Fancy Pants

Chapter 25

Teddy stared at Dallie's back as the two of them stood in line at the counter of a McDonald's off 1-81. He wished he had a red and black plaid flannel shirt like that, along with a wide leather belt and jeans

with a torn pocket. His mother threw out his jeans as soon as they got the tiniest little hole in the knee, just when they were starting to feel soft and comfortable. Teddy stared down at his leather play

sneakers and then ahead at Dallie's scuffed brown cowboy boots. He decided to put cowboy boots on

his Christmas list.

As Dallie picked up the tray and walked toward a table at the back of the restaurant, Teddy trotted along behind him, his small legs taking two quick skips, trying to keep up. At first when they'd been heading out of Manhattan into New Jersey, Teddy had tried asking Dallie a few questions about whether he had a cowboy hat or rode a horse, but Dallie hadn't said much. Teddy had finally fallen silent, even though he had a million things he wanted to know.

For as long as Teddy could remember, Holly Grace had told him stories about Dallie Beaudine and Skeet Cooper- how they'd met up on the road when Dallie was only fifteen after Dallie had escaped from the evil clutches of Jaycee Beaudine, and how they'd traveled the interstates hustling the rich boys at the country clubs. She'd told him about bar fights and playing a round of golf left-handed and miraculous eighteenth-hole victories snatched from the jaws of defeat. In his mind, Holly Grace's stories had gotten mixed up with his Spiderman comic books and Star Wars and the legends he read in school about the wild West. Ever since they'd moved to New York, Teddy had begged his morn to let him meet Dallie when he came to visit Holly Grace, but she always had one excuse or another. And now that it had finally happened, Teddy knew this should be just about the most exciting day of his life.

Except that he wanted to go home now because it wasn't turning out anything like he'd imagined.

Teddy unwrapped the hamburger and lifted the top off the bun. It had ketchup on it. He wrapped it back up. Suddenly Dallie turned in his seat and looked right across the table into Teddy's face. He stared at him, just stared without saying a word. Teddy began to feel nervous, like he'd done something wrong. In his imagination, Dallie would have done things like reach over and slap him ten, the way Gerry Jaffe did. Dallie would say, "Hey, pardner, you look like the kind of man me and Skeet might like to have on the road with us when things get tough." In his imagination, Dallie would have liked him a whole lot more.

Teddy reached for his Coke and then pretended to study a sign over on the side of the room about eating breakfast at McDonald's. It seemed funny to him that Dallie was taking him so far away to meet his mother-he hadn't even known that Dallie and his mom knew each other. But if Holly Grace had told Dallie it was all right, he guessed it was. Still, he wished his mom was with them right now.

Dallie spoke so abruptly that Teddy jumped. "Do you always wear those glasses?"

"Not always." Teddy slipped them off, carefully folded in the stems, and put them on the table. The sign about eating breakfast at McDonald's blurred. "My mom says it's important what's inside a person, not what's outside-like if they wear glasses or not."

Dallie made some kind of noise that didn't sound very nice, and then nodded his head toward the hamburger. "Why aren't you eating?"

Teddy pushed at the package with the end of his finger. "I said I wanted a plain hamburger," he

muttered. "It's got ketchup."

Dallie's face got a funny, tight look. "So what? A little bit of ketchup never hurt anybody."

"I'm allergic," Teddy replied.

Dallie snorted, and Teddy realized that he didn't like people who didn't like ketchup or people who had allergies. He thought about eating the hamburger anyway, just to show Dallie he could do it, but his stomach was already feeling funny, and ketchup made him think about blood and guts and eating

eyeballs. Besides, he would end up with an itchy rash all over his body.

Teddy tried to think of something to say that would make Dallie like him. He wasn't used to having to think about making grown-ups like him. With kids his own age, sometimes they thought he was a jerk or he thought they were jerks, but not with grown-ups. He chewed on his bottom lip for a minute, and then he said, "I've got an I.Q. of one hundred sixty-eight. I go to gifted class."

Dallie snorted again, and Teddy knew he'd made another mistake. It had sounded like he was bragging, but he'd just thought Dallie might be interested.

"Where did you get that name-Teddy?" Dallie asked. He said the name funny, like he was trying to

get rid of it fast.

"When I was born, my mom was reading a story about some kid named Teddy by this famous writer-

J. R. Salinger. It's short for Theodore."

Dallie's expression grew even more sour. "J. D. Salinger. Doesn't anybody call you Ted?"

"Oh, yeah," Teddy lied. "About everybody. All the kids and everything. I mean, just about everybody except Holly Grace and Mom. You can call me Ted if you want to."

Dallie reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. Teddy saw something frozen and hard in his face. "Go on up and get yourself another hamburger fixed the way you want it."

Teddy looked at the dollar bill Dallie was holding out and then back down at his hamburger. "I guess this'll be all right." He slowly pushed back the wrapper.

Dallie's hand slammed down over the hamburger. "I said go get another one, dammit."

Teddy felt sick. Sometimes his mom yelled at him if he made a fresh remark or didn't do his chores, but it never made his stomach feel all wiggly like this, because he knew his mom loved him and didn't want him to grow up to be a jerk. But he could tell that Dallie didn't love him. Dallie didn't even like him. Teddy's jaw set in a small, rebellious line. "I'm not hungry, and I want to go home."

"Well, that's just too damned bad. We're going to be on the road for a while, just like I told you."

Teddy glared at him. "I want to go home. I have to go to school on Monday."

Dallie got up from the table and jerked his head toward the door. "Come on. If you're going to act like a spoiled brat, you can do it while we're on the road."

Teddy lagged behind on the way out the door. He didn't care anymore about all Holly Grace's dumb old stories. As far as he was concerned, Dallie was a big old butt-wipe. Slipping his glasses back on, Teddy tucked his hand in his pocket. The switch comb felt warm and reassuring as it settled against his palm.

He wished it was real. If Lasher the Great was here, he could take care of old Dallie Butt-Wipe Beaudine.

As soon as the car moved onto the interstate, Dallie punched the accelerator and shot into the left lane. He knew he was acting like a real son of a bitch. He knew, but he couldn't stop himself. The rage wouldn't leave him, and he wanted to hit something about as badly as he'd ever wanted anything in his life. His anger kept eating away at him, growing bigger and stronger until he could hardly contain it. He felt as if some of his manhood had been stripped away. He was thirty-seven years old and he didn't have a goddamn thing to show for it. He was a second-rate pro golfer. He'd been a failure as a husband, a goddamn criminal as a father. And now this.

That bitch. That goddamn selfish, spoiled little rich-girl bitch. She'd given birth to his child and never said a word. All those stories she'd told Holly Grace-those lies. He'd believed them. Christ, she'd gotten back at him all right, just like she'd said she would the night they'd had that fight in the Roustabout parking lot. With a snap of her fingers, she'd given him the most contemptuous fuck-you a woman could give a man. She'd taken away his right to know his own son. Dallie glanced over at the boy sitting in the passenger seat next to him, the son who was the flesh of his body just as surely as Danny had been. Francesca must have discovered by now that he had disappeared. The thought gave him a moment's bitter satisfaction.

He hoped she was hurting real bad.

Wynette looked very much as Francesca remembered it, although some of the stores had changed. As

she studied the town through the windshield of her rental car, she realized that life had carried her in a huge circle right back to the point where everything had really begun for her.

She hunched her shoulders in a futile attempt to relieve some of the tension in her neck. She still didn't know if she'd done the right thing by leaving Manhattan to fly to Texas, but after three unbearable days

of waiting for the phone to ring and dodging reporters who wanted to interview her about her relationship with Stefan, she had reached the point where she had to do something.

Holly Grace had suggested she fly to Wynette. "That's where Dallie always heads when he's hurting," she had said, "and I guess he's hurting pretty bad right now."

Francesca had tried to ignore the accusation in Holly Grace's voice, but it was difficult. After ten years of friendship, their relationship was seriously strained. The day Francesca had returned from London, Holly Grace had announced, "I'll stick by you, Francesca, because that's the way I'm made, but it's going to be a while before 1 trust you again."

Francesca had tried to make her understand. "I couldn't tell you the truth. Not as close as you are to Dallie."

"So you lied to me? You fed me that stupid story about Teddy's father in England, and I believed it all these years." Holly Grace's face had darkened with anger. "Don't you understand that family means something to Dallie? With other men it might not matter, but Dallie isn't like other men. He's spent all his life trying to create a family around him-Skeet, Miss Sybil, me, all those strays he's picked up ever the years. This is going to just about kill him. His first son died, and you stole his second one."

A wave of anger had shot through Francesca, all the sharper because she had felt a prick of guilt. "Don't you judge me, Holly Grace Beaudine! You and Dallie both have some awfully freewheeling ideas of morality, and I won't have either of you shaking your finger at me. You don't know what it's like to hate who you are-to have to remake yourself. I did what I needed to do at the time. And if I had to go through it again, I'd do exactly the same thing."

Holly Grace had been unmoved. "Then you'd be a bitch twice over, wouldn't you?"

Francesca blinked her eyes against tears as she turned onto the street that held Dallie's Easter egg house. She was heartsick over Holly Grace's inability to understand that Dallie's long-ago affair with her hadn't been anything more than a small sexual diversion in his life-certainly nothing to justify the kidnapping

of a nine-year-old child. Why was Holly Grace taking sides against her? Francesca wondered if she was doing the right thing by not involving the police, but she couldn't bear the idea of seeing Teddy's name smeared all over the tabloids. "Love Child of Television Personality Kidnapped by Golf Pro Father." She could see it now- photographs of all of them. Her relationship with Stefan would become even more public, and they would dig up all the old stories about Dallie and Holly Grace.

Francesca remembered all too well what had happened after "China Colt" had made Holly Grace famous. Every detail of her unusual marriage to one of professional golf's most colorful players had suddenly become fodder for the media, and as one wild story followed another, neither of them could go anywhere without being dogged by paparazzi. Holly Grace handled it better than Dallie, who was accustomed to sports reporters but not the sensationalis-tic press. It hadn't taken him long to start throwing his fists, which had eventually attracted the attention of the PGA commissioner. Following a particularly nasty altercation in Albuquerque, Dallie had been suspended from tournament play for several months. Holly Grace had divorced him soon after to try to make both their lives more peaceful.

The house still bore its lavender trim and chain of leaping jackrabbits, although the tangerine paint had been touched up by a less skillful hand than Miss Sybil's. The old schoolteacher met Francesca at the door. It had been ten years since they'd seen each other. Miss Sybil had shrunk in size and her shoulders were more stooped, but her voice hadn't lost its authority.

"Come in, my dear, come in and get out of the cold. My, my, you'd think this was Boston instead of Texas, the way the temperature's dropped. My dear, I've been at sixes and sevens ever since you called."

Francesca gave her a gentle hug. "Thank you for letting me come. After everything I told you on the phone, I wasn't sure you'd want to see me."

"Not want to see you? My gracious, I've been counting the hours." Miss Sybil led the way toward the kitchen and asked Francesca to pour them both coffee. "I don't like to complain, but life hasn't been very interesting lately. I can't get around the way I used to, and Dallas was keeping company with such a dreadful young woman. I couldn't even interest her in Danielle Steel, let alone the classics." She gestured Francesca into a seat across from her at the kitchen table. "My, my, I can't tell you how proud I am of you. When I think of how far you've come…" She suddenly drilled Francesca with her schoolteacher's gaze. "Now tell me all about this dreadful situation."

Francesca told her, sparing nothing. To her relief, Miss Sybil wasn't nearly as condemnatory as Holly Grace had been. She seemed to understand Francesca's need to establish her independence; however, she was clearly worried about Dallie's reaction to discovering that he had a child. "I believe Holly Grace is correct," she finally said. "Dallas must be on his way back to Wynette, and we can be quite certain he won't take this well. You'll stay in the guest room, Francesca, until he gets here."

Francesca had planned to stay at the hotel, but she gratefully accepted the invitation. As long as she remained in the house, she would feel that she'd somehow gotten closer to Teddy. Half an hour later, Francesca found herself curled up beneath an old patchwork quilt while the winter sunlight trickled in through the lace curtains and the old radiator hissed out a comforting flow of heat. She fell asleep almost instantly.

By noon of the next day, Dallie still hadn't appeared and she was nearly frantic with anxiety. Maybe she should have stayed in New York? What if he wasn't coming to Wynette?

And then Holly Grace called and told her that Skeet had disappeared.

"What do you mean, disappeared?" Francesca exclaimed. "He said he'd contact you if he heard anything."

"Dallie probably called him and told him to keep his mouth shut. I expect Skeet's gone to meet him."

Francesca felt angry and impotent. If Dallie had told Skeet to put a gun to his head, he would probably have done that, too. By midafternoon, when Miss Sybil left to go to her pottery class, Francesca was ready to jump out of her skin. What was taking Dallie so long? Afraid to leave the house for fear Dallie would appear, she tried to study the American history material for her citizenship exam, but she couldn't concentrate. She began pacing through the house and ended up in Dallie's bedroom, where a collection of his golf trophies sat in the front window catching the thin wintry light. She picked up a copy of a golf magazine with his picture on the cover. "Dallas Beaudine-Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride." She noticed that the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper and his features had a sharper cast, but maturity hadn't robbed him of one morsel of his good looks. He was even more gorgeous than she remembered.

She searched his face for some small sign of Teddy, but saw nothing. Once again, she wondered how he had known that Teddy was his son. Putting down the magazine, she looked over at the bed and a shower of memories drifted over her. Was that where Teddy had been conceived, or had it happened earlier, in a Louisiana swamp when Dallie had stretched her out over the trunk of that Buick Riviera?

The phone next to the bed rang. She banged her foot on the bed frame as she raced over to it and snatched up the receiver. "Hello! Hello?"

Silence greeted her.

"Dallie?" The name came out like a sob. "Dallie, is that you?"

There was no answer. She felt a prickling along the back of her neck, and her heart began to race. She was certain someone was there; her ears strained to catch a sound. "Teddy?" she whispered. "Teddy… it's Mommy."

"It's me, Miss Fancy Pants." Dallie's voice was low and bitter, making her old nickname sound like an obscenity. "We've got some talking to do. Meet me at the quarry north of town in half an hour."

She heard the finality in his voice and she cried out, "Wait! Is Teddy there? I want to talk to him!"

But the line had gone dead.

She raced downstairs, snatched her suede jacket from the hall closet, and pulled it on over her sweater and jeans. That morning, she had tied her hair at the nape of her neck with a scarf, and now, in her haste, she got the thin silk tangled in the jacket collar. Her hands trembled as she pulled the scarf free. Why was he doing this? Why didn't he bring Teddy to the house? What if Teddy was sick? What if something had happened?

Her breathing was quick and shallow as she started the car and backed it out onto the street. Ignoring the speed limit, she drove to the first service station she could find and asked for directions. The instructions were complex, and she missed a route marker north of town, going miles out of her way before she found the flat dirt road that led to the quarry. Her hands ached from their tight grip on the steering wheel. Over an hour had passed since his call. Would he wait for her? She told herself that Teddy was safe-Dallie might hurt her, but he would never hurt a child. The thought brought her only a small measure of comfort.

The quarry sat back from the road like a giant wound, bleak and forbidding in the fading gray winter light, overwhelming in its size. The last shift of workers had apparently left for the day because the vast, flat yard that fronted the quarry was deserted. Pyramids of reddish stone stood near the idle trucks. Miles of silent conveyer belts led to green-painted hoppers sitting like giant funnels above the ground. Francesca drove across the yard toward a corrugated metal building, but she saw no sign of life, no vehicles other than the idle quarry trucks. She was too late, she thought. Dallie had already left. Her mouth dry with anxiety, she drove her car out of the yard and along the road to the maw of the quarry.

It looked to Francesca, in her agitated state of mind, as if a giant knife had sliced open the earth, gouging its way straight down to hell. Desolate, eerie, raw, the canyon of the quarry dwarfed everything on the horizon. A scattering of bare winter trees above the rim on the opposite side looked like toothpick twigs, the hills in the distance like baby sandpiles. Even the darkening sky no longer loomed so large; it seemed more like a lid that had been dropped down over an enormous empty cauldron. She shuddered as she forced herself to drive to the edge, where two hundred feet of red granite had been sliced open layer by layer, the process of desecration paradoxically revealing the secrets of its creation.

In the last of the light, she could dimly make out one of Teddy's toy cars sitting at the bottom.

For a fraction of a moment she felt disoriented, and then she realized the car was real, not a toy at all. It was just as real as the Lilliputian man who leaned against the hood. She pressed her eyes shut for a moment, and her chin quivered. He had chosen this awful place purposely because he wanted her to feel dwarfed and powerless. Struggling for control, she backed the car away from the rim and then drove along it, almost missing a steep gravel road that led into the quarry's depths. Slowly, she began her descent.

As the dark quarry walls rose above her, she mentally steadied herself. For years, she'd been charging at seemingly impenetrable barriers, battering herself against them until they gave way. Dallie was merely another barrier she had to move. And she had an advantage he couldn't anticipate. No matter what he might have told himself, he was expecting to confront the girl he remembered, his twenty-one-year-old Fancy Pants.

Even as she had gazed down at him from the lip of the quarry, she had sensed that he was alone. As she drove nearer, she saw nothing that made her think differently. Teddy wasn't there. Dallie wanted to extract his full pound of flesh before he gave her back her child. She parked her car at an angle to the front of his, but nearly forty feet away. If this was to be a showdown, she would play her own war of nerves. The light was almost gone and she left her headlights on. Opening the door, she got out deliberately-no haste, no wasted motion, no glances spared for those looming granite walls. She came toward him slowly, walking in the path of the headlights with her arms at her sides and her spine straight. A chill blast of wind tore at her scarf and spanked the end against her cheek. She locked her eyes with his.

He stood facing her with his back to the car, hips leaning at an angle against the front of the hood, ankles crossed, arms crossed-all of him locked tight and closed away. His head was bare, and he wore only a sleeveless down vest over his flannel shirt. His boots were dusty with the red grit from the quarry, as if

he had been there for some time.

She drew near him, her chin high, her gaze steady. Only when she was close enough could she see how terrible he looked, not at all like the magazine-cover photograph. In the glare from the headlights, she noted that his skin had a drawn, gray cast, and his jaw was covered with stubble. Only those Newman-blue eyes were familiar, except that they had turned as cold and hard as the rock beneath her feet. She stopped in front of him. "Where's Teddy?"

A blade of night wind cut through the quarry, lifting the hair away from his forehead. He stepped away from the car and straightened to his full height. For a moment he didn't say anything. He just stood there looking down at her as if she were a particularly loathsome piece of human refuse.

"I only hit two women in my life," he finally said, "and you didn't count because it was more a reflex action since you hit me first. But I've got to tell you that ever since I found out what you did to me, I've been thinking about getting hold of you and doing the job right."

She needed the full force of her will to speak calmly. "Let's go someplace where we can sit down and have a cup of coffee so we can discuss all this."

His mouth twisted into an ugly sneer. "Don't you think the time to be sitting down and drinking coffee was ten years ago, after you found out you were going to have my kid?"

"Dallie-"

He raised his voice. "Don't you think that might have been the time to call me up on the telephone and say, 'Hey, Dallie, we've got a little problem here I think we should maybe sit down and talk about'?"

She buried her fists in the pockets of her jacket and hunched her shoulders against the chill, trying not to let him see how much he was frightening her. Where was the man who had once been her lover-a man quick to laugh, a man amused by human foibles, a man as slow and easy as warm molasses? "I want to see Teddy, Dallie. What have you done with him?"

"He looks just like my old man," Dallie declared angrily. "A pint-sized replica of that old bastard Jaycee Beaudine. Jaycee beat up women, too. He was real good at it."

So that's how he had known. She gestured toward her car, unwilling to stay any longer in this dark

quarry and listen to him talk about beating up women. "Dallie, let's go-"

"You didn't figure on Teddy looking like Jaycee, did you? You didn't count on my recognizing him

when you planned this dirty little private war."

"I didn't plan anything. And it's not a war. People do what they have to. You remember what I was like back then. I couldn't go running back to you and ever have a shot at growing up."

"It wasn't just your decision," he said, his eyes sparking with anger. "And I don't want to hear any of that feminist horseshit about how I don't have any rights because I'm a man and you're a woman, and it was your body. It was my body, too. I'd damn well like to have seen you have that boy without me."

She went on the attack. "What would you have done if I'd come to you ten years ago and told you I was pregnant? You were married then, remember?"

"Married or not, I'd have seen you were taken care of, that's for damn sure."

"But that's the point! I didn't want you to take care of me. I didn't have anything, Dallie. I was a silly little girl who thought the world had been invented to be her personal toy. I had to learn how to work. I had

to scrub toilets and live on scavenged food and lose whatever pride I had left before I could gain any self-respect. I couldn't give that up and go running back to you for a handout. Having that baby by

myself was something I had to do. It was the only way I could redeem myself." The closed, settled expression on his face didn't ease, and she was angry with herself for trying to make him understand.

"I want Teddy back tonight, Dallie, or I'm going to the police."

"If you were going to the police, you'd have done it by now."

"The only reason I've waited is because I didn't want the publicity for him. Believe me, I won't put it off any longer." She stepped closer to him, determined to let him see that she wasn't powerless. "Don't underestimate me, Dallie. Don't get me mixed up in your mind with the girt you knew ten years ago."

Dallie didn't say anything for a moment. He turned his head and stared off into the night. "The other woman I hit was Holly Grace."

"Dallie, I don't want to hear-"

His hand whipped out and caught her arm. "You're going to listen, because I want you to understand exactly what kind of a son of a bitch you're dealing with. I slapped the shit out of Holly Grace after Danny died-that's the kind of man I am. And you know why?"

"Don't-" She tried to pull away, but he only gripped her tighter.

"Because she cried! That's why I slapped her. I slapped that woman because she cried after her baby died." Harsh shadows cast by the headlights slashed his face. He dropped her arm, but his expression remained fierce. "Does that give you any idea what I might do to you?"

He was bluffing. She knew it. She felt it. In some way, he had cut himself open so she could see inside him. She had hurt him badly and he had made up his mind to punish her. He probably did want to hit her-only he didn't have the stomach to do it. She could see that, too.

With more clarity than she wished for, she finally understood the depth of his pain. She felt it through every one of her senses because it mirrored her own so closely. Everything inside her rejected the idea

of living things being hurt.

Dallie had her son, but he knew he wouldn't be able to keep him for long. He wanted to hit her, but it went against his nature, so he was looking for another way to punish her, another way to make her suffer. She felt a creeping chill. Dallie was smart, and if he thought long enough he just might find his revenge. Before that happened, she had to stop him. For both their sakes, and for Teddy's sake, she couldn't let this go any further.

"I learned a long time ago that people who have lots of possessions spend so much energy trying to protect what they have that they lose sight of what's important in life." She stepped forward, not touching him, just making certain she could look him directly in the eye. "I have a successful career, Dallie-a seven-figure bank account, a blue-chip portfolio. I've got a house and beautiful clothes. I have four-carat diamond studs in my ears. But I never forget what's important." Her hands went to her ears. She pulled the backs off the studs and then slipped the diamonds from her earlobes. They nestled in the center of

her palm, cool as chips of ice. She held them out to him.

For the first time he looked uncertain. "What are you doing? I don't want those. I'm not holding him for ransom, for chrissake!"

"I know that." She rolled the diamonds in her palm,. letting them catch the glare from the headlights.

"I'm not your Fancy Pants anymore, Dallie. I just want to make certain you understand exactly what my priorities are- how far I'll go to get him back. I want you to know what you're up against." Her hand closed around the diamonds. "The most important thing in my life is my son. As far as I'm concerned; everything else is just spit."

And then while Dallie watched, Black Jack Day's daughter did it again. With one strong movement of her arm, she threw her flawless four-carat pear-shaped diamond studs far out into the darkest reaches of the quarry.

Dallie didn't say anything for a moment. He lifted his foot and rested his boot on the bumper of the car, staring out in the direction she had thrown the stones and finally looking back at her. "You've changed, Francie. You know that?"

She nodded.

"Teddy's not an ordinary boy."

The way he said it, she knew he wasn't issuing a compliment. "Teddy's the best kid in the world," she answered sharply.

"He needs a father. A man's influence to get him toughened up. The boy's too soft. The first thing you have to do is tell him about me."

She wanted to scream at him, tell him she would do no such thing, but she saw with painful clarity that too many people knew the truth for her to keep it a secret from her son any longer. She nodded reluctantly.

"You've got a lot of lost years to make up for," he said.

"I don't have anything to make up for."

"I'm not going to disappear from his life." Once again his face grew hard. "We can either work something out ourselves, or I can hire one of those bloodsucking lawyers to stick it to you."

"I won't have Teddy hurt."

"Then we'd better work it out ourselves." He took his foot off the bumper, walked around to the driver's door, and climbed in. "Go on back to the house. I'll bring him to you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? I want him now! Tonight!"

"Well, now, that's too bad, isn't it?" he said with a sneer. And then he slammed the car door.

"Dallie!" She ran toward him, but he was already heading out of the quarry, his tires spitting gravel. She yelled after him until she realized how futile that was, and then she raced to her own car.

The engine wouldn't start for her at first, and she was afraid she had run the battery down by leaving her lights on. When it finally turned over, Dallie had already disappeared. She raced the car up the steep road after him, ignoring the way the rear end fishtailed. At the top, she caught sight of two dim red taillights in the distance. Her tires spun as she accelerated. If only it wasn't so dark! He turned out onto the highway and she raced after him.

For several miles, she stayed with him, ignoring the squeal of her tires as she accelerated around wild curves, pushing the car to reckless speeds when the pavement straightened. He knew the narrow back roads and she didn't, but she refused to fall back. He wasn't going to do this to her! She knew she'd hurt him, but that didn't give him the right to terrorize her. She pushed the speedometer to sixty-five and then to seventy…

If he hadn't finally turned off his lights, she might have had him.