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Dekker had seen way too much in his life. He’d been a detective with the OCPD before Stacey died. He’d quit the department during the tough time that followed. But before that he’d seen too many examples of the terrible things people can do to each other. Now he worked on his own as a private investigator, which gave him an ongoing opportunity to witness more of man’s inhumanity to man. Sometimes he saw trouble coming whether it was on the way or not.
Joleen put on a confident smile. She was going to do her best to make things work with the Atwoods. It was her duty, as the mother of their grandchild.
She could stand up just fine under Robert Atwood’s cold looks and demanding ways. What could he really do to her, after all? She held all the power, when it came to their relationship with Sam.
She would not abuse that power. But she wouldn’t let Robert Atwood walk all over her, either.
Joleen found the Atwoods waiting by the back door. They followed her into the kitchen and on to the central hall, where Uncle Hubert’s snoring could be clearly heard through the open door to the living room.
Joleen held up a hand. “Just one minute.”
The Atwoods stopped where they were, at the foot of the stairs. Joleen moved to the living room doorway. Uncle Herbert lay just as she and Dekker had left him two hours before, faceup on the couch, his stocking feet dangling a few inches from the floor. Gently she closed the door.
“This way.” She led Sam’s grandparents across the hall to the room her father had used as his study. She reached in and flicked the wall switch. Four tulip-shaped lamps in the small chandelier overhead bloomed into light.
The room was as it had always been. Samuel Tilly’s scarred oak desk with its gray swivel chair waited in front of the window. His old medical books and journals filled the tall bookcases on the inner wall. There was a worn couch and two comfy, faded easy chairs.
“Have a seat.” Joleen closed the door.
The Atwoods did not sit.
They stood in the center of the room, between the couch and her father’s desk. Robert looked more severe than ever. And Antonia, hovering in his shadow as always, looked nothing short of bleak—too pale, her thin brows drawn together. She had clasped her hands in front of her. The knuckles were dead white.
Joleen said, “Antonia? Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes. Fine. Just fine…”
“But you don’t look—”
Robert interrupted, “My wife says she is fine.”
“Well, I know, but—”
“Please. I have something of real importance to propose to you now. I’ll need your undivided attention.”
Joleen did not get it. Antonia looked positively stricken, and all her husband could think about was what he wanted to say? A sarcastic remark rose to her lips. She bit it back. “All right. What is it, Mr. Atwood?”
Robert cleared his throat. “Joleen, after the spectacle I have witnessed today, I find I cannot keep quiet any longer. I have come to a difficult but important decision. It is painfully obvious to me that my grandson cannot get the kind of upbringing he deserves while he is in your care. Antonia and I are prepared to take him off your hands. I’m willing to offer you five hundred thousand dollars to sign over custody of young Samuel to me.”
Chapter 3
Joleen forgot all about Antonia’s distress. She could feel her blood pressure rising. So much for trying to make it work with the Atwoods.
She spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m sorry. I’m sure I could not have heard you right. You did not just offer to buy my baby from me—did you?”
Antonia squeaked. There was no other word for it, for that small, desperate, anguished sound. She squeaked and then she just stood there, wringing her hands.
Robert, however, had no trouble forming words. “Buy your baby? What an absurd suggestion. Of course, I’m not offering to buy Samuel. What I am offering you is a chance. A chance to do the right thing. For your child. And for yourself, as well.”
“The right thing?” Joleen echoed in sheer disbelief. “To sell you my baby is the right thing?”
Robert waved a hand, a gesture clearly intended to erase her question as if it had never been. “I know that you have never attended college—except for a year, wasn’t it, at some local trade school?”
“Who told you that?”
“I have my sources. Now you will be able to finish your education. You’ll be able to do more with your life than run a beauty shop.”
“I happen to like running a beauty shop.”
He looked vaguely outraged, as if she had just told an insulting and rude lie. “Please.”
“It’s true. I love the work that I do.”
He refused to believe such a thing. “I am offering you a future, Joleen. You are a young, healthy woman. You will have other children. My son only had one. Antonia and I want a chance to bring that one child up properly.”
“Meaning I won’t bring Sam up properly.”
“My dear Joleen, you are twisting what I’ve said.”
“I am not twisting anything. I am laying it right on the line. You don’t think I will bring my son up right, so you want to buy him from me.”
“You are overdramatizing.”
Joleen, who, since the loss of her kind and steady father a decade before, had always been the calmest person in her family, found it took all of her will not to start shrieking—not to grab the brass paperweight on her father’s desk and toss it right in Robert Atwood’s smug face.
“My offer is a good one,” Robert Atwood said.
Joleen gaped at him. “I beg your pardon. It is never a good offer when you try to buy someone’s child.”
“Joleen—”
“And what is the matter with you, anyway? Your ‘offer’ is bad enough all by itself. But couldn’t you have waited a day or two? Did you have to come at me on my sister’s wedding day?”
“Please…” croaked Antonia. She looked as if she might cry.
Robert put his arm around her—to steady her or to silence her, Joleen wasn’t sure which. He held his proud white head high. “Once we’d made the decision, the sooner the better was the way it seemed to me. Might as well make our position clear. Might as well get you thinking along the right track.”
A number of furious epithets rose to Joleen’s lips. She did not utter a one of them—but she would, if this man went on saying these awful things much longer.
This conversation can only go downhill, she thought. Better to end it now.
“Mr. Atwood, I’m afraid if you stay very much longer, I will say some things that I’ll be sorry for. I would like you to leave now.”
Antonia made another of those squeaky little noises. Robert squeezed her shoulder and said to Joleen, “I want you to think about what I’ve said.”
I am not going to start yelling at this man, she told herself silently. She said, “I do not have to think about it. The answer is no. You cannot have my child. Not at any price.”
Robert Atwood stood even taller, if that was possible. “My dear, I would advise you not to speak without thinking.”
“Stop calling me that. I am not your dear.”
“Joleen, I am trying to make certain that you understand your position here.”
Joleen blinked. This had to be a nightmare, didn’t it? It could not be real. “My position?”
“Yes. You are an unwed mother.”
Unwed mother. The old-fashioned phrase hurt. It made her sound cheap—and irresponsible, too. Not to mention a little bit stupid. Someone who hadn’t had sense enough to get a ring on her finger before she let a man into her bed.
Maybe, she admitted to herself, it hurt because it was all too true. She had not been smart when it came to Bobby Atwood. Which seemed funny, at that moment. Funny in a sharp and painful way. A tight laugh escaped her.
“Don’t try to make light of this, Joleen.”
The urge to laugh vanished as quickly as it had come. “I promise you, Mr. Atwood. I am not makin’ light. Not in the least.”
“Good. For child care, you rely on your family members, and they are not the kind of people who should be caring for my grandson.”
Joleen thought of that paperweight again—of how good it would feel to grab it and let it fly. “You better watch yourself, insultin’ my family.”
Robert Atwood shrugged. “I am merely stating facts. Your mother, from what I understand, and from what I witnessed today, is sexually promiscuous. Your younger sister has been in serious trouble at school and was arrested last year in a shoplifting incident. Your other sister has had some problems with the law, as well. None of those three—your mother or those sisters of yours, are the kind I would trust around my grandson. If it comes down to it, I will have little trouble convincing a judge that females like that aren’t fit caregivers for Samuel, that he would be much better off with Antonia and me.”
Joleen couldn’t help it. She raised her voice. “‘Females like that’?” she cried. “Just who do you think you are, to call my family females like that?”
“You are shouting,” said Robert Atwood.
“You’re darn right I am. I was warned about you and I should have listened. But I didn’t, and look what has happened.”
“Joleen—”
“That is all. That is it. You won’t get my baby, don’t think that you will. And I want you out of my mother’s house.”
Right then the door to the front hall swung inward. It was Dekker, all six foot three and 220, or so, very muscular pounds of him. “Joleen. Everything okay?”
The sight of her dear friend calmed her—at least a little. She said quietly, “Everything’s fine. The Atwoods were just leaving.”
“You’ll be hearing from my attorney,” Robert Atwood said.
“Fine. Just go. Now.”
Apparently, he’d said all he came to say. At last. With great dignity he guided his wife toward the door.
Which Dekker was blocking. “What’s this about a lawyer?” he demanded.
Robert Atwood spoke to Joleen. “Tell this thug to step out of my way.”
Joleen longed to tell Dekker just the opposite—to ask him if he would please break both of the Atwoods in two. But, no. It wouldn’t be right to kill the Atwoods. Not on DeDe’s wedding day, anyway.
“It’s okay, Dekker. Let them go.”
Dekker, who had a fair idea of what had been going on in Samuel’s study, stepped aside reluctantly. The Atwoods left the room. He followed them, just to make certain they got the hell out.
Once they went through the front door, he shut it firmly behind them. Then he returned to Joleen.
She was standing by her father’s desk, a pretty woman in a long dress that was not quite pink and not quite red. Her heart-shaped face was flushed, her full mouth tight. A frown had etched itself between those big brown DuFrayne eyes.
Dekker quietly closed the door.
Her mouth loosened enough to quiver a little. “Please don’t say ‘I told you so.’”
Just to make sure he had it figured out, he said, “They want to take Sam away from you.”
He hoped that maybe she would tell him it wasn’t so. But she didn’t. She picked up a brass paperweight of a Yankee soldier on a rearing horse from the edge of Samuel’s desk. “I thought about smashing Robert Atwood in the face with this.”
Dekker shook his head. “Bad idea. And, anyway, violence is not your style.”
“Right now I feel like it could be. I feel like I could do murder and never think twice.”
“You couldn’t.”
She clutched the brass figure against her body and looked at him with fury in her eyes. “He called my mother promiscuous, Dekker. He said Mama and DeDe and Niki weren’t fit to take care of Sam. He raised a shallow, sweet-talkin’ lowlife like Bobby—God forgive me for speakin’ ill of the dead—and he has the nerve to come in my mother’s house and say that my people are not good enough to do right by my child, that I am not good enough, that—”
In two long strides, he was at her side.
She looked at him with a kind of bewildered surprise—that he had moved so fast, or maybe that, in moving, he had distracted her from her rage. “What?”
“Better give me that.”
She only gripped the paperweight tighter. “He offered me money, Dekker. Money for my baby. Five hundred thousand dollars to let them have Sam.”
Dekker swore. “I’m sorry, Jo. You shouldn’t have had to listen to garbage like that.” He put his hand over hers. “Come on. Put this thing down….”
She allowed him to pry her fingers open. He set the paperweight back in its place on the desk. Then he took her by the shoulders.
“What else?” he asked, when she finally met his eyes.
She swallowed, shook her head as if to clear it of so much hot, hurtful rage. “When I…when I told him no, that I wouldn’t take his money and he could not have my child, he started talkin’ lawsuits, how he would not have any trouble convincing a judge that Sam would be better off living with him and Antonia.”
Predictable, thought Dekker. He said, “Anything more?”
Those big eyes narrowed. “He knew. About how Niki got picked up for shoplifting last year. And he seemed to know about DeDe, about her little joyride in that stolen car.”
In fact, it was one of Niki’s friends from the bad-news crowd she’d been hanging around who’d actually tried to walk out of the department store with a cashmere sweater under her coat. But Niki had been there. She had known of the attempted theft and done nothing to stop it. And before that, there had been a series of incidents at school, bad grades and detentions, minor vandalism of school property and truancies, too.
As for DeDe, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, she had been a true wild child. She went out with bad boys, she drank, she experimented with drugs. She’d ended up before a judge after the incident with the car, when she’d hitched a ride with a boy she hardly knew. The boy had shared his bottle of tequila with her and taken her down I-35 at a hundred miles an hour.
She’d gotten off easy, because it was her first arrest and because she hadn’t known that the car was stolen and because, by some miracle, the judge had believed her when she swore she hadn’t known. But she’d come very close to doing some time. After that, she’d cleaned up her act.
The problem with Niki and DeDe, the way Dekker saw it, was losing their father—and not getting enough attention and supervision from their mother. Camilla loved her girls with all her heart, but she’d been sunk in desperate grief for the first year or two after Samuel’s death. And since then she was often distracted by all the boyfriends. She also worked long hours at the salon that she and Joleen now operated together.
