Pregnant and Incognito

by Pamela Browning

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Oh, being cagey, are you?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.”

  Raymond adopted a teasing tone. “Darling, don’t you know you can’t keep secrets from me? And by the way, if you haven’t spoken with Noelle, you should give her a call.”

  “I have.” Dana was surprised that Raymond didn’t know this. He and Noelle were close friends.

  “And Tricia?”

  “No, but I’ll be in touch with her soon.”

  “I hope so. We miss you, Day. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me where you are? I could come to see you. You sound a little down today, dear. I’d love to cheer you up.”

  “No,” she said too quickly. “I mean, I have some things to do. Important things.” Like giving birth, she thought. Perhaps later she would ask Raymond to be the baby’s godfather. He’d think that was a hoot.

  “When you’re ready for company, give me a buzz. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’m glad I caught you in the studio,” she said.

  “Me, too. Ta-ta, darling.”

  “Ta—I mean goodbye, Raymond.”

  When she hung up, she sat and thought how great it would be to reconnect with Raymond when this was all over. Dana tried to imagine showing up at his apartment with a baby in her arms, but she couldn’t. Raymond’s apartment was done entirely in white—walls, carpet, everything. A baby most definitely wouldn’t be welcome there, although she knew Raymond was fond of children. But let’s face it—her life would be different from Raymond’s once she had a baby. It would be impossible to pick up their friendship right where she left off. She’d better get used to the idea.

  Tears of self-pity flooded her eyes, and she lowered her head to her crossed arms on the kitchen table and let them flow. She missed her friends, she missed her show and she missed her former life. She missed the emotional equilibrium that she had once had long ago, in the days before she became pregnant. These days it seemed as if every little thing upset her. Usually she didn’t give in to her fluctuating emotions, but today she couldn’t help it.

  After a while she sat up straight, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Everybody had problems, not only her. Conn, with his financial worries, and Esther, with her loneliness. At least she, herself, wasn’t lonely. She had her baby.

  “In spite of everything, I’m still glad I have you,” she said out loud to the baby. It might be a silly habit, this talking to Blaine or Rosemary, but it gave her great comfort. She had an idea the baby could hear her.

  And maybe it could. It chose that moment to flip over, its little hands or feet fluttering against the inside of her womb like butterfly wings. Like butterfly kisses, only inside.

  CONN STOPPED BY Dana’s cabin that afternoon to fix her drainpipe. She opened the door before he knocked, her eyes and nose suspiciously red.

  “You’re not getting sick again, are you?” he asked in a sharper tone than he intended.

  “No, and Oscar’s doing fine. I fed him some chopped liver that I had in the freezer.”

  “Let’s take a look at him.” He walked through the house and out the back door to the lean-to. When he went in, the owl eyed him with annoyance and emitted a screech or two.

  “How are you, guy?” Conn said. He opened the cage and reached in for the bird, which had the temerity to peck his thumb.

  “Hey, cut that out!”

  “That must mean he’s feeling fine,” Dana said from behind him.

  Conn set the bird on top of a barrel. Experimentally he palpated the owl’s back and stomach, then spread its wings out. This provoked a squawk and another peck, but he satisfied himself that he had been correct in his assessment of the injury last night.

  “In a few more days Oscar’s going to be soaring high. We’ll set him free once I’m sure he can fly.”

  Dana followed Conn back into the cabin and watched while he got down on the floor to remove the section of pipe that was rusted. It didn’t take him long to replace it with the new one.

  “Do you have time for lunch?” she asked as he was packing up his tools.

  “No, I have to go home and see if I can fix my hawk wagon. It’s leaking oil.” He had acquired the truck from Steve when he’d bought the house, and this was the first time it had given him any trouble.

  Dana seemed about to ask him something when the phone rang and she answered it.

  “Hello?”

  Conn wasn’t paying much attention, but he sensed an immediate shift in Dana’s posture from relaxed to tense, and his eyes flew to her face. She had gone ashen, and for a moment he thought that it must be bad news.

  “I…I can’t talk right now,” she said. “I’ll phone you back in a while.” If he wasn’t mistaken, her voice shook.

  A silence, and then Dana turned her back abruptly and went into the living room, which afforded her some privacy although he could still hear every word she said.

  “No. No, I can’t. Later, I said!” He heard her click off the phone and waited for her to come back into the kitchen, but she didn’t.

  He cleared his throat, reminding her that he was there. He grabbed his toolbox and walked past her to the door, picking up his computer on the way. Dana stood with the phone in one hand, clutching the back of the desk chair with the other. She looked as if she had seen a ghost.

  “Dana, is everything all right?”

  She seemed to pull herself back from someplace a long way away. “Y-yes. I think so.”

  He tried again. “It must be bad news.”

  She blinked. “Not exactly.” But he noticed that she looked down and to the right the way she did when she wasn’t telling the truth. Sometimes he hated this ability of his to know when people were lying. It made his life more difficult than it needed to be.

  He forced himself to be polite even as he felt a certain anger that Dana wasn’t being straight with him. “If you’re sure you’re okay, I’ll be on my way.”

  “Sure. I’m fine.” She came to the door to bid him goodbye and treated him to a faint smile when, after a moment’s hesitation, he bent and kissed her on the cheek.

  When Conn drove away, Dana was still standing on the porch. He wondered who it was that had called her, had provoked such a profound response. From what he could tell, she wasn’t friendly with anyone in town other than Esther. And he was pretty sure that if it had been Esther on the phone, Dana would have told him.

  So it was someone from her past life, probably. Someone that she preferred not to tell him about. Philip, perhaps, and by this time Conn was convinced that Philip was the name of her former fiancé, the baby’s father.

  But perhaps, he thought, extrapolating as he used to do when he was on the trail of an article, there was more to this than a saga of love gone wrong. Maybe Dana was involved in something nefarious. As odd as it would seem for Dana Cantrell to be part of any shady dealings, maybe she wasn’t only hiding from the father of her baby. She could, he reminded himself with all the cynicism of a jaded reporter, be on the lam from organized crime. She could be a criminal herself. She could—

  Oh, damn. She couldn’t. Not Dana. At least, not the Dana he knew.

  He went home and checked his truck, deciding that he needed to add more oil. He didn’t have any, so there was no choice other than to drive back into town. By the time he pulled into a parking space at the Conoco station, he was still steamed that Dana wouldn’t tell him the truth. Oh, the part about how she’d found out she was pregnant and her subsequent flight was true. He was sure of that. There had been none of that shifting of her eyes, no reticence, no waffling. If she trusted him enough to tell him that much, why didn’t she spill the rest of her story? Again, he had come full circle around to the possibility that she was hiding something more.

  A feeling of futility settled over him, and it was exceeded only by his anger—at Dana, and at himself for being such a chump. Suddenly he wanted to put some space between himself and this situation, and soon. A visit with his m
other was long overdue, and while he was in L.A. he could stop in at the Nation’s Green offices to see Jim Menoch.

  Walking into the gas station, just to let off some steam, he kicked a crumpled beer can that happened to be lying nearby, and it flew up and hit the side of the building with a clatter.

  A small boy stuck his head out the window of a rusting small compact car. “You mad about something, mister?” he asked with interest.

  “Yeah,” Conn growled. “You might say that.”

  When he went back to his truck, something out of place on the ground caught his eye. A credit card was what it looked like, so he bent and picked it up. He thought he might have dropped it when he got out of the truck earlier.

  He turned it over with interest. The name embossed on the front wasn’t his. “Day Quinlan,” it said.

  Conn doubted that he’d ever watched Day Time in his life. Yet he knew vaguely what the woman host of the program looked like. Short, blond, cute.

  Like Dana, only not pregnant.

  With dawning comprehension, with hard-hitting astonishment, he realized who Dana Cantrell really was. She was Day Quinlan, and she’d probably lost her credit card in his truck. Dana was the woman that people all over the country were trying to find, and here she was, living less than a mile away from him in Cougar Creek. Suddenly all the contradictions made sense—a beautiful woman, alone and pregnant; the expensive boots worn with beat-up cast-off shirts from her father; the prissy cloth napkins on the old table.

  The thought occurred to him, though he tried hard to fight it, that Martin Storrs would pay a good deal of money to learn where Day Quinlan was. Not only that, but if Conn chose to take the job at the Probe, exposing Dana would be a hell of a debut. It would blow all the other tabloids’ celebrity columns right out of the water.

  DANA WAITED until Conn’s truck had disappeared from view before she called Noelle back. The phone rang, and Noelle picked it up on the first ring. For once the sound of her best friend’s voice didn’t lighten her heart or give her a warm feeling. “How did you find me?” Dana asked without preamble.

  “Why, Raymond gave me your number,” Noelle said airily. “You must have forgotten to block the call return when you called him. After the two of you hung up, he pushed a button, and a robot at the phone company recited your phone number, just like that. Neat, huh?”

  Dana rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Noelle was right. When she had called Raymond, it had been on impulse, and she had neglected to block the call return function on her phone. How could she have been so stupid, and with Raymond of all people? She’d be lucky if he didn’t plaster her name and telephone number on billboards all across Chicago.

  “Day?”

  “I’m here,” she said wearily.

  “I checked the area code. What ever possessed you to take off for some godforsaken place in Arizona?”

  “I can’t explain it,” she said. “Don’t even ask.”

  “Well, of course I’m asking. Philip said—”

  “You haven’t told him?” Dana asked sharply, her stomach taking a swan dive toward her feet. “I don’t want Philip to know where I am.” Or Myrtis, either, she might have added.

  “Honestly, Day, this is so inconsiderate of you. Did it ever occur to you that the man might need closure?”

  “He had closure when I caught him in bed with Erica,” she yelped in spite of herself. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “I consider both you and Philip my friends,” Noelle informed her.

  “Since when?” Noelle had always been primarily her friend. Hadn’t they laughed together, cried together, consoled and encouraged each other for the past seven years? Hadn’t they bonded, truly bonded, as only girlfriends could do?

  “Oh, Day, you should have seen how brokenhearted poor Philip was when you left without a word. Take pity on him.”

  Dana greeted this request with a stony silence. Take pity on the man who had betrayed her so cruelly? Who had had no qualms about breaking her heart?

  “Day?”

  “I don’t want to discuss Philip with you, Noelle. Not now and not ever.”

  “But Day—”

  When Dana clicked the phone off, Noelle was still talking.

  CONN FOUND HIMSELF with plenty to do over the next few days, what with preparing for his trip to Los Angeles, deciding that the hawk wagon’s oil leak required a new gasket, and further polishing the Florida panther article.

  He kept Dana’s credit card on a shelf below the bathroom mirror to remind himself why he hadn’t called her. He couldn’t help it; he thought of her differently now that he knew who she really was.

  And every time he saw her name in front of him, he was reminded of how easy it would be to let a few words slip to Martin. Or to Bentley, to whom he owed a favor after she’d spoken out on his behalf over the Senator Bridlingame incident. It would make sense to divulge his information only after negotiating a suitable rate of payment, of course. The money could provide the down payment for his mother’s entry into Catalina-Pacific.

  Of course, after he’d blown the whistle on her, Dana could expect an avalanche of reporters, photographers and cameramen to descend on her. Neither she—nor the town of Cougar Creek—would ever be the same.

  But how could he do this? How could he betray this woman, whom he had come to know and like? And it was more than like, he had to admit that. He was crazy about her, but not about Day Quinlan. No, it was Dana he cared about.

  He cared too much about her to blow her cover, especially in light of all the recent emotional upheaval in her life. True, Conn needed money. But he didn’t need it that desperately. Yet.

  When Dana called him the day before he was to depart for L.A., he was slightly surprised to hear her voice, and he was happy, too. Keeping away from her was an exercise that had sorely tested his resolve. He’d wanted to pick up the phone any number of times, but he wouldn’t have known how to make conversation with something as major as her true identity sitting between them, looming large and ominous over their whole relationship.

  “Oscar is ready to be released into the wild, I think,” she said brightly after a few pleasantries. “I’ve been letting him out of his cage, allowing him to move around in the lean-to for exercise. Do you think you could come over and take a look at him?”

  Conn immediately felt guilty. He’d almost forgotten about the screech owl, and he needed to release him before he left on his trip. He told Dana he would be over that afternoon.

  But when he arrived at Dana’s place, despite working up a heady sense of anticipation over seeing her, instead of knocking on her door, he went around to the shed and checked on the owl. After a few minutes Dana came out to investigate the bird’s screeching. She leaned against the door and watched as he spread Oscar’s wings and checked for swelling.

  When he had finished, Conn slammed the door of the cage. “I think he’s ready to fly,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. Dana looked especially pretty today. She had brushed her hair back behind her ears and was wearing a fuzzy blue sweater, a bright blaze of color against the trunks of birches shining silver in the sun.

  He made himself stay on track, refusing to be distracted. “The longer we keep Oscar pent up, the weaker his muscles will be. We can walk down the creek to a place where there aren’t a lot of trees and release him right away.”

  “You don’t mind if I go with you?” The bracelet Dana wore gleamed golden against her skin, and he saw that it was the one he had returned to her on the morning after he’d met her. The initials on it had been D. Q. If he’d watched television more regularly, he might have caught on way back then.

  “Of course I don’t mind,” he said.

  “I’ll go get my jacket,” she said as she started back toward the cabin.

  “You’d better wear boots,” he called after her when he saw that she was wearing a pair of flimsy flats. “It can be rough going if there are a lot of rocks on the ground.”
r />   He had to carry the owl’s cage, so he wasn’t able to help Dana over the difficult spots in the terrain as they made their way along the edge of the creek. The brassy gleam of autumn was everywhere, a panoply of color. The wind-scoured air felt cool on his face, and above them the sky was a blazing blue. Dana said very little, looking down as she walked and concentrating on where she put her feet. He was glad that he didn’t have to talk to her.

  Now that he knew who she was, it seemed as if he was dealing with a different person altogether. After getting to know her in this remote setting, it was hard to imagine Dana—Day—on a stage in front of TV cameras. She was famous, a celebrity. People all over the world recognized her from her syndicated show. But he knew things about this woman that few other people did. Things such as the fact that she made really good coconut cake, that she was allergic to shellfish, that she’d been closer to her father than her mother.

  That she responded to his kisses as if she’d been set on fire.

  When they reached an open spot, he set the cage with the owl in it on the ground. The bird responded with a cacophony of ear-splitting screeches.

  “One thing about taking care of him,” Dana said wryly. “It’s prepared me for the demands of a baby. After hearing what Oscar can do, a baby’s crying in the middle of the night will be no problem.” Conn smiled at this in spite of himself and opened the cage door.

  “Well, Oscar, this is it,” Dana said, sounding as though she didn’t like it much.

  He sent her a sharp look. “I told you not to get attached to this guy.”

  She let out a sigh and laughed slightly, self-deprecatingly. “I know. I liked taking care of him, that’s all.”

  He tugged a pair of gloves out of his back pocket and pulled them on for protection from the owl’s talons. Oscar struggled slightly when he removed him from the cage, then quieted. “Well, guy, you’ll be on your own from now on. Godspeed.” Conn held the bird aloft for a moment and tossed him into the air. Oscar’s wings fluttered, spread and caught the currents before he soared across the clearing. Then, wings flapping and with not even a backward glance, he flew above the tops of the ponderosas on the other side of the creek.