Montana Creeds: Dylan

Maybe Sheriff Book had been right.

She might be coming down with something.

And maybe that monster-memory she’d been fighting to keep submerged was about to break the surface, finally, and ruin her carefully constructed life.

CHAPTER TWO

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, after half an hour trying to spoon room-service oatmeal into Bonnie’s tightly closed mouth and finally giving up, Dylan checked out of the hotel and went looking for a Wal-Mart.

Bonnie needed a car seat, and a whole slew of other things.

So he put her into a shopping cart, and the two of them wheeled around. He guessed at her clothes sizes, and she kicked up a fuss when he went to try some shoes on her, but after a brief struggle, he won. In the toy department, he snagged a doll almost as big as Bonnie herself, mounted on a plastic horse no less, but she didn’t show much interest in that, either.

“Toys,” an older woman told him sagely, leaning in to whisper the wisdom, “have to be age-appropriate.”

“Age-appropriate?” Dylan pushed his hat to the back of his head.

The woman tapped the box containing the new doll, sitting tall and straight on her horse. “This is for children five and up. Your little girl can’t be any older than two.”

“She’s small for her age,” Dylan replied automatically, because he didn’t like other people telling him what to do, even when they were right. But once the meddlesome shopper had rounded the bend, he put the doll back on the shelf and rustled up a soft pink unicorn with a gleaming horn and a fluffy mane. According to the tag, it would do.

And Bonnie took to it right away.

After making a few more selections, and paying at the checkout counter, they were good to go. Dylan made a couple of calls from the truck and located a pediatrician on the outskirts of the city.

Jessica Welch, M.D., operated out of an upscale strip mall. She was good-looking, too, with long, gleaming brown hair neatly confined by a silver barrette at her nape. Not that it mattered, but when Dylan met a woman—any woman—he noticed things about her.

“Who do we have here?” Jessica Welch, M.D., asked, chucking Bonnie, who had both arms clamped around Dylan’s neck, under the chin.

Bonnie threw back her head and screamed out one of those ear-piercers that go through a man’s brain like a spike. Ever since Dylan had hauled her into the waiting room, a full forty-five minutes before, she’d been clinging to him. He’d been the only father present, and the looks he’d gotten from the various mothers waiting with quieter, better-behaved kids weren’t the kind he was used to getting from people of the female persuasion.

Dr. Welch was unmoved. Screaming children were not uncommon in her day-to-day life, of course. “This way,” she said.

Dylan and Bonnie followed her down a short corridor and into a small examining room. Bonnie didn’t let up on the shrieking, and she’d added kicking and squirming to the fit; hostilities were escalating.

“I guess she thinks she might get a shot or something,” Dylan said, completely at a loss. By then, Bonnie had knocked his hat off, and she was pulling his hair with both hands.

Dr. Welch simply smiled. “Let’s have a look at you, Miss—?”

“Bonnie,” Dylan said. “Bonnie Creed.”

Bonnie Creed. He liked the sound of that.

The doctor examined the papers on her clipboard. “And you’re her father,” she said. It was rhetorical, a conclusion not a question, but Dylan felt compelled to answer all the same.

“Yes.”

“I would have known by the resemblance,” Dr. Welch said. As it turned out, she had a few tricks up her sleeve. By letting Bonnie listen to Dylan’s heart through a stethoscope, she got the kid to quiet down.

“Any significant health problems?” the doctor asked, finishing up with the routine stuff, like looking into Bonnie’s ears with that little flashlight-type thing and peering down her throat.

“Not that I know of,” Dylan said. “She’s been—er—living with her mother.”

“I see,” Dr. Welch replied solemnly.

“I was hoping you could tell me what to feed her and stuff like that,” Dylan went on. He felt his ears burning. By now, the doctor was probably wondering if she should notify the authorities or something.

“I take it you haven’t been around Bonnie much,” she said thoughtfully.

“It was kind of sudden. Sharlene decided she couldn’t take care of her anymore, and left her with me.” He probably looked and sounded calm, but if Dr. Welch drew her cell phone, he and Bonnie would be out of there in a flash and speeding for the open road. Damn. He should have called Logan. Then he’d have some kind of legal backup at least—

“I’ll need a number where I can contact you, Mr. Creed.”

Dylan gave her his cell number and hoisted a reaching Bonnie off the end of the examining table and back into his arms.

“Two-year-olds,” Dr. Welch went on, with a sudden smile, “usually prefer a semisoft diet—some baby food, not the infant variety. Anything that’s easy to chew.”

“No bottles or anything?” Dylan asked.

“One of those sippy cups, with the lid,” the doctor said. “Bonnie needs a lot of milk, and juice is okay, too, provided you watch the sugar content.”

Dylan figured he ought to have been taking notes. What the devil was a sippy cup, anyhow? And didn’t just about everything have sugar in it?

He kept his questions under his hat, having already made a fool of himself. If the doc didn’t take him for a child abductor, it would be a miracle.

Dr. Welch gave Bonnie a couple of shots—the kid barely noticed—ferreted out a list of healthy foods for children and sent them on their way. Dylan paid the bill, and he and Bonnie left. Until they were fifty miles north of Vegas, he checked the rearview mirror for a squad car every few minutes.

AS IT HAPPENED, Dylan didn’t have to call Logan, because Logan called him—at an inconvenient time, as usual.

Logan was getting married to Briana Grant, that was the gist of it, and there was no talking him out of it, Dylan learned, when he took his brother’s call on his cell phone, seated in a truck-stop restaurant somewhere along the winding road homeward. Bonnie, in the provided high chair, kept flinging strands of spaghetti at him—she was covered in the stuff, and so was he.

And he was losing patience. “Look, Logan, I—” He paused when Bonnie stuck her whole head into her plate and came up looking like some pasta-Medusa. “Stop that, damn it—”

Bonnie merely giggled and preened a little, like all that goopy spaghetti was a wig she was modeling.

“Are you with a woman?” Logan asked.

“I wish,” Dylan said. “I’ve got to hang up now—I said stop it—but I’ll get there when I can. If I don’t show up in time, go ahead without me.”

After that, Dylan barely registered what his brother said.

Logan asked him to get word to Tyler, he remembered that much, and relay the message that he wanted to talk to their younger brother, in person.

As if. Tyler was in pissed-off mode. There would be no getting through to him, and Dylan said so, in so many words.

Then Bonnie started throwing spaghetti again.

This time, she hit the woman in the next booth square in the back of the head.