Chapter Thirty-two

THE 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.