The Darkness to Come (7 page)

That evening, Rachel cooked dinner. She was an excellent cook, and Joshua loved to observe her at work. As he sat at the dinette table, skimming the newspaper, he watched her.

Dressed in a flannel shirt, lounge pants, and slippers, she flitted around the kitchen like a hummingbird around a flower garden, adding a sprinkle of spices here, tasting the sauce there, all the while singing in a soft, soothing voice. Under normal circumstances, she derived great pleasure from cooking. Tonight, she seemed to be in an especially buoyant mood.

It puzzled him. That morning, he’d been convinced that she was keeping something important from him, and he’d planned to watch her closely at dinner, just to be sure nothing was amiss. At lunch, Eddie had advised him to let it go, and Joshua wanted to—but he couldn’t. Not while the uneasiness still lingered in his stomach, like an undigested meal.

But Rachel wasn’t acting like a woman who had anything to hide. Unless her apparent joy was a ruse to deceive him . . . .

No,I don’t believe that
.
I can’t believe she would scheme like that to mislead me.

“Dinner’s ready,” Rachel said, taking silverware out of the drawer. “Go wash up, baby.”

Joshua pushed away from the table. He nearly knocked over the chair, and caught it before it hit the floor. Coco, who’d been resting nearby, scurried away and hid between Rachel’s legs.

“Sorry, Coco,” Joshua said. “Scared you half to death, didn’t I?”

He glanced at Rachel, habitually expecting a rebuke for his clumsiness, but she only smiled—a smile of love and infinite patience. Not the smile of a woman who nursed deception in her heart.

He decided, once and for all, that his suspicions about her were totally off base. He was going to let them go.

When he returned to the kitchen after washing his hands, Rachel was setting dinner on the table: shrimp scampi over linguine, sautéed zucchini, and garlic bread. Coco followed at her heels, waiting for a morsel to drop.

“Need any help?” he asked.

“You could turn on some music, light a few candles.”

“Special occasion?”

“Maybe.” She smiled.

He turned on the satellite radio system and tuned it to one of their favorite R&B channels. Then he got two candles out of a cabinet, placed them inside the frosted glass hurricane lamps on the table, and carefully lit them.

They often drank wine with dinner, for the health benefits. But after Rachel dimmed the recessed lights, she took a bottle of sparkling white grape juice out of the refrigerator.

“You mind doing the honors?” She handed the bottle to him. “I would’ve gotten champagne, but...”

“We
are
celebrating something.” Sitting, he twisted off the cap and filled the two wine goblets on the table.

“Don’t you have some good news to tell me?”

He scratched his chin, thinking. “Wait a minute, that’s right! The proposal I sent to the restaurant group—I called them, when you said I should. They want me to do the project!”

“Of course they do.” She settled into her chair. “Congratulations, love. I knew you would get the work. Here’s to many more lucrative deals.”

He tapped his glass against hers, and they sipped.

“How did you know I’d get the project?” he asked.

“I had a good feeling about it. You know how I get hunches sometimes.”

“But you knew
exactly
when I should call them. Even the guy I spoke to there said my timing was amazing.”

She shrugged. “What can I say? Call me psychic. I get a spark of intuition, and I listen to it.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about us getting divorced. You’re my good luck charm, for real. I’m not ever letting you go.”

“Good, ‘cause I’d like to stay around for a while.” She laughed.

They bowed their heads and said grace. Then they heaped their plates with food and began to eat.

“This looks delicious.” Joshua spun linguine around his fork and speared a plump shrimp. “My mom’s a good cook, but she can’t touch you.”

“Lord, please don’t ever say that around her,” Rachel said. “She hates me enough as it is.”

Joshua cringed. But Rachel was speaking the truth. His mom had been distrustful and cool toward Rachel from the beginning, considered Rachel a corrupting influence on him. He had never understood why his mother felt that way toward Rachel, but there was much that he would never understand about his mom. At their wedding in his family church, he’d been half-convinced that his mother was going to raise her hand when the pastor asked if anyone present opposed the union, but she had thankfully remained silent—while directing a hot glare at Rachel that made her true feelings clear.

“My mom doesn’t hate you,” Joshua said. “Hate is a strong word.”

“How about ‘intense dislike’?” Rachel asked. “She has an intense dislike for me. She thinks I stole her precious little baby away from her, to corrupt him.”

“Mom is just . . . a little overly protective, that’s all.”

“A little?”

Joshua laughed. “Okay, she gets out of control, sometimes, I admit. But she means well. She’ll grow to love you in time. You’ll see.”

“I’m not holding my breath.” Rachel chewed a piece of garlic toast, swallowed, smiled. “But maybe she was right about the corrupting part. If she only knew what we did in the bedroom . . .”

He felt her foot slide under the cuff of his jeans and tease his calf.

“Hey.” Joshua blushed. “You must not want me to finish dinner.”

“Sorry, I’m a bad girl.” She stroked his calf again with her foot, and then pulled it away. She winked. “That’s how we messed around and got the first one.”

Joshua was bringing the fork to his lips, but her remark made him pause.

“The first one?” he asked.

“You had some good news to share, and so do I,” she said. She set down her fork, drew in a deep breath, and looked at him. Her eyes glistened. He realized it was because she was starting to cry.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“Did you say, pregnant?” His lips trembled.

“Yes,
pregnant
.” She was nodding, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I took an early pregnancy test this morning, and it was positive. I’m pregnant with our baby, Josh. You’re going to be a daddy.”

Joshua shot out of his chair so quickly that it tipped backward and clattered to the floor, but he didn’t notice, didn’t care. Rachel came out of her chair, knocking over hers, too, made some comment about how clumsy both of them were, and Joshua picked her up and swept her into an embrace, crying for the first time since he’d attended his granddad’s funeral ten years ago, and the best thing now about his tears was that they were tears of joy.

Chapter 7

Rachel’s announcement left Joshua buzzing for the rest of the evening. She was pregnant.
Pregnant
. He was going to be a father.
A father
.

They had not exactly been trying to conceive, but they hadn’t been trying to prevent it, either. Their attitude was that when the time was right, the baby would come. A child was a gift from God. No one could ever strictly control the granting of a blessing.

He had an almost irrepressible urge to call everyone he knew and share the good news. But Rachel promised him to silence. She wanted to visit her OB-GYN and confirm the pregnancy with another test, to be absolutely sure. She also advised him that until she passed the first trimester, it would be unwise to tell the whole world about the baby, because in the early stages there was always the possibility of a miscarriage. In the meantime, she wanted him to keep the news under wraps.

He reluctantly agreed to her request, though walking around with such a wonderful secret was going to drive him nuts. There was so much to think about, so much to plan . . . he felt as if he were going to pop like a balloon.

I’m going to be a dad. I can’t believe it.

He had assumed he would be awake all night, riding high on excitement, but he wound up falling asleep shortly before midnight, exhausted, like a kid who’d eaten too much candy crashing after the sugar rush faded. Rachel climbed in bed, found a comfortable spot in his arms, and drifted asleep, too.

When he awoke sometime later that night, she was gone.

He glanced toward the bathroom. The door was shut, but blackness framed the doorway. She wasn’t in there.

He thought about the nightmare she’d had last night, and anxiety wrenched his stomach. What if she was sleepwalking this time, fleeing her mysterious dream villain?

It was a melodramatic idea—Rachel might have padded downstairs only to get a glass of water—but he couldn’t discount it. With her announcement of her pregnancy, he felt an instinctual drive to protect her from harm. That included Rachel accidentally hurting herself in the throes of a bad dream.

He put on his glasses. The clock read a quarter past three.

He got out of bed, shuffled into the hallway. It was dark. No light filtered up there from downstairs, which it would have if she were in the kitchen.

He was about to call her name, when he heard a clicking sound coming from the room at the end of the hallway. Rachel’s office.

Quietly, he went down the hall. The door was cracked open about an inch, giving him a narrow view.

Rachel sat before her desk, typing on her laptop. The silvery glow from the display was the only light source in the study, imbuing her face with a ghostly pallor.

What was she doing in here at a quarter past three o’clock in the morning?

He looked at the screen. He could make out a few words. He frowned, leaned forward—

--and unintentionally bumped against the door. Rachel twisted around, startled.

“Hey, it’s only me,” he said.

“You scared me.” She put her hand to her chest, sighed.

He stepped inside the room. “Sorry. I saw you’d gotten out of bed. What are you doing up?”

“Reading about pregnancy.” She hit a button on the keyboard, closing the programs she had opened. “I’m so excited I can hardly sleep. I figured as long as I was awake, I’d do some research.”

Joshua wished there was sufficient light in the room to reveal her eyes, because he was positive that she was lying to him. The text he’d read on the screen was proof of her duplicity.

“When are you coming back to bed?” he asked.

“Right now, actually.” She switched off the computer. Within seconds, the display went black, and darkness fell over the room.

She came to him, slid her arms around his waist. One of her hands crawled inside his boxer shorts.

“Coming with me?” she asked in a whisper.

Although Joshua was usually as pliable as clay in Rachel’s erotically adept fingers, he wasn’t in the mood for sex. But if he turned her down, she would think something was wrong. Something
was
wrong, but he wasn’t prepared to talk about it yet.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “I’m going downstairs to get some water. Want anything?”

“Only you.” She pulled her t-shirt over her head, dangled it from her finger.

Joshua’s vision had mostly adjusted to the darkness. Rachel was wearing only her panties, and the sight of her could have resurrected the pulse of a dead man. In spite of his troubled mood, the promise of being with her sent a wave of warmth through his veins.

“Be right back,” he said.

“Don’t keep me waiting long.” Hips swaying prettily, she sashayed to their bedroom.

He watched her go, his mouth dry; he really could use some water. Before heading downstairs, he glanced at the laptop again, and felt an uncomfortable twinge.

He hadn’t seen the word “pregnancy” on the screen when he’d been spying over Rachel’s shoulder. He’d seen a different word altogether.

Penitentiary.

Chapter 8

Dexter awoke from a turbulent night full of vivid dreams about laboratories and white-jacketed men bearing hypodermic syringes.

Although he awoke in his childhood bedroom, sheets swaddling his body, he could not remember actually sleeping. All he remembered was laying awake thinking about his wife, hearing the shrill wind gusting around the house, and the weird images—which, in retrospect, seemed less like dreams and more like visions of some hidden past.

He could not make sense of them; he was sure he’d never been in a lab of any kind. Yet the face of one of the dream doctors in particular was so sharp in his mind it was as if Dexter had once met him in the flesh: a black man in his fifties with skin so fair he looked biracial, curly brown hair, wire-rim glasses, and probing eyes. He’d bore a syringe so huge it looked as if it would leave a puncture wound that would never heal.

Dexter shivered, and the chill had nothing to do with the poorly insulated house. He hated doctors and needles.

The bedside clock read half-past seven. He had a busy day ahead of him, and he needed to get moving. He would put the dreams out of mind. As disturbing as they were, they were only dreams, and meant nothing.

When he crossed the hallway to the bathroom, he smelled coffee, bacon, grits, eggs, biscuits. Mom believed in keeping her men fed. She’d been trained well.

He showered and dressed. He grabbed his duffel bag—he had packed it last night with the knives and money—and headed to the kitchen.

Dressed in a bathrobe, a scarf wrapped around her head, Mom was placing several slices of crispy bacon on paper towels, to drain the grease. She grinned at him.

“Morning, Dex, baby. I was just about to come see if you wanted some breakfast.”

“I’ve got to go handle some business, Mom. Can you throw together a couple sandwiches for me?”

“Of course, baby.” She reached for the platter of fresh biscuits, paused. “You seen your baby brother? He ain’t come back last night.”

After dinner last night, Dexter had pulled Leon aside, given him a thousand dollars, and told him to stay away from the house. Leon had been all too happy to leave. With a pocketful of cash, he’d stay zooted out of his mind for at least a week or so. Or, if they were lucky, he would OD.