Utah: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 7)

by J. J. Henderson

  “Ellen, are you ready?” asked Rose.

  In the stillness of the kitchen she could hear each woman breathing, a slight moan from Frannie. And then she knew. She said, “I’m not going to do it.”

  Frannie said, “What?”

  “I don’t want an abortion. I want to have the baby.”

  “Ellen, you just turned 16,” Rose said. “You’re in a...reformatory. Who’s going to...What will you do with the baby?”

  “I know somebody who wants her...if I can’t take care of her.” She stood. “Look, I’m sorry, but...I’ve made up my mind. We should...you up to riding in a car, Fran?”

  “Sure, El. But are you sure you don’t want to...”

  “We can’t do this again, Ellen,” said Martha. “You leave here now, you can’t come back. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  “Yes. That’s OK. I know what I want to do. This isn’t right. Not for me anyways.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BABY WARS AND WEDDING BELLS

  Seven months later, when Lucy and Loretta met as planned at the Denny’s restaurant in Tremonton, after the hugs and preliminaries a momentary pause came as they let the deep ironies of the situation settle over them. That they loved each other as sisters was no longer in doubt, but what changes had been wrought by their meeting and all that had gone on around it! They had come together here, after all, so that Loretta could help Lucy adopt Ellen’s baby, a process proving more difficult than Lucy had hoped, given the intransigence of the state of Utah in allowing her to take the baby out of state. She had barely been able to talk her way in to begin with. Utah did not harbor much affection for Lucy Ripken. Some bureaucratic nerve center had her on its radar screen, ID’ed as the one behind that messy business with the Longford family, and now what was she doing but showing up here against court orders to attempt to spirit away one of their own?

  On the other hand, Loretta had left San Diego in the midst of a messy divorce, with issues of child custody contentiously unsettled. At the time of her departure, her husband had been maneuvering to get the hearing into the courtroom of a judge he knew to be sympathetic to the evangelical cause. This judge would consider the church of primary importance when determining the custody issue. All Loretta wanted was joint custody and the right to take the kids—or at least one of them, Candy—out of state if she decided to live somewhere else, like, say, Seattle. She had not abandoned Jesus, she had simply changed her vision of the man and his message. And she still opposed abortion, as she now announced to Lucy, “About 99.9 per cent of the time.”

  “Well, that’s OK,” said Lucy. “Leaves a little wiggle room anyways.” They smiled at each other, drinking coffee.

  “Look, Luce, I can help you with the paperwork and everything else, but I can’t be there if you’re going to use the tape. You know that, right?”

  “Of course, hon. Believe me, I have no intention of showing that horrible thing again unless I have to. It’s a last resort.”

  “To blackmail an entire state?”

  “Whatever works.”

  “Lucy, I can’t figure out if you’re a homemaker or a homewrecker.”

  “Nobody ever said they were mutually exclusive, right?”

  “Ellen looks good, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah. I’m so happy. God, I never imagined things would turn out so well. You know, I was sitting right there—” Lucy pointed at a booth—”And Ellen was sitting on that banquette right behind you when I first saw her.”

  “Her father was here too?”

  “The whole crew. Dorothy, the boys. I’m just sitting there drinking a cup of coffee, wondering how on God’s earth I arrived at such and such a place at this particular time—actually, I have a confession to make, Loretta—I had been...well, this old boyfriend gave me a little cocaine for the road, and I had been taking it that day...”

  “Cocaine! Lord, Lucy, I...”

  “I know, I know. Really stupid. But I was feeling kind of lost, you know, on the road by myself and so I...well, anyway, you come down off that stuff and you just want to die, I mean there’s nothing worse. So there I was, staring around the room, about as depressed as I could be—and I saw her looking at me.”

  “Ellen?”

  “Yes. And I thought, that girl looks even worse off than I feel. Next thing I know she corners me in the bathroom and tries to talk me into taking her away...well, you know the rest of the story.”

  “Uh-huh. Including my fateful meet with you. Which is now ending up in a total upheaval of my life.”

  “Hey, it isn’t my fault your husband turned out to be...”

  “Forget it, Lucy. I don’t want to discuss Jeffrey. I feel badly about what’s happening.”

  “I know you do. But I also know you wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t think it was right.”

  “So this is the plan: I’ll file the papers for you tomorrow. The Home Study and the rest of the stuff. They will evaluate, and will probably reject you based on last summer. I suspect the Probation Department and maybe the Prosecutor’s Office will be sticking their useless weighty opinions in. Then I’ll present a written argument, and if needed make an oral one, with maybe just a faint little hint of certain...things that might be revealed...and then if that isn’t enough you’ll probably be grilled again—on top of the standard grilling from Social Services—and if that doesn’t work, well, that’s when we go to the videotape. I just pray it doesn’t come to that.”

  “Moi aussi, sister. I would love to burn that thing—I have the only remaining copy, you know—but I don’t dare do it until Ellen’s out of there and on her way.”

  “She’s gonna be fine.”

  “I know. I feel almost like...well, like I should be the grandmother, not the mother.”

  “I think Ellen will be better off going to school without having a kid to raise.”

  “And what about me? What about my career?”

  “You’ll manage, Lucy.”

  “You’re right. I will manage. With or without a man in my life, I’ve always managed.”

  “Well, it’s another world with a baby, I kid you not. You can’t imagine.”

  “Jack’s been through it. That’ll help.”

  “Yeah. And so have I. Once I get things straightened out with Jeffrey and the kids, I’m seriously thinking of moving to Seattle. I really liked it up there...and I’d like to be closer to you and the baby.”

  “Really? What about your kids?”

  “Candy wants to live with me. I hate to split them up, but really, they don’t like each other that much, and...I really would like to get her away from that church. I don’t like the...there’s a man there who’s...he’s a friend of Jeffrey’s and a minister and all, but...”

  “He’s a sleaze.”

  “Yes. So anyways, we move to Queen Anne Hill, you live on Bainbridge, you have a babysitter anytime you want to bring him or her over.”

  “Sounds good to me. I look forward to meeting your kids. And to seeing more of you. Jesus, Loretta, I feel like I threw your life into a whirlpool. I’m really sorry sometimes for...”

  “Lucy, you saved my rear end. I’m...I was willfully ignoring so much, in pursuit of...some idea of family perfection that was dictated by these...self-righteous men, including Jeffrey, I have to say...reading the New Testament and using the words of Jesus to dictate rules that benefitted them, and their vision of the world. I just couldn’t do it any more.”

  “Well, welcome to the world of moral uncertainty, honey.”

  “Better that than moral concrete. But really, I don’t see it that way. The path is actually very clear, it’s just not straight and narrow the way Jeffrey would have it.”

  “More like a labyrinth.”

  “I guess. Well, I have to go and write this document that says what a great mom you’re going to be. And you know what, I won’t have to lie even a little bit.”

  “Hey thanks, sister Loretta.”

  “My pleasure, sister Lucy.”


  Ellen really didn’t want anyone around those last weeks, and that included Lucy too. But she knew Lucy had to be there because of the baby, and so Ellen bit her tongue and kept it all to herself, even when Lucy asked how you doin’? and the like. Ellen didn’t tell the truth. The truth had gotten too scary. She had been dreaming of her father almost every night, and it seemed like the bigger and more pregnant she got the more vivid these dreams became. Towards the end she’d felt like she would be giving birth to him, back from the dead, swaddled in bloody baby clothes and leering at her. These images that tormented her, like dreams from Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen or those other evil baby movies, all mixed up with the recurring sight of Daddy climbing out of her bed and coming towards the camera, where she stood watching, only she couldn’t be watching because that was her behind him, lifting the knife and driving the blade into his back once, twice, three times to make him die.

  Before, she had been able to see what she’d done like a movie, the video just another one of the cinematic memories that reeled through her brain. But now the opposite had happened: not only had her video taken on the weight and clarity of real memory—for that’s what it was, after all—but all these other images from movies and videos had taken on the same reality, so that she could hardly tell where the bad dreams stopped and the bad memories began. She remembered with terrible clarity now what had happened between her and her father, and her own helpless complicity. Why hadn’t she tried harder to get somebody to listen? How could she have let it go on so long? She had too much time to think of these things. She thought of bringing it up with Mom, or with Lucy, but chose not to.

  Instead she ate a lot of chocolate ice cream, and cottage cheese with ketchup, and mountains of French Fries, enough food to almost bloat the workings of her brain along with her belly, and the day at last drew near. In fact she went into labor six days before her due date, right in the middle of filling out an application to get a scholarship to go to a film school prep program at the Sundance Institute. The labor only lasted four hours. The 8 pound 3 ounce baby was born at six p.m. on a Monday evening in Aquarian February. Lucy came just a few hours later and together they held her, and together they named the beautiful baby girl Loretta Ellen Yates Ripken.

  While they waited the 48 hours required by law to allow Ellen time to reconsider her decision to give the baby up for adoption, Loretta was able to convince the powers that be—representatives from a state social services agency—that Lucy was the exact right person to have this baby due to her sterling character and her financially secure fiance and his Bainbridge Island home. She went on and on with the positives; and then, reading several unconvinced faces in the firewall of Mormon bureaucrats gazing at her from behind their table, she finished by saying, “And given the unusual circumstances of this child’s birth, we’re sure the state as much as Ms. Ripken and I—and especially Miss Longford—would regret any decision I might be forced to make vis a vis re-opening certain aspects of this...inquiry...in pursuit of a just placement of this baby. I hope you understand my meaning.” Two hours later, they let it be known that they fully understood her meaning by granting Lucy full parental rights. She spent a week with Ellen, easing her off her post-natal depression, and then with her new daughter in her arms flew home to Seattle and her new life with Jack, on Bainbridge Island. Actually, Ellen’s post-partum depression was anything but; it seemed that from the day she gave birth to Loretta, her nightmares miraculously ended.

  They wouldn’t allow her to travel out of state alone just two weeks after getting out of the Sky Mountain lock-up, and so Ellen’s mother Dorothy accompanied her on that early morning flight to Seattle in July. Ellen was going to Sundance in August, and to college in Colorado in September, having scored high enough on SATs and equivalency exams to merit acceptance. Her checkered past actually worked for her, of course, for there is nothing like a reformed bad girl to stir the passions of admissions boards and the like. Saving souls is virtuous activity.

  There to meet them at SeaTac waited Lucy Ripken, two days away from her Saturday waterfront wedding, and in her arms, where she lived, little Loretta Ellen Yates Ripken, the best and smartest baby in the known universe. Or so Lucy believed, and had convinced her mother, her friends Rosa in New York and Robin in Seattle, and anyone else who cared to hear it.

  Lucy had mixed and difficult emotions, waiting for Ellen. She had tried to work around and past the somewhat unnerving reality that Ellen was, after all, the birth mother of her baby, the small person who now loomed larger than anyone else in her universe. She didn’t for a second believe that Ellen had been wrong to give her up; nor had Ellen said a word in her letters to suggest that she regretted doing so. But still...here they came, Ellen and Dorothy, off the jet connector and into the lobby. Lucy forgot all her fears the second she laid eyes on Ellen. They ran towards each other, and met in a gentle hug with the baby enveloped between them. Little Loretta let out a squawk. “Why just look at her!” Ellen said. “She’s beautiful! Lucy, how are you?”

  “She’s beautiful because she looks like you,” Lucy said. “Hi. Dorothy. I’m...”

  “Lucy. I know. God, lot of water under the bridge since we met.”

  “Yes.” They all stopped for an instant, contemplating the void they’d left behind them; that would never leave them. “Ellen, I hear you’re off to college in like, record time.”

  “Yeah, providing I don’t violate my...you know, probation.”

  “What are you gonna do, run off to Seattle?”

  “How ‘bout steal a baby?” she said, but her smile took the edge off. “Can I hold her?”

  “Here, hon,” Lucy said, handing her over. “Like that, right. Underneath.”

  Ellen held and rocked her gently. “Hey little one, how’s it goin’?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Lucy said. “I’ve got a wedding errand list that’s about a mile long. You guys have checked baggage?”

  “Lucy, we’re here for your wedding. What do you think?”

  “It’s just one big bag,” Dorothy said. “But it is really big because El here couldn’t decide which dress was right.”

  “I’ve got a dress for you, Ellen,” Lucy said, as they strode down the terminal. Ellen still carried the baby. “You’re in the wedding, remember?”

  “I know, but you know, I figured I might want to change after, or there might be a party or something, right?”

  “Yeah, there’s a reception, and since you and Candy are both gonna be in the wedding, we made sure to tell Jack’s pals to bring their teenage boys. How you doing with my baby there, Ellen?”

  “Here, you take her, she’s getting heavy,” Ellen said, handing her over. “She’s cute, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a really good baby,” Lucy said. “Least that’s what Jack says, and he already went through it once.”

  “I’m glad...I’m glad you have her, Lucy,” Ellen said quietly as they rode the escalator down to the baggage claim area. “I wouldn’t have...”

  “I know, Ellen, I know,” Lucy said. “I almost talked you out of...well, I still believe that people should have the right to choose, but...God am I glad for the choice you made.”

  Lucy Ripken married Jack Yates at Jack’s partner’s house on the Bainbridge Island waterfront two days later. They held the reception at Jack and Lucy’s house. Loretta Graves, Lucy’s half-sister, came over on the ferry with her daughter Candy, from her new place on Queen Anne Hill. They had bought a small run-down house with a view of Bainbridge on the west side of Queen Anne, and hired Robin Markham to remodel it for them. Loretta Graves and her daughter Candy, Ellen Longford, Robin Markham, and Rosa Luxemburg, who flew out from New York with her boyfriend Derek for the wedding, served as maids of honor. Candy Graves and Ellen Longford, fast friends from the moment they laid eyes on each other, took turns babysitting. The wedding ceremony featured short, sweet, realistic vows from Lucy and Jack, a squawk from the baby, and a pair of dogs, one black, one white, barking as th
ey ran down the beach, side by side, the best of friends. The reception went on until well past midnight. They partied past the last ferry, and so Loretta and Candy ended up spending the night. At two o’clock in the morning Lucy, Ellen, and Loretta sat down in the kitchen. Jack was asleep in the room he shared with Lucy, Little Loretta was asleep in her room, with Candy in a sleeping bag on the floor close by, flanked by a pair of passed-out dogs. Even Rosa, once the party girl of SoHo, had faded; she and Derek, now residing in Lucy’s old loft, had pleaded jet lag and faded into dreamland in the guest room. Dorothy slept on the couch in the tv room. In the silence of the middle of the night Lucy poured the last of a bottle of fancy French champagne into three glasses, and proposed a toast to the women who sat with her. “Here’s to the latter day saints,” she said. “You two made my life.”

  “We...I...can say the same to you, Lucy,” said Loretta. “I never would have...made it without your mad wisdom.”

  “Me too,” said Ellen. “This past year began in hell and ended in heaven. It has been a miracle. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if I...if I hadn’t broken into your truck after...what I did.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Lucy. “It’s all true. I saved your butts. But for me the baby’s become the answer to all the questions I asked, and I never would have got her without you. Both of you. I don’t mean to pander to the gods of domesticity, and I will be getting back to work soon, but meanwhile, back at this ranch, I’m having the time of my life with this kid. Who knows, maybe one of these days I might even get to sleep.”

  “Well, cool wedding anyway, Lucy,” Ellen said.

  “And you’re off to where on your honeymoon?” Loretta asked.

  “A Club Med for families on the southwest coast of Mexico. I’m going to teach Jack to windsurf if its the last thing he ever does. And I’m going to write the story of the last year of my life,” she said. They sat quietly for a moment. “Well, I think it’s time to say good night. See you tomorrow, eh?” Ellen and Loretta both said a soft “Good night,” and went off to their respective beds. Lucy got up and slipped quietly in to check on her sleeping baby. Then she went to bed.