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Without taking off her coat, Glory slipped into the sanctuary and settled into a rear pew. On the stage, Mary and Joseph knelt, incognito in their twentieth-century clothes, surrounded by undercover shepherds, wise men and angels.
Jill, wearing a pretty plaid skirt in blues and grays, along with a blouse and sweater in complimentary shades, stood in front of the cast, her long brown hair wound into a single, glistening braid.
“That was fabulous!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “But let’s try it once more. Angels, you need to sing a little louder this time.”
Glory smiled, brushing snow off her coat as Jill hurried to the piano and struck up an encore of “Silent Night.”
The children, ranging in age from five or so to around twelve, fascinated Glory. Sometimes she regretted studying finance instead of education; as a teacher, she might have been able to make up, at least in a small way, for one of the two major losses in her life—she would have gotten to spend time around little ones. As it was, she didn’t even know any kids—they just didn’t apply for fixed-rate mortgages or car loans.
Joseph and Mary looked enough alike to be brother and sister, with their copper-bright hair and enormous brown eyes. Two of the wise men were sporting braces, and the third had a cast on his right arm.
Glory was trying to decide who was an angel and who was a shepherd when her gaze came to rest on a particular little girl. Suddenly she scooted forward in her seat and gripped the back of the next pew in both hands.
Looking back at her from beneath flyaway auburn bangs was the pretty, pragmatic face of Bridget McVerdy, Glory’s great-grandmother.
For a moment the pews seemed to undulate wildly, like images in a fun-house mirror, and Glory rested her forehead against her hands. Almost a minute passed before she could be certain she wasn’t going to faint.
“Glory?” A hand came to rest with gentle firmness on her shoulder. “Glory, are you all right?”
She looked up and saw Jill standing over her, green eyes filled with concern. Her gaze darted back to the child, and the interior of the church started to sway again. Unless Dylan had fathered a baby without ever knowing, or telling his mother and sister…
“Glory,” Jill repeated, sounding really worried now.
“I—I’m fine,” Glory stammered. She tried to smile, but her face trembled with the effort. “I just need some water—”
“You sit right there,” Jill said in a tone of authority. “I’ll get you a drink.”
By the time she returned with a paper cup filled with cold water, Glory had managed to get back in sync with the earth’s orbit, and the feeling of queasy shock in her stomach had subsided.
Talk about your forties movies and Christmas miracles, she thought, her eyes following the child that had to be her own.
Jill excused herself and looked at her watch as she walked up the aisle. Parents were starting to arrive, peering through the sanctuary doors and congregating in the back pews.
“All right, showstoppers,” Jill said, “it’s a wrap, for tonight, at least. Angels, practice your songs. You were a little rusty on ‘It came upon a Midnight Clear.’”
Glory wondered if she’d be able to stand without her knees buckling. She fumbled through her purse for aspirin and took two tablets with what remained of her water.
Just then, the little girl on the stage broke away from the other angels and shepherds and came running down the aisle, grinning.
Glory’s eyes widened as her daughter drew nearer and nearer, turned slightly in her seat to see her fling her arms around a man clad in blue jeans, boots and a sheepskin coat.
Jesse.
“Hi’ya, Munchkin,” he said, bending to kiss the child where her rich, red-brown hair was parted.
Glory’s mouth dropped open. He knew, she thought frantically. Then she shook her head.
He couldn’t know; fate couldn’t be that cruel. His grandfather wouldn’t have told him, Dylan hadn’t known the truth, though he might have guessed, and Delphine had been sworn to secrecy.
At that moment Jesse’s maple-colored eyes found Glory’s face. They immediately narrowed.
Glory felt no more welcome in the First Lutheran Church than she had in the cemetery the day before. She sat up a little straighter, despite the fact that she was in a state of shock, and maintained her dignity. Jesse might be sheriff, but that didn’t give him the right to intimidate people.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. After raising the collar of his macho coat, he turned his attention back to the child, ignoring Glory completely.
“Come on, Liza,” he said, his voice sounding husky and faraway to Glory even though she could have reached out and touched the both of them. “Let’s go.”
Liza. Glory savored the name. Unable to speak, she watched Jesse and the child go out with the others. When she turned around again, Jill was kneeling backward in the pew in front of Glory’s, looking down into her face.
“Feeling better?”
Glory nodded. Now that the initial shock had passed, a sort of euphoria had overtaken her. “I’ll be fine.”
Jill stood, shrugged into her plaid coat and reached for her purse. “Jesse’s looking good, isn’t he?”
“I didn’t notice,” Glory replied as the two women made their way out of the church. Jill turned out the lights and locked the front doors.
Her expression was wry when she looked into Glory’s eyes again. “You were always a lousy liar, my friend. Some things never change.”
Glory started to protest, then stopped herself. “Okay,” she conceded, spreading her hands wide, as Jill led the way to a later-model compact car parked at the curb. She was too shaken to offer an argument, friendly or otherwise. “He looks terrific.”
“They say he’s never gotten over you.”
Glory got into the car and snapped her seat belt in place. Strange, she’d spent the past eight years thinking about Jesse, but now a gangly child with auburn hair and green eyes was upstaging him in her mind. “The little girl—Liza. Where did she come from?”
Jill started the engine and smiled sadly before pulling out into traffic. “You remember Jesse’s big brother, Gresham, don’t you? He married Sandy Piper, from down at Fawn Creek. They couldn’t have children, I guess, so they adopted Liza.”
Glory let her head fall back against the headrest, feeling dizzy again. The car and Jill and even the snowy night all fell away like pages torn from a book, and suddenly Glory was eighteen years old again, standing in Judge Seth Bainbridge’s imposing study….
She was pregnant, and she was scared sick.
The judge didn’t invite her to take a chair. He didn’t even look at her. He sat at his desk and cleaned out his pipe with a scraping motion of his penknife, speaking thoughtfully. “I guess you thought you and your mama and that brother of yours could live pretty high on the hog if you could just trap Jesse, didn’t you?”
Glory clenched her fists at her sides. She hadn’t even told Jesse about the baby yet, and she figured the judge only knew because he and Dr. Cupples were poker buddies. “I love Jesse,” she said.
“So does every other girl between here and Mexico.” At last, Jesse’s grandfather raised sharp, sky-blue eyes to her face. “Jesse’s eighteen years old. His whole life is ahead of him, and I won’t see him saddled to some social-climbing little chippie with a bastard growing in her belly. Is that clear?”
The words burned Glory, distorted her soul like some intangible acid. She retreated a step, stunned by the pain. She couldn’t speak, because her throat wouldn’t open.
The judge sighed and began filling his pipe with fresh tobacco. The fire danced on the hearth, its blaze reflected in the supple leather of the furniture. “I believe I asked you if I’d made myself clear, young lady.”
Glory swallowed hard. “Clear enough,” she got out.
The defiance he’d heard in her tone brought the judge’s gaze slicing to Glory’s face again. He and Jesse had a tempestuous relationship, but he obviously regarded himself as his grandson’s protector. “You’ll go away to Portland and have that baby,” he said. He waved one hand. “For all I know, it could belong to any man in the county, but I’m taking you at your word that Jesse’s the father. I’ll meet all your expenses, of course, but you’ve got to do something in return for that. You’ve got to swear you’ll never come back here to Pearl River and bother my grandson again.”
She was trembling from head to foot, though the room was suffocatingly warm. “When I tell Jesse about the baby,” she dared to say, “he’ll want our child. And he’ll want me, too.”
Judge Bainbridge sighed with all the pathos of Job. “He’s young and foolish, so you’re probably right,” the bitter old man concluded. He shook his head mournfully. “You leave me no choice but to drive a hard bargain, Missy. A very hard bargain, indeed.”
Glory felt afraid, and she wished she hadn’t been scared to tell Dylan about her pregnancy. He would have gotten mad all right, but then he’d probably have come with her to answer Judge Bainbridge’s imperious summons. “What are you talking about?”
The most powerful man in all of Pearl River County smiled up at Glory from his soft leather chair. “Your brother—Dylan, isn’t it? He’s had a couple of minor scrapes with the law in recent months.”
Glory’s heart pounded to a stop, then banged into motion again. “It wasn’t anything serious,” she said, wetting her lips with a nervous tongue. “Just speeding. And he did tip over that outhouse on Halloween night, but there were others…”
Since Jesse had been one of those others, she left the sentence unfinished.
The judge lit his pipe and drew on the rich, aromatic smoke. He looked like the devil sitting there, presiding over hell, with the fire outlining his harsh features. “Dylan’s about to go off to the air force and make something of himself,” he reflected, as though speaking to himself. “But I guess they wouldn’t want him if he were to be caught trying to break into a store or a house.”
Glory felt the color drain from her face. Everybody knew Judge Bainbridge owned the sheriff and the mayor and the whole town council. If he wanted to, he could frame Dylan for anything short of murder and make it stick. “You wouldn’t—Judge Bainbridge, sir, my brother doesn’t have anything to do with—”
He chuckled and clamped down on the pipe stem with sharks’ teeth. “So now I’m ‘sir,’ am I? That’s interesting.”
Glory closed her eyes and counted methodically, not trusting herself to speak. She was afraid she’d either become hysterical or drop to her knees and beg Jesse’s grandfather not to ruin Dylan’s chance to be somebody.
“You will leave town tomorrow morning on the ten o’clock bus,” the judge went on, taking his wallet from the inside pocket of his coat and removing two twenty-dollar bills. “If you stay, or tell Jesse about this baby, your brother will be in jail, charged with a felony, before the week is out.”
Glory could only shake her head.
Seth Bainbridge took up a pen, fumbled through a small metal file box for a card, and copied words and numbers onto the back of an envelope. “When you arrive in Portland, I want you to take a taxi to this address. My attorneys will take care of everything from there.”
She was going to have to leave Jesse with no explanation, and the knowledge beat through the universe like a giant heartbeat. Just that day, out by the lake, they’d talked about getting married in late summer. They’d made plans to get a little apartment in Portland in the fall and start college together. Jesse had said his grandfather wouldn’t like the idea, but he expected the old man to come around eventually.
All that had been before Glory’s appointment with Dr. Cupples and the summons to Judge Bainbridge’s study in the fancy house on Bayberry Road.
“I won’t get rid of my baby,” she said, lifting her chin. Tears were burning behind her eyes, but she would have died before shedding them while this monster of a man could see her.
Bainbridge’s gaze ran over her once, from the top of her head to the toes of her sandals. “My lawyers will see that he or she is adopted by suitable people,” he said. And with that he dismissed her.
“Glory?”
She was jerked back to the here and now as the car came to a lurching stop in Jill’s slippery driveway. She peered through the windshield at a row of Georgian condominiums she’d seen that morning, while driving around and reacquainting herself with the town. There had been lots of changes in Pearl River over the last eight years; the sawmill was going at full tilt and the place was prosperous.
Jill strained to get her briefcase from the back seat and then opened the car door to climb out. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re wondering how I could afford a condo on a teacher’s salary, aren’t you?”
Actually Glory hadn’t been wondering anything of the sort, but before she could say so, Jill went rushing on.
“Carl and I bought the place when we were married,” she said, slamming her door as Glory got out to follow her inside. “When we got divorced, I kept the condo in lieu of alimony.”
The evergreen wreath on Jill’s front door jiggled as she turned the key in the lock and pushed.
“I guess that’s fair—” Glory ventured uncertainly.
“Fair!” Jill hooted, slamming the door and kicking off her snow boots in the foyer. “I should hope so. After all, Carl makes five times as much money as I do.”
Glory laughed and raised her hands in surrender. “I’m on your side, Jill. Remember?”
Jill smiled sheepishly, and after hanging up her coat and Glory’s, led the way through the darkened living room and dining room to the kitchen. “I thought I’d make chicken stirfry,” she said, washing her hands at the sink.
“Sounds good,” Glory replied. “Anything I can do to help?” She felt like a mannequin with a voice box inside. She said whatever was proper whenever a comment was called for. But her mind was on Liza, the little girl she’d been forced to surrender to a pack of expensive lawyers nine years before.
Jill shook her head and gestured toward the breakfast bar. “Have a seat on one of those stools and relax. I’ll put water in the microwave for tea—or would you rather have wine?”
“Wine,” Glory said, too quickly.
Although she didn’t make a comment, Jill had definitely noticed Glory’s strange behavior.
Nevertheless the two women enjoyed a light, interesting dinner. After a couple of hours of reminiscing, Glory asked Jill to take her back to the diner.
Glory didn’t even pretend an interest in going upstairs to her mother’s apartment. She plundered her purse for her keys and went from Jill’s car straight to her own.
The sports car wasn’t used to sitting outside on snowy nights, instead of in the warm garage underneath Glory’s apartment complex, but it started after a few grinding coughs. Glory smiled and waved at Jill before pulling onto the highway and heading straight for the sheriff’s office.
The same deputy Glory had encountered earlier that day—she saw now that his name tag said Paul Johnson—was on duty at the desk when she hurried in out of the cold.
It took all her moxy to make herself say, “I’d like to see Sheriff Bainbridge, please.”
Deputy Johnson smiled, though not in an obnoxious way, and glanced at the clock. “He’s gone home now, Glory.”
Of course. Glory remembered that Jesse had been dressed in ordinary clothes when he’d come to the church to pick up Liza, instead of his uniform. “He still lives out on Bayberry Road, with his grandfather?” she asked, hoping she didn’t sound like a crazy woman with some kind of fatal attraction.
The deputy plucked a tissue from a box on the corner of the desk and polished his badge with it. “The judge has been in a nursing home for five years now. His mind’s all right, but he’s had a couple of strokes, and he can’t get around very well on his own.”
Glory skimmed over that information. She couldn’t think about Seth Bainbridge now, and she didn’t want to take too close a look at her feelings about his situation. “But Jesse lives in the Bainbridge house?”
Officer Johnson nodded. “Yep.” He braced his chubby hands on the edge of the desk, leaned forward, and said confidentially, “Adara Simms will be living out there with him soon enough, unless the missus and I miss our guess. Jesse’s been dating her since she moved to town last year. ’Bout time they tied the knot.”
Glory did her best to ignore the unaccountable pain this announcement caused her. She nodded and smiled and hurried back out to the parking lot.
The snow was coming down harder than before, and the wind blew it at a slant. The cold stung Glory’s face and went right through her coat and mittens to wrap itself around her bones.
The downstairs windows of the big colonial house that had been in the Bainbridge family ever since Jesse’s great-great-grandfather had founded the town of Pearl River glowed in the storm. Glory parked her car beside Jesse’s late-model pickup truck and ran for the front porch.
She pounded the brass knocker against its base, then leaned on the doorbell for good measure.
“What the—” Jesse demanded, pulling a flannel shirt on over his bare chest even as he wrenched open the door. He was already wearing jeans and boots. “Glory,” he breathed.
She resisted the temptation to peer around his shoulder, trying to see if the woman Deputy Johnson expected him to marry was around. “Is Liza here?” she asked evenly.
Grimacing against the icy wind, Jesse clasped Glory by one arm and wrenched her inside the house. “No,” he said, on a long breath, after pushing the door closed. “I have legal custody of Liza, but she spends most of the time in town, with my cousin Ilene. I’m always getting called out in the middle of the night, and I don’t want to leave her alone.” He buttoned his shirt and shoved one hand self-consciously through his hair.
Jesse Bainbridge looked for all the world like a guilty husband caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Glory didn’t care if she’d interrupted something. “Did you know?” she demanded, taking off her coat.
“Did I know what?” Jesse frowned, looking agitated again.
It was possible, of course, that he really hadn’t learned who Liza was, or even that Glory had borne him a child, at all; but it seemed unlikely now. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Jesse and his grandfather had been in this together from the beginning.
