GUS WAS JUST heartbeats short of ejaculating when he realized that Felipe was knocking on the door.
The door opened just the tiniest crack, and Felipe announced that Gus had a phone call.
“Shit!” Gus muttered. Something must be terribly wrong for Felipe to interrupt. But he would have his pleasure before dealing with whatever it was.
“Quickly,” he told the woman, rolling onto his back.
Suzette was her name. She crouched beside him and within half a minute Gus’s body shuddered its way to a climax. Then he pushed her away and told her to leave.
She regarded him for a heartbeat or two with her huge dark eyes before grabbing her clothes and racing toward the door.
Gus clutched a pillow to his chest, allowing himself a moment for the aftermath of the orgasm to subside. He took a deep breath and willed his racing heart to slow down. “Damn,” he muttered. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”
Beautiful Suzette. She was like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, with those eyes and her masses of dark curls, pouty mouth, lily-white flesh, black garter belt, and even an authentic French accent. The last time he had asked her to stay with him for a time. And they had talked about French cinema. She was quite knowledgeable.
This time he had planned to have her stay the night. She had sung French cabaret songs for him and made a production of taking off her clothes. He had pulled her to the bed and kissed her all over.
But the mood had been destroyed. And probably it was just as well. He liked her too much.
And suddenly tears sprung to his eyes. It was one of those moments when he would have gladly given all his worldly goods just to be normal.
When he was twelve years old, he had asked the endocrinologist in Zurich to promise him that if he ever had children, they would not be dwarfs. The doctor had refused to make such a promise.
Gus had undergone a vasectomy when he was seventeen. By then he knew that he was as tall as he was ever going to be and that his ugly, disproportioned body would be his for life. With his family’s vast wealth, he realized there would be women willing to marry him, but no woman was ever going to love him. He had kept a succession of mistresses, each for a shorter period of time than her predecessor, until he decided to end the practice. For several years now, Felipe-who had served as Gus’s bodyguard/valet since his prep-school days-arranged his sex life for him, booking both the hotel suite and the woman, always in the middle of the night, when it was easier for Gus to slip in and out back entrances unobserved. Because of his short stature, Gus preferred to be in bed when the woman arrived. Nothing pleasured Gus more than watching a beautiful, long-legged woman pleasure him, especially if she was skillful at prolonging the process. He preferred never to have the same woman twice but on occasion broke his own rule. This was Suzette’s fourth time.
Felipe brought his cell phone. “The ranch,” he said.
Gus called Montgomery’s private line.
“Jamie Long is gone,” she said in a near-hysterical voice as soon as she answered the phone.
“Gone?”
“Oh, Gus, I am so dreadfully sorry,” she moaned. “The security office called to say that the front gate had been opened. I went immediately to Jamie’s apartment. She’s gone, Gus,” she said, her voice breaking. “Packed up and gone.”
“On foot?” Gus asked.
“No, in her car,” Montgomery admitted, her words interspersed with gasping sobs.
“Okay, Montgomery, take a deep breath and calm down,” Gus said.
He could hear her sniffling a bit and drawing in her breath. “That’s good,” he said. “Now, how did the girl get access to her car?”
“She demanded that it be brought over here so she could start putting her possessions in it. She said she wanted to be ready to leave here as soon as possible after the baby was born. At first I told her that the car wasn’t in running condition and a part had to be ordered for it. Then I stalled for more time, telling her it was hard to find parts for a car that old. But she went to the motor pool and saw the car up on blocks and covered with dust and realized that no one had touched it in months. She told me that she was going on a hunger strike and wouldn’t eat a morsel of food until the car was up and running and parked out back. I didn’t know she had an extra key to the car,” she moaned, the sobs beginning again. “I’d gone over her apartment with a fine-tooth comb. Not just when you told me to take her copy of the contract. I went through it several times. Every inch of it. And there were no keys. Not a one. I swear there weren’t. I would have taken them if there were.”
“Well, obviously, the girl got the car started some way,” he said, his tone hard and flat.
There were several seconds of silence before Montgomery said, “Yes. Of course, she did.” Her voice was calmer now. Almost too calm. “I am so sorry, Gus. I have failed you and our darling Amanda. And Sonny. I have failed you all, and I want to die. I just want to die.”
Gus took a deep breath in an effort to control his anger. “Now, Montgomery,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “What we need to do is work our way through this. How long ago did the girl leave?”
“Less than thirty minutes.”
“Do you have any idea what caused her to bolt?”
“I think she was getting suspicious. Jamie knew that Amanda was claiming to be pregnant with a baby due about the same time as the one she was carrying. And she got upset when I wouldn’t allow her to call the secretary in Bentley Abernathy’s office and when she realized that she wasn’t really enrolled in the correspondence course. Then she quizzed me about when and how she would receive the money that would be owed to her after the baby was born. She wanted some sort of documentation showing that arrangements had been made and the money would be put in her bank account as soon as the baby was born. I told Amanda to call and reassure her, but I don’t think she ever did. And…” Montgomery paused.
“What?” Gus demanded.
“I probably should have told you sooner, but I didn’t think it was all that important…”
“Told me what?” Gus demanded.
“I think that Jamie may have been up in the tower. That maybe she talked to your mother and saw Sonny.”
“What makes you think such a thing?” Gus asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
“Mary Millicent asked me about the blond pregnant girl,” Montgomery admitted. “She was upset because the girl stopped coming to see her. She said that Jamie was Sonny’s girlfriend and that she was going to have Sonny’s baby.”
“Jesus Christ!” Gus yelled, no longer trying to hold back his anger. “How could my mother have known that? And how did that girl get access to her?”
“I don’t know, Gus,” Montgomery moaned. “Somehow Jamie found the hidden door. I didn’t tell her about it. I swear that I didn’t.”
“You should have put a lock on the door and installed an alarm. Your two most important responsibilities were to keep Mother away from other people and to keep tabs on Jamie Long. Now you call me in the middle of the night to tell me that you have screwed up on both. I counted on you to take care of things down there.”
“I am so sorry, Gus,” she wailed. “I don’t understand how it could have happened. Should I call the county sheriff and tell him Jamie stole the items in the car?” Montgomery asked, her voice frantic. “Or I could send some of our people out to look for her. The weather has turned bad, and she couldn’t have gone very far. I couldn’t let her stop eating, Gus. I was afraid it would hurt the baby.”
“Just shut up, damn it, and let me think!” Gus yelled.
Ann Montgomery dropped the receiver on the floor and put a hand to her throat. She found it difficult to breathe.
Gus had yelled at her. Her darling boy had yelled at her. The boy she had raised and mothered.
He didn’t love her anymore.
She had failed them. Failed Amanda and Gus. And Sonny, too.
She stared down at the telephone receiver. Gus was still yelling, using the Lord’s name in vain, demanding that she pick up the phone and talk to him.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I wanted that baby more than anything.”
Now even if Gus let her stay on at the ranch, she would no longer be in charge. And even if Jamie Long was found and brought back here to have the baby, Ann knew that she might be allowed to spend the rest of her life wiping Mary Millicent’s bottom but she would never be permitted to care for Sonny’s baby.
She stretched out on the bed she had shared with Buck, the bed in which she had birthed his baby. Her poor little dead baby boy. She had bathed his lifeless little body and kissed him all over and smoothed talcum powder on his skin and wrapped him in the blanket she had crocheted for him. When Buck came, she placed the baby in his arms. He told her it was for the best. She hated Buck for saying that, but he had gone with her to the cemetery and dug a grave. And weeks later, a wooden marker with the inscription “Stillborn Baby” appeared on the grave.
For the longest time afterward, Ann would sprinkle talcum powder on her pillow and pretend it was her baby while she rocked it in her arms. And she begged God to please let her baby into heaven, a baby who had been born of sin but had not sinned himself.
After Mary Millicent arrived at Hartmann Ranch, she had asked about the nameless infant buried in the family cemetery. Ann never told her whose baby it was but said that no preacher had ever said words over it. Immediately Mary Millicent grabbed her coat and the two of them marched up the path and knelt beside the little marker, and Mary Millicent Tutt herself, the famous evangelist who had written books on salvation and preached on radio and television and had saved millions of souls, raised her arms heavenward and asked the Lord to hold this baby close and give him everlasting life.
After Mary Millicent gave birth to Gus and Amanda, Ann’s arms didn’t feel so empty anymore. She had Buck’s grandchildren to love. Those were the happiest years of her life. Now every time Ann became exasperated with Mary Millicent, she reminded herself that Mary Millicent had saved her baby’s soul and allowed her to love and mother Gus and Amanda. The call had long since left Mary Millicent, but back then she had the ear of God. Ann had no doubt of that.
The phone was silent now. Gus wasn’t yelling anymore.
She rose from her bed and regarded her reflection once again. So old and ugly. She didn’t want to see that old ugly face ever again.
She walked through the living room of the spacious, beautiful apartment that had never meant as much to her as the creaky old house that used to be out back-where she had lived with her father until he died and Buck had starting coming to her in the night.
She didn’t bother to close the door behind her when she left the apartment for the last time. At the back door, she punched in the security code. She opened the back door, walked down the steps, and crossed the backyard to the side gate by the driveway.
It was starting to snow. The weatherman on television had said it might snow south of here, but not in huge, empty Marshall County, where she had spent her entire life in service of the Hartmann family. And she had allowed her heart to be filled with love for them and had told herself that they loved her in return. But probably they were just using her. Dumb old Ann Montgomery. She had spread her legs for old Buck and raised Mary Millicent’s children and taken care of her when she was old and useless and her children couldn’t deal with her anymore. Ann had run their ranch and kept their secrets. Now she had failed them, and Gus had yelled at her. It felt as though he had stabbed her with a knife. Stabbed her dead.
She knew it must be very cold, but she didn’t feel it. Maybe she was already dead. Maybe she had been dead for years.
She took the winding path up to the windswept little cemetery and opened the iron gate, its rusty hinges squealing in protest. The wind whipped her nightgown around her legs as she walked past Buck’s headstone to the back corner where their baby was buried. She wished she could dig down into the frozen earth to where her baby lay and hold him in her arms while she died. But at least she was close to him. She curled her body around the small headstone and began crooning to her baby. Her pretty little baby boy. His little chest had shuddered. She had tried to breathe for him, tried to put air in his little lungs. But he had never taken a breath. Buck had refused to give him a name, but in her heart she had named him David.
She recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm. Then her mind roamed through the Bible and she recited favorite passages until she realized that light was filling up the sky. The light was warm, and it was coming closer and closer until she was in the middle of a soft warm cloud that smelled of talcum powder.
Almost immediately Gus knew that he had gone too far. It was Montgomery he was yelling at. The woman had practically raised him and Amanda. The woman who loved them completely and would have laid down her life for either one of them.
But he kept yelling, demanding that she answer him, saying that he was sorry, that he loved her. He and Amanda loved her. More than they had loved their own mother. Then he hushed, sensing that she was no longer listening.
He yelled for Felipe to get Kelly on the phone.
“Oh, God,” Gus moaned, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
When Felipe handed him the phone, Gus said, “Kelly, you need to go over and check on Montgomery ASAP!”
“What’s going on?”
“Jamie Long flew the coop, and Montgomery is freaking out.”
Kelly let out a low whistle. “So, that’s who went through the front gate.”
“Apparently so. You have any idea how she managed that?”
“One of the remotes is missing,” she admitted.
Gus resisted the urge to let forth a stream of obscenities. No more yelling. He needed to stay calm. Needed Kelly’s help.
“Go see about Montgomery,” he told her, “and get me the license-plate number on the Long girl’s car. Don’t make a big deal of this, Kelly. If anyone at the ranch asks, just say the girl decided to have her baby elsewhere.”
“Will do.”
“I’m worried about Montgomery,” he admitted. “She was pretty upset when I talked to her. Call me back right away.”