Gus took a deep breath in an effort to control his anger. “Now, Montgomery,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “What we need to do is work our way through this. How long ago did the girl leave?”
“Less than thirty minutes.”
“Do you have any idea what caused her to bolt?”
“I think she was getting suspicious. Jamie knew that Amanda was claiming to be pregnant with a baby due about the same time as the one she was carrying. And she got upset when I wouldn’t allow her to call the secretary in Bentley Abernathy’s office and when she realized that she wasn’t really enrolled in the correspondence course. Then she quizzed me about when and how she would receive the money that would be owed to her after the baby was born. She wanted some sort of documentation showing that arrangements had been made and the money would be put in her bank account as soon as the baby was born. I told Amanda to call and reassure her, but I don’t think she ever did. And…” Montgomery paused.
“What?” Gus demanded.
“I probably should have told you sooner, but I didn’t think it was all that important…”
“Told me what?” Gus demanded.
“I think that Jamie may have been up in the tower. That maybe she talked to your mother and saw Sonny.”
“What makes you think such a thing?” Gus asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
“Mary Millicent asked me about the blond pregnant girl,” Montgomery admitted. “She was upset because the girl stopped coming to see her. She said that Jamie was Sonny’s girlfriend and that she was going to have Sonny’s baby.”
“Jesus Christ!” Gus yelled, no longer trying to hold back his anger. “How could my mother have known that? And how did that girl get access to her?”
“I don’t know, Gus,” Montgomery moaned. “Somehow Jamie found the hidden door. I didn’t tell her about it. I swear that I didn’t.”
“You should have put a lock on the door and installed an alarm. Your two most important responsibilities were to keep Mother away from other people and to keep tabs on Jamie Long. Now you call me in the middle of the night to tell me that you have screwed up on both. I counted on you to take care of things down there.”
“I am so sorry, Gus,” she wailed. “I don’t understand how it could have happened. Should I call the county sheriff and tell him Jamie stole the items in the car?” Montgomery asked, her voice frantic. “Or I could send some of our people out to look for her. The weather has turned bad, and she couldn’t have gone very far. I couldn’t let her stop eating, Gus. I was afraid it would hurt the baby.”
“Just shut up, damn it, and let me think!” Gus yelled.
Ann Montgomery dropped the receiver on the floor and put a hand to her throat. She found it difficult to breathe.
Gus had yelled at her. Her darling boy had yelled at her. The boy she had raised and mothered.
He didn’t love her anymore.
She had failed them. Failed Amanda and Gus. And Sonny, too.
She stared down at the telephone receiver. Gus was still yelling, using the Lord’s name in vain, demanding that she pick up the phone and talk to him.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I wanted that baby more than anything.”
Now even if Gus let her stay on at the ranch, she would no longer be in charge. And even if Jamie Long was found and brought back here to have the baby, Ann knew that she might be allowed to spend the rest of her life wiping Mary Millicent’s bottom but she would never be permitted to care for Sonny’s baby.
She stretched out on the bed she had shared with Buck, the bed in which she had birthed his baby. Her poor little dead baby boy. She had bathed his lifeless little body and kissed him all over and smoothed talcum powder on his skin and wrapped him in the blanket she had crocheted for him. When Buck came, she placed the baby in his arms. He told her it was for the best. She hated Buck for saying that, but he had gone with her to the cemetery and dug a grave. And weeks later, a wooden marker with the inscription “Stillborn Baby” appeared on the grave.
For the longest time afterward, Ann would sprinkle talcum powder on her pillow and pretend it was her baby while she rocked it in her arms. And she begged God to please let her baby into heaven, a baby who had been born of sin but had not sinned himself.
After Mary Millicent arrived at Hartmann Ranch, she had asked about the nameless infant buried in the family cemetery. Ann never told her whose baby it was but said that no preacher had ever said words over it. Immediately Mary Millicent grabbed her coat and the two of them marched up the path and knelt beside the little marker, and Mary Millicent Tutt herself, the famous evangelist who had written books on salvation and preached on radio and television and had saved millions of souls, raised her arms heavenward and asked the Lord to hold this baby close and give him everlasting life.
After Mary Millicent gave birth to Gus and Amanda, Ann’s arms didn’t feel so empty anymore. She had Buck’s grandchildren to love. Those were the happiest years of her life. Now every time Ann became exasperated with Mary Millicent, she reminded herself that Mary Millicent had saved her baby’s soul and allowed her to love and mother Gus and Amanda. The call had long since left Mary Millicent, but back then she had the ear of God. Ann had no doubt of that.
The phone was silent now. Gus wasn’t yelling anymore.
She rose from her bed and regarded her reflection once again. So old and ugly. She didn’t want to see that old ugly face ever again.
She walked through the living room of the spacious, beautiful apartment that had never meant as much to her as the creaky old house that used to be out back—where she had lived with her father until he died and Buck had starting coming to her in the night.
She didn’t bother to close the door behind her when she left the apartment for the last time. At the back door, she punched in the security code. She opened the back door, walked down the steps, and crossed the backyard to the side gate by the driveway.
It was starting to snow. The weatherman on television had said it might snow south of here, but not in huge, empty Marshall County, where she had spent her entire life in service of the Hartmann family. And she had allowed her heart to be filled with love for them and had told herself that they loved her in return. But probably they were just using her. Dumb old Ann Montgomery. She had spread her legs for old Buck and raised Mary Millicent’s children and taken care of her when she was old and useless and her children couldn’t deal with her anymore. Ann had run their ranch and kept their secrets. Now she had failed them, and Gus had yelled at her. It felt as though he had stabbed her with a knife. Stabbed her dead.
She knew it must be very cold, but she didn’t feel it. Maybe she was already dead. Maybe she had been dead for years.
She took the winding path up to the windswept little cemetery and opened the iron gate, its rusty hinges squealing in protest. The wind whipped her nightgown around her legs as she walked past Buck’s headstone to the back corner where their baby was buried. She wished she could dig down into the frozen earth to where her baby lay and hold him in her arms while she died. But at least she was close to him. She curled her body around the small headstone and began crooning to her baby. Her pretty little baby boy. His little chest had shuddered. She had tried to breathe for him, tried to put air in his little lungs. But he had never taken a breath. Buck had refused to give him a name, but in her heart she had named him David.
She recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm. Then her mind roamed through the Bible and she recited favorite passages until she realized that light was filling up the sky. The light was warm, and it was coming closer and closer until she was in the middle of a soft warm cloud that smelled of talcum powder.
Almost immediately Gus knew that he had gone too far. It was Montgomery he was yelling at. The woman had practically raised him and Amanda. The woman who loved them completely and would have laid down her life for either one of them.
But he kept yelling, demanding that she answer him
, saying that he was sorry, that he loved her. He and Amanda loved her. More than they had loved their own mother. Then he hushed, sensing that she was no longer listening.
He yelled for Felipe to get Kelly on the phone.
“Oh, God,” Gus moaned, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
When Felipe handed him the phone, Gus said, “Kelly, you need to go over and check on Montgomery ASAP!”
“What’s going on?”
“Jamie Long flew the coop, and Montgomery is freaking out.”
Kelly let out a low whistle. “So, that’s who went through the front gate.”
“Apparently so. You have any idea how she managed that?”
“One of the remotes is missing,” she admitted.
Gus resisted the urge to let forth a stream of obscenities. No more yelling. He needed to stay calm. Needed Kelly’s help.
“Go see about Montgomery,” he told her, “and get me the license-plate number on the Long girl’s car. Don’t make a big deal of this, Kelly. If anyone at the ranch asks, just say the girl decided to have her baby elsewhere.”
“Will do.”
“I’m worried about Montgomery,” he admitted. “She was pretty upset when I talked to her. Call me back right away.”
Chapter Twenty-two
WHEN JAMIE POINTED the remote control at the front gate, she half expected an alarm to sound and the car to be bathed in bright spotlights and men to appear suddenly and drag her from the vehicle.
Until that moment she had told herself that she could always change her mind. That this was just a trial run and not the real thing.
But in bed early this morning, she had felt a tightening of her abdominal muscles. Not exactly painful, but uncomfortable. She experienced the same feeling again in the bathroom, along with the beginnings of hysteria. Freda had warned her about the possibility of a false alarm. About Braxton Hicks contractions. Sometimes they could be pretty strong, but they came intermittently and then went away. Real labor didn’t go away. Jamie prayed that was what she was experiencing. Braxton Hicks.
She experienced another episode midmorning but nothing else for the rest of the day. She had been thoroughly shaken by the experience, however.
What if the pains she had felt were a lead-up to true labor?
What if her labor started during daytime? She’d never be able to leave in broad daylight, and if she waited until dark, she risked having the baby alone and unattended.
Jamie had known all along that leaving would not be simple. That fact in itself is what finally convinced her. Miss Montgomery and Kelly were not about to allow her just to get in her car and drive away. They would find some grounds to stop her—accuse her of stealing something most likely. And it would be almost impossible for Jamie to prove otherwise. It would be her word against theirs, and they worked for the Hartmanns. In Marshall County, the Hartmanns were above the law.
She knew her departure would have to be clandestine. She needed to get as far away from Hartmann Ranch as she possibly could before anyone realized that she had left.
Getting access to her car had been a major problem. She hadn’t planned to threaten a hunger strike. The words just came out of her mouth. She wouldn’t have done it, of course, at least not to the extent that it would hurt the baby. But Montgomery didn’t know that. Montgomery had called her a “wicked girl.”
Once the car was in running order and parked in the ranch-house garage, Jamie went about the business of packing up her possessions and carrying them out to the car, always accompanied by a gardener or sometimes by Miss Montgomery herself. Jamie made a deliberate effort to be cheerful around Miss Montgomery and Nurse Freda, telling them how excited she was about returning to Austin and continuing her college education and getting in touch with her friends. “I know you think I’m rushing things,” Jamie told Miss Montgomery, “but I’m bored and don’t have anything better to do.”
The garage was locked at night, but Jamie had been able to unlock a window on the back of the building while her current escort was out front smoking and chatting with his compadres.
With the only possessions left in her apartment the articles of clothing and toilet articles she would need for the remainder of her stay, the two rooms looked bare and impersonal. She considered putting back the decorative items that had been in the room when she arrived but decided against it. The bare look signified that the end of her incarceration was near.
With the packing done, she was anxious to leave. Her plan was to wait until the danger of winter storms had passed but not so long that she would be in danger of going into labor. She hoped to have enough time to get herself settled and make arrangements for the delivery of her baby.
Her baby. That was how she now thought of the baby boy she carried. Her baby. Her child. Her son. And with acknowledgment came love. She continuously caressed her swollen belly. Her love for her unborn child made her strong and determined. She must plan her escape thoroughly and well so she would be the one who raised her son.
Since the area north of the ranch was so vast and empty, Jamie was fairly certain Miss Montgomery and Kelly would assume that she would head south to Interstate 40, which would take her either east to Amarillo or west into New Mexico. Jamie planned, however, to drive north into the Oklahoma Panhandle. If all went well, she would have breakfast in the town of Guymon. According to the atlas in the library, Guymon was a town of more than five thousand people, or at least it had been twenty years ago when the atlas was published. It was large enough to have restaurants and motels, and a stranger in town could go unnoticed. Not that she would be staying long.
She tried to imagine what was going to happen at the ranch when it was discovered that she had left. Would Kelly contact the county sheriff and the Texas highway patrol and claim she’d run off with the silverware or the family jewels? Jamie knew that she would feel safer once she crossed the state line and was in a different legal jurisdiction.
Jamie imagined Amanda’s fury when Miss Montgomery called with the news. She would expect her brother to track her down. Jamie hoped to make that impossible.
Just last night she had crept down the stairs in the middle of the night to make sure the security code had not been changed. At the back door, she punched in three fours and a five, then opened the door a few inches. No alarm sounded. The code was still in effect. She went down the steps and tried the code on the back gate. It worked.
This afternoon she and Ralph took their usual walk with Lester following behind. She was too nervous to eat much dinner and flushed most of the food down the toilet so that nothing would seem amiss. Then she took Ralph downstairs for his last outing before Miss Montgomery locked up for the night. Back in her apartment, she put on her granny gown—just in case Miss Montgomery decided to stop by—and pulled back the covers on her bed. She even stretched out on the bed for a while, watching the weather. The weather reporter said that what should be the Panhandle’s last winter storm of the season was now located over central New Mexico. The storm would affect the Texas Panhandle as far north as I-40, with only isolated flurries predicted farther north.
A good thing she was heading north, Jamie told herself. She should have clear sailing.
She forced herself to stay in bed until midnight. Then she got up, dressed warmly, and packed the remainder of her possessions in a plastic bag.
Ralph followed her down the stairs. She paused briefly at the back door, took a deep breath, and punched in the security code. The minute she opened the door, Ralph raced past her, headed down the steps, and lifted his leg at the closest tree.
As always, the backyard was lit by floodlights mounted on the roof of the house, but the gate was close to the house and deep in shadows. She couldn’t read the numbers on the touch pad but counted to the fourth button, punched it three times, and the button next to it once.
Ralph followed her as she hurried across the paved area in front of the garage, then went around back. She put Ralph through the window, then cra
wled through herself.
The garage door made a frightening amount of noise, but no lights came on in the ranch house. She peeked around the corner of the garage. No lights were on in the employee cottages.
She drove at a crawl past the house and down the front drive. Then, after weeks of agonizing and planning, she arrived at the point of no return.
In her gut, or wherever it was within the human psyche that one puts logic aside and blunders forward if for no other reason than inaction feels wrong, Jamie had found the courage to point the remote at the metal gate and press the button. Ghostly and silent in the darkness, the gate swung open.
She held her breath.
There were no spotlights. No alarm. No men racing toward the car.
“Maybe this is going to work,” she whispered to Ralph, who seemed as apprehensive as she was by this strange late-night outing.
With her heart pounding furiously, she drove through the open gate.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She was on the other side. She looked over her shoulder and watched the gate close. The front drive was empty.
So far so good.
Except it was starting to snow. Just a little, though. Just those isolated flurries the weatherman had mentioned. Not a cause for concern.
The tires crunched on the gravel as she turned north on Hartmann Road and drove ever so slowly, squinting into the darkness of the moonless night. She strained to make out the edge of the roadway, which she used as a guide. She wanted to be well past Hartmann City before she turned on the headlights.
The snow was coming down harder now. She replayed the forecast in her head. The snowstorm would be south of the interstate. She was certain of it. The ranch was more than twenty miles north of the interstate.
She would drive out of it soon. At least she hoped so. She’d never driven in snow before.
After she passed the Hartmann City turnoff, she turned on the headlights, which did little to help visibility. All she could see in front of her was swirling snow. She slowed to a crawl, continuing to use the edge of the road as her guide.
The Surrogate Page 19
