Читать книгу Babies By The Busload - Raye Morgan - Страница 9

J.J. felt like whistling as she walked up the pathway to her condo. Things had gone much better today. The giftwrapped box of special doughnuts she’d brought in for the station manager seemed to have done the trick of turning him from a foe into a fan. And when she’d had a chance to fill in and do a morning update, there had been a flurry of complimentary phone calls from the public. Things were looking up, and she smiled to herself as she fumbled for her keys, shifting from one hand to the other the bag of groceries she’d picked up on her way home.

A feeling rather than a sound prickled the nerve endings on the back of her neck, and she looked around to find a young girl sitting on the steps to the next condo, gazing at her solemnly.

“Hi,” J.J. said, surprised. She didn’t often live in housing where children were encouraged. It made for a rather artificial life, but it was quiet that way.

“Hi,” the girl said back, her dark eyes huge. She wore a pink shirt and a blue corduroy jumper and her feet were in little red tennis shoes. Blond curls bounced around her pretty little face. She had a look you couldn’t help but smile at, and J.J. did.

“My name’s J.J. What’s yours?”

“Annie.”

“Annie. That’s a pretty name.” She didn’t have a lot of experience with children, and ordinarily she hardly noticed them. But something made her want to linger and talk a little more to this one. Was it her appealing face? Or the slight hint of sadness in her eyes?

“Do you live nearby?” she asked her.

Annie nodded, but she didn’t leave her step.

J.J. glanced at the next condo and bit her lip. Could this be one of Jack’s brood? Should she ask? For some strange reason she was hesitating, as though finding out the truth would draw her in somehow. But that was silly. Asking a question didn’t imply a commitment of any kind, did it?

“Is Jack Remington your daddy?” she asked, steeling herself for the response.

Annie nodded again, and J.J. smiled again. Yes, she could see his handsome face in the lines of this little girl’s bone structure.

“Well, isn’t that nice?” she murmured, turning back to her door and inserting the key. Jack’s daughter was awfully cute, but J.J., for one, didn’t want to get to know her. The more distance she could keep between herself and the man, the better.

She’d turned the key and the door was swinging open, but before she could escape into her house, Annie’s little-girl voice intruded once again.

“Do you have any babies?” she asked, her piping voice echoing through the walkway.

J.J. swung back around and stared at her. Annie had risen from her step and come a bit closer, shifting her weight from one red tennis shoe to the other. What a question to ask a complete stranger. And yet, from the look on her face, the answer seemed to be important to her.

“No,” J.J. said quickly. “No, that’s something I don’t have.”

“We have three.” She held up her fingers to demonstrate the number, her expression not so much proud as matter-offact. “One, two, three.”

“Very good,” J.J. said, smiling at her. “I guess you all are lucky.” Now that was a pretty disingenuous thing for her to say. Three babies sounded like a prescription for chaos to her. A netherworld filled with hellions.

She glanced at the sweet little girl standing before her and realized that hellions was possibly too strong a word. Monsters? No, you couldn’t call children monsters. It wasn’t right. Uncaring little beasts? From her experience, that pretty much hit the nail on the head.

But Annie nodded, her little face completely serious. She obviously agreed that babies were a good thing to have. To her it seemed perfectly normal to have a few hanging around.

“When are you going to get your baby?” she asked, her face completely solemn.

“You sound like my mother,” J.J. said, laughing. “Does everyone have to have one?”

Annie frowned, not sure of the answer to that one. “We have three,” she said again stoutly.

“Maybe more than your share,” J.J. murmured, but not loud enough for the little girl to hear.

The bag was getting heavy and she went into the entryway and on into the kitchen, setting the bag on the counter. Turning, she found the little girl had followed and was standing in the doorway.

“I guess you need your husband first, huh?” Annie said, continuing the conversation, merely setting things straight.

J.J. would just as soon have changed the subject. Babies and husbands were not things she’d wanted in recent years. And to tell the truth, she hadn’t missed them. Suddenly everyone from her own mother to her old roommate to the little girl next door was bringing up this motherhood stuff. And though she laughed it off, as she always had, something was beginning to stick, to tickle, to bother her about it.

She began taking groceries out of the bag, putting them on the counter, and suddenly the single cans and single TV dinners seemed to be mute symbols of her lonely life. She frowned. She had to fight against such thoughts.

“You’re awfully young to be thinking so much about babies,” she murmured a bit defensively.

Annie took a step, bringing her farther into the kitchen.

“I have to think about babies,” she said brightly. “I have to take care of them.”

J.J. put the quart of milk into the refrigerator and smiled at Annie. Despite her own reservations, this seemed to be a subject that consumed the little girl. What could she do? She might as well go with it.

“You’re a help at home, aren’t you? Three babies.” She shook her head. What a nightmare world that sounded like. “What are their names?” she asked.

“Kristi and Kathy and Baby Mack.”

“Baby Mack?” She raised a questioning eyebrow.

Annie was obviously beginning to feel at home. She came all the way into the kitchen and looked around at the cabinets and the clock shaped like a large orange cat.

“We call him Baby Mack because he’s soooo small,” she said in her chirpy voice. “But Daddy says he has a punch like a Mack truck.” Her forehead scrunched and her nose wrinkled. “What’s a Mack truck?” she asked J.J. curiously.

J.J. grinned. “A big one.”

“Oh.” Annie turned and looked into the living room.

“How come you’re living in Bambi’s house?” she said out of the blue.

J.J. swung around and looked at her curiously, childhood memories of Disney films swirling. This area was awfully close to the edge of civilization, but she hardly thought wildlife came down and camped out in the houses. But then again, what did she know?

“Bambi? You mean the deer?” she asked.

Annie shook her blond curls. “No, Bambi.” She said it louder, as though that might get the meaning across a little better. “She’s Daddy’s friend. She’s pretty and she wears big high heels.”

“Oh.” Aha—that sort of Bambi. She suppressed a catty smile. Daddy’s friend, was she? Jack had enjoyed quite a reputation as a ladies’ man in the old days, but that was before marriage and kids. Surely he didn’t play those games any longer.

“Well, Bambi doesn’t live here anymore. I’m going to be staying here for a while.”

Annie looked puzzled by that. “Where did she go?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Maybe Daddy knows.” She settled her chin into her palms. “She likes my Daddy.”

J.J.’s head went back and something twisted in her soul. Surely good old Jack wasn’t flirting around with the neighbor right under his daughter’s nose?

“I’ll bet a lot of women like your daddy,” she murmured, looking at the girl speculatively.

Annie shrugged. “Not Marguerite. Daddy says Marguerite hates him sometimes.”

J.J. knew she ought to smile pleasantly and leave this conversation lie. She tried. She really did. But in the end, curiosity got the better of integrity.

“Who…who is Marguerite?” she asked, hating herself but unable to resist.

Annie looked at her blankly. “She has orange hair. She lives with us. Her room is next to mine. She takes care of Daddy.”

“Oh, she does, does she?” First Bambi, now Marguerite. She’d always pegged Jack Remington as a playboy, but this was going a bit far. For some reason, she was seething. The lousy womanizer. The profligate. The lewd and lascivious lecher. How dare he flaunt his lovers in front of this sweet little girl of his?

And what about this girl’s other parent? Didn’t she count in his self-centered world?

“Just.ah.where exactly is your mother?” she asked, trying to hide her real emotions.

Annie looked up and faced her with clear eyes. “My mama is in heaven,” she lisped. “Daddy says God needed her.”

J.J. felt as though she’d just been punched in the stomach, very hard, and her emotions made another wide swing. She felt all color drain from her face and her mouth was full of cotton. Her first impulse was to take the little girl into her arms, but that was impossible, and after the first move toward doing exactly that, she pulled back. She couldn’t do it. She hardly knew her. And though the youngster was very friendly, something told her she didn’t want to be hugged.

“I. I’m sure your daddy is right,” she said instead.

Jack a widower—that was something she hadn’t expected. It put a whole new light on things, but it was going to take her a few minutes to sort out just how. Poor man. Poor Annie. She ached inside for both of them. Hesitating, she was about to try to say something comforting, but before she got the words out, her telephone began to ring, and she swung around as though there’d been a reprieve.

“Bye,” Annie said, starting toward the doorway.

“Goodbye, Annie,” J.J. said on her way to the telephone. But something made her pause. The child had just told her something so horrible, she hated to see her skip off this way. “Listen,” she added, hesitating. She felt as though she needed to do something for her, but she had no idea what that might be.

“I live right next door. You come on over if you need anything, okay? I’ll be glad to help in any way I can.”

Annie waved and disappeared out the door, and J.J. hurried back into the kitchen, reaching for the phone.

“Hello?”

The deep voice of the handsome sportscaster at the station answered. Martin Olsen had made his interest plain earlier in the day, but she wasn’t in the market for a new relationship right now. She had other things on her mind and goals she was determined to reach. So after a few moments of light banter, she politely declined his invitation to dinner and rang off.

Going back to her open door, she looked out at the steps for Annie, but the girl was gone. Sighing, she closed the door and went back to the kitchen, methodically putting away the rest of the groceries. The situation with Jack and his daughter had disturbed her. She had no similar idea what the death of a wife and mother actually did to a family. She’d had no experience. But she knew it had to be horrific, and she winced, pushing away the emotions such a tragedy inspired.

It was easier to think about Jack as a playboy with all these Bambis and Marguerites and who-knows-who-elses in his life when he had these little kids to care for, and get outraged about that. But even that exasperation was fading in her. After all, what could she do about the girl? It was re ally none of her business if Jack wanted to run around like a teenager with brand-new hormones. Maybe that happened to widowers. Maybe they needed it.

Still, there had been such a haunted look in Annie’s eyes.

Jack Remington. It was such a stroke of very bad luck to have ended up next door to the man who single-handedly had almost ruined her career before it had even begun. As she prepared a pot of lemon tea, she let her thoughts drift back to that summer ten years ago in Sacramento when she’d landed an intern job at a local television station. She’d been thrilled, even though the job had meant being handed every grubby little chore the others didn’t want to be bothered with. That was the way it was when you were low man on the totem pole, and she had been glad to put up with it for the experience and the pleasure of being in the business she adored.

She’d spent the summer taking in every bit of knowledge she could glean. She’d watched Jack from afar. He’d been the star anchor at the station at the time, and everyone had treated him like a king. She’d been ecstatic when he smiled at her, but he’d only spoken to her once.

It was late in the summer and she’d finally had a chance to go on camera with a newsbreak at the hour. She’d given it everything she had and most people had been generous with their praise. And then Jack had come sauntering along and looked her up and down, and she’d held her breath, waiting to hear what he had to say.

“You’re a very pretty girl,” he said at last. “I’ll bet you were a cheerleader in high school, weren’t you?”

Thinking he meant it as a compliment, she’d colored and smiled at him. “Why, yes, I was.”

His mouth had twitched at the corners. “That’s what I thought,” he said, the scorn plain in his tone. “Well, let me give you a little bit of advice, Miss Jenkins. Pay a little more attention to the program your newsbreak is interrupting. In the movie playing tonight, a child has just been told he might never walk again. The viewers are crying their eyes out. And then you come on, grinning like a loon and shouting out the news item as though it were the main cheer at a pep rally.” He shook his head. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Miss Jenkins, if you think you’re going to get anywhere in this business.”

He’d walked away, leaving her behind in a humiliated heap. Not only had he hated her style, he hadn’t remembered her name right. No one met her eyes for the rest of the day, and the next morning she was told her services were no longer needed at the station.

The shock of finding herself sidelined so quickly still stung. Okay, so he had been right, she’d been so anxious about her spot she hadn’t thought to put it into context. She’d learned a lot from what he’d told her, she had to admit that. But still—he didn’t need to lecture her so harshly in front of the entire staff, and most of all, he shouldn’t have had her fired. It just wasn’t right and she resented it to this day.

The night before, after their meeting around her hot tub, she’d scanned the local listing, looking to see what station he was working for these days, but she hadn’t been able to find any mention of his name, and that had surprised her.

This morning at work, she’d brought him up to Martin, the sportscaster.

“I didn’t know Jack Remington was working here in St. Johns,” she’d said, making her voice as casual as she could.

“Jack Remington?” Martin’s handsome brow had furled. “Who’s Jack Remington?”

But another employee standing nearby had heard of him. “Jack Remington? You’re kidding. Where did you see him?”

She hesitated, and something about his interest made her wary. “Uh, I thought I saw him near the condo complex where I’m staying. Maybe I was wrong.”

“Jack Remington,” the man had mused, thinking back. “He used to be the best, you know. He was slated for major network success when he dropped out of sight. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“Yes,” J.J. had murmured, moving away. “I wonder.”

So it seemed he had forsaken his old career. Strange. Still, she would rather not ever find out why than to have to deal with him again. And since she was only slated for the area for a few weeks, she doubted that would be a problem.

She picked up the invitation to her friend’s baby shower and smiled at the silly duckling with a bow, but her smile faded as she read the date again. It was only weeks away. She didn’t think she was going to be able to make it. After all these years, it would be wonderful to see the old gang again. Pinning the invitation to the kitchen bulletin board, she resolved to see if she could find a way to go.

She went back to the station at three, and it was evening before she returned home again, a sack from the local fried chicken outlet under her arm. As she came up the walk, she thought she heard animals in the trees, but when she cocked her head and listened, she realized it was babies crying. A lot of babies crying.

She frowned. She had only one thin wall between her condo and Jack’s. Letting herself into her place, she found her unease had been warranted. The crying sounded even louder in her living room than it had outside.

“What on earth is going on in there?” she muttered irritably. “It sounds like a baby convention.”

A soft knocking on her door got her attention and she opened it to find Annie standing there, her lower lip quivering and moisture welling in her eyes.

“Annie!” she cried, pulling the child into her entryway. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

The little girl burst into tears, but she tried to force back the flow, wincing away when J.J. tried to comfort her with a hug. J.J. drew back, uncertain of how to deal with this. She wasn’t used to children, hadn’t been around them since she’d been a child herself. Annie looked so sad, so pathetic, she wanted badly to do something for her. But what?

Her first instinct was that something terrible had happened, but that thought was beginning to recede, despite the child’s inability to get her story out. Inexperienced as she was with children, she had a feeling no one was lying bleeding somewhere. This had all the earmarks of a problem dealing with the emotions, not with physical danger. Some of her adrenaline slowed a bit, and she risked touching the little girl’s hair.

“Just take it easy,” she murmured, frowning at her worriedly.

Meanwhile, the tears Annie was trying to hold back kept squeezing out. “I…I…” Her face crumpled and she couldn’t get the words out.

J.J. turned and grabbed a tissue from a box on the counter and handed it to her, bending close, aching to help but not knowing how.

“Just take a deep breath and tell me slowly,” she encouraged her.

Annie tried, but the sobs were shaking her and it took a few minutes before she could speak.

“It’s all my fault,” she wailed, hiccuping.

“What’s your fault, Annie?” J.J. coaxed, stroking her hair and not receiving a rebuff.

“M-M-Marguerite,” Annie forced out. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?” Marguerite? Wasn’t that the live-in girlfriend, the floozy? Of course, she had no hard evidence, but things Annie had said that very afternoon had pointed in the direction of painted lady. And if that was the case, good riddance to her. Little girls like Annie needed.well, she wasn’t sure what they needed. J.J. went down on her knees to get closer to the sad little face.

“Oh, honey, how could that possibly be your fault?”

She rubbed her eyes with both fists. “I…I didn’t like the pot roast.”

J.J. blinked. “The pot roast.” There had to be a connection here. If only she could see what it was.

Annie nodded, finally getting everything but her lower lip under control. “I couldn’t eat it. I just couldn’t.”

“Oh.” The picture was clearing. “Did Marguerite make the pot roast?” she guessed.

Annie nodded again. “I hate it.” She made a face, shuddering. “It’s yucky.” She looked up at J.J. earnestly, intent upon explaining. “It’s got like hairy things and then the big globs of jiggly fat stuff and when it gets in your mouth it—”

“I see. I understand.” J.J. cut her off hurriedly, suppressing a smile, and stroked the little girl’s hair again, her fingers catching in the curls. “And she’s touchy about food critics, is she?”

“Uh-huh.” Annie nodded vigorously. “She put all her clothes in a bag and she went out the door.”

“Ah.”

“And it’s all my fault.”

“Oh, honey.” A thought occurred to her and she looked at the girl sharply. “Did your daddy tell you that?”

Annie blinked at her, not understanding the question. “Huh?”

J.J.’s entire opinion of the man hung in the balance. She spoke again, making the words very clear, and watched for the tiniest reaction.

“Did your daddy say it was your fault?”

She shook her head, and her curls, damp from her copious tears, tried to give their usual bounce.

“Daddy said, ‘Oh, never mind. We can take care of things without her.’”

“Oh.” Well, there went that theory. At least Jack wasn’t an ogre to his child. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed.

“Then the babies started to cry. They won’t stop. And Daddy said, ‘Go get Mrs. Lark to help, quick.’ I said, ‘Okay, Daddy,’ and I went really, really quick. I knocked on Mrs. Lark’s door. I knocked really, really loud, but she didn’t come out. And I knocked on Mr. Gomez’s door, but he wasn’t home. So I came here.”

“Your daddy needs help, does he?” Startled, she looked toward the still open doorway. “Is it just the crying? Or does he need a doctor? Or the police?” She realized it might be best to make things clear.

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head so that her curls hit her in the nose. “He needs help with the babies. ‘Cuz they keep crying.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. That sort of help was supposed to be within the realm of ‘women’s work’, wasn’t it? Which meant she ought to be able to handle it. But she didn’t want to do this. She really didn’t want to see Jack again if she could help it and she was hoping for an excuse not to go.

“What exactly is wrong with the babies?”

Annie’s wide brown eyes stared at her. “They’re crying.”

J.J. narrowly averted rolling her eyes. That fact had pretty much been established. But did babies just cry? Wasn’t there a reason? She hesitated. “Yes, I know that,” she said at last. “In fact, I knew that before you got here.”

Annie was surprised and somewhat captivated. “You did?”

“Sure. Listen. You can hear them through the walls.”

She led her into the living room and took her to the wall, placing her hand against the surface, so she could feel as well as hear. Annie listened and her face brightened.

“I hear them!” she cried. Then a cloud came over her expression once again. “They’re getting too loud. Come on.” Annie took J.J.’s hand and tugged, looking up at her anxiously. “Come on. Hurry.”

J.J. managed to keep the groan inside and she followed reluctantly. But she went. And she steeled herself, preparing, against all common sense, to walk right into the lion’s den.