His Best Friend's Baby (5 page)

“Yeah. It’s less than I thought it would be, too. But Dean borrowed a lot on the business. There are some big debts.”

“Oh.” She sounded and looked forlorn. “I wish...”

“What?”

“He’d told me.”

Quinn wished the same. Hadn’t Dean known how shaky the footing was, how far the plunge to the ground would be? Why hadn’t he taken success a little slower? Waited to get a boat, to expand the business, to drive the dream car?

But Quinn knew the answer. Despite the fact that his mother never did come back for him, Dean had been the eternal optimist. And an eternal adolescent. “Nah,” he’d have said. “That won’t happen to me.”

But death had happened, and he hadn’t expected that, either.

Quinn tried to smile. “He enjoyed the boat and the car and...” His pretty wife.

Her eyes filled with tears again, even as she gave him a smile as wry as his. “He did, didn’t he?” She sniffed again. “Will you, um, negotiate for me?”

He’d already begun, but he was smart enough not to tell her that. He only nodded.

“I guess I should shower,” she said, starting to stand.

It struck him suddenly that she’d lost weight. Her pixie face had acquired some hollows that hadn’t been there before. The robe hung off one shoulder, exposing a bony protuberance on her shoulder and the most pronounced collarbone he’d ever seen.

“You’re not eating enough.”

She yanked the robe around herself. “And you know this how?”

“I haven’t seen you eat more than a few mouthfuls in...” He couldn’t remember. “You look skinnier.”

“You know, Quinn, Dean always said you didn’t have a girlfriend because you had trouble trusting anyone. I’m starting to think it’s because you’re a lot better at insults than you are at compliments.”

He’d gone rigid halfway through this speech, hating the idea of her and Dean talking about him, of Dean telling her things about him that were supposed to stay between the two of them.

Her face changed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

Quinn just walked out. He was hardly aware of her staring after him.

You jerk,
Dean, he thought, and didn’t even know if he was angriest at his best friend for psychoanalyzing him for the benefit of anyone who’d listen, or for dying.

* * *

T
WO
WEEKS
LATER
, Mindy stood naked looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the closet door. She was pretty sure she was three-and-a-half months pregnant, and she could already see changes in her body.

She
was
skinnier, thanks in part to grief but mainly to the never-ending nausea. Morning sickness, ha! When she first got out of bed in the morning was her worst time, sure, but her stomach stayed queasy most of the day. If she actually threw up, she’d feel better for a little while—long enough to realize she was starved and to stuff her face—but then she’d just get sick again. So she barely managed crackers and celery and carrots—the clean sharp flavor of raw vegetables tasted especially good—and clear soup. Juice and crackers for breakfast, chicken noodle soup for lunch, and vegetables and more crackers at intervals the rest of the day.

She’d lost almost ten pounds, which she knew couldn’t be good. But she was trying. And the morning sickness would go away soon. She hoped.

Despite the weight loss, she was starting to have a little pooch below her belly button. If not for the missing ten pounds, her jeans might have been getting tight around the waist.

Brendan Quinn sure knew how to make a girl feel good.

Dean had been dead six weeks now, and she was starting to dread the very sight of Quinn. That made her feel petty, because he was doing so much for her. Most of it unasked.

Sighing, she glanced once more at her skinny, pregnant body and turned away, picking out underwear, T-shirt and jeans from the dresser.

A couple of weeks ago, she’d started sleeping up here again, in the bed she’d shared with Dean. She felt less lonely here. Sometimes she’d even pretend to herself that he was just working late.

Except for the obstetrician she’d seen for the first time a couple of weeks ago, Mindy hadn’t told a soul yet about the pregnancy. Not her mother. Not even Selene. And not Quinn. Especially not Quinn.

Her jeans on, the T-shirt in her hand, she frowned into space. Quinn already treated her as if she were fragile, and not in a good way. Not as if he wanted to take care of her, but rather as if he thought she was completely incapable of taking care of herself. He did things without asking whether she wanted him to, then managed to look irritated because he had to do them. If she admitted she could hardly go out to the grocery store because she was so sick to her stomach, he’d be unbearable.

She let out an exasperated puff of air.
Be
unbearable? He
was
unbearable. Ten times in every conversation she had to remind herself that he meant well. And he was incredibly capable. Apparently he’d been fielding calls night and day from Mick Mulligan, who really did need his hand held, Dean had said. Quinn dealt with the lawyer, he’d negotiated the sale of Fenton Security, he’d arranged for the boat to be trailered to a marina and put up for sale, and he mowed the lawn.

And he judged her. She saw it in his eyes. He thought she was selfish, silly, lazy. At first he hadn’t believed she really loved Dean; now he seemed to think she should get over it and whip her life into shape. Except he obviously didn’t think she could.

In fairness, he was doing his best to see that she walked away with as much money as possible. Presumably because he didn’t believe she was able to make a living, and he felt he owed it to Dean to be sure she was okay.

That was what rankled: the fact that he despised her and was helping only out of a sense of obligation to Dean. At first she’d been grateful no matter what. The truth was, she didn’t have anyone to step in, and at first she
hadn’t
been in any shape to make decisions. But now she could make her own, only Quinn persisted in treating her as if she were a developmentally disabled adult who needed a new guardian.

And, oh boy, if he found out she was pregnant he’d become so much worse. Instead of being the proverbial thorn in her side that
could
be plucked out, he’d become something painful but permanent. Arthritis that sent white-hot jolts through her knees every time she stood up. Because Quinn would feel an obligation to be sure Dean’s child was okay. And given his attitude toward her, he’d be positive she was incapable of being an adequate parent. Everything she did, he’d criticize, if only silently, with a lift of a dark eyebrow or condemnation in his eyes.

Mindy sank onto the edge of the bed.

She wasn’t sure she wanted him to ever find out about the baby.

There. She’d thought it. Maybe that did make her selfish, because it was possible that a relationship with Dean’s son or daughter would mean something to Quinn. He and Dean had been friends for a very long time.

But maybe...maybe later she could deal with him. Once she’d had the baby, and gotten her life together. Maybe then she’d call Quinn and say, “Hey. You want to meet Dean Jr.?”

And then, if he glanced around and said something like, “Shouldn’t his crib be in
his
bedroom, not yours? He’s got to learn to be independent,” she would be able to stand up to him. Right now, that was really hard for her to do. She owed him too much.

So right now, she didn’t want him to know she was pregnant. And that was a problem, because pretty soon he was going to notice. He wouldn’t be able to
help
noticing.

Only, there was a way to make sure he didn’t notice. That was to not let him see her.

Not to see Brendan Quinn—maybe never to see him again—would be an enormous relief.

CHAPTER FIVE

Q
UINN
COULDN
’
T
BELIEVE
how fast the fight blew up.

He’d come over to mow the lawn only to find it had been done. He could tell whoever had done it had used a mulching mower, which was supposed to be good for the grass. He’d have raked anyway, but he supposed it looked okay.

Mindy answered the door in a baggy
T-shirt and shorts, her legs long and tan. She must have seen him stop on the way up the walk, because she said, “I hired a lawn service. I shouldn’t have let you do it as long as you did. I’m sorry.”

So as he followed her in, he asked who she’d hired. After she told him, he merely asked whether she’d shopped around, and suddenly she was mad.

“You know, I’m not quite as stupid as you seem to think I am. I made it on my own for a lot of years before I met Dean.”

Uh-huh. Two or three years, maybe.

“Did you ever have a lawn?” he asked.

Eyes glittering with anger way out of proportion to the argument, she snapped, “Did I miss something? Is shopping for the best price to have your lawn mowed any different than shopping for someone to replace your garbage disposal?”

“I just asked.”

“No, you assumed!”

“As far as I could tell, Dean took care of you.”

She stiffened. “So you felt obligated to continue the job? Isn’t that a little above and beyond the call, Quinn? It’s not like you signed on to the job like Dean did.”

His grip on his temper slipped. “And I have to ask myself a dozen times a day whether he had the slightest idea what he was doing when he signed on.”

“You know, somehow I could tell. You never gave me any slack, Quinn. Not even for Dean’s sake.”

He hadn’t seen that knife coming before it slipped between his ribs. But he wouldn’t let himself wonder if she was right, if he should have tried harder for Dean’s sake. What did she know about the kind of friendship that saved two lost kids, that gave each the bedrock to build a life on? She didn’t even have a friend close enough to call when her husband was murdered!

Quinn gave her a scathing look. Funny time to notice she’d painted her toenails again. Pale pink. Nothing vivid, but a sign of recovery.

“Maybe that’s because I was too good a friend to shrug and say, ‘Hey, guy. Learn from your mistakes. Divorce. Broken heart. Whatever. You’ll get over it.’”

Voice crackling with anger, she said, “And you were so sure I was going to break his heart
because...
” Then she shook her head and made a disgusted sound. “You know what, Quinn? I don’t care why you don’t like me. Unlike you, for Dean’s sake I tried to be friends. But I don’t have to try anymore. I’m grateful for what you’ve done, even though I know it was done out of love for Dean, not out of any sympathy for me. But I can manage on my own now.” She marched to the front door and held it open. “You’re a free man, Quinn. Consider your obligation canceled. Go back to your life.”

He laughed in disbelief. “With pleasure!” Three strides and he was out the front door into the warmth of the June day, the scent of newly mown grass filling his nostrils. Hearing the quiet sound of the door shutting behind him, he only wished this was it, that he’d never see her again.

But he knew better. Unfortunately for him, she’d be calling. She wasn’t stupid, he didn’t believe that, but her real-life skills were not what he’d call impressive. She’d get the paperwork for the sale of Fenton Security and not be able to make heads or tails out of it. Or her cute little BMW would break down some day, and who would she call? A scary sound in the night, and his phone would be ringing. Lucky him.

He was just grateful that she
would
have enough cushion of money to let her go back to school—or take some time to find another husband. If Fenton Security had been in trouble and even the house had had to be liquidated to pay debts... Getting into his car and slamming the door, he shook his head. Got to love small favors.

Right now, he’d just enjoy a brief vacation, so to speak. He’d hope for a week before she got over her snit and realized she needed him more than she resented him.

* * *

A
WEEK
TURNED
INTO
TWO
before Quinn knew it. High-profile murders tended to suck up time in a big way, and this week’s was a doozy.

A hot young rock star was in town to play the Key Arena. In fact, he had played to a sold-out crowd at the Key Arena. Then he partied with his band members and some groupies before heading for his room at the waterfront Edgewater Hotel with a cute blonde tucked against his side.

Come two o’clock the next afternoon, the band members gathered in the lobby and the limo showed up to take them to the airport for their flight to Portland, where their next concert was scheduled. Only the rock star didn’t appear, and he didn’t answer the knock on his door. The concierge let one of the band members into the room, where he found their headliner dead on the king-size bed, a bullet through his temple.

What was meant to look like a suicide wasn’t. Wrong angle for the path of the bullet, and wrong temple for a lefty. Murderers made stupid mistakes, lucky for the cops.

Turned out the rock star was married to
another
rock star with an ego bigger than his. She’d been heard to say, “If I ever catch him with another woman, he’s dead.”

Turned out also that he had a restraining order on a stalker, who happened to be in Seattle. For entirely innocent reasons, of course.

The cute blonde who’d gone to his room with him had completely vanished. No one at the party knew her; they all thought she’d come with someone else.

The case had all the makings of a thriller. Within days, Quinn had a camera in his face every time he turned around. His photo was in
People
magazine the following week. Mindy Fenton was far from his mind.

Week two, the cute blonde’s corpse floated in with the tide. At least, a young blond woman, whose body had been in the Sound the right length of time, bumped up against a moored sailboat and scared the rich forty-year-old couple who had taken it out for a sail and were just tying up.

The stalker, also young and blond, admitted to stalking, but claimed that in the wee hours she’d seen a
second
woman knock and enter the hotel room. She insisted that she’d then returned to her own hotel and gone to bed. A night clerk confirmed he’d seen her cross the lobby and get in the elevator. Apparently even stalkers needed sleep.

The woman was undeniably crazy as well as grief-stricken. “I would never have hurt him!” she kept crying. “I love him.” When she realized her verb was wrong, that the obsession of her life was now past tense, a sob escaped her. “He loved me, too! I know he did! He needed to get out of being married to
her
.” Loathing was easy to read. “The other woman was so he’d divorce her. And then we could be together.”

The restraining order?

She
made him get it.

Right.

But Quinn believed she hadn’t hurt the love of her life. Her faith in their future was still too solid. Stalkers didn’t kill until they were disillusioned and had to face the reality that the loved one would never be theirs.

Quinn flew to San Francisco, where the rock-star wife had supposedly been the night her husband had been murdered. Funny thing was, no one could confirm her whereabouts. In fact, a maid at her hotel swore no one had slept in the bed on the night in question.

Interestingly, the stalker had apparently bought
two
airline tickets to Seattle—one from Southwest Airlines on the same day the band had flown in to Seattle, and another on Alaska Airlines the day of the concert. That one had been bought at the counter just before the flight, too late for the purchaser to have checked baggage. The ticket seller remembered her because she’d cut it so close and because she looked vaguely familiar.

“I assumed I’d waited on her when she flew Alaska in the past.”

When Quinn showed her a photo of the stalker, she shook her head decisively. “No. That wasn’t her.” Cute blonde dredged out of the water brought an equally certain, “No.” When he produced a paparazzi photo of the wife trying to slip out to the grocery store or the gym without makeup, her hair back in a ponytail, she said, “Yes! Yes, that’s her.” Then her eyes widened. “Wait. Isn’t that...”

He tucked the photo away. “I’m going to ask you to keep what you know to yourself for a few days.”

“Oh!” Eyes still wide and glassy, she nodded and kept nodding. “I can do that. Sure. Wow.”

Back in Seattle, Quinn and Ellis Carter flashed the wife’s photo around some more and found a taxi driver willing to swear he’d picked her up at the airport—“Yo! That woman is a witch!” he declared—and a desk clerk at the Alexis Hotel who had registered her for a room.

“I knew who she was,” he said with composure. “We often have guests who choose to register under an alias to avoid the public eye. I thought nothing of it.”

All suggestive enough to earn a search warrant, executed by San Francisco P.D. They called within a few hours.

“Here’s a bizarre one,” the San Francisco detective told Quinn. “Get this. We found a lock of blond hair in a little crystal candy dish with a lid. The hair had been dipped in blood. Dried now, but you could tell what it was. The lab’s got it. If the DNA matches...”

If the blood had just been the rock star’s, his wife might have dreamed up an excuse for treasuring the two-inch chunk of blood-soaked hair. They weren’t exactly a normal couple with all-American habits. Unfortunately for her, some of the blood came from the blonde whose body had been fished from the Sound.

The arrest brought huge headlines and ensured that the faces of the dead musician and his wife dominated the covers of the tabloids. Quinn got tired of the endless requests for interviews and was grateful to have a couple of quiet days off.

His own lawn had gotten shaggy and the milk in his refrigerator was sour when he poured it on his cereal.

He growled, and dumped the rest down the sink. The bread was growing mold, too. He cut it off and toasted a couple of pieces for breakfast. Grocery shopping needed to come ahead of mowing.

In the produce section at the store, he saw a pair of long legs that turned out to belong to a teenager with short tousled hair like Mindy’s, but also a nose ring. Still, he stood in the checkout line wondering how she was doing. She hadn’t left a phone message. Maybe she’d seen him on the news and realized he wouldn’t have had time for her anyway. Or maybe she was more stubborn than he’d expected.

He wouldn’t make her beg, but she was going to have to ask for help. All he was doing was honoring her declaration of independence, not holding a grudge. In that spirit, he sure wasn’t going to drive by as if by chance just to see what the house looked like, even though the thought crossed his mind as he turned out of the grocery store parking lot.

Another week passed, and then another, and he began to wonder if she would call. Dean’s attorney phoned at last to let him know that probate was coming along.

“With the boat and the BMW sold as well as the business...”

Quinn interrupted. “She sold her car?”

“Mrs. Fenton is a levelheaded young woman,” Armstrong said with apparent approval. “Without a substantial income of her own, she could see that continuing to make such steep payments doesn’t make sense.”

So the little bright blue car was gone. Quinn frowned, wondering what she’d chosen to drive instead.

“I was going to buy the Camaro,” he said.

“Yes, in fact I have it here. That’s really why I called. She’s already signed the papers so we can transfer the title.” He went on, but Quinn didn’t listen.

She didn’t want him at the house even to pick up the car. Maybe he was just dense not to have realized she disliked him so much.

Stupid to be shocked, but he was. He was also suddenly conscious of a hollow feeling under his breastbone. He shouldn’t have had that Philly sandwich for lunch. The stupid onions.

“Yeah. Okay. Sure,” he said, only belatedly noticing that Armstrong was still talking. Into the silence that followed his interruption, Quinn said, “I’ll, uh, pick up the car at your office. This afternoon? Good. Sure.”

By the time he slid behind the wheel of the Camaro late that afternoon, anger had taken the place of the shock. Mindy might dislike him, but she sure hadn’t hesitated to use him. Funny thing, but she hadn’t told him to get lost until Dean’s affairs were pretty well wrapped up and she knew she’d have enough money to get by.

Well, he’d done as much as he had for Dean’s sake, not hers; she was right about that.

“I tried,” he said aloud, figuring he was as close to Dean here in the car he’d loved as he’d get anywhere. When Quinn turned the key in the ignition, the engine started with a throaty purr. Accelerating out of the parking lot in the candy-apple-red Camaro, he remembered how much Dean had enjoyed the way heads turned when he drove this car. Quinn did like the power, the sense that he had only to ask and the car would surge forward like a thoroughbred out of the gate at Emerald Downs. The bright red, though, made him feel conspicuous. But the car would stay red. He wouldn’t give Mindy the satisfaction of finding out she was right.

His jaw flexed. No! The Camaro would stay red because Dean had liked it that way. The car was a memento, a reminder of Dean’s boyish delight in expensive toys, starting with the mountain bike the Howies had bought him that first Christmas in their home. He’d grinned and cried at the same time.

“You mean, it’s mine?” the gawky kid had asked in wonder. “I can take it, even if my mom comes for me?”

Quinn had considered his matching bike a loaner. The only gifts he’d ever had were from men sniffing after his mother back before she got so strung out. Those hadn’t really been for him; even as a little kid, he’d known that. Gifts came with strings attached. He’d hated the knowledge he’d seen in his mother’s eyes.

He hadn’t known what the Howies thought he’d give in return for that bike or the other Christmas and birthday gifts that followed, and they never had explicitly asked for anything. Even so, he’d continued for his own self-defense to think of everything they’d given him as borrowed, like the bedroom and his place at the dinner table. When he’d graduated from high school and left the Howies’, he hadn’t taken much: a few clothes, the clunker of a car he’d bought with his meager income from bagging groceries, and that was about it.