Buch lesen: «A Baby For Lord Roderick»

Chapter One

“I have to go, Daddy.”

Liam turned his head briefly from the road and looked down at his small daughter in the seat beside him. In the wan light from the dashboard he saw she’d managed to curl herself into a comfortable ball despite the restraining seat belt. “I thought you were asleep.”

Bea stretched a frail-looking arm in front of her, the heel of her hand jutting out like a crossing guard halting traffic, and yawned. “I was. But now I’m awake and I’ve got to go.”

Liam peered out the windows at densely wooded countryside, broken up now and then by open stretches he assumed were the meadows and alpine lakes he remembered from his last and only visit twenty years ago to this northeastern corner of Utah. It was nearly midnight, black as pitch outside, and raining. His visibility was limited, but he was sure they weren’t passing petrol stations. The last one he’d seen of those was a neglected, two-pump enterprise in a bump-in-the-road berg nearly half an hour’s drive behind them.

“We’re almost there, Bea. Do you think you can wait till we get to Gran’s house to go to the loo?”

Bea unfolded herself till her thin legs hung over the edge of the seat, pushed a tangle of brown curls out of her eyes, then started to squirm. “No, Daddy, I can’t wait. I’ve got to go now.”

Liam supposed he could pull over, fetch the umbrella he’d thrown in the boot of the rented car along with their luggage, and shield Bea from the rain while she squatted by the side of the road. But she’d just gotten over a cold and he wasn’t too keen on the possibility of her getting chilled. She’d lost more weight in the last month and she seemed to catch every bug going around. Besides, she’d be embarrassed. She was only five, but she was as self-conscious as a teenager.

Suddenly they crested a rise in the road and he saw lights ahead. Relieved, he announced, “This is your lucky day, Beatrice Mary McAllister. That’s got to be Annabella ahead. Just hold on a little longer, okay?”

Liam would be as happy as Bea to finally reach their destination. He’d traveled enough in the United States to be able to adjust quickly to driving on the right side of the road, but he’d driven nonstop from Salt Lake City and was jet-lagged and exhausted. They’d left the main highway, Route 150, quite some time ago and had been traveling along a dark, lonely road as jigsawed as a puzzle piece. And with Bea asleep, he’d had nothing and no one to keep him company but the rhythmic swish and muted thump of the windshield wipers, the resonating vibration of the tires on the wet road, and a country-music station that faded in and out depending on minor fluctuations in altitude.

It wasn’t that he was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel. Nodding on the road had never been a problem. But he’d been doing too much thinking. Since the tragedy that tore apart his world a year ago, he had avoided the quiet situations that left one tempted to replay the best and worst moments of one’s life. But he was forced to agree with Gran that this trip, and the quiet that went with it, was something he could no longer avoid.

He slowed as outlying houses and buildings cropped up alongside the road. They all looked battened down for the night. “Let’s just hope there’s a petrol station or a restaurant open, because it might take a bit too long to locate Gran’s house. She lives on the edge of town, about a quarter mile up one of these mountains, you know.”

Bea sat up and peered over the dashboard. “Is there a McDonald’s here?”

“I doubt it, sweetheart. This is the back of beyond.”

“The back of what?”

Liam chuckled. “That’s just another name for places like Annabella, Bea…towns too small and remote to attract a global hamburger chain.”

“But even Bridekirk’s got a McDonald’s.”

She was right. Even their tiny village back home in England had a McDonald’s, built right across the street from the Nag’s Head Inn, a pub nearly two hundred years old. While he’d been none too pleased when the colorful facade of a McDonald’s had been wedged between far more venerable styles of architecture on the cobbled streets of Bridekirk, he’d give anything to see those golden arches now. The main street of Annabella looked as drenched and deserted as the last two towns they’d passed through.

“There, Daddy! I think I see a petrol station.”

Liam followed the direction of Bea’s pointed finger. It was a station, all right, but it was closed. “Maybe the loo’s outside in the back. Cross your fingers it’s open, or else we’re going to have to find you a tree to pee behind. At least there’s plenty of those.”

Bea nodded and, instead of crossing her fingers, she crossed her legs.

Liam pulled off the road and behind the station where a yellow light flickered forlornly in the rain, revealing a small rubbish bin resting against the wall between two white doors, their paint blistered from the sun. He ordered Bea to stay put for a minute and made a dash through the rain to check the door marked “women.” It was locked—or jammed—and the knob was sticky. He grimaced and, without much hope, tried the men’s door next. The knob turned.

Liam gingerly pushed open the door and flicked on the light. He was surprised to discover the facilities relatively clean. Since there was no urinal, there’d be one less thing he’d have to explain to his curious daughter; the condom machine was going to be difficult enough to put a name and a purpose to. He rolled out some paper towels, wetted them and cleaned the toilet seat for good measure, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror as he straightened to wash his hands.

He noticed, but wasn’t distressed by, the way the indirect lighting in the washroom accentuated the smudges under his eyes and made his dark hair seem dull and lifeless. He had a five-o’clock shadow, too, giving him a gaunt appearance. His looks had often been touted by the British tabloids as comparable to Daniel Day-Lewis “in one of his hunkier roles.” With an indifferent smirk at the haggard reflection staring back at him, Liam decided that Daniel should definitely be offended by the comparison.

He went back to the car, got the umbrella out of the boot and popped it open, then went to the passenger side and lifted Bea out, carrying her like an American football under his arm. She weighed next to nothing. He set her down inside the washroom and shut the door, waiting outside while she did her business.

Liam gazed where the lights of the idling Jeep Cherokee shone into a stand of spruce and aspen trees. He took a deep breath of rain-washed mountain air. It was cold…colder and wetter than he’d thought Utah would be in September, although perhaps it would warm up some once the storm passed. He was glad he’d dressed Bea in a sweater and jeans, but was still anxious to get her back inside the heated car.

Large raindrops plopped steadily against the top of the umbrella, dripped off its rim and made mini-explosions on the black asphalt at his feet. The noise was loud, but not loud enough to drown out the static of misery that crackled in the back of his mind. He was used to keeping busy to avoid those dark thoughts….

What was that? He cocked his head. Had Bea called him? He turned and tapped on the door with a single knuckle. “You say something, Busy Bea?”

“No, Daddy. I’ll be done in just a minute.”

Liam turned away and resumed his pensive observation of the weather. Then he heard it again. A faint mewling sound, like a kitten. It was coming from the rubbish bin.

Liam took a tentative step toward the bin, its lid propped open several inches by a large sack of garbage that stuck up above the rest. He peered inside the receptacle, which smelled pungently of decayed food and motor oil, and saw nothing moving. He stepped away, convinced that if a kitten was somewhere inside, it was better off there than outside in the storm.

The noise came again, but this time it sounded less like the plaintive crying of a kitten and more…well…human. Liam got a fluttering feeling in his stomach and told himself he was just imagining things. Surely that wasn’t whimpering he heard. Whimpering, like a baby fussing in its crib. It had to be an animal of some sort, an animal that only sounded human.

A shaft of light appeared on the asphalt. “Daddy, I’m done.”

Liam turned to see Bea in the doorway of the washroom, her arms crossed, her hands gripping her knobby shoulders. Quickly he scooped her up and carried her to the car. “Wait here, sweetheart. I’ve got to check something out. I think there might be a kitten or some other small animal in the rubbish bin.”

Her face tilted to his, her eyes shining and hopeful. “Can we keep it? It must need a home or it wouldn’t be sleeping in a stinky old rubbish bin.”

He made a wincing smile. “We’ll see.”

He closed the car door and returned to the rubbish bin. He knew he was probably being stupid, but he couldn’t rest now till he knew what was making that noise. He hoped he wouldn’t be racing to hospital in a couple of minutes to get a rabies or a tetanus shot…or both.

He waited till he heard the cry again—so pitiful and weak it tugged at his heart—then carefully but rapidly began to remove the garbage in the area he thought the sound was coming from. He felt an urgency that belied the rational voice in his head that kept telling him he couldn’t possibly be unearthing from a rubbish bin something…someone…human. But stranger things had happened and life just wasn’t fair. Some people were willing to die to bring a child into the world, and some people threw children away.

Underneath a large paper cup that dripped the sticky remnants of a soda and a mustard-smeared wad of fast-food wrapping paper, Liam found the source of the noise. He was so stunned and horrified, he thought for a moment he was going to vomit. He gulped back the bile and breathed what amounted to a prayer and a curse. “Dear God.”

It was a baby. Wrapped loosely in a small, faded patchwork quilt, it lay with its head at an awkward angle against a grease-soaked paper sack, its fists raised above its bare chest, trembling and pale with cold. Its dark hair was still slick from the birth canal and the stump of its umbilical cord was reddish-brown with blood.

Liam forced himself to set aside his horror, his revulsion toward whoever had tossed this baby in the garbage, and focused on saving its life. He threw down his umbrella, pulled off his sweater, then gently picked up the infant. It was a boy. A boy like the newborn son Liam had lost a year ago…along with Victoria, his wife.

Liam discarded the sticky quilt and quickly wrapped him in the sweater, still warm from his own body heat. Clutching the child to his chest, he hurried to the car and slid into the seat. The baby felt so cold against him, Liam was scared to death it was too late to save him.

“Daddy, show me the kitten! Can we keep it?”

“Bea, it’s not a kitten. It’s a baby. He’s very cold and I’ve got to get help quickly or he might—” Liam caught himself before finishing the sentence. But Bea was no dummy. Since her mum’s death, his daughter was all too aware that bad things happened to people. She stared, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, while Liam reached with a shaky hand to turn up the heater full-blast.

He laid the baby in his lap and quickly rewrapped him in the sweater, taking care to cover his head but not obstruct his breathing. The baby had stopped the pitiful crying that had alerted Liam to his presence in the first place, but the quiet was almost more disconcerting.

He was tempted to rub the baby’s skin to warm him up, but had a vague recollection of having read that that was not a good thing to do in hypothermia cases. As well, he had no idea whether or not hypothermia was the only danger this newborn was facing. Had he been injured during the birth? Manhandled afterward? Were his lungs functioning properly? The dire possibilities seemed endless.

Holding the baby in the crook of his left arm and tight against his chest, Liam punched the car into gear and circled the station, looking for a phone booth. When he didn’t find one, he pulled up to the road. He tried not to feel desperate as he looked up and down the dark street, wondering which way to go.

“Are we going to hospital?”

Liam heard the fear in Bea’s voice, the residual terror of hospitals since her mum’s death. He tried to give her a reassuring smile, but his teeth stuck to his dry lips. “We’re going to find a phone booth and call for help, Bea, or knock on a door if we have to,” he managed. “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll get help.”

Bea’s bottom lip quivered and her eyes brimmed with tears. “Please don’t let the baby die, Daddy.”

ALLIE WOKE UP with a start, soaked in sweat, her heart hammering, her mouth dry. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa in front of the television while watching Sabrina, the original one with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, and now an infomercial was on. A man gleefully pulverizing fruit in a mixer touted the benefits of a diet comprised only of juices, while a buxom blonde in a body leotard posed nearby and smiled vacuously.

Allie glanced distractedly at the digital clock on the VCR. It was ten minutes past midnight. She swung her legs over the side of the couch, propped her elbows on her thighs and rested her head against her trembling hands.

What a dream. What a horrible dream.

And it was still so vivid….

She was sitting on the porch in Grandma Lockwood’s squeaky old rocker. She held a baby in her arms and crooned to it the same nonsensical words her grandmother had sung to Allie when she was an infant.

“Hi-dumma, do-dumma, hi-dumma-diddle-dumma, hi-dumma-diddle-dumma-day.”

Allie smiled contentedly into the baby boy’s pink and peaceful face. Her heart swelled with mother’s love.

Suddenly the precious weight of the baby’s body in Allie’s arms disappeared. She found herself holding only the patchwork quilt her grandmother had made for Allie’s firstborn. Terrified, she stood up and began searching for the baby.

She looked everywhere. In his crib by her bed. On the couch. Under the couch. Under the couch cushions.

With the fantastical illogic of dreams she found herself looking in spaces no normal-sized baby could fit. In the sewing box. Under the TV guide. Down the bathtub drain. And all the while her horror and desperation grew.

Where had he gone? Where was her precious child?

It was such a relief to wake up and realize there was no baby to lose.

No baby.

Allie shook her head, wry and resigned. This was the first time one of her baby dreams had ended badly, but maybe it was her subconscious mind trying to wake her up to the reality of her situation.

It had been going on for months. Three, sometimes four nights a week, she’d dream of a baby. It was a different baby each time, a child as real and individual and detailed in her morning’s memory as if she’d held it in her arms the night before.

At first the vivid dreams frightened Allie. She thought her sterile state was making her, quite literally, go crazy. But, over time, she started looking forward to them. They filled a need. They allowed her to hold, to bathe, to nurse, to rock and to sing to babies of every description. Sometimes they were blond and blue-eyed, sometimes dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-skinned. The only thing they all had in common was that they were hers. Hers to love and care for.

Ironically the dreams hadn’t started when Allie found out her fallopian tubes were nothing more than stringy cords of scar tissue and she’d never be able to have a child of her own. They hadn’t started when she found out her husband of half a dozen years had been sleeping with Rhonda Middleburger, the waitress at Bill and Nada’s Diner, nor did they begin when she and Doug divorced nine months ago. They’d started just when she thought she’d come to grips with the realities of her life.

It had been New Year’s Eve. In the first moments of the new year she’d made an important resolution. She was going to quit feeling sorry for herself. So what if all she’d ever dreamed of beyond obtaining her medical license was to be a mother, to fill her house with kids and noise and the type of wonderful family chaos she’d enjoyed in the home she’d grown up in? She, Althea, was destined for something different. No children, no noise, and, apparently, no husband, either. But that was okay. She’d have a wonderful, full life anyway.

“But first maybe I need to see a shrink about these dreams,” Allie grumbled to herself as she reached for the remote to turn off the TV. “It was weird enough when they were nice dreams, but—”

Allie was startled by the sound of the doorbell ringing, then a fist hammering on the front door. She dropped the remote and hurried down the hall toward the front of the house, straightening her oversized, sleep-creased flannel shirt so that the buttons at least marched in a straight line between her breasts. She ran a hand through her short blond hair, but knew she must still look a mess. Whoever was on the other side of that door probably wouldn’t care, though, or even notice how she looked. As a doctor in a small town she’d been summoned from bed many times to take care of an emergency, but most people called first and told her they were coming.

“Allie, you in there? Open up!”

It was Doug’s voice. His tone wasn’t cajoling or tender, so he must be knocking on her door in his official capacity as Sheriff instead of for the usual reason he bothered her in the middle of the night.

“I’m coming!” she called, flipping on the lights as she jogged through the living room, then made short work of the dead bolt lock that secured her front door. When she’d purchased the security item at Harv’s Hardware, Harv had just looked at her, wondering, she supposed, what she thought she needed with a dead bolt in a town where no one bothered to lock their doors. She marvelled now at the irony of willingly opening her door to the man she’d meant to keep out by installing the dead bolt in the first place.

“Doug, what’s wrong?” The words were spoken as she opened the door, before she was able to look past her ex-husband’s tall, uniformed figure to an even taller man standing just behind him.

Now she was speechless. It had been years since she’d last seen Liam McAllister in person. Twenty years. He’d been thirteen years old and she’d been eleven. He’d spent a week that summer with his grandmother and Allie had spied on him for hours at a time from the tip-top branches of the big cottonwood tree on the edge of Mary McAllister’s property.

Since then Allie had heard of Liam, read about him and seen his pictures as part of numerous media stories. The public’s fascination with the former playboy aristocrat turned devoted husband seemed insatiable, and reporters had relentlessly stalked him through the sad and happy dramas of his life till he must have felt like screaming…or finding a secluded island to escape to.

But why on earth to Annabella? To see Mary, she supposed. But what was he doing on her front porch in the middle of the night instead of Mary’s, and why did he have such a stricken expression in his eyes?

“Allie, we’ve got a sick child here. Maybe dying.” Doug slipped past her frozen form and into the living room. Liam followed, along with a small, thin girl who clutched the back of his shirt. She appeared frightened and pale, but hardly at death’s door.

Confused, Allie bent down and peered into the child’s pinched face. “Don’t you feel well, honey?”

“It’s not Bea,” Liam said shortly. “It’s the baby.”

Allie straightened up. She’d registered the name “Bea.” She’d read that Liam had a five-year-old daughter named Beatrice, nicknamed Busy Bea, but she’d never seen a picture of her because Liam refused to allow her to be photographed. She’d read about and sympathized with his tragic losses a year ago, but since his premature son had died along with his wife that terrible day, Allie wasn’t sure what baby Liam was talking about.

She gave a helpless little shrug. “What baby?”

Allie had been so shocked to see Liam, she hadn’t noticed that he was clutching what looked like a balled-up sweater in his arms. Now he tipped his bundle toward her and turned back the sweater to reveal a baby, sallow and still, its umbilical stump raw from an obviously recent birth. Allie’s breath caught in her throat, rattled there for a stunned, horrified moment, then gushed out with her next words.

“Bring him back here to my office.”