A new day was dawning, and the storm was over.
She covered the mattress with a fresh blanket, wrapped a quilt around her shoulders, and turned her attention to the fire, leaving a trail of blood with every step she took. She stuffed the towel she had used to clean the baby between her legs, knelt in front of the fireplace, and blew on the coals. The blowing took such effort. And she felt so weak. But somehow she found the strength to blow again and was able to ignite a fresh wad of cotton batting. Then she continued blowing until it was safe to add more wood.
She closed her eyes, relishing the blessed heat that the fire emitted and worrying that the smoke from the chimney could be seen from the road.
She couldn’t stay here long. Just a few hours to get her strength back.
With the fire going, she turned her attention back to the baby. His eyes were open. “Hello, little guy,” she said. “I’m your mother.”
Chapter Twenty-three
GUS WAS BACK at Victory Hill sitting at his desk when the phone rang. He grabbed it and barked, “Yes.”
“Montgomery is dead,” Kelly’s voice reported.
Gus closed his eyes and slumped back in his chair. “Dead?”
“Yeah. Sorry it took so long. We searched the house from top to bottom. Then we spread out over the grounds, but the weather’s turned bad. A regular blizzard. One of the gardeners finally found her in the family cemetery completely covered over with snow. All she had on was a nightgown. She was lying with her arms around the marker for the stillborn baby.”
So that’s whose baby was buried there. Montgomery’s. But he couldn’t think about that now. At some later time, maybe he would process the information. Right now he had to deal with the situation at hand.
“And the girl?” he asked.
“I sent two men out in a truck with snow chains. They managed to get all the way to Alma and didn’t see a sign of her. The service station was closed but they asked at the truck stop. Lots of truckers and travelers are holed up there. No one had seen her.”
“How bad are the roads? Could she have even gotten that far?”
“I suppose, but I don’t see how she could have gotten any farther. The interstate and state roads are closed.”
“Who says?”
“The highway patrol. They aren’t allowing any traffic onto the interstate. Apparently there’re dozens of jackknifed eighteen-wheelers. I’m thinkin’ maybe she headed north, in which case she might have beat the weather. Hard to say.”
“Send men out on horseback. And get hold of someone in that little town north of there.”
“Monroe?”
“Yeah. Monroe. Call law enforcement in any town where she might be holed up, but tell them not to approach the girl. Tell them she’s a psycho and may be armed. They’re to keep her under surveillance and notify you.”
Jamie cleaned the baby with warm water from the pot by the fire. Then she cleaned herself as best she could.
She had torn down there, and blood was flowing. More than when it was her period. A lot more. She tore a blanket into sections that she could fold into pads.
She winced as she wiped the blood off her buttocks and thighs, which were covered with bruises from her slips on the ice while unloading the car and gathering wood. Her shoulder also was badly bruised, and the lump on her forehead was excruciatingly tender.
She pulled on the same maternity jeans and top she’d been wearing, then let Ralph outside and closed the door.
In a few minutes, Ralph announced his return. She put out food and water for him and drank some water herself and ate a couple of crackers. Then she put more wood on the fire, curled up with her baby in her arms, and closed her eyes. Soon she would have to decide what came next, but right now she did not have the strength.
She slept off and on, waking to put more wood on the fire, change the makeshift pad between her legs, and make sure the baby was still breathing before surrendering once again to sleep.
Midday, the baby began to cry.
Probably he needed to be nursed. But how did one do that?
She wrapped him in a fresh towel, then bared a breast and propelled her nipple into his mouth, but he did not take hold. She changed positions and tried again, speaking words of encouragement. Still no luck. In desperation, she rubbed the nipple back and forth over his lips. He would suck a few times and then stop. She tried the same maneuver again and again, hoping he was getting something. Then she held him in her arms and surrendered herself once again to sleep.
It was dark when she nursed him again, this time with seemingly better results. While he nursed, she tried to plan.
She hoped that Kelly and Montgomery hadn’t discovered that she was missing until morning and assumed she was already hundreds of miles away. She doubted if anyone would be looking for her this close to the ranch. Maybe she should just stay here for another day or two and give the roads a chance to clear.
Except she needed to find someone to stitch her up and either reassure her that the heavy flow of blood was normal or do something to stop it. And she needed baby clothes and diapers. Needed to buy a book on how to take care of a baby. Needed to find a place to stay. And a computer. A new name. And a cup of hot coffee would be really nice.
What choice did she have but to press on? Just the thought of loading her things back into the car made her exhausted, but she really should leave while it was dark. If she waited until tomorrow evening, she would have to find more firewood, and she had already scavenged most of the wood around the house. To find more, she would have to go farther out and leave the baby here alone. Besides, eventually someone was going to notice the smoke coming from the chimney.
Leaving the baby on the mattress, she ate a couple of granola bars and drank a bottle of water. Then she bundled up the bloodied towels and bedding and stuffed them into the trunk. After carrying her other possessions out to the car, she tidied up the house as best she could, collecting the trash in bags and putting them in the car to be discarded later.
By the time she was finished, she was exhausted and the baby was crying.
Once again she offered a breast to him. This time he grabbed hold like a little piglet. And Jamie laughed out loud.
“We learn fast,” she told him. How beautiful he was, she thought as she looked down at him. How perfectly beautiful. Her baby. She was a mother now. Not a surrogate mother. An honest-to-gosh mother. She would die before she let anyone take him away from her.
When he seemed to have finished nursing, she put the baby in a nest she had made for him among the items piled on the backseat. Ralph jumped into the front seat.
She got in the car and took a last look at the house, thinking of the long-dead family that had once lived here. Their house had saved her life and that of her baby.
She drove with her headlights on low beam, crawling along at a snail’s pace, almost sliding off the road several times. Once, she saw headlights up ahead and panicked, but the vehicle turned and headed toward a cluster of lights a half mile or so off the road.
At dawn she met a pickup truck. She could tell that the driver was an elderly person with frail, hunched shoulders.
The sun had cleared the horizon when she met a second pickup, this one driven by a man wearing a cowboy hat. He raised a finger from the steering wheel by way of a greeting. Jamie nodded then watched in the rearview mirror, half expecting him to turn around and chase after her.
She drove a bit faster now that it was daylight. The roadbed was covered with loose snow but not icy. After an hour or so, she reached the intersection with U.S. 54. Just a few more miles and she would be leaving Marshall County. Forever.
The lone service station in the tiny town of Monroe was closed, but it took less than an hour to reach Stratford, where she stopped at a convenience store. She filled the gas tank and purchased diapers, baby wipes, Kotex, and a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Back in the car, she diapered the baby and wrapped him in the last clean towel. Then she drove around to the back of the store and deposited her trash bags in a Dumpster.