Raising the Stakes

“What was wrong with it?” she’d asked, and he launched into a mind-numbing recitation that involved a dirty air cleaner and something called a ballast resistor. Dawn listened, nodded once or twice as if she understood what sounded like a foreign language, and finally the mechanic grinned and said the bottom line was that they’d bill her at the end of the month.

The good news was that her old car still had plenty of life in it. Good news? It was wonderful news. And it was heaven to be home at last.

Dawn kicked off her shoes, waggled her toes and sighed with relief. Wearing heels every day was something new. Her dealer’s uniform had consisted of a shirt, vest and pants. Flat had been okay. The new job required heels. Nothing outrageous, just pumps, but she wasn’t used to heels at all. Summers on the mountain, she’d gone barefoot; winters, she’d worn heavy walking boots. Never heels, no matter what the season. Harman hadn’t approved. They made a woman look like a slut, he’d said, but then he’d said that about almost anything she wore, even the shapeless dresses she’d sewed herself in hopes they would be acceptable…

Dawn took off her jacket and carefully placed it on a hanger. She was doing it again, wasting energy thinking about the past. Was it because she’d missed her Sunday visit with Tommy last week? She always saw her boy on Sunday. Always. She got up at five, was on the road by five-thirty, arrived at Rocking Horse Ranch at seven and they spent the entire day together, just she and her son.

Sometimes she took him to a wonderful place Tommy called their hideaway, where water rushed down over smoothly sculpted rocks and things were so green and lush you forgot you were in the desert. Or they drove to what remained of a mining camp, where Tommy had found a battered tin cup that made his eyes shine. If the weather was iffy, they drove to the mesa not far behind the ranch, followed a steep path to the bottom and explored the little canyon at the base.

She saw her son during the week, too, if time permitted, but those Sunday visits were what she lived for—and she’d missed the last one. Becky had asked her to come in and spend Sunday reviewing things. For one wild moment, Dawn almost said she couldn’t do it, that she had a little boy waiting for her… But nobody knew Tommy existed, not even Cassie.

He would always be her secret. It was his only protection.

It still amazed her that she’d made good her escape from the mountain.

That night, she’d known Harman would go after her. He had friends; one of them would surely lend him a car or a truck. As she’d huddled with Tommy in the dark parking lot of the Victory Diner, waiting for the 1:00 a.m. bus that would take her to freedom, she’d feared every pair of headlights that came down the street. Sure enough, once the bus was on the highway, she’d looked out the window to see a familiar old car racing alongside. It belonged to Harman’s best drinking buddy, but her husband was at the wheel.

“Harman,” she’d whispered. She shrank back in her seat as he glanced at the bus, even seemed to look right into the window where she sat with her baby in her lap, but then he’d pulled ahead. She’d almost sobbed with relief. Harman had been watching for the truck. His truck. He hadn’t thought she would have abandoned it and taken the bus instead.

The look of him, wild-eyed at the wheel of that car, haunted her. It was how she imagined him still, driving through the night in search of her. It was why she would never tell her secrets to anyone, why she’d said no, she wouldn’t mind giving up her Sunday when Becky asked. She’d called the ranch, told Tommy she had a cold because she was afraid he’d think she put her job before her love for him, and gave him a big mmmwha that she said was a superduper giant kiss to tuck under his pillow—it was a game that always made him giggle.

Maybe she couldn’t wake up mornings to see her boy’s smiling face or tuck him in last thing at night, but she had saved him from his father. That was all that mattered. As for her edginess tonight…well, the incident this afternoon had shaken her. A perfectly pleasant man had tea

sed her a little and she’d almost gone to pieces. She’d thought she was past all that, the feeling of suffocating terror when a man leaned too close, when she saw that look, that tautness in a man’s face that meant he was thinking of taking you to bed to do whatever would give him pleasure…

“Stop it,” she said briskly.

The apartment was hot and airless after being closed up for so many hours. Dawn hit the switch for the AC, listened as it gurgled and groaned to life, then checked her answering machine. The red light was blinking. Dawn felt her heart in her throat, told herself she was letting her imagination run wild but sagged with relief when Cassie’s voice flowed from the speaker.

“Hi. It’s me. I know I said I’d come by for pizza but one of the girls called in sick, so I probably won’t make it. Oh, I got your message. That’s great, about your car. Keir’s terrific, isn’t he? Okay, gotta go. Talk to you tomorrow. Maybe we can meet for lunch, you think? Ciao.”

The machine clicked off. Dawn pressed her hand to her throat. “You really have to stop this,” she said softly.

A blinking light on an answering machine didn’t have to mean bad news. There were a thousand reasons for someone to leave a message. The hotel called with schedule changes. Salesmen phoned to try to sell her siding and insurance. She and Cassie were in touch almost every day. In her heart, she knew all that. In three years Mrs. Wilton had only phoned a couple of times, and the calls had been about simple things, like Tommy needing new sneakers or jeans.

It was just that she’d had this—this uneasy feeling all afternoon, the sense that something was wrong. Not wrong, exactly. Maybe just off-kilter. At work, she’d looked up a couple of times with the feeling that someone was watching her but nobody ever was, except for a harried reception clerk who had come to tell her a guest with blue hair and a free drink card was driving everyone crazy, insisting she could swap the card for dinner at La Chanson.

Dawn unzipped her skirt and hung it alongside her jacket.

Her mother would have said she was as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. She would have told her to knock on wood three times or spit over her shoulder, whatever. Dawn had never been able to keep Orianna’s endless superstitions straight, nor had she wanted to. She’d never wanted to be like her mother in any way, which made it even harder to understand how she’d ended up with a man like Harman.

To hell with Harman. He was out of her life, and hadn’t she promised herself she wasn’t going to waste another moment thinking about him?

She snatched up the phone, stabbed the programmed number of the Rocking Horse Ranch. Mrs. Wilton answered on the second ring. Yes, Tommy was fine. He was sleeping. What was new? Well, he’d decided he wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up. Or maybe a fireman, but only if firemen could ride horses, too.

Dawn laughed as she imagined her little boy’s earnest face. By the time she hung up the phone, she felt fine again. She had to stop seeing shadows where there weren’t any. That man who had helped her today, for example. So what if he’d asked her where she was from? She’d asked him the same question. It was just conversation; it didn’t mean a thing.

He was a nice guy, that was all. Nice, and nice-looking. Definitely nice-looking. No question about it. Her Good Samaritan was what Cassie would call a hunk.

She took the pins from her hair and shook it loose, stripped off the rest of her clothes and stepped into the shower. There was a time, however brief, she’d have noticed how handsome he was right away. When she was fifteen, sixteen, before Harman came into her life, she’d just started becoming aware of those things. Other girls her age at Queen City High School had been standing in little knots, eyeing the boys and giggling for quite a while before she’d wanted to eye them herself.

Of course, she never had.

Dawn rinsed off and wrapped herself in a towel.

She didn’t belong to any of those cliques. There was a pecking order even in that squalid town, and she was at the bottom of it. She would have died of embarrassment, anyway, if she’d looked at a boy and he’d noticed, though embarrassment would have been the least of her worries if her mother had caught her. Orianna had set out the rules the day Dawn first got her period. It was just about the same time her breasts began to develop and her waist to curve in above her hips.

“You’re a woman now,” she’d said.