His Best Friend's Baby by Janice Kay Johnson - His Best Friend's Baby Read Free Book Online Page A

Then she made herself listen to phone messages. Mick had questions, the attorney had questions, several people had left condolences. A reporter from the P.I. was still hoping for comments. After deleting them all, she carried to the table the basket into which she’d been throwing correspondence. Quinn was right; the bills were piling up.
    The attorney had said she could continue to write checks to pay bills and daily expenses. Okay, she thought, she could do this. She’d paid her own until she’d married Dean, so it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to write out a check for the phone bill. And it would give her enormous pleasure the next time Quinn showed up to say, Oh, I’ve already done that.
    She opened a tablet of paper and decided to list what she owed first. She didn’t even know what Dean paid for.
    Mindy found a bank statement first and discovered that the mortgage was an automatic deduction. An enormous one. She stared at the amount with dismay. A neighbor had sold recently, and if this house was worth about the same... There must not be very much equity, or Dean wouldn’t have been making such big payments.
    After a moment she shrugged. It wasn’t as if she had a choice.
    A few lines down she spotted two more deductions, both car payments. His and hers. She’d driven a beater when she’d met Dean, and he’d insisted on buying her a new car. He’d worry about her, he’d said when she’d protested. And Dean had loved the Camaro he drove, but he still owed an awful lot on it. Thinking about the car, fire-truck red, sitting in the garage made her falter and blink back more tears.
    Swallowing, she made herself go on, reaching for the next envelope and neatly slitting it open with the letter opener she’d found on Dean’s desk.
    This one was a MasterCard. He owed $4,569. Mindy had never even had that big a credit limit before. She wrote the amount of the debt, the creditor and the payment on the second line, after the mortgage.
    The gas bill was way higher than she’d expected, too, as was the water and sewer and the Nordstrom bill and bills for two different Visa cards. He owed a whole lot of money on the boat that occupied a third of the garage. He’d loved that boat, too, a white cabin cruiser he’d re-named The Mindy after he’d met her. He loved to take friends out on the Sound. Mindy, who didn’t swim very well, hadn’t actually enjoyed going out. She’d pretended she got queasy, but the truth was that panic had flooded her from the moment water opened between the dock and the hull.
    The boat, at least, was easy—she’d sell it as soon as she could.
    There was enough in the checking account to pay all the bills, but not much would be left over. Especially since some of these payments were already late, and the next month’s bills would be arriving soon. Dismayed, she recalculated a couple of times. She guessed she would have to call the attorney. Dean had had investments, hadn’t he? Maybe they could sell some stock, or cash in a CD, or something.
    She debated whether to write a little note on each bill saying something to the effect that Dean Fenton had died unexpectedly, that the will was in probate and she, his wife—no, widow—would be the one now paying. But wasn’t that something the executor should do? Dean’s executor, of course, was Quinn, who in that capacity had every right to nag her and maybe even override her decisions. She didn’t know.
    She opened the checkbook, but didn’t write anything for a long time. Dean L. and Mindy A. Fenton, the checks all said. Only, now it would just be Mindy A. She was responsible for all those debts. Debts she hadn’t even known they owed.
    With shame she realized she should have known. Would have, if she’d ever asked or expressed any interest. But she hadn’t. Dean had acted as though he loved to take care of her and give her anything she wanted, and with this house and the boat and the Camaro and his own business, he’d looked as