At the sound of his name, Spike raised his head, looked up, and thumped his bushy tail on the floor. When no orders were forthcoming, however, he sighed, put his head back down on his front paws, and closed his eyes once more.
Joanna sighed. “All right then,” she said. “What was it that you needed to discuss that was so all-fired important that you were both willing to risk losing your jobs over it?”
“I was late,” Kristin said in a small voice.
The way she said it, Joanna knew at once she wasn’t talking about being late for work. “A whole week,” Kristin continued after a pause. “And that’s not me. I’m one of those women who’s as regular as clockwork—every twenty-eight days.”
Joanna felt her eyes widen. “You mean to tell me you’re pregnant?” Kristin nodded miserably. “What happened? Weren’t you using birth control?”
Kristin nodded again as two fat tears spilled out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “We were,” she replied. “Condoms. But something must have happened to one of them. I couldn’t talk to my mother—she’d have a fit—so I was planning to talk to you about it on Sunday, after the shower, to ask your advice. But then Dick Voland showed up and I lost my nerve. So I talked to a friend instead. She gave me the name of a doctor down in Agua Prieta who would take care of it for me, but . . .” At that point, Kristin buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Joanna took a deep breath. It was déjà vu all over with a painful piece of her own life. She remembered all too well when she had been in Kristin’s shoes in a similar situation; when she, after agonizingly considering whether or not to have an abortion, had finally been forced to tell Andy that she, too, was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to and had delayed for weeks, hoping she was wrong. Part of her reason for not wanting to tell was due to the fact that she and Andy had barely begun dating. She hadn’t wanted him to feel trapped into marrying her, but as soon as he found out, he had insisted. He and Joanna had run off to Lordsburg, New Mexico, the very next weekend, to tie the knot.
And the knot had worked. Theirs hadn’t been a trouble-free marriage, but it had been a good one. They had been in love and they had stayed that way. Together they had been happy. The only person who had seemed seriously offended by Jenny’s early arrival had been Eleanor Lathrop, who had, as it turned out, her own long-hidden and hypocritical reasons for being opposed to shotgun weddings.
With a jolt, Joanna emerged from an instant replay of her own past with the sudden realization that reliving the misery of her own experience was doing nothing to alleviate Kristin Marsten’s.
“She wasn’t even going to tell me,” Terry Gregovich was saying. “I could tell all last week that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. I thought we’d get a chance to talk about it over the weekend, but then I had to work all day Sunday. Yesterday morning, I called her here at work. I told her I knew something was up, and if she wouldn’t meet me to tell me what it was, that I’d come here to her office and I wouldn’t leave until I knew where I stood.” He paused. “I was afraid there was somebody else and that she wanted to break up with me.
“So I told her I was picking up some burgers at the Arctic Circle and that she should meet me down at Vista Park. It was while we were there that she finally broke down and told me what was up. I asked her if she knew for sure. She said no, she only thought so. That’s when I told her, we can’t go around making decisions in the dark and that we had to have her tested so we’d know what was what. She didn’t want to go to a doctor here in town or in Sierra Vista because she was afraid someone would talk. And she didn’t want to get one of those pregnancy test kits from the drugstore for the same reason. So yesterday afternoon, I turned off my pager and we drove up to Tucson—to Planned Parenthood.”
“And?” Joanna prodded.
Kristin looked up through teary eyes and nodded. “It’s true,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
“So what are you going to do?” Joanna asked.
“It’s not how I wanted it to work out, Sheriff Brady,” Terry answered. “It’s not how either one of us wanted it. But I love Kristin, and she loves me, and both of us want this baby. So if you have to fire one of us, go ahead. You can have my resignation right now. If I go up to Tucson I can probably find another job that will pay as well or better than this one. If I’m going to be a husband and a father in the next little while, you’d better believe I’m going to take those responsibilities seriously.”
Having said that, he reached out for Kristin’s hand and held it tenderly, cradled between both of his.
“So what’s the plan then?” Joanna asked. “Are you going to tell your parents?”