The Midwife And The Lawman

Hope shot Devon a glance that said as plainly as words not to mention they were both qualified to administer drugs by IV if the doctor so ordered. That was not Lydia’s way.

“I’ll call Joanna,” Devon said, reaching out a hand toward her grandmother. A hug or a touch had always been the signal they used to convey an apology when they’d clashed during Devon’s growing-up years. And they had clashed, often. They were too much alike, Devon’s mother, Myrna, always said. But Lydia didn’t see, or chose to ignore, her granddaughter’s tentative gesture. These days the distance between them was too great for a simple ritual to make things right.

“I suppose you must,” Lydia said, “if Lacy can deliver here. It will be less stressful for her and the baby.”

Devon nodded. “Good. That’s settled, then. Let’s get back to our mother.”

Lydia smiled at Hope and reached for the door-knob. She didn’t give Devon a backward glance.

IN ANOTHER HOUR it would be daylight. Lydia turned away from the window. Lacy Belton, her new daughter asleep in the crook of her arm, dozed on the high bed. Nearby, her husband was stretched out in a recliner that the parents of one of her mothers had donated to the center. The older children were curled up in the corner on an air mattress.

The delivery had taken longer than she’d anticipated, but everything went smoothly. Another life brought safely into the arms of a loving mother, one more small atonement for the sin of giving her own firstborn away.

Feeling every one of her seventy-four years, she turned her thoughts from the past—she knew from long experience there was no comfort there. It was so quiet now she could hear the beat of her heart. Steady and strong. No pain, no shortness of breath. Just weariness, and the ever-present weight of despair. How was she ever going to make things right with Devon? If she’d known that long-ago night that Devon had overheard her making arrangements with Parker Reynold and his father-in-law to buy Hope’s baby, could she have done something, anything, to mitigate the damage?

Probably not. Devon was as stubborn and bull-headed as she was. And what she had done was wrong, criminal even, though it had all turned out right in the end—Hope had been reunited with her son. But at seventeen, would Devon have been able to understand her grandmother’s motivations, her desperation? She might have. If only I had known she was there, hiding, listening to every word.

Hope opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Everyone asleep?” she asked in a whisper, moving closer in her soft-soled shoes. At Lydia’s nod, she said, “Come and have a cup of tea.”

Lydia cast one last look at the sleeping family, then walked with Hope to the staff room just down the hall. Tom could find her easily if Lacy or the baby needed her.

“Where’s Devon?” she asked, blinking a little at the light Hope flicked on.

“I sent her home. She’ll have to do most of the prenatal visits tomorrow because you’re sleeping in.” Hope motioned Lydia to a seat and poured her a cup of her favorite herbal tea.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. The cardiologist gave you permission to come back to work part-time. Part-time doesn’t mean eighteen-hour days.”

“I feel fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” Hope said bluntly. She took a seat beside Lydia, her own mug cradled between her hands. “We can’t go on like this, Lydia. The tensions between you, Devon and me are spilling over into our work.”

“I’m tired. I really don’t want to discuss this tonight.” Her voice sounded like a tired old woman’s even to her own ears.

“You won’t want to discuss it tomorrow or the day after, either.” Hope’s tone remained quiet but firm.

“I tried to explain to Devon why I did…what I did.” The guilt of it still lay heavily on Lydia’s soul, and she couldn’t say the words aloud without pain. She couldn’t say, I sold your baby to Parker Reynolds. “She still holds me responsible.”

“She will always hold you responsible, unless you tell her the whole truth.”

“No. I can’t. Not after all this time.”

“Lydia, Parker and I both agree Devon should know that Dalton is my son. You can’t let her go on believing I don’t know where my child is. My uncle is in prison. I’m not afraid of him anymore. I release you from the promise you made me to keep Dalton’s identity secret.” She reached out and covered Lydia’s hand with her own. Tears sparkled in her eyes. “I thought you’d told her the truth about his adoption months ago.”

Lydia pulled away from the gentle touch. She set the mug down with more force than she should have. Tea sloshed over the rim onto the plastic tabletop. She blinked back the sting of unfamiliar, unwelcome tears. She never cried. “It’s too late. Don’t you see? Talking about it isn’t enough. It won’t turn back the clock. It won’t make Devon respect me again. It won’t make her love me again.”

CHAPTER TWO

MIGUEL SAT with his booted feet propped on the porch railing of his cabin. He’d “borrowed” a set of old, high-backed wooden kitchen chairs from his parents’ garage just so he could do exactly what he was doing now. There was no way you could tip back on two legs and take in the sight of the Sangre de Cristos on one side, and Enchantment nestled in its valley on the other, in a plastic lawn chair. None at all.

He took a swallow of his beer. It was warm. He grimaced and poured the rest over the edge of the porch onto the ground. He liked a beer now and then, but it had to be cold. He didn’t drink much. Not with a father and brother who were both recovering alcoholics. He had too many strikes against him with his genetic makeup not to be wary of following the same path.

A hawk cried as it circled overhead. Off in the distance a dog barked, or maybe it was a coyote, although coyotes didn’t usually come this close to town. Below him, on the narrow winding road, he saw lights flicker on in a couple of the minimansions that had been built out this way in the past decade.

His cabin wasn’t in the same league with those homes. Log sided, it had four rooms and a bathroom downstairs, and space for two more bedrooms and another bathroom beneath the steep-pitched dormer roof, if he ever had the time and money to finish them. But it was his. And so were the five wooded acres it sat on. His heart and his roots were here. The high country, the thin, clear air, were in his blood.

Hunter’s blood, Daniel called it. The Elkhorn clan had been hunters since the Diné, as the Navajos called themselves, had come into the Glittering World. Or so the legends told. But Daniel had left the Arizona reservation and moved to Enchantment when he married Miguel’s Mexican grandmother and took over running her father’s hardware store.

His father, Dennis Eiden, on the other hand, had wandered into Enchantment in the sixties, a war-weary vet out to see the country he’d fought for before settling down. He was a blond, blue-eyed farm boy from Ohio, but one look at Elena Elkhorn and he had stayed. He married her, moved her to Albuquerque. Worked days and went to school nights until he got his teaching degree, then brought her back to Enchantment to settle down and raise a family. He was retired now, throwing pottery and selling it for good money at a gallery in Taos.

And working to stay sober. Just like Miguel’s older brother, Diego, a Bureau of Indian Affairs cop on the big reservation in Arizona.

The sound of a familiar engine coming up the road in the twilight wormed its way into Miguel’s thoughts. It was Devon’s Blazer. He was so attuned to its vibrations that he even woke up in the middle of the night if she drove by to attend a birth.

He dug a plastic bottle of raspberry-flavored iced tea out of the little cooler where he’d stowed his beer and swung his legs off the railing. He jogged down the drive past the stand of pines that shielded his home from the road and waited for her. He wasn’t expecting her to come up to the cabin without an argument, but he had a backup plan if she put up too much of a fuss. He patted the pocket of his shirt. It was still there, the sheet of paper with the guest list for Nolan McKinnon and Kim Sherman’s wedding-rehearsal dinner. As best man and maid of honor respectively, he and Devon were hosting the damn thing as their gift to the couple. If it was up to him and Nolan, it would have been barbecue and beer, the same as the couple had planned for the reception. Catered by Slim Jim’s, the best damn barbecue in the state.

But it wasn’t up to him and Nolan.

Devon slowed when she saw him standing by the side of the road. She wanted this party to be perfect to show Kim she was welcome in the family, and she was making herself into a nervous wreck to accomplish that goal. She rolled down the window and looked up at him, no hint of a smile showing on her face. Miguel felt the absence of that smile like a cloud blocking the sun on a cool day. He loved Devon’s smile, a slow curving of her lips that grew and widened until it wreathed her face and sparkled in her eyes. “What is it, Miguel?” she asked, weariness underlying her words.

He held out the bottle of flavored tea. “I thought you might like a glass.”

She shook her head. “Thanks, no. It’s been a long day. A long two days, and I’ve got tons of things to do up at my place.” Devon had moved into a tiny cabin a thousand feet farther up the mountain. At night he could just make out her bedroom light from his kitchen window.

“We’ve got a ton of things to do here, too.” He pulled the sheet of paper out of his pocket. “The chef at Angel’s Gate needs to know our final numbers and whether we’ve decided on the chicken or the fish.” Angel’s Gate was the multimillion dollar ski resort that had opened that spring in the mountains above town.

She flexed her long, tapered fingers on the steering wheel. She had small wrists, dainty and feminine, and slender arms. But she was stronger than she looked. She had to be to catch babies for a living.

Her facial features resembled her grandmother’s, but she wasn’t as rangy and rawboned as Lydia. Devon was soft and curved in all the right places. She molded herself to him when she lay beneath him. Her honey-blond hair spilled over her shoulders and curled itself around a man’s fingers, caressed his cheek when he kissed her throat or traced the roundness of her breast with the tip of his tongue—

“Have you eaten?” He hadn’t meant to bark the question at her, but he had to get his mind on something else—fast. She jumped a little in her seat.

“What? Yes. I had an apple and some crackers with peanut butter.” She looked a little confused.

“How long ago was that?”

“Between Lena Morales and Winona Preston’s prenatal visits. About eleven, I guess.”

“It’s almost eight. We can’t be talking food and menus with you wasting away from hunger. That’s no way to make an informed decision. C’mon up. I’ve got chicken salad and flat bread. I’ll make you a sandwich.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can. I didn’t do the cooking. My mom did. Old family recipe.” It was time they got out in the open what had happened between them that night six weeks earlier. She’d been scared and exhausted when he’d come across her in the hospital waiting room the second night after Lydia’s heart attack. He’d only meant to offer her something to eat and a place to kick back and relax for a while. It had ended up being much more than that. “It’s only for a sandwich, Devon. You don’t have to be afraid I’m going to try and get you into bed again.”

Her gray eyes met his brown ones without flinching. “I’m not afraid. But I really am too tired to deal with this.” She waved the paper at him.

Miguel straightened, putting a little distance between them. It had been his fault that night. He’d let the situation get out of hand when she’d been frightened and alone. Hell, who would have guessed the same fire that had sparked between them as teenagers would flare out of control all these years later? Their coming together had been spontaneous and white-hot, unplanned and unprotected. At least they’d dodged the pregnancy bullet. Although the thought of his baby growing in Devon’s belly was a consequence he would have welcomed, it would only have made a complicated situation impossible. He reached out and plucked the sheet of paper from her hand. “Okay, I’ll tell him half chicken and half fish and we’ll just let people fight it out at the buffet table.”