Enchanting Baby

CHAPTER TWO

AS SOON AS THE DOOR CLOSED behind the men, Lydia Kane and her staff rushed into the waiting room where the two mothers were clutching their toddlers to their pregnant bellies.

“Everything’s all right.” Lydia stretched her arms forth. “He’s gone now. Is everyone okay?”

“We’re fine,” both of the patients answered at once, but their expressions remained wide-eyed and fearful.

“Was that guy dangerous?” one of them asked.

“I hope not,” Lydia soothed. “But we couldn’t take any chances. We have a patient here who has a restraining order against a stalker back in Denver, so we can’t be too cautious.” She turned to her staff. “Lenora, why don’t you go ahead and move these clients back to exam rooms where they can be more comfortable?”

As soon as the patients were gone, the receptionist, Trish, covered her mouth in shame. “I shouldn’t have put her real last name on the board.”

Lydia patted her shoulder. “It’s been a hectic day and you were just following the routine.”

“Don’t worry, Trish,” Katherine said, adding her reassurances. “While Lydia was calling the cops, I called Ashleigh and warned her. Another officer went out to the Coleman cabin while Miguel was on his way here.”

“Still, that awful man saw her name. Now he knows she’s in Enchantment!” Trish wasn’t going to forgive herself so easily.

“You had no idea he’d look back there,” Katherine reassured her further.

“I’m so glad you were alert!” Trish’s shoulders relaxed a bit.

“Yes. Good job, Katherine.” Now Lydia patted the midwife’s shoulder.

“And you did the right thing, Lydia.” Katherine smiled at her boss. “If that is the stalker, thank God Miguel has hauled him off.”

“Yes.” Lydia looked out the window as the cruiser pulled away. “Miguel Eiden isn’t about to let that guy hurt anybody.”

THE POLICE STATION WAS BACK on the main drag, Paseo de Sierra. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains so that Greg couldn’t see much through the grimy rear windows as they pulled into the gravel parking lot. But it looked like the police department was connected by a short breezeway to the civic complex that housed the library and the chamber of commerce. The building was a timber-and-adobe structure that looked as if it had been restored and added onto a couple of times.

The cop took him inside and led him down a narrow hallway to a tiny office, brightly lit and sparsely furnished. He unlocked the cuffs and said, “Take out your driver’s license and have a seat.”

Greg pulled his license out of his billfold, then sat down in a folding chair at a bare utilitarian table. A yellow legal pad and pen were already in place there.

The cop removed his cowboy hat and pitched it onto the table. Before he sat down he snatched up a beige wall phone.

“Ernesto? Miguel here. I’ve got the guy in the interrogation room. Go ahead and start the tape.”

“Tape?” Greg said, “You’re taping me? Isn’t that illegal?”

The cop pulled a wry smile. “Get real.” He checked Greg’s driver’s license, then sat in the chair facing him.

“This is unbelievable.” Greg leaned forward in his chair while the cop scribbled some notes. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

A pretty young woman stuck her head in the door. “Officer Eiden—” her voice was saccharine sweet “—you want this?” She waved a sheaf of papers at Miguel. Without looking up from what he was writing, the cop held out a hand and she took her time sauntering the few steps across the room to deliver the papers.

“Thanks, Crystal.” Giving his full attention to the papers, the cop dismissed her.

But she lingered at Miguel’s shoulder, giving Greg an avid once-over. “You think this is the guy?”

The cop cut her a sharp glance. “Crystal. You can go now.”

She swished out, and the cop perused the pages, occasionally stopping to copy something he’d read onto the legal pad. He looked like he was about Greg’s age—early thirties, maybe. In this part of the country there were a lot of people of Navajo descent, and this man’s bronze skin and straight dark hair hinted at this heritage. When he finished reading he made a two-fingered signal at a picture-window-size mirror set into one wall, then he favored Greg with a cool, assessing squint. “I suppose you think just because this is a small town, we don’t tape perps?”

“So I’m a perp?”

“You tell me.” The cop looked at his watch and jotted something else on the yellow pad.

“What is it that you want me to tell you?”

Still writing, Miguel said, “Just answer a few simple questions…and don’t forget to smile for our camera.”

Greg refrained from waggling a sarcastic wave at “Ernesto,” who was evidently already videotaping from beyond the dark glass.

“What’s your full name?”

Through the Plexiglas in the cruiser Greg had seen Officer Eiden writing down the tag number on his Navigator, and he assumed what the cop had in his hands was an NCIC report—and maybe some additional information from the Denver police. But Greg knew this tactic. The cop would make notes of Greg’s answers to see if they jibed with the official report. “Gregory McCrae Glazier.”

“Age.”

“Thirty-four.”

“Occupation.”

“Land developer.”

The cop calmly jotted down this answer without comment. A lot of people didn’t know what a “land developer” did—buying and opening up new plots of land for housing and business. Greg was anxious to skip ahead. While this cop was playing twenty questions, Ashleigh Logan could be crossing another state line.

“And—” Greg leaned forward, hoping this would help move the process along “—at one time I was a deputy sheriff.”

This, the cop did not calmly jot down. He fixed his gaze on Greg. “Was? Are you retired? Ex-cop? What?”

Greg was well aware that within the brotherhood of the badge, the difference between an ex-cop and a retired cop was vast. An ex-cop was suspect. Had he been drummed out of the force? Had he screwed something up bad? Couldn’t he handle it?

“I’m an auxiliary deputy, but for all practical purposes I’m inactive.”

The cop frowned. “From what agency?”

“The sheriff’s department out in Last Chance, Colorado. My dad was the sheriff until he got killed in the line of duty. My grandfather was the sheriff before him. I guess you could say I inherited the job.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“Technically, I didn’t quit. I had to spend all of my time in Denver for a couple of years.” When Kendra’s kidneys had failed entirely, he’d moved her near the dialysis center. “I found a good replacement, a foreman on my ranch. Ever since, I’ve been inactive.”

He might as well have quit. Greg was through with law enforcement. He had stopped trying to fill his father’s shoes as soon as he found out how sick Kendra was. Playing deputy and keeping the ranch going in the years after his father died had siphoned off precious time that he should have spent with Kendra. Time he could never regain. But to keep from having to explain all of that to this cop, he gave the simple answer. “I still carry a commission card.”

And my gun, he added mentally. He wasn’t sure that fact would win points with this guy, either. “But I don’t do much duty.”

Eiden was a bit of a bulldog. “Why not?”

“It’s pretty quiet where I’m from. The sheriff only calls us if he needs backup on something. Not much call for crowd control out in Last Chance.”

“Okay. I get it.” Eiden scribbled another note. “So, how long have you been a deputy?”

“Since I was nineteen. I was sworn in right after my father was killed.”

“In the line of duty, you say?”

“Yeah. It was a long time ago.” Greg was growing impatient. It was, indeed, a long time ago. And they were all gone. His dad. Kendra. Gramps. All that mattered now was the baby.

Eiden was studying him with the instinctual squint of a cop who suspected he wasn’t getting the whole story, but Greg was in no mood to share. The fact that he’d made a lot of sacrifices—including his ability to father a child—in his desperate but futile battle to save Kendra’s life was nobody’s business.

“Why am I here?” Greg was anxious to focus the conversation back into the now.

The cop put his pen down. “Ms. Kane told me you came to the clinic looking for a woman, someone you believe is one of her clients.”

Greg frowned, thinking, So? What a weird little burg this was. “Do you haul everyone who walks into that clinic looking for someone over to police headquarters for interrogation?” It was all so bizarre that Greg couldn’t help adding, “Is that some kind of crime in Enchantment, New Mexico?”

“Would you mind giving me the woman’s name?”

“Ashleigh Logan. The one with the TV show.”

Greg noticed Officer Eiden didn’t have to write that down. He waved the pen. “I know who she is. Why are you looking for her?”

“It’s personal.” That answer had seemed sufficient at the clinic. Well, no, it hadn’t. The people at the clinic had called the cops.

And this cop, evidently, didn’t like that answer, either. “I can detain you if you don’t cooperate with me, Mr. Glazier.”

“On what charges?” Greg wondered if he should call his lawyer, who was all the way back in Denver.

“I said detain. I didn’t say arrest. If you’re a deputy you know that I can put you in investigative detention. Now, I think you’d better tell me what business you have with Ashleigh Logan.”

If Lydia Kane’s furtive behavior hadn’t convinced Greg that the woman he was seeking had, indeed, come to Enchantment to hide, this cop’s pressure tactics sure did. Greg had the creeping sensation that he was dealing with something sinister here. That thought sent a chill through him, because if Ashleigh Logan was in some kind of danger, so was the child inside of her—his child.

The cop’s eyes glittered like dark polished stones while he waited for Greg to answer. No one, Greg decided, could look more threatening.

“Look,” Greg said, trying to sound reasonable. “I need to find Ms. Logan for reasons that are mine alone. It’s something between the two of us. Is she in some kind of trouble or something?”

“I asked you why you’re looking for her.”

“I’d rather not say. I need to explain the full situation to her first. She deserves that much. Like I said, it’s personal.”

The cop leaned forward and braced his elbows on the table with his smooth brown hands fisted together over the legal pad. “You her boyfriend or something?”

Greg took a measure of the guy, deciding whether to trust him or not. Miguel Eiden seemed solid and clean cut. Except for a scar on his square jaw that looked as if it’d been earned in a fight. So maybe the guy had a bit of a history. Didn’t everybody?

Eyeing him, Greg bet his top stud horse that the guy knew exactly where Ashleigh Logan was.

And if Ashleigh Logan was in Enchantment, the sooner he talked to her, the better. He had tried not to let himself consider this possibility, but if Ashleigh Logan had already found out about the disastrous mistake…well, she might do something rash if she was devastated enough. He had to make her see that there was more at stake than she knew. He suppressed his fears by reminding himself that she was the star of a show about having babies, and that her own unorthodox pregnancy had already been highly publicized. How would it look to her viewers if cute, bubbly Ashleigh Logan opted for a late-term abortion? And The Birth Place clinic didn’t look like the kind of place where a woman would come for such a procedure, anyway. Still, Greg couldn’t quell a certain sense of urgency. This was his child, the only child he would ever have. He had to ask.

“You know where she is, don’t you?”

Miguel Eiden’s mouth formed a tight line. “I asked you a question, Mr. Glazier. What is your relationship to Ashleigh Logan?”

They had clearly reached a Mexican standoff, and since the cop had the gun on his hip, Greg was bound to lose. He decided he’d have to tell the guy the truth if he was ever going to get out of here.

“I don’t have a relationship with her. We’ve never even met.”

The cop’s frown deepened.

Greg could see he was going to have to tell the guy all of it. “This has to be kept confidential.”

The cop leaned back and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “I’m a police officer, not a gossip columnist.”

Right. As if Greg needed reminding. “Ms. Logan is pregnant.”

The cop gave him a sarcastic frown that said, duh. Ashleigh Logan had chronicled every step of her pregnancy on her nationally syndicated cable TV show for all the world to see. “And?” Eiden pressed.

“The baby is mine.”

The cop’s eyebrows shot up. He dropped his threatening pose and his expression became incredulous as he leaned forward. “I thought you said you’ve never met her.”

“I haven’t.”

“Then you’d better tell me what gives, Mr. Glazier.” He leafed through the papers as if he’d missed something. “’Cause this deal is sounding stranger by the minute.”

Greg sighed, suddenly feeling beaten down by the combined effects of his bizarre situation and the nagging altitude sickness. “Strange isn’t the word for it. Seems like my whole life has been strange, and incredibly unlucky.”

“I wouldn’t call you unlucky, exactly.” The cop continued to study the printout. “I guess you realize we ran an NCIC on you. They had your prints—your being a deputy and all. And Denver had more.”

Greg nodded. The visit to the sister. Why were the cops so interested in him? Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe he should be asking why they were so interested in Ashleigh Logan.

Eiden went on. “In the last two years you’ve made a killing off the property boom around Denver. You’ve been in the news a few times, doing civic stuff. On paper, you look like a real Boy Scout, unless you count a couple of speeding citations that you racked up out on Highway 63. Running back and forth to your ranch out on the Big Sandy, I’d guess.” The corners of Miguel Eiden’s mouth peaked downward grudgingly, as if to say Greg’s profile was no big deal.

“Yeah, that about sums me up.” Greg raked a hand over his face. Except for the fact that the love of his life had died a painful death at the age of twenty-nine, and his father had been shot dead by a pack of rodents, and his druggie mother had skipped off with some hippie when Greg was barely out of diapers, leaving him to be raised by his eccentric grandfather. “Could I please have some water?”

The cop went to the beige wall phone. Soon the flirtatious Crystal showed up with a plastic cup of ice water. Greg drank some, then started in. “When she decided to have a baby, Ms. Logan went to the sperm bank where she had stored her deceased husband’s sperm.”

The cop looked genuinely surprised at that, but he muttered, “To each his own.”

“So, she got artificially inseminated and she thinks she is pregnant with her late husband’s child. But I found out that’s not true. They made a mistake. The child is mine. I came here to tell her that.”

The cop’s face showed that something had finally clicked. “And that’s why you were trying to contact Ms. Logan in Denver?”

Greg nodded and the cop made a note. Greg hated to see this information go on record before he’d had a chance to explain this to Ashleigh Logan, but he supposed there was no help for it.

“You plan to tell her there was a mix-up at the sperm bank?”

“For starters.”

“Is there some way for me to verify your story?”

“I could put you in touch with the sperm bank in California. They would back up my story if I told them to release the information to you.”

“Okay.” Eiden poised his pen. “Give me the number.”

Greg pulled a card from his wallet and handed it over.

After he copied the number, Eiden said, “Okay. We’re done for now. I’ll take you back to your Navigator.” His chair screeched on the linoleum as he stood and reached for his cowboy hat.

“Wait!” Too fast, Greg also jumped to his feet. A wave of dizziness struck as he felt himself break into a cold sweat. A sudden sense of panic mixed with altitude sickness for a moment as he clutched the table and focused on the fact that he wasn’t going to leave here until he found out where Ashleigh Logan was. He had to say something to convince this cop that he needed to know where she was, right now. “There’s something else you should know.” He shook his head to clear it.

One of the cop’s black eyebrows spiked up. “You okay?”

“Altitude sickness.”

“Sit down.”

Greg did so, gratefully. He sipped some more cold water, then said, “This pregnancy—this baby. This is it for me. I won’t get any more chances. The sperm bank…mine’s all gone. They, uh, they accidentally let it…uh, defrost.”

The cop looked as if he was struggling to hide a split second of involuntary disgust, then his dark eyes flitted sideways with something like sympathy. “I get it.” He tugged his cowboy hat down, looking uncomfortable, embarrassed, as if he didn’t like discussing another guy’s sterility problems. Well, Greg didn’t like talking about it, either. But there it was. He was sterile. Though he wasn’t about to explain to this guy how that had come about. The salient fact was, this baby, Ashleigh Logan’s baby, was Greg’s one and only chance to be a father.

“Weird deal, huh?” he prompted when the cop didn’t say anything.

Eiden looked up.

“So maybe you can understand why this is so urgent to me,” Greg pressed. “What if she finds out the truth before I get to her? What if she’s come here to do something…rash?”

Eiden put a hand up. “They don’t do stuff like that at The Birth Place.” He looked at Greg as if he wanted to tell him more, as if he wanted to help. “Are you staying somewhere in town?”

“I was thinking about getting a room at that bed-and-breakfast down the way.”

The cop looked at his watch. “The Morning Light?”

Greg nodded.

“We’d better get you over there, then. Morning Light fills up pretty early during aspen-turning time.” He tugged on the brim of the cowboy hat.

“Aren’t you going to tell me where she is?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Glazier. For tonight, I want you to sit tight, okay? I’ll give you a call as soon as I clear up a few details.”

THE SUN HAD SLID BEHIND the mountains now.

After dropping Greg in the circular drive at the clinic, the cop waited, gunning the engine of his cruiser, with the alley lights blazing on Greg’s back as he walked up to the door of the Navigator. Greg wondered what the guy thought he was going to do. Break into the clinic? Rifle through the file cabinets? Dig out Ashleigh Logan’s records? Not a bad idea, actually. He assumed it was frustration that was making him think like this.

Greg got in his vehicle and fired it up, wondering if this whole odyssey was worth the grief. Maybe he should just head back to the family ranch and forget about this baby—if indeed there still was a baby.

The people at California Fertility Consultants had refused to give Greg the name of the man whose sperm had been confused with his, had refused to confirm that Greg’s sperm had indeed been used to inseminate some unknown woman. It was only the intense publicity surrounding Ashleigh Logan’s pregnancy that had finally tipped him off. When he’d seen the name of the clinic in that article in USA TODAY, he’d figured out the dates—her husband’s sperm would have been stored at about the same time his was. The article said the sperm bank was proud of the fact that they had successfully stored specimens for that long. Well, their storage techniques weren’t the problem. It was what they had done when they put the “specimens” into storage that had caused the damage.

Now two lives were thoroughly messed up. No, make that three lives. At first Greg had wanted to sic his lawyers on the idiots at that sperm bank, but after he’d calmed down, he’d realized that the threat of a lawsuit was his trump card. And he’d used it well.

Why, he asked himself again, was he doggedly pursuing this baby at all? It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to occupy his time between the ranch and his business pursuits in Denver, especially now that Gramps had passed on. But the sad reality was that even though there was plenty of work to do, plenty to distract him out in Last Chance, Colorado, there was not a soul to share it with. There was no one to love.

In the last few years Greg Glazier’s world had narrowed down to two things: horses and money. Neither one seemed like enough of an anchor to hold him for the next forty or fifty years of his life. Hell, if he was anything like Gramps—and he was—his life might go on for another sixty years. Family, Gramps had kept repeating in his final days, whispering it over and over in the end, like a parting prayer. Family.

Greg drove the Navigator like a little old lady as Officer Eiden followed him back down Desert Valley Road into the center of town. After he turned off of Paseo de Sierra onto the short street that led to the Morning Light, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that the cop was gone, but he hoped he hadn’t seen the last of that guy. The cop knew where Ashleigh Logan was.

Greg had no trouble relocating the bed-and-breakfast he’d spotted earlier. He stepped through the door and headed toward reception. A rambling adobe villa with huge bougainvillea plants hanging from the eaves, stuffed with antiques, Pueblo pots and Indian trade blankets, the Morning Light was the kind of charming place that would have made Greg feel right at home under normal circumstances.

But tonight, the serene atmosphere did nothing to settle Greg’s churning thoughts. He followed a friendly older woman to an upstairs room, where he tossed his duffel bag into the closet and threw himself down to brood in a sagging horsehair chair by the darkened window.

Right now he’d like nothing better than a good stiff shot of his grandfather’s whiskey. But he was too nauseated to tolerate it, and what if the cop, finally willing to give him Ashleigh Logan’s location, called? He wanted to be ready to jump back in the Navigator and go straight to her.