Scoop to Kill: A Mystery a La Mode - By Wendy Lyn Watson Page 0,66
Experience had given the women of the Decker family powerful imaginations when it came to men taking a powder.
Still, Ashley took me by surprise when she choked the word “dead” through her tears.
“Dead?” I repeated. She nodded.
Was it . . . ? No. Couldn’t be.
But then I remembered the blond ponytail on the mourner at Bryan’s funeral, the one who broke into hysterics at the mention of the grandchildren Bryan’s mother would never have.
“Ashley, honey, was Bryan Campbell the father?”
The intensity of her weeping gave me my answer, but she confirmed it by nodding again. Then she pulled out of my embrace and wrapped her fingers around my forearms, tight. Her eyes were wild with panic, the whites showing all the way around the irises.
“Oh, God,” she gasped. “You can’t tell anyone. Promise me!”
Just the year before I’d witnessed the heartache and havoc caused by keeping secrets about babies. I couldn’t promise to keep Ashley’s secret. Poor Marla and Steve would be crushed to learn that their son had slept with a student and gotten her pregnant, but the promise of a grandchild would go a long way to softening the blow.
“You have to promise me you won’t tell his parents,” she insisted. “Even Bryan wasn’t going to tell them, because they’d insist on keeping the baby. And I—I don’t know what I want, but I—I don’t want them to know.”
She was tripping over her words, but I knew what she meant. And she was right. Steve and Marla—check that—Marla would insist on being a part of this child’s life. If Ashley wanted to give the child up for adoption, Marla would try to get custody and the child would grow up surrounded by a whole community of people who knew the circumstances of his birth. Or if Ashley wanted to keep the baby, she’d be tied to Marla and Steve, people she didn’t even know, for the rest of her life.
Wait . . .
“Ashley, did you tell Bryan you were pregnant?”
She gave me a “get real” look. “Of course I told him,” she said. “The minute I found out. I thought maybe he’d feel bad and change my grade for me. But he wouldn’t.”
Wow. I couldn’t tell whether that was a sign that Bryan had principles or a sign that he was a cold-hearted jerk. Or both.
“He said it was too late,” she continued. “If he turned in a change-of-grade form, he’d have to provide a reason and get it past a bunch of administrators.”
I didn’t buy that. Oh, I believed Bryan fed her that line, but I didn’t believe it was actually true. I had a sneaking suspicion Bryan could have changed her grade if he wanted to. He could have chalked it up to a math error, for crying out loud. But he wouldn’t want to give up that tiny bit of power he had over Ashley, wouldn’t want her to “win.”
“You could have reported him to the department chair,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Duh. But Bryan said, ‘How do I even know that baby is mine? I don’t even know you’re pregnant.’ And I said, I can do a DNA test. And he said, ‘Not until the baby’s born.’ ”
Bryan raised a good point, God rest his soul.
“Are you sure the baby is Bryan’s?”
“Yes,” she huffed. “I hooked up with him at the Bar None just before Christmas. I called him Dr. Campbell and everything, because I knew he got a kick out of being the big professor.”
Aha. So Ashley was the girl Bryan had hooked up with the night he went out with the debating crowd. Crystal had seen them, and she knew who Ashley was. No wonder Crystal had been so certain that the girl Bryan left with wasn’t a girlfriend.
“I figured it wouldn’t hurt,” Ashley continued. “I’d stroke his ego a bit, have a little fun with him. He was kind of cute, and it was fun breaking the rules like that. And I thought maybe he’d even give me a pass on the extra papers.” She snorted. “Of course he didn’t. When I saw him at the start of spring semester in January, he acted like it never even happened.”
She pulled a dozen sheets of toilet tissue off the roll, mopped her eyes, and blew her nose. “During the first part of the semester, I was busy with my FitFab application and all the interviews, so I wasn’t going out to the bar. And then I started feeling sick so much