to Aunie, but no matter how descriptive or how many instances she could cite when he’d been on the periphery of their lunch group, Aunie was unable to pin a face to the name.

  Oddly enough, for a short while as they milled out on the herringbone brick plaza fronting the building, Aunie thought she felt someone watching her. The fine hairs on her nape stood up, just as they’d been doing for the past week. Her head whipped around and she automatically scanned the crowd … but saw no one who seemed to be paying her undue attention.

  Then she felt slightly ridiculous. Talk about an inflated sense of her own importance. In view of yesterday’s arrest, it hardly seemed likely that anyone was watching her now; and in truth the sensation had only lasted for a brief instant. For all she knew, some guy had thought she was cute … for about fifteen seconds. She smiled slightly at the ego-puncturing thought. Nevertheless, she made a mental note to mention the impression to James—provided she saw him—and then she put it out of her mind.

  She was slightly embarrassed to admit it, even to herself, but she was every bit as greedy for information about the caller as any other student present today. She liked to believe she was above the sort of gossip and conjecture that tended to run rampant around the campus, but she found herself willfully absorbing every particle of intelligence that made the rounds, be it real or speculation. If it pertained to the young man who’d managed to turn so many lives upside down, she listened.

  It was still a struggle to assimilate the knowledge that it was a stranger and not Wesley who’d been calling her.

  It was drizzling by the time her last class let out and Mary offered her a ride home. Aunie declined, wanting to savor the freedom of her first unattended walk in several weeks. She took her time, window-shopping along Broadway, stopping to purchase a few toiletries she’d been meaning to replace for some time. By the time she fit her key into the outdoor lock of the apartment building, she was nearly soaked to the skin, but she didn’t care. It appeared that finally her life was being returned to her. And rain or no rain, she had enjoyed herself immensely.

  The young man trailed more than a block behind her on the opposite side of the street. He found keeping her in sight along Broadway as easy as pie. When she turned off into the residential district and he lost the convenient camouflage of sidewalks congested with students and shoppers, it was a little trickier, but not much. She hadn’t spared so much as a single glance behind her, and not for the first time that day he blessed the poor chump who’d gotten himself arrested yesterday. No doubt he was a degenerate little jerk-off, but his timing couldn’t be faulted.

  And timing was all, the young man thought. It was no skin off his teeth to admit he’d been starting to feel the pinch of desperation. He’d lucked onto Franklin’s registration for college several weeks back and thought he’d had it made. As it happened, however, that was the last piece of luck he’d had. The address on the registration turned out to be a post office box she never visited. She hadn’t applied for a Washington state driver’s license; she hadn’t registered a car. No one knew anything about her except that blond bitch, Holloman, and when he’d approached her, she’d refused to give him the time of day. He was not her type obviously. Either that or she didn’t appreciate a good old-fashioned pickup. Some women were like that.

  The primary problem, of course, was that Franklin was surrounded by men whom he for one didn’t care to encounter up close. Without their vigilance, he could have followed her home the first day, but their presence made trailing her a sticky proposition. He hadn’t missed how cautious and observant they were when they escorted her to and from the vehicles they’d parked illegally right in front of the college. And they clearly knew the town well. He didn’t believe they’d ever spotted a tail, but they drove as if they assumed one and they’d lost him every time. Who the hell were these people?

  Then, just to make matters about as dismal as they could possibly get, tomorrow, from everything he’d been able to determine, Franklin was taking her last final. After that, of course, she’d be gone for the summer. So God bless the deviate. Two days later and he would have been shit out of luck.

  Protected beneath the leafy branches of a tree one block south, he leaned against the rough-barked trunk, picked his teeth with a matchbook cover, and grinned in satisfaction when she turned up a short walkway and let herself into an old, well-maintained apartment building. Bingo. Yes sir, this beat hell out of waiting for the DMV to cough up the addresses on the Harley, Thunderbird, and Jeep registrations he’d requested. Especially since he hadn’t a clue if they’d lead him anywhere. He had sweated bullets this past week worrying that the three beefeaters who owned those vehicles were simply the babe’s hired talent. Now he didn’t have to give a rat’s ass.

  He leaned against the tree and smoked a cigarette. Anyone peeking out from behind a curtain would assume he was sheltering from the rain for five minutes. Then, whistling, he flicked the butt away and strolled up the street. Pulling a notebook from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt as he passed the apartment house, he breezed on by without a pause, scribbling down the address as he went.

  His bonus for being the one to locate Mrs. Wesley Cunningham was in the bag.

  The Jacksons’ door opened as Aunie was closing the entrance door behind her and Otis stuck his head out into the hallway. “I’m glad you’re home,” he said. “You got any plans for this afternoon?”

  “Just goin’ to the gym,” she replied. “But it’s not something I have to do; I can easily put it off.” She studied him. “You look kind of frazzled, Otis. What’s the matter … baby keep you up all night?”

  “I’ve gotta leave for work and Lola’s got the flu or something. She’s feeling lousy … can’t seem to hold anything down this afternoon.” He gave her a beleaguered look, his big shoulders twitching. “Aunie, could you do us an enormous favor and watch Greta-Leigh for a few hours? My sister can take her at six; and if Lola’s still feeling under the weather later tonight, I can probably get the next couple days off. I know it’s an imposition—”

  “Don’t be silly,” she interrupted him. “I’d love to take care of her.”

  “Thanks, Aunie. I appreciate this more than I can say. Jimmy’s nowhere around, and I was coming to the end of my rope trying to figure out what to do.” He gave his wristwatch a hurried glance and then rubbed his long fingers over his hard skull. “Come on in. I’ll get her bottles and diapers together.”

  Between the two of them, they located and packed all the baby’s essentials and brought her diaper bag and the infant up to Aunie’s apartment. Aunie ran in to change out of her wet clothes while Otis said goodbye to his daughter.

  “Daddy’s gotta go to work now, honeybunch,” he murmured, chin tucked into his neck as he gazed lovingly at the baby sprawled on his massive shoulder. Big, dark eyes stared up at him and the plastic clown-smile of her pacifier bobbed as she worked the nipple. “You be a good girl for Auntie Aunie and I’ll see you in a couple of days.” He l
ooked up at Aunie as she walked into the room, towel-drying her hair. “Or sooner, if Lola doesn’t feel better. You got my work number?”

  Aunie grinned at him and recited it. “James made me memorize everyone’s number. Don’t you worry about a thing now. We’ll be just fine—won’t we, sugar?—and I’ll take real good care of her.” She tossed the towel aside and held up her hands for the infant.

  Otis reluctantly peeled Greta-Leigh off his shoulder, pressed a kiss on her forehead, and handed her to Aunie. His white teeth flashed in a smile. “Thanks again, Aunie. I owe you one.”

  “Oh, yeah, this is a real hardship,” she replied and gave him a cocky smile. “I just hate having to play with this little ol’ sweetie pie all afternoon. Go on now; get to work.” She walked him to the door, smiling tolerantly as he told her the time of Greta-Leigh’s nap and last bottle, and gave her more information than she needed concerning the various supplies they had toted up to her apartment.

  “I thought he’d never leave, didn’t you, sugar?” Aunie asked the baby when the door had closed behind Otis’s back. She nuzzled the incredibly soft skin in Greta-Leigh’s neck. “It’s just you and me now, kid.”

  * * *

  Wesley concluded his conversation with the detective, recradled the receiver, and went into action. He buzzed his secretary and gave her crisp instructions; he called his maid and ordered her to pack.

  When he was finished giving the commands that would smooth the way for his trip, he leaned back in his chair and smiled in satisfaction.

  The little slut’s time had come.

  Aunie played with the baby for a while and then put her on a blanket on the floor and stretched out on her stomach next to her, ankles crossed in the air, to study for finals.