The Baby He Wanted. Janice Kay Johnson
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that she wasn’t flying home for the holidays, but pretending to be joyous was beyond her.
It wasn’t like she was hiding anything from them. Well, not hiding very much anyway. Once she’d made the decision to carry the baby to term, she’d told them she was pregnant. The only part she’d refused to talk about was the identity of the father. She didn’t want to think about Bran “short for Brandon” Murphy, who might or might not be married.
After she’d fled, it had occurred to her that he could have gone to the tavern for the same reason she had: he was bummed. Say, because his wedding had been canceled.
That idea was slightly more palatable than the alternative, that she was a last hurrah. But not a whole lot. If his bride-to-be had stood him up right before the wedding, what did that make her, Lina? Some kind of hey-she’s-available fill-in? All cats were gray in the dark, right? And in the morning, when it wasn’t dark anymore, he’d had her from behind and never had to look at her face. If he hadn’t gotten any sex on what should have been his wedding night, he’d certainly had plenty the night before.
Occasionally she let herself wonder if it had occurred to him he hadn’t used a condom that last time. But, really, what difference did it make whether he’d just forgotten or made the decision to wake up the way he liked even though he couldn’t protect her? The result was the same.
At least the morning sickness phase was long past. These days, all she had to combat was exhaustion. She needed to go to bed way earlier than normal if she was going to feel anything close to human when her alarm clock went off in the mornings. And, just her luck, middle school kids rode the same buses as high school kids, tying them to a similar schedule. No, worse: her first class was at the obscene hour of seven thirty. High school teachers were able to sleep in ten minutes later.
Today, she should count her blessings. With two weeks off for the holidays, she could sleep as much as she wanted. Catch up on sleep. Store it. If she could think of anything fun to do, she was free for that, too. Wild and crazy? Not a chance. She’d used up her quota the night she got pregnant.
She could take a nap after lunch, then go for a swim later.
A nap and exercise. As a way to spend her first day of vacation, it was such a thriller, even she was depressed. Maybe Maya could get away to have lunch with her.
Maya answered her call, muted the phone for a minute and came back to say, “Yes, please.” She lowered her voice. “Mr. Floyd is driving me nuts. Must get out of here.”
Lina changed from her sweats into maternity jeans and a warm sweater with enough stretch to cover her burgeoning belly and put on boots because they zipped and were less work than bending over to tie laces.
Her mood lifted during the short drive to the bank branch where Maya worked as a loan officer. Once she reached it, she idled briefly out front. Mr. Floyd, the branch manager, discouraged the use of the parking lot for friends and family. If she’d been absolutely determined, she could have squeezed her Kia into a minuscule spot behind a van, but she made a face and decided to skip it. Parking on the cross street made sense anyway; she could pick up a couple of things at the Walgreens on the other corner once she and Maya were back from lunch.
She locked up and walked past the drive-through and the ATM to the front doors, but when she tried to open one, she couldn’t. They were locked. What on earth—
Belatedly, she focused on the printed sign plastered to the glass: “Temporarily Closed—Computer Network Issues. We Regret the Inconvenience.”
How strange. Maya hadn’t said anything, so whatever it was must have just happened. Lina peered in and couldn’t see a soul, teller or customer, which wasn’t a big shock since this bank had a conference room to the right just inside and restrooms to the left. The only other windows looked in at the currently empty conference room. Past the short hallway, a second set of doors led into the bank proper, and what view she would otherwise have had was partially blocked by one of those standing height desks where you could write a check or fill out a deposit slip before getting in line. From this angle, she could only see one teller window, with no one behind it.
Presumably, IT people were working frantically. Maybe everyone else was gratefully having a cup of coffee, or Mr. Floyd had decided to hold an impromptu staff meeting to be sure nobody was allowed to waste time. Sounded like him.
Still, Maya was entitled to her lunch break. She would surely have called or at least texted to say she was delayed. And, would they really lock the doors instead of letting customers come in for an explanation of the problem?
As Lina backed away from the doors, pondering, she took out her phone. No messages, no texts.
Darn it, people had to be inside. Driving past the parking lot, she’d noticed Mr. Floyd’s dark gray BMW in its place of honor as well as a couple of other cars. Although those might belong to the IT people rather than customers.
Call Maya, she decided.
But her friend didn’t answer her cell phone. Lina didn’t leave a message.
Increasingly uneasy, she tried to decide what to do. She could wait in her car for a few minutes and then try again. Go to Walgreens and assume Maya would call when she was ready to leave. But the weirdness of this had her alarmed.
The back door was not only always kept locked, it was also steel and windowless. The only other place she could really see into the bank was the drive-through window, assuming they hadn’t pulled down the shade. No cars had gone in or come out since she’d arrived. Why couldn’t she use it as a walk-through to bring somebody to talk to her even if only to say, “Yes, we really are closed.”
She went back the way she’d come and circled the corner of the building. Feeling almost as though she ought to be tiptoeing, she approached the double drive-through with the center island. Then she saw the explanation for the lack of traffic: a sandwich board blocked the entrance to the drive-through. She presumed the same sign was tacked to the other side.
Not understanding her trepidation, Lina inched up to the window.
The shades hadn’t been pulled, but she still couldn’t see anyone. Aliens had beamed everyone in the bank up to their spaceship. IT guys had taken employees hostage until they fully understood the hideous mistake someone had made that had frozen up the bank’s computers.
Only...shouldn’t someone be laboring on one of the computers? Unless the problem was off-site, but if that was so, why wasn’t Maya answering her phone and where was everybody?
Lina’s skin prickled. She shifted a few feet to the left and with a rush of relief saw four people standing in a cluster. Mr. Floyd and Maya and two men. Okay, she’d been silly—except...one of the men held a gun to Maya’s temple.
Oh, God, oh, God. This was a bank robbery, happening right in front of her. Without taking her eyes off the scene inside, Lina fumbled for her phone at the bottom of her purse.
The bank manager shook his head. He looked scared but mulish. At the same time, Maya saw Lina with her face pressed to the glass. Her eyes widened, the terror on her face changing to something else.
The next second, her head blew up.
And then the man who’d shot Lina’s best friend turned and saw her.
* * *
LEANING BACK IN his desk chair, Bran unwrapped the sandwich he’d just picked up from the deli. He didn’t love eating at his desk, but he was trying to cram some work in so he could leave early. He had an appointment to talk to a woman who had been a neighbor of his family when he was a kid. She and her husband had lived right across the street when Bran’s little sister, Sheila, was murdered. Apparently Mr. Greaver had died a few years back, but his widow had stayed put. Bran and his brother, Zach, both cops, were trying to get in touch with everyone who’d lived nearby then. Sheila’s killer had never been arrested. Despite having no jurisdiction, they intended to accomplish what the investigators at the time had failed to do.
So far, they’d only hit dead ends, but there’d been