Like the ever-present feeling that she wasn’t good enough.
“Martha?”
She peered over at the minister, noticing the lines around his eyes when he smiled. “I’m glad to be here,” he said, holding her gaze with his own.
Something happened to her in that second. She felt…a jolt. A sudden, unexpected peace. She wanted to believe in it. To hope that someday things would be okay.
But that was only because she was overtired.
She knew better.
Breaking eye contact, Martha nodded.
And dialed.
EVEN HEARING ONLY ONE side of the phone conversation between Ellen’s parents, David could tell what was happening.
Martha was asking for support that Todd Moore was unwilling—or unable—to give her.
Will Parsons had told David a little about his once-closest friend, Todd Moore. He’d described Todd as a man searching for meaning in life, trying his best to be fair while daring to seek out happiness during his time on earth. David had been prepared to give the man the benefit of the doubt. But now…
“I don’t know what to say to her, either, Todd. I don’t really think it matters all that much. She needs you. Especially you—” Martha turned away as her voice broke. “Right now.”
David watched the slender muscles along the back of her neck as she nodded. “I understand.”
Then she murmured, “Yeah, I know.” Her voice had softened, filled with the kind of intimacy that could only develop over years of knowing everything there was to know about a person.
“Okay.” Another nod. Slower.
Watching as much as listening, David filed away the insights he was learning, sensing that he was going to need them.
Todd Moore was letting Martha down again. And she was allowing him do it.
She expected nothing more.
Which might be why she got nothing more.
“I’ll tell her.” Her voice was filled with resignation and disappointment. Of the two, the resignation seemed stronger.
David felt a tug of concern that he couldn’t ignore. Resignation was a step further than disappointment into emotional darkness. And much harder to combat. Perhaps he’d been led to a job that was beyond his limited capabilities.
“EL?”
Shelley slid quietly into her older sister’s bedroom a few minutes before the alarm was due to go off on Friday morning.
“Yeah?”
“You awake?” She wanted to climb into the double bed, find Ellen’s toes with her own, cuddle up like she used to do when she had nightmares. But she was afraid to touch her. Didn’t know if that was okay.
Or even if she really wanted to.
“Yeah.”
“Can I…sit?” She motioned to the end of the bed.
“Of course.” Ellen sat up, propping pillows behind her back. She moved slowly, gingerly. Her hair was all flat from having dried by itself after the shower they’d made her have at the hospital the night before. Mom had told them about that. And about the pill Ellen had to take to make sure there was no kid. Shelley wanted to run.
Instead she sat. Stared. Didn’t know what to say. She was afraid she’d do something really stupid, like cry.
“How are you?” She couldn’t hold Ellen’s gaze for long, afraid of what her sister might say.
“I’m not sure.”
She glanced up, frightened by how strange her sister looked to her. Makeup could do a lot, but would it hide the puffiness around her eyes and lips? How could she go to class looking like that? “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” Ellen’s smile was horrible. Sad. Empty or something. Ellen was always the one who made the rest of them feel better.
“I helped Mom get you ready for bed. I picked out the pajamas,” she said awkwardly, not sure if Ellen would be mad at her for invading her privacy.
How had they grown so far apart without even knowing it?
Ellen nodded. Smiled that sickly smile again.
Shelley didn’t know what to do next. Wishing she’d never come in, she wondered how to get up and leave.
“It’s okay.”
Shelley’s gaze flew up at her sister’s words, but when she looked at Ellen, all she wanted to do was cry. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’m okay,” Ellen said, a tiny hint of her normal self in her eyes. “Really.”
Shelley nodded. Swallowed. Wishing she were up there on that pillow, too, Ellen’s arms around her.
“Did he…hurt you?” Was talking about it a mistake?
“A little.”
Pursing her lips, Shelley nodded again. Of course he’d hurt her. What a stupid question.
“You don’t look too bad.” It was a lie.
“Thanks.” Ellen knew it was a lie.
“Well.” Shelley stood up. “I guess I’ll go get ready for school now.”
Ellen nodded.
“You going today?”
“I don’t know.” Ellen glanced around her bedroom as though lost, scaring Shelley all over again. “I don’t think so.”
The bastard was going to die. And burn in hell forever.
“You, um, need anything?” Please say no.
“No.”
“Okay, see ya later, then.” She had to force herself to walk, not run, from the room.
“Shel?” Damn.
She turned around. “Yeah?”
“It wasn’t—” Ellen stopped, took a breath that was very noticeable. “It could’ve been worse,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t…a virgin…you know?”
Glancing at the open door, Shelley moved quickly back to the bed, and sat down beside her sister. “You weren’t?”
“No.”
Thank God.
“You and Aaron?”
“Yeah. New Year’s Eve.” Ellen almost smiled a real smile, but it must’ve hurt because she stopped.
Drake had been asking Shelley to “do it,” too, and she’d been coming up with excuses. She just hadn’t been sure. Couldn’t get over how disappointed Mom would be if she found out.
But that didn’t matter now.
If there was a rapist on the loose she wasn’t taking any chances. She’d much rather do it the first time with someone she loved. Just as Ellen had.
“Was that the only time?” she asked.
Ellen shook her head. “We really…liked it,” she said.
And then started to cry.
Shelley sat there staring for a second, with no idea what to do. So she started to cry, too.
And somehow ended up with Ellen in her arms instead of the other way around.
Life had changed and wasn’t going to change back. Not ever.
CHAPTER SIX
THE NUMBER FOR THE nursing home showed up on David’s caller ID at home. It was the last Tuesday in February. That he should get a call now, when he hadn’t been contacted in more than a year, wasn’t as much of a shock as it might have been. He’d been half expecting something like this to happen. Some reappearance of his mother in his life. He figured there was a reason he’d been chosen as the one Ellen ran to. It was five days since her attack, and he’d had a sense of anticipation—or was it dread?—ever since.
“Pastor Marks,” he said, picking up on the fourth ring. If his hands hadn’t been sweating, his heart beating so roughly, he might have smiled at the uncharacteristic greeting. Irrational as it was, he still felt a pressure to prove that he was worthy.
It was the administrator of Higley Lakes calling. David had had a total of two conversations with the woman in the ten years his mother had lived there. Once he’d started making enough money to pay the fees, he’d moved her from a state-funded home to this private facility. He spoke to floor staff when he called in once a month. And it was floor staff who called him on those occasions when a decision had to be made. They were probably raising the fees again. What was his mother insisting on this time? She already had a private room, her own phone and a double bed. Well, whatever she wanted, David wo
uld see that she got it.
“I regret to inform you that your mother is gravely ill.”
Every vein in his body chilled. He stood at the desk he barely used in a study he seldom entered, except to check messages, and tried to remember all the things he’d learned over the past twenty years. Or any of them.
“What’s wrong?” Other than the usual mental aberrations that kept Elizabeth Cole locked away in a barred unit of the upscale Phoenix care facility.
“She’s in the last stages of brain cancer,” the voice said.
Deep. Dark. Frozen. David digested the words. “How long have you known?”
“The final report came in this morning. With her…detached…mental state, it was impossible to catch the symptoms.” Detached in that Elizabeth only told people what she wanted them to know. And was amazingly capable of ignoring the rest.
“She appeared to go blind a couple of days ago, which called for tests that revealed a tumor….”
Appeared to go blind. The woman was so far removed from life that appearing to go blind was unusual enough to call for precautionary tests, but not call her family. Elizabeth had also appeared to be deaf once, for two years.
And she’d had—or appeared to have—any number of other symptoms and conditions since her hospitalization more than twenty years before.
“I want to see her.”
“I’ll ask.”
He clenched the hand in the pocket of his jeans. “I’ll wait.”
“It would be better if I called you back,” the woman informed him. “They’ve given her something for pain, and when I left the ward a few moments ago, she seemed to be relaxed and falling asleep.”
“Fine,” he said, although of course it wasn’t.
She could die in her sleep.
And he’d been waiting twenty-three years to see her again.
True to her word, Helen Carr, administrator of Higley Lakes, called back when he returned to his house for lunch that day. He’d spent the intervening hours in his church office, reminding himself of what his life was about.
And praying that his mother would let him come.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Marks, but your mother cannot see you at this time.”
Pastor Marks. I’m Pastor Marks.
“At this time?” he asked, forgetting everything he’d just spent the past couple of hours telling himself. “She can’t see me at this time? You’ve just told me she’s dying. What other time is there?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Your mother’s doctors say that she’s capable of making decisions such as these and that her desires must be honored.”
He’d heard that more often than he could count. “I understand.”
He didn’t. Not at all. How could a woman be so incapacitated that she’d been locked up for twenty years and still be considered lucid enough to rob her son of his last chance to see her?
Not that it mattered. If she didn’t want to see him, David wouldn’t go. It was that simple. And that hard. It always had been.
“Please call me if she changes her mind,” he said, and dropped the phone back in its cradle.
Elizabeth Marks wasn’t dead yet. There was still hope.
“LIFE SURE DOESN’T TURN out the way we plan, does it?” Becca Parsons asked Wednesday morning, holding her friend’s hand as they sat together on the cream-colored leather sofa, a new addition to the mayoral office in downtown Shelter Valley.
Martha had arrived a few minutes early for a meeting the sheriff had called concerning Ellen’s attack six days before. Being with Becca was the hardest. Martha constantly had to fight the urge to break down and cry.
Because if she started, she was afraid she’d never stop. There was just so much grief and rage inside her. All things that weren’t going to change.
“You and Will have been pretty lucky,” she said now, grateful for the reminder that while there was no point in hoping or believing in things unseen, there was still the possibility of a benevolent fate descending during a lifetime.
“That we have,” Becca said with a smile. “But look what we had to go through to get here.”
Twenty years of agonizing disappointment and the near loss of their love and marriage. And during most of that time, Martha had felt herself so lucky….
“Your time will come again,” Becca said in that way she had that usually instilled such confidence.
Martha shook her head. “I think mine was opposite to yours,” she said. “I used up all my luck during the first forty years of my life.”
“No, you didn’t.” Becca shook her head, her blue eyes filled with a compassion that spanned their long friendship. At forty-six, Becca was still as beautiful as ever. Tall, slim, model-like in her poise and dress. The tiny lines on her face only enhanced her authority. “I’m not letting you give up, so you might as well lose that idea right now.”
Martha smiled, as she’d been meant to, and wished her determined and powerful friend could turn back the clock. Because she was afraid that was the only way she’d ever be able to look at life again with any measure of trust.
“I mean it,” Becca said more firmly. “Look at me, Marth. Four years ago I was forty-two and childless, with high blood pressure, broken dreams and a failing marriage. And now I’ve got a beautiful daughter, a baby son whose smile is known all over town, a job I love and a husband who adores me as much as I adore him. If I’d given up when I thought I had no other choice, I’d have lost everything.”
“I know.” And she did. But what Becca didn’t understand, and Martha did, was that it was all a crap shoot. Luck of the draw. And she couldn’t embrace the idea of a future happiness that was so fleeting.
She might have told her friend as much, but was saved the lecture such a pronouncement would have procured by the knock on Becca’s office door. It heralded the arrival of the only two other citizens of Shelter Valley who knew about Ellen’s attack—besides Ellen herself. Pastor David Marks, who’d visited Ellen several times during the past week. And Sheriff Greg Richards, who’d called this meeting.
“It’s been six days and I have not found a trace of information to lead me to the man who picked up Ellen outside of Wal-Mart,” the thirty-eight-year-old sheriff said as soon as they were all seated in the conversation area in a corner of the office. His intense, dark-green gaze touched them all in turn. Becca and Martha were still on the couch. The men had each taken one of the two matching armchairs on the other side of the teak coffee table.
“What about the landlord at the apartment building?” David asked, frowning.
“That room was rented before he bought the place. The only contact he has is a post office box. Rent is paid yearly by money order. According to him, the place is used fairly often, but not every week, and by a variety of people.”
“He has to keep some kind of records,” David said, his voice not at all the calming one Martha was used to. Later she might be bothered by how personal an interest he was taking on Ellen’s behalf. For now she just wanted the rapist found.
“Typical for a place like that, he’s just pleased to have it rented and didn’t really care if records were kept,” Greg Richards answered succinctly. Everyone knew how obsessive Greg got when protecting his own. If he was running true to form, he wasn’t going to allow himself any rest until this crime was solved.
Martha hoped to God he ran true to form.
“What about the other residents?” David asked.
“Mostly transient. No one was around the night of the attack. To date I’ve been able to track down a total of two. And neither of them had anything to add about the residents of the room Ellen was taken to. For most of those types, one of the laws of survival is to keep their eyes straight ahead and not notice a thing.”
“Someone had to have seen something,” David said, sitting forward, elbows on the arms of his chair, as though ready to push off.
While Martha found the testosterone level in the room a bit overpowering, at this point she didn’t care who did t
he talking as long as Ellen’s attacker was found, prosecuted and strung up by his balls for what he’d done.
“The only thing that’s come up more than once is that the occupant or occupants of this apartment appear to be businessmen of some description,” Greg said.
“What about damage to the place? Any of that ever reported?”
“None,” Greg said. “No noise or trouble, either.” The respect in his eyes as he watched the other man wasn’t lost on Martha.
“I’m guessing you didn’t call us all here just to report on a lack of progress,” Becca murmured.
“You’re right.” Greg looked at Martha, and she didn’t like what she saw in his eyes.
The permanent knot in her stomach tightened with new dread as she asked, “What?”
“I need to let the town know—”
Martha didn’t even let him finish before she started shaking her head.
“At least something,” Greg insisted.
“No.” Martha felt Becca’s hand slide over hers. She was distantly comforted by the show of support. And was one hundred percent focused on shutting the sheriff down on this one.
“She’s been through enough, Greg,” Martha said. “You should see her. The kid who used to be so vivacious and accommodating lurks around the outskirts of her life, introverted, quiet, pretending everything’s fine. I’m afraid of what it would do to her if the whole town heard about the rape.”
“Don’t you think part of it’s due to knowing that the guy who did this to her is still out there?” Becca’s words came softly from beside her.
“I’m sure it is,” Martha said. “But it’s also due to an invasion of privacy from which she might never recover.” Martha found herself seeking out the pastor, as though his reaction to what she was saying mattered. “We can’t further invade her. She’s afraid people will stare, which some will, or avoid her, which is also possible. She doesn’t want people to look at her differently. At this point, making this crime public would be as criminal as what the bastard did to her. She trusts us.”
David Marks nodded.
“I also have to worry about the safety of this town,” Greg said. “People need to know that there could very well be a rapist walking in their midst.”
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