I could imagine Sally’s frustration at being given so little to work with. When she’d called me the night before to offer me the tidbit about Jack Burns himself having rented the plane that took him to his final landing place, perhaps she’d been in search of some additional detail to pad out the story. Accompanying it was the usual grim shot of the two medics loading the covered stretcher into the ambulance. You could tell the covered bundle was sort of flat . . . I gulped and pushed the memory away.
I glanced at the clock. It was a relief to have to look at it again, to have something to plan my days around. I’d resumed working part-time at the library in Lawrenceton four weeks ago when Sam Clerrick had called me out of the blue to tell me his oldest librarian had suddenly turned to him to say, “I can’t shelve one more book. I can’t tell one more child to be quiet. I can’t deal with this new aide. I can’t tell one more patron where the Georgia collection is.”
Left in a bind, Sam had called me since I’d worked for him before. I’d agreed instantly to take the job; and Sam had agreed to see how my working part-time would do, at least while he scouted around to see if anyone wanted to work full-time. So I was working nine to one for five days a week, with one of the days changing every week, since the library was open on Saturdays from nine to one. No one wanted Saturday every week, including me. The aide took over in the afternoons, sometimes in conjunction with a volunteer.
I was ready to go in early. Might as well get the inevitable inquisition from my co-workers over with.
It was a beautiful spring Tuesday, with lots of sun and a brisk cool breeze. Angel was sitting on the steps leading up to the Youngbloods’ garage apartment, looking muddy, the result of pallor under her chronic tan.
“What’s the matter?” I couldn’t remember Angel ever being ill.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The past few days I’ve just felt awful. I don’t want to get up out of bed, I don’t want to run.”
“Do you have a temperature?”
“No,” she said listlessly. “At least, I don’t think so. We’ve never had a thermometer.”
I tried to imagine that. “Did you try to run today?”
“Yeah. I got about half a mile and had to come back.” She was still in her running clothes, sweating profusely.
“Look, let me take you in to the doctor. I’ve got an hour before I really have to be at work,” I said impulsively. I hated to think of Angel driving to the doctor by herself; she was so obviously ill.
“I’ve never been to a doctor except to get stitched up in an emergency room,” Angel said.
“Let me go call him,” I said, when I’d recovered from my shock. “You go take a shower and pull on some slacks.”
Angel nodded wearily and pulled herself up by the railing. She was trudging up the stairs as I went inside to call the doctor and the library. “I promise I’ll work the hours today,” I told Sam. “I just have to take a friend to the doctor. She hasn’t got anyone else.”
“There are disadvantages to having an employee who doesn’t really need the job,” Sam said distantly. “Is this going to be happening much?”
“No,” I said, a little offended, though I knew he was in the right. “I’ll be in on time tomorrow. It’s just today that I’ll be a little late.”
When I got out to my old blue car, Angel was sitting on the passenger’s side in white slacks and a yellow tank top, though it seemed cool for a tank top to me. I remembered how profusely she’d been sweating after her short run. She was leaning her head against the glass of the window.
Angel’s indisposition was worrying me more and more. I’d never seen her anything less than 100 percent physically, and I’d always envied her Superwoman physique—though not enough to work out every day so I’d have one like it. Angel was silent and listless during the short ride into town.
Dr. Zelman’s waiting room was not as full as I’d feared. There were two elderly couples; probably only one out of each pair needed to see the doctor. And oddly enough, there was blond Mr. Dryden, who was arguing with Dr. Zelman’s receptionist, Trinity.
“Would you please inform the doctor that I’m here on official business?” Dryden was saying in an exasperated voice.
“I did,” Trinity said coldly.
I could have given Mr. Dryden some good advice right about then, had he been in the market for it. “Never alienate the receptionist” is the first rule of all those who have a limited pool of doctors to draw from.
“Does he realize that I need to get back to Atlanta very soon?”
“He does indeed realize that.” Trinity’s face under its fluff of brown-and-gray permed hair was getting grimmer and grimmer.
“You’re sure you told him?”
“I tell Dr. Zelman everything. I’m his wife.”
Dryden resumed his seat in a chastened manner. It seemed the only two adjacent seats in the waiting room were the ones next to him. After we’d filled out the necessary “new patient” and insurance forms, Angel and I settled in, with me next to Dryden. I wriggled in my seat, resigned to discomfort. My feet can never quite touch the floor in standard chairs. So I often have to sit with my knees primly together, toes braced on the floor. I was wearing khakis that morning, and a sky-blue blouse with a button-down collar. My hair, loose today since I’d been in a hurry to get Angel to the doctor, kept getting wrapped around the buttons. Since Angel obviously didn’t feel like talking, once I’d disentangled myself I opened a paperback (I always keep one in my purse) and was soon deep in the happenings of Jesus Creek, Tennessee.
“Aren’t your glasses a different color today?” inquired a male voice.
I glanced up. Dryden was staring at me. “I have several pair,” I told him. I had on my white-rimmed ones today, to celebrate spring.
His blond brows rose slightly above his heavy tor toiseshell rims. “Expensive,” he said. “You must have married an optometrist.”
“No,” I said. “I’m rich.”
That kept him quiet for a while, but not long enough.
“Are you the same Aurora Teagarden into whose yard the body fell yesterday?” he asked, when the silence seemed to stretch.
No, I’m a different one. There are several of us in Lawrenceton.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t say anything at the Burns house last night?”
“What was I supposed to say?” I asked, bewildered. “ ‘Gee, Mrs. Burns, I saw your husband’s body. It looked as though someone had run over it with a meat tender izer?’ Actually, she did ask me if he was dead before he hit the ground and I told her I thought he was.”
“I see.”
About damn time.
“However,” he continued, “we need to interview you about the incident.”
I noted the terminology. “Then you’ll have to do it this afternoon. I have to go to work after I take my friend home. And I have to get my husband off to Chicago.” I added this last out of sheer perversity, since Martin, experienced traveler that he was, always packed for himself and drove himself to the airport in a company car, not wanting his Mercedes to be the target of thieves or vandals in the long-term parking lot. The only thing I had to do with Martin’s trips was to miss him.
I’d been missing him a lot lately.
Dryden suggested four o’clock at my house, I agreed, and I returned pointedly to my book. But Dryden had his talking shoes on.
“So, your husband is the plant manager at Pan-Am Agra?”
“His job just got upgraded to vice president in charge of manufacturing.” I turned a page.
“Have you been married long?”
By golly, I was on the verge of being rude. Really.
“Two years,” I said briefly.
Then, thank goodness, Trinity called Angel’s name.
“Please come in with me, Roe,” my bodyguard said quietly.
Considerably surprised, but pleased to be escaping Dryden, I tucked my book in my purse and rose to my feet. Dr. Zelman’s new nurse took over from Trinity, leading us to a cramped examining room with rose-and-blue walls and a table that would barely hold Angel. Something about the nurse seemed familiar. As she talked to Angel about her aches and pains, efficiently taking Angel’s blood pressure and checking her temperature, I realized the woman in white was Linda Ehrhardt, whose bridesmaid I’d been in the long, long ago. She’d been Linda Pocock for years now. As she turned away from Angel, she recognized me too.
After the usual exclamations and hugs, Linda said, “I guess you heard I got divorced and moved back home.”
“I’m sorry. But it’ll be nice to see you again.”
“Yes, that’ll be fun. Of course I brought my children, and they’re in school here now.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten. Was that two girls?”
“Yes, Carol and Macey.” Linda extracted the thermometer from Angel’s mouth and glanced at the reading. She wrote it down on Angel’s chart without a change of expression.
“Mrs. Youngblood, you’ll need to disrobe for your examination,” Linda said rather loudly, as though Angel’s habitual silence meant she was short on wits rather than words. “There’s the cubicle in the corner, just put on one of those gowns.”
Angel glared at Linda after she’d looked at the cubicle, and I had to admit I couldn’t see Angel’s changing in that tiny area as a possibility. But she managed, grumbling to herself. So I wouldn’t be just sitting there listening to her, I brushed my hair with the help of the mirror over the sink, carefully drawing the brush all the way through the mass of streaky brown waves, trying not to break off my ends by pulling the brush out too soon. I gave up when it was flying around my head, wild with electricity. By that time Angel had managed to reensconce herself on the table with the obligatory sheet across her lap, though she was clearly unhappy with the whole situation and not a little afraid.
Dr. Zelman burst in just as Angel was about to say something. He never just came into a room, and he never just left; he made entrances and exits. He almost never closed the door completely, something his nurse or his patient’s friends had to do. (I crept behind him to do it now.) Now in his early fifties, “Pinky” (Pincus) Zelman had worked in Lawrenceton for twenty years, after a short-lived practice in Augusta that had left him inexplicably longing for something more rural.
“Mrs. Youngblood!” he cried happily. “You’re so healthy you’ve never been to see me before, in two years here, I see! Good for you! What can I do for you today?” Dr. Zelman caught sight of me trying to be unobtrusively solicitous, and patted me on the shoulder so heavily I almost went down. “Little Ms. Teagarden! Prettier than ever!” I smiled uneasily as he turned back to Angel.
Angel stoically recited her symptoms: occasional exhaustion, occasional queasiness, lack of energy. I winced when I thought of asking Angel to help me mow the yard the day before. Now quiet and intent, Dr. Zelman began examining her from head to toe, including a pelvic, which Angel clearly hadn’t expected (I hadn’t either) and which she barely endured.
“Well, Mrs. Youngblood,” Dr. Zelman said thoughtfully, rooting for his pencil in his graying hair (it was stuck behind his ear), “it’s really too bad your husband didn’t come with you today, because we have a lot to talk about.”
Angel and I both blanched. I reached out and grabbed her hand.
“Because, of course, Mrs. Youngblood, as I’m sure you guessed, you
are
pregnant.”
Angel and I gasped simultaneously.
“I’m sure you knew, right? You must have missed two periods. You’re at least ten weeks along, maybe more. Of course, with your wonderful physique, you’re not showing.”
“I’m not regular at all,” Angel said in a stunned way. “I really didn’t notice, and it didn’t occur to me to wonder, because my husband . . . has had a vasectomy.”
I sat down abruptly. Fortunately, there was a chair underneath.
For once, Dr. Zelman looked nonplused. “Has he had a recheck done recently?” he asked.
“Recheck? He got snipped! Why should he have a recheck?” For once, Angel’s voice rose.
“It’s wise, Mrs. Youngblood, wise indeed, to have that recheck. Sometimes the severed tubes grow back. I’m sorry I gave you the news so blithely, since it seems you and your husband had not planned to have any children. But a baby’s on the way, Mrs. Youngblood. Well on the way. You’re in such excellent condition and so slim that the baby may not show at all for another month or so, especially since this must be your first pregnancy.”
Angel was shaking her head from side to side, disbe lievingly.
“If your husband wants to talk to me,” Dr. Zelman said gently, “I can explain to him how this happened.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s going to think he knows already,” Angel said dismally. “But I would never in this world . . .” She shook her head, finishing the rest of her sentence in her head.
I had to help Angel dress, she was so deeply shocked. tried not to burble, since she was upset, but I was so excited by proxy that it was hard.
A baby.