Silent Pledge

by Hannah Alexander

  “Grandma told them not to. She said you didn’t have enough time to spend with your family as it was, and you needed this free clinic as much as anybody did, to take some of the extra work you’ve had lately. I talked to Dad about it on the phone the other night, and he agrees. He also thinks you should get a partner to help you.”

  Mercy shot her daughter a quick glance. “He does, does he?”

  “Yeah. Are we going to Branson Saturday? He said we might, if you could get off.”

  “When did he say this?”

  “Yesterday morning when I talked to him on the phone.”

  “Well, I wish he hadn’t said anything until he spoke with me. I can’t get off that long.”

  “See what I mean? Mom, you need a break. Can’t you at least try?”

  Mercy hesitated and chose her next words carefully. “Tedi, how do you feel about a short lunch alone with you father Saturday?” It would be impossible to leave town this weekend, even for an afternoon, with Delphi in such need of reassurance, and Kendra just out of the psyche ward, and Odira and Crystal both fighting their way back to health.

  Mercy didn’t realize, for a moment, how deep the silence had grown in the car. She looked across the seat at Tedi. “Honey?”

  Tedi continued to gaze out the passenger window toward the school grounds. The morning sun glared on her glasses, which in turn reflected against the window and hid her expression. But Mercy could see sudden tension in the line of her jaw and the set of her shoulders.

  “Are you just disappointed because we can’t go to Branson?” Mercy asked quietly.

  Tedi shook her head. “No, Mom,” she murmured.

  “Is it because you still don’t feel comfortable about meeting your father alone?”

  “You told me I wouldn’t have to.” Tedi turned from the window with a look of apprehension on her face. “You said I would never—”

  “Okay. It’s okay. You don’t have to. We’ll have our usual date for lunch, and I’ll be there all the time. I’ll never make you do anything with your father that frightens you.” Tedi turned back to the window once more. Some of the tension disappeared, and Mercy heard a sigh.

  “I didn’t think I’d be scared, Mom.”

  “I know. He’s changed so much, I thought I’d forgiven him, but last night something happened to make me realize I hadn’t…not completely. I think maybe both of us are afraid he might suddenly change back to the person he was before.”

  “But that shouldn’t happen, Mom. He’s a different person now. He’s a Christian, so why am I scared?”

  “Because you and I both know that even Christians aren’t perfect. And I think you and I still need to deal with some things from the past.”

  “I don’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings.”

  “Neither do I, but we have to be honest before we can work things out.” Mercy pulled up to the child-unloading zone, frustrated that she had to leave Tedi like this. “We’ll talk about it more tonight.”

  Tedi grasped the door handle. “I think Dad’ll be disappointed, though. He told me he’d saved up some extra money, and he asked me what I thought you’d like to do, just the three of us. I was the one who came up with the idea for Branson.”

  Mercy felt even worse. Theo had undoubtedly been planning to do something special for them for a while, but she hadn’t picked up on it. Why couldn’t he have left things as they were? “I’m sorry, honey. Maybe if he keeps saving, we can do something later.” But she didn’t want to spend that much time with him.

  Maybe her feelings weren’t important. She had learned that even when you knew to do the right thing, you didn’t always feel like doing it.

  Tedi opened the door and got out. “Don’t forget the play tonight at school. Dad said he was going to be there.”

  “He is?” Why did it suddenly seem as if Theo was everywhere she looked?

  “Bye, Mom.” Tedi grabbed her book bag and closed the door with a wave.

  Mercy needed to talk to Tedi longer…but then she always needed to talk to Tedi longer. Until last night…but she didn’t want to think about last night, or the idea that she might be expected to remarry Theodore. She couldn’t stand the thought.

  Why hadn’t it occurred to her that Tedi would be afraid to spend time alone with her father? She’d lived alone with him for five years and watched his alcoholism and his temper escalate into something uncontrollable and dangerous. But recently there seemed to be a fresh love growing between Tedi and her father, a new relationship that had no connection with the old one. Theo was putting his focus in the right place for once in his life, and his new outlook on life proved that God could change anybody. Why was that so hard for Tedi—and Mercy—to accept?

  The grease-laden smoke of bacon and sausage mingled with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and the chatter of the breakfast crowd at the Dinner Bucket on Thursday morning. Lukas yawned over his scrambled eggs—he knew better than to ask for egg substitute in this café—and he said a silent apology to Mercy and Ivy for ignoring his cholesterol level. They could give him a good dose of olive oil and avocado when he returned to Knolls, which would be tonight if he could get there. He just needed to give Mercy a call sometime today so she would be expecting him. Nancy Moss would be proud.

  He took another swig of coffee and listened to the desultory conversation going on at the table behind him, where four old farmers complained about beef prices at the local sale barn. Because of the hay shortage last year, people were trying to sell off their stock to save money. Things were tight, but hogs were doing well enough.

  Lukas checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to get to work, and he wanted to gas up beforehand. He poured an extra squirt of ketchup on his potatoes and raised his fork for the final three bites when the front door of the café squeaked open and four big, black-leathered, puffy-eyed men trooped inside, looking like grumpy bears out of hibernation for a winter snack.

  Catcher and Company.

  Lukas shoveled a final mouthful of egg and took a slurp of coffee, aware that the only open seats were the four padded stools beside him—two per side at the raised counter. He tried to ignore the discomfort he felt at their arrival. The word coward came to mind, not for the first time since he came to Herald. For goodness’ sake, he wasn’t an undersized little kid anymore. He was a grown man.

  Granted, he had made quite a commotion in the E.R. the other night, complete with shouting and unplugging a television. In the end Catcher had walked out of the hospital in an inebriated state against medical advice. And it was also true that these bikers were still unofficial suspects in the kidnapping of Jerod Moore. Some gossipers had even gone so far as to blame them for the recent disappearance of several children in Central Missouri—not to their faces, of course. These were tough bikers, but no one was going to try to jump Lukas and beat him up right here in the center of a crowded café, not even four big loudmouthed beer guzzlers.

  The booted feet stomped in his direction until shadows of the men fell on him. Lukas tried to remind himself that most people didn’t recognize him when he wasn’t in his scrubs.

  “Hey, Doc,” came a growl from behind him. A powerful hand grasped his shoulder.

  Lukas swiveled on his stool and looked up at the longhaired biker with the sun-creased face and matching black eyes from his most recent fight.

  “Hi, Catcher.” Lukas nodded to the other three men. One of them was Marin, Catcher’s sparring partner who had cut his arm open with a beer bottle last Saturday night. The two others, Lukas realized with deepening dismay, had been in the waiting-room crowd that had been stalking him when Catcher showed up.

  “Sutures are holding up great,” Catcher said as he straddled the backless stool beside Lukas. The man’s breath didn’t knock Lukas over with the fumes of booze this morning. He reached up and unzipped the extralong sleeve of his leather jacket, which was constructed specifically for motorcycling. He slid it back over the flesh of his forearm, revealing a nicely healing wound—no
bandage, of course.

  In spite of the tension, Lukas couldn’t deny a glow of satisfaction at his handiwork. “Looks like you’re doing a good job with it.”

  The fortysomething waitress in jeans and a white T-shirt walked up behind the counter with four platters of the breakfast special balanced on her arms. “Here you go, fellas.” She slid the platters onto the counter at the four empty places. “You’re a little early this morning. Coffee’s comin’.”

  As the other three men peeled off their jackets in the overheated room, Catcher reached over and pulled his platter toward him, then leaned closer to Lukas. “Don’t suppose you’d yank these stitches out for me right now, would you?”

  “Sorry, not yet.” Lukas took a final swallow of his coffee and felt the effects of the caffeine surging through his system. Or that might possibly be adrenaline. “I’d like to give this a couple more days to heal, or the wound could come open and make a bigger scar.”

  “Oh, come on.” Catcher filled his fork with bacon and eggs. “You think I care about a little thing like a scar?” He shoved the bite into his mouth.

  While Catcher was busy chewing, Lukas checked his watch again, picked up his ticket, and slid from his stool. “I’d give it until at least tomorrow afternoon. Saturday would be better, and don’t forget to keep it clean.” Before Catcher could argue, he paid his bill and escaped.

  But out in the Jeep, when he turned the key in the ignition, the motor refused to speak to him. Nothing but an empty click reached his ears.

  He frowned, pulled out the key and looked to see if it was the right one. It was. He inserted the key and tried again.

  Click.

  He sat staring at the dashboard for a moment, then closed his eyes and groaned. “This can’t be happening.” Not now. Please, not now. I’ll be late for work, and Dr. Denton warned me to be on time because he has a flight to catch, and Catcher and his friends could come tromping out and decide they need a little morning exercise, and if I don’t remove those sutures for him, he might get mad and turn this Jeep over on its roll bar.

  He jiggled the gearshift and stepped on the clutch and tried one more time. Nothing.

  He slapped the steering wheel and wrenched his way out of the Jeep, closing the door behind him with a hearty slam. Of all times to have a dead battery, this could be a worst-case scenario. The hospital was all the way across town, and although that didn’t encompass a whole lot of acreage, that acreage was a long, narrow tract of land that hugged the shoreline. It would be impossible to walk in eight minutes. Herald had no taxi service. Of course, he could step back inside the café and ask one of the farmers for a ride. Maybe Catcher would like to give him a lift. Now, there was a thought!

  Lukas shoved his hands in his pockets and eyed the big shiny Harley-Davidson motorcycles huddled close together amidst the rusted pickup trucks surrounding the rickety shack that housed the only café in Herald. Then he turned and started walking down the road. He could jog once he warmed up a little. Surely the trip couldn’t take that long.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Prayer could make a man hungry. Clarence pulled on his baggy big-man sweats, shoved on his house shoes and headed toward Ivy’s kitchen, where all the warm, comforting smells of breakfast still lingered. And lucky for him, Ivy was nowhere to be seen.

  “Chocolate chip cookies, here I come.” Four days had passed since his last three-cookie binge, and he was craving them like a kid craved birthdays. Telling himself he would eat only three cookies, he lumbered to the fridge and opened the freezer door. The cool air reached out and chilled his face like the kiss of an ice-cream truck.

  The plate of foil-wrapped cookies was gone.

  He slumped back in defeat, still staring at the packages of casseroles, ground turkey and frozen veggies. Ivy always baked chocolate chip cookies for special functions and kept them stockpiled in the freezer for when she would need them. As she had explained to Clarence once, cookies were the only decadent food she ever touched anymore. She used a low-fat recipe—trust Ivy to find a way to ruin even chocolate chip cookies—and she never baked less than three batches at a time. He believed she kept them there to test his willpower. So far he had happily failed the test. Twice a week, usually in the middle of the night, he would sneak into the kitchen when everyone else was asleep and snitch a snack.

  Since the ones Ivy made were lower in fat, he doubted if even the biggest ones had more than fifty calories a cookie—he prided himself in knowing the calorie count of every food he put into his mouth. He had to eat thirty-five hundred calories to add a pound, and so even if the three cookies he usually ate equaled two hundred calories, he would have to eat eighteen times that many to gain a pound.

  He took the math a step further and decided that, since a normal human being burned seventy to one hundred calories walking a mile, he must burn at least two and a half times that much. He figured he burned off all the cookies every time he walked on the treadmill. Some cookies right now would give him the incentive to exercise.

  He closed the door and sighed. He was just slumping back into his apartment when he heard a knock. Someone was at the outside entrance to the apartment—an entrance he never used.

  “Clarence!” came a muffled call. “Clarence, are you in there?”

  He rushed through the small sitting room and tiny kitchenette to the door that exited onto the side porch. He opened it to find Buck and Kendra huddled together against the cold. Kendra’s nose was red, and the flesh around her eyes was puffy, as if her tears hadn’t stopped in four days.

  “Could we come in for a minute?” Buck asked, glancing through the doorway toward the small sitting room beyond.

  “Why, sure.” Clarence hustled out of their way and stood aside for them to enter. “Kendra, did they spring you this morning?”

  She grimaced as her gaze darted around the room. “It’s been over ninety-six hours and it felt like weeks. It’s like I was in prison with a bunch of crazies.”

  Buck cleared his throat.

  She looked up at him. “There are a lot of unhappy people in that place,” she said quietly.

  Clarence gestured toward the love seat and chairs that were placed in an area Ivy called the “conversation circle.” “Go on, sit down. What’s up? Is everything okay? You didn’t have any trouble on the road, did you?”

  “No, the truck’s fine.” Kendra perched on the edge of the love seat and looked at Buck nervously. He sat down beside her.

  Clarence lowered himself onto the sturdiest straight-backed chair. He didn’t use this furniture often. Even after he’d lost over a hundred pounds, these things looked too spindly to hold him. He’d never broken one of Ivy’s chairs yet, but something could snap at any time.

  Buck leaned forward. “Clarence, you know when you…prayed for us the other night?”

  How could he forget something like that? “Yeah.”

  “Would you do it again?”

  Clarence blinked, then looked at Kendra. She watched him closely, her beautiful blue eyes wide and…hopeful? And Buck, too, looked hopeful. They both seemed to lean toward him as if he had some kind of answer to their problems. He felt like a fraud. All he’d done the other night was open his mouth and speak some thoughts out loud, hoping—no, knowing—God was listening. But Clarence knew he didn’t have any power to help them himself.

  “Well, sure.” Could this actually be an answer to his prayer? Maybe they’d made the decision to come and see him while he was talking to God earlier this morning. He thought about the verse for the day on his dresser. If the prayer helped the other night, and if it had helped this morning, then prayer would help again. No reason why God wouldn’t be here this time, too.

  He cleared his throat as he bent his head and closed his eyes. God, are You there? His silent thought seemed to echo. “Uh, first of all, Lord, thank You for answering our prayers and helping us out the other night. We’re asking more stuff in Jesus’ name. Please give some comfort to Kendra and Buck today. They’ve
been through so much pain.” As he said the words he felt as if he could feel the pain himself all of a sudden. He knew they felt cut off from the world, alone and wondering what was going to happen to them next. Somehow the loneliness seemed to have transferred itself to him.

  To his horror he felt the sting of tears behind his eyelids. He fought to keep them from pressing through. He heard Kendra sniff a couple of times. Should he hurry up and pray so she could get some tissue to wipe her nose?

  “Help Buck know what to do to help Kendra. Help him to be strong for her, no matter what it takes. And, God, show Kendra the way out of the pit she’s in, because You’re the only one who knows. I sure don’t. Thanks, God.” He opened his eyes to see both of them with heads still bowed. Kendra’s cheeks were wet with tears. They didn’t realize he was done. “Amen.”

  They opened their eyes and looked at him, and Kendra sniffed again. “It’s like you know what to say to Him.” She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. “That’s what it’s like. It’s like a pit I can’t get out of, and nobody knows how to find me here. I feel like I’m just wandering around lost.”

  Buck reached over and drew her into his arms. Her shoulders tensed, but he didn’t let go.

  “I’ve been there, Kendra,” Clarence said. “Lots of times. And it was so bad I tried to kill myself, too, but in a different way. But then God sent some people to help. I know God sent them, because they’ve told me. He’ll send somebody for you, too, but I’ll be here with you while they’re coming.”

  By the time Lukas reached the center of town, he was ready to wring the gel-smearing culprit’s neck. He had a pretty good idea who the culprit was, too. Hadn’t he seen the K-Y on Carmen’s desk the other day? Why hadn’t he picked up on her nervousness at the time?

  She was the reason his battery was dead. She was the reason he was late for work and he was freezing to death. Of course, it was his own fault he hadn’t brought gloves and a knit cap. The cold morning air breezing in from the half-frozen Lake of the Ozarks seemed to bite harder now than it did a few moments ago, and Lukas decided not to jog. He didn’t want to frostbite his lungs.