Teddi had taken only a few steps when an arm reached out of the shrubbery and grabbed her.
She hardly had time to gasp when Jason said urgently in her ear, “Where are you going?”
“He was here, Dora’s accomplice. He headed off that way on foot. I thought I’d better follow him. Where were you? I thought you were going to come as soon as I blew the whistle!”
“I’ll explain later. I’ll follow the guy. That’s him at the corner, isn’t it? You stay here and keep an eye on Dora.”
He let go of her arm and was gone before she could protest.
Teddi stared after him, her pulse still racing. What could Jason do if the man realized he was being followed? Was Dora’s accomplice likely to be violent?
There wasn’t much she could do about it now. Though if Jason didn’t come back soon with an explanation, would she have to call the police? She didn’t know what she’d tell them, or what information she had that would enable them to rescue him if he’d gotten into trouble.
She was trembling as she let herself back into the darkened kitchen. What a mess it all was, and now she’d dragged Jason into it, too. His folks would kill her if anything happened to him.
Dora’s TV was still playing, and so was Mamie’s music. This was too small a house to hold two simultaneous sources of sound, Teddi thought wearily. Well, maybe it would soon be over, this farce of Dora being Ricky’s widow. But would things ever get back to normal, as she and Mamie had known it before Dora came? She didn’t really see how they could.
Her eyes were stinging as she moved toward the lighted part of the house.
Mamie wasn’t reading. She was sitting with a big photograph album on her lap, looking at the pictures. She looked up and saw Teddi and smiled.
She held a loose snapshot in her hand. “Isn’t it funny? You think you’ll remember some things forever, but you don’t. After a while you forget. Ricky and Ned looked so much alike at the same ages that if I hadn’t written on the backs of their pictures to identify them, I wouldn’t be sure now which of them it is.”
And suddenly the idea was there, fully formed, in Teddi’s mind. It startled her so much that for a moment she was unable to speak.
Beside her, Dora’s door opened and she emerged and headed for the bathroom.
Obviously she hadn’t expected Teddi to be standing there, for she jumped and swerved to keep from walking into her. But she didn’t pass before Teddi saw that she’d been crying.
Somehow she hadn’t expected tears. It made Teddi feel funny in a way she couldn’t have explained.
Mamie got up from her chair, setting the album aside, retaining only the single snapshot. She came into the hallway to join Teddi, saying, “Sometimes I can figure it out from the background, something else in the picture. I think this one is of Ricky, because he was three the year I grew the dahlias that took first place at the county fair. See how big they were?”
Water flushed in the bathroom, and after a moment Dora came out. She murmured, “Excuse me,” and would have walked past them to return to her own room if Teddi hadn’t spoken.
“Mamie’s found another picture of Ricky when he was little. Don’t you think Danny looks a bit like him?” Her mouth was dry as she told the lie, but it had the desired effect. Dora stopped, automatically looking at the snapshot in Mamie’s extended hand.
Teddi swallowed hard and tried to sound natural. “He was so cute, wasn’t he? He was such a good-looking guy, I always thought. It was a shame he got so badly scarred in that accident last year.”
She caught Mamie’s startled expression, but Mamie didn’t say anything. Dora’s mouth sagged open. “Scarred . . .” she echoed faintly.
“He was lucky to find a girl like you,” Teddi persisted, “who didn’t care about the scars on his face.”
Dora licked her lips uncertainly. “Uh . . . yeah, I guess.”
“They didn’t matter to you, did they?” Teddi said insistently.
Dora drew in a shallow breath, and her head moved slowly from side to side. “No. No, they didn’t.”
There was a perceptible silence. Relief, welcome yet strangely painful, swept through Teddi’s body. She shifted her gaze to Mamie, to see how she was taking this.
As she’d more or less expected, there were tears forming in Mamie’s eyes. But she wasn’t shocked enough to be falling apart, only deeply saddened. She looked directly into Dora’s face, and her voice was oddly compassionate.
“You never even met my son Ricky, did you, Dora?”
Consternation swept over Dora’s countenance. She put one hand to her throat and made a choking sound.
“I think,” Mamie said, with more control than Teddi felt, “that we’d all better sit down. We have some talking to do. Maybe it would help to have some cocoa. Let’s go out in the kitchen. Teddi, will you get down the mugs, and I’ll do the hot chocolate.”
Dora sank onto a chair, her face chalky. “How did I give myself away?”
Teddi set out the thick mugs, overcome by thankfulness that Mamie hadn’t fallen apart. She didn’t know what she would have done in that circumstance. She herself was feeling incredibly weak in the knees.
“You accepted the idea of the scarring,” Teddi said.
“Was Ricky’s face badly scarred?” Dora was bewildered, taken off balance.
“No,” Teddi told her. “Ned was the one in the accident. He went through a windshield. He’s been having plastic surgery for it. But when Mamie said how much the boys looked alike, it occurred to me that if you were an imposter, you wouldn’t know whether Ricky was scarred or not. Unless you were the one who sold him the insurance policy, so you saw him then.”
Dora reminded Teddi of a balloon with a slow leak. She was perceptibly deflating before their eyes. “No. You’re right, I never met Ricky. It was Roger who sold him the insurance policy.”
“Who’s Roger?” Mamie asked, adjusting the heat under the milk she’d poured into a saucepan. “Danny’s father?”
“My husband,” Dora admitted in a small voice. “He worked in the insurance booth. He wasn’t very busy right then, and he and Ricky talked. The plane went down so soon afterward, and Roger said wouldn’t it be funny if any of the people who were killed were ones who’d bought insurance from him. Someone like Ricky, who hadn’t seen his family for quite a while, someone single. And then when he checked on the list of survivors, and Ricky wasn’t on it. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she swallowed.
“Roger saw an opportunity for fraud,” Mamie said. Mamie didn’t sound angry, exactly, though there was now an edge to her voice. “He thought maybe if you could convince Ricky’s mother that you’d been married to him, you could get your hands on that insurance money. And maybe more, if I had anything else. He knew I’d be excited . . . any mother would be . . . to think I had a grandchild coming. So you showed up and claimed to be Ricky’s wife.”
“I didn’t really want to do it,” Dora said forlornly. “But it was true, we needed money, and Roger said it would be easy.” She gave a bitter laugh that held no humor. “Easy! Having the baby all by myself because I didn’t dare go into a hospital with no identification and no insurance except under the wrong name! He said I couldn’t take a chance on talking too much if they gave me anything for pain and I didn’t keep my head clear, so I had to have the baby at home.”
Mamie spooned cocoa mix into each of the mugs, then poured the milk into them. When Dora made no move to touch hers, Mamie put the pan back on the stove and stirred the hot chocolate for her, pushing it toward her.
“Drink it. It will do you good.”
Mamie was astounding, Teddi thought. Imagine, talking this way after what Dora had done! As if she still cared about this young woman who had tried to cheat her.
There was pain in Mamie’s face, yes. Teddi could see it. But not the kind of complete disheartenment she had imagined. “How long have you known she wasn’t really Ricky’s wife?” Teddi demanded abruptly.
“Oh, dear. I was a little bit suspicious at the beginning, until I saw that marriage certificate. I haven’t seen anyone’s proof of marriage for years. I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. Where did you get it?”
Dora was visibly shrinking in her chair. “Roger made it. On his brother’s computer.”
“I guess I was still a bit uncertain,” Mamie said. “Which is, I suppose, why I never even called Ned about her, not even after the baby came.” She’d brought a bag of marshmallows to the table and dropped them into each of the cups, then slumped into her own chair. “There were so many things. She was nearly ready to give birth to a child, yet Ricky hadn’t written to me about a marriage. He never did write much, but surely he would have called me? That really bothered me, but it was possible, I supposed. A lot of men don’t stay in touch with their families, even when there’s been no estrangement. They mean to, but they just don’t get around to doing it. Look how seldom we hear from Ned. The trouble was, too, that I wanted so badly to believe this was Ricky’s child. I let myself overlook some of the indications that there was little proof.”
“I told Roger it wouldn’t work.” Dora sounded sullen now, again near tears. “There would be too many things I wouldn’t know. He said I’d be able to get you to talk enough to find them out. He said once the baby was born, we’d be able to twist you around our little fingers. You’d be besotted with him. I never heard that word before, but that’s what he said. Besotted.”
“And what was supposed to happen then?” Mamie asked, sipping at her cocoa. “When I became besotted with the baby? Were you going to stay here indefinitely? Let me help raise him and support both of you?”
“We were going to figure out a way to get the insurance money. I’m not sure how, but Roger’s smart. He’d have worked out something.”
“Forge a will leaving everything to my grandson?” Mamie asked with a wry twist of her mouth. “Maybe even arrange an accident for me, to make sure you didn’t have to wait too long to inherit?”
Alarm brought Dora’s head up. “No! We’d never have done anything like that!”
Wouldn’t they? Teddi wondered. She didn’t like Roger much. She suspected that he would have been capable of almost any action to get what he wanted. A moment later Dora confirmed this.
“I wasn’t supposed to have to stay here very long,” Dora said. “I told him I couldn’t, and he said I wouldn’t have to. He didn’t like the job at the airport, and he said if we had the insurance money he could quit and we’d go somewhere else. I hoped he’d decide it would be okay to keep the baby with us if there was enough money—”
Mamie’s voice cut sharply through her words. “Did you consider not having the baby?”
“I didn’t. Roger was annoyed when I told him I was pregnant. He said babies are expensive, and messy, and fussy. First he suggested I get rid of it, before it was born, but I refused to do that. He still didn’t want it, so when he came up with this idea, I let him talk me into it. I thought this would solve everything until I got up here, and the baby was born, and then he started talking about . . .”
She broke off, her eyes filling once more with tears.
Mamie was gentle now. “What did he talk about, Dora? That you couldn’t bear to think of?”
“He said you’d maybe want to take Danny and raise him. So we wouldn’t have to. He said if we couldn’t get the insurance money any other way, you’d probably hand it over in order to keep him. If you thought he was your grandchild, I mean.”
“And how did you feel about giving away your child?”
Dora didn’t seem to notice anything odd about Mamie’s voice, but Teddi did. There was an icy edge to it that Teddi had never heard before.
“I told him I wouldn’t do it. I refused to talk about giving the baby away. I hung up on him the last time, and then he came up here to talk to me in person. He thinks he can sweet-talk me into anything.”
“And can he?” It was still there, velvet over a hint of ice, or steel. Maybe steel, Teddi thought.
Dora was suddenly ferocious. “Not this time. I’m not giving away my baby.”
In the ensuing silence, Teddi sipped at her hot chocolate, glad it was almost hot enough to burn. Dora had been found out. There wasn’t much she could do, now, was there? No matter what the unknown Roger wanted.
Mamie finally spoke. “How do you feel about being married to a man who doesn’t want you to keep your child?”
“Right this minute,” Dora said with a spark of anger, “I’d like to strangle him.”
“But you can’t do that. So what will you do?” Mamie asked.
For a moment Dora looked confused, as if she’d forgotten that the original plan was now in a shambles. Then, as full comprehension swept over her, she muttered, “I don’t know.”
“Do you want to be married to a man who refuses to let you keep your baby? Or risk staying with him when he resents the child and might abuse it?”
Obviously the idea had not occurred to Dora. Color flooded her pale face. “I’d never let anybody hurt Danny!”
A knock on the back door made their heads turn in that direction to see Jason’s face through the window. Teddi got up to let him in.
He stepped into the kitchen, uncertain at seeing them all sitting companionably, as it must have seemed, around the table.
“Uh . . . maybe we’d better talk outside,” he told Teddi.
She stared at the red welt across his forehead. “What happened to you? Did . . . did Roger attack you?”
“Roger? Is that his name? The guy I was chasing?”
Dora stood up, nearly spilling her cocoa. “You were chasing Roger?”
Mamie rose, too. “What’s going on? Is Roger here?”
“He came to demand that I go out and talk to him, later. After you were all asleep. About . . . what we were going to do next.” Dora was still flushed, from embarrassment this time. It was clearly difficult for her to adjust to the realization that none of the things she and Roger had planned were going to happen. “Why were you chasing him?”
“Did he hurt you?” Teddi demanded, still held by the red welt.
“No, he never even saw me. He had a car parked around the corner. I got the license number, for what that’s worth. It’s an old Camaro. California plates.” His gaze settled on Dora. “I think the rest of you know something I don’t.”
“I’ll explain it in a minute,” Teddi assured him. “What happened to your forehead?”
“That’s why I was late getting here after you whistled. My little sister left a skate on the stairs and I didn’t bother turning on the hall light because I was in a hurry. I stepped on the skate and fell.” He touched the raised weal. “I think this was from the edge of the railing. Who’s Roger?”
“My husband,” Dora said almost inaudibly.
“So Danny’s not Ricky’s kid at all.” Jason’s gaze swept from one of them to the other.
“No,” Teddi said. Dora looked so woebegone, she almost felt sorry for her.
Apparently Mamie felt some pity for her, too. “It was a terrible thing to do,” she said without rancor, which Teddi thought was pretty big of her.
Dora nodded. Twin tears slid down her cheeks, which were back to their normal pallid state. She raised her palms to wipe them off.
“You made so many mistakes,” Mamie went on. “You didn’t know much about my son, and what you did express was wrong. Did you just expect me to accept you as Ricky’s widow with so little proof? Only a faked marriage license, no picture of him, and that insurance policy? I wanted Danny enough so that I almost decided to take him on whatever terms I could get him, even if you were a fraud.”
Teddi wanted to reach out and hug her, as Mamie would have done had their situations been reversed, but she felt frozen into immobility.
“I called the number he’d given for a home phone,” Mamie continued, “and got his landlady. He was living in a rooming house, and she didn’t know anything about a wife. She knew he’d been killed in that plane crash, and she didn’t know where to send his belongings. I asked her to ship them to me here. How could you possibly have thought you would get away with it, Dora?”
More tears followed the first ones. After a moment, Mamie dug into a pocket for a handkerchief and passed it over.
Dora mopped ineffectually at her face and blew her nose. “What are you going to do? Are you going to have us arrested?”
“I think we need some help in dealing with Roger, at least. Where’s he staying?”
Dora shrugged. “Just in his car, I think. He probably doesn’t have the money for a motel.”
“Why did you risk stealing money from me, when getting caught would have blown your whole scheme? Did you think I wouldn’t miss a twenty-dollar bill, nor notice when it was put back?”
“I put it back,” Dora said defensively. “I didn’t really steal it.”
“But why did you take it in the first place?”
“I needed to talk to Roger. I had to call him. There were too many things I didn’t know what to do about. I thought she”—and here she looked at Teddi—“was looking at me suspiciously and I didn’t know what to do. I knew it would cost more to call than I had in coins; I had to have enough for a long conversation, and I didn’t dare call from the house. It would have showed up on your phone bill.”
“So how were you able to put the money back?” Teddi asked.
“I tried to get change for the twenty at the gas station, but the attendant said his money was all locked up at night. So he told me I could make a collect call without having to have any cash. I didn’t break the twenty.”
“When are you supposed to meet Roger?” Mamie asked. “And where?”
Dora gulped pathetically. At least it would have seemed pathetic if she hadn’t tried to do such a rotten thing to Mamie. “Midnight. He said he’d be parked around the corner again.”
Mamie looked past Dora to Teddi and Jason. “I think it’s time to call my lawyer. It’s kind of late, but Joe’s a friend from church. I think he’ll advise me even at this time of night. This needs to be reported to the police, Dora. You can’t attempt fraud and extortion this way and expect not to have to face the consequences.”
Dora’s face crumpled, and she slid back into her chair and leaned forward over the table, sobbing softly.
In the adjoining room, Danny began to wail.
“I’ll get him,” Teddi offered, and hurried to scoop the infant out of his basket.
“Poor little toad,” she whispered into his soft hair. “What’s going to become of you?”
It was a problem for which there seemed to be no immediate solution. The baby was taken to his mother to be fed. Dora took him back to her room, tears soaking her shirt front, while Mamie talked on the phone.
Jason was looking at his watch as she hung up and announced that both the lawyer and the police would be at the corner at the appropriate time.
“My folks will be wondering what’s going on. I’d better check in with them. But if it’s okay with you, Mrs. Thrane, I’d kind of like to stick around and see what happens.”
Mamie nodded, then, when Jason was gone, addressed Teddi. “You knew the money had been taken out of the jar, too, didn’t you? Yet you didn’t tell me about it.”
“I was afraid you’d think that I’d taken it,” Teddi admitted, flushing.
Mamie gave her a hug. “No, no, dear, I never thought that for a minute. If we’d shared our suspicions, I guess we’d have brought this to a conclusion a lot sooner.”
“I knew you wanted Danny to be your grandson,” Teddi said. “I thought it would hurt you terribly to realize he wasn’t.”
Mamie released her. “Oh, I did want him to be Ricky’s child. But there were so many things that didn’t fit. I guess right from the beginning, before he was even born, I doubted Dora’s story. But I felt sorry for her. She was going to have a baby, and she appeared to be all alone and desperate for help and a place to stay. God forgive me, but there were moments when I seriously considered letting her get away with it, and pretending Danny really was mine, too.”
“What’ll happen to Danny if his parents go to jail?” Teddi asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know. He’ll need to be cared for, one way or another. I don’t know if they’d let me take him or not. I’ll have to ask Joe about that.”
Teddi stared at her in wonder. “You’d keep him? Even knowing what’s happened?”
“It’s not his fault. I do love him, you know. The same as I’d love any child who needed me, and I think Danny does right now. For a while, at least. Teddi, I have a splitting headache. Would you massage my temples the way you do, see if we can make it back off?”
When Jason came back, he and Teddi and Mamie sat around the kitchen table, waiting for whatever would happen with the lawyer and the police. Dora sat by herself in the rocker in her room, holding the baby, unable to stop weeping.
When Mamie’s friend Joe finally stopped by the house, it was nearly two A.M.
“He was there, in his car, right where he said he’d be. Offered no resistance. Do you want them to take the girl in tonight, too?”
“I don’t think she’s a flight risk,” Mamie decided. “Leave her here until morning. Then we’ll go down to police headquarters together, if that’s all right? I’d like to have you there, too, Joe. What about the baby, if both its parents are in jail? Can you do anything to arrange for us to keep him here? She’s nursing him, but I wouldn’t think she’d want to take him to jail with her. We’d have to get bottles and formula, that kind of thing, before Dora and Danny are separated.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Joe said gruffly.
When he had gone, Jason stood up and stretched. “Well, I’d better head for home before my dad calls the cops after me. I guess tomorrow’s going to be pretty busy. You think we’d better postpone the tennis lesson?”
“Yeah,” Teddi agreed. She couldn’t even think about tennis until this matter was settled.
“But I’ll talk to you in the afternoon, okay? When you know what else is going to happen.”
“I’m counting on it,” Teddi told him, smiling for what seemed to be the first time in a long while.
She walked with him to the back door.
“Boy,” Jason said on his way out, “wait’ll I tell my cousin Jenny what came of those things I wanted her to investigate. Even if Mamie had already called his landlady.”
She’d have to tell Callie all the details, too, Teddi thought. But for tonight, she thought she was going to go upstairs and offer a prayer of thanks that she was still here, and Mamie was okay, and even Danny would probably be all right.
“Good night,” she told Jason quietly as she closed the door behind him and locked it.
Mamie was standing there, waiting, when she turned. Without words, they went into each other’s arms. They stood that way for what seemed a long time, tears running down both their faces, until finally Mamie drew back and reached for the box of tissues on the counter.
“I suppose we ought to get some sleep,” Mamie said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a very long day.”
“I don’t know if I can sleep,” Teddi said uncertainly. “Mamie, could we just sit and talk a little longer?”
“How about if we lie on my bed, with just a night-light on, until we get sleepy?” Mamie suggested.
And so they did, and before Teddi drifted off she heard Dora in the room across the hall, making small sounds as she put Danny back in the bassinet.
Teddi’s emotions were in such turmoil, she couldn’t sort them out. Not tonight. But Mamie would be there tomorrow, and Mamie would make it all come out as right as it could, for Dora and Danny and herself.
And for me, Teddi thought. And for me.
And she slept without dreaming and without fear.