After Mary Millicent arrived at Hartmann Ranch, she had asked about the nameless infant buried in the family cemetery. Ann never told her whose baby it was but said that no preacher had ever said words over it. Immediately Mary Millicent grabbed her coat and the two of them marched up the path and knelt beside the little marker, and Mary Millicent Tutt herself, the famous evangelist who had written books on salvation and preached on radio and television and had saved millions of souls, raised her arms heavenward and asked the Lord to hold this baby close and give him everlasting life.
After Mary Millicent gave birth to Gus and Amanda, Ann’s arms didn’t feel so empty anymore. She had Buck’s grandchildren to love. Those were the happiest years of her life. Now every time Ann became exasperated with Mary Millicent, she reminded herself that Mary Millicent had saved her baby’s soul and allowed her to love and mother Gus and Amanda. The call had long since left Mary Millicent, but back then she had the ear of God. Ann had no doubt of that.
The phone was silent now. Gus wasn’t yelling anymore.
She rose from her bed and regarded her reflection once again. So old and ugly. She didn’t want to see that old ugly face ever again.
She walked through the living room of the spacious, beautiful apartment that had never meant as much to her as the creaky old house that used to be out back-where she had lived with her father until he died and Buck had starting coming to her in the night.
She didn’t bother to close the door behind her when she left the apartment for the last time. At the back door, she punched in the security code. She opened the back door, walked down the steps, and crossed the backyard to the side gate by the driveway.
It was starting to snow. The weatherman on television had said it might snow south of here, but not in huge, empty Marshall County, where she had spent her entire life in service of the Hartmann family. And she had allowed her heart to be filled with love for them and had told herself that they loved her in return. But probably they were just using her. Dumb old Ann Montgomery. She had spread her legs for old Buck and raised Mary Millicent’s children and taken care of her when she was old and useless and her children couldn’t deal with her anymore. Ann had run their ranch and kept their secrets. Now she had failed them, and Gus had yelled at her. It felt as though he had stabbed her with a knife. Stabbed her dead.
She knew it must be very cold, but she didn’t feel it. Maybe she was already dead. Maybe she had been dead for years.
She took the winding path up to the windswept little cemetery and opened the iron gate, its rusty hinges squealing in protest. The wind whipped her nightgown around her legs as she walked past Buck’s headstone to the back corner where their baby was buried. She wished she could dig down into the frozen earth to where her baby lay and hold him in her arms while she died. But at least she was close to him. She curled her body around the small headstone and began crooning to her baby. Her pretty little baby boy. His little chest had shuddered. She had tried to breathe for him, tried to put air in his little lungs. But he had never taken a breath. Buck had refused to give him a name, but in her heart she had named him David.
She recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm. Then her mind roamed through the Bible and she recited favorite passages until she realized that light was filling up the sky. The light was warm, and it was coming closer and closer until she was in the middle of a soft warm cloud that smelled of talcum powder.
Almost immediately Gus knew that he had gone too far. It was Montgomery he was yelling at. The woman had practically raised him and Amanda. The woman who loved them completely and would have laid down her life for either one of them.
But he kept yelling, demanding that she answer him, saying that he was sorry, that he loved her. He and Amanda loved her. More than they had loved their own mother. Then he hushed, sensing that she was no longer listening.
He yelled for Felipe to get Kelly on the phone.
“Oh, God,” Gus moaned, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
When Felipe handed him the phone, Gus said, “Kelly, you need to go over and check on Montgomery ASAP!”
“What’s going on?”
“Jamie Long flew the coop, and Montgomery is freaking out.”
Kelly let out a low whistle. “So, that’s who went through the front gate.”
“Apparently so. You have any idea how she managed that?”
“One of the remotes is missing,” she admitted.
Gus resisted the urge to let forth a stream of obscenities. No more yelling. He needed to stay calm. Needed Kelly’s help.
“Go see about Montgomery,” he told her, “and get me the license-plate number on the Long girl’s car. Don’t make a big deal of this, Kelly. If anyone at the ranch asks, just say the girl decided to have her baby elsewhere.”
“Will do.”
“I’m worried about Montgomery,” he admitted. “She was pretty upset when I talked to her. Call me back right away.”
Chapter Twenty-two
WHEN JAMIE POINTED the remote control at the front gate, she half expected an alarm to sound and the car to be bathed in bright spotlights and men to appear suddenly and drag her from the vehicle.
Until that moment she had told herself that she could always change her mind. That this was just a trial run and not the real thing.
But in bed early this morning, she had felt a tightening of her abdominal muscles. Not exactly painful, but uncomfortable. She experienced the same feeling again in the bathroom, along with the beginnings of hysteria. Freda had warned her about the possibility of a false alarm. About Braxton Hicks contractions. Sometimes they could be pretty strong, but they came intermittently and then went away. Real labor didn’t go away. Jamie prayed that was what she was experiencing. Braxton Hicks.
She experienced another episode midmorning but nothing else for the rest of the day. She had been thoroughly shaken by the experience, however.
What if the pains she had felt were a lead-up to true labor?
What if her labor started during daytime? She’d never be able to leave in broad daylight, and if she waited until dark, she risked having the baby alone and unattended.
Jamie had known all along that leaving would not be simple. That fact in itself is what finally convinced her. Miss Montgomery and Kelly were not about to allow her just to get in her car and drive away. They would find some grounds to stop her-accuse her of stealing something most likely. And it would be almost impossible for Jamie to prove otherwise. It would be her word against theirs, and they worked for the Hartmanns. In Marshall County, the Hartmanns were above the law.
She knew her departure would have to be clandestine. She needed to get as far away from Hartmann Ranch as she possibly could before anyone realized that she had left.
Getting access to her car had been a major problem. She hadn’t planned to threaten a hunger strike. The words just came out of her mouth. She wouldn’t have done it, of course, at least not to the extent that it would hurt the baby. But Montgomery didn’t know that. Montgomery had called her a “wicked girl.”
Once the car was in running order and parked in the ranch-house garage, Jamie went about the business of packing up her possessions and carrying them out to the car, always accompanied by a gardener or sometimes by Miss Montgomery herself. Jamie made a deliberate effort to be cheerful around Miss Montgomery and Nurse Freda, telling them how excited she was about returning to Austin and continuing her college education and getting in touch with her friends. “I know you think I’m rushing things,” Jamie told Miss Montgomery, “but I’m bored and don’t have anything better to do.”