Stork Raving Mad: A Meg Langslow Mystery (A Meg Lanslow Mystery)

thought hit me.
    “Your money?” I echoed. “Strictly speaking, aren’t we talking about the college’s money?”
    “Mine now,” he said. “And it’s all Jean Wright’s fault.”
    “It was her idea to embezzle from the college?”
    “No!” His voice was scornful. “She has enough family money to have no financial worries, and she’s not interested in anything except her stupid little department. But if she hadn’t been blackmailing me to help her with all her dirty tricks, I wouldn’t have needed the money. I could have just stayed here and built up my resumé until I finally got a well-paid administrative job at an important college. But then she came along. And I knew sooner or later she’d spill the beans.”
    “That you’d cheated your way into your position, taking scholarships and awards that were intended for deserving Latino students.”
    “I was deserving, too,” he said. “I was tired of seeing people whose grades weren’t any better than mine getting all the breaks just because they belonged to some minority, while I had to work and take out thousands of dollars of loans to get what was being handed to them.”
    I was tempted to echo Ramon and point out that he didn’tknow what those other students had gone through to get those grades and what kind of prejudice they’d experienced. But I got a feeling that starting a debate over affirmative action wasn’t in my best interest at the moment. Not with my opponent holding a gun at my back.
    Suddenly I realized that my legs and feet were wet. Had I peed myself out of fright? Not my normal reaction to danger. I usually coped well as long as a crisis lasted, and then got the shakes afterward. But who knew what the hormones were doing to my normal reactions.
    Wait—the hormones . . .
    “Oh my God!” Blanco exclaimed. “You just peed on my foot!”
    “No, I didn’t,” I snapped. “My water just broke!”
    “Your what?” He stepped away from me, and I’d have breathed a sigh of relief, but when I turned around, the gun was still pointed at me.
    “My water,” I said. “Amniotic fluid. What the babies are floating in.”
    “Yuck!” His tone was a curious mixture of disgust and puzzlement, as if he were trying to figure out if this was less gross than being peed on, or more. For that matter, I wasn’t sure myself whether my water had broken or whether the stress had made my bladder give way.
    “Wait!” he said. “Does this mean—?”
    “That I’m going into labor?” I said. “Probably. I have no idea how soon, though. Could be anytime, though since—
aaaaahhhhh!
”
    I faked a contraction, clutching the twins and doubling over as if in pain. I wasn’t sure how long a first contraction was supposed to last. Probably best if I make it relatively short, though long enough to rattle him. I relaxed my tensed body and glanced back at Blanco.
    He was still pointing the gun at me and looked annoyed, not rattled.
    “Stop that,” he said. “We don’t have time for that now.”
    “I can’t very well stop it,” I said. “It’s labor. It happens when it happens, and you can’t—AAAAHHHH!”
    This time the contraction was all too real, as if my body wanted to say, “You think that was what labor’s like? You have no idea. Watch this!” I vaguely remembered that there was something I was supposed to be doing to get me through this. But what?
    Patterned breathing! That was it! If only I could remember how it went. I’d thought the father’s role as a Lamaze coach was designed to make him feel like an integral part of the birth process rather than the anxious, useless bystander he’d have been a few decades ago. Now I realized how critical it was going to be to have Michael beside me, shouting instructions about whatever the hell it was I was supposed to do to get through this horrible pain.
    “I said stop that!”
    It had to be several centuries later, and for all I knew, Blanco had been uselessly nagging at me to stop the whole time.
    As the pain finally eased, I heard a burst of laughter in the distance. From the rehearsal in the barn. They had to be prettyloud for us to hear them all the way in here. No way they’d have heard me over that, especially since everyone thought I was upstairs in bed. I was on my own.
    “Get up!” Blanco snapped.
    I found myself staring up at him from the floor, where I had crouched to ride out the pain. The gun was still pointed at me. I stood up, more than a little shaky. The