by Alana Terry
She shook her head. “No. Why?”
Ben pulled out her cell phone. It was the first time Jade had realized it wasn’t in her pocket like normal. “Where’d you get that?”
He didn’t answer her question but just said, “Keith Richardson left you five different text messages in the past half hour.”
Jade yanked the phone out of his hands. “What did he say?” Elder Keith had been like an uncle to her when she was younger. His daughter Trish had been her best friend, and they’d promised to go to college together and be roommates and study pre-law together. Jade knew for a fact Trish had been one of the girls Pastor Mitch abused, but even if Elder Keith was aware of the crime, he was too loyal to Morning Glory to ever try to put a stop to it.
And now he was messaging her after Dez disappeared?
She scrolled through the texts, trying to will her hand steady.
It’s Elder Keith. Are you there?
We need to talk. Can I call?
I know it’s early, but this is important.
Are you getting any of my messages?
Jade’s stomach flopped, and she physically recoiled from her phone when she read his last message.
I know what happened to your daughter.
Chapter 14
AISHA AND MRS. SPENCER had both gone home, so it was Ben who was left to do what he could to soothe Jade’s nerves.
“It’s going to be all right,” he assured her. “We’ve got someone in Palmer on their way to speak with Richardson right now. They’re going to contact us as soon as they find anything out.”
Ben sat patting her hand. It was a silly, fruitless gesture, but she couldn’t find the words to ask him to stop.
“I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”
She’d lost track of how many times he’d said this or something similar. If he was so sorry, why wasn’t he doing more to get her daughter back? She gritted her teeth, hating how out of control she felt.
“I went through something a little similar. I know it’s not the same thing as missing a child.” Whatever Ben was going to say next, Jade was certain it wouldn’t be helpful, but he went on, and she stared at the wall blankly, too numb to speak.
“My dad was a cop down in LA during the race riots. He wasn’t on duty that night, but he got called in anyway. My mom had taken me and my sister to my grandma’s house in Redondo Beach to get away from the heat, and she kept us up late to pray for dad’s safety. He didn’t come home that morning, and by the next night we still hadn’t heard anything. It wasn’t until the following day his partner found out where my mom was to tell her that my dad had been killed.”
Jade didn’t speak.
“I know it’s different when it’s your parent and not your child, but I remember that day of waiting, how hard it was. If you were to look at my mom, you might have thought she aged a decade in twenty-four hours. I’m sorry for what you’re going through.”
Jade tried to swallow, but the lump in her throat made it impossible.
“I guess that’s something we do have in common though,” Ben said quietly. “Both of us losing our dads.”
She didn’t want to agree. Didn’t want to acknowledge that what this trooper went through was anything like what she’d endured the night her dad died. Her father had known the police were coming for him. He had no regrets about what he did to Pastor Mitch. When it seemed clear that his daughter’s abuser would go free, he’d taken justice into his own hands, and he was prepared for his arrest. He was ready. He’d even called some of his family members, people outside Morning Glory who were still speaking to him, and made some arrangements to make it easier for Jade and her mom while he was in jail.
What he wasn’t prepared for was six white men barging into his home in the middle of dinner and making the entire family lie face down on the floor. Jade was eight months pregnant at the time, and when one of the officers shoved her roughly, her dad intervened.
The cop shot.
Her father was dead before he even hit the ground.
And now Jade was sitting here across from this white trooper whose white father had also been a cop. A white cop. The kind Jade had learned to fear. Had learned to hate.
And yet he’d been a victim of senseless violence as well. A victim of the racist disease that had plagued their country for centuries.
She felt sorry for Ben and what he and his family must have gone through. But she still wasn’t sure she wanted his sympathy. Still wasn’t sure he’d earned the right to presume that he could understand her situation.
She hung her head, listening to the drone of the church fridge and the muttered voices of those around her, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where fathers always came home when they promised they would, where police — all police — could be trusted to protect the vulnerable.
Where five-year-old girls didn’t disappear without a trace, leaving nothing behind but nameless fears and unbearable uncertainty.
Chapter 15
IF BEN WANTED HELP writing Keith Richardson’s life story, he should have asked someone who’d actually managed to sleep last night. Jade filled in the details she could remember, but half an hour later, the sketch was still far from complete. She didn’t even remember what Elder Keith had done for a living.
After Ben checked to make sure her phone was still set to record incoming and outgoing calls, Jade tried calling the number Elder Keith used to text her, but it went immediately to a generic message stating that his voice mailbox was full. She texted him back. Once. Twice. What did he know about Dez?
Then came more of Ben’s questions. “Was Keith Richardson ever violent?”
Jade shook her head. “No. He was Pastor Mitch’s right-hand guy, a yes man. He never wanted to rock the boat or do anything besides what Pastor Mitch specifically told him.” Jade hated the way that even after she’d freed herself from Morning Glory’s authoritative presence in her life she still referred to its leaders by their titles. It was as if she were still a little twelve-year-old girl being told that to disrespect her pastor, even in the privacy of her own thoughts, would be as sinful as spitting in the face of Jesus himself.
“You said Keith was angry with your dad about exposing the abuse.”
Jade nodded. “Yeah. They got into quite a few fights. Just yelling though.”
“Never violent?” Ben pressed.
“No. Not that I ever saw.” In truth, it was her father who had the temper, her father who would raise his voice. Her father who had attacked Pastor Mitch with a baseball bat. Who had died trying to protect his daughter from being manhandled by a white cop.
What did Ben think? Did he side with the Palmer police captain? Just two days after her father’s murder prompted an internal investigation, the cop who shot him was reinstated. As far as Jade knew, he was still serving on the police force. The policeman went on record claiming he’d been afraid for his life, and nobody thought to second-guess him. Nobody questioned why six armed men were entitled to use deadly force on a father trying to shield his child. The unspoken consensus was that her father deserved to die, shot point-blank in front of his wife and the pregnant daughter he was trying to defend.
“What can you tell me about Elder Keith’s family?” Ben asked.
Jade was grateful for the chance to distract herself from memories of her father’s murder. “He had a daughter in the same grade as me and a son who was already grown and out of the house.”
“What about his wife?”
Jade shrugged. “She was the church receptionist. Pretty quiet and mousey.” Just like all the women at Morning Glory were taught to be. “Mrs. Richardson was good friends with Pastor Mitch’s wife. In fact, I think they were related, cousins or something like that.” Jade hardly ever thought about her pastor’s wife, but now a picture of Lady Sapphire popped into her head uninvited, the cold hardness in her eyes, the feel of her sharp fingernails pinching her skin. The sound of her hiss as she accosted Jade in the bathr
oom and whispered, “If you bring charges against my husband, I fear for your soul in the afterlife.”
Jade could still remember the hint of wintergreen on Lady Sapphire’s breath before she plastered on her fake smile and stepped out the bathroom like a queen presiding over her subjects. Which, in terms of the Morning Glory hierarchy, was exactly what she was. Pastor Mitch was the ruling dictator, and Lady Sapphire was his beloved confidante, the hauntingly beautiful reigning figurehead, whose words of exhortation were elevated to as high a level as her husband’s.
Lady Sapphire was known for her vivid dreams, which all members of Morning Glory were taught to uphold as infallible as the Scriptures themselves. The story of Lady Sapphire’s dream the night before she married Pastor Mitch took on the role of both legend and prophesy, the promise of a child who could carry on Pastor Mitch’s apostolic ministry in the state of Alaska. Years later the medical community pronounced Lady Sapphire infertile, but she persisted in believing in that miracle offspring, the fulfillment of God’s promise given decades earlier.
But Ben wasn’t asking Jade about the pastor’s wife. He was asking about Elder Keith, and Jade took pains to answer each question methodically even though her brain was screaming from exhaustion. Elder Keith was, for the moment, the force’s primary person of interest. Jade didn’t understand why he would have bothered texting her if he was the guilty one, but Ben explained that the best possible outcome would be if Elder Keith claimed responsibility and made a demand for ransom.
If Elder Keith wanted money in exchange for Dez’s return, he had incentive to keep her safe.
The teams were continuing to search outside, waiting for daybreak when a new round of local volunteers could be called in. Jade was grateful the troopers and police and everyone else involved in the search and rescue were being so thorough, but the more she thought about her past at Morning Glory, the more she had to admit that Dez’s disappearance was almost certainly an abduction.
It made sense. The warning letter, the texts from Elder Keith.
Jade wondered when she’d hear back from the police sent to question him in Palmer.
She didn’t think she had the energy to withstand even another five minutes of this torturous waiting.
Chapter 16
A LITTLE LATER IN THE morning, Mrs. Spencer showed up with four cartons of eggs and other supplies donated from Puck’s Grocery store. Aisha came in just a few minutes later. While Mrs. Spencer set about making breakfast for the rescue workers, Aisha took Jade into Pastor Reggie’s office to pray.
Over half a decade after leaving Pastor Mitch’s church, it was still difficult for Jade to remember that she didn’t need a pastor’s permission or an elder’s blessing to lift her requests up to God. She’d been trained so thoroughly by the Morning Glory leadership to rely on church hierarchy to grab heaven’s attention that it took her years to learn to pray on her own. Even now, with the stress and anxiety so heavy on her, she found it nearly impossible. Having Aisha with her helped a little. Aisha was a newer Christian, having come from a Muslim background before she got saved and moved to Glennallen, but Aisha seemed to excel at the gift of prayer. As she raised her requests to God, Jade felt a fraction of the weight she’d been carrying lift from her shoulders. As soon as they said amen, the burden returned, but at least the short reprieve convinced her that God was listening.
He had to be. There was no one else now to watch out for her daughter. No one else to guarantee her protection. What was Dez thinking right at this moment? What fears or tortures was she enduring? It was too horrific to fathom. Jade had done everything in her power to shield Dez from the details of her past. Whenever her daughter asked who her daddy was, Jade told her that God was her Father and for now that’s all she needed to know. The thought that the same people who had witnessed Jade’s most humiliating abuse had now kidnapped her daughter was inconceivable.
Ben was still holding onto hope that Elder Keith was trying to contact her with a ransom demand, but Jade knew Morning Glory better than that. The church and its leadership had all the money they wanted thanks to a guilt-inducing tithing system. To remain in good standing, church members had to pledge up to thirty percent of their annual income and even provide tax statements to verify their faithfulness. It was more likely Dez’s kidnapping was about power, the real currency Morning Glory’s leaders cared about.
To continue to wield their power, Morning Glory enacted policies that could have been taken straight out of a dictator’s rulebook. If a church member questioned the pastor, if they fell short in their financial giving, if rumors circulated regarding some petty offense, they were paraded in front of the congregation for public shaming. Once a young nurse was excommunicated simply because Lady Sapphire had a dream accusing her of a spirit of lust. When anybody was forced out of the congregation like this, their history was completely purged from the church records. Even their tithe statements — public record from Morning Glory’s earliest days — were altered, their contributions listed anonymously. Jade was sure her own family had been erased as well, probably even more zealously given the way they had exposed Morning Glory’s ugliest secrets to the world.
How many times had she been told to respect her leaders, not to question their authority? What she and her family had done was unforgivable. She wasn’t sure what kind of changes had taken place after Pastor Mitch’s recent death from cancer, but if things were anything like what they were before, it wasn’t difficult to imagine the church finding a way to get back at her.
But why now? If Morning Glory was so angry with Jade and her family, if they were bent on retribution, why did they wait five years after Jade’s pregnancy to act? What had changed? Was it because Jade had shared her testimony in public? Last night’s audience couldn’t have been larger than forty. Besides, her testimony was far more about God’s grace delivering her from a life of church dictatorship and legalism than it was about besmearing Morning Glory’s reputation.
It didn’t make sense.
And how was Elder Keith involved? Even though he hadn’t wanted Jade’s family to get the police involved, he’d always been soft-spoken, docile, and in most cases completely unintimidating. Had his rise to leadership after Pastor Mitch’s death corrupted him?
Jade hated to confront these questions alone. She longed for a word of wisdom or encouragement from her parents more than ever. It wasn’t fair that God took both of them away. They never saw their granddaughter crawl or walk or eat solid foods or babble her first words. Why had God added sorrow upon sorrow in Jade’s life like that?
In the book of John, Jesus promised his disciples not to leave them as orphans, but that’s exactly what happened to Jade. She was an orphan, a single mom doing her best to provide for her daughter, working a menial job because it was the only thing she could find that would allow her to stay (mostly) on top of the bills and keep her daughter nearby. She’d tried so hard, working herself ragged, agonizing over every one of Dez’s cuts and scrapes and ear infections and cold viruses. How many times had she begged God to give her strength to handle life as a single mother?
And now Dez was gone. Had God forsaken her? Was such a thing possible?
She thought of Jesus’ words on the cross. If the Son of God could feel abandoned by his heavenly Father, why couldn’t she? All Bible promises aside, Jade had never felt more betrayed. Here she was doing everything she could think of to live a godly Christian life. She brought her daughter to Sunday school, to Glennallen Bible’s midweek services. They read stories from Scripture together each night before bed. Each night, that is, until last.
And if Jade felt so abandoned, how must Dez feel right this instant?
Mrs. Spencer handed Jade a paper plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Jade had no appetite but picked at the food methodically, hoping it would get her mind off her troubles.
By the time she finished breakfast, she was still just as tormented as she’d been before, but now she had a stomachache on top of all
her other worries.
Chapter 17
“I WANT TO THANK EVERYONE for your continued support in this search and rescue,” Ben told those gathered in the church kitchen. The smell of bacon grease made Jade queasy while people around her ate their hearty breakfasts.
The sun still hadn’t come up yet, and when it did, they’d have less than five hours of functional daylight to keep searching for Dez outside. Jade wondered how long it would take until the teams gave up. How long was a child that little expected to survive in this cold? At least this morning the sky was overcast, giving Glennallen a cloud covering that warded off the most bitter of the cold. Temperatures hovered around zero, a vast improvement from yesterday.
“Even though we’re continuing to follow up on leads in Palmer, we’re going to keep on focusing locally,” Ben stated. “We know Dezzirae is out there somewhere, and we’re all committed to doing whatever it takes to see her safely reunited with her mother.”
Jade tried to ignore the glances that passed her way and focused on Ben, wondering if he’d slept at all last night.
“We’ve got a lot of people this morning,” he continued, “both local volunteers and workers from across the state. I’m not here to turn this into a big religious event, but for anyone who feels so inclined, I’d like to offer a prayer for Dezzirae’s safe return. If you don’t care to join us, there’s no pressure or expectations. You can head on upstairs, and we’ll meet you there in just a few minutes.”
Nobody moved. A moment later, Ben was lifting up his voice to heaven. Aisha and Mrs. Spencer sat on either side of Jade, offering gentle back rubs and hand squeezes that only accentuated how numb she felt. If Ben wanted to pray and others felt like joining him, she wasn’t going to argue. But as the morning hours passed without a single word from her daughter, Jade found herself trusting less and less in the power of prayer. If God wanted to bring her daughter home, wouldn’t he have done so by now?