"Joshua, hurry!" Blanche urged.
Yes, hurry, Felicity thought. Please, I want this to be over. To her amazement, Joshua climbed onto the bed beside her. On his knees, looking down at her, he reached out and stroked her cheek. "I'm sorry, Lissy," he said, and even his voice sounded odd, not like him at all, almost as if he were choking on something. "We've got to get the baby out."
Her brain was sluggish, so it took her a minute to sort out the meaning of his words. By then he had straddled her body. In the last second before the next pain overwhelmed her, she felt his hands on her abdomen and realized his intent. "No!" she screamed, but he did not stop. A searing agony tore through her as some solid part of her gave way to this irresistible force.
"It's coming!" Blanche cried. "The head's almost out! Once more, Joshua!"
Felicity could hear Candace's voice, a continuous drone far off in the distance. Vaguely, she realized the black woman was praying. But for whom? The baby, of course, that strange voice in her head reported. They all want to save the baby. Didn't Joshua say so? He was sorry, but they had to get the baby out.
Again her muscles tautened, and again his cruel hands bore down with excruciating force. Tides of blackness washed over her, tempting her to sink into them, to escape the pain.
"Oh, dear God," Blanche said, her voice faint and very far away.
"Lissy! Felicity!" Josh called, but she could not reply.
Asa Gordon glanced around the large table at the happy family group gathered for the evening meal. He was smiling his "perfect guest" smile, but all day he had been unable to shake a nagging feeling of uneasiness. Instinct told him that something was wrong, although he had no idea what it could be.
"My wife tells me that you're looking for your sister," Harry Fitzsimmons said. Harry owned the ranch Asa had come across this afternoon. Mrs. Fitzsimmons had invited him to supper and to stay the night. Actually, her invitation had been for as long as he wished to remain. Although he was sorely tempted to linger in the comfort of the Fitzsimmonses' home, Asa knew he would be moving on in the morning.
"Not exactly, Harry," Asa explained patiently. "You see, Claire passed on several years ago. It's her daughter I'm trying to find. My niece, Felicity Storm."
The Fitzsimmonses had eleven children, and every one of them was listening attentively to the story, so Asa decided to indulge them. "You see, our father did not approve of the man Claire married, so the two of them ran away. We haven't heard from them in years, not since Felicity was just a baby. Caleb, my brother-in-law, works as a traveling photographer, so keeping track of them was impossible."
"Then, last year, our father passed away," Asa continued, pausing for just the right amount of filial regret and enjoying for a moment the rapt attention the Fitzsimmonses were paying him. He was, he realized suddenly, getting awfully skillful with his lying. These stories seemed to burst, fullblown, from his lips without any conscious forethought. The idea disturbed him, but he did not let it show.
He cleared his throat and began again. "Our father passed away, and he left Felicity quite a handsome settlement. His last wish was that I find her and make sure she gets it." Asa concluded his story by lowering his eyes in humility.
"That's a very noble sentiment, Mr. Gordon," Mrs.
Fitzsimmons said. Plainly, the rest of the family thought so, too.
Asa shrugged modestly. "Unfortunately, it seems I'm doomed to failure, ma'am. Nobody in Texas has seen hide nor hair of them or their wagon for almost a year."
"What does the wagon look like?" the oldest Fitzsimmons daughter asked.
Something in her tone warned Asa that her question was more than idle curiosity. He described the wagon, but he waited vainly for any hint that she recognized having seen it before. Asa did notice that she was unusually quiet throughout the remainder of the meal. Perhaps she knew something more. Perhaps he would spend a few days at the ranch after all, just to make certain.
But he did not have to. After supper, the girl brought one of the cowboys to him.
"Slim here thinks he saw a wagon like the one you described," she informed him after making the introductions. "I thought I remembered him telling me about it, but I wanted to make sure before I said anything to you."
For the first time in many long months, Asa felt a surge of excitement, even though common sense warned him not to be too hopeful. "When did you see the wagon, and what did it look like?" Asa asked carefully.
Slim squinted his homely face as he tried to remember. "I think it was late last winter sometime. After Christmas; I know that for a fact," he began. "The wagon looked like one of them army wagons. You know the kind, with the high sides and a wooden roof."
"An ambulance," Asa supplied.
"Yeah, that's it," Slim said. "It had pictures painted on it, mountains and trees, that kind of stuff. And some fancy writing. A long word that started with a B or a P. I disremember which."
Asa was hard-pressed not to whoop with glee. Still, the sighting was months old. "Did you see the people?"
Slim nodded. "A man and a girl; his daughter, I reckoned. I rode up to see if they needed help. They were mighty skittish. I told them if they were drummers to come on over to the ranch, that everybody'd be glad to see them."
"What did they say?"
Slim shrugged. "They said they were in a hurry and wouldn't have time to stop."
"Did they say where they were going?"
"No, they didn't say," Slim reported, "but I saw their tracks a few days later. They headed south."
Asa realized on some level that he must be hard up indeed to be so delighted over such a small and ancient kernel of information. But the fact remained that it was far more than he had discovered in all his months of scouring the state of Texas for clues.
"What's south of here, Slim?" he asked, already making plans.
Chapter Nine
Felicity lifted her eyelids slowly, cautiously, hoping that when she was fully awake her pain would fade like a bad dream. But it didn't. Every muscle in her body throbbed, and her insides felt as if someone had seared her with a red-hot iron. It was labor, she thought, except that unlike labor, the pain did not recede.
She listened a moment for Blanche or Candace. They should have been bustling around her, wiping her brow, encouraging her, but the room was still. Too still. Only the faint sound of someone breathing broke the ominous silence.
Cautiously, Felicity turned her head toward the sound, afraid a sudden movement might jar new sources of agony to life. She blinked in surprise. Joshua was sitting in his wingbacked chair beside her bed, and he was sound asleep. His chair did not belong in the bedroom, her pain-fogged brain argued. And why would he sleep sitting up? And why was he in here at all? Men had no place in a birthing room. Candace had said so.
Except this was no longer a birthing room, she remembered with terrifying suddenness. Her hands went instinctively to her now-flat abdomen, heedless of the way her sore muscles protested the movement. The baby! The baby had been born!
But where was it? she wondered frantically, glancing around the shadowed room. The heavy draperies had been drawn against the afternoon sunlight, so at first she could not make out the cradle sitting empty in the corner. NO! her mind screamed when she saw it. The baby was here! She knew it was. She remembered…
But she did not remember, not exactly. Where was her baby? "Where's my baby?" she croaked, her voice hoarse and faint.
Joshua stirred, and his eyes flickered open. In another second he was fully awake. "Lissy, are you all right?" he asked anxiously, leaning over the bed to see her better.