Cape Refuge

by Terri Blackstock

  She looked in the refrigerator and found the casserole that Melba had brought. She got a spoon and dipped out one scoop, put it into her mouth, and forced herself to swallow it. It went down smooth and tasteless. It didn’t settle her stomach or her heart. Nothing was settled, she thought.

  She walked around her sister’s house, feeling the oppression of some dark force weighing down on her, crushing the breath out of her, keeping her from sleep or rest or peace, reminding her of violent, horrible things like flames dancing around her sister, spears flying into her parents, bars hovering around her husband.

  She went to the couch and curled up on it, her knees at her chest, dropped her forehead, and wept hard, knowing that tomorrow, somehow, she would have to get hold of herself. There was too much to be done, and only the two of them to do it.

  C H A P T E R

  20

  Morning dawned with a stark brightness that contrasted the grief in Cade’s soul. But he didn’t have time to grieve. He arrived early at the station but, instead of going in, walked across the street to the sand and the beach. He needed to breathe the sea air, to experience the morning when it felt so much like midnight.

  He walked to the hard, wet sand and stood there a moment, looking out over the clear sky. Seagulls swooped and squalled, attending to the business God had given them. He needed to do the same.

  In this same bright morning, with the sea pounding against the shore, the sun shining with blinding brightness, and the sky clear and blue, a brutal killer lurked. As temperamental as Jonathan could be, he didn’t fit that description.

  But if he didn’t do it, then who killed Thelma and Wayne?

  Cade turned around and scanned the homes and condos and rooms along the beach. Something caught his eye between two decks side by side. Someone sleeping in the sand.

  Probably a drunk who forgot where he lived, he thought. He trudged across the sand to the two decks with just three or four feet between them, ready to wake the drunk and make him move on.

  But instead he saw a girl, scrawny and bruised, sound asleep, with a backpack for her pillow and one shirt as her cover. Her eye was black and swollen, and she held her mangled arm close against her.

  He thought of waking her and sending her on her way, but she looked so young. She was probably a runaway and needed to be reported. She also needed medical help.

  He bent over her and shook her. Her eyes shot open. She squinted in the sunlight and quickly sat up.

  “It’s against the law to sleep on the beach,” he said. “Can I see some ID?”

  She clutched her arm, as if it gave her intense pain, and looked around, disoriented. “I—didn’t know it was against the law. I won’t do it again.”

  He held out his hand and repeated the question. “Can I see some ID, please?”

  Looking helpless, she got up and dusted the sand off of her clothes and her hair. She put the strap of her backpack in her teeth and with one hand dug into it as if looking for her wallet. She kept the other hand bent against her ribs.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “My wallet. It’s gone. It had my driver’s license. It must have been stolen.”

  He had heard that before. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Sadie,” she said. “Sadie—Smith.”

  He grinned. “Smith, huh? That’s convenient. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” she said.

  “You’re not eighteen. You’re not a day older than fifteen.”

  “I am,” she said. “I swear.”

  He saw the despair on her face and felt sorry for her. He stepped closer, touched her arm. “Let me see that.”

  Carefully she pulled off the windbreaker she was wearing. He winced at her disfigured arm.

  “How’d you get hurt?”

  “Fell down some stairs,” she said.

  “It looks broken. You need to see a doctor.”

  “Well—I don’t have much money. I was going to look for a job and a place to live today, and then I plan to see one.”

  He frowned. He wondered if someone was looking for her, frantic that she wasn’t at home in her bed. The wind whipped up, blowing her hair, disheveled and tangled. She pulled it down from its haphazard ponytail and combed her fingers through it.

  “Where are you from, Sadie?”

  She hesitated a moment. Clearly, she wasn’t used to lying. “Birmingham. I just moved here yesterday.”

  “Moved here, huh? You got a U-haul somewhere or did you just ‘move’ that backpack?”

  She looked down at the sand. “I was going to stay at that Hanover place—but when I got there I found out the people who ran it were killed. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  He stared at her for a moment, wondering if such a coincidence was even possible, or if she knew something about the murders. “Come with me,” he said.

  She looked frightened and backed away. “No, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. Please.”

  “I just need to talk to you at the station across the street.”

  “Am I arrested?” she asked. “Just ‘cause I didn’t have a place to stay?”

  “No,” he said. “Get your stuff and come on.”

  She turned back and grabbed the shirt that had served as a makeshift blanket, stuffed it and the windbreaker into her backpack, and trudged across the sand.

  As they crossed the street, he watched the way she cradled her arm. Fell down the stairs? Likely story. She had obviously been in a struggle, with that eye and arm. Had it been with Thelma and Wayne? Had she been the one who stole the speargun? If she knew how to use it, and stood close enough, it was possible . . .

  And here she was sleeping on the beach, thinking she was hidden between the decks of two condominiums. . . . Her story didn’t add up, and he was almost certain she had lied about her name and age.

  He got her into the small interview room with another cop to witness, then asked her if he could search her backpack.

  “Sure,” she said, and handed it over.

  There wasn’t much there—just one shirt, a few school supplies, her wallet. “Thought you said you’d lost this.”

  “Oh,” she said. “It must have been under something.”

  He opened it, and didn’t find a driver’s license. “No ID,” he said.

  She just looked at him.

  That had been no big surprise. He had run her name through his database, but found no match for Sadie Smith. She fit the description of a dozen missing persons, but that proved nothing.

  “Tell me how you knew Thelma and Wayne.”

  “I didn’t know them,” she said. Her eyes were big and round, blue as the sky today. But one of them was swollen almost shut.

  “Then how were you going to stay with them?”

  “A waitress at a diner in Savannah told me they might take me in. I didn’t know they were dead.”

  “What time did you come into town yesterday?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe seven. It was still light out.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Tammy, the waitress, brought me. I don’t know her last name. She was nice. She said Thelma and Wayne were good about helping people with no place to go. She dropped me there, and I waited on the porch for somebody to get home. Then a florist guy came with a wreath . . .” She dropped her eyes to her arm, and her voice trailed off to a whisper. “He told me.”

  He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face. He hadn’t slept since they had found the bodies, and he was dog tired.

  Her story sounded true. He thought about what Thelma and Wayne would have done for this girl, how Thelma would have embraced her and brought her into the House, seen to her wounds, and taken care of her needs. He wondered if he should call Blair and Morgan, but then he thought better of it. They had too much on their minds. They didn’t need the burden of a teenage runaway. But he couldn’t just send her back out on the street, and he wasn’t too anxious to throw her back to the person who had beaten her up.
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  He stood up. “Come with me,” he said.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “I’m taking you to the doctor.”

  “I don’t have any money. I can’t—”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Cade said, “but you can’t just walk around with a broken arm. You need medical attention. Thelma and Wayne would have done that for you.”

  She was quiet as she followed him out to his car, and when he opened the passenger door on the front seat, she slipped in. He started the car, and she looked over at him.

  “Are you going to arrest me after he fixes my arm?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” he said, “but I can’t very well send you back out there to fend for yourself.”

  “It’s better than being in jail,” she said. “I swore I’d never go to jail. And I meant it. I didn’t mean to break the law. I won’t do it again.”

  He wondered why a child her age would swear she would never go to jail. Girls dreamed about being movie stars, models, mothers. Jail didn’t cross the average kid’s mind.

  “I can get a job,” she said. “I can find a place to live.”

  “Let’s just take care of one thing at a time,” he said. He drove a couple of blocks, then pulled into the driveway of an old Victorian house, painted purple. A sign out front said, “Cape Refuge Medical Clinic.”

  “Doc Spencer is a good man. He’ll fix you up.”

  She looked pale as she got out of the car and followed him in.

  C H A P T E R

  21

  Dr. Spencer was a kind old man who looked like somebody’s grandfather. In the waiting room, he had one whole wall filled with pictures of babies he had delivered and children he had treated. In the examining room, he had a model of a skeletal backbone, and a Norman Rockwell print of a goofy boy getting a shot.

  He was gentle with Sadie’s arm, though any pressure at all felt like a knife stabbing into it. “The X-rays show that it’s broken in two places,” he said. “I’m going to have to set it and put a cast on it.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Tell me, honey. How’d it really happen?”

  She decided to stick to her story. “I just lost my balance and fell down some stairs.”

  He breathed a disbelieving laugh. “Your legs don’t look bruised.”

  She knew she shouldn’t have let the nurse talk her into putting on that gown. “I don’t know—I—”

  “When a young girl like you turns up on this island, sleeping on the beach, with breaks and bruises—I can’t help thinking that she might be a runaway who was abused at home.”

  She swallowed and looked down.

  “You were beaten up, weren’t you?”

  She blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. “Okay,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m a runaway. I’m eighteen. I can go anywhere I want.”

  “Who beat you up? Your boyfriend? Your father?”

  “I don’t have either,” she said.

  “Your mother?”

  “No. . . .”

  He started to clean his glasses with the edge of his lab coat, then shoved them back on. “Whoever it was, they need to be locked up. They don’t need to get away with this.”

  Sadie looked at the ceiling, trying not to let those tears fall. Jack always got away with it. She had called the police before, but he had threatened to hurt Caleb if she told them what had happened.

  “I just want to start a new life,” she whispered. “This place looks like a dream I had once. If I could just start over here.”

  The old man patted her shoulder and offered her a compassionate smile. “Well, let me get that arm cast, and you can get on with starting over.”

  C H A P T E R

  22

  The funeral director in Savannah was good at his job. His soft, gentle manner suggested that he grieved over their parents too. But Morgan knew he had never met them.

  “Will you be having two services, or just one for both of them?” he asked in that cautious, soft voice.

  “Just one,” Morgan said, and Blair nodded agreement.

  “And who would you like to preach at the funeral service?”

  Morgan looked at Blair. Their father was the preacher of their little church. “I don’t know,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Who preaches at the funeral of the preacher?” Blair said in that weary monotone she had used all day.

  “Well, you could choose a member of the congregation, or a preacher from a nearby church, or someone from your past. Or we could provide a preacher—”

  “No,” Blair cut in. “A lot of people loved our father. We don’t need to get a stranger.”

  Morgan was having trouble swallowing. “That—that man who ran that shelter in town. You know, where Pop went to help out. He brought some of those people home,” Morgan said. “Yes, maybe he would do it. His name was Frank. Frank Jordan, I think. It was the Gateway Missions in Savannah.”

  “I’ll contact him for you,” the man said. “Now, would you like to have the service here or somewhere on Cape Refuge?”

  “At our warehouse, where we had church,” Morgan said.

  “No.” Blair’s mouth trembled. “Morgan, that’s where they were killed. There’s still blood on the floor.” Her voice broke. “I don’t want it there.”

  Morgan looked down at her hands in her lap. She wished that Jonathan was here or that they had brought Melba. They needed someone objective to help with the million decisions to be made.

  “There’s also the problem of seating,” the man said. “It’s very likely that a lot of people will turn out for this. Probably way too many to fit into a warehouse.”

  “All right,” Morgan said. “Maybe the Calvary Baptist Church would let us use their building.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said and jotted that in his notebook. “Now, about visitation. When would you like to hold the viewing?”

  “I don’t want a viewing,” Blair said. “I don’t want people gawking at my mother and father.”

  “Then we could close the caskets and simply have a visitation.”

  “No,” Blair said. “I don’t want to see people and talk to them and answer their inane questions and hear their empty platitudes. The funeral’s enough.”

  “But, Miss Owens, most families find the visitation to be comforting. People can come by and tell you what your parents meant to them.”

  “I know what my parents meant to them,” she said.

  He looked at Morgan, as if hoping she would reason with her sister. But Blair’s logic made sense to her. “Just the funeral,” she said.

  “And the burial, of course,” he said. “Would you like to bury them at our cemetery?”

  Blair leaned back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. Morgan knew she was fighting tears. She still hadn’t seen her cry.

  She wished she were that strong. Her tears hadn’t stopped since yesterday.

  “I know this is difficult,” the man prompted.

  Finally, Blair answered. “I don’t want them in the ground.”

  Morgan took her hand. “Blair, they’re not in those bodies. It doesn’t matter where we bury them.”

  “I can’t do it. Maybe we should bury them at sea. They loved the sea. We could take a boat out and have a small, private service out on the ocean.”

  Morgan considered that for a moment. “I think they would have liked that.”

  “Then you’ll want them cremated,” he said, jotting on his notepad.

  “No, we certainly do not,” Blair said. “Can’t we have a sea burial with caskets?”

  “Of course we can,” he said. “We’ll have to get permission, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Then we’ll do that,” Blair told the man. “We can use Jonathan’s boat and have a private burial at sea.”

  “But won’t your parents’ friends want to come? Your church members? The people of the community? There’s comfort in closure. . . .”
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br />   “The people can worry about their own closure,” Blair said, her voice too loud. “I don’t have the energy to do it for them.”

  Later, as Blair drove home, physically exhausted and mentally drained, Morgan gazed out the window. “Did we do the right things?” she asked.

  “We did the best we could,” Blair said.

  Morgan sighed. “There are still so many decisions to be made. The music, the eulogy—I wish Jonathan was here.”

  “Maybe they’ll let him out in time for the funeral.”

  Silence lay heavily over them as they drove home. Morgan leaned her head against the window and sniffed and wiped tears. After a while, she said, “I’ve got to start thinking of them in heaven. Pop’s hearing restored, his arthritis gone, Mama’s laughter like music in Jesus’ ears.”

  Blair wanted, more than ever, to believe in an afterlife. If heaven was real, were they singing praise songs and running through meadows? Were they reunited with that AIDS patient they had harbored at Hanover House, or Sam, the man in the last stages of cancer when he had come?

  She wished she could believe she would see them again. But her mind wouldn’t allow herself to believe. Yesterday was the end of them, and that was all there was to it.

  If she could only make herself say good-bye.

  C H A P T E R

  23

  The cast itched, and Sadie’s arm ached. Gritty sand had worked its way into the cast, and it coated her clothes and her skin. Hot sun lasered down on her with blistering intensity, but she couldn’t seem to escape it.

  She had spent the afternoon walking along the beach, picking up change left by sunbathers. A quarter here, a nickel there. Once, she had found a dollar rolled up inside a paper cup. She managed to collect a little over ten dollars, half of which she spent on a hot dog and drink. Strength seeped back into her muscles and bones with every bite, but dread overwhelmed her. Night would fall soon, and she still hadn’t found a job or a place to stay.