With Child

by Janice Kay Johnson

  The attorney had said she could continue to write checks to pay bills and daily expenses. Okay, she thought, she could do this. She’d paid her own until she’d married Dean, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to write out a check for the phone bill. And it would give her enormous pleasure the next time Quinn showed up to say, Oh, I’ve already done that.

  She opened a tablet of paper and decided to list what she owed first. She didn’t even know what Dean paid for.

  Mindy found a bank statement first and discovered that the mortgage was an automatic deduction. An enormous one. She stared at the amount with dismay. A neighbor had sold recently, and if this house was worth about the same… There must not be very much equity, or Dean wouldn’t have been making such big payments.

  After a moment she shrugged. It wasn’t as if she had a choice.

  A few lines down she spotted two more deductions, both car payments. His and hers. She’d driven a beater when she’d met Dean, and he’d insisted on buying her a new car. He’d worry about her, he’d said when she’d protested. And Dean had loved the Camaro he drove, but he still owed an awful lot on it. Thinking about the car, fire-truck red, sitting in the garage made her falter and blink back more tears.

  Swallowing, she made herself go on, reaching for the next envelope and neatly slitting it open with the letter opener she’d found on Dean’s desk.

  This one was a MasterCard. He owed $4,569. Mindy had never even had that big a credit limit before. She wrote the amount of the debt, the creditor and the payment on the second line, after the mortgage.

  The gas bill was way higher than she’d expected, too, as was the water and sewer and the Nordstrom bill and bills for two different Visa cards. He owed a whole lot of money on the boat that occupied a third of the garage. He’d loved that boat, too, a white cabin cruiser he’d renamed The Mindy after he’d met her. He loved to take friends out on the Sound. Mindy, who didn’t swim very well, hadn’t actually enjoyed going out. She’d pretended she got queasy, but the truth was that panic had flooded her from the moment water opened between the dock and the hull.

  The boat, at least, was easy—she’d sell it as soon as she could.

  There was enough in the checking account to pay all the bills, but not much would be left over. Especially since some of these payments were already late, and the next month’s bills would be arriving soon. Dismayed, she recalculated a couple of times. She guessed she would have to call the attorney. Dean had had investments, hadn’t he? Maybe they could sell some stock, or cash in a CD, or something.

  She debated whether to write a little note on each bill saying something to the effect that Dean Fenton had died unexpectedly, that the will was in probate and she, his wife—no, widow—would be the one now paying. But wasn’t that something the executor should do? Dean’s executor, of course, was Quinn, who in that capacity had every right to nag her and maybe even override her decisions. She didn’t know.

  She opened the checkbook, but didn’t write anything for a long time. Dean L. and Mindy A. Fenton, the checks all said. Only, now it would just be Mindy A. She was responsible for all those debts. Debts she hadn’t even known they owed.

  With shame she realized she should have known. Would have, if she’d ever asked or expressed any interest. But she hadn’t. Dean had acted as though he loved to take care of her and give her anything she wanted, and with this house and the boat and the Camaro and his own business, he’d looked as if he could afford to. She knew he’d been a cop until not that long ago, but it just hadn’t occurred to her that he’d borrowed heavily on future success that wasn’t going to happen.

  With a sinking feeling, she admitted if only to herself that some of Quinn’s contempt was justified. She’d been some kind of…trophy wife, something fun and pretty like the Camaro or the boat. Not really the partner she’d imagined, or she would have known.

  The panic she felt as she wrote checks, one after another, wasn’t much different than the panic that bounced in her when the expanse of water opened between the boat that began to feel oh so tiny and the shore, shrinking to a faint smudge like a mirage.

  Dean was dead, and she was pregnant, and unless—please God!—he had lots of investments, she wasn’t going to have enough money to keep up with these bills.

  She had to start selling things, and soon. Quinn, she thought with a small coal of anger, suspected how things stood, or he wouldn’t have been nagging the way he had. How dared he not say anything and make it sound like it was she who’d been lax!

  And Dean… How dared he keep buying and buying, throwing parties and playing golf and insisting she had to have the little BMW in the driveway, and never tell her he didn’t really have the money!

  After she’d put stamps on the bills, she would mount a search for the safe-deposit key the attorney kept asking about.

  She had to know where she and the small flutter of life inside her stood.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ONCE HE’D GOTTEN HER to thinking about money, by God that’s all she seemed able to think about. When could he find a buyer for the security business? How did she go about selling the boat? Now the Camaro. The cherry-red Camaro Dean had coveted all his life and loved with a passion.

  “What?” Quinn stared across the paper-strewn kitchen table at Dean’s widow. “You’re already planning to sell his car?” When he wasn’t even cold in his grave?

  She heard the unspoken part. Her face took on that closed, stubborn look he was coming to detest even more than the frail, woe-is-me expression she’d worn for the first few weeks.

  “I don’t want to drive it, and I can’t afford the payments.”

  “How much are they?”

  She pushed the bill across the table.

  Quinn picked it up and frowned. She was right. Dean owed a whopping amount, and she really couldn’t keep up the payments.

  Quinn had been spending most of his off hours either making decisions in Dean’s place for Fenton Security, mowing the lawn and doing upkeep on the house, or helping Mindy untangle her husband’s financial affairs.

  Secretly, Quinn was appalled by how recklessly Dean had borrowed. Maybe he shouldn’t be—Dean always had wanted the nice things in life, and had been a bigger risk-taker than Quinn. But damn it! He’d been living on the financial edge, Quinn was discovering. Balancing fine, because his business was successful and expanding, but without a hell of a lot in the way of reserves. He’d have been in deep doo-doo if the economy had taken a downturn, for example, and a good share of his clients had gone out of business or decided they could do without security.

  But Quinn wouldn’t have criticized Dean aloud to anyone, much less to the cute little blonde who’d enjoyed all of Dean’s toys as long as someone else was paying the bills.

  “I’ll buy the Camaro,” he heard himself say.

  “And paint it black?”

  That stung. “Thanks.”

  She flushed. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, I’m serious. Dean loved that car.”

  “Then…if you’ll take over the payments, it’s yours.”

  He was blown away by the offer even though there was no way in hell he could take it. He’d started to think of her as greedy, but, okay, maybe she had some conscience.

  “I’ll pay you.” He hesitated, then forced himself to say, “But thanks.”

  Her eyes were wide and luminous. “I meant it. Dean would love to know you’d kept his car.”

  “And I can afford to buy it.” He held up a hand. “No argument.”

  The momentary glow on her face was extinguished, and Quinn felt like a crud.

  “Okay,” she said, voice dull. “Do I really have to wait for probate to finish before I sell stuff?”

  “We’ll talk to Armstrong,” Quinn promised. Surely the attorney would be reasonable. “If the bills can’t be paid, something has to go.”

  Mindy nodded and said like a child, “Are we done?”

  He pictured her, a tiny, scrawny kid,
asking politely, “May I be excused now?”

  “Bored?”

  As she stood, anger flashed on her face, erasing the childlike impression. “Frustrated. I might as well go watch TV. I can’t do anything about any of that.” She waved at the piles of bills and bank statements.

  With strained patience, he said, “Solutions don’t always happen instantly, just because we want them to.”

  “Have I ever mentioned that you’re a jerk?” she snapped, and shoved the chair in.

  He rubbed the heel of his hand against his chest, where his heartburn was acting up. “Your opinion was obvious enough, thank you.” And rich, he thought, coming from the drama queen. No, not queen—princess. Little Miss I’m Entitled.

  She stomped out. Suppressing his own frustration, Quinn put away the papers in a plastic file box and left it on the table. He was almost glad when his beeper went off. A dead body would be a welcome diversion.

  HE BEGAN TO WONDER if she was throwing parties every night, or maybe just attending them. Far as he could tell, she was never up before ten or eleven in the morning, and then she would look puffy-eyed, wan and repelled by any suggestion that she should make decisions. Quinn didn’t remember Dean ever commenting that she was a night owl, but then he and Dean had hardly ever talked about Mindy at all. It had been safer that way.

  As far as Quinn could tell, she wasn’t job hunting, so he guessed she was planning to live on her inheritance as long as it lasted. Thus her panic about unnecessary drains on the final total.

  Quinn had originally figured she’d be left a wealthy young woman, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Too many bills had come to light, too few investments. Still, when it all shook out, he thought she’d have a decent amount left. If she was careful, enough to get by for a couple of years without working. Pretty good deal considering she hadn’t been married that long and hadn’t had a damn thing when she’d met Dean.

  Quinn recalled she’d worked as a barista at a Tully’s downtown, which was where Dean had met her. She’d apparently been making a little on the side with her “art.” She’d probably sold a few painted wood signs to friends. The talent Dean raved about hadn’t been discovered by the wider world. She’d lived with a houseful of minimum-wage friends and students near the university.

  Given her background, what right did she have to be unhappy to find out she wouldn’t be wealthy? But clearly she was. She got more petulant by the day, more determined that everybody hurry, hurry, hurry so she could sell whatever wasn’t nailed down.

  He’d stopped by this morning to tell her he thought he had a buyer for Fenton Security. A pair of buyers, more accurately.

  Quinn was beat, after a hard night. A body had fallen from the Olive Street overpass, landing on the windshield of a semi and shattering the glass. The semi had jackknifed, resulting in one hell of a traffic snarl that had closed I-5 south for three hours. The poor schmuck who’d hit the windshield was grizzled, dirty and wearing three layers of clothes and boots with soles that must have flapped when he walked. Staggered, more likely, from the powerful odor of cheap wine that had wafted from him along with the sickly tang of blood. Turned out he was well known in the missions around the Pioneer Square area. Nobody knew his name. Said he went by Crow. Just Crow.

  A witness out walking his dog late had spotted a souped-up Toyota pause on the overpass just before she was distracted by the sound of splintering glass, the squeal of brakes and the scream of metal striking concrete abutments. Weirdly, she had even remembered half the license-plate number.

  “Because it’s identical to mine,” she had said. “ALN. I call my car Alan because of the license plate.” She’d looked a little embarrassed at the admission. “But the numbers were different.” Her eyes had gone unfocused, and then she’d said in triumph, “Seven hundred. It was seven hundred something. I don’t remember the rest.”

  “Ms. Abbott, you’re amazing,” Quinn’s current partner had told her with a generosity that didn’t come so easily to Quinn.

  Ellis Carter was bumping against retirement, which meant he could be a little slow in the rare event of a chase, but his warmth and ease with witnesses more than atoned for the potbelly and arthritic knee.

  They had run the plates and—bingo!—had come up with only one blue Toyota Supra carrying license number 7—ALN. It was registered to a twenty-something scumbag who, when he’d answered his doorbell, smirked at the idea that he might have tossed a drunk from the freeway overpass just for fun. The smirk had faded when he’d heard there was a witness. The friend hovering in the background had broken and run. Getting him to babble had taken less time than cleaning up the mess on the freeway.

  All Quinn wanted to do was go home and crash, but he figured he should share the good news first.

  He rang the doorbell, and after a long delay, Mindy appeared, still in her bathrobe.

  “Quinn.” She didn’t sound thrilled to see him on her doorstep at ten in the morning.

  Face it—she probably wasn’t thrilled to see him no matter what time of day it was.

  He studied her puffy, tired eyes and the dark circles beneath them. “Still not sleeping?”

  Mindy let out a puff of air that was half laugh, half exasperation. “So I look like crap. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She could go from animation to lifeless quicker than most of the residents of Seattle who actually died. “Did you need to talk to me about something?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “I suppose.” Still in zombie mode, she stepped back. Looking at the floor, she waited, seemingly unaware that her robe gaped open exposing…

  God. Was that one of Dean’s T-shirts? Yeah, Quinn decided, it was. She’d taken to sleeping in her dead husband’s shirts. And boxer shorts that he hoped like hell weren’t Dean’s. He caught a glimpse of those long, long legs and of her bare feet. Those he’d seen before, as she went barefoot most of the time at home and conceded to necessity by wearing flip-flops when she went out except in the direst weather. She used to paint her toenails, though. Not just pink or red. He’d made a habit of glancing at her feet just to see what she’d done now. Sometimes her nails were turquoise, or silver glitter, or had tiny flowers or eyes of Osiris or peace signs painted on crayon-bright backgrounds.

  Now, he saw a chip or two of red clinging to the cuticles, but she must not have touched them since… He stopped there. Since before.

  Still in the entryway, he faced her. “I might have found someone to buy the business.”

  “Really?” Accentuated by the smudges beneath them, her eyes looked more gray than green when she lifted her gaze to his face.

  “You know Lance Worden? Scarecrow?”

  Her face cleared at the nickname and she nodded.

  “He and a buddy of his were looking to start a security company in south King County. Didn’t want to compete with Dean, and Scarecrow—Worden—thought with Federal Way and that area growing it would be good territory. But depending on price he’d be interested in Fenton Security instead.”

  “Would he keep the name?”

  “We didn’t get that far,” Quinn said with scant patience. He’d expected her to be pleased, maybe even excited, and instead she was worrying about something meaningless.

  Maybe he should share her regret at the loss of one more piece of Dean’s identity, but honest to God he was getting tired of answering the phone five times a day to answer questions for Mulligan, who in the absence of Dean had lost any ability he’d ever had to be decisive.

  “Oh.” Mindy’s mouth twisted. “It’s just…Dean was so proud of the company. Sometimes he’d wash one of the trucks here, in the driveway, you know, and I’d see him stop when he was drying it and give a few extra rubs to the logo. Sort of polishing it.”

  Oh, damn. Quinn had seen Dean do that, too.

  More harshly than he’d intended, he said, “There’s no more Fenton.”

  Her
chin came up. “I’m a Fenton.”

  The idea was jarring. “You’re going to keep the name?”

  She was pissed off now. “Of course I’m going to keep the name! Dean and I didn’t get a divorce!”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “What did you mean?”

  He had no idea. “Just…you haven’t been Mindy Fenton that long. The name must still feel strange to you. I thought…”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I’d want to ditch any memory of Dean as quickly as possible.”

  As so often happened around her, a band of pain began to tighten around his skull. “Can we not argue?”

  “Fine.” She turned her back on him and stalked toward the kitchen.

  Quinn followed.

  Mindy poured herself some juice and didn’t offer him anything. She carried it to the table and sat without inviting him to join her, either.

  “So I just need to come up with a price?”

  Leaning against the breakfast bar, Quinn reminded her, “Probate…”

  “Oh, God.”

  “We might be able to come up with an agreement that makes it a done deal except for the formality of the sale closing,” he suggested. “So Scarecrow and his partner could take over the business as soon as possible, even if we can’t tie the bow until Armstrong says it’s okay.”

  “But I wouldn’t get the money until then?”

  “Maybe not.” He frowned. “Probably not.”

  Her eyes got misty. God almighty. She was going to cry over a check being delayed for a few months.

  “You’re not that broke, are you?” he asked.

  “No. No, I… No.” She sniffed, wiped at her eyes, and said, “Everything makes me cry. I’m sorry.” One more sniff and she squared her shoulders. “How do I set a price?”

  “I’ve already done that.”

  She set down her juice glass. “You’ve…what?”

  “I found out there are formulas. Assets and income minus debts and costs.”