To Catch A Wife

The man nodded. “Even then I knew there was something special about you. Then, years later, after you’d graduated college and told me you were going into the police academy, I was as proud as I’d have been if you were my own son.”

Jack smiled at the recollections. “You do remember why I was here in the first place?”

Gord grinned. “Could’ve made a lot of omelets with all those eggs you boys were tossing around town.”

Not to mention the numerous rolls of toilet paper they’d used to festoon the trees lining the street in front of the high school.

Jack shook his head sheepishly. “You let us off pretty easy.”

“Let the punishment fit the crime, I always say. You and your buddies learned your lesson.”

“We sure did.”

“Wish the same was true for Jesse Wilson, but it seems some fellows never grow up.”

Jack glanced at his watch and stood. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, Gord. I’ll think about it, I really will, but right now I have a witness to interview.”

Chief Fenwick stood, too, and extended his hand across the desk. “You do that. Just don’t take too long. Mayor Bartlett has assured me the job belongs to the person I recommend, and I’m recommending you.”

They shook on it. “Give my best to Eleanor, will you?” Jack said as he left the chief’s office.

On his way to the interview room and his waiting witness, the events of the past few hours swirled in his mind. A family in the making, Emily’s reluctance notwithstanding. An incredible career opportunity, albeit one he had no intention of taking. Sitting at his desk that morning, which now seemed a lifetime ago, he’d felt deflated by a job that had become a drain. Now, instead of freaking out, he was energized by the prospect of change. Was he being naive? He didn’t think so.

* * *

EMILY GRIPPED THE edge of her desk. She couldn’t breathe. She pulled in a quick breath, then another, then another and another. Her heart raced. The images on her laptop monitor blurred. The room tilted from side to side, and her stomach followed. Her face warmed, and she could feel her forehead getting damp. With her fingers still clamped to the edge of the desk, she squeezed her eyelids shut and tried to force herself to stop panting.

Calm down, she told herself. You know how to get through this. Breathe slowly. Breathe in, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. You can do this.

By degrees, she relaxed her death grip on the desk and slowly opened her eyes. She forced herself to focus on the words on her computer screen. Her heart still felt as though she’d run a marathon, but it was no longer hammering its way out of her chest.

“You need to keep it together,” she said out loud after she was more or less breathing normally again. Would panic attacks be bad for the baby? They probably weren’t good.

She pushed back her chair, stood shakily, wobbled unsteadily into the bathroom and leaned on the sink. These episodes left her drained and weak, physically and emotionally. She hated them. They’d started while she was away at college, pushing herself to keep her GPA high enough to maintain her scholarship, knowing her family was enormously proud of her while she missed them desperately and wished more than anything she was back in the big old farmhouse, being bear-hugged by her dad, dining on one of Annie’s sumptuous meals instead of eating cafeteria food, and even enduring CJ’s endless attempts at one-upmanship.

Emily had come home for Thanksgiving with a prescription for antianxiety medication, and her father had sat her down for a heart-to-heart. He had warned her against taking them and advised she find another way to cope. Following the debilitating injuries he’d suffered during the Gulf War, he’d found himself relying heavily on medications to relieve the pain and trauma he’d experienced. Taking them had been easy. Stopping had not. Not wanting to disappoint her father, Emily had flushed the pills. When she returned to school, she had made an appointment with a counselor on campus who’d taught her breathing techniques to control the hyperventilation. He had also recommended more exercise and less caffeine. She had done everything except give up coffee. The techniques had worked, and after moving back to Riverton, she was seldom bothered by the attacks. Now they were back.

Jack Evans had proposed to her, and she had turned him down. Had she done the right thing? She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Of course she had. Technically, it hadn’t been a proposal. He hadn’t asked, “Will you marry me?” He had hastily stated, unequivocally, “We’ll get married.”

Just what every girl dreamed of. Not.

She was convinced he hadn’t meant it anyway. He was probably in shock and blurted out the first thought that popped into his head, the thing that was considered the right thing to do. Emily sighed. She hadn’t known what to expect when she told him about the baby, but she hadn’t anticipated that. He had asked her out to dinner, which made tonight a first date, a prospect that should have her filled with anticipation, not trepidation.

“Why can’t you be normal?” she asked her reflection in the mirror.

Her father had always said her tendency to march to the sound of her own drum was part and parcel of being the middle child. She shuddered to think what he would say about this, and she was in no hurry to find out. Fred, with whom she had shared her most secret hopes and dreams, claimed her at times unorthodox behavior was on account of her mother leaving when Emily was so young. As she became older and learned how to talk herself out of doing the wrong thing, she realized both her friend and her father were probably right.

And when she considered her sisters’ place in the birth order—Annie, the oldest, having to be the responsible one, and CJ, the youngest, a little flaky and a bit too self-centered—Emily decided she was better off being the one in the middle.

Feeling more in control, she splashed cold water on her face and returned to the living room. Tadpole had given up her search for another peanut and was running on her lopsided wheel. Emily found the intermittent squeak, squeak, squeak oddly comforting. It meant she wasn’t alone in the apartment.

She sat at her desk, eased her feet out of her shoes and wriggled her toes. She opened the file with Sig Sorrenson’s obituary. She read and reread the first paragraph three times, realized the futility of trying to edit without the ability to concentrate. She couldn’t do justice to this man’s long life while she was completely absorbed in her own, so she closed the document and logged into her email instead, scrolling up the list and deleting coupon offers for a spa treatment, an oil change and a two-for-one brunch special at a pancake house in Madison. She read a message from her boss reminding her about the town council meeting on Monday afternoon, and she checked her calendar to be sure she had entered the correct time. She had three new followers on Twitter and a reminder that two new comments had been posted on her latest blog entry. The sender of the most recent email nearly caused another panic attack.

From: Norma Evans

Why would Jack’s mother send her an email? Surely, he hadn’t told his parents about them yet. No, he wouldn’t. She was sure of it. They needed to get to know each other first.

Subject: Missing garden gnomes, etc.

“Okay, breathe. This is about the blog, not the baby.” She opened the email and started to read.

Dear Emily,

I thought you would be interested to know that along with all the other things that have gone missing around this lovely little town of ours, my garden trowel has disappeared. And before you ask, I can assure you I did not misplace it. I was using it yesterday afternoon in one of my flower beds, the one right outside the front door, because with this lovely weather we’re having, I’m getting ready to plant my marigolds. Some say it’s still too early for them, but those flowers are hardy and can hold their own against a late spring frost. When I went in to make dinner, I stuck the trowel in the ground and left it there on purpose because I was planning to finish the flower bed this afternoon.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when I went out after lunch today and my trowel was gone! My first thought was Walt had put it away, but when I asked him about it, he said he never touched it. So this must be the work of the Garden Gnome Bandit, don’t you think? There’s really no other explanation. I called the police, but they don’t seem to be taking these thefts seriously. We need someone like my son, Jack, on the Riverton PD, don’t you agree?

I hope your family is doing well. Tell your father hello from us, and remind your sister Annie I’ll see her at the Hospital Auxiliary’s bazaar and rummage sale in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to sampling some of that strudel of hers.

Yours truly,

Norma Evans

Emily let out a long breath, realizing she’d been holding it while reading through to the end of the message and waiting for the penny to drop. Norma Evans was nothing if not long-winded, but she had given no indication she knew anything about her impending grandparenthood. The disappearance of her garden trowel coinciding with the appearance of those two pink lines was purely coincidence.

Welcoming the distraction, even though it had come from Jack’s mother, she pushed away from her desk and stood to look at the Riverton street map she’d pinned to the bulletin board above the bookcase. She plucked a pushpin from the box on the top shelf and stuck it into the map to mark the location of the Evans’s family home.

The missing items now totalled nine, and the location of the red plastic ball on the head of this pin fit the pattern that had been slowly emerging. Every item had been taken from a nine-square-block residential area a little to the north of the historic downtown area. The one outlier was Gabe’s Gas ’n’ Go on the highway, but that was only two blocks to the west. Next, she scanned her list of things that had been stolen.