Rancher's Double Dilemma

by Pamela Browning

  “Garth,” she said quietly, “I want you to understand that it is not my intention to get between you and Cody in the matter of the move to Wichita Falls.”

  He stared at her for a long moment. “I believe you,” he said. “I think the problem is that I’m so worried Cody really will leave that I’m seeing bogeymen where none exist.” With that he turned on his heel and continued on upstairs.

  What just happened? Lacey asked herself as she went outside to sweep the porch. What was that all about?

  She had the idea that most of their exchange was less about Kim and Cody than it was about her and Garth.

  There isn’t any me and Garth, she reminded herself, and she immediately began to worry about going to see this Ardie person. Garth was going to try to pin something on Ardie, and Lacey wasn’t at all sure that this was the right attitude. Not only that, she wondered what she and Garth would talk about on the ride over to Redflower.

  It took a while to drive fifty miles. Make that a hundred when you counted driving back. “That’s a whole lot of talking—or a whole lot of silence,” she said to the dogs.

  Al didn’t even take notice that she had said anything. Tipper flapped her tail a couple times in the dust and then laid her head down and blinked liquid brown eyes at Lacey.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Lacey told her. “Sometimes being a dog isn’t so all-fired bad, is it?”

  “I’VE NEVER SEEN YOU in a dress before,” Garth said to Lacey shortly after noon on Sunday as she preceded him out the back door into the kind of heat that robbed a person of breath.

  Lacey commenced to get into the Honda. “I went to church this morning, and I haven’t had time to change,” she told him.

  “Church? I didn’t know you went to church.” He got in and started the car as Lacey yanked the skirt of her dress, which suddenly seemed a tad too short, down over her knees. The dress was primrose-colored voile with a full skirt and a fitted bodice with a modest scoop neckline. Or rather, the neckline used to be modest. Now, due to the fact that her breasts were a whole lot curvier than they’d been a year ago, it was possible to see cleavage if you looked directly down the neckline, which so far no one had had the bad manners to do.

  “I haven’t had much of a chance to go to church lately,” she said. She’d been surprised when Cody had come down for breakfast and told her that he was concerned that she didn’t get much time off. She didn’t get any time off, that was the truth of it. He said that since he was going to be baby-sitting that afternoon, he would gladly take over the full care of the babies while she relaxed. It was the least he could do, he said. And, anyway, Kim was coming over later, and there would be the two of them to look after the girls, so Lacey shouldn’t feel at all guilty about taking time off. Lacey had thanked him profusely and headed straight for church. She’d felt the need for spiritual sustenance.

  “So did you see anyone I know? At church, I mean?” Garth looked over at her curiously.

  “I expect you know all those people, Garth,” she said. Honestly, he might be a smart man, but some things he just didn’t get, like not giving her any time off and now this.

  She thought he flushed under his tan, but he kept his eyes fixed on the road. “I expect so. I guess what I mean is, did anyone talk to you?”

  “Mary Lou from the drugstore recognized me. Mrs. Spurlin, Francelle Spurlin from down the road, well, she came up and wanted to know where the babies were and where you were. Home with Cody, I told her. She invited me to join her church circle.”

  “Francelle is very sociable. She sometimes looked after Joan when she was sick.”

  They came to the end of the driveway, and Garth slowed, then turned the corner onto the highway. From the trunk came the jingle of broken glass as the straw tote bag she’d thrown back there a week or so ago slid to the other side.

  “What…?” Garth said.

  “The, um, the Mason jars,” she told him. “I put them in the trunk.”

  “They’re broken,” he said.

  “Only one or two,” she told him.

  He muttered something under his breath, and she balled her fists tightly in her lap, waiting to be reprimanded. But he didn’t say anything more and kept driving.

  Ahead of them, heat shimmered up from the asphalt. Lacey looked out the window and counted twenty-five telephone poles, and about the time she got to the twenty-fifth, Garth flipped on the radio, which was playing a Willie Nelson song.

  Lacey turned her face to the window and counted twenty-five more telephone poles plus two roadkill armadillos. The silence in the car grew long and oppressive, if you could call it a silence when Willie Nelson was rasping out the words to what turned out to be multiple songs. It must be Willie Nelson Day at that particular radio station, Lacey figured. When the fifth song began to play, she lost patience.

  “Could you dial up another radio station, please?” she said.

  Garth shot a look out of the corners of his eyes. “You don’t like Willie Nelson?”

  “Oh, I like him okay, but five songs in a row is a bit much, don’t you think?”

  “You can put something else on,” Garth told her gruffly. “Just don’t treat me to any classical music, which is what the local stations mostly like to play on Sundays. It’s not my thing any more than five Willie Nelson songs are yours.”

  Lacey punched radio buttons until she found a station that played bluegrass. “That all right?” she asked Garth.

  “Fine,” he replied through tight lips, so they drove along listening to that for a while.

  She counted fifty telephone poles this time. While she was counting she saw that they were drawing closer to a line of trees on the horizon. “What’s that?” she said.

  Garth spared a look. “Perla Lake.”

  “I didn’t realize there was a lake nearby.”

  “They dammed up the Vaquero River when I was a kid, and the lake is the result.”

  “Can people swim there, or what?”

  “Swim, fish, whatever. It’s a state park.”

  A swim would feel good right about now, Lacey thought longingly. Despite the car’s air-conditioning, perspiration dampened her skin and made her dress stick to her back.

  I’m more nervous about this visit than I thought, she told herself. Well, as her mother would have told her, nobody ever said life would be easy. Lacey hadn’t expected life to get so hard this early on, that’s all.

  She felt a sudden longing for her mom. She’d never called Sheila Sue back to tell her about finding Ashley. Lacey had been so busy, that was one reason she’d neglected to call. Plus, after she had phoned Sheila Sue last time and realized that she’d interrupted something that was important to her mother, she had an idea that Sheila Sue and Fletcher wouldn’t welcome yet another tale of woe from Lacey, whose life had turned into a progression of such tales ever since she married Bunny.

  “This Ardie, what do you know about her?” Lacey asked Garth when she simply couldn’t be quiet any longer.

  “I don’t know much about her other than she was the only person in the delivery room that night besides Ruth. And whatever happened, Ardie must have been responsible.”

  “You seem awfully eager to implicate her.”

  “Ruth was Joan’s favorite aunt.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Can it, Lacey. I don’t want to hear what you’re going to say. I can’t believe anything bad of Ruth, and that’s that.”

  “Okay, you’ve closed your mind. Why are we going to see this Ardie, anyway, if you’re already sure she did it?”

  Garth let out a long explosive breath. “Because we have to,” he said tersely.

  “I’m going to listen to what she says, Garth, and you’d better listen, too,” Lacey told him, but he didn’t answer. She noticed that his hands gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had turned white, a revelation in itself that he wasn’t as sure of himself as he wanted her to think.

  As they entered the small town of Red
flower, which wasn’t a whole lot bigger than Mosquito, Lacey pulled a church program out of her purse and started to fan herself. Garth favored her with a questioning look before upping the air conditioner one notch.

  “Thank you,” Lacey said.

  “All you would have had to do was ask,” he said.

  How could she tell him that she didn’t dare ask for any favors when her well-being and happiness depended on his attitude as they tried to piece together the story of July tenth of last year? She wrapped her arms around herself, chilled not by the cold air from the vents but by the thought that no one in this scenario could end up happy. No one!

  Garth turned down a narrow tree-lined street and pulled to a stop in front of a neat frame house with a couple of kids’ plastic toys in the front yard. The house was surrounded by a fence, and there were marigolds planted around the front stoop.

  “Here we are,” he said. He cut the engine and wiped his hands on the knees of his jeans.

  She slid out of the car, and they walked up the walkway together. Before they could knock on the door, someone opened it. It was a little bird of a woman with an angular face and reddish-brown hair, and she wore a welcoming smile. For a moment, this person didn’t look familiar, but then Lacey recalled that the hair had been hidden under a green elasticized cap on the night of the babies’ births.

  “I’m Ardie,” she said, holding out her hand to Lacey first, then Garth. “Come on in.”

  Lacey preceded Garth into the living room of the house. It was neat, with a box of toys in one corner, a silent television set in another. The couch was old with bright needlework pillows propped in the corners. More needlework was framed on the walls. One whole wall was filled with books, and fresh flowers were artistically arranged in a vase on the coffee table.

  “Why don’t we all sit down?” Ardie suggested. Her manner was friendly and so open that it was hard for Lacey to believe this woman had anything to hide.

  Lacey sat uneasily on the seat of a worn brown-plaid recliner, and Garth found a seat on the couch. She noticed that he was wiping his palms on his knees again, and she opened her purse and removed a handkerchief. Her hands were perspiring, too.

  Ardie, her demeanor forthright and candid, addressed Lacey. “I do remember that night you were at the hospital in labor,” she said. “That’s why I agreed to talk to both of you when Garth asked me about it. I felt real bad about that baby that died.” She looked reflective for a moment. “What exactly would you like to know?”

  “I want you to tell us every single thing that went on in that obstetrics ward on the night of July tenth,” Garth said. He was unmistakably belligerent.

  Lacey had to say this for Ardie: she managed to keep her cool under such withering fire.

  “I’ll do my best,” she said quietly.

  “I hope so,” Garth said, and in that moment Lacey knew that Garth wasn’t likely to hear what he wanted from this pleasant woman who even now was wrinkling her forehead in concern and puzzlement. Whatever had happened that night, Ardie Fernandez had not been complicit. If she had been, Lacey would have been able to read her guilt in her face. Long experience working in a restaurant had taught her how to read people, and what she saw in Ardie was genuine helpfulness and honesty above reproach.

  Lacey looked from Garth to Ardie and realized that if anyone were going to save this exchange from its downhill slide, it would have to be her.

  Lacey cleared her throat. “Ardie, did you see or hear anything that would give us an idea of what happened? Because these babies are obviously twins. They look so much alike, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s hard to believe that anyone could have thought that they didn’t belong together, which is why I find it hard to understand—”

  “Lacey, could we please have the short versions of these questions?” Garth said with more than a little impatience.

  Lacey looked at him, willing him to remain calm. “Sure. Ardie?”

  Ardie hesitated before she spoke, but then she seemed to gather herself together and plunge ahead. “Well, I remember that Lacey was brought in from the emergency room. She was having contractions so close together that we knew she was going to deliver pretty soon. When she told us it was going to be twins, we were worried.”

  “Why?” demanded Garth.

  “We’d never seen her before. And we already had one other person in labor that night—Joan. She was a difficult case, since she had already lost two babies. We only had two people on duty that night, Ruth and me.”

  “Joan’s Aunt Ruth,” Lacey said.

  Ardie nodded in agreement. “Ruth ran things in that delivery room and the maternity ward, too. She didn’t believe in newfangled ideas like the father in the delivery room, and she said that relatives got in the way in the labor room, and her word was law. At that point she was only a week or so away from retirement.”

  “Ruth retired late in life,” Garth said in hurried explanation. “She was seventy-five years old, but she loved working and always said that she’d work as long as the chief of staff allowed it.”

  “That’s Dr. Stoner,” Ardie said. “He finally had to tell her it was time to go. She’d started acting kind of strange in the last year or so.”

  “Strange?” Lacey said, alert to this.

  Ardie nodded. “One time I saw her put the telephone in the refrigerator in our break room. When I went and took it out, she didn’t even seem to know what a telephone was for. Another time one of the custodians found her walking around the halls and looking lost and confused. He asked her if he could help her, and she wanted to know where the food was. It turned out she was talking about the cafeteria. She’d been going to that same cafeteria to eat for forty years, and she couldn’t recall how to get there.”

  Garth looked distinctly unsettled.

  Ardie continued. “Then Ruth’s personality started to change. Sometimes she’d get really angry over stuff that a normal person might have let slide as long as it didn’t endanger a patient. One time I had to go out to the parking lot right after I arrived on duty because I’d forgotten to turn off the headlights of my car, and I told Ruth I’d be gone a minute, and she lit into me like you wouldn’t believe. Even though she’d been growing increasingly irritable, I was surprised that this time she said I was stupid and negligent, and she also made statements that were way out of line, more like illogical rantings. Later Dr. Stoner heard about the incident and asked me what happened. It was shortly after that, that he told Ruth he couldn’t approve her petition to go on working for another year. Then later, when I heard she’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—”

  “She has Alzheimer’s?” Lacey said, her mind reeling. “Garth, did you know this?”

  He nodded reluctantly. “I didn’t think there’d been any signs of it before she retired.”

  Ardie went on talking, her manner earnest and concerned. “But there were, Garth. I suspect that the onset of her Alzheimer’s disease was well over a year ago. But that night, the night Lacey and Joan were in the delivery area, Ruth seemed okay. We were both hoping that Joan’s doctor, Dr. Polk, would return from San Antonio in time to deliver her, since she was not an easy case and had already lost two babies, but he sent word that he couldn’t make it. His daughter’s wedding, you know. So Ruth and I worked together to deliver your babies, Lacey, two beautiful little girls.”

  “And healthy,” Lacey said. “Right?”

  “Right,” Ardie said. “They seemed fine. My shift was over before Joan delivered, so I left after they were born.”

  “But Ruth stayed?” Lacey was on the edge of her seat listening to this story.

  “Yes, she and I didn’t work exactly the same hours. And there wasn’t an aide coming on duty after I left—Ruth usually handled the next few hours by herself. When I heard later that one of your twins had died afterward, I couldn’t quite believe it.”

  “Didn’t you ask Ruth what happened?” Garth wanted to know.

  “Sure I did, but I didn’t get a chance until
the day of Ruth’s retirement party. She said that Lacey’s baby, the one that was born first, had suddenly stopped breathing.”

  “And what about Joan’s baby?” Garth asked.

  “Ruth said that Joan had a healthy baby, and I saw the baby myself through the nursery window. But I didn’t go into the nursery—I worked the delivery room, not the nursery, and we had our hands full during the next few days because every expectant mother in the county came in to give birth, it seemed like. The Colquitt baby went home with Joan. You and your surviving baby went home the morning after your twins were born,” she said, looking at Lacey.

  Lacey remembered how Bunny had insisted they leave the hospital that morning, how she had cried, how she had been too weak to go to the simple graveside service that he had arranged earlier.

  “You didn’t see anything that made you suspicious? You didn’t think that maybe somebody had made a mistake?” Garth spoke slowly, deliberately.

  “No, Garth, I didn’t.” A funny look came over Ardie’s face. “Something that Ruth said later stuck with me. She said that God had made things right so that you and Joan could have a healthy child. At the time it seemed like she was only thankful that you had Ashley, but now I think about the way she said it, and I don’t know. She might have meant something else by it.”

  “If she switched the babies,” Lacey said urgently, “if she is the one who substituted Joan’s baby for mine, I have to know. We need to go talk to her, Garth. We have to!”

  Garth stared at Lacey bleakly for a moment before he stood up. Lacey stood too. “Thanks, Ardie,” she said.

  Ardie looked troubled. “I wish I could be more helpful,” she said.

  “Maybe you have been,” Lacey told her.

  “I hope so.”

  A car turned into the driveway, and two small children erupted from it.

  “That’s my kids. I sent them over to my mother-in-law’s with my husband so we could talk.”

  The children came chattering up the walk as Lacey and Garth stepped out on the front porch. Garth stopped to speak to the husband, who was someone he knew from school, and Lacey went and got into the car. When Garth slid in beside her, he said, “I’m not sure we’re any further ahead than we were before we came.”