over the passenger seat before I managed to summon my official dog-command voice.
“Sit,” I ordered firmly. “Sit and stay.” Lucy did both, but she didn’t like it, and she whimpered softly from time to time, letting me know that she wasn’t the least bit happy.
Alan had already told me he’d been up all night. It was one thing to give him Marge’s number and expect him to initiate contact with her in case he needed help. It seemed unlikely, however, that he’d pick up the phone, dial a complete stranger, and ask her to come over to give him a hand with his precious granddaughter. Realizing that was never going to happen without some kind of intervention on my part, I took the bull by the horns and called Marge myself.
“I’m just now meeting up with Alan and Athena at the hotel,” I told Marge when she came on the line. “I expect we’ll be at Belltown Terrace in the next forty-five minutes or so, getting them settled in. How about if you just happen to stop by about then, too? That way you and Alan can be properly introduced, and if he does need your help, he won’t have to feel like he’s leaving Athena in the care of a complete stranger.”
“Sounds good to me,” Marge said.
“He also just told me that he and Athena were up all night long. The poor guy looks like death warmed over. If you could maybe put in a couple of hours this afternoon so he could get some rest . . .”
“No problem,” Marge said.
“And one more thing . . .”
“What’s that?”
“As far as Alan’s concerned, you’re a friend of the family who’s stepping in and lending a hand out of the kindness of your heart.”
It killed me to do so, but I managed to utter those words with a totally straight face.
“Mr. Dale is not to know that you’re paying the bill?”
“Correct.”
“Okeydokey,” Marge said. “Whatever floats your boat.”
As we ended the call, it occurred to me that this was the most amiable Marge Herndon had ever been. Maybe marriage was actually starting to agree with her and mellowing her out.
For the next fifteen minutes or so, I sat in the car holding Athena and trying to come to grips with the idea that this tiny human being, now sleeping peacefully in my arms was, unknowingly and through no fault of her own, sowing all kinds of chaos and complications wherever she went. She wasn’t just disrupting Alan Dale’s life, she was throwing my life into disorder as well, because by then I was pretty sure Athena Dale really was my own granddaughter. What in the hell was I going to do about that?
Alan appeared a few minutes later, wheeling the fully loaded luggage cart out to a rented Honda Accord parked three spaces from my Mercedes. With Athena in hand, I exited the S550 and went to join him. The first item he unloaded from the luggage cart was the infant seat, which he placed in the backseat on the Honda’s passenger side.
“Go ahead and put Athena in that while I load everything else,” he said.
It turns out my task assignment was easier said than done. It took me several false starts to finally manage to belt Athena into her infant seat, but when it came time to secure that with the vehicle’s seat belts, I found that complex operation to be far above my pay grade. After filling the trunk, half the front seat, and half the backseat with accumulated stuff, Alan at last stepped forward to take charge of the seat-belt issue while I returned the cart to the hotel’s front lobby.
When I came back, I handed Alan a Mapquest printout of how to get from hither to yon. He studied it for a moment.
“This doesn’t look too hard,” he said, “I think I can manage.”
“Be advised,” I warned him. “The map in your hand is for backup purposes only. What Mapquest doesn’t understand is that due to the rapid expansion of the Amazon campus, the whole south Lake Union area is now one huge building project. Several of the streets they suggest you use to get from I-5 to Belltown Terrace are currently blocked for construction. I think we should take 45th over to I-5 and head south. We’ll exit at Stewart, turn right onto Denny, take that all the way over to Second, and turn left on that. Belltown Terrace is a couple blocks down Second on