Spit, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, stroke, stroke, stroke … Kit pulled herself through the water, ignoring the lightning, ignoring the thunder, her mind and heart set on one goal: David.
She reached him just as he rolled onto his back, exhausted. “David!”
His eyes flew open and he turned to look at her.
“Come on!” she said. She handed him a flotation cushion, grabbed his life jacket, and began pulling him toward the life preserver and the rope, her breath coming hard. They reached it just as another bolt of lightning split the sky.
The storm was moving east. Already the rain had begun slowing down. She could see land now. “Pull yourself to shore,” Kit yelled. A wave smacked David in the face and he came up sputtering. “Go!”
He reached forward, grabbed the rope, and pulled. Water sluiced off his shoulders. His hair looked shiny and dark, his muscles taut. Kit stayed right behind him. She could see something was wrong. David was using his left hand on the rope just to hold himself in place while he reached forward with his right and pulled himself forward. A couple of times, he almost lost his grip. The scar from his gunshot wound was bright red.
Several times, she wondered if they’d make it. The storm had begun to move past but the rain was still heavy. Then she looked up and saw flashing lights. Chris had called the rescue squad.
“Just hold on, David! They’ll pull you in!”
Chris had grabbed the line attached to the horseshoe collar ring. He pulled it. Two rescue squadsmen joined him.
David rolled onto his back, hanging on with his right hand. When he finally reached the dock, hands reached down to grab him. Kit heard him yell when they pulled him up by his arms.
By the time Kit joined him, David was on his knees, throwing up salt water.
“That kid,” David said, gasping through heaves, “he was dead … before he hit … the water, right?”
“Right.” She was breathless, her lungs burning from exertion.
He shook his head. “ ’Cause this … this is no way to die.”
David refused transport. Kit thanked the rescue squad and they began packing up their gear. The storm was leaving as quickly as it had arrived. David sat on the dock in the diminishing rain, his muscles trembling, trying to recover his strength. Kit sat next to him, while Chris went inside to find an umbrella and beach towels.
“I’m sorry,” David said. “I had no intention …”
“Why didn’t you come in sooner?” Kit’s voice sounded sharper than she intended. “You should never be out …” David held up his hand, which was shaking, and Kit shut up. He didn’t need a lecture. When Chris came back, she introduced them.
“Thank you,” David said, “for helping me.”
Chris nodded. His suit pants, white dress shirt, and tie were drenched. Kit wondered if the rain had ruined his shoes. “Why don’t we go inside?” he suggested, as he held a golf umbrella over them.
“No,” David said. “I’m a mess. I’ve got to go home.” He stood up on shaky legs and began walking toward the road.
“What are you doing?” Kit asked.
“I’ll get a ride.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Come inside.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll take you home. We can get your car later.” She turned to Chris. “Will you excuse me?”
“Sure. We were about done. I’ll call you.”
By the time they arrived at David’s house, the rain had slowed considerably. David had regained just enough energy to take a shower. Then he put on sweats and collapsed on the couch. Kit had grabbed dry clothes before they left her cottage. She used the shower after him, got redressed, and now was trying to figure out what to do next. She knew she needed to take him to retrieve his car; but right now, he looked too exhausted. “You need to ice your shoulder,” she said. “Can I get an ice pack for you?
“Look, thanks,” he said. “You’ve done enough. Go ahead and go.”
“How will you get your car?”
“I’ll call a cab.”
“That’s unnecessary. I’ll take you.”
“No.”
“David, look …”
“Kit,” he said, sitting up abruptly, “I’m sorry to drag you into this. I appreciate you rescuing me. Honest. I would have drowned. So thank you. I guess I did need that lifeguard. That was incredibly courageous of you.” He rubbed his left shoulder.
“Why were you out there in that storm?” The aggression in her voice surprised even her.
“I don’t know …”
“What’s wrong with you? Do you have a death wish or something?” The minute she said it, she regretted it.
“Of course not.” David stood up and paced away. He turned around. “All right. I’ve been frustrated.”
“About what?”
“At you. At the situation.”
“What situation? What are you talking about?”
David ran his hand over his head. “I’d like to see you. Get to know you better. You seemed to shut the door on that.”
“I can’t get involved with you.”
“Why?”
“It violates a promise I made.” She felt a rush of emotion.
“What promise?”
“I don’t want to marry a non-Christian, so I’m not dating one.”
“So, we can’t even be friends?”
“No!”
“And you think you can tell in advance how things are going to play out?”
“Well, yes!”
“How well did that work with Eric?” he said, his eyes flashing.
His rejoinder took her aback. Kit stared at him.
“Honestly, Kit, I’d like to be able to talk to you.” David dropped down on the couch and put his head in his hands. “I’m trying so hard to sort things out. Today, I went out kayaking just so I could think. I got out in the middle of the channel. The clouds began building, but I kept going.
“When the thunder got loud, I turned around, and began heading west, toward where my car is parked. But the storm came in quicker than I figured it would. I could barely make any headway. I got frustrated. I couldn’t make headway with this woman I like and I couldn’t make headway in the storm. And then, I got so angry, angry at myself, angry with God. I yelled at him,” he said, ducking his head sheepishly, “and I challenged him to show up.
“That was stupid. That was so stupid. The wind was so strong and the waves got choppy. Then the rain came down so hard and I couldn’t see the shore. I couldn’t tell where I was, and I was getting swept away. I was paddling like mad. My shoulder was killing me and then … and then, it gave out.”
Kit’s anger was draining out of her. David looked up into her eyes. “I have never, ever been so scared. Even when I was being shot at. Never. Then, in a flash of lightning I saw a white cross.”
“What white cross? There’s no white cross!”
“I saw a white cross, and I headed for it. And then I saw you.” He rubbed his hands on his pants legs. “I realized out there in that channel that I am not ready to die. I’m not. God is way bigger than I am. He is …” David stopped, and shivered. “Kit, you understand this stuff. I don’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I listened to your podcasts while you were asleep in the car.”
Kit closed her eyes and turned away, her heart pounding. On the one hand, she had a responsibility to share her faith. What faith, a voice inside her head screamed.
On the other hand, she felt so attracted to him! Right this moment she could take him in her arms! And that terrified her. Oh, God, she thought. What am I supposed to do?
“You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
Her eyes widened in surprise. She turned around.
“I don’t blame you, after what Eric did.” David’s eyes were soft. “Anyone would feel that way.”
“It’s not that!”
David raised his eyebrows. Clearly, he didn’t believe her.
Kit tried
to regroup. “What happened to your first marriage?”
She saw the surprise register in his face. “I was twenty, she was eighteen. Too young, too stupid, and too selfish. It didn’t last a year.”
Kit paced. “If my brother knew you, what would he warn me about?”
“Is he a good brother?”
“Yes. And smart.”
“He would tell you I don’t drink, smoke, use drugs, or womanize. But he would say I’m impulsive and hyperactive. And, I watch too much football.”
“Redskins?”
“Anything.” David took a deep breath. “Is that it?”
Kit crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why haven’t you remarried?”
“I was saving myself for you.” David grinned.
“Straight answer!”
“Good grief, I’ll bet you aced interrogation techniques … OK, here’s the straight answer. After I became a cop, I dated other women. Most of them were too much bother. They wanted to settle down and I didn’t or they came with a boatload of problems from prior relationships, or they had a list of demands I just didn’t want to meet. Then I met this beautiful woman on the beach, standing over a dead body … now there’s a story we could tell our kids.”
Kit had to work hard to suppress her smile.
“Am I doing all right?” David asked.
She paced around the living room again, her arms folded. She shook her head, then looked at him. “Who left?”
David’s eyes widened.
“Who left the marriage?”
He looked down and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I did.”
Kit bristled. “Why?” She knew her face was red. She glared at him.
Eventually, he looked up. “It wasn’t working. It just wasn’t working, Kit.” His voice was quiet.
She calculated his answer. “You didn’t love her anymore.”
He took a deep breath. “Right.”
“Of course. That’s exactly what Eric said.” Looking around she spotted a scrap of paper. “Here,” she said, scrawling a name and phone number on it and shoving it at David. “You say you’ve got questions about God? Ben Heitzler is an agent in the Washington Field Office. He’s a strong Christian. He’ll answer any questions you have.”
Kit walked out before David could say anything else.
Later she realized she hadn’t taken him to get his car. Later she wondered if she’d been too harsh. Later she shed tears on her pillow, wondering if she would ever be able to love again.
12
WHEN DR. HILL, THE BOTANIST, CALLED THE NEXT DAY, KIT IMMEDIATELY latched on to the excitement in his voice and let it lift her up. “You are a lucky young woman,” he said.
Lucky. Sure. Kit closed her eyes. “Why is that?”
“I thought you were going to have to go out in the field again. Many times, in fact. You got a match on your first try.”
Kit pressed the phone to her ear. “What did you find?”
“Sample number D6 matches the DNA of five of the six acorns in the boy’s pockets.”
Kit was booting up her computer as he spoke. She wrote down D6 as she waited for the program to load. “How sure are you?”
“I’d say 95 percent.”
“And you could testify to that in court?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you have any kind of graph or readings you could print out?”
“Yes. You want me to email them to you?”
“I’d like that.”
Kit hung up and checked her notes. Sample number D6 came from a farm near Glebe Hill in Accomack County. She’d found two live oak trees flanking the lane leading to an abandoned old house. In her mind’s eye she could see it: a weathered gray, two-story farmhouse with broken-out windows on the edge of a tomato field. There were boxwoods around the place. Someone who cared about plantings had once lived there.
She wanted to call David. Instead she called Chris. Then, throwing a few things, including a digital camera, into a backpack, she got into her car and headed for Glebe Hill, nearly an hour southwest of Chincoteague.
Parking up in an old churchyard on a hill near the farm, Kit slung on her backpack, threw on a UVA cap, and rehearsed her story: she was a grad student in botany in search of remarkable trees for a project. She’d heard a rumor that a particularly old oak was the area and that’s why she was tromping around the woods.
Her backpack held a tree book, binoculars, her camera, and a notepad. She clipped a water bottle on the carabiner that hung from the pack, and fastened on her fanny pack, which carried her gun. On the drive over she had stopped at Walmart and bought a hand-held GPS. They’d used David’s when they’d collected the samples. Now, she stared at the device in her hand. She wondered how it worked and wished she had asked him.
“I’m smart. I can figure it out,” she told herself, and she plunged ahead. She found the right screen on the GPS, entered the latitude and longitude of the farm field from her notes, faltered with the GPS menu, tried again, and finally found the screen with the arrow indicating the direction she should walk. She pressed a button to mark her current location and she trudged off into the woods, brushing away a spider web as she did.
About half a mile in, she arrived at a spot which overlooked the farm she was interested in. Staying well back in the treeline, she lifted her binoculars to her eyes. Below her stretched the tomato fields, neat green rows crosshatched about one-third of the way from each end. A dozen workers were there, picking the fruit—eight men and four women.
The old house stood across the field from Kit. Two live oaks stood on the lane leading up to it. Assuming her notes were accurate—and she was sure they were—the tree on the left was the mother of the acorns in the little boy’s pocket. It stood seventy, maybe eighty feet high by her calculations. It had a huge trunk, and its limbs spread out at least forty feet. She could imagine a little boy playing in the shade of the tree, swinging from its branches … and collecting its acorns. But how did he get from here out onto the ocean? Was he being taken back to Mexico?
Dr. Hill had asked her for a picture of the oak. She hoped she could get close enough to do it justice. For now, she had to be content with standing beneath the poplars, oaks, and dogwoods on the hill and observing the field below. She took pictures with her camera, using a long lens, and wrote down everything she saw.
As Kit watched, a beat-up white truck approached the field. Immediately the pickers began streaming toward it, carrying boxes she could see were full of tomatoes. They put the boxes in the truck, which then took off, a cloud of dust streaming behind. The pickers sat down at the edge of the field, and after a while, another vehicle, a van, came and picked them up. Lunchtime? Or were they moving on to another field?
Kit put down her binoculars, made some notes, and made her way back to her Subaru. Then she drove down the road that went past the field. Because the house stood abandoned, there was no mailbox at the end of the lane, no way of knowing a street address to find the farm on the property maps. So she passed the place by, and grabbed the numbers off of the mailbox for the next house down. Then she turned a corner and was nearly hit head-on by a white Mercedes Benz.
No centerline divided this little country road and the driver of the Benz was apparently used to having it to himself. He blasted his horn. Adrenaline coursed through Kit. She swerved to the right. Her tires hit the rough shoulder. “Watch it!” she said angrily.
The Benz sped off and Kit shook her head. “What a jerk.”
Down the road she saw a small, private lane leading back through a stand of tall pine trees. On the other side of the road was a large, white, cinderblock building. Outside of it was the battered van Kit had seen before. Was this the tomato processing plant? She grabbed the GPS and marked the location.
She had so many questions. Where did the workers go? Where were they staying? Who was their crew chief? What about their families? And most of all, was her little boy connected with this crew?
Turning a
round, Kit drove back past the old farmhouse. The field was still empty. Seized by temptation, Kit found a place to pull off, parked the Forester, slung on her backpack, threw her UVA cap on her head, and began walking up the lane.
This far inland, away from the ocean breezes, the air was stifling, thick with humidity. Locusts buzzed in the bushes and far away, a buzzard circled lazily on an updraft of air. A fine glaze of sweat appeared on Kit’s brow. She wiped off her upper lip and took a sip from the aluminum water bottle. The lane stretched for about a quarter of a mile, and in retrospect, she wondered if she should have driven down it instead of leaving her car off the property. She’d thought she’d look less like an intruder on foot. Now, she second-guessed herself.
The tomato plants stretched out in neat rows on either side of the lane, staked up on wooden sticks that were about six feet tall. Kit could see fruit in various stages of ripening still hanging on the vines—these fields weren’t finished yet, and she guessed that the pickers rotated from field to field, hitting one every two or three days.
In her mind’s eye, Kit could imagine kids playing hide-and-seek in the rows, digging in the dirt along the edges, and chasing each other in the woods that surrounded the farm. Approaching the tree, she took multiple pictures. Then she reached the house and glanced around. Seeing no sign of anyone, Kit stepped past the overgrown boxwoods, up onto the front porch, and peered inside. The broken windows gapped like missing teeth. Wide pine board floors stood empty except for leaves and debris blown in from outside. She walked around the old place, noting the old-fashioned cellar, the tin roof, and the small outbuilding that she guessed had served as a smokehouse. A privy still stood in the back.
From the back porch, Kit could look into what had been the kitchen. One end opened into a large pantry. Kit balanced precariously on the half-rotted boards of the porch, aimed her camera through the broken glass of the back door, and took shot after shot, her neck tight with tension.
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