Fancy Pants

  Holly Grace had been unmoved. “Then you'd be a bitch twice over, wouldn't you?”

  Francesca blinked her eyes against tears as she turned onto the street that held Dallie's Easter egg house. She was heartsick over Holly Grace's inability to understand that Dallie's long-ago affair with her hadn't been anything more than a small sexual diversion in his life—certainly nothing to justify the kidnapping of a nine-year-old child. Why was Holly Grace taking sides against her? Francesca wondered if she was doing the right thing by not involving the police, but she couldn't bear the idea of seeing Teddy's name smeared all over the tabloids. “Love Child of Television Personality Kidnapped by Golf Pro Father.” She could see it now— photographs of all of them. Her relationship with Stefan would become even more public, and they would dig up all the old stories about Dallie and Holly Grace.

  Francesca remembered all too well what had happened after “China Colt” had made Holly Grace famous. Every detail of her unusual marriage to one of professional golf's most colorful players had suddenly become fodder for the media, and as one wild story followed another, neither of them could go anywhere without being dogged by paparazzi. Holly Grace handled it better than Dallie, who was accustomed to sports reporters but not the sensationalistic press. It hadn't taken him long to start throwing his fists, which had eventually attracted the attention of the PGA commissioner. Following a particularly nasty altercation in Albuquerque, Dallie had been suspended from tournament play for several months. Holly Grace had divorced him soon after to try to make both their lives more peaceful.

  The house still bore its lavender trim and chain of leaping jackrabbits, although the tangerine paint had been touched up by a less skillful hand than Miss Sybil's. The old schoolteacher met Francesca at the door. It had been ten years since they'd seen each other. Miss Sybil had shrunk in size and her shoulders were more stooped, but her voice hadn't lost its authority.

  “Come in, my dear, come in and get out of the cold. My, my, you'd think this was Boston instead of Texas, the way the temperature's dropped. My dear, I've been at sixes and sevens ever since you called.”

  Francesca gave her a gentle hug. “Thank you for letting me come. After everything I told you on the phone, I wasn't sure you'd want to see me.”

  “Not want to see you? My gracious, I've been counting the hours.” Miss Sybil led the way toward the kitchen and asked Francesca to pour them both coffee. “I don't like to complain, but life hasn't been very interesting lately. I can't get around the way I used to, and Dallas was keeping company with such a dreadful young woman. I couldn't even interest her in Danielle Steel, let alone the classics.” She gestured Francesca into a seat across from her at the kitchen table. “My, my, I can't tell you how proud I am of you. When I think of how far you've come...” She suddenly drilled Francesca with her schoolteacher's gaze. “Now tell me all about this dreadful situation.”

  Francesca told her, sparing nothing. To her relief, Miss Sybil wasn't nearly as condemnatory as Holly Grace had been. She seemed to understand Francesca's need to establish her independence; however, she was clearly worried about Dallie's reaction to discovering that he had a child. “I believe Holly Grace is correct,” she finally said. “Dallas must be on his way back to Wynette, and we can be quite certain he won't take this well. You'll stay in the guest room, Francesca, until he gets here.”

  Francesca had planned to stay at the hotel, but she gratefully accepted the invitation. As long as she remained in the house, she would feel that she'd somehow gotten closer to Teddy. Half an hour later, Francesca found herself curled up beneath an old patchwork quilt while the winter sunlight trickled in through the lace curtains and the old radiator hissed out a comforting flow of heat. She fell asleep almost instantly.

  By noon of the next day, Dallie still hadn't appeared and she was nearly frantic with anxiety. Maybe she should have stayed in New York? What if he wasn't coming to Wynette?

  And then Holly Grace called and told her that Skeet had disappeared.

  “What do you mean, disappeared?” Francesca exclaimed. “He said he'd contact you if he heard anything.”

  “Dallie probably called him and told him to keep his mouth shut. I expect Skeet's gone to meet him.”

  Francesca felt angry and impotent. If Dallie had told Skeet to put a gun to his head, he would probably have done that, too. By midafternoon, when Miss Sybil left to go to her pottery class, Francesca was ready to jump out of her skin. What was taking Dallie so long? Afraid to leave the house for fear Dallie would appear, she tried to study the American history material for her citizenship exam, but she couldn't concentrate. She began pacing through the house and ended up in Dallie's bedroom, where a collection of his golf trophies sat in the front window catching the thin wintry light. She picked up a copy of a golf magazine with his picture on the cover. “Dallas Beaudine—Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride.” She noticed that the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper and his features had a sharper cast, but maturity hadn't robbed him of one morsel of his good looks. He was even more gorgeous than she remembered.

  She searched his face for some small sign of Teddy, but saw nothing. Once again, she wondered how he had known that Teddy was his son. Putting down the magazine, she looked over at the bed and a shower of memories drifted over her. Was that where Teddy had been conceived, or had it happened earlier, in a Louisiana swamp when Dallie had stretched her out over the trunk of that Buick Riviera?

  The phone next to the bed rang. She banged her foot on the bed frame as she raced over to it and snatched up the receiver. “Hello! Hello?”

  Silence greeted her.

  “Dallie?” The name came out like a sob. “Dallie, is that you?”

  There was no answer. She felt a prickling along the back of her neck, and her heart began to race. She was certain someone was there; her ears strained to catch a sound. “Teddy?” she whispered. “Teddy... it's Mommy.”

  “It's me, Miss Fancy Pants.” Dallie's voice was low and bitter, making her old nickname sound like an obscenity. “We've got some talking to do. Meet me at the quarry north of town in half an hour.”

  She heard the finality in his voice and she cried out, “Wait! Is Teddy there? I want to talk to him!”

  But the line had gone dead.

  She raced downstairs, snatched her suede jacket from the hall closet, and pulled it on over her sweater and jeans. That morning, she had tied her hair at the nape of her neck with a scarf, and now, in her haste, she got the thin silk tangled in the jacket collar. Her hands trembled as she pulled the scarf free. Why was he doing this? Why didn't he bring Teddy to the house? What if Teddy was sick? What if something had happened?

  Her breathing was quick and shallow as she started the car and backed it out onto the street. Ignoring the speed limit, she drove to the first service station she could find and asked for directions. The instructions were complex, and she missed a route marker north of town, going miles out of her way before she found the flat dirt road that led to the quarry. Her hands ached from their tight grip on the steering wheel. Over an hour had passed since his call. Would he wait for her? She told herself that Teddy was safe—Dallie might hurt her, but he would never hurt a child. The thought brought her only a small measure of comfort.

  The quarry sat back from the road like a giant wound, bleak and forbidding in the fading gray winter light, overwhelming in its size. The last shift of workers had apparently left for the day because the vast, flat yard that fronted the quarry was deserted. Pyramids of reddish stone stood near the idle trucks. Miles of silent conveyer belts led to green-painted hoppers sitting like giant funnels above the ground. Francesca drove across the yard toward a corrugated metal building, but she saw no sign of life, no vehicles other than the idle quarry trucks. She was too late, she thought. Dallie had already left. Her mouth dry with anxiety, she drove her car out of the yard and along the road to the maw of the quarry.

  It looked to Francesca, in her agitated state of mind, as
if a giant knife had sliced open the earth, gouging its way straight down to hell. Desolate, eerie, raw, the canyon of the quarry dwarfed everything on the horizon. A scattering of bare winter trees above the rim on the opposite side looked like toothpick twigs, the hills in the distance like baby sandpiles. Even the darkening sky no longer loomed so large; it seemed more like a lid that had been dropped down over an enormous empty cauldron. She shuddered as she forced herself to drive to the edge, where two hundred feet of red granite had been sliced open layer by layer, the process of desecration paradoxically revealing the secrets of its creation.

  In the last of the light, she could dimly make out one of Teddy's toy cars sitting at the bottom.

  For a fraction of a moment she felt disoriented, and then she realized the car was real, not a toy at all. It was just as real as the Lilliputian man who leaned against the hood. She pressed her eyes shut for a moment, and her chin quivered. He had chosen this awful place purposely because he wanted her to feel dwarfed and powerless. Struggling for control, she backed the car away from the rim and then drove along it, almost missing a steep gravel road that led into the quarry's depths. Slowly, she began her descent.

  As the dark quarry walls rose above her, she mentally steadied herself. For years, she'd been charging at seemingly impenetrable barriers, battering herself against them until they gave way. Dallie was merely another barrier she had to move. And she had an advantage he couldn't anticipate. No matter what he might have told himself, he was expecting to confront the girl he remembered, his twenty-one-year-old Fancy Pants.

  Even as she had gazed down at him from the lip of the quarry, she had sensed that he was alone. As she drove nearer, she saw nothing that made her think differently. Teddy wasn't there. Dallie wanted to extract his full pound of flesh before he gave her back her child. She parked her car at an angle to the front of his, but nearly forty feet away. If this was to be a showdown, she would play her own war of nerves. The light was almost gone and she left her headlights on. Opening the door, she got out deliberately—no haste, no wasted motion, no glances spared for those looming granite walls. She came toward him slowly, walking in the path of the headlights with her arms at her sides and her spine straight. A chill blast of wind tore at her scarf and spanked the end against her cheek. She locked her eyes with his.

  He stood facing her with his back to the car, hips leaning at an angle against the front of the hood, ankles crossed, arms crossed—all of him locked tight and closed away. His head was bare, and he wore only a sleeveless down vest over his flannel shirt. His boots were dusty with the red grit from the quarry, as if he had been there for some time.

  She drew near him, her chin high, her gaze steady. Only when she was close enough could she see how terrible he looked, not at all like the magazine-cover photograph. In the glare from the headlights, she noted that his skin had a drawn, gray cast, and his jaw was covered with stubble. Only those Newman-blue eyes were familiar, except that they had turned as cold and hard as the rock beneath her feet. She stopped in front of him. “Where's Teddy?”

  A blade of night wind cut through the quarry, lifting the hair away from his forehead. He stepped away from the car and straightened to his full height. For a moment he didn't say anything. He just stood there looking down at her as if she were a particularly loathsome piece of human refuse.

  “I only hit two women in my life,” he finally said, “and you didn't count because it was more a reflex action since you hit me first. But I've got to tell you that ever since I found out what you did to me, I've been thinking about getting hold of you and doing the job right.”

  She needed the full force of her will to speak calmly. “Let's go someplace where we can sit down and have a cup of coffee so we can discuss all this.”

  His mouth twisted into an ugly sneer. “Don't you think the time to be sitting down and drinking coffee was ten years ago, after you found out you were going to have my kid?”

  “Dallie—”

  He raised his voice. “Don't you think that might have been the time to call me up on the telephone and say, 'Hey, Dallie, we've got a little problem here I think we should maybe sit down and talk about'?”

  She buried her fists in the pockets of her jacket and hunched her shoulders against the chill, trying not to let him see how much he was frightening her. Where was the man who had once been her lover—a man quick to laugh, a man amused by human foibles, a man as slow and easy as warm molasses? “I want to see Teddy, Dallie. What have you done with him?”

  “He looks just like my old man,” Dallie declared angrily. “A pint-sized replica of that old bastard Jaycee Beaudine. Jaycee beat up women, too. He was real good at it.”

  So that's how he had known. She gestured toward her car, unwilling to stay any longer in this dark quarry and listen to him talk about beating up women. “Dallie, let's go—”

  “You didn't figure on Teddy looking like Jaycee, did you? You didn't count on my recognizing him when you planned this dirty little private war.”

  “I didn't plan anything. And it's not a war. People do what they have to. You remember what I was like back then. I couldn't go running back to you and ever have a shot at growing up.”

  “It wasn't just your decision,” he said, his eyes sparking with anger. “And I don't want to hear any of that feminist horseshit about how I don't have any rights because I'm a man and you're a woman, and it was your body. It was my body, too. I'd damn well like to have seen you have that boy without me.”

  She went on the attack. “What would you have done if I'd come to you ten years ago and told you I was pregnant? You were married then, remember?”

  “Married or not, I'd have seen you were taken care of, that's for damn sure.”

  “But that's the point! I didn't want you to take care of me. I didn't have anything, Dallie. I was a silly little girl who thought the world had been invented to be her personal toy. I had to learn how to work. I had to scrub toilets and live on. scavenged food and lose whatever pride I had left before I could gain any self-respect. I couldn't give that up and go running back to you for a handout. Having that baby by myself was something I had to do. It was the only way I could redeem myself.” The closed, settled expression on his face didn't ease, and she was angry with herself for trying to make him understand. “I want Teddy back tonight, Dallie, or I'm going to the police.”

  “If you were going to the police, you'd have done it by now.”

  “The only reason I've waited is because I didn't want the publicity for him. Believe me, I won't put it off any longer.” She stepped closer to him, determined to let him see that she wasn't powerless. “Don't underestimate me, Dallie. Don't get me mixed up in your mind with the girl you knew ten years ago.”

  Dallie didn't say anything for a moment. He turned his head and stared off into the night. “The other woman I hit was Holly Grace.”

  “Dallie, I don't want to hear—”

  His hand whipped out and caught her arm. “You're going to listen, because I want you to understand exactly what kind of a son of a bitch you're dealing with. I slapped the shit out of Holly Grace after Danny died—that's the kind of man I am. And you know why?”

  “Don't—” She tried to pull away, but he only gripped her tighter.

  “Because she cried! That's why I slapped her. I slapped that woman because she cried after her baby died.” Harsh shadows cast by the headlights slashed his face. He dropped her arm, but his expression remained fierce. “Does that give you any idea what I might do to you?”

  He was bluffing. She knew it. She felt it. In some way, he had cut himself open so she could see inside him. She had hurt him badly and he had made up his mind to punish her. He probably did want to hit her—only he didn't have the stomach to do it. She could see that, too.

  With more clarity than she wished for, she finally understood the depth of his pain. She felt it through every one of her senses because it mirrored her own so closely. Everything inside her rejected the idea o
f living things being hurt. Dallie had her son, but he knew he wouldn't be able to keep him for long. He wanted to hit her, but it went against his nature, so he was looking for another way to punish her, another way to make her suffer. She felt a creeping chill. Dallie was smart, and if he thought long enough he just might find his revenge. Before that happened, she had to stop him. For both their sakes, and for Teddy's sake, she couldn't let this go any further.

  “I learned a long time ago that people who have lots of possessions spend so much energy trying to protect what they have that they lose sight of what's important in life.” She stepped forward, not touching him, just making certain she could look him directly in the eye. “I have a successful career, Dallie—a seven-figure bank account, a blue-chip portfolio. I've got a house and beautiful clothes. I have four-carat diamond studs in my ears. But I never forget what's important.” Her hands went to her ears. She pulled the backs off the studs and then slipped the diamonds from her earlobes. They nestled in the center of her palm, cool as chips of ice. She held them out to him.

  For the first time he looked uncertain. “What are you doing? I don't want those. I'm not holding him for ransom, for chrissake!”

  “I know that.” She rolled the diamonds in her palm, letting them catch the glare from the headlights. “I'm not your Fancy Pants anymore, Dallie. I just want to make certain you understand exactly what my priorities are— how far I'll go to get him back. I want you to know what you're up against.” Her hand closed around the diamonds. “The most important thing in my life is my son. As far as I'm concerned, everything else is just spit.”

  And then while Dallie watched, Black Jack Day's daughter did it again. With one strong movement of her arm, she threw her flawless four-carat pear-shaped diamond studs far out into the darkest reaches of the quarry.