“No.” I shake my head slowly. “I’ll be safe until the next pregnant mistress comes along. Then he’lldo the same thing again. I’m not staying here with him. I can’t.”
“You don’t have to stay forever. Just a couple days. Then you take the baby and run.”
“And then what?”
“And then you raise my baby as your own. You have money. You have a nice place down in Florida. You can raise him there.”
“But it’s yourbaby. Don’t you want to raise this baby yourself?”
“With what? Love and fairy dust?” Her face twisted in anguish as tears began to roll down her cheeks. “I have no money. No husband. No job. I don’t even have a place to live anymore. And I can’t get a job with a baby to care for, even if someone were willing to hire an unwed mother. No.” She shook her head. “I’ll leave. And you take the baby.”
Silence filled the space between us as a kaleidoscope of ideas bloomed inside my mind.
“We’ll go together.”
“How?”
“We lockDickiein this stinking room. We take the baby and head to Florida. When we get there, we call the police and tell them everything. He’ll go to jail, and we’ll never have to worry about him again. Andwe’llraise your baby. I’ll get a job. I’ll help you.”
She looked up at me with those big eyes. “You’d do that, for me?”
“I’d do it for your baby.”
“The baby isn’t Dickie’s.”
I sink back against the cinder block wall behind the cot. “What?”
She nodded, a small smile creasing her face. “He thinks he’s the father. But he’s not.”
“Then who—”
“The baby’s father died in Viet Nam.”
A quick intake of breath. “Danny.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the girl with the green eyes.”
“He talked about me?”
“All the time. In his letters from basic training.”
She smiled. “We met when he was at Fort Leonard Wood. I moved up here to work at the dealership before he shipped out. We were going to get married. But then his orders came, a week after I arrived. And then he died ... over there. I don’t know if my last letter ever reached him ... telling him about the baby.”
She stroked her swollen belly. “When I realized I was pregnant, and Danny was dead ... I panicked ... and Dickie ... well, he was always making passes at me. Always touching me. Always asking me to bend over and pick up the pencil he’d just dropped on the floor. So I stopped fighting him off. It was impossible anyway, trapped in that office with him after everyone else had gone home, on those days when he asked me to stay late to take ‘dictation.’” Her lips curled downward in a sneer as she said the word.
Her expression hardened. “I let him do what he was going to do anyway, whether I wanted him to or not. I figured I could get some cash out of him if he thought the baby was his. Figured he’d put me up somewhere while I was pregnant. And he did. Paid my rent and all my expenses these last few months once I started to show and had to quit working ... and then he told me if I just stayed here until the babywas born, you would raise it ... and I was fine with that ... but I never in a million years imagined that he’d try to kill you.”
“When did you find out?” I asked.
“This morning, when the contractions started. He told me what I needed to do ... and I can’t. A tiny trace of foxglove to keep you here until the baby came is one thing. But this ... this is murder. And I won’t do it.”
She gasped as another contraction gripped her body. “We don’t have much time ...”
I grabbed her hand, and she squeezed so hard I thought she’d break my fingers. “After the baby comes, I’ll send him out to get something, something to get him out of the house. He has no idea, about babies or childbirth or what a woman needs after. I’ll tell him we need talcum powder for the baby. Or aspirin or orange juice or pickles for me. Something. He’ll be so happy when he sees it’s a boy. He’ll do anything I ask.”
“How do you know it’s a boy?”
