It was spring in Pickford's Meadows, and Dr. William Hemmings, the secretly fallen pastor and renegade doctor not yet exposed, bustled about his private clinic on Main Street. Since the disaster and mayhem of last August, it had been fairly quiet in the conservative farming community, and things seemed to have returned to normal, or as near as possible. Clete was still out in the country, obsessively hunting the two remaining members of the dog pack, now that Jim Devereaux had raised the reward astronomically since Priscilla's death. He blamed the dogs, not totally without good reason, for taking her away. The stray blast that had killed her had never been accounted for, and was attributed to Billy Canning, but the reason for the shooting seemed to be completely attributable to the dog pack's presence, so Lobo and his remaining companion were being hunted day and night, and Clete swore that it was just a matter of time, even now nearly nine months later. His leg and chest had taken months to heal and the former had been too weak to carry his weight until fairly recently.
Yesterday, he claimed to have found something very promising, which was why he wasn't there for the birth of his child, as it had come rather suddenly. Nancy had just delivered a beautiful little girl and Hemmings had her sedated in the next room and the baby in another room, waiting for parental attention.
The doctor was in turmoil and, though he was not in any way to blame for the present situation, was terrified of facing Nancy Anderson's bad-tempered black husband. But there would be hell to pay, and there were no two ways about it. Thinking back, Hemmings could trace it to the day he had seen Mark Denning pick Nancy Pace up in his car and drive away with her. Though he did not know that they had gone to a hotel for an afternoon of sex, he surmised that they had found somewhere discreet to get together, for that was the day she had been impregnated with the purely white little baby girl he had just helped Nancy bring into the world. Mark's child. It was as obvious as could be that it was not Clete's child, even though he had been ecstatic at the prospect of having children. Now, he, the town hero, would be shamed and made a laughing stock.
And truly, none of this fit into Hemmings' plans at all, for he knew that he could expect great social upheaval in the community and, with Clete's temperament, perhaps violence. How could he be expected to remain calm after finding out that his least favorite politician and husband of the woman he secretly loved, had sired his firstborn. And the social chaos that would follow would utterly and completely upset Hemmings' plans.
And Clete was not alone in his feelings for the beautiful, silver-voiced, piano teacher wife of Mark Denning. Hemmings still carried on the hypocrisy of his church, even though he had violated all his vows out of his obsessive love for DesirЋe. But now, with this scandalous event, the pleasant situation that had existed for Hemmings during the last year appeared doomed to an untimely end. DesirЋe would perhaps divorce Mark and maybe Clete would kill him, but there was a big danger that the lovely blonde girl would leave town in disgrace.
During the last nine months, Hemmings had had DesirЋe to himself quite a lot. The post-hypnotic suggestions planted last year had continued to bring her to his office regularly, and less than a month after the terrible events that had led to Priscilla's death and the massacre on the Pace farm, DesirЋe had begun to come in for her pre-natal examinations and scans. Hemmings, knowing that the child was his own, watched the girl's pregnancy progress, from the ripe glow in her cheeks and the cessation of her periods to the gradual plumping of her thighs and buttocks, and swelling of her breasts and belly. The scans showed that it was likely a boy child, and the two couples had become almost cordial as their time of joy approached concurrently.
Yes, he had watched DesirЋe's body swell and change slowly, day by day. Still under hypnosis, Hemmings found that he was able to have sex with her in his office twice a week, making sure that she remembered nothing of the sessions. He photographed her naked body and kept a scrapbook, proud that she was healthy. Her skin was perfect and there would be no stretch-marks. Motherhood would leave her looking young and lovely as ever, and to make sure, every session after he had drawn his depleted penis from her vagina, while she slept contentedly in the afterglow of the orgasms that came to her so easily, he had rubbed her belly and breasts with expensive creams.
Hemmings traced DesirЋe's pregnancy back to the day or two before Nancy's impregnation when his angel had come to his office and he had seduced her under hypnosis. He was so proud now to be the father of DesirЋe's child that he deeply regretted not being able to boast about it all over Pickford's Meadows.
Mark Denning was out of town, as usual, since he had been elected to the State Senate, and though people were trying to contact him to tell him the birth was in progress, no one had succeeded in getting through to him yet. She was only a couple of days overdue by Hemmings' calculations, but the doctor was not bothered by her husband's absence. This was his own special time with his secret love DesirЋe and his own child.
Hemmings had her mildly sedated and kept her on a drip. If things became too painful for her, he could induce unconsciousness. Her legs were in the stirrups and she was gasping with the contractions, which, he knew, were coming regularly.
"How're we doing, DesirЋe?"
DesirЋe took a deep breath. "It's getting very uncomfortable, Doctor. I hope…" and she groaned and pressed her lips tightly together, breathing through her nose in quick, choppy puffs. "I hope it's over soon. Is my baby all right?"
Hemmings checked the baby's ECG and nodded. "He's doing just fine," he said with pride. His baby, his son, through the womb of the young woman he adored. "I'm going to check the dilation." He gently inserted two fingers into DesirЋe's vagina, and was happy to see she was progressing well. "Seven centimeters, my darling. It won't be long now." This was going to be just fine. He had given her an enema when she had come in with Tanya and was keeping the temperature constantly comfortable for her. There was a videotape running of the birth, something DesirЋe knew nothing of; like the twice-weekly photographs of her, it was for Hemmings' own private viewing.
Though it had been quiet in Pickford's Meadows for the last eight months, it had not been totally uneventful, and Hemmings knew just about everything that went on in the community, with his window over Main Street, and the microphone secreted in his waiting room that picked up all the gossip. Rodney and Tanya Foster were still in town while the former worked on his book. He'd had a huge advance for it, and after the money he had made from the magazine articles that went out all over the country after the killings last year, he was in a very comfortable condition financially. He and Tanya spent several evenings a week, sometimes staying all night, at the Devereaux ranch with James and his niece Robyn, who for some reason had not returned to university and her father last September. Hemmings thought the situation a trifle strange, but he supposed the older man needed some company and comfort in his grief at the loss of his only daughter.
DesirЋe was terrifically brave, the doctor thought. She was hardly making a sound in the pain of her contractions, and when the time came to push, she did a marvelous job, exhausting herself without complaining. With her birth canal dilated to a full ten centimeters, Hemmings moved to the camera and focused it for a close-up on DesirЋe's yawning birth canal, wanting to capture the moment perfectly for remembrance. He moved down and watched carefully without obscuring the camera's view, watching the girl's wonderful, lovely, sweet vagina stretching naturally to deliver the dear child.
In time, while he rubbed her swollen belly, the baby's head began to crown, and he could see it all, with thick, dark hair. He moved the light closer to see better, and could see that, yes, the baby's hair was very dark, which was odd, with tight, close-set waves. As the top of the head emerged, Hemmings peered up close, swore, and quickly moved to DesirЋe's side. He quickly and carefully twisted a valve on the IV line in her arm, increasing the amount of sedative, and watched her eyes begin to droop. Then he quickly went over and turned off the camera.
He was numb with shock and disappointment, and with fear of the consequences for DesirЋe. He had miscalculated the time of the conception, and saw that she was not overdue at all with the birth. It was incontrovertible that she had conceived on the same day as had Nancy Anderson, then Pace, the day the latter had ridden off with Mark in his car and DesirЋe had paid a quiet visit to the sheriff's office. That had been it, damn it! While Nancy was shagging Mark in some motel room, DesirЋe was lying on Clete's desk while he pumped her full of his potent, black sperm! Under hypnotic induction in the doctor's office punctuated with her sobs of shame, she had revealed in graphic detail the full and lurid details of that episode. Hemmings had not been unduly worried about it, for he had confirmed her pregnancy and assumed that, as nasty as the act had been with Clete there in his office, she had been protected by a pregnancy already implanted two or three days previously.
Well, calculating conceptions and terms of pregnancy was far from an exact science, as the doctor had now learned to his chagrin. If he had known, he might have been able to do something about it, though it would mean further violating every thing he had held dear until being shattered by his obsession with DesirЋe.
While Hemmings helped the nearly unconscious girl deliver her firstborn, he fumed and cursed. It was an incredibly awkward, dangerous situation they were in now. Mark would divorce DesirЋe and Clete would murder Mark. The scandal would be colossal in this conservative and religious community, and DesirЋe, his lovely, honey-voiced, innocent angel, would go away, flee, and Hemmings would never see her again, or hear her angelic singing, would never know the joy and fulfillment of her twice-weekly visits to his office.
Bringing the dark-skinned boy child out of DesirЋe's defiled belly, he took the innocent newborn into the other room and laid him in a bassinet next to Nancy's little girl. If he had thought that last August's massacre was a disaster, it was nothing compared to the murder and mayhem that was looming on the horizon when the two new fathers found that a most hated cuckoo had invaded their nests.
It was a scenario beyond the wildest imaginings of a pulp writer, and would have been laughable were the impending consequences not so dire, things at this point limited only by the imagination. He was aware that both the Dennings were reluctant participants in the lustful goings-on, though it was a sure thing that they would be the ones to suffer the most. Though Clete would probably go madly violent at seeing that Mark had sowed his seed in the sheriff's field, he had been aware of one only incidence of sex between the two of them. Nancy was so young, and her family was far from white trash, but Clete would feel triumphant at the knowledge that he had fathered DesirЋe's son. The political and social consequences for Mark would be incalculable.
As he walked into the nursery to put the ID wrist bracelets on the neonates, Hemmings wracked his brains for some obscure, technical excuse he might offer, but could come up with nothing really plausible. To coin a very apt and vulgar phrase, the shit had hit the fan with great force in Pickford's Meadows.
Hemmings quietly closed the door on Clete and Nancy Anderson and shuffled in to where DesirЋe was slowly coming awake. Mark was coming shortly and the doctor had kept the dear girl conveniently sedated. He had begun bringing her out when Clete arrived, and now she was opening her eyes. They were soft and vulnerable, and the doctor smiled as he saw color coming back into her pale cheeks. He loved her and nothing could be allowed to hurt her. Sitting on the bed, he stroked her forehead and pressed her hands in his.
"How was your sleep, little mother?" he asked tenderly.
Her throat was dry, and she had trouble getting her first words out. "How-how's my baby?"
Hemmings had some difficulty finding the words. "Just fine, DesirЋe. Just fine." He heard footsteps in the hall and kissed her cheek. "Mark's here. Are you ready to see him?"
DesirЋe gave a little nod and smiled. "Oh, yes!"
Mark knocked, then came in, hurrying to his young wife's side, kissing her warmly. It was obvious that their former marital problems of the year past were all patched – he had never learned of her experiences with Clete – and there was a long moment of tender affection displayed between them. While they made him jealous with their loving and touching, Hemmings went into the nursery.
"Oh, Mark, I wanted you with me for the birth," DesirЋe cooed. "It would have been so perfect."
"I know, baby," he returned in the same velvety intonation. "I was in an important high-level meeting and my secretary was blocking all calls. I'm so sorry."
The girl sniffed and kissed him. "But you're here now, and that's all that matters."
"You know something, darling?" Mark said. "I feel a powerful urge to make love to you right now."
She laughed weakly. "I think we should wait at least until after dinner."
Mark chuckled, and then turned as the door opened. Hemmings was standing there cradling a bundle of white fabric. He came over and gave it into DesirЋe's eager, open arms. Tears of joy were streaking his face and Mark looked up.
"Thank you, Doctor," the young father said. "Thanks for everything."
DesirЋe moved the blanket from the baby's face and sobbed. "Oh, baby, look!"
Mark moved the folds aside and looked down at the tiny body. "It's a girl!"
The young mother cried, "Oh, yes, Mark, and she's got your eyes!" She pressed her cheek to the baby's face and began to sing.
A slight look of puzzlement on his face, Mark looked up at the doctor and met his cryptic gaze. From the scans Hemmings had told them to expect a boy, but then he supposed those things, like politics and love and a great many other things, were not completely reliable.
Nothing's perfect, he thought, and turned back to his wife and child, his happy family.