“I don’t know,” she admitted truthfully.
“Sorry to hear about your baby,” he added and she froze. “Terrible thing to lose one after carrying it so long.” Her insides turned to ice.
“Y—yes,” she said, her skin crawling. Had she told this man that her baby had died?
“Well, yer young yet, they’ll be more.” He raised an eyebrow. “Next time maybe it would be better to get yourself a husband first.”
“Would it?” she snapped sarcastically, as if she’d done it a hundred times before.
He didn’t so much as flinch. “It’s what the Good Book says.”
“And doesn’t it also say something about ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’?”
“That it does, but me and the missus we’ve been married nearly fifty years, had our kids all four of ’em afterwards. A baby needs a mother and a father, but then, you already know that, I s’pose. Anyway, sorry about the loss.”
“Yes. Yes, of course, thank you,” she said and knew the blood had drained from her face. The doorman thought she was Kylie . . . and Kylie had been pregnant . . . oh, dear Lord.
Grasping the precious key, she backed away, then hurried up the shabby stairs rather than wait for the wheezing elevator. On the third floor she ran down the hallway to the door of 3-B where Nick, holding a sleeping James, was waiting.
“See what you can do if you put your mind to it,” he said with a smile.
“You wouldn’t believe,” she whispered and told him her conversation with the doorman as she slid the key into the lock.
She stepped through the door and back in time.
With her first sweeping glance of the tidy apartment, a thousand memories assailed her. She froze, her heart thudding as piece by painful piece the memories of her life came into clear, sharp focus. Clutching the doorknob she saw a green corduroy couch—the couch she recognized that she’d bought at a yard sale. An afghan was thrown across it—knit by her mother, not wasp thin, dour faced Victoria Amhurst, but a warmer woman who smelled of cigarettes and perfume laced with vanilla. Dolly . . . her name had been Dolly. “Mo
m,” she whispered, knowing the woman who had raised her was dead. Her knees threatened to buckle.
She wasn’t Marla. Just as she’d suspected. Her name was Kylie Paris. And she’d been driving to Monterey the night of the accident, at the wheel of Pam’s Mercedes, in an attempt to find her baby. Dear God, she knew, remembered why she’d been with Pam. Involuntarily she looked at James. Precious, precious child. It began and ended with James. After being released from the hospital, Kylie’d had the fight with Alex, figured out that he and Marla were keeping the baby hidden away in Monterey and asked Pam to help her.
But it had all gone wrong. Somehow the trip had been boobytrapped, as if it had been a setup! Alex had tried to kill her. He had to have been the one . . . and Marla . . . she’d been in on it, too. Kylie felt the blood drain from her face.
“Are you all right?” Tenderness and concern shone in Nick’s eyes.
Kylie’s stomach clenched and her throat worked. “This . . . this is my home,” she said, her voice hoarse, tears filling her eyes. She walked through the rooms remembering the double bed she’d bought with her first paycheck, from the bank where she’d worked before joining the securities firm; the bureau was an antique, she’d refinished it with her own hands; a Tiffany lamp was her prize, she’d paid a small fortune for the colored glass. She ran her fingers over the bureau and stared into the bathroom, pink tile and matching floor mats.
On the frame of the mirror was a magnet.
Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
That saying had become her mantra, the code she’d lived by. And she’d lived here, alone, though there had been men in her life, a succession of lovers who had come and gone . . . Good-time Charlies, the kind of men she would never settle down with, because she had no intention of settling . . . for anything less than the best.
Now, she leaned against the doorframe to the bedroom and saw their handsome, strong faces in her mind’s eye. Ronnie. Sam. Benton . . . and there were others . . . but none had touched her as Nick had. None had been near the man, or the lover that he was.
“You’d better sit down,” he suggested now, shifting James from one shoulder to the other. “And tell me what’s going on.”
“I was just remembering,” she said, spying a window ledge where the one animal she’d owned, a stray tiger-striped cat with wide green eyes and the ability to destroy every pair of panty hose in her drawers, had often sat. She’d dubbed him Vagabond and he’d left two years after he’d shown up. Kylie had never known what had happened to him, though she’d searched for weeks, calling shelters and friends, neighbors and even the police. The SFPD hadn’t been interested, of course, and she’d been left with the painful sensation that even her pet had abandoned her.
“Damn,” she whispered, vaguely aware of Nick watching her as she moved through the apartment. She opened a closet door. An array of cleaning supplies and equipment met her eyes.
In that second, with amazing clarity, she recalled the concrete and steel elementary school where she’d shone academically, making up for the fact that she’d been branded a bastard, a girl who didn’t know who her father was. She’d matured early, before anyone else in her class, and the older boys had teased her. One even, near the end of the school year, had lured her into a janitor’s closet and offered her ten dollars for a peek at the most bodacious breasts in all of Ben Franklin Elementary. It had been a dare and she’d never been one to back down from a challenge.
The closet had been stuffy, lit by a single bulb, surrounded by shelves filled with cleaning supplies, toilet paper and boxes of plastic bags. Three boys and Kylie had been wedged among the mops, trash baskets and fading posters of Farrah Fawcett and Raquel Welch.
“Come on, Kylie, why not?” Ian Perth had asked, his breath stinking, sweat pouring down his fleshy, red face.
“I heard you’d do anything for money,” Brent Mallory had added. He was sunburned, his teeth were way too big for his face, his blond hair stuck up at weird angles.