'No?'
'No. I had a good marriage that lasted for twenty-six years. Up till the day Jim died, we were happy together.'
'Congratulations.'
His sarcasm didn't escape her. 'You wish I'd been unhappy?'
Raising his voice, he said, 'I wish you'd been happy with
'Whose fault is it that I wasn't?' she fired back.
He swore. Neither said anything for a while, then he asked, 'How'd Malone die?'
She took so long to answer, he thought she might refuse to. Finally she said, 'He had a stroke. Sitting at his desk in his office. It left him in a coma. He died two days later without ever waking up, which was actually a blessing. The neurologist told me that Jim had sustained extensive brain damage.'
Dodge drove in ponderous silence. Then, 'So you loved the guy.'
'Yes, Dodge, I did. Mostly I loved him for loving me and Berry. She was almost a year old when Jim asked me to marry him. He'd been a confirmed bachelor for forty years but was willing to take on a wife and baby.'
'He wanted you. You had a baby.' Dodge gave an eloquent shrug.
'He didn't view Berry as a sacrifice he had to make in order to marry me. He accepted her without explanation or qualification. He loved her dearly and reared her as his own. Which was good, since he and I never had any children together.'
'Why not?'
'No reason. Just one of those things. It never happened. We didn't let it become an issue. Both of us were very involved in expanding the business. We worked long and hard. And we were satisfied with the daughter we had.'
Either his nicotine deficiency or this discussion about another man loving and rearing his daughter was making his chest hurt. But Dodge couldn't stop giving voice to the questions that had bedeviled him for three decades. 'What kind of kid was Berry? Was she happy?'
Caroline looked across at him and smiled. 'Very. Completely. She was exuberant. Smart. Precocious. Athletic. Competitive. Willful at times, but not bratty.'
'Stubborn like you.'
'Cunning like you.'
'Did she have your redhead's temper?'
'I don't have a redhead's temper.'
He laughed at her tart response, then she joined him. His laughter was the first to falter. 'Did you ever tell her?'
'What?'
'Do I have to spell it out, Caroline?'
She turned her head away to gaze through the windshield. She was doing that thing with her hands, clasping and unclasping them, a habit familiar to him. She did that whenever she was organizing her thoughts, particularly distressing ones.
'Yes, I told her. Jim had adopted her and given her his name, but I thought she should know that he wasn't her birth father. I didn't want that to be a big, dark secret lurking in the background of our lives, just waiting to spring and inflict damage on our relationship.'
It cut Dodge to the quick to be reminded that he'd signed away all parental rights to his daughter. It had been a sanitary procedure, handled by lawyers. At the time, he'd been angry and had thought he'd been given little choice.
He couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if he had raised a stink. Would the outcome have been different if he'd refused to relinquish the upbringing of his daughter to another man?
But now, as thirty years ago, he couldn't see any benefit arising from a tug-of-war that would only have prolonged the inevitable and created more hostility and heartache for everyone involved, particularly for Caroline and Berry.
'When Berry was old enough to know where babies come from,' Caroline continued, 'I told her that Jim wasn't the man who'd planted the seed in my tummy. Something to that effect,' she said, smiling gently. 'But I assured her that Jim was her daddy. She accepted it.'
Dodge braked for a traffic light, touched his breast pocket where the packet of cigarettes beckoned to him, worked his bottom more comfortably into the driver's seat, and muttered deprecations at the driver in front of him who didn't know to pull into the intersection so he could hook a quick left when the light turned yellow, allowing Dodge to hook an even quicker one before it turned red.
He cleared his throat. 'Wasn't she ever curious to know who the sower of the seed had been? She never asked what had happened to her real daddy, why he'd left her and didn't come back?'
'She brought it up only once,' Caroline said. 'She was of an age when I felt I should caution her against the pitfalls of having sex in the heat of the moment without using common sense or, if that failed, protection. And she asked if that's what had happened to me. She wanted to know if she'd been a mishap, an unwanted responsibility that a man had run away from.'
She looked across at Dodge, and he looked back at her.
Caroline went on. 'It broke my heart to hear the vulnerability in her voice when she asked that question. Apparently she'd been haunted by the thought that her conception had been an unhappy accident. She'd yearned to know the truth but hadn't asked for fear of having her supposition confirmed.'
'Jesus,' Dodge groaned miserably.
'I relieved her of the notion. I emphasized that she'd been conceived during a happy time, and that neither her father nor I had regretted the pregnancy. I told her that there had been issues between us that didn't relate to her, but that were serious enough to prevent us from being together, and that you--he--had seen the advantages of her staying with me.' She looked down at her hands, still clasping and unclasping them in her lap. 'She believed me. At least I suppose she did, because she never raised the subject again.'
'And now?'
'Now?'
He gave her a dubious look. 'She's a smart cookie, Caroline. How could she not have a clue?'
'Maybe she does. She hasn't asked outright, but she's pressured me for information about you.'
'So she suspects that I'm not just a referral from a friend.'
'Possibly. But it's quite a leap from expressing curiosity over your credentials to determining that you're her father. She might be putting two and two together, but it hasn't added up to four yet.' After a moment, she added softly, 'One thing, though.'
'What?'
'Even if she is deliberating it, she won't reveal her hand until she's good and ready.'
'Plays her hand close to her vest?'
She shot him a smile. 'In that way she's like me.'
Walmart came into view. The massive parking lot was in a state of barely controlled pandemonium. A few sheriff's office and state trooper cars were there with their colored lights flashing. Dogs were running in circles, sniffing the ground near a row of garbage receptacles. Onlookers were being held back by uniformed officers of various agencies, including the Merritt city police.
And in the thick of it was Ski Nyland.
Dodge understood why the deputy's telephone summons had been so abrupt.
