Designer Genes

  Designer Genes

  Jacqueline Diamond

  For my longtime trusted mechanics, Ed and Keith

  Digital edition published by

  K. Loren Wilson

  P.O. Box 1315

  Brea, California

  Copyright 2000, 2013 by Jackie Hyman

  First print edition published by Harlequin Books. This edition has been revised and updated.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission of the author except short excerpts for review or promotional purposes. And you may read funny passages aloud to amuse your friends. Thank you.

  Chapter One

  She’d been a striking woman with long blonde hair. He couldn’t remember the shape of her face, though. Oval? Rectangular? Octagonal?

  Her image remained indistinct. But their first contact in that hotel conference room had been memorable enough to haunt his dreams ever since.

  She’d gazed deep into his eyes, and he felt it all the way down into the pit of his stomach, which thrummed as if its throttle were stuck.

  Her voice flowed over him like the sound system in a Lexus. She was murmuring something about a donation, a fund-raiser. And he was always game to help raise money for his favorite charity.

  But he hadn’t counted on this kind of donation. Maybe a small-town Texas mechanic just didn’t understand the ways of big-city L.A. And where had the beautiful woman gone...?

  With a groan, Carter Murchison rolled over. Instantly, something screamed in his ear.

  “What? What?” He sat bolt upright as Buffy the cat let out another shriek of protest and leaped off the bed. He must have rolled on top of her.

  Blearily Carter started to get up and discovered that, oddly, he was wearing his boots. Even more oddly, his bedroom smelled of grease and motor oil.

  His eyes got unstuck and confirmed what he already suspected. He’d fallen asleep on the couch in his garage, which was his place of business. At the moment, an old Chevy with a shot transmission and a pickup truck with a broken axle occupied half the space.

  Through the wide-open lift door, he noted that a warm April dusk had fallen. On the other side of Cross Street, lights blazed at Nowhere Junction K-8 School.

  Carter wiped his forehead, and realized from the sticky sensation that he’d just smeared his face with motor oil. What was wrong with him anyway, falling asleep so early?

  He had been out late last night, helping a rancher whose truck had broken down. And he’d jogged four miles this morning, double his usual.

  One thing he knew for sure: the cause wasn’t booze. Carter never drank, not since he’d made a fool of himself one weekend in high school.

  Except, of course, for accidentally imbibing at that school board convention in Los Angeles last year. Thirsty from the unaccustomed dry heat, he’d downed five or six cups of tropical fruit punch that was so sweet he hadn’t suspected it contained alcohol.

  All he recalled of his subsequent actions was seeing a pretty lady in a conference room, taking a trip to a fertility clinic and making a most peculiar donation. The next day, the hotel manager had apologized for accidentally serving punch intended for a fraternity party.

  Carter never saw the pretty lady again, except in his dreams.

  He didn’t think he was the only one who’d made a fool of himself that evening. His friend Quade Gardiner had sure worn a smug expression the next morning. Being a good-looking, wealthy rancher, Quade had probably had no trouble attracting female attention.

  Thinking of Quade, who was chairman of the school board, made Carter wonder why the school was all lit up tonight when the district had so many financial problems. Now, if it were the first Tuesday of the month, he could understand, but according to the calendar from The First National Bank of Nowhere, it was.. .impossible to say, because he hadn’t turned the pages for two months.

  Well, no wonder. He hadn’t wanted to get motor oil on that tantalizing photograph of Lilibeth Anderson, the town beauty queen.

  Now that he was awake, he realized this must be the night of a board meeting. That was why Finella Weinbucket, the perpetual PTA president, had said, “See you later!” at lunchtime when she’d passed Carter in front of Popsworthy’s Dry Goods Store.

  He’d figured she was planning on getting her car tuned up. Then he’d forgotten all about it.

  Carter checked the wall clock. In fifteen minutes, he would be late for the school board meeting. Considering that he lived across the street, the others would rag on him mercilessly.

  He was dirty and hungry. Although they had a potluck dinner at the school board meetings, which might be tempting, he knew that if he ate there, he’d have to take a helping of Finella’s Spring Salad or risk offending her. And eating that muck was a fate he wouldn’t wish on a car thief.

  Grumbling under his breath, Carter exited through the back. He left the garage open, in case anyone wanted to drop off a car for him to repair first thing in the morning.

  As he headed across the yard to his house, he remembered the cans of imported sardines he’d bought on sale at Gigi’s Grocery last month. As usual with Gigi’s specials, the cans had been dented, a sign she’d bought them cheap from the wholesaler.

  He’d meant to save them as treats for the cat. Tonight, however, he needed them more than she did.

  *

  Buffy Arden was as tolerant of cow droppings as the next person. Also of cactus, barbed-wire fences and giant red-ant hills. Since she’d never seen them close-up before, she held no ingrained prejudices.

  However, she’d already figured out that she didn’t like them anywhere close to her sports car or to her six-month-old daughter. Or to the thousand-dollar shoes that her husband—her soon-to-be ex-husband, she amended mentally—had bought her. Paying for everything was his only redeeming quality, as things had turned out.

  By her calculations, the car had broken down twenty miles short of her destination, which was not the way she’d planned it. While Buffy hadn’t expected her engine to die precisely in the middle of town, she’d hoped it might gasp and moan pathetically enough to justify taking it to the mechanic. That was why she’d postponed her maintenance and spent the past five hundred miles ignoring a lit-up dashboard.

  Now she’d landed in the middle of nowhere. Scratch that. If this truly were the middle of Nowhere, she’d be fine. But nowhere without a capital “N” as in Nowhere Junction didn’t count. Her carefully laid plans had gone miserably awry.

  A calculated breakdown had seemed a graceful way to introduce herself and, more importantly, her daughter to Carter Murchison. But now she’d have to summon a tow truck from the nearest town, and according to her GPS, that was a place called Groundhog Station.

  She should have expected this kind of mishap. Things hadn’t gone right in months, not since Roger called from Japan to say he wanted a divorce. The fact that he’d phoned her in the maternity ward had made his treachery all the more odious.

  Now night was falling and she was standing on a cactus-strewn roadside strip next to a barbed-wire fence, being eyed by a row of cattle. The spring air was redolent with their leavings, which probably contributed massively to global warming, and at any moment she expected to discover the nearest source with her much too expensive but irresistible shoes.

  So much for inspecting the terrain. She didn’t see a single house, barn or other sign of civilization anywhere.

  Sliding into the car, Buffy shoved back a strand of champagne-blonde hair and turned the key in the ignition. Not a peep. “Look,” she told her car, “Can’t you hold it together a little longer? Is twenty miles too much to ask?”

  From the rear seat, Alison gurgled with amusement. The baby had enjoyed the entire trip from Los Ange
les, even though she had no idea that she herself was the reason for it. She was cute and sweet, and made everything worthwhile. Buffy could hardly wait till her daughter grew up so they could be best friends.

  She’d heard that some girls didn’t get along with their mothers. Things would be different for the two of them, she’d known from the moment she gazed into her little girl’s loving face.

  However, that had been several hours before Roger’s phone call. And now here they were en route to their future, if she could ever persuade this vehicle to move.

  Buffy decided to take a sharper tone. “What is your problem?” she demanded of the car. “You’re being unreasonable.” How unfair that it should die now, after making it through the Snoring Desert, which was kind of like an endless beach with neither an ocean nor good-looking surfers.

  It wasn’t actually named Snoring, although it deserved to be; it was the Sonoran, whatever that meant. Thank goodness for GPS, since geography had never been Buffy’s strong point. Having grown up in Los Angeles, she viewed the United States as consisting of three major coastlines dominated by L.A., New York and New Orleans. Anything in between had a squishy name that started with a vowel, such as Omaha, Ohio or Utah.

  She’d made it this far thanks to her navigation system, which conveniently reduced each segment to a straight line with the occasional crossroad. In addition, she’d brought an auto club guidebook that showed cities and towns with a cluster of supposedly helpful symbols. She couldn’t decipher those except for the tepees, which must mean either a campground or Indians. Buffy had been hoping to meet a few Native Americans because she’d love to learn how they fashioned jewelry out of feathers.

  “Enough is enough,” she told the car. “Do we have an agreement?” It didn’t answer. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Once more, Buffy keyed the ignition. The spark thingy must have been listening, because there was a cough and sputter, and the vehicle rumbled to life.

  She’d told Roger repeatedly that inanimate objects responded to a stern approach tempered by empathy. He’d laughed. Wouldn’t you know that when she proved him wrong, he wouldn’t be around to see it?

  She eased onto the two-lane highway and resumed her interrupted journey to Nowhere.

  *

  Quade Gardiner, chairman of the Nowhere Junction Board of Education, straightened his rough-hewn frame and tapped his gavel on the folding table. Carter braced himself in case the table collapsed.

  He was not being paranoid. Furniture collapsing would be typical, given the events of the past year.

  The five-member board had formerly sat in a semicircle on the auditorium stage, until—due to unsuspected dry rot—part of the stage gave way during a meeting. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured.

  The trustees had moved their chairs and tables to the foot of the stage. That worked fine for three months until the first major rainstorm of the season revealed a leak in the roof directly above the board’s annual financial report.

  It had been the only copy, since the rainstorm had also wiped out the school district’s computer, which hadn’t been backed up for over a month. Although the district secretary routinely copied documents onto a flash drive, she’d accidentally thrown that away along with a pile of sodden notes. These had been scooped up by Mazeppa the Bag Lady, who’d recovered the drive from the bottom of her shopping cart on request. She’d handed it over in exchange for a lot of begging and a short list of demands, including eye shadow, shoe inserts and breath mints.

  The board now arranged its seats to one side, beneath a striped canopy borrowed from the local scout troop. They faced an assemblage of about fifty citizens, some of whom wore hard hats.

  “Please come to order,” Quade said, although the only one talking was Mazeppa, who stood in the back muttering to herself. “Can we dispense with the reading of the March minutes?”

  Finella, who sat to Quade’s left, glanced up from her knitting. Although only in her early forties, she had embraced middle age like a long-lost lover. Sun-seared lines etched the corners of her mouth and eyes, while her short light-brown hair was turning a splendid mouse gray. “So moved.”

  “I second the motion,” said Horace Popsworthy, seated next to her. Thin of hair and watery of eye, he was running for mayor in June, so he could be counted on to agree with almost anybody.

  “I’m sorry to report that the state has denied our request for emergency funds to rebuild the school,” Quade said.

  A groan arose from the audience. “What’re we gonna do?” somebody yelled.

  “Let’s post it on Kickstarter,” someone else suggested.

  “You think those geeks are gonna support our small-town school?” came an angry mutter. “They’ll just tell us to put the classes on-line.”

  School board meetings in Nowhere Junction were the closest thing left in America to true participatory democracy, Carter mused. Sometimes, the results proved satisfying. Mostly, they proved the old saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth. And also, occasionally, the rule about things tending to descend into chaos.

  The chairman raised his hand for silence. “I know how we all feel about taxes,” he said, “but I believe we need to put a bond issue on the June ballot. Because of the deadline, we’ll have to vote on it tonight.”

  “A bond issue?” roared Popsworthy, who seized on every issue that came up as part of his platform. “I won’t hear of it!” He looked around as if for applause. A couple of people uttered half-hearted cries of, “Hear! Hear!”

  “Is there some hurry about rebuilding?” asked Finella. “I mean, those space heaters in the classrooms work fine, and we’ve got plenty of canvas for the roof.”

  “If we don’t have enough money by the start of the fiscal year on July 1,” Quade said, “we can’t begin construction for at least another year. One more major breakdown and the state’s going to condemn this facility, which means our kids will have to be bused to Groundhog Station.”

  The principal, Uncle Dick Smollens, nodded in glum confirmation, and a horrified murmur ran through the audience. It was already a source of dissatisfaction that the town’s older students attended a regional high school in that rival community.

  “A town of two thousand people needs its own school,” said Gigi Wernicke, the grocery store owner, whose large frame overflowed her folding chair. “Especially with this—this baby boom we’re having.”

  She referred to the fact that the student population of a hundred and fifty was being augmented annually. This was thanks in large part to board member and handyman Billy Dell Grimes and his wife, Willie, who had eight kids and another on the way.

  Carter understood her point, and he hated to disagree with Quade, his best friend from their high school days. Nevertheless, as a board member, he had an obligation to express a different view.

  “What with April 15 being just around the corner, I’m having a hard time with the idea of more taxes, and so are a lot of small businesspeople,” he said. “Can’t we find another way? We could hold a fund-raiser, for instance.” But not if it involved the kind of donation he’d made in L.A. Only—that hadn’t really benefited the school district, to the best of his knowledge.

  What had the pretty blonde lady said? That he’d be helping couples complete their families. That he be immortalizing his legacy. That he’d be doing it for the children. But which children?

  In the back of the room, Mazeppa set down a paper plate half-full of Finella’s Spring Salad, whose main ingredients were corned beef and lemon gelatin. “Aw, shoot!” she roared. “We should have expected something like that from a bachelor. You and Quade don’t even have kids.”

  “That’s so,” agreed Popsworthy. “Some of us are devoted family men.” That was ironic, considering that his only son, after graduating from high school two years ago, had promptly moved to Dallas. Apparently discovering this was not far enough from Nowhere Junction, he had subsequently relocated to Tucson and then to Las Vegas. According to the lat
est rumor, he’d joined the Peace Corps and was preparing to travel to Nepal. What was next, outer space?

  Frowning, Quade tapped his gavel. “Seeing as Carter and I got elected by default two years ago when we skipped a town meeting, I consider any criticism on that score out of line.”

  “Besides, Carter’s right about the taxes,” said Billy Dell. He was sitting at the end of the semicircle of trustees in order to make a quick getaway if his wife, Willie, went into labor. She sat in the front row, her pregnancy clearly near term. “Some of us can hardly make ends meet as it is.”

  “If you spent less time playing Starship Intruders with your kids and took on a few more handyman jobs, it wouldn’t be so durn hard,” snapped Mazeppa. With her strawlike dark hair, glittering eyes and pinched mouth, she scarcely needed makeup for her annual role as the witch in the town’s Halloween Carnival.

  “That does it!” Billy stood up. “Now I know Mazeppa is related to some of the town folks and we take care of our own, but she’s been living in my laundry room for six months and criticizing every move I make. Besides, we need the space for a nursery. It’s time somebody else shouldered the burden.”

  Tears sparkled in Mazeppa’s eyes. “I guess I know when I’m not wanted. Young people are all alike. When you’re old, they figure you’re disposable.”

  “Don’t cry,” Carter said quickly. “Nobody’s going to put you out on the street.” He wished Quade would steer them back to the topic of replacing the school, but sticking to the agenda at a public meeting in Nowhere Junction was a Herculean task.

  “Oh, nobody’s going to put her out, are they?” said Billy Dell. “Well, Carter, that reminds me, you’ve got a great big house all to yourself.”

  “Great big? It’s less than twelve hundred square feet, and there’s a dog and a cat.” Realizing that might not appear a very strong defense, he added, “And terrible fleas.”

  Finella’s knitting needles clicked. “We don’t care to hear about your fleas, Carter. Why don’t you go see Dr. Miles and spare us the medical details?”