“No,” Finn said. “Keep going.”
Zac drove to the end of the road and stopped at the four-way sign. “Where to?”
“I don’t care.”
Okay. Zac rolled down his window and took a long drink of the air outside. He turned left and drove down a wide blacktop road, corn and soybean fields on one side, widely spaced houses on the other, autumn’s crispness in the cloudless blue expanse above him. The gas tank was full, so he let the miles roll away.
A quarter hour later Finn said, “Nicole won’t see them anymore. And I won’t see them.”
He’d see Anna and James. Eventually. Zac knew that as surely as he knew he would see Colm again. These people had the hope of glory. Zac had thrown it away.
“I forgot we could ever leave,” Finn said. “I still knew, but day to day I forgot.”
Had Zac done the same before Colm forced him to remember? Maybe.
Finn pressed his palm to his head. “It’s a little late to ask, but what do you think of the odds? Of tracking him?”
“I never thought they were great.”
“But you came anyway. On a wild-goose chase.”
Zac shrugged.
Finn gave him a squint that might have held suspicion. “You wanted answers too.”
“Sure.”
“And I’m too unreliable to get them myself. Is that it?”
Zac gave a sigh that came from the depth of sleepless nights and the need to scale a dune or two. “I didn’t know, man. I don’t know you, not really, and this thing is …”
“Yeah,” Finn said, then after a minute, “I want to see the Wisters. And we’ll grab some things from Cady’s place. And I guess then we’ll go back to her without a lead on Doc.”
“Maybe she’s had time to process all this. Accept what Anna wrote to her.”
“Without proof? Don’t count on it.”
THIRTEEN
Why, it’s Finn.”
The door opened wider to reveal a man in his seventies, his face crinkling with a smile that brightened his eyes and gathered wrinkles in their corners. He was about Zac’s height, and he’d beaten baldness by shaving his head, probably long ago. He motioned both Zac and Finn inside, shut the door, and offered his hand to Zac.
“Matthew Wister.”
“Zac Wilson. Good to meet you.” Matthew’s grip was feebler than Zac expected given his sharp gaze.
“Any friend of Finn’s. But what brings you over here at ten in the morning?”
Finn’s fingers curled into his palms. Matthew noticed the gesture, glanced from him to Zac and back again.
“Something’s happened, Matthew.” Finn’s voice had hushed.
The room seemed to draw in its breath and hold it. Matthew gave a slow nod. “I’d better get Ruth. I think she’s out feeding her birds.”
“I’ll get her,” Finn said.
He disappeared toward the back of the house, his stride easy, his way sure. With a slower gait, Matthew led Zac to their kitchen and offered him a seat at the table. He turned away to rummage in a cupboard.
“Coffee? Tea? How long have you known Finn?”
“No, thanks. And long enough to know he’s got one of those faces that never seems to age.”
Matthew took a tea tin from the cupboard and shut the door but kept his back to Zac. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Finn says differently.”
Tension gripped the man’s shoulders, straightened posture that had a moment ago been comfortably hunched. Zac should have realized before—would have, surely, if his thoughts weren’t submerged in the sludge of sleep deprivation—that he could not reveal his knowledge without causing suspicion. A man Finn had never mentioned knowing, a man with a face as young as Zac’s, should not have the knowledge.
Too late. Besides, they couldn’t have discussed anything as long as Matthew and his wife thought they had to protect Finn’s great secret.
Stiff now, Matthew turned to set the tin on the counter between them. “Sir, the man we’re speaking of is very dear to my wife and me. If you mean him any hurt, I’ll do what I can to stop you.”
“I get why you don’t trust me. But Finn will tell you—”
“Maybe I should try digging something up on you in return. These days secrets are uncovered on the internet; what would I find?”
A social media following of nearly a million individuals. A video of a tiny figure falling from a tightrope, flailing its way down toward death until it disappeared behind rock outcroppings. Zac forced himself not to look away as he gestured to Matthew: Go ahead; look me up. In the quiet, the cuckoo clock on the wall behind him piped the half hour. A faint bubbling noise that must have been an aquarium sounded from a nearby room. A door slid open and shut, and a woman’s voice reached them.
“Let me make you some green tea.”
“Maybe later,” Finn said as they entered the kitchen.
“Finn,” Matthew said. “What’s going on? Who is this person?”
Finn glanced at Zac long enough to convey a promise: he wouldn’t reveal what Zac had asked him not to. He shrugged. “He’s Zac. We covered that.”
“Why is he here?”
“He’s here as a friend.”
“Since when?”
Finn frowned. He didn’t put it together—the significance of the query. “Since a few days ago, I guess.”
“But you told him.”
Ruth drew in a quick breath. “Told him what?”
“Yes,” Finn said. “He knows we’re old. Me, Cady—all of us.”
“All of you?” Matthew folded his arms over his concave chest as he turned on Zac. A giveaway gesture. Fear for his friends.
Zac could assuage it. He had only to disclose his own birthday. He kept his mouth shut.
“Later,” Finn said. “Right now I’ve got to say what I came for.”
Matthew carried the tea tin to the table and sat, the stoop returned to his shoulders. “All right then. We’re listening.”
Each of them moved to join him. Zac sat with his back to a corner, facing the cutaway wall. Finn sat across from the Wisters, folded his arms on the table, and told them the story. Ruth was in tears before he finished. Matthew sat trembling, his lips parted as if he would speak, but he didn’t.
“Oh Finn,” Ruth whispered. “All four of them?”
Finn nodded.
“I miss them already.”
Another nod.
She palmed the tears from her cheeks, but they continued to fall into the corners of a smile that drew her face into bunches of wrinkles. “But oh, James and Anna. Sweet Anna meeting Him at last.” Her veined hand lifted in a gesture at herself. “Any day now, for Matthew and me.”
“I know.” Finn bowed his head.
“Oh Finn. I’m sorry.”
“No. You’re right. I haven’t been able to see it … that way. Not yet. And with Sean and Holly, it’s …” He looked up to meet her eyes again. “You know.”
“I do. I have regrets with them.”
“So do I.”
“But they chose long ago, Finn.”
“I know.”
She reached across the table to set her spindly fingers over Finn’s broad hand. “Have there been any signs for you or Cady?”
“I don’t think so. We don’t feel different. But …”
“You said it hit fast. How fast do you mean?”
“Sean said something to us at lunch that day—that his heart felt strange, like the beats were slowing down. He asked if we’d ever felt anything like it, and none of us had. And then within a few hours, his hair was graying, and …” He gave a long sigh. “There’s something else though. This didn’t just happen to them.”
“What do you mean?”
He pulled Anna’s note from the pocket of his jeans. The edges had tattered further in the day since Zac had seen it. Finn handed it to Ruth, and Matthew leaned in. As she read, Ruth nodded, sighed, touched the lines, then looked up with new tears on her cheeks.
“You old children. What’ve I told you about turning out like Matthew and me? It’s nothing to envy.” She ran her thumb over the signature. “But I see Anna had to find out herself.”
Finn took the letter back. “Cady’s questioning it.”
“What is there to question?” Matthew said.
He explained her theory, named Doc as their suspect, but before he’d finished Matthew and Ruth were shaking their heads.
“Maybe I can see it because of something James told me,” Matthew said. “They missed being parents, grandparents, part of the raising of generations. Anna especially. To me this makes sense for them, for who they were.”
Ruth nodded. “And as she says, they weren’t risking much. Hard even to tell which of the possibilities would be worse.”
She was crying as she said it, yet her eyes held no heartache. Zac studied every movement of her face, muscles that tightened and relaxed as she spoke. He must be staring, but he couldn’t look away from her. The tears were for herself. The quiet radiance in her was for Anna and James. Ruth Wister’s heart seemed to overflow into Zac’s, a waterfall under which he stood frozen, feeling the pure depth of her feeling. He tried to find the word for it as she folded her hand again over Finn’s.
“Finn, we can’t let this eat us up. They’re walking with the King, lifetimes of trouble fallen off them for good.”
“I’m trying,” Finn said.
She bowed her head over their hands and without transition said, “Almighty King Jesus, we wish we could see them once more here on earth. We weren’t ready; we didn’t know we needed to be. But You were ready to receive them, and for them I rejoice.”
That was it. Ruth was rejoicing.
And her joy was flooding Zac’s chest and rising all the way into his eyes and he had to get out of there.
He pushed to his feet, his chair skidding back over the tile. The three of them jolted at the noise, and Zac held up his hands, hoping to distract from his face. “I’m sorry. Please excuse me.”
He fast-walked out the front door, down the porch steps, down the sidewalk. He dug his knuckles into his chest. Stupid. Of all the things he picked up from other people, joy in eternity should be a relief not a wrecking ball.
Someone was near. He glanced over his shoulder. No, nobody around. He lengthened his stride as if outpacing a pursuer. Creating distance from Ruth had stopped the overflow, but he was still filled with it. He stopped in front of a house with a wrought-iron fence running parallel to the sidewalk. He curled his hand around some pointed decorative thing and hunched under the weight of Ruth’s joy, the weight of the way she’d spoken to Him. He squeezed the edge of the fence until it left an impression across his palm and he heard his own voice.
“God.”
“He’s here,” David had said that night out on the dunes. Sure He was. He was everywhere. Didn’t give Zac the right to speak to Him.
“I— If I could just—” He pushed away from the fence and broke into a run as the words continued pouring from the overflow of joy that was drowning him and souring in the pit of his own soul. “God, if— No. I can’t, I won’t, no.”
The wind took the words away as he ran faster, words he didn’t need, didn’t want, didn’t deserve to say.
FOURTEEN
By the time Zac had run himself out and returned to the Wister residence, Finn should have been waiting annoyed by the car. Instead Zac sat on the porch for at least fifteen minutes while their three voices drifted through the screen, too quiet for him to make out many of the words.
He did hear his name. Twice.
He gritted his teeth. Rudeness wasn’t his way. He had to get a grip and stop escaping from people he would have embraced a month ago. He stood to rejoin them, but Ruth’s joyful eyes were a memory too near. He caught himself pushing his knuckles to his chest, but it was an absent gesture now. The run had emptied him of everything he’d felt within the walls of the house. He’d stay out here until Finn emerged.
When Finn did, he was alone. He gave Zac the indecipherable squint and nodded to the car, and Zac got behind the wheel before Finn had the chance.
They drove without a word. For directions Finn let his phone do the talking. Soon they were pulling up the driveway of Cady’s home, a gray-green bungalow decked in white trim and wrapped halfway around with a porch. Flower boxes and hummingbird feeders all around the house, a purple bike in the garage. Zac smiled at the female touches everywhere. Cady’s vehicle was a compact pickup truck, salsa red. He smiled at that too.
“What are we taking back?” he said as Finn unlocked the door from the garage to the mudroom.
“Clothes and toiletries. Some other stuff.”
“You plan on checking a bag?”
“Yeah. One of hers.”
This time Zac hung back and Finn traipsed through the house as if he lived there. The possibility snagged Zac like a snare around a rabbit’s neck. He paused between the mudroom and the kitchen and looked around the lower level as far as his line of sight would allow. A flannel shirt was tossed over the back of a chair, unisex buffalo check, and he waited for Finn to disappear upstairs before stalking to it and snatching it up. He held it out by the shoulders. A woman’s cut and size. He sighed.
The living room held a small TV and a big sound system. One chair, one couch. Everything decorated in pleasant earth tones. He wandered everywhere but upstairs and had to chuckle at himself. He accused David of old-school piety, yet he couldn’t walk into Cady’s bedroom lest he feel like a cad.
Finn looked unfazed by the intimate environment he was leaving as he lumbered down the stairs dragging a wheeled suitcase.
“Finished?” Zac said.
“Got clothes for her, and this pink thing she keeps makeup in.”
The latter was a waste of suitcase space. Cady didn’t need makeup. “What else does she need?”
“Her laptop. For work.” Finn wandered into the living room, frowning. “She probably misses her vinyl collection, but it’s not like we can take her turntable and all. Anyway, we’ll be home soon.”
Zac’s jaw tightened, but he had to expect this. Harbor Vale wasn’t their home yet. Shoot, wasn’t his home yet either. Well, mission to find Doc or no mission, that was going to change. As soon as they got back. He wanted to stay. He would stay.
“Did you call and ask her what she wants?” If so, he should have heard Finn’s voice from upstairs.
“Right now I don’t think she cares.”
“Pick something nonessential. You know, a comfort item.”
Finn tilted his head as if Zac were some escaped zoo animal.
“Come on, she’s a grieving female in a strange place. She needs something from home.”
“That’s what the ‘Get Outside’ pillow is for. She got it for Anna and James as a housewarming present when we moved here. And I think it was also a joke.”
But that belonged to Anna. Cady needed something of her own. Zac turned a slow circle, trying to see the decor from Cady’s point of view. The wall art, the double-stacked bookcase, the retro record cabinet with frosted glass doors. Over the back of the couch was a folded blanket, a few strings pulled through and dangling. Its faded mauve clashed with the room’s color scheme. Zac strode to the couch and picked it up. The thing had been worn so soft he feared ripping it.
“This,” he said.
Finn seemed to appraise him. “She’s had that since the fifties. I don’t know how it hasn’t fallen apart yet.”
“Definitely this.”
“Okay. And … maybe a book or two.”
“She have a favorite?”
“She’s into music biographies and vampires.”
Zac’s mouth must have fallen open. He shut it. “Vampires.”
“Yeah, you know, immortality? She can’t get enough of it.” Finn nodded to one of the shelves.
Cady had shelved teen paranormal romances—a few so famous even Zac recognized them—beside Dracula and ’Salem’s Lot. He laughed.
&nb
sp; “She has search term alerts sent to her email. Vampires, immortals, age reversal, fountain of youth. You’d think she’d have her fill from looking in the mirror.” Finn shrugged.
“No, I get it.”
“You do?”
“Sure.” He couldn’t explain it though. With nothing else to go on, he chose based on the condition of the book spines. The most battered were A Nineteenth-Century Vampire Anthology, one of the notorious teen novels, and a biography of the Bee Gees. “These.”
“Whatever you say.” Finn unzipped the suitcase and stuffed the blanket and the books inside.
When they left Cady’s, they had nowhere to be until their flight departed in six hours. Finn stated no need or desire to check on his own house, so Zac headed for the nearest town. Maybe they’d run into Doc while walking the streets.
Right.
They’d been driving in simple silence for maybe fifteen minutes when Zac’s phone pinged from a cup holder in the middle console and, simultaneously, Finn’s did from somewhere on his person. Zac glanced aside as Finn fished his phone from a front jeans pocket and tapped a few times.
“Well?” David or Cady. They were the only people on the planet who had both Zac’s and Finn’s phone numbers.
“Hold on, I’m—” All the breath seemed to gust from Finn’s body, as if someone had punched his chest in with an armored fist.
“What?”
“Cady.”
Zac’s pulse spiked. He grabbed his phone and pulled up the text. THIS WAS WAITING FOR ME AT THE HOTEL. A photo attachment. He kept his hand steady on top of the wheel. The picture was of a handwritten note.
Cady, please forgive me for my grievous errors. I never intended what happened. I am so sorry. Please forgive me if you can.
Unsigned. The handwriting was an obvious mask, careful printing as if from a penmanship textbook, back when the art was still taught. A tremor ran down Zac’s arm, and he put the phone down and replaced his hand on the wheel.
“He’s there. He’s after her.” Finn’s voice was strangled.
“He’s there,” Zac said. “Doesn’t sound like he’s hostile though.”
“She was right all this time. It’s a ploy like he pulled on James and Anna. He’s going to kill her.”
From Sky to Sky Page 11