Chapter 23
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Pamela frowned, as a few minutes later Anderson announced that he was heading to the hospital, and he looked more than a little upset. Pamela asked as he went to step out the front door, “You got an update from Levi?”
He looked over at her and shrugged. “From him and Leland, combining forces. Levi’s team was doing some online searches while Leland had boots on the ground, meeting snitches in alleyways and texting whistleblowers.
So nothing good. Apparently some of the information on that USB is related to big-time drug cartels. So that has now been confirmed.”
“How could Tim be so foolish?”
“Yeah, somehow my brother-in-law has gotten himself into a crapload of trouble. I was hoping it was local muscle, but it’s not. It’s bigger,” he shared, “far bigger. I’m hoping Talia and the triplets aren’t in as much danger, but we can’t be sure. Timothy definitely is.”
“So, what will you do?”
“We still don’t have any real answers, and I don’t want Tim taken out before I get those real answers.” She opened her mouth, then quickly shut it. “I know I sound like a hardass,” he admitted, “and I’m concerned for everyone involved, but I also must keep Talia safe in the hospital.”
“Of course,” she agreed. “You get over there.” With that, he got into Talia’s vehicle and quickly headed off.
Pamela was unsettled with the latest information Anderson had shared with her. She was thinking about all the people she worked with who had drug issues and addictions, and the suppliers they had in town, who were supplying them with drugs.
It made her sick to think that the father of these beautiful babies may have been contributing to the problems she fought with every day at work. How disgusting to think that’s who and what he was. She stared down at the babies, more love enveloping her than she thought possible.
She whispered to them, “It’s okay, ladies. We’ll all get through this. Your mom is coming home soon. I just know it.” She couldn’t imagine how that reunion would look.
At the same time, she needed to make sure that everything would be ready for Talia. She sent Anderson a text. Let me know if there’s any improvement in your sister’s condition and whether we should start planning on what we need to get in place when she comes home.
He called her not long afterward. “They’ll send her home as soon as they can but not as soon as she wants, I’m sure.
However, she’ll need help. We may want to set up her and the babies on the first floor, so Talia doesn’t have to navigate the stairs.
We’ll definitely need a gate at the bottom of those stairs to keep the curious triplets from going up them. ”
Pamela replied, “I’ve been looking at the house and the layout, trying to figure out what would work the best.”
He told her, “You sort out anything that you think would help. And, when I get home, we can make a plan to get it done in time for Talia’s homecoming.”
“First, we need to figure out where she’s at. She might need to be hospitalized for a few more weeks.”
“I’m about to walk in, so hopefully I can catch the doc and ask him about a potential release date.” With that, he ended the call.
It wasn’t quite so easy, but Pamela knew that, if there was anyway for Talia to be home, that’s where she would want to be.
So, Pamela sat down with a notepad, the children happily trying to climb the furniture and her legs, while clamoring around on the floor beside her.
Pamela wrote up a list of things they could do to make life a little easier for Talia and to get her home faster.
When a knock came at the front door, she hesitated to open it, but a man called out, “It’s Leland. I met you earlier. I am here to help.” She opened the door, and he smiled at her. “Good for you. I could have come in the back door, but I figured that would freak you out.”
“Yes,” she confirmed, “and the babies are right here. So, it’s not as if I have a whole lot of choice as to where I’ll be in the house.”
“Of course not.” He came in and smiled, crouching down beside the closest girl and reaching out to gently touch her cheek. “They really are something, aren’t they?”
“They sure are,” she agreed, “but they’re also very vulnerable.”
“They are, indeed. That’s one of the reasons I’m here because I want to make sure that somebody is always here, backing you up.”
“Did Anderson call you?”
He nodded. “He did. Apparently some information on that USB he found here concerned him.”
“He didn’t tell me very much, but what I heard was scary enough,” she shared.
“Of course.” Leland laughed. “The military side of Anderson wouldn’t want to get you worried but did want you on guard.”
“Yeah. Now that you’re here, and he thinks the babies and I need further protection, I’m a lot more worried.”
Leland smiled. “I get it. And you want to be in on all the information, but there is a limit to how much we know. We’re still tracing all the threads that we can follow.”
“Right,” she said, staring at him. “That just sounds like you’re trying to put me off.”
He burst out laughing. “I’m not trying to do that at all,” he shared, finally quieting, still smiling.
“Yet I am aware that you don’t have any experience with this type of thing or these situations.
I wouldn’t expect you to. However, we also don’t want anything to go wrong, keeping the babies safe and well taken care of. ”
She nodded. “I agree with you there, but he left so quickly …”
He nodded. “I get it. I think his instincts were kicking in, and he couldn’t stay, so he sent me back.”
“I’m glad to have you here then,” she said, with a smile. “There’s coffee in the kitchen, if you want a cup.”
“I would love a cup,” he replied. “However, if things are fine and kosher here, I could grab some shut-eye first, crashing here on the couch, if you’re okay with that.”
“Of course I am,” she said. “You guys have been running all over the place, so if you need sleep, by all means get it while you can. I’ll only wake you if necessary.”
“That sounds great,” he replied cheerfully, as he stretched out on the couch, a smile on his face as he watched them.
Pamela laughed. “I don’t know how you think you’ll sleep through these girls as they laugh and cry and climb your legs every five minutes.”
“I used to be good at it,” he told her. “But times change, and you become a little softer as you get older.”
“I don’t know about that either.” She smiled. “It seems to me you guys don’t have a whole lot of softness until you look at these little ones.”
“And then we turn into marshmallows,” he shared.
“I will admit to seeing a little bit of that,” she teased. “It makes me feel better.”
“No need to feel better or worse,” he stated, staring at her. “We are here to help, and that’s the most important part.”
“Right. I need to remember that.”
“That’s not exactly what I was getting at. What I mean is, if you’re interested in Anderson, it’s important for you to realize that he won’t allow himself to move forward with that, not until this situation is resolved and everybody is safe.”
She was surprised but grateful for his openness. “I get that, but he’ll leave immediately.”
“Maybe not immediately, but he will have to go back to work. So, if it’s not something you can handle, that might be a breaking point for you too.”
“No, I don’t think that’s an issue for me,” she noted. “My life is also stressful sometimes, so yeah, I get it, too. And I also feel called to do what I’m doing, even though a lot of people don’t understand that. So again, I do understand.”
“Good,” he said. “In that case, if you’re okay, I’ll just close my eyes.
” Then he crossed his arms and just went still, as if frozen.
She almost wanted to walk over and poke him, just to be sure he was alive because he abruptly dropped into whatever sort of slumber this was.
She had never seen anything like it and found it fascinating.
As she remained in the living room, playing with the babies, she completely ignored the fact that Leland was even here.
When she finally got comfortable enough to understand that he was literally sound asleep, the babies started to move around him.
They were pulling themselves up on the furniture and generally getting into as much trouble as they could, but none of it seemed to bother or to even register with him.
It was kind of amazing. As soon as they started to cry a little bit, she picked them up one at a time and headed to the kitchen where she plunked them into their highchairs so she could feed them. When she came back for the third one, he was looking at her, his eyes wide open.
He asked, “Do you need help?”
She shook her head. “No, they’re all doing fine in the highchairs, so go ahead and sleep some more.”
He closed his eyes and just went out like that again.
It was a fascinating skill, and one she wanted to acquire.
Lots of times in her work she repeatedly got called out after hours and lost a lot of sleep.
So she understood how it was to run on nothing.
To turn it all off and to sleep so quickly would be a game-changer, and he was certainly doing a heck of a job with that trick.
She quickly warmed up food for the babies and started feeding them. One was ravenously hungry. One had absolutely no interest in food, and the other one seemed to be much more interested in playing with her spoon than the food itself.
And that was so very typical of babies. It took twice as long to feed them this time, mostly because of lack of interest from one of them, which clearly distracted the other two.
By the time Pamela finally got their mealtime finished, got them cleaned up, and got the floor cleaned up all over again, she was exhausted.
She did all that before she took them out of their highchairs and then realized she would need to change them one at a time.
She moved quietly to the small powder room off to the side, changed one, came back, put her back in the highchair, changed the second one, put her back in the highchair.
And by the time she finished changing the third one, Leland stood in the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
She looked at him and asked, “Feel better?”
“Yeah, I really do. I didn’t realize just how much I needed that.”
“The fact that you can actually sleep like that is amazing,” she murmured. “That’s a skill I need to cultivate.”
“It’s a skill everybody should cultivate,” he replied. “Yet these things aren’t taught in school or in any life courses. And it’s too bad.”
“I presume you learned it in the military.”
He looked at her in surprise and then nodded. “How’d you know I was in the military?” he asked curiously.
“You all seem to be cut from the same cloth,” she noted, with a smile. “And I understand Levi is ex-military too.”
“Yep, although there is no ex about it. Once you spend your lifetime doing this work, it just never shuts off,” he pointed out. “Which, in this case, is a good thing because Levi is one of the good guys.”
“Thank God,” she noted. “We need more of them.”
He laughed and nodded. “We do, indeed.” He looked down at the little ones. “You got them all changed too, huh?”
“Yeah, I took pity on you.”
He grinned. “Not that I can’t do it,” he added.
“I know,” she said. “The nice thing is, it’s not so much that you can’t do it, but, in this instance, you didn’t have to do it.”
He nodded and asked, “Now what?”
“Bedtime,” she announced. “As you can see, they’re already yawning and rubbing their eyes. They want some sleep, and I need some too.”
He picked up one and suggested, “I will take two if you’ve got one.”
And, with that decided, getting them all out of their highchairs, she headed to the upstairs bedroom for the girls, with the three cribs.
Leland asked, “Can you just put them down, or do you need to stay?”
“I have been staying until they are all asleep, just because they’re fussier with Talia gone,” she explained. “I need them to know that they’re safe and secure, so they don’t have nightmares all night.”
“It’s all about the nightmares,” he said. “I agree with that. The nightmares are debilitating, and, if you can’t get that beat, it’s a never-ending fight to get restorative sleep. So, yes, I get the nightmare part.”
She nodded. “So I will stay here for a bit, and you can go off and have another nap.”
He looked momentarily interested in that idea and then just shrugged. “I think I’m doing okay.”