J. Jance - Fatal Error

“Tell me,” she said again.

“No,” he managed. Even with the tape over his mouth, it sounded like what he meant to say, “N-O!”

Suddenly, out of nowhere a plastic bag appeared. With a single deft movement, she pulled the cloudy plastic down over his head.

“Tell me and I’ll let you live.”

Richard was an experienced liar. So was Mina Blaylock. He knew that, no matter what, she going to kill him anyway. So since it would make no difference, Richard would not give her his money. No matter what.

He heard her tear loose a swath of transparent packing tape. He felt it tighten around his neck. For a few moments-a minute or so-there was enough air to breathe inside the bag. As the plastic went in and out with each breath, he could see her sitting there, watching and waiting, hoping he would give in.

He didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see her. Soon he felt himself struggling for breath as the oxygen inside the bag became depleted.

“Tell me,” he heard her say from very far away.

He shook his head once more, and had a fleeting moment of victory. He knew he was dying, but he also knew he had won and Mina Blaylock had lost.

Sedona, Arizona

Ali’s phone rang as she pulled out of the Sugarloaf parking lot. “Hey, Ali,” her very pregnant daughter-in-law said. “Are you busy?”

Knowing a little of Athena’s background, Ali did her best to tread lightly in the mother-in-law department. There was enough bad blood between Athena and her own parents that Athena’s folks hadn’t been invited to Chris and Athena’s wedding. The only family member who had broken ranks with everyone else and attended the wedding was Athena’s paternal grandmother, Betsy Peterson.

The rift with Chris’s in-laws was something Ali couldn’t understand. As far as she could see, Athena was a remarkable young woman. She had served in the Iraq War with the Minnesota National Guard and had returned home as a wounded warrior. She was a double amputee, minus her right arm from above the elbow and her right leg from below the knee. When her first husband divorced her-while she was still recovering from her injuries in Walter Reed-Athena’s parents for some unaccountable reason stuck with their former son-in-law and his new wife. The previous summer Chris and Athena had made the trek to Minnesota in hopes of normalizing relations, but nothing had changed. The ex-son-in-law was still more acceptable to Athena’s parents than their own daughter.

Chris and Athena had met while they were both working at Sedona High School, where Chris taught American history and welding technology and Athena taught math. Athena was fiercely independent, and Ali admired both her spirit and her spunk. Athena had taught herself to do most things, including playing basketball, with her left hand, although she now had a realistic-looking prosthesis in place of her right arm. Getting pregnant, and especially getting pregnant with twins, had set her back some in the self-confidence department. And having two babies this early in their marriage wasn’t something that had been in Chris and Athena’s game plan either.

As far as Ali was concerned, the appearance of twins was no surprise. After all, Chris’s grandmother was a twin, so the tendency was right there in his DNA. Athena’s ob-gyn, Dr. Dixon, had allayed many of Athena’s worries by telling her that people who can get pregnant usually can be pregnant. She had also said that studies with pregnant women who had been born missing whole or parts of limbs due to the drug thalidomide had been able to carry babies successfully. Their only major difficulty had been maintaining balance late in their term.

A counselor from the VA had put Athena in touch with another young woman who was also an amputee and a new mother-although she was only a single amputee with a single baby. It helped Athena to know that she wasn’t alone, that there was someone else out there with similar problems and dilemmas.

“Just on my way home from the Sugarloaf. Why, is there something you need?”

Athena sighed. She sounded upset. “Yes. I could really use your help. I’d appreciate it if you could come by for a little while.”

“Of course,” Ali said. “I’ll be right there.”

“Just let yourself in when you get here,” Athena said. “I’m supposed to be on full bed rest.”

Ali glanced at her watch. At 2:45 Chris was probably still at school. Then instead of heading home, she drove up to her old place on Andante Drive, where Chris and Athena now lived. Ali had inherited the place from her aunt Evie, her mother’s twin, and had sold it to Chris and Athena when she moved on to Manzanita Hills Drive.

The house was actually a “manufactured home,” a nonmobile mobile that had been permanently attached to a set of footings and a concrete slab built into the steep hillside, an unusual set of construction circumstances that allowed for an actual basement, which Chris used as a studio for his metal artwork.

As soon as Ali opened the front door, she caught a whiff of fresh paint. With the twins, Colin and Colleen, due within the next three weeks, Ali knew that Chris had been intent on pulling the nursery together. Athena was lying on the living room couch with one of Edie Larson’s colorful quilts pulled up over her baby mound.

“How’s it going?” Ali asked, closing the door behind her.

“After I took that little tumble last week, Chris made me promise that I’d stay put while he was gone.”

Some of Athena’s fellow teachers had thrown a shower on Athena’s behalf. On the way back to the house, loaded down with gifts and determined to carry them herself, Athena had tripped and fallen. She had scraped both knees and her one elbow but had suffered no major damage. Chris, however, had been beyond upset.

“So what’s going on?” Ali asked. “Are you okay?”

“The twins obviously aren’t on the same schedule,” Athena said with a wan smile. “When one of them is asleep, the other one is wide awake and kicking like crazy. So I’m not getting much sleep, and neither is Chris.”

Ali smiled. “That’s going to get a lot worse for both of you before it gets better. Is there something I can do to help?”

“It’s about the nursery,” Athena said.

“What about it?”

“We had a big fight about it before he left for school this morning.”

“What about?” Ali asked.

To Ali’s amazement, Athena burst into tears. Since Athena was one tough cookie, Ali figured it was either something terribly serious or else it was about nothing more than a storm of late-pregnancy rampaging hormones.

“Chris is determined to have the nursery completely finished before your parents come home tomorrow, so he’s been working like crazy, painting until all hours. Last night he managed to get all the furniture put together too-the changing tables and the chests of drawers and the cribs.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Ali ventured.

Athena nodded and blew her nose. “We managed to get all the clothes washed and dried, but when he started to sort them, it turns out he’s completely hopeless. I ended up dumping everything back out into one of the cribs. I could sort them myself, but I’m not supposed to be on my feet that long.”

“I suspect you both have a bad case of impending parenthood nerves,” Ali said. “And I’m happy to do it. Thrilled, even. Now let me at ’em.”

Athena offered a thin smile and then allowed Ali to help her off the sofa. She led Ali to the nursery that had once been Chris’s room. The room smelled of freshly applied paint. Two walls were pink; two were blue. The changing tables, dressers, and cribs were white. In one crib was a mountain of baby gear-some of it new and some of it secondhand. With Athena sitting in the rocker supervising the process, Ali commenced folding all the incredibly tiny outfits and separating them first by sort (blankets, shirts, nightgowns, and snuggle outfits) and second by colors (blues and greens, pinks and yellows). The blues and greens were destined for Colin’s drawers while the pinks and yellows would go to Colleen’s.