The Mountain Midwife (6 page)

W
HAT
?” A
SHLEY SHOT
to her feet. “Why would someone do that?”

She knew the answer before Jason responded, and she began to shake.

“He wanted to make sure you couldn’t call for help.”

“But I have a cell phone. That’s what I used.”

“Up here,” Jason pointed out unnecessarily, “cell phones don’t work inside buildings.”

“But . . . but—” She leaned against the wall beside the table and closed her eyes. One, two, three deep breaths stopped her from having an all-out panic attack but didn’t stop her shaking. “I knew something was off about the whole thing, but I didn’t think . . . I never considered I might be in danger. Not that that would have stopped me. She was a woman in need. It’s my job. Still . . . he cut the phone line.” She covered her face with her hands.

A chair scraped across the floor. A moment later, Jason’s arm curved around her shoulders. “Take it easy, Ash. You’re all right.”

“But the woman isn’t. And the baby.” Ashley squeezed her eyes shut. She would not cry in front of her childhood friend and these strangers. She wouldn’t admit to anyone what a failure she felt like in that moment.

She should have known. She should have somehow gotten the woman away from that man with his colorless lashes and eyes and peculiar smell.

“His smell.” Her head shot up and she glanced around the room, from Jason’s chiseled features, to the coffeemaker and other appliances, to the plate of muffins on the table, as if these familiar items would give her direction. “He smelled funny, yet I recognized it.”

“Cordite?” one of the tech guys asked.

“Alcohol?” Jason suggested.

Ashley shook her head to both. “I wouldn’t think those smells were odd on a human being, but—” She sighed and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate.

A meow accompanied by pressure against her legs broke her train of thought. She glanced down at the two cats rubbing around her ankles. “I just fed you, ladies.”

The seal-point Siamese gave Jason a wide berth and stalked to the basement door, while the calico rubbed against his legs with a flirtatious sidelong glance. The door was closed. Ashley must have pushed it all the way shut when she returned from feeding them and before all of them made their way down to the dishes.

“Of course. I am sorry.”

The men gave her looks clearly conveying how they thought she was nuts.

She smiled at them and opened the door. Calico and Siamese darted through the doorway and thundered down the steps.

“Their litter box is down there. We keep the door ajar—” She snapped her fingers. “That’s it. He smelled like a cat box.”

The men exchanged glances but said nothing to her or to one another. Instead, the techs gathered up their cases and cameras, helped themselves to muffins, and said something about getting on their way.

“You can clean up now,” one of them shot over his shoulder.

Ashley looked to Jason. “What’s going on here?”

“Meth.” Jason rose to pour himself yet more coffee but did not return to the table. “The cottage industry of Appalachia. The smell is often described as smelling like cat urine.”

“I knew that. But he didn’t look strung out on anything.” Ashley recalled the man’s strange pale eyes. Strange for their lack of color, but they weren’t strange like those of someone using drugs. “I’ve seen enough addicts of one sort or another in my work to know that much.”

“Not necessarily a user—a maker.”

“No more moonshine? It’s meth now?” Ashley remembered reading an article about it a while back. “As if we don’t have enough problems here.”

Restless, she collected cleaning supplies from the floor of the pantry.

“We have more problems here than you might think.” Jason set his cup on the granite counter and crossed the room to take Ashley’s hands in his. “I got a phone call while you were in the cellar. Something no one wanted out on the radio for scanners to pick up.”

“What?” Ashley was suddenly cold despite the warmth of her old friend’s hands gripping hers.

“The baby.” Jason’s brown eyes sparked. “Someone left it at the hospital emergency room entrance.”

H
UNTER WISHED THEY
had settled in the living room or even the kitchen instead of the den. The den was just too small and cozy and full of furniture for him to pace.

He stood anyway and began to walk around the room, running his finger along the bottom edge of the TV as though checking for dust, straightening an already straight lampshade on a floor lamp, hooking and unhooking the heavy gold rope that held back the draperies. These were things he had grown up with. The objects changed. The TV had grown larger and flatter. The furniture had gone from fabric to leather, the drapes from some sort of pattern to a solid chocolate brown.

He had just assumed his parents had brought him home from the hospital to this home. He had assumed that his siblings were his siblings, older by far, but that wasn’t unusual, his parents happy to have a late-life child. They had always shown him as much love and affection and support as they showed their other children.

No, not other children—their children.

Hunter’s knees weakened. He feared if he didn’t sit he would crash right through the window onto the terrace. But sitting would place him level with his parents, with the McDermotts, and he could not avoid making eye contact. If he made eye contact at that moment, he suspected he might read something he didn’t want to see—pity, anxiety, fear of their own. He hadn’t yet grasped what his own emotions were, let alone considered figuring out anyone else’s. Right now he wanted the clinical, the
factual, so his engineer’s brain could stay in control and make the right calculations.

He turned his back to the window and propped one shoulder against the frame, his arms crossed over his chest. “So I share no blood with any of you?”

“None.” Dad’s voice was a mere croak. He cleared his throat. “Sheila Brooks is your mother.”

“And my father?” Hunter pressed.

His parents exchanged glances, then shook their heads like puppets sharing the same string.

“If Miss Brooks knew, she didn’t put it on the birth certif—”

“Birth certificate?” Hunter cut his father off with a slash of one hand. “Whoa there. Back up. I’ve seen my birth certificate. It says you two are my parents.”

Mom plucked invisible lint from her pants. “A common practice with adopted children.”

“Especially when you want to deceive them about their origins.” The accusation emerged in a harsh, clipped tone, and Hunter understood his emotions now—anger. “You have lied to me for thirty-two years. You even said you gave me the name Zachariah for some kind of family something. Why?”

“We wanted to spare you feeling different,” Mom began.

“Spare me or yourselves from having to admit you bought a child from—what? Some redneck hillbilly—”

“Hunter,” Dad barked, “that’s not appropriate.”

“Isn’t that what you thought? My birth origins were so shameful you didn’t want to admit I didn’t come from the stock of some blue-blooded girl who made a mistake?”

“Teachers might have treated you differently if they had known.” Mom began to pat her arms and legs as though searching
for something. “If we had told you, you might have told someone and then people would look at you like you were . . . well, lesser. You know how people are.”

“I do.” He did have to concede that to them. “But I have been past the age that can’t keep secrets for at least fifteen years and out of schools where that might have mattered for fourteen.”

“Th-the time was never right.” Mom, a Harvard Law grad who had testified on Capitol Hill more than once without a flutter, was stammering and trembling.

Hunter knew he should let up on her, that the right action was to back down and go to her and hold her until she calmed down. Dad should hold her until she calmed down. But he was clenching and unclenching his fists on his knees, and Hunter was still too outraged by a thirty-two-year deception.

“What about my brother and sister—er, your other children? Do they know?”

His parents—no, the McDermotts—shook their heads.

“That must have taken some creative storytelling to explain how Mom produced a child without being—”

“Hunter”—Dad shot to his feet—“sit down and be respectful.”

Part of Hunter, the hurt and angry child deep inside, who had just learned he didn’t really have a family at all, warred with what the mature, coolheaded engineer man knew was right. The engineer won—or compromised. He perched on the arm of a chair and waited for Dad to sit and either of them to speak.

Dad sat, but Mom began to talk. “It was a private adoption arranged through a lawyer. I took a leave of absence from the firm to be nearby the last three months. It was summer. Nothing much was happening on the Hill anyway, so I wasn’t much missed.”

And making everyone think she had simply carried a pregnancy
well was easy. Hunter kept his mouth shut about that. It was implied in Mom’s words.

“We—the attorney, that is, or rather, through him—we made sure Miss Brooks got proper nutrition and wasn’t taking drugs or drinking,” Mom continued. “I had rented a house and wanted her to come live with me, but she wouldn’t. She preferred . . . where she was living.” She grimaced. “She wanted to stay with her mother, which I suppose is understandable for an eighteen-year-old girl.”

“I have a grandmother?” Hunter wanted to jump up and walk around again, but settled for tapping the toe of his foot on the carpet.

Mom and Dad shrugged.

“We don’t know whether Mrs. Brooks is still alive. This was a closed adoption, and they weren’t supposed to contact you.”

“Then how did she find me?” Hunter went still. “I mean, she saw the news video of what happened in Portugal, but how did she know it was me?”

His parents shrugged.

“Do I look like her? My father? A relative?”

“I only saw a picture. She was beautiful with blond hair and your blue eyes. And as for your father—” She shook her head. “He apparently was out of the picture, not from around there.”

“But you never met her?” Hunter’s head was reeling. He not only had a mother about whom he knew nothing, but, of course, a father as well, one about whom not even the McDermotts had any information. “You never saw her?”

“We thought we would take you directly from the hospital delivery room,” Mom said, “but she had a home delivery with a midwife.” Her face twisted like that of someone who smelled something foul. “We were so afraid you wouldn’t be all right with that kind of primitive care.”

“But you have surpassed all expectations.” Dad grinned.

“Why?” was all Hunter managed to ask past a throat burning with bile.

“Why what?” Dad asked.

Hunter gave him an impatient glance. “Why did you want to adopt me anyway?”

“We already had a boy and a girl,” Mom answered. “We thought adopting an underprivileged child was the right thing to do.”

“But not in enough people’s eyes to actually make that public or tell the child in question the truth?” The bile had turned to a lump. He might weep, something he hadn’t done since his grandfather’s death a decade earlier.

Tears for a man who hadn’t even been his grandfather.

“Did Grandpa know?” To Hunter, it wasn’t a non sequitur.

His parents gave him blank looks.

“He was so good to me,” Hunter explained. “I thought he might not know.”

Dad bowed his head. “Dad didn’t know.”

So would Grandpa, who had always favored Hunter because he was the grandchild who showed the most aptitude for mathematics and building things like his engineer grandfather, have been so extra kind to Hunter if he had known? Surely that gentle, giving man wouldn’t have minded what Hunter’s background was. Yet he would like to be certain of that. Something else the McDermotts had taken from him with their deception—security, reassurance of his place in the world.

Hunter jammed the heels of his hands against his eyes to stop them from throbbing. If the others found out, how would his role in the family change? They would at least act as though nothing had changed. But he would sense the difference, a withdrawal, a
sidelong look here and there. His brother might make jokes about how now they understood why Hunter hadn’t gone to law school. His sister would too quickly assure him that nothing had changed. He had been raised right.

“I suppose I’m ungrateful if I say I don’t appreciate this being kept from me.” Hunter lowered his hands and saw exactly that on his parents’ faces—impatience, even a little anger. “But I’m saying it anyway. No, it goes further than not appreciating this secrecy about my birth. I’m angry with you for keeping it from me.”

“You have no reason to be angry.” Dad’s irritation rasped through his voice. “You would have grown up in squalor, probably without proper nutrition and certainly no education to speak of.”

Mom nodded. “You’d probably be a drug addict like most of those people.”

“Those people?” Hunter gripped the doorframe so tightly he half expected it to pop off in his hand. “Like most of those people? What would you know of them from your cozy house thirty-two years ago?”

“I read articles.” Now Mom was sitting upright, her spine more stiff than normal, her hands gripped against her middle. “I hear specials on the radio. Those people—”

“Don’t you mean my people? My relatives? My ancestors? My bloodline?”

“Your bloodline is fine.” Dad attempted a smile that appeared more like a grimace. “We had it DNA tested a few years ago.”

“Without my knowledge?” Hunter took so many deep breaths to calm himself he feared he would hyperventilate. “Did you fear that all your careful nurture might end up embarrassing you eventually? What would you have done then, if I’d gotten married and produced a less than stellar child, something that was a throwback to those people?”

“Hunter, no need to be sarcastic.” Dad tried to look stern with firmed mouth and narrowed eyes. “As I said, your DNA—”

“Shows your social experiment worked? Nurture beats nature?” Hunter had turned up the sarcasm at least a half dozen notches and didn’t care.