Surrogate Escape

His mouth twisted. “She can’t get around very well right now.”

Lori recalled the diabetes and the toe amputation—more than one. His mother had always been a big woman, and the disease had only made her less mobile. Some of her anger leaked away.

“Yes, of course.”

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Jake, pointing to the fussing infant.

“Hungry, maybe. Let’s have a look.”

Lori found Jake’s kitchen and laid the baby on his dinette. Then she peeled back the blanket and stroked the knit edge.

“You kept it,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Just reminds me of her.”

Lori didn’t need a reminder. She carried the memories in her heart like a spike. The baby girl she’d lost. Jake’s baby. At the time she thought the miscarriage was her fault, that she must have done something wrong. She knew better now.

The baby before them had ceased fussing and stared up at them with wide blue eyes. The infant was pink and white, with skin so translucent you could see the tiny veins that threaded across her chest and forehead. She was clearly a newborn, still streaked with her mother’s blood.

Lori shrugged out of her coat and Jake stepped forward to take it. Always the gentleman, she thought. Perfect as Captain Freakin’ America. Captain of the soccer team, basketball team and track team. Fast, smart and somehow once interested in her. The world made no sense.

“What’s that white stuff?” he asked, peering over her shoulder, his breath warm and sweet on her neck.

“That’s the caul. It’s the tissue sack that surrounds the baby in the womb. I hear that some Anglos believe that wearing the caul is lucky.”

“What Anglos?”

“The Irish, I think. Maybe Scottish. I can’t recall. My granddad was a Scot.” Why did she feel the need to remind him her father had not been Apache?

* * *

JAKE GLANCED AT HER, letting the desire build again. He knew her grandfather had been a Scot. He even remembered her father. He’d been a redhead who worked for the oil and gas company in Darabee for a while. He was the reason that Lori’s hair took on a red gleam in the sunlight. She’d taken a lot of teasing over that in grade school. She even had a light dusting of freckles over her nose. Or she had as a child, anyway. It made her different. Jake thought those differences made her more beautiful, but he’d been one of the worst in middle school. Anything to get her attention, even if it was only to see her flush and storm off.

Lori had changed over the five years of separation, and at age twenty-one, she had grown into a woman’s body. Her skin was a healthy golden brown and her mouth was still full but tipped down at the corners. Above the delicate nose, her dark brows arched regally over the deep brown eyes. The sadness he saw there was new. Today she wore her long, thick hair coiled in a knot at the base of her skull, practical like her uniform. And the hairstyle disguised the soft natural wave in her hair. Lori worked with children and babies, so her top was always alive with something bright and cheerful. Today it was teddy bears all tumbling down her chest with blocks. The bottoms matched, picking up the purples of the top and hugging her hips. The shoes were slip-on clogs with rubber soles. White, of course.

But beneath the trim medical nurses’ scrubs, he knew her body. Or he’d known the body of her youth. His fingers itched to explore the changes, the new fullness of her breasts and the tempting flare of her hips. They were children no longer, so before he went down this road again, he needed to think first. He hadn’t thought the last time.

Actions had consequences. He knew that well enough by now.

She had been a pretty girl but had become a classic beauty of a woman. When she danced at powwows, she drew the photographers like a blossom drew bees. The camera loved her, and he had a copy of a magazine where she’d been chosen as a cover model back in their senior year. Dressed in her regalia, she had a poise and intelligence that shone past the bright beads around her neck and white paint that ran down her lip to her chin. The cover that should have been a coup turned into another source for teasing as the lighting highlighted that her brown eyes were more cinnamon and revealed red highlights in her hair. Where was that magazine? His eyes popped open and he glanced about his living space, hoping she wouldn’t spot it before he could tuck it away.

Lori continued on, “My grandmother, my dad’s mother, told me once to look out for a baby with a caul. It means the baby is special.”

“All babies are special,” he said, thinking of one in particular.

* * *

LORI GLANCED AT the newborn, a little girl, checking her toes and fingers and finding her perfectly formed, if somewhat small.

“Do you have a kitchen scale?”

“A what?”

She smiled. “No way to check her weight, then. Grab my medical kit.”

Jake darted away as Lori examined the umbilical cord. Someone had tied it with a strip of green bark over a foot from the baby and then sliced the cord cleanly through. It was not the sort of cut a midwife would make, and it was not the sort of twine you would find in a home. More like the materials someone who had given birth outdoors would use.

Her mind leaped immediately to a teenage mother. Lori checked the baby and found nothing to indicate where the child had been born, but by the look of her, she was white.

“Here it is.” Jake set the kit down on the chair with a thump.

“Hold on to her so she doesn’t fall,” said Lori.

“Hold on how?”

Lori wrapped the baby again and then took his big, familiar hand and placed it on the baby’s chest.

“Easy. Don’t press.”

Then she retrieved a diaper from a side pocket. When she returned, it was to find him using a piece of gauze to wipe the blood from the infant’s face.

“We’ll do that at the clinic,” she said.

“It’s a blood sample,” he said. “Mother’s blood, right?”

She stilled. What she had seen as a childcare issue he saw as a crime scene.

“It’s probably some scared kid,” she said.

“It’s a felony. There are places to bring a baby. Safe places. She left it outside in my truck.”

She looked down at the tiny infant. Someone had given birth and then dumped her on a windy, cold September morning. She had treated babies abandoned by mothers before. They did not all survive. This little one was very lucky.

“Fortunate,” she said.

He met her gaze.

“To be alive,” she qualified.

Jake nodded. “I think she was still out there, watching me.”

“The mother?”

He nodded.

“That’s likely. She would have been close. Any idea who?”

“I need to take a look around the house.”

She nodded. “Go on, then.”

Jake tucked the gauze into one of the evidence baggies he had on his person and then slipped it into one of the many pockets of his tribal police uniform.

“Done with your evidence collection?” she asked.

He nodded. “For now.”

“Then I’ll get the little one fed and ready to transport while you have your look around.”

“Did you call Protective Services?” he asked.

“Betty called while I got my kit.” Betty Mills was her boss and the administrator of the Tribal Health Clinic. “She said they have to contact whoever is on call in our area. It could be a while.”

“Do you have a car seat for a newborn?” he asked, the unease settling in his chest.

Lori readied the diaper. “Yes. In my trunk. I’ll bring her to the clinic for a checkup. Unclaimed babies always come to the clinic now. Do you think the mother could still be out there?”

“I’ll know soon.” He zipped his police jacket and replaced the white, wide-brimmed Stetson to his head. Then he cast her a long look that made her stomach quiver. She pressed her lips together, bracing against her physical reaction. Fool me once, she thought. “Thanks for coming, Lori.”

“You want me to wait?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She nodded and watched him go. Jake Redhorse was her poison, but she was not going to be the tribe’s source of gossip again. She couldn’t go back and fix what was broken between them. Only he could do that, and it would mean admitting he had protected his reputation at the expense of hers. Left her out in the storm that never reached him. His luck, his reputation, his honor and his willingness to do what was right had all played in his favor. While her family legacy had cast her in the worst light. The natural scapegoat for daring to taint the reputation of the tribe’s golden boy.

So, you’re saying it’s mine? That was what he’d actually said to her. He wasn’t the first to suspect she’d pulled a fast one. How could they be so willing to think so little of her? After the gossip flew, she became the target of disdain. Her appearance in the classroom drew long silences, followed by snickering behind raised hands. Meanwhile, everyone felt sorry for Jake. Forgave him instantly. Who could blame him? He’d been tricked. Swindled. Seduced.

During junior year, Jake was still playing soccer and planned to play basketball but was already planning to get a part-time job moving cattle when the baby came.

When she mentioned her intention to work at the Darabee hospital as a health care aide, he’d scoffed.

“Finish high school, Lori,” he’d said. “So you don’t end up like your mom.”

So he’d planned to drop out and have her stay in school. More fuel to make him the hero and her the parasite.

She had glared at him. “You could still go to college.”

“No. I’ll be here for my child.”

Yes. Of course he would. But he had never had to.

Instead, he had accepted condolences first for the unplanned pregnancy and later for his loss. His loss. Never their loss. She clamped her teeth together as the fury spiked. Instead, he had finished high school and gone to college and she had gone. too. Become a nurse. Shown them all. Only, no one had really noticed or cared.

Yet one look at the wiggling, smiling baby and her temper ebbed. As she looked down into her eyes, she felt a tug in her belly and breasts.

She knew this feeling, had felt it once before, even though her baby had already left.

Uh-oh, she thought. Pair bonding, her mind supplied, as if reviewing for one of her tests in school. That magic thing that made a baby uniquely yours.

“Don’t do this, Lori,” she warned herself. But it was already too late.

* * *

JAKE WALKED AROUND the truck. The wind had picked up so much that it whistled through the trees. Cold sunlight poured in golden bands through the breaks in the tall pines to the east. Behind the truck, he found a bloody palm print on his tailgate and pine needles beside the hitch. It looked as if someone had stepped on the bumper and then hoisted up to place the baby in the bed of the truck. She was small, then.

Had she arranged the red cloth so that he would notice it immediately against the silver of the F-150’s body?

He could see no blood on the ground and no tracks on the earth on either side of the driveway. He cast his gaze about, looking for a place where she could have watched his arrival and still have been shielded from discovery. Then he walked to the most logical spot. There in the eastern row of piñon pine, at the base of one of the large trunks, was a spot where the needles had been disturbed. He squatted and saw that someone had been here, waiting, evidenced by the sweep of a foot back and forth, creating two little mounds of needles and a swath of clean dark earth in between. He could not stand in the spot without hitting his head on the branches, but if he crouched down, he had a perfect view of the road and his driveway and the back of his pickup.

So she’d waited here, holding the infant, and then seeing his police cruiser make the turn onto his road... He checked the distance and imagined the timing. She, this brand-new mother, must have hurried out to the drive. He could see it now, the soft indentation of her foot. No boots. A sneaker, maybe. Small with little tread. She would have had to be quick, her hands likely still covered with the blood of the birth. Who had helped her bring the baby? He could find no evidence of a second person.

Did the father know she had left his child? The ache in his heart hardened in his belly.

He walked the perimeter of his property. Farther back, between his home and the pasture beyond, was something purple and bloody. He slowed his steps, approaching carefully. It was a placenta; he knew that from calving. The flies had found it already. He lifted his radio and called it in.

Carol Dorset, their dispatcher, was in the office now and picked up on the first ring. Carol had been on dispatch back before Jake could even remember and had been the one to answer the phone the night Jake had to call 911 on his daddy.

“Chief’s not here yet.”

He glanced at his watch and noted it was 9:05 a.m. The shifts started at 7:00 a.m. and were staggered throughout the day. Since the explosion, they rotated covering nights. They were expecting two new hires, one patrol and one detective, but they had not started yet.

“Should I call the chief at home?” asked Jake. Since he hadn’t been on the job very long, he wasn’t sure what to do.

“I wouldn’t,” said Carol.

“What about Detective Bear Den?” he asked.

“He just left about thirty minutes ago. You can call him. I won’t.”

Tribal Police Detective Jack Bear Den had been out with him last night on the fatality involving a car and a tree. An outsider leaving their casino too late and too drunk. Jake had been first on scene and then Bear Den. Arizona Highway Patrol was next, and then the meat wagon.

He signed off the radio and replaced it to his side, then he retrieved his phone and hesitated, debating whether to call. If he waited, Bear Den might be asleep. He might even be already.

The dam breach and the aftermath was more than they could handle, which was why Bear Den had asked Jake to interview the family of the latest runaway, Maggie Kesselman. She’d be gone a week tomorrow. Girls had been disappearing since last November. There were always runaways among their tribe, but Bear Den had a hunch these girls had not taken off for Phoenix or Vegas. He said that there was something different happening, and he’d had Jake do some initial legwork when he’d been tied up with the dam breech.

Jake considered calling Ty. His older brother had a very good tracking dog who could find this new mother. He stared down at his phone.

He had not spoken to Ty in a long time. Too long. But since Jake had become a tribal police officer seven months ago, Ty was even more distant. Jake wondered what Ty would think if he asked him to chase down a criminal. He’d laugh, if he decided to pick up his phone.

Ty had gotten the worst of it from their dad, no doubt. He just couldn’t shut his mouth or back down. Jake admired that, even though it brought Ty trouble more often than not.

Jake now felt a cold that had nothing to do with the wind. The blood trail from the placenta vanished in the tall grass. It occurred to him that if he’d walked to his back window with the baby, he might have seen the infant’s mother escaping through the pasture behind his place. But he hadn’t.

Had she paused here? Had she crept up to his window to peer inside?

Jake lifted his cell phone and called Detective Bear Den. This was a crime scene and he didn’t want to screw things up.

Bear Den picked up on the second ring, his voice gravelly. Jake’s stomach dropped because he was certain Bear Den had just gotten to sleep. Jake explained the situation. Bear Den gave him instructions and told him he’d be there soon. The line went dead. Jake returned his phone to his pocket and finished circling the property, finding no further evidence.

The wind pushed at him, and he turned back to the house and the infant—and Lori. She seemed mad at him. But she had no reason to be. He’d asked her to marry him, hadn’t he? He’d been willing to go through with it, too.

Ironic, he thought. An unexpected pregnancy had torn them apart and now, it seemed, had brought her back to him again. Well, he wasn’t sixteen this time. Back then, he’d actually thought he loved Lori. But then they lost the baby and she acted as if he’d done something wrong, instead of everything right. He didn’t understand her. It was as if she’d gone crazy. Even as he saw his dreams collapsing. Even knowing that he’d never become a police officer. He’d been willing to drop out of high school, give up college and marry her. He would have done it, against his mother’s wishes, against his brother Ty’s advice, he would have given his baby his name. And after they told him she had lost the baby, he hadn’t left her. He’d gone to see her, to comfort her, and when they finally let him in to see Lori, she’d yelled at him. He remembered exactly what she had said. The only mistake I made was saying yes.

Then she’d sent him off. Him!

Ty had called from boot camp just before Lori delivered and told him that Lori’s older sisters Amelia and Jocelyn had each tried the same thing on Kee the minute he’d been accepted to college. Jocelyn had been only thirteen at the time. Amelia had moved on to Kurt Bear Den but ended up snagging Kent Haskie. Kent had married Amelia senior year and then gone to trade school to learn to fix air and cooling systems. They were still married and had four kids. Jocelyn had married Doug Hoke after their child was born in Jocelyn’s junior year. Ty had told him Doug didn’t know if he was the father, said it was hard to tell without a test and Jocelyn had been a popular girl. Kee had said Lori had targeted the best, just like a hunter assessing a herd of elk. That comment still chafed.

He didn’t like being used, and he was not going to let that happen ever again. Still, he had never blamed Lori. He knew he’d made a mistake and had accepted responsibility. What more did she want?

Everyone thought he’d broken it off. Oh, no. She had. Firmly and irrevocably. He didn’t understand it or her. And he didn’t trust her. His confusion had kept him at a distance.

He didn’t date women he didn’t trust, and he did not trust Lori.

So why had he almost kissed her?

Chapter Three

“Any idea who left the baby?” asked Detective Bear Den.

The questions came more quickly when his boss, Wallace Tinnin, had arrived in a walking cast and come to a halt in Jake’s driveway, wincing. The chief of tribal police had broken his ankle in the dam explosion and flat-out refused to use crutches. Judging from his sour expression and the circles under his eyes, he needed them—along with about ten hours of sleep.

This man had been a police officer for as long as Jake could remember and had come to his childhood home more than once. On one memorable visit, Tinnin had arrested both Jake’s father and Ty in the same day.

Jake answered all the questions and Bear Den went off to examine the crime scene, otherwise known as Jake’s home.

“You did a good job today, son,” said Tinnin.

The praise was like a balm to his spirit and made his throat tighten. Tinnin had been the father figure Jake had chosen, a kind, decent man with an even, predictable temper. He was sparing with praise, which made it all the more precious when it was doled out.

“Thanks.”

“You two getting back together?”

Tinnin knew all about them, of course. The entire tribe did. For a time there, he and Lori were the favorite topic of gossip, a cautionary tale and then a sad story that made folks shake their heads.

Isn’t that a shame about Jake Redhorse? I’m not surprised about the Mott girl, but Redhorse...you’d think he’d know better.

He unlocked his jaw to speak. “No, sir. I just called her because both the ambulance and my brother Kee were unavailable.”

“I see. Last choice, huh? Funny, though. You two losing a baby girl and then you two finding one, what, three years later?”

“Five.” March sixteenth, just two days after his own birthday. And the wedding was exchanged for a funeral. The white dress stored and the black dress purchased. Jake’s mother had been relieved that he would not have to marry “that girl.” He’d worn his first suit, his wedding suit, to his daughter’s funeral. His upper and lower teeth collided again, and he ground them side to side.

Jake looked away. He’d been a good kid and made his mother proud, mostly. And he’d always tried to give her something, anything to bring her joy. His dad had been in prison, his oldest brother in medical school, and Ty was shipping out on his first tour. He’d been the man of the house at sixteen, and he’d made a mistake with Lori.

“Have you seen the baby yet?” asked Jake.

Tinnin’s thick brows lifted, and he gave a shake of his head. His boss was thin to the point of being gaunt. Gray streaked his collar-length hair in a way that made it look as if he’d accidentally leaned into a freshly painted wall, the white clinging to just the top layer of his scalp. The bags and circles under his eyes were perpetual. His jeans and denim coat made him look like a cowboy, unless you noted the shield clipped to his belt and the bulge where he wore his .45 caliber pistol.

“Why would I need to see her?”

“She has blue eyes,” said Jake.

“All babies have blue eyes. No pigment yet.”

“And blond hair.”

Tinnin shifted, taking the pressure off his injured foot. “You think that baby is white?”

“Seemed so. I was there when Mom brought Abbie home, and I’ve been on a call for a woman delivering.”

“Genevieve Ruiz,” he said.

Jake nodded. “I’ve seen newborn Apache babies. This one is different.”

“Might go see for myself.”

“I’ll come with you.”

They headed to town in separate vehicles. Tinnin followed Jake to the tribe’s urgent-care facility. Tinnin parked in a handicapped spot, and Jake walked slowly beside him through the emergency intake area. They passed Verna Dia heading for her car. She cast them a wave and tossed her bag into her passenger seat.

Inside the urgent-care area, they were greeted and waved on by another nurse, Nina Kenton. There was staff on duty now and patients already waiting. The clinic wasn’t open overnight, though they did have a few rooms if they needed them, but that meant one of the staff had to work overtime, which cost money. The clinic was only six years old, furnished by casino profits, and it ran a deficit every year.

They waved to familiar faces as they headed to the baby wing, as Jake called it. This was a unique section of the facility, the women’s health clinic, and included birthing rooms, exam rooms and a nursery. They found Lori with the chief physician, Dr. Hector Hauser, in the nursery, both wearing surgical masks over their faces. The bassinets were lined up but mostly empty. Jake spotted only two tiny sleeping faces.

This, then, was why Lori had been at work so early. She had become the favored delivery nurse because, according to their dispatcher, Lori was gaining clinical experience in preparation for taking the certification exam to become a neonatal nurse. She spent her life trying to bring healthy babies into the world, and Jake had to wonder at that. He also wondered why she had not married. Of the Mott sisters, only Lori and Dominique were single, and Dominique was still in high school. The Mott girls had a family history of marrying young and filling the tribe’s rosters with new members.

Tinnin paused at the locked door to the nursery. They could go no farther without access. This area remained locked to keep unauthorized people from doing something stupid, like snatching a baby, but they could see in through the viewing window.

Dr. Hauser had the tiny girl on a digital scale as she kicked and fussed, with Lori standing watch. Hauser’s jowly face made him look both sad and serious. Unlike many in their tribe, Hauser kept fit and trim, but the lines at his eyes and the flesh at his neck told that he was well past his middle years.