“Them runaways,” Benny said, still looking at Anne. “They get pregnant for the money Butz promises them for their babies.”
“They’re not already pregnant?” Anne asked.
“Nope. Least ways not most of ‘em. Couple hit town that way. But Butz prefers the young ones who aren’t already knocked up. He normally can’t interest the prostitutes. They don’t need the money.”
“So Butz is out looking for runaways,” Tom asked.
“All the time,” Benny said. “It’s the runaways that need the money.”
“But you said Lindy didn’t do it for money,” Anne prompted.
“No, she had other reasons.” Benny paused to glare at Tom. “When Butz approached her, she told him she’d get pregnant, no problem, as long as she could pick the father.”
“Who normally fathers the children of the runaways?” Anne asked.
“Lindy never said.”
“Was Lindy living on the streets when Butz approached her with his proposition?” Tom asked.
“You know she was,” Benny said sulkily. “It was right after you shut her out.”
“How exactly did I shut her out?”
“She was in love with you, man.” Anger laced Benny’s words. “Would’ve done anything for you. And you turned your back on her.”
“I couldn’t love Lindy the way she wanted me to, Benny,” Tom said calmly. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try to do my best for her.”
Benny looked down at the picture of Lindy in the newspaper. “It wasn’t enough, preacher.”
“You’re right, Benny,” Tom agreed softly. “It wasn’t enough.”
Benny’s head came up at Tom’s words and he looked into his face. What Benny read there took the last vestiges of anger out of his eyes.
“How much money is Shrubber paying the girls?” Anne asked after a moment.
Benny looked over at her when he answered. “Lindy said two thousand cash apiece. ‘Course, they get nine months of free room and board and all the doctoring stuff to go with it. As soon as they’re knocked up, Shrubber insists on ’em being confined to that old house of his with that witch of a nurse. She lives with ’em twenty-four hours a day.”
“Why is that?” Tom asked.
“Shrubber has ’em tested first, makes sure they’re clean of drugs and disease. That’s why Butz tries to get the young ones who’ve just hit town and haven’t gotten into the drug scene. Shrubber tells ’em part of the deal is that they have to stay clean until they deliver.”
“So the nurse is there to keep them away from drugs,” Anne said.
“And sex. Lindy always had to sneak away from the nurse to talk to me. They make sure the girls don’t get around any guys so they don’t catch nothin’. Not that she and I did anything but talk.”
“Do the girls know where their babies are going?” Anne asked.
“Infertile couples,” Benny said. “Each girl is given a name she’s supposed to use when it comes time for her to deliver. It’s just in case some nosy hospital staff ask. But the doc always takes that Ronley nurse along to the delivery room to avoid as much contact with regular hospital staff as he can.”
“What happens to the girls after they deliver?” Tom asked.
“Shrubber takes their babies, pays ’em their money and has Butz dump ’em back on the streets.”
“But Lindy sneaked out of the hospital with her baby before they could take him,” Anne said.
“Yeah. Planned it that way from the first. Lindy wasn’t like them other girls, all broke and scared and willing to do almost anything for some cash. She had money she never told Butz or Shrubber about.” Benny flashed Tom a look. “Told me she earned it working for you.”
“She did,” Tom said. “So how did she arrange to get away from the hospital?”
“She wanted to buy the old Beetle that my uncle gave me for my birthday,” Benny said. “Offered me a hundred more than it was worth. All I had to do was park it down the street from the hospital when she went to deliver.”
“Is that what you did?” Tom asked.
“No way,” Benny said. “She’d only driven a couple of times, and never a stick shift. I wasn’t going to let her get behind the wheel, especially after just having a baby.”
“You were a good friend,” Anne said.
Benny looked over at her and shrugged.
“So you waited for her in the VW,” Tom guessed.
“Nearly ten hours,” Benny admitted. “It was January and the snow was a foot high. I nearly froze my butt off. Then suddenly there she was, coming down the street toward me, wearing only a hospital gown and slippers and carrying the baby. I got her into the car as fast as I could and we lit out of there.”
“Where did you go?” Tom asked.
“Here,” Benny said. “Had no place else. After she rested up a couple of days, she asked me to drive her over to see you at the parish. She wanted to show you the baby. I think she thought that when you saw him you’d...well, you’d marry her and everything would be all right. Only when we got there, the rector said Lindy’s call to the bishop had ended up driving you out of the parish. And he wouldn’t tell Lindy where you had gone.”
“How did Lindy react to the news?” Anne inquired quietly.
“It bummed her out at first,” Benny said. “Then, after a few days, she seemed to be okay again. Asked me to teach her to drive. Said she wanted to take me to work and pick me up afterward. Said that would give her a chance to do the grocery shopping for us and not leave everything to me. I was happy to teach her. I thought that meant... I hoped she might be thinking of staying around awhile.”
“You were in love with her, Benny?” Anne’s voice was very gentle as she asked the question.
The bleak look on Benny’s face was answer enough. “I bought curtains for the windows, even got her a box of chocolates. But when I tried to kiss her, she pushed me away. Stupid to think a pretty girl like Lindy could ever love a face like this.”
Benny paused and looked down at his hands. “She didn’t pick me up after work the next day. I wasn’t surprised when I got home and found she and the car were gone.”
“Did you try to find her?” Tom asked.
“No point,” Benny said as he raised his eyes to him. “I knew she’d be searching for you. It was always you.”
“You never heard from her again?” Anne asked.
“No, but Butz paid me a call a couple of days later.”
“He came here?” Tom asked.
“Yeah,” Benny said. “Busted in my door. Demanded to know where Lindy and the baby were. Someone at the house must’ve seen me talking to Lindy and blabbed. But I knew Butz couldn’t have really known anything, otherwise he would have come by a lot sooner. Anyway, he knocked me around a bit trying to get me to talk. When I kept telling him he was crazy and I didn’t know anything about Lindy or a baby, he finally gave up and left.”
“Yet Shrubber still got you fired,” Tom said.
“The bastard told my boss I was coming on to his daughters. What a crock, pretending those runaways were his daughters.”
Benny looked at Anne and the baby. “That’s Lindy’s baby, isn’t it?” he said.
Tom saw the frown on Anne’s face.
“What makes you think so?” she asked.
“Got the same coloring and all. ‘Course, he’s bigger now. And he’s awake and looking around. All he did when he was here was eat, sleep, pee or poop. But what the hell. I didn’t complain. He was her kid. And he made her happy. That’s all I ever wanted to do. Just make her happy.”
And Tom believed it because he saw the misery in Benny’s eyes.
* * *
“TOM, I HAVE TO talk to you,” Anne said as they sat across from each other that night at his Boston
home. They had fed the baby and just finished a dinner of beef stew and biscuits from the supplies that Connie and the women of the parish had provided.
Tom knew that Anne was troubled. She had barely said two words since they’d left Benny’s house three hours before. And she was looking at Tommy sleeping in her lap with a frown on her face. She never frowned when she looked at Tommy.
“What is it, Anne?” he asked, bracing himself.
“I want to tell Pat—no, I have to tell Pat about what Shrubber and Butz are up to with those runaway girls.”
“When do you plan to do this?” he asked.
“I have to do it soon,” Anne said. “The thing is, I don’t have the answers to some questions she’s bound to ask.”
“Such as?”
“I know you told me you didn’t impregnate Lindy,” Anne continued, her eyes still on Tommy as she gently stroked his cheek, the frown digging a dent between her eyebrows. “And I believe you. But from everything we’ve learned so far, it just seems...”
“It seems what, Anne?” Tom prompted.
“The nurse’s aide at the hospital said that Lindy had a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby that Lindy claimed looked just like his father. Rolan Kendrall sure couldn’t have been the dad, since he has black hair and eyes. And Lindy obviously told Benny it was you. Benny also recognized Tommy as being the baby Lindy brought home from the hospital.”
Tom waited for what he knew Anne was going to ask.
Finally, her eyes rose from the baby’s face to his. “Where is Lindy’s child and how did she get Tommy?”
“Anne, I cannot talk about this.”
She sighed. “I was afraid that was what you were going to say.”
“You know I will tell you whatever I can.”
“Yes. But I can’t go to the D.A.’s office with what I have now. There are too many unanswered questions. We could prove Tommy is yours with a DNA test. But if I go for one, Pat is going to ask who his mother is. When I don’t have an answer to give her, she is going to be between that proverbial rock and a hard place. She’s my friend, Tom. But she’s also an officer of the court. A child’s missing mother is not something she can overlook. Even my order giving you temporary custody could be rescinded.”
“Why?” Tom asked.
“Since I’ve become your wife, I can no longer be considered a disinterested party.”
“I see.”
She was quiet a moment more before she said, “There’s something else.”
“What’s that, Anne?”
“You subdued Benny and his friends so easily this afternoon. And there were three of them.”
“And that’s begun to bother you,” Tom guessed.
“No. What’s bothering me is that I now realize you didn’t need me to burst in and tell Shrubber and Butz that Tommy was ours in order to prevent them from taking him. You could have stopped them yourself, couldn’t you?”
He smiled. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love and admire what you did for me that day, Anne.”
“What I did that day led to us both being trapped into this fake marriage,” she said with an unhappy sigh.
Tom felt the sting of her words. She still thought their marriage a fake? He had hoped with everything they had shared over the past few days that she had begun to realize how very real it was.
“You have some special kind of training in fighting, don’t you?” Anne asked.
“A little.”
“A little,” she repeated. “Is that like a little pregnant?”
Tom chuckled.
“Just what I thought.” A rueful smile drew back Anne’s lips. “I doubt it was part of the curriculum covered at the seminary.”
“Not exactly,” Tom agreed.
“I asked you once before what led you to become a priest. You didn’t want to tell me then. Will you tell me now?”
Maybe it was time he did. At least this was something he could share with her, even if he preferred not to.
Tom picked up the bottle of burgundy she had opened earlier to go with their dinner, and offered Anne some. When she shook her head, he filled his glass.
“I told you how my parents, grandfather, aunt and uncle died when I was five,” he began.
“And your grandmother took care of you,” Anne said, remembering Tom’s words.
“My grandmother wasn’t physically strong. The death of her husband and three children hit her hard. I was her only grandchild. I believe she did her best for me in the time we were together. But the grief that never lifted from her heart finally took her two years later.”
“When you were seven,” Anne said, feeling incredibly sad for his losses.
“My grandmother made sure that the family’s estate was placed in trust for me. But by law I couldn’t get access to it until I was eighteen. Since I had no living relatives, I became a ward of the state and ended up in a foster home.”
“In New York City?”
Tom nodded. “On the surface the foster home looked fine. The father had a good-paying job. The mother was a homemaker with two boys of her own.”
But as Anne soon learned, there was a lot wrong beneath the surface of this ideal foster family. The father gambled away most of his paycheck every week. The mother had taken Tom in only to get enough money to pay for food for herself and her sons. They were three and four years older, and took turns beating him up. Their mother never stopped them. Tom’s bedroom was a closet, his bed the floor.
“And I once wondered why you had something against the foster care system,” Anne said with a sad shake of her head.
“The neighborhood wasn’t the best. There were bullies who preyed on kids with lunch money on their way to school. I learned not to carry any.”
“You didn’t get any lunch?” she asked.
“Anne, I’m only bringing up this part to explain about Li Yu-Tang.”
“Who is Li Yu-Tang?”
He was a new boy to the neighborhood, Tom related. Of Chinese ancestry. A lot smaller than the other eleven-year-olds in their class. Which made him immediate prey for the bullies. Tom was walking to school the morning after the new boy arrived when he saw three bullies getting ready to jump him. Tom couldn’t let them beat up the little kid. He charged them, threw his lunch at the biggest of the bullies and yelled for Yu-Tang to run. He didn’t.
“What happened?” Anne asked, wondering if she really wanted to know.
“While I was barely holding my own with the big guy,” Tom said, “Yu-Tang flattened the other two. Then he came over and finished the guy I was fighting.”
“He knew martial arts,” Anne said with a relieved smile.
“His two uncles were Kung-Fu masters,” Tom confirmed. “And Yu-Tang was well on his way to being one. We were best friends from that day on. After he finished teaching me what he knew, I no longer worried about carrying lunch money to school.”
“What of the older boys in that foster home?”
“Let’s just say they began to respect my closet space.”
“I’m glad you learned to defend yourself so well,” Anne said.
Tom was happy to hear it. Especially with what he had to tell her next.
Yu-Tang’s reputation for being an unbeatable fighter spread over the next year. His fighting skills kept trouble away a lot of the time, but they also drew trouble. A sixteen-year-old named Gordo, who had been trained in karate and kick boxing and was twice Yu-Tang’s size, challenged him to a fight. But Yu-Tang never fought unless attacked. Gordo was so bent on proving he was a better fighter that he jumped Yu-Tang. Yu-Tang knocked Gordo out in less than a minute.
“Gordo came to boiling mad,” Tom said. “He swore he’d get revenge. The next day he got hold of his father’s gun, lay in wait for Yu-Tang and shot him dead.”
&
nbsp; “Dear God,” Anne gave a long, sad sigh.
Tom drank the wine in his glass, then waited until the warmth reached his stomach. He needed that warmth at the moment as painful memories returned. And the remembered hatred that had encased his twelve-year-old heart.
“Yu-Tang was my best friend, Anne. In truth, the only friend I’d known up to that point. I went after Gordo. When I found him, I used everything that Yu-Tang had taught me. I intended to kill him. But I was stopped.”
“What stopped you?” Anne asked.
“We were in an alley behind an Episcopal church. Father Edward Thurman was the rector there. He heard the commotion and came out to see what was going on. Father Ed was pushing sixty but he still had the guts to pull me off Gordo. When the police came, I told them Gordo had killed Yu-Tang and why. When Gordo got out of the hospital a month later—”
“Wait a minute,” Anne said. “You beat him up so badly he was in the hospital for a month?”
“If Father Ed had pulled me off him five seconds later, he would have been in the morgue,” Tom said quietly.
Anne let out a long, shaky breath.
“Gordo was tried as an adult for the murder of Yu-Tang,” Tom continued. “He’s still serving his sentence. I was charged, as well.”
“With assault?” Anne asked.
Tom nodded. “I served six months in a juvenile detention center.”
It would have been a lot longer, Tom admitted to Anne, if Father Thurman hadn’t interceded. He’d told the judge that Tom could have easily beaten him, too, but he hadn’t. After he’d served his time, the foster family refused to take Tom back. He was glad. Still, no other family was willing to take him. Not a kid who had just served six months for assault.
“Where did you go?” Anne asked.
“Out on the streets just as soon as I could escape the state-run boardinghouse.”
“You were on the streets at twelve years old?”
“Trust me, Anne. I met better people there than I did in that state-run facility.”
“But how did you live?”
“I got by. Then one day while I was digging French fries out of a dumpster, I met up with Father Edward Thurman again.”
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