“I beg your pardon?”
“About the baby. Did you have it or did you get an abortion?”
15
« ^ » “
I was so stunned I could only sit there in the half-darkness looking as guilty as a yard dog slinking out of the henhouse.
“What baby?” I asked dumbly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”
“Aren’t you the same Deborah Knott that’s Miss Barbara Peabody’s niece?”
“Well, yes.” No point in denying something so easily checked.
“Chan told me all about you that summer,” said Millie Ragsdale. “And he told me why you left when you did:— because he got you pregnant.”
“There’s only been one immaculate conception,” I said hotly, “and I wasn’t there for that one, either. I don’t know why he’d tell you such a thing, but he was lying.”
“He said you wouldn’t leave him alone. Couldn’t keep your hands off him.”
“Oh, please. Your brother was a horny teenager with over-active glands and what was obviously an overactive imagination. He was at least two years younger than me and I certainly didn’t go to bed with him.”
This was the truth, technically speaking, but only because Aunt Barbara had walked up on us in the gazebo at the crucial moment and I had split for New York soon afterwards. However, this was
“When I introduced you,” Dixie said suddenly, “Chan
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Hey, wait a minute here. This is getting blown way out of proportion. Yes, I met a kid named Chandler Nolan a hundred years ago and yes, I went with him to a couple of movies and let him kiss me a few times and maybe there was even some heavy breathing. But that was all. I don’t care what kind of bragging he did, Mrs. Ragsdale, that was
“Wet, no doubt,” Pell murmured wickedly from the shadows beside me.
Millie Ragsdale glared at him.
“I left because he was a ruddy nuisance. He was supposed to be there to cut my aunt’s grass and weed her rose garden. Instead, I couldn’t step out the door without him being all over me like flypaper.”
“You were after
“He was a kid,” I told her gently. “A pimply-faced, gangly kid with too much imagination. Think back to when you were nineteen. Think about the enormous gulf between a nineteen-year-old woman and a seventeen-year-old boy. At that age, would you have had sex with a boy two years younger than you?”
At first, I thought she was going to deny the thought of sex with anyone before marriage. Instead, she said stubbornly, “Chan was never pimply-faced.”
For some reason, Quentin Ragsdale couldn’t let that pass. “Yes, he was, Mill. I remember how he always had Noxzema and Clearasil in his gym bag. And he did like to brag about girls he never really had.”
Millie looked at him, suddenly tearful. “Whose side are you on, Quentin?”
He reached out and touched her hand. “There aren’t any sides here, hon, and you’re tired.”
His words seemed to diffuse the tension that hers had built up and there was a general stirring as everyone suddenly realized that yes, it was getting late. Long day today. And longer tomorrow, no doubt.
It was quickly decided that the Ragsdales and Shirley Jane would drive on over to Lexington, that Lynnette would finish the night in my bed and that I could move into Dixie’s guest room.
As the others went inside the house, David Underwood drew me to one side.
“You got anything planned for tomorrow morning, Judge?”
“Not really,” I answered. “Why?”
“Then how about you come down to my office around ten o’clock?”
The invitation did not sound optional, so I smiled a smile of as much pure innocence as I could muster and told him I’d be happy to meet him then.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” Dixie asked later as I was making up her guest bed with clean sheets.
She had packed Chan’s overnight case, zipped his extra shirts and jackets into his garment bag, and was now clearing his toiletries from the half bath next door.
“When did I have a chance?”
“At the hospital?”
“Right. While you were worried and feeling guilty because you weren’t there when Chan got to your floor, I was
