“With one point seven mil, I’d say the bitch could go just
about anywhere she fucking well pleases.”
“One point seven? That much?” Javier whistled. “You
need any funds in the interim, man? Something to tide you
over?”
“No more favors. I’ll handle it.”
“What’s your plan then?”
“Everyone who helped her get away...everyone she
loves,” Dexter said, “I’m going to fucking kill them. It’s a
simple matter of respect, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah, man.” Javier paused. “But what about her?” “What do you think I’m going to do to her?” Dexter said. “I...I guess I don’t wanna know, boss.”
“The bitch better have my money—down to the last dol-
lar. After she gives it to me, I’m gonna make her wish her
mama had used the fucking coat hanger.”
9
That evening at home, Rachel cooked dinner. She was an excellent cook, and Joshua loved to observe her at work. As he sat at the dinette table, skimming the newspaper, he watched her.
Dressed in a flannel shirt, lounge pants, and slippers, she flitted around the kitchen like a hummingbird around a flower garden, adding a sprinkle of spices here, tasting the sauce there, all the while singing in a soft, soothing voice. Under normal circumstances, she derived great pleasure from cooking, and that night, she seemed to be in an especially buoyant mood.
It puzzled him. Earlier, he’d been convinced that she was keeping something important from him, and he’d planned to watch her closely at dinner, just to be sure nothing was wrong. Eddie had advised him to let it go, and he wanted to—but he couldn’t. Not while the uneasiness lingered in his gut like an undigested meal.
“Dinner’s ready,” Rachel said, taking silverware out of the drawer. “Go wash up, baby.”
He pushed away from the table. He nearly knocked over the chair, and caught it before it hit the floor. Coco, who’d been resting nearby, scurried away and hid between Rachel’s legs.
“Sorry, Coco,” he said. “Scared you half to death, didn’t I?” He glanced at Rachel, habitually expecting a rebuke for his clumsiness, but she only smiled—a smile of unconditional love and infinite patience. Not the smile of a woman who nursed deception in her heart.
Maybe his suspicions were totally off-base. There was a pleasant evening ahead—good food, lively conversation, perhaps tender lovemaking—and it seemed foolish to spoil it by dwelling on theories of how she might be deceiving him.
Eddie was right. He needed to let it go.
When he returned to the kitchen after washing his hands, Rachel was setting dinner on the table: shrimp scampi over linguine, sautéed zucchini, and garlic bread. Coco followed at her heels, waiting for a morsel to drop.
“Need any help?” he asked.
“You could turn on some music, light a few candles.”
“Special occasion?”
“Maybe.”
He turned on the satellite radio system and tuned it to one of their favorite R&B channels. Then he got two candles out of a cabinet, placed them inside the frosted glass hurricane lamps on the table, and carefully lit them.
They often drank wine with dinner. But after Rachel dimmed the recessed lights, she took a bottle of sparkling white grape juice out of the refrigerator.
“You mind doing the honors?” She handed the bottle to him. “I would’ve gotten champagne, but...”
“We are celebrating something.” Sitting, he twisted off the cap and filled the two wine goblets on the table.
“We’re celebrating us,” she said.
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“Us?”
“Us finding each other. Falling in love. Getting married. Being happy. Do we need a special occasion to celebrate those things?”
“Not at all.”
They bowed their heads and said grace. Then they heaped their plates with food and began to eat.
“This looks delicious.” He spun linguine around his fork and speared a shrimp. “My mom’s a good cook, but she can’t touch you.”
“Please, don’t ever say that around her. She hates me enough as it is.”
He winced. His mom had been nasty toward Rachel from the beginning, considered her a corrupting influence on him. He had never understood why his mother felt that way toward her, but there was much that he would never understand about his mom.
“Hate is a pretty strong word,” he said.
“How about ‘intense dislike’? She has an intense dislike for me. She thinks I stole her precious little baby away from her, to corrupt him.”
“She’s a little overly protective, that’s all.”
“A little?”
He laughed. “Okay, she gets out of control, sometimes, I admit. But she means well. She’ll grow to love you in time.”
“I’m not holding my breath.” She chewed a piece of garlic toast. “But maybe she was right about the corrupting part. If she only knew what we did in the bedroom...”
He felt her foot slide under the cuff of his jeans and tease his calf. A warm, delicious rush of desire spread through his center.
“You must not want me to finish dinner,” he said.
“Sorry, I’m a bad girl.” She pulled her foot away, winked. “That’s how we messed around and got the first one.”
He was bringing the fork to his lips, but her remark made him pause.
“The first one?” he asked.
“When I said we were celebrating us, I meant it.” She set down her fork, drew in a deep breath. She blinked, and he saw tears welling in her eyes.
His heart whammed.
“Are you about to tell me...”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“Pregnant?”
“Yes, pregnant.” She was nodding, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I took an early pregnancy test this morning— twice to be sure—and it was positive. I’m pregnant with our baby, Josh. You’re going to be a daddy.”
10
Rachel’s announcement left Joshua buzzing for the rest of the evening. She was pregnant. Pregnant. He was going to be a father. A father.
They had not exactly been trying to conceive, but they hadn’t been trying to prevent it, either. Their attitude was that when the time was right, the baby would come. A child was a blessing from God. No one could entirely control the granting of a blessing.
He had an almost irrepressible urge to call everyone he knew and share the good news, but Rachel promised him to silence. She wanted to visit her OB-GYN and confirm the pregnancy with another test, to be absolutely sure. She also advised him that until she passed the first trimester, it would be unwise to tell the whole world about the baby, because in the early stages there was always the possibility of a miscarriage.
In the meantime, she wanted him to keep the news under wraps. He reluctantly agreed to her request, though walking around with the secret was going to drive him nuts. There was so much to think about, so much to plan ...he felt as if he were going to pop like a balloon.
I’m going to be a dad. I can’t believe it.
Although he and Eddie had talked about fatherhood often, it seemed incredible that he would soon join the club. He still felt like a big kid himself. To imagine being responsible for a child’s welfare, offering guidance, serving as an example of manhood. It was impossible to wrap his mind around the thought.
He had assumed he would be awake all night, riding high on excitement, but he wound up falling asleep shortly before midnight, exhausted, like a kid who’d eaten too much candy crashing after the sugar rush faded. Rachel climbed in bed, found a comfortable spot in his arms, and drifted asleep, too.
When he awoke sometime later that night, she was gone.
He glanced toward the bathroom. The door was shut, but blackness framed the doorway. She wasn’t in there.
He thought about the nightmare she’d had last night. What if
she was sleepwalking this time, fleeing her mysterious dream villain?
It was a melodramatic idea—Rachel might have padded downstairs only to get a glass of water—but he couldn’t discount it. With her announcement of her pregnancy, he felt an instinctual drive to protect her from all harm. That included Rachel accidentally hurting herself while in the throes of a bad dream.
He put on his glasses. The clock read a quarter past three.
He shuffled into the hallway. It was dark. No light filtered up there from downstairs, which it would have if she were in the kitchen.
He was about to call her name, when he heard a clicking sound coming from the room at the end of the hallway. Rachel’s office.
DON’T EVER TELL 67
Quietly, he moved down the hall. The door was cracked open about an inch, giving him a narrow view.
Rachel sat before her desk, typing on her laptop. The silvery glow from the display was the only light source in the study, imbuing her face with a ghostly pallor.
What was she doing in here at a quarter past three o’clock in the morning?
He gazed at the screen. He could make out a few words. He leaned forward—and accidentally bumped against the door.
She whirled with a gasp.
“It’s only me,” he said.
She put her hand to her chest, sighed.
“You scared me.”
“I saw you’d gotten out of bed.” He stepped inside the room. “What are you doing up?”
“Oh, only reading about pregnancy and newborns.” She hit a button on the keyboard, closing the programs she had opened. “I’m so excited I can’t sleep. I figured as long as I was awake, I’d do some research.”
He wished there was sufficient light in the room to reveal her eyes, because he was positive that she was lying to him. He knew what he’d seen on the screen, and it had nothing to do with pregnancies and babies.
“When are you coming back to bed?” he asked.
“Right now, actually.” She switched off the computer. Within seconds, the display went black, and darkness fell over the room.
She brushed past him as she left the office. “Coming?”
He glanced at the blackened screen once more.
“Coming,” he finally said, and followed her to the bedroom.
Lying in bed together, Rachel cuddled against him. He stared at the dark ceiling, but didn’t close his eyes.
“Thinking about our baby?” she said.
“Yeah.” And other things.
“Justin Anthony Moore,” she said.
Shortly after their marriage, they had picked out possible baby names for a boy, or a girl. Rachel had approached the task with an intensity that approached obsession, as if determining a name in advance somehow secured their child’s future.
“What if we have a girl?” he asked.
“We’re going to have a boy.”
“It’s way too early to tell, Rachel.”
“I don’t care about what the ultrasound might tell us. I know what I feel.”
“I only want a healthy baby. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“A healthy baby...that’s what I want, too.” She was silent for a minute. “Love, do you ever think of going away?” “Going away?”
“You know, like having a sanctuary... from the world. Somewhere you could be totally safe... without a care at all.”
“Like a getaway or something?”
“Hmmm...like that.”
“To get away from who?”
“No one in particular. Life... the world. Just the four of us—you, me, Justin... the dog.”
“A secluded getaway would be nice,” he said. “Maybe we can buy one if we start playing the lottery.”
“Maybe...” Her voice had softened to a whisper.
“Where would you want it to be?”
“Somewhere that...no one...knows about . . .”
“Such as?”
She didn’t answer. Her breathing had deepened. She was drifting asleep.
He lay awake a while longer, mulling over their strange conversation and what he had seen on her computer screen, and eventually, he drifted to sleep, too.
He awoke at seven-thirty to find that Rachel had already left for work.
There was a note on the dresser, written in her elegant script: Hey, sleepyhead. Will call with time for OB-GYN appt. Love, R.
At the mention of the doctor, giddiness bubbled through him all over again. But the memory of how Rachel had lied about her late-night Web research quickly put a damper on his excitement.
On his way downstairs to brew coffee, he paused at the threshold of her study. He pushed open the door.
The answers to his questions might reside on her computer. If he looked, Rachel would never know.
But he hesitated. He wasn’t one of those rude individuals who took malicious pleasure in digging through another’s belongings. His mother was nosy like that. He harbored bad memories of her rooting through his drawers and closets, looking for anything she could use to make his life miserable.
He turned away from the study and went downstairs. He brewed a pot of coffee. Tim had repaired his computer yesterday afternoon as promised, so he took the laptop to his office and started to work on some initial design ideas for a new client.
His office was located directly beneath Rachel’s study. Although it was surely his vivid graphic artist’s imagination at work, he thought he could sense her computer up there, tempting him to uncover its secrets.
Finally, he pushed out of the chair and strode upstairs, walking so fast that Coco, sleeping on the sofa in the family room, stirred awake and chased after him, curious about his urgent mission.
He rushed into Rachel’s study and punched the laptop’s power button.
The machine whirred, proceeding through the boot-up cycle. He sat in the desk chair, started to adjust the height to accommodate his legs, and stopped himself. If he neglected to readjust the chair, she would know he’d been in there.
Sweat coated his forehead. By doing this, he was crossing a line in their marriage, admitting to himself that he no longer trusted her, and there would be consequences to pay for his actions, if not to Rachel, then to his own conscience.
Coco had not entered the room. The little dog sat on her haunches on the threshold, and he swore that her bubbleeyed gaze was accusatory.
“I don’t have any choice,” he said to the dog, as if the animal would tattle on him. “I have to know what’s going on.”
The computer reached the Welcome screen. In a log-on box, the username field was populated by his wife’s first name, but the cursor blinked in the password field—which was empty.
He clicked the OK button, hoping that the system would grant him access without a password.
It beeped and flashed a pop-up message: Please enter a password.
“Shit,” he said.
He drummed a tattoo on the desk. He glanced at Coco, typed the dog’s name, and hit Enter.
Incorrect password.
He typed his own name.
Incorrect password.
Rachel’s salon.
Incorrect password.
“Damn it, what is it then?”
He leaned backward, the chair springs squeaking. He looked around the study. Gazed at her collection of dog figurines sitting on a shelf, the novels and business texts that packed the bookcase, the photograph of a sun-splashed beach standing on the corner of the desk.
Hunched forward, he began to type in anything that came to mind, combinations of numbers and letters, her birth date, their anniversary, his own birth date, the name of her favorite restaurant....
None of them worked.
He spun away from the computer. His knee bumped against the desk and set a ballpoint pen rolling across the desktop. It dropped into a small trash can.
He reached inside the can to retrieve the pen. His fingers brushed across a crumpled piece of paper.
He pulled out the pen, and th
e paper. He unfurled the paper on his lap.
It was a print-out of a Web page. Unfortunately, the ink cartridge had run dry while printing the document; the text was so faint it was virtually unreadable.
He raised the page to the overhead light.
He could make out four words: Illinois Department of Corrections.
There was other text, but it was too pale for him to decipher.
He checked the trash can again. It contained only a discarded wrapper from a black ink cartridge. Nothing else.
Apparently, Rachel had printed this document, seen the low-quality of the text, and had then replaced the cartridge. After which, she presumably reprinted the page.
There was a two-drawer filing cabinet on the other side of the room. He opened the drawers, found the expected files: documents for their home, insurance, tax returns, marriage certificate, financial investments. Nothing suspicious.
He examined the page again.
He’d at least learned why he’d seen the term “correctional center” on her laptop last night—not something that would have been found on a Web site about childbirth and babies. She’d been researching the Illinois prison system.
But why?
On the screen, the pulsing cursor mocked him.
A painful idea occurred to him: if he knew his wife better, he would know her password. If they were truly soul mates, as he believed, he would understand how her mind worked, would be able to figure out the secret pass code she would create.
The realization brought an even more hurtful truth: if their marriage was stronger, she wouldn’t be hiding anything like this from him in the first place.
The phone on the desk rang. According to Caller ID, the call was coming from Rachel’s salon.
He grabbed the phone and left her study for the hallway.
“Hey, love,” she said. “Whatcha up to?”
“Just working.”
“You okay? You sound kinda weird.”
“I’m fine. Just been busy this morning.”
“I won’t keep you then. I wanted to let you know that my appointment with the OB-GYN is for two o’clock. Still want to come?”
“Definitely. Where’s the doctor’s office?”
She gave him the address, and told him to call her if he didn’t think he’d be able to make it. He assured her that he would be there.
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