The Surrogate

The man was little more than a skeleton. Like Mary Millicent. Fluids were dripping into a vein in his arm, and his urine was being drained into a large plastic bag that hung from the side of the bed.

Jamie thought of the pictures of the glorious young man with the unruly blond hair and wonderful smile that she’d seen on the wall of the library and felt overwhelming sadness that he was now reduced to such a state.

“Who takes care of him?”

“The nurse and the witch-and one of the Mexican men helps out some. They feed him through a tube, but he’s nothing but skin and bones. Once he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen. When he smiled at me, I felt like I had been given a wonderful gift. I loved this boy more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my entire life. More than I loved God. My heart loved him and my eyes and my ears and my fingertips and my soul.”

Jamie realized the old woman’s cheeks were awash with tears and put a comforting arm around her bony shoulders. “It must be wonderful to love someone like that,” she said.

“No, it’s not. It makes you weak when you love. It gives God a way to punish you,” Mary Millicent said, pulling away from Jamie’s embrace. “After the accident, Amanda brought So

Mary Millicent picked up So

“What does my pregnancy have to do with So

The anguish vanished from Mary Millicent’s face and she emitted a lewd-sounding cackle. “He’s your lover,” she said and used her hands to mimic intercourse.

“I don’t have a lover,” Jamie said.

“Honey, you don’t have to pretend with me. I live right up there,” Mary Millicent said, pointing toward the ceiling. They think I don’t know what goes on down here, but I do. I heard Amanda tell So

Jamie took another step back. She shouldn’t have come here. She didn’t want to know about this poor shell of a man who was more dead than alive. And she didn’t want to hear nonsense coming from the mouth of an addle-brained old woman.

“You want to go upstairs and see where I live?” Mary Millicent asked.

Jamie shook her head as she turned and walked shakily toward the stairs.

“Don’t you want to kiss him good night?” Mary Millicent asked.

“No,” Jamie said, grabbing hold of the banister and hurrying down the stairs. She could hear Mary Millicent singing in her quavering old-lady voice,

Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,

All through the night;

Guardian angels God will lend thee,

All through the night…

Frantically Jamie pulled open the door and crept into the chapel then pulled the altar back in place and, with a pounding heart, looked up and down the corridor, half expecting to see Miss Montgomery or Amanda Hartma

But she had done nothing wrong. All she had done was befriend a lonely old woman. It wasn’t as though she had set out to discover what was apparently a carefully guarded secret, a secret being kept by an incredibly wealthy family that practiced power and subterfuge along with religion.

But maybe they kept So

Back in her apartment, Jamie sank onto the sofa and buried her face against Ralph’s neck, who was pathetically glad to see her. Not that she had been gone long, but he was unaccustomed to being left alone in the middle of the night.

Jamie willed her heart to stop racing and took several deep breaths in an attempt to slow it and to control the troubling avalanche of thoughts tumbling through her mind. She placed a hand on her stomach in a rare acknowledgment of the pregnancy that was changing the contours of her body. Had Mary Millicent really overheard Amanda saying that So

Jamie shook her head in denial. She wasn’t going to believe the raving of a crazy old woman. Toby Travis was the father of the baby. She had signed a contract agreeing to have a baby for him and Amanda. The nice fertility doctor in Austin had used Toby Travis’s semen to inseminate her.

Could someone have taken semen from poor So

Jamie remembered reading about an Aberdeen-Angus bull in Canada that was thought to have fathered more offspring than any other bull ever. His semen was packed in dry ice and shipped all over the world. Which meant that human semen could surely be transported from Marshall County to Austin.

Did a man have to give his consent before his semen was used to conceive a child, she wondered. Of course, men became unwilling fathers all the time, but at least they had realized that was a possibility when they had unprotected sex with a woman.

Jamie recalled an old movie that she had watched late one night after her grandmother had gone to bed. The World According to Garp. An army nurse had crawled into a bed with an unconscious soldier and gotten herself pregnant.

If that was possible, then it might be possible for someone to masturbate an unconscious man to an orgasm.

Jamie shook her head to clear her mind of such an image. No way, she told herself.

Or Nurse Freda might have done some sort of surgical procedure.

Jamie touched her stomach. If she had been impregnated with So

What about Amanda’s own pregnancy? Was she just pretending to be pregnant?

Maybe she was pla

Jamie groaned and put her hands to her head. It was too confusing. Too insane. She had gotten herself locked up in a loony bin. She needed to talk to someone on the outside, someone who could help her make sense of things.

She got up and went to the desk. She opened first one drawer and then another, searching for her address book.

It wasn’t there.

She looked in the bedside table. Between the sofa cushions. Under the bed. In every drawer. The top of the closet. Behind every book.

Then she looked again.

Maybe it had fallen in the trash can and been thrown away by accident.

Convinced that the address book was nowhere to be found, she picked up the phone, hoping Lenora’s number was not unlisted. Lenora already knew why she was at the ranch. Surely talking to her would not be a violation of the privacy clause.