Jeremy waited in the car, sitting with his eyes closed, leaning wearily on the headrest. He didn't look up as I climbed into the car and switched on the ignition.
"I'm still scared, Mr. Beaumont," he said doggedly. "And I feel so damn helpless."
It might have been only three days since I'd first met him, but Jeremy no longer seemed like a kid to me. Maybe we both were growing up. Tragedy had temporarily scrubbed the wedding, but I sensed Jeremy Todd Cartwright III was a keeper. Bearing that in mind, it wouldn't do to have him calling me Mr. Beaumont for the rest of our lives.
"We're all scared, Jeremy," I assured him. "And by the way, call me Beau, would you? Everybody else does."
He sat up then and glanced in my direction. "Having a baby…I just never thought about it that much before. You have to take her home, feed her, take care of her, read to her, teach her things, help her grow up. How do you know what to do so you don't hurt her? What if she gets sick? I mean, being a father is just overwhelming, isn't it?"
"I'll say," I agreed, with remarkable restraint.
We were quiet, both of us presumably musing about the responsibilities of fatherhood. At least, that's what I was doing. When Jeremy spoke again, though, he changed the subject. "I hear they arrested Tanya. Do the cops really think she killed both those people?"
"That's the general idea."
"Not Tanya," Jeremy said decisively. "Never in a million years. She wouldn't do such a thing. She's one of the kindest people I know. She won't even kill a spider. She carries them outside. I've seen her do it."
Jeremy didn't know even the barest surface of Tanya Dunseth's real story, and I wasn't at liberty to tell him. There's a pervasive belief that the kinds of abuse suffered by Tanya Dunseth provide a fertile breeding ground for many of society's psychopathic killers. And there's a common tendency to forgive the trespasses of those once-tormented children. I had learned that myself when it came to Anne Corley.
To Jeremy I said, "Not killing bugs doesn't necessarily translate into not killing people, but Tanya claims she's innocent."
"What's going to happen to Amber in the meantime?" he asked.
"She'll be all right." I explained our hastily arranged child-care program.
Jeremy shook his head. "It's not fair. Tanya's worked so hard. Now she's going to lose everything, probably even Amber."
"We're working on the problem," I said.
And "we" were. My use of the plural pronoun was accidental. I realized only after the fact that I actually meant it, that I was now a committed member of the Save Tanya Dunseth Movement. Roped into the program reluctantly at first, now I qualified as a full-fledged volunteer along with Ames and the people who offered to baby-sit.
I asked Jeremy if he wanted to come by Oak Hill and visit with some of his friends, but he declined. He was scheduled for Majestic Tuesday afternoon. He wanted to get some rest.
The idea of rest-of crawling into a bed and actually sleeping-seemed uncommonly sensible. In fact, I was more than ready for an entire night's worth of serious shut-eye myself, but it didn't turn out that way. To begin with, Ralph was back at Oak Hill when I returned from the farm.
I asked how things were going, and he gave me a surprisingly dour response. "Not so good."
"Why? What's the matter?"
"Fraymore found a note in Daphne's sweater pocket signed by Tanya. It says to meet her at the house after the play. Or maybe it says after Juliet. I'm not sure, because I didn't see the note itself. Fraymore is sending it out for fingerprint analysis."
"Does Fraymore know about the rest of it? About the Daphne-Shore connection and that bastard in Walla Walla?"
Ralph nodded. "Tanya told him. I figured we'd be better off telling him before he learned about it himself. Not that it made any difference. The arraignment's sometime late tomorrow."
"Any hope of posting bond?"
"What do you think?"
"I agree," I told him. "It was a dumb question. Not even Ralph Ames is that much of a miracle worker." Ralph greeted that with a sickly smile.
"What about Child Protective Services?" I asked. "When do you think they'll get into the act?"
"I've held them off for the time being," he said, "but I don't know for how long."
All in all, it wasn't an uplifting conversation. Later that night when I tried to go to sleep, Ralph's comments kept replaying themselves in my head, giving me something constructive to worry about. The two of us together hadn't been able to save Anne Corley, and I doubted we'd be able to rescue Tanya, either.
The other obstacle to sleeping was Amber. Florence of Oak Hill is a miracle worker in her own right, but only up to a point. She hadn't been able to conjure a crib out of thin air on such short notice. There was a second bed in the Iris Room-a twin-but it had no sides. There's a good reason cribs and playpens are made the way they are. It's hard to keep a rambunctious two-year-old confined to a bed with no rails.
So Amber Dunseth slept in Alex's and my queen-sized bed. With us. Between us, actually.
"I'm sorry," Alex said as we lay in bed with a restless and still wide-awake child wiggling between us. "I shouldn't have interfered, especially not when you already had so much going on."
Amen, I thought. I said, "It has been one hell of a day."
"Do you think Ralph will be able to help Tanya?"
"I doubt it."
"Oh," she said.
Any more than I had with Jeremy, I wasn't free to tell Alex the details of the harrowing story Ralph and I had heard from Tanya. I had no right to. If she chose to reveal that part of her history to others, that was her choice. It wasn't up to me to make that decision for Tanya Dunseth, not even with Alexis Downey.
"Couldn't Ralph do one of those plea-bargain things?" Alex asked much later. "They're in the news all the time. Maybe Tanya suffers from some form of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and it caused her to go temporarily insane."
On the face of it, temporary insanity really wasn't totally out of the question for a change-if she had done it, that is. But I kept going back to Tanya's insistence that Martin Shore hadn't hurt her, that he and Daphne had, in their own dreadful way, made her life better. They had rescued her from a hellhole of unremitting abuse.
I could understand how the shock of seeing Daphne Lewis might trigger the return of Tanya's loathsome memories and allow her to see into a murky past she had obscured in an effort to survive. Yes, it must have been terrible to recall all those years of pain and degradation. But if Tanya really was the kind of person who avoided killing spiders, why would she set out to murder the very people who once helped her? What was the point?
If she was going to go against her own beliefs and kill someone, why mess around with Daphne Lewis and Martin Shore when she could instead go after someone who really deserved it-like her father, for instance?
With those conflicting thoughts circling in my head, sleep became more and more elusive. When I dozed at all, it was on tiptoes for fear of crushing Amber. Several times I woke up in a panic and lay there listening for the sound of her breathing, afraid that something had happened to her while I slept. Once or twice a baby knee or elbow dug deep into my gut and shocked me awake. How do pregnant mothers ever get any sleep?
So much for yet another romantic night in Ashland, Oregon, I told myself grouchily around 4:00 A.M. Next time, we could just as well bring Hector along. That cat is trouble, but at least he's trouble of a predictable nature. When everything else seems strange and out of control, it's nice to have something you can count on, something whose behavior you can predict with reasonable accuracy.
In a universe awash in uncertainty, there's reassurance in knowing that some things in life are unchanging, that they respond in an entirely preordained fashion, even if it's only to bite a chunk out of your naked toes.