Clay

by Jennifer Blake

  Lainey twisted and turned as she attempted to see around him. “For me,” she said. “Is it a present?”

  “You’re a very pretty young lady, but I don’t know why you’d think I might bring you a present.”

  “Because you like me!” she cried.

  “Nope,” he said, bringing the gifts around and depositing them on her lap. “Because I love you madly, deeply and forever.”

  She blushed, she really did, and barely even glanced at the things on the sheet that covered her. “I love you, too,” she said with a smile that was going to annihilate the boys in a few years.

  “Now if only your mom felt the same,” he quipped, trying to keep it light to cover the squeezing sensation around his heart.

  Lainey’s blue eyes took on a twinkle. “Maybe if you brought her a present?”

  “Excellent idea,” he said, falling back with his hand on his heart, pretending to be stunned by the suggestion. Then he twisted his face as if in difficult thought. “What do you suggest?”

  “Chocolate candy?”

  It was, Clay knew, Lainey’s favorite thing, and one definitely not on her diet list. “We’ll see, punkin,” he said, ruffling her hair an instant before turning to April.

  She wasn’t alone. Luke had slipped into the room behind him while he was talking to Lainey. Clay turned in time to see him pull April from her chair and into his arms, then bend his head to give her a long and hungry kiss.

  “Well, heck fire, Luke,” Clay drawled. “It’s only been one night.”

  “One long and lonely night,” Luke told him over his shoulder, “with me rattling around in the big house at Chemin-a-Haut like a referee’s whistle with nobody to blo—”

  “Watch yourself, Benedict,” April said hastily. “We have a small pitcher in the room.”

  “I’m not a pitcher and I don’t have big ears,” Lainey declared from her thronelike bed.

  April, her face a little flushed, recovered with aplomb. “Of course not, sweetheart. Would you like some grape juice before I leave?”

  “Sorry,” Luke said with a grimace, as he reached to shake hands with Clay. “Got a little carried away there. Not that it’s unusual.”

  Clay understood perfectly. And wished that he didn’t since it seemed unlikely that anything as simple as a quick apology was going to fix things with Janna. “If you’re not in a big hurry, could you and April stick around a few minutes longer while I talk to Dr. Hargrove? I won’t be long, promise.”

  “We’ll be glad to,” April answered for her husband.

  Luke’s dark eyes gleamed through his lashes as he flicked a glance at his wife then winked at Lainey. “Not to worry,” he said easily. “Spending time with gorgeous females is one of my favorite things, especially when they’re held down in bed with all kinds of tubes and cords so they can’t get away from—Ouch!” Luke massaged his shoulder while an injured look sat on his strong sun-bronzed features. “Now what was that for?”

  “Punch him again,” Clay advised April as he rolled his eyes. Then he swung around and left the room in search of Simon Hargrove.

  “Young Lainey is doing great, seems to be one of those kids who go from fine to death’s door in seconds, but bounce back just as fast. Her signs are good, and so were her numbers when they ran a blood test a few minutes ago. She’s almost clear of fever. If there’s somebody who will be conscientious about giving her antibiotic for the next couple of days, I don’t see why she can’t go home this afternoon.”

  “You’re sure?” Clay tilted his head as he waited for the answer. They stood outside the door of an examining room in Hargrove’s office, which was a couple of blocks from the hospital.

  “I’ll write the orders and leave them at the nurses’ station.”

  “Just what I wanted to hear, Simon, thanks.” Clay hesitated, then added, “There’s just one more thing. I don’t suppose any of Lainey’s blood drawn this morning is still in the lab?”

  The physician narrowed his eyes a fraction. “Might be.”

  “I’d hate like hell to have you stick her again, but I’d like another blood test done.” He went on to outline exactly what he had in mind.

  “We can do that,” Hargrove said with a slow nod, “though we may have to send it to an outside lab for verification, to Baton Rouge or New Orleans.”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  Hargrove fished a cell phone from his pocket and punched in a number. It was apparent when he began to speak that he’d contacted the lab. Seconds later, he ended the call and pocketed the phone again. With a quick smile, he said, “No sticks for Lainey. Report to the lab and they’ll stick you. After that, it’s a matter of waiting for the results.”

  Clay winced, shuddered and then squared his shoulders. “Right. Thanks again.”

  The handshake Hargrove offered Clay was firm and lasted just a little longer than necessary. The look in his eyes carried warm approval. “This kid, she’s special, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So is her uncle.”

  Clay didn’t know how to answer that, so he said nothing.

  It took longer at the lab than Clay expected, since he had to wait on the paperwork and that put him at the end of a long line. The process left him a little light-headed, so the lab technician made him drink a glass of juice and stay flat on his back for a half hour, then recommended an early lunch. All in all, it was after twelve o’clock before he headed back to the hospital.

  As he turned the corner, he saw Luke waiting in the hallway outside Lainey’s door with his features set in grim lines. Clay almost broke into a run. Voice sharp, he called, “Something wrong?”

  “Not with Lainey. Where’s Janna?”

  “Grand Point. Why?”

  “I don’t think so. I could have sworn I saw your airboat heading out past the house this morning. If you weren’t in it, then…”

  “Shit,” Clay said with feeling. “Why the hell didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “It never occurred to me that someone else would take your Jenny. Then it took me a while to remember and make the connection, since a stunning female distracted me. But April was telling me while you were gone about the shots fired last night. She also said Janna seemed at the end of her rope. I put that together with the airboat, and the fact that you were here but Janna hasn’t shown up yet, and decided you ought to know.”

  “Yeah.” Clay looked down at the pattern in the terrazzo floor. From what Luke said, Janna must have left Grand Point the minute he was gone. Since she’d taken the airboat, her destination had to be the camp. It sounded as if she was up to something that she didn’t want him to know about.

  She had an old piece of a car parked at the camp, which meant that she could go anywhere once she was there. But what could she have to do that was so urgent? The only thing he could think of was the extra money for the transplant. It was possible that she’d taken this opportunity, while Lainey was safe at the hospital, to see the banker she’d mentioned.

  Yes, and maybe she’d gone to see Gower. The very idea made Clay feel as if someone had used a noose to take a half hitch around his heart.

  “Roan called while you were gone,” Luke said, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Roan?”

  “He said to tell you the raid went off as planned except for one small problem.”

  Clay definitely did not like the sound of that. “What problem?”

  “The doctor and his nurse lit out some back way that the police didn’t know about or expect. They were spotted, though, and a couple of patrol units are giving chase.”

  “And Roan with them, I suppose?”

  “You know it.”

  “He say what direction they took?”

  “No, and I didn’t think to ask. But if they’re smart, they won’t stop until they reach Mexico or South America.” Luke hesitated a second, then he added, “If Janna was going to see this doctor, she was probably too late. Anyway, Roan would have mentioned it if she’d been the
re.”

  “Right.” Somehow, Luke’s comforting words didn’t do a lot of good.

  “Not much you can do about it now except see if she comes back.”

  He could follow her, look for her, Clay thought. But which direction would he go? And what would he say when he found her—“You can’t do this kind of thing without my permission”? But she could and she had, and there was no way he could change that.

  So he would watch out for Lainey and he would wait.

  But when Janna Kerr got back the two of them were going to have an understanding. One way or another.

  17

  The camp looked exactly as they had left it, Janna thought. Nothing had changed. It seemed strange since so much else was different.

  She eased the airboat up near the dock then cut the engine, letting the unwieldy craft glide forward under its own momentum until she was close enough to step out onto the catwalk. It was a relief to have arrived with the thing in one piece. Though she had watched Clay easily crank and maneuver the airboat, there had been a few dicey moments before she got the hang of it. She’d taken more than one wrong turn on the way back here, too; the twisting, branching lake channels through the lanes of cypress tress were deceiving, especially when she’d seen them last in the dark. Several times, she’d almost turned back.

  The difficulties of the boat ride weren’t her only concern. It had felt wrong to borrow Clay’s boat without his permission, wrong to leave without telling him what she meant to do, wrong to leave him at all. Why, she wasn’t sure. He’d left her, after all.

  Desolation, pure and simple, had been her first reaction to waking up alone in Clay’s bed. It had been even more disturbing to discover that he was not even in the house, that she’d been stranded without a car or any other transport except the airboat. It was vaguely possible that he’d left without saying goodbye because he was reluctant to disturb her, but it felt like desertion.

  Clay owed her nothing, of course. She’d had more from him than she had any right to expect considering what she’d done to him. He’d helped her, taken care of Lainey, given her shelter and even a degree of surcease. No promises had been made, no permanence implied.

  It didn’t matter. The desolation remained.

  “Well, there you are.”

  Janna jerked upright from where she had just secured the stern line of the airboat. “Arty,” she exclaimed as she whipped around. “You scared me half to death.”

  “Didn’t mean to,” he said as he moved from among the trees where his faded shirt and shapeless pants allowed him to blend into the landscape. “Me and Ringo have been keeping an eye on the place is all, like Clay said.”

  “You’ve talked to Clay?” She shaded her eyes from the bright, molten sunlight that poured onto the dock as she studied Arty’s lined features above his beard.

  “Not exactly. He sent Luke out yesterday to let me know what happened with the little gal and ask me to take care of Lainey’s pet ’coon. Luke passed the message.”

  “Oh.” It hadn’t crossed her mind that Arty would be concerned, and it should have since she knew how attached he’d become to Lainey. Nor had she given more than a passing thought to poor Ringo. “That was considerate.”

  “Clay’s like that.”

  “Yes.” She turned away, reaching into the airboat and retrieving her shoulder bag of woven brown straw in order to hide her disturbance. “Well, Lainey is much better this morning. She was chattering away when I spoke to her on the phone.”

  Arty frowned. “You didn’t stay with her last night?”

  “April looked after her. She’s still with her, since I had something I needed to do.”

  “That’s okay then,” the old man said with a semi-satisfied nod. “You’ll find everything’s good here. Quiet as a tomb.”

  His description sent a small shiver along her spine that she tried to ignore. “No visitors?”

  “You expecting any?”

  The deadline for supplying the extra money Dr. Gower wanted had come and gone. Nurse Fenton’s threat to cancel the surgery notwithstanding, she would not have been surprised to hear that either she or the doctor had come to collect it. Keeping her voice light, as if it didn’t matter, she answered, “You never can tell.”

  “No sign, far as I can see.” He paused. “You come back for something then? Something I can help you with?”

  He wasn’t prying, she told herself as she moved toward the house and he fell into step beside her, but only trying to be of service. “I just had an errand.”

  “One somewhere else besides Turn-Coupe, that would be.” He glanced toward her old clunker of a car, the rear of which could just be seen beyond the far corner of the camp house.

  “Right.”

  “But you’ll be coming back here?”

  “Today, you mean? I suppose, since I’ll have to return Clay’s boat.”

  “And after? When young Lainey is out of the hospital?”

  How could she tell? It depended on so many things beyond her control. “I don’t really know.”

  “Oh, aye,” the old swamp man said with a sage nod. “That’ll be for Clay to say, I reckon.”

  “Clay?” The look she gave him was something more than inquiring.

  The weathered mahogany of his skin turned almost purple with embarrassment. Casting a harried look toward the lake shallows where his old boat was beached, he answered, “Nothing, nothing. Guess me and Ringo better be headin’ home now so’s you can get on with your rat killing. You tell young Lainey that old Arty said hello. You hear?”

  Janna heard and she agreed. She waved him off, then turned back toward the house.

  What Arty had said remained with her, however, as she stepped into the hot, airless confinement of the house with its smells of old, discarded furniture and the grease of a thousand pans of fried fish. Clay had been the soul of helpfulness, but had no right to say where she and her daughter went or what happened to them, none at all.

  Janna changed out of the shorts and shirt she’d borrowed from the things left behind by Clay’s mother, slipping into a loose-fitting linen dress in cool aqua-green linen instead. She secured the long length of her hair in a soft knot on top of her head with silver pins and applied a modicum of makeup by feel as much as by her reflection in the poorly lighted bathroom mirror. Armored by the transformation into something near comfortable elegance, she locked the camp house behind her and set out for Baton Rouge.

  The drive seemed to take forever. Her overstimulated emotions churned uncomfortably inside her. She worried that April might have other obligations so that Lainey would be left alone. What Clay might be doing, thinking or planning was a constant threat. It was a distinct relief when the Mississippi River Bridge loomed ahead of her, and she could swing north on the other side past the state capitol building surrounded by its green areas.

  A short time later, she was in the section where Dr. Gower’s medical center was located, an area of barbecue joints, pawn shops, hot-sheet motels, liquor stores, defunct car washes and half-deserted strip malls. The center was actually located at one end of such a mall. The term was an exalted one for the run-down collection of examining rooms and small surgical unit where he worked. It had once housed an optical store, Janna thought, and was still connected on one end to a department store building with going-out-of-business signs splashed across the brown paper that masked its empty windows.

  As she stepped from her car in the parking lot out front, the humid heat struck her, along with the smells of coffee and fumes from the chemical plants along the river. She was still a little early, since Dr. Gower was seldom in his office before ten o’clock. She hadn’t stopped for breakfast, and really wasn’t hungry now, but refused to consider that the emptiness and weakness inside her had causes other than a skipped meal. A quick cup of coffee and order of beignets from the coffee shop next door to the defunct department store might help.

  In fact, the sugar and caffeine rush made her feel worse. She was painfull
y aware that the whole point had been delay, putting off the uncomfortable and inevitable, and that she could afford no more of it.

  It seemed quieter than normal as she walked down the covered sidewalk in front of the strip mall. Traffic was light on the street running past it, and cars gave a wide berth to the white patrol unit that eased along before turning at the corner. The parking lot was deserted except for the vehicles that probably belonged to the people who worked in its few stores. She saw no sign of the BMW that Dr. Gower normally drove, but that meant nothing; he often parked in the back so he could come and go through a rear door.

  The medical center had a brown brick facade in a style popular during the seventies when the area had been more prosperous. Entry was through a glass door filmed with the grime of years. The inside walls were stained and covered with curling posters, the vinyl floor had a buildup of old wax in the corners so deep it was yellow-brown, and the exposed fluorescent light fixtures overhead gave the whole thing a lavender-gray, cadaverous aspect.

  The receptionist, a new girl Janna had not seen before, sat at a brown metal desk in the center of the room with only a phone and a cheap intercom centered on the expanse. She looked up from filing her plastic nails into a handful of purple-black weapons. No, Dr. Gower was not in, she said, but Nurse Fenton might be able to help her. As she started to direct Janna back to the assistant’s office, Janna waved off the instructions. If there was one thing she knew, it was her way around the center. Behind her, she heard the receptionist buzz through to the doctor’s assistant anyway.

  “So,” Anita Fenton said, her mouth set in an unpleasant line as she turned from where she had been working on a computer terminal at right angles to her main desk. “I suppose you want me to reschedule your daughter’s surgery?”

  “Actually, I don’t,” Janna answered, glad that she’d been given such an opportune opening for what she wanted to say. “I’ve come to tell Dr. Gower that I’m removing Lainey’s name from the list of transplant prospects.” She took the chair in front of the cheap desk with her shoulder bag in her lap and her hand clasped on top of it.