Kitabı oxu: «Excuse Me? Whose Baby?: Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby!»

1

“YOUR LAWYER CALLED.”

Dex Fenton was trotting down the creaky wooden steps of the English building, carrying a pile of essays she’d just collected from a Shakespeare class, when she heard Professor Hugh Bemling’s remark.

Lawyer? Whose lawyer was he talking about?

The thin, bearded professor stood in his office doorway, cleaning his glasses with his shirttail. Shaking back a mass of flyaway brown hair that threatened to block her vision, Dex looked around the hall, but she didn’t see anyone else he could have been addressing.

“I don’t have a lawyer,” she ventured.

“Well, a lawyer called and asked for you,” he said.

Dex tried to ignore the sinking sensation in her stomach. She didn’t know any lawyers and she preferred to keep it that way. Nevertheless, she refused to let herself be intimidated by anyone, ever. “Did you catch his name?”

“I wrote it down.” Hugh, who regularly got lost in the library stacks and had addressed Dex as Dixie for her first three months as his teaching assistant, fished through his pockets. He dragged out a laundry receipt and his campus health card before handing her a crumpled note.

Dex squinted at the ink-smeared letters. “‘O wavy hair, O beauteous maiden,”’ she read, and stopped. Obviously, this was not a telephone message but a poem of an embarrassingly personal nature.

Hugh’s cheeks, or what was visible of them beneath his gray-flecked facial hair, flushed bright red as he snatched back the paper. “That’s…some random thoughts I jotted down. I can’t think where I put your message.”

Dex adjusted her stack of essays. “I’m sure it was for someone else.” And so was the poem, she hoped. “I’d better get going. I’ll have these graded by Monday.”

“Have what graded? Oh, the papers, yes.” Hugh patted his shirt pockets. “I know that note’s here somewhere. Let me check in my office.”

“Thanks, Hugh, but you don’t need to…” She didn’t bother to finish. He was already gone.

There was no point in waiting. Once inside, he would get so busy pawing through piles of journals that he’d forget what he was looking for.

Anyway, Dex had another job to do. In addition to assisting the professor, she made ends meet by working as a campus courier.

She’d earned a B.A. and a master’s degree in English, but her parents, both college professors, weren’t impressed. Dex had completed the coursework for her Ph.D., but found herself stuck on writing her dissertation.

She just couldn’t seem to work up much enthusiasm for it. Or, maybe, for becoming Dr. Dex Fenton and having to leave the friendly environs of Clair De Lune, California, to take whatever college teaching post she could scrape up.

So she worked two part-time jobs and rode a bicycle and lived in an efficiency apartment over a garage. Most of the time, she rather enjoyed things the way they were.

Out in the sunshine, she hurried around the brick building to the bike rack, where she stuck the essays into her bike’s side compartments and put on her helmet. She hoped she had enough room left to carry today’s campus deliveries. Fortunately, today was Friday, usually a light mail day.

As she mounted her bike and set off, a few jacaranda blossoms drifted onto Dex’s arm. Some of the lavender petals, which appeared every spring as sure as the swallows came back to Capistrano, clung to her pink sweater and blue jeans.

“O wavy hair, O beauteous maiden.” Spring was certainly getting to Professor Bemling, Dex thought. He was a cute guy, if you liked absentminded forty-year-olds. At twenty-six, though, she considered him too old for her.

The kind of guy she wanted was in his early thirties, with sun-streaked dark hair and alert brown eyes. He gave the impression of being tall, although he wasn’t quite six feet, and he had slim hips that moved with a sensuous rhythm.

She shook her head. Why on earth was she thinking of a man she wanted nothing to do with?

The main section of De Lune University was laid out in an old-fashioned rectangle, its symmetry marred only by the jutting addition of the glass-and-steel faculty center. Dex was passing that facility, which was probably why her mind had gone skittering across memories from a crisp evening four months ago.

The holiday faculty party had featured mistletoe and dance music, tipsy flirtations and a general letting-down of inhibitions. In an eggnog-induced blur, she’d felt a man’s dark eyes catch hers with unexpected intensity.

He’d asked her to dance and laughed at everything she said. She didn’t resist when he whirled her onto the patio.

He’d smoothed her unruly curls with both hands, then kissed her senseless. It was all so blurry, so sensational and so…insane. Dex pedaled faster, trying to put the scene, and the memory of what had followed, behind her.

Half a quadrangle farther, at a rear entrance to the administration building, she banged on the door. This was the squirrely abode of Fitz Langley, the maintenance and communications supervisor.

“Hey, Fitz!” she yelled. “Got any stuff for me to deliver?”

The door rattled and shook as the rusty lock stuck. Finally, it wrenched open and out poked a head worthy of mounting on a hunter’s wall. A shaggy chestnut mane framed a broad leonine forehead, a flattened nose and a mouth that could roar but rarely did.

The door opened wider under pressure from Fitz’s short, stubby frame, and he handed her two padded envelopes and a box. “Most of the stuff’s already been delivered, but these just came in. By the way, some lawyer called you.”

Dex got that sinking feeling again. Apparently an attorney really was looking for her. And looking hard.

Could someone be suing her? If so, he’d be sorely disappointed. Her two jobs barely paid enough to scrape by, and she owed a pile of student loans that would become due the moment she finished her doctoral dissertation. Whenever that might be.

“What lawyer?” she asked. “Has he got a name?”

“I e-mailed you.”

“I only check my mail when I enter grades in the computer.” Dex was annoyed by e-mail, phones, answering machines and anything else that interrupted her thinking. Not that her thinking was terribly profound, but how was it ever going to get that way if things kept jangling and blipping at her? “Can’t you just tell me?”

“Once I input data, I erase it from my personal memory banks.” With a shrug, Fitz vanished into his lair.

Dex strapped the deliveries onto the back of her bike. As she pedaled off, she wondered if someone could have died. She hoped not. And left her money. She still hoped not.

Her parents in Florida were both in excellent health, as far as she knew. She called them infrequently, since they listened only when she had some accomplishment to dazzle them with. Still, she would have heard if they were ill.

Her only other close relative was her younger sister, Brianna, a precocious twenty-four-year-old magazine editor. If anything happened to her, it would be her husband calling, not a lawyer. Dex was certain they had no Midas-touched great-aunt who might have popped off. In fact, no rich person had ever crossed her path except once, and she would just as soon never see or hear from him again.

As if to remind her of that one lapse, she found herself again passing the faculty center, going in the other direction. Dex gritted her teeth and sped up.

She didn’t know what had gotten into her that night. He was the wrong sort of man for her entirely. Too bold. Too confident.

She needed someone gentle and understanding, someone who could offer the warmth she’d missed while growing up. Even at the holiday party, she’d known she was making a big mistake. Yet in the arms of Mr. Hot Stuff, she’d been transformed into a hormone-charged Jezebel.

The only fortunate aspect to the whole night was that no one had noticed the man entering and leaving Dex’s apartment. In Clair De Lune, the walls might not have ears but everyone else did, and took notes, too.

She rounded a corner and jerked the handlebars to avoid colliding with two lovesick students standing on the sidewalk, their jean-clad legs entwined, their lips locked and their hands earnestly groping each other. Spring was, of course, the mating season among primates enrolled at De Lune University.

At the art department, Dex raced up the steps and, with a brisk greeting, set the box on the secretary’s desk. Some days she stuck around to chat, but today she was sure she could hear those essays grumbling in her saddlebags. And then there was the annoying question of why that lawyer might be calling her.

She left one of the envelopes at the music department and headed to the science complex, which was located in a separate quadrangle. Her last delivery was for the fertility research center.

As soon as she entered, she noticed something odd. Usually the place had a sterile look, with the receptionist sitting alone at her desk. Today, however, professors, graduate students and technicians formed solemn clumps in the pale peach entryway.

Dex spotted a doctoral student she knew. “Hey, LaShawna, what’s going on?”

The tall African-American woman swung toward her. Instead of giving an upbeat greeting, LaShawna Gregory hugged her clipboard as if it were a life preserver. “It’s Dr. Saldivar. She’s had an accident.”

“An accident?” Dex had never heard of an explosion occurring in an infertility lab. Except maybe a population explosion. “Here?”

“No, in India.” Unshed tears glimmered in the young woman’s eyes. “She was due back yesterday from a medical conference but…” She bit her lip. “We keep hearing rumors. Something about an elephant.”

Helene Saldivar was a brilliant researcher who helped couples have kids. Tall and rawboned, the woman strode through life, her manner brisk but kindly. “Her patients must be upset.”

“Her patients?” said LaShawna. “She doesn’t actually treat any…”

The receptionist marched over and plucked the envelope from Dex’s hands. “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s still work to be done around here.”

Dex nodded guiltily. “I hope the accident isn’t serious,” she told the graduate student, and hurried out. Eager to start grading papers, she sped along the three blocks from campus to the apartment she rented from the retired dean of comparative literature.

Amid a block of pastel-painted bungalows and pineapple-shaped palm trees on Forest Lane, Dean Marie Pipp’s dark-shingled home lurked like an escapee from a Grimm’s fairy tale. An overarching eucalyptus blocked most of the sunlight from the yard, where spindly herbs dominated the flower beds.

Across the street, little old Mrs. Zimpelman stopped trimming her roses and waved to Dex. Then she dialed her cell phone and made a call to one of her gossipy friends. Mrs. Zimpelman reported all the comings and goings on Forest Lane as if it were Avenue of the Stars.

Dean Pipp, by contrast, minded her own business. Today, however, she must have been watching through the window. When she saw Dex, she came onto the porch, her fringed shawl quivering in the light breeze.

“Yoo-hoo, my dear!” she called. “You have a telephone message!”

Dex already had a good idea whom it was from.

THE LAW FIRM of Page, Bittner and Steele occupied the seventh floor of Clair De Lune’s tallest professional building. It was served by four elevators, two of them out of service and the third dedicated to floors eight through twelve.

Dex waited in the lobby for a ridiculous length of time. She wished she’d stopped to eat lunch, but Dean Pipp, whose farsighted eyes could scarcely decipher her own spidery handwriting, said the attorney needed to see her either at one or at once, which in this case amounted to the same thing.

“It’s some important fellow downtown,” she’d said. “You know, the firm of Something, Something and Something. Mr. Something ran for mayor last year, didn’t he? It’s his partner Mr. Something who wants to see you.”

“Page, Bittner and Steele,” Dex had deciphered when she took the note. It was a prestigious partnership. What on earth could they want, and why the urgency?

Curious and tired of the constant messages, Dex had hopped on her bike and headed for the firm.

Across the marble-floored lobby, the revolving door swung into action. Although she was blinded by a burst of sunlight reflecting off the glass doors, she heard awed murmurs from the other elevator hopefuls, as if a celebrity had entered the building.

Dex’s vision cleared. Toward the elevator bank strolled the confident figure of the town’s self-made multimillionaire, who also happened to be one of De Lune University’s biggest benefactors and a visiting member of its computer faculty.

His body was toned and lean. His brown hair retained a hint of sun bleaching, even though it was years since he’d given up surfing for long days running his computer software firm and long nights making women very, very happy.

James Bonderoff was known for his sophisticated lifestyle and, judging by the pictures in the local newspaper, his exquisite taste in women. He preferred gorgeous executives and professional women, all of whom looked terrific getting in and out of his expensive cars.

He didn’t usually go for women with crinkly hair who tended toward plumpness. He probably didn’t even remember Dex.

James gave the group a puzzled smile. “Something wrong with the lifts?”

At that moment, the only working elevator opened. The crowd parted like the Red Sea to let him enter.

Dex tried to duck back, but she was standing too close to the doors. The crowd swept her in, right next to the last man on earth she ever wanted to see again.

He smelled of sunshine and expensive aftershave, and he wore his silk suit as casually if it were jeans and a T-shirt. Beneath the elegant fabric, there was no mistaking the muscular build of the man. Especially since the crowd was mashing her right into his pecs.

In the enclosed space, his dominant presence aroused a prickly combination of uneasiness and longing. There was too much of him, Dex decided. The legs were too long, the shoulders too broad, the face too sculpted.

She couldn’t imagine herself rolling around in a delirium of sweaty ecstasy with such a man. Or rather, she didn’t want to imagine it, because she had done it and regretted it ever since.

A tall woman on the far side of the elevator gave Jim a come-hither look and flirtatiously finger combed her hair. Dex was impressed. She couldn’t drag her fingers more than two inches through her tangled mane without the aid of a blowtorch.

As they stopped at floor after floor, the occupants dispersed. For the last leg, there were only two people in the elevator.

Dex edged away from Jim, keeping her gaze averted. With luck, he’d go striding off at the seventh floor, never to be seen again.

“Don’t I know you?” The remark rumbled through her nervous system. She felt his breath whisper across the crown of her head, which was all he could see.

What the heck? Lifting her chin, she met his eyes squarely. “You might say that.”

She could see at once that she’d misjudged the distance. She was closer than she’d thought, so close that when the elevator stopped, the tiniest stumble brought her against his arm.

She drew back in time to glimpse surprise on his face. And recognition. Oh, heavens, not recognition!

“Didn’t we—?” Jim stopped in mid faux pas.

“That was my twin sister,” Dex said. “The one who does stupid things at faculty parties.”

His face registered confusion. Curiosity. Doubt. When the doors opened, Dex hurried to exit, forestalling further conversation.

The name of the law firm blazed from glass doors dead ahead. Apparently the partnership took up the entire seventh floor.

“Paying a visit to your lawyer?” Jim asked. He was very close to Dex’s ear, or else his baritone reverberated at a particularly sympathetic frequency.

“My lawyer?” Good heavens, what kind of budget did the man think she had? “Well, you know how it is. Between the personal trainer, the live-in hair stylist and the full-time guru, I had to let somebody go. So I decided to come fire my lawyer.”

Her humor fell flat. His silence, possibly offended or merely bored, followed her through the glass doors. She’d made another great impression, Dex thought uneasily.

The law office, she discovered as she entered, was decorated in such intense black and white that humanity seemed like an intrusion. Then, from a back office, she heard a baby cry. If it went with the decor, it must be a baby penguin.

On sighting Jim, the receptionist snapped to attention. The only other person present was a young man tending the plants. He stared at Dex’s chest so hard that he accidentally watered the file cabinet.

“Mr. Bonderoff!” the receptionist said. “This is an honor. And you must be Miss, uh, Fenton. Mr. Page is waiting for you.”

“For which one of us?” Dex asked.

“Both,” the woman said.

“The two of us?” Jim seemed as taken aback as she was. “There must be some mistake.”

“Why, no,” the woman said. “Please, go right in.”

Dex and Jim exchanged glances. This, she realized instantly, was a mistake. Those dark eyes of his plugged into her as if he were installing his software directly on to her hard drive.

They had only one thing in common, she reminded herself as she dragged her gaze away, one stolen night, slightly tipsy but not full-out drunken. She didn’t want a repeat. She also couldn’t imagine what possible involvement a lawyer might have.

“Does this guy represent you?” she asked.

Jim shook his head. “My company has its own legal department in-house. I’m as mystified as you are.”

Now they had two things in common, Dex mused.

Following the secretary’s directions, they crossed the salt-and-pepper tile and entered an office the size of a roller rink. The black-and-white theme was no more appealing here, Dex found, even when expressed in a diamond-pattern carpet and a gleaming black desk.

A wall of windows overlooked the shake-shingle and red tile roofs of downtown Clair De Lune. One tidy block after another of low buildings spread in all directions, some constructed of Spanish-style white stucco, others of funky wood. Even from this height, she could make out window boxes overflowing with petunias and geraniums.

She wished she were outside, anywhere but here. James Bonderoff’s nearness was proving even more disturbing than his absence had been.

From behind the massive desk emerged a man with stooped shoulders and pale eyes. “Burt Page,” he said. “We’ve met.” He held out his hand to Jim.

“Oh, yes. Chamber of Commerce breakfast last month, right?” Jim returned the handshake.

“What’s this all about?” Dex asked.

“Ah, Miss Fenton. Please have a seat, both of you.”

Jim draped himself over a chair. Dex perched on an identical one and had to prop her gym shoes on a crossbar because her feet didn’t reach the floor.

“Well.” Burt Page folded his hands atop his desk. “This is an odd situation.”

“What is?” Jim asked.

“It’s about Helene Saldivar,” said the attorney. “You do know her?”

“I’ve funded some of her research,” the millionaire said.

“That’s your only connection with her?”

Jim cleared his throat. “She ran some, well, private medical tests for me. As a favor.” Quickly, he added, “She’s a fine person. Nothing wrong, I hope?”

Instead of answering, the lawyer said, “And you, Miss Fenton? You knew her as well, I believe?”

“Sort of.” Dex squirmed. The kind of contact she’d had with Helene Saldivar wasn’t something she cared to discuss in front of James Bonderoff. “I heard she had some kind of problem with an elephant.”

“I’m afraid so.” The lawyer shuffled a sheaf of papers on his desk. “It seems that, while she was in India, she suffered a coronary.”

Jim frowned. “She had a heart attack?”

“It was an unfortunate coincidence,” said the attorney. “Although it’s not uncommon for a motorist to suffer an attack and crash the car, it’s the first time I’ve heard of anyone being stricken and falling off an elephant.”

“Is she going to be all right?” Jim leaned forward, his hands clenched. What kind of tests had she run for him, anyway? Dex wondered.

The lawyer stopped rattling the papers. “I’m afraid the accident was terminal.”

Dust motes swirled against the white wall behind him as silence reigned. After a moment, Dex said, “You mean she’s dead?”

Page nodded. “I have her will here. You’re both named.”

“But why?” She couldn’t imagine that Dr. Saldivar would leave her so much as a test tube. Dex had simply become, at the doctor’s request, an egg donor to help out some of her desperate patients.

Then she remembered with a jolt that, according to LaShawna, Dr. Saldivar didn’t treat patients.

“I don’t understand, either.” Jim’s voice had a hoarse quality. “What’s going on?”

“It has to do with the disposition of Ayoka,” said the lawyer.

“The elephant?” Dex peeled off a loose bit of fingernail polish. The rose-colored flake dropped onto the black-and-white carpet, where it stood out like a neon sign.

“No, no.” Burt Page cleared his throat. He stared at his desktop, then at the ceiling, then out the window. “Ayoka isn’t an elephant. She’s the, er, baby.”