Snowbound Halloween (2 page)

 “Thea?” Kara’s voice came over the cell phone. “How are you? Ron and I are really looking forward to tonight!”

The words made absolutely no sense to Thea. “Tonight?”

Kara kept talking without any sense that something was wrong at Thea’s end of the conversation. “You know I wasn’t too happy about this idea of yours when you first told me about it, but Ron has won me over with the costumes he picked out.  I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m actually excited about tonight!”

Thea’s head was so mired in her fears and her anxiety that it took a moment for Kara’s words to fully penetrate her brain, but when they did it made everything she was worried about seem a thousand times worse. “Oh my God, the costume party is tonight! It’s Halloween!”

“Don’t tell me you forgot about your own party!” Kara laughed.

Thea felt dazed and confused by the sudden recollection that Nick had his biggest event of the year tonight at his bar and it was all her fault. How the hell was she supposed to tell him he was about to be a father when he was already going crazy trying to get ready for his first annual Halloween Costume Party at The Church Key tonight?

“Of course I didn’t forget,” Thea lied. She didn’t sound convincing, even to herself. “I’m getting off early from my job with Dr. Bartlett even though it’s Halloween and I’m usually the one who gives out the candy when the little trick-or-treaters start coming around.”

“Wait a minute,” Kara said. “You work for a dentist, don’t you? What is he doing giving away candy on Halloween?”

Reminiscing about past Halloweens on the job was a pleasant distraction from Thea’s current problems and she almost smiled. “When I first started working for Dr. Bartlett, he didn’t give anything away. You can imagine how unpleasant that was when all the little trick-or-treaters showed up in their costumes. So I spent the whole next year convincing him we had to show the kids what a healthier treat was. So now we give them boxes of raisins or sugar free gum.”

Kara had an easier time laughing than Thea did today. “That isn’t much better than giving them nothing. I hope you did better convincing Nick to pull out all the stops tonight.”

“There will be bowls of fattening, teeth-rotting candy everywhere,” Thea assured her. “Plus the truly important thing—a dollar off of every drink for everyone who comes in costume. I don’t know if this will be a money maker for Nick tonight, but everyone should enjoy the party.”

These last words deflated Thea’s spirits again. How could she have a good time at the party? She was pregnant and she didn’t know how her boyfriend was going to respond to the news. She couldn’t even get drunk to avoid her problems—not that she did that sort of thing anyway—especially not living with Mom. But if there was ever a time you ought to be able to get drunk to forget your problems, finding out you were pregnant when you weren’t married ought to be it. Yet she knew she couldn’t take the chance and risk causing birth defects to the child growing inside of her.

Kara finally figured out that something was wrong on Thea’s end of the line. First she went silent, and then she very quietly asked, “Are you all right, Thea?”

Thea barely succeeded in holding her sobs inside. It had been a mistake to call Kara. This really wasn’t the sort of problem she could confide in anyone. She had to figure out what to do on her own.  “What could be wrong?”

Kara kept her voice very quiet and asked the sort of questions that an older sister should have asked, but then, Thea’s older cousin had always been a better sister than Becka, hadn’t she? “I don’t know. Are you having a problem with Nick?”

Not yet I’m not,
Thea thought,
but give me a couple of hours and we’ll have a doozy.
“No, Nick’s great,” Thea said. Her voice sounded robotic and flat to her own ears.

“You didn’t have a fight, did you?” Kara asked. Perhaps because of her role in introducing them, Kara had always evidenced a sense of responsibility for Thea’s relationship with Nick.

Not yet, we haven’t
, Thea wanted to tell her.

A sob almost escaped from her, and suddenly Thea was absolutely certain she couldn’t tell Kara about her pregnancy. “Look, I’ve got to go,” she told her with a lot more energy than she’d answered Kara’s questions about Nick. “I’ll see you tonight, okay.”

“Thea, you can tell-” Kara started to say, but Thea disconnected the call without letting her finish the thought.

She refused to even look at the caller ID as she drove around for the next hour crying and waiting for it to be time to report to Dr. Bartlett’s office.

Chapter Two

“Here she is now, Nick,” Jo Taylor said into the telephone as Thea walked into Dr. Bartlett’s office. She was a cute little African-American woman with darker skin than Thea’s who’d work as an oral hygienist for Dr. Bartlett for about five years now. She smiled as she handed Thea the phone. “It’s your boyfriend. He says your cell must be off because he’s been trying to call for an hour. Hey, are you all right?”

Thea had tried to clean her face up with hand wipes in the car before reapplying her makeup, but evidently she hadn’t done as good a job as she’d wanted to. She put on her professional face and smiled at Jo. “Of course, I’m all right. What could be wrong? It’s Halloween, after all.”

Jo grinned. “And rumor has it there’s quite a party tonight. Are you sure there’s going to be a lot of eligible bachelors there?”

Thea kept the professional mask up and nodded her assurance. Ever since she’d started dating Nick, Jo had been after her to get Nick to help Jo find somebody. Thea didn’t think it was the interracial thing attracting Jo—just an avid desire to be in a relationship with a halfway decent guy. It was sad, when you stopped to think about it. Thea knew a lot of women looking to meet that special someone—
any
special someone. And working in the bar, she’d met a lot of guys in exactly the same position. Why was it so hard to hook two of them together so they could try and forge a connection?

Jo waved the phone at her and Thea reluctantly accepted it. “Hi, Nick.”

Nick didn’t waste any time in expressing his concern. “Are you all right? Kara called me about an hour ago asking if we’d had a fight. I tried to call you but you weren’t picking up your phone.”

There was no way Thea was going to tell Nick what was on her mind over the telephone—especially not with Jo standing next to her listening in to her side of the conversation. “It’s out of charge,” she lied. “It cut out on me while I was talking to Kara.”

Nick was no fool and he was not convinced by her excuse. “And you couldn’t just plug it in or call me back on your land line?”

Thea really wished Jo wasn’t rudely standing next to her just now.  It made lying more difficult but she kept spinning her yarn just the same. “I wasn’t home. I decided to pick up some more candy for tonight’s party.”

Nick still didn’t completely believe her. He knew something was up and from the expression on her face, so did Jo. “We have plenty! You don’t need to…”

Nick’s voice trailed off as he evidently realized he was sounding ungrateful. His belated remembrance of proper manners just served to heighten Thea’s irritation with him.

“Look, Nick, I have to get to work here. My desk is full of paperwork.”

Full
was definitely exaggeration. There were only two folders left from yesterday to be taken care of this morning.

The tone of unhappiness in Nick’s voice strengthened. “You’re sure there’s nothing wrong? Kara said she thought we’d been fighting.”

Why wouldn’t he just leave her alone? Wasn’t it bad enough he’d impregnated her? Did he really have to give her the first degree too?

“Do you remember fighting with me last time we got together?” Thea asked him.

If he said
yes
she would forget about the baby and go over to his bar and kill him. Two nights ago she’d finally gotten Nick to try a little light bondage and she hadn’t known she could orgasm that powerfully. He’d gotten into it, too—into it enough to joke with her about changing their costumes to warden and prisoner. She had struggled a little but they had definitely not been fighting.

“No, I don’t think we disagreed at all,” Nick said. He sounded very thoughtful, as if he were racking his brain to try and remember what he’d done wrong.

“There you have it then! I’ve got to get to work.”

She hung up the phone and stood nearly quivering with anger.

“Wow!” Jo said. “What did he do?”

The question surprised Thea. “What? Nothing! Nick didn’t do anything. We didn’t fight?”

Jo slowly shook her head from side to side. “I’ll bet you that’s not what Nick thinks right now.”

Thea didn’t have time for all this nonsense. “What are you talking about?”

Jo backed up a step, taking umbrage at Thea’s tone. “It’s none of my business, but if my boyfriend hung up on me the way you just did Nick, I’d be trying to figure out what he was angry about—and getting really pissed off when I couldn’t think of anything I’d done wrong.”

Jo stalked away leaving Thea to wonder how much worse life could get today.

When Thea pulled into the parking lot of The Church Key, Nick’s hole-in-the-wall little bar, she could see his truck in its usual space in the back of the lot and the cars of perhaps fifteen customers huddled closer to the front door. It never ceased to amaze her how many people drank during the afternoon—or during the morning for that matter. There hadn’t been
any
drinking in her house growing up—Mom would not permit it—but somewhere along the way Thea had formed the opinion that drinking was a nighttime and weekend recreational activity. After dating Nick for ten months she now knew just how far from the truth her naïve beliefs were. The recreational drinkers were an important part of Nick’s business, but there was a significant core of heavier imbibers who liked to show up for a round before they went into the office, always swung by at lunch for a little pick me up, and began to slip back into the bar during the early afternoon to add a little liquid cheer to their day. They weren’t the majority of Nick’s patronage, but they were a steady source of income upon which his bar depended.

She wondered idly how many would trouble themselves to put on a costume when evening came.

Not that that was her big concern today. She touched her stomach wondering how long it would be before she could feel the little boy or girl moving inside of her. Technically her little child didn’t have a gender yet—another thing she’d have to read up on so she would know what to expect from her pregnancy. At least she had a lot of friends with children she could ask when she was ready to let people know she was expecting.

She parked her car, turned off the engine, grabbed her purse and opened the door. The sky was gray and turning cold—bad news for all the children planning to Trick-or-Treat tonight. At least in October it was still too early to worry about snow. They’d had two hard winters in a row and Thea was not looking forward to another season of Nick’s backup bartender, Jim, interrupting their few nights off with panicked calls that the streets were turning hazardous with a fluffy white blanket. Not that he was that much better during regular storms. How a man with his sort of fears ever expected to move out of his mother’s basement was beyond Thea.

She walked briskly across the parking lot, her eyes not quite taking in the skeletons and scarecrows that adorned the front of the building. Nick had even bought a couple of bales of hay and a dozen pumpkins to decorate the entrance. His brother, Tim, had carved a couple of massive jack-o-lanterns to make the display look more like Halloween than simply autumn. They’d been planning tonight’s party for more than a month but with the results of her pregnancy test heavy on her mind, Thea wasn’t in the mood to enjoy the occasion.

She hesitated with her hand on the doorknob, ready to push it open and enter the bar. Maybe she was being foolish. Nick really did seem to care about her. Maybe she should just go inside, take him back to his little office and tell him he was about to be a father. But with all of their friends and a good chunk of their families coming over tonight, Thea just couldn’t bring herself to risk a major embarrassing fight that would spoil the evening for everyone. She felt like the hostess tonight, even though it was Nick’s bar, and she wasn’t going to do anything that would make the Halloween party fail.

At least that was what she kept telling herself. It was just as possible that she was simply too afraid to discover that Nick really didn’t love her as much as she thought he did a couple of days ago.

She pushed open the bar door. The light was gloomier inside even before they started putting up shrouds of fake cobwebs and black and orange crepe paper. Blowup ghosts and monsters decorated the corners and every wall was plastered with the image of a witch or a skeleton. The tables were already piled with bowls of treats—Mini Snickers, Milky Ways and Three Musketeers, plus Sweet Tarts, Milk Duds, Tootsie Rolls, Junior Mints, candy corn, and M&Ms. And that didn’t count the traditional salty treats like peanuts, pretzels and potato chips. Thea still wasn’t certain if Nick just really liked candy. He never indulged himself, but when it came to the bar he often went a little crazy.