BABY, BABY, BABY

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  Contents:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

  Epilogue

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  Chapter 1

  ^ »

  Melanie Sears couldn't help but grin. Not only was it her last day at work, but her boss, the mayor, an elegant if not arrogant man who was addicted to hundred-dollar haircuts and thousand-dollar suits, was down on his pin-striped Armani knees, begging her to stay.

  "I'll be back in eighteen months, Sam."

  "Things are falling apart already." While he whined, His Honor gestured through his office door toward the reception area. "Look how badly your surprise party turned out."

  Melanie didn't disagree, but then, even with her own amazing organizational skills, she would have been hard-pressed to bring off the perfect celebratory combination of congratulations on a job well done, happy semi-retirement and baby shower. She knew for a fact, however, that if she had been in charge of her own party, the paper plates and napkins wouldn't have said Bon Voyage, that she wouldn't in a million years have served a punch whose main ingredient was Tang, and that she would never, ever, even at gunpoint, have hired a mime.

  "What the devil was in that punch?" Mayor Venneman stood and began to pick carpet lint from his trousers. "Motor oil?"

  She told him about the powdered orange drink and then laughed as she watched his pinstripes shiver. "I'm sure it won't happen again with Cleo in charge. I gave her a list of preferred caterers, but maybe I should make another copy, just in case."

  "Maybe you should stay." He slumped into the big leather chair behind his desk, looking more like a petulant two-year-old than the savvy and suave politician he was. "Why do you need to take eighteen months off to have a baby? Why can't you do what everybody else does? Work until the bitter end, then come back thin and frazzled after a three-month maternity leave with all those nasty pumps and jars and pictures of the kid? Why do you want to have a baby anyway?"

  "Actually I want two," Melanie said with a laugh. "You're going to have to go through this again in a few more years, Sam. Better get used to it. I've got it all planned out."

  * * *

  Planning was what Melanie did best. When she was ten years old, her mother died, entrusting her only daughter with the care and feeding of Dr. Henry Von Briggle Sears, Ph.D., poet, painter, and perfect specimen of the absentminded professor. Far from considering it a burden, Melanie thrived on making lists, scheduling appointments and seeing they were kept, even making sure that Pop turned in grades to the art history department on time each semester.

  While most young girls were learning makeup tricks and fantasizing about their teen idols, Melanie was learning how to balance a checkbook and pay bills and compile lists of dependable plumbers and repairmen. Instead of developing a fondness for lipstick and costume jewelry, she grew enamored of calendars with large spaces, Rolodexes, and Post-It notes.

  They'd lived in a huge, century-old, redbrick monstrosity just a few blocks from the university. Pop's studio on the third floor was the only room where a person had to pick his way through a maze of easels and battered boxes and waist-high piles of books, where every chair was occupied whether or not someone was sitting in it, where the slightest movement might send canvasses toppling like dominoes or set off an explosion of dust motes in the air. The rest of the house was dustless and serene, thanks to Melanie, with a place for everything and everything in its proper place. Always.

  "Life isn't solely about order," her father had told her more than once. But Melanie wasn't so sure.

  Not back then. Not now, either.

  "Lighten up," people told her.

  But the one time in her thirty-one years that she'd lightened up and let go of her beloved lists had been a disaster. Love or lust, or whatever it was she felt for Sonny Randle the minute she'd laid eyes on him two years ago, had rendered her temporarily insane. She must've been certifiably nuts to marry him after knowing him only a few weeks. But since the divorce a year ago she was sane again, and fiercely determined to stay that way.

  After Melanie left Sam Venneman whining and wringing his manicured hands in his office, she took one last look through the drawers of her desk and behind the sliding doors of her credenza in the unlikely chance that she'd overlooked something earlier in the week. The drawers were empty. Not even a lone paper clip remained. It was the same for the credenza. All the cupboards were bare.

  Stashed unobtrusively in a corner were the belongings of her replacement, Cleo Pierce. The former anchorwoman for the local NBC affiliate hadn't had to be asked twice to shelve her consulting business to take on a job that would put her in constant contact with Sam Venneman, America's Most Eligible Mayor. Not only had Cleo eagerly signed on as the interim executive assistant, but she'd insisted on a contract that clearly specified that the position would be hers for the entire eighteen months of Melanie's planned leave of absence.

  There was no going back now, but then, Melanie had no intention of changing her mind. It was, after all, a perfect plan.

  Her other position at city hall, that of director of community relations, had been more difficult to fill on a temporary basis. In fact, Sam was still interviewing candidates. The pay wasn't all that great, hardly enough to buy aspirin for all the headaches involved when trying to please nearly two hundred neighborhood associations, each with its own agenda. Some of them needed tax abatements to entice new residents; many needed grants to fix up deteriorating playgrounds and parks; all of them, including her own Channing Square Residents Association, were pleading for higher police visibility and more foot patrols.

  To that end, a little over a year ago Melanie had come up with the Cop on the Block program, which would guarantee low-cost loans to officers who agreed to live in selected high-crime areas of the city. The program was her pet project, her baby, and after she'd steamrolled it through the board of aldermen, she'd schmoozed and cajoled and nearly arm-wrestled half the bankers in town until a few of them agreed to provide the loans in return for the unbounded gratitude of city hall and unlimited luncheon invitations and photo opportunities with Sam Venneman and any national dignitaries who visited him.

  Although Melanie hadn't seen the actual paperwork, the first Cop on the Block loan had been approved just this week, so that had been part of the celebration at her surprise party this afternoon in addition to her leave of absence and imminent motherhood.

  Speaking of which, she told herself, she should probably get out of here before one more person asked when the baby was due and then stood counting fingers and looking perplexed when she answered early next January, a full nine months away, or before Claude Davis of the parks department came up with another joke about sperm banks.

  Melanie took one last glance around her office. It looked so aimless without her planner open on the desk and so bleak without her collection of Pop's watercolors on the walls. There were only rectangular outlines now to show where they had hung. She hoped Cleo wouldn't paint the walls some horrible shade of green or make any permanent changes that would surely drive her crazy when she returned next September.

  Most of all, she hoped things didn't go completely to hell in a handbasket the minute she left city hall.

  Well, maybe just a little.

  It was nice to be appreciated.

  * * *

  On the way to her car, as always, Melanie slowed her pace to admire the flower beds that surrounded city hall. Since it was April, the grounds were awash in tulips—stately red ones, so perfect they almost looked fake, and smaller yellow ones with waxy leaves and frilly petals. In a few months they'd be replaced by a profusion of daisies and purple salvia. Come autumn, the old limestone building would look gorgeous as it rose from beds of bronze chrysan
themums. Claude Davis of the parks department might have told lousy jokes about sperm banks, but he was a hell of a planner when it came to gardens. Maybe she'd call him next week to give her some ideas for the little space she wanted to plant in her backyard now that she'd have ample time to tend it.

  She was pulling her little planner from her handbag to make a note to herself about Claude when she heard the clack of high heels on the sidewalk just behind her and turned to see Peg Harrel, the mayor's longtime secretary, rushing to catch up.

  "Are you really sure this is what you want to do, Melanie?" Peg bent her platinum-colored, pixie-haircut head to light what was probably the first cigarette she'd had since her lunch break at noon. "Single parenthood isn't any bed of roses, you know. It's a bummer, actually. My kids would be the first to tell you."

  "I'm really, really sure, Peg." If she'd said it once, she'd said it a million times lately. Maybe she shouldn't have been so honest and forthcoming about her plan to get pregnant, but she was so thrilled about this baby and had wanted to share the news with everyone at city hall if not the entire city.

  Melanie closed her planner with a little thump and continued in the direction of the parking lot with Peg smoking up a storm at her side. "The party was fun, Peg. Thanks for putting it together. I never suspected a thing."

  "I'll bet you did."

  "No. Not for a second. Honest," Melanie lied.

  "What did you think of the mime?" The woman nudged her arm. "Wasn't he a riot?"

  Melanie nodded politely although she thought cloying would have been a better description. She wondered vaguely if the world was divided into people who enjoyed mimes and people who ran the other way—screaming—when they saw one coming.

  A few yards from her spiffy little yellow Miata, soon to be traded in on a sensible minivan, Melanie reached into her bag for her keys and then sighed. "Leaving isn't going to be quite as easy at I thought it would be. I'll really miss everybody. Plus, I'm not used to not working."

  "Oh, you'll be working, kiddo." Peg laughed and rolled her eyes. "Trust me. You'll be working. You just won't be getting paid for it."

  "Well, that's true, I guess."

  "You'll be working twenty times harder than you ever did here. So, when's the big day?"

  "Monday. My appointment is at eleven, so by noon I ought to be one slightly and happily pregnant lady."

  "No kidding. Does it always work the first time?"

  "It will with me," Melanie said, her voice infused with every bit of the confidence she felt. Even though her OB-GYN had cautioned her that three, sometimes four artificial inseminations were the norm before a pregnancy "took," she was positive that Monday would be her day and that her baby's birthday would be in the first week of January. It was just too perfectly planned to go wrong.

  Peg wrapped her cigarette-free arm around Melanie's shoulders and gave her a hug. "Well, good luck, kiddo. We'll try to hold it together while you're gone. Keep us posted."

  "I will. Thanks again, Peg."

  The woman started to walk away, then stopped. "Oh, with all of the excitement of the party, I almost forgot to tell you. You know that cop who was shot last week? The one who got blown through the plate-glass window?"

  "What about him?" As she asked, she could feel that tiny fault line in her heart begin to quiver the way it always did whenever she heard the words "cop" and "shot" in the same sentence.

  In this particular case, the officer had been hit during a raid on a crack house in the Bienville neighborhood, one of the highest crime areas in the city. He'd been wearing a bulletproof vest, thank God, but the direct hit had still managed to propel him backward ten or fifteen feet, through a window and out onto the sidewalk. His name was still being withheld from the press, and Melanie had found the whole incident so disturbing that she'd avoided all the memos that referenced it. Even now, having asked, "What about him?" she really didn't want to know.

  "Guess who it was?" Peg asked.

  From the way the woman's eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead and her mouth kind of oozed to the side, Melanie didn't have to guess. But before she could prevent the answer she didn't want to hear, Peg exclaimed, "Your ex!"

  "Oh." While the fault line inside her slipped another tiny notch, she struggled to come up with some sort of appropriate comment. "Well, I'm glad he wasn't hurt."

  "Me, too. Sonny hasn't stopped by city hall in quite a while now, has he? Two or three months at least."

  Melanie nodded. It had been two months and two weeks, to be exact, and she didn't even have to consult her calendar to remember. Her ex-husband's entrances and exits were always indelible.

  "Maybe he finally knows the meaning of the word divorce," Melanie said. She could have said maybe he'd finally taken her threat of a restraining order seriously. And somewhere in a far corner of her heart she wondered if it was because he didn't care anymore.

  Peg sighed a little cloud of cigarette smoke. "I always enjoyed seeing him, even if you didn't. I used to keep lollipops in my desk for him when he was trying to quit smoking. Red ones."

  "I remember." She also remembered how those damned red lollipops increased the sensuality of Sonny's already way-too-sexy mouth and how many times she'd wanted to kiss him, just to see if he still tasted as good as he looked.

  All of a sudden she noticed that Peg was standing there silent and staring at her as if waiting for a reply to a question Melanie hadn't even heard.

  "I'm sorry. Did you say something?"

  "Just that it's a shame to be having artificial insemination when the genuine article is…"

  "I'd better get going, Peg, before the traffic gets too bad." Melanie stabbed her key in the car lock, opened the door, and tossed her handbag inside. "Thanks again for the wonderful party. Hold down the fort while I'm gone, huh? And don't let Cleo do anything too bizarre to my office, okay?"

  "Oh, sure. Good luck, Melanie. But I still think…"

  "'Bye, Peg."

  * * *

  The genuine article.

  Peg's words kept sneaking into Melanie's thoughts no matter how she tried to dismiss them. It was a good thing she could have made the drive from city hall to Channing Square with her eyes closed because images of Sonny kept distracting her from the worse-than-usual Friday rush-hour traffic inching south on Grant Parkway.

  The genuine article.

  The first time she'd ever seen him, Solomon Stephen "Sonny" Randle had looked like a genuine bum and smelled as if he'd just climbed out of a Dumpster.

  Two years ago, during one of Mayor Venneman's forays to New York to do the morning talk shows, Melanie had presided in his absence at an awards ceremony for the police department. Always a nervous wreck at such occasions, she'd been even worse that afternoon, sitting up front with the chief of police and various dignitaries, trying to keep her trembling knees together in the way-too-short skirt of her gray gabardine suit.

  After she'd made an equally short, rather gray-gabardine speech, she had handed out a score of letters of commendation to fresh-faced young patrolmen in dress blue uniforms with gleaming buttons, and presented half a dozen certificates of valor to older, but no less natty, officers. Then she called the name on the final certificate—Lieutenant Solomon S. Randle—and watched in horror as a bearded derelict shambled from the back of the auditorium to the podium where she stood.

  Only the fact that the audience had cheered wildly—including the brass behind her on the stage—kept Melanie from screaming "Somebody stop him!" She'd presented the certificate with one hand while using the other to discretely wave away the garbage stench emanating from the awardee.

  Afterward, at the reception that followed, he had come up to her like an ill wind, but one carrying two glasses of champagne.

  "Here. Hold these a second," he'd said in a voice that ranged somewhere between rough gravel and harsh cigarette smoke.

  Melanie held the wet glasses, then watched in awe as the derelict cop proceeded to divest himself of one greasy beard, two st
raggly eyebrows, a terrible scar, and several gold front teeth, to emerge—Oh, Lord, had he emerged!—as the most gorgeous man Melanie had ever seen in her life.

  He'd still smelled to high heaven in his undercover garments, but by then she almost hadn't cared.

  The three weeks that followed had been not just a whirlwind, but a complete sensual blur unlike anything she had ever experienced until she'd woken up married in Sonny's disheveled downtown loft.

  She now woke up at the wheel of her Miata on Grant Parkway

  to realize she had missed her turn onto Channing Avenue

  . Melanie cursed her ex-husband for derailing her again, then circled around in the terrible traffic and finally made the turn onto Channing only to find herself behind a moving van that seemed intent on going three miles per hour and hitting its brakes every few hundred feet.

  Anyplace else and she might have given the truck an irritated beep of her horn to speed it up, but since it appeared that somebody was moving in, Melanie was patient. Heaven knows Channing Square

  needed all the residents it could get. Besides, she didn't mind driving slowly because it gave her a chance to look around and to savor the late-afternoon spring in Channing Park, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the city.

  Although she'd only lived here a year, as the recording secretary and official historian for the Channing Square Residents Association, Melanie knew this little corner of the city inside out. The park's thirty acres had been dedicated in 1845, but the grand residences that surrounded it hadn't started going up until after the Civil War. In the l870s they had risen with a Victorian vengeance, one graceful Second Empire town house after another, and then the staunch redbrick Federals and the somber Romanesque Revivals. For a few glorious decades Channing Square

  had been the most prestigious address in the city.

  Then, as happened in so many cities, the rich folks had moved on to bigger and better homes, leaving the mansions in Channing Square

  behind to suffer the consequences of the coming years. And suffer they did, especially during the Depression when most had been cut up into small apartments. By the 1980s the once-great neighborhood had become a slum with half of its homes' windows boarded up and crack dealers holding sway on every corner. The beautiful park had been overgrown with trash trees and weeds, its lovely Victorian bandstand, which had once played host to the John Philip Sousa Band, becoming a place to turn quick tricks or to stash dead bodies in the dark of the night.