Prophet

by Frank Peretti

  There was silence. Deanne looked at Leslie and Max, worry in her eyes.

  “Shannon?”

  Shannon’s voice sounded weak. “Where did she die?”

  “The Women’s Medical Center, that clinic on Kingsley Avenue.”

  That seemed to hit home. Shannon said nothing for a moment, fidgeting with the receiver. Then she said, “O God . . .”

  “Shannon? Honey, are you still with me?”

  “Pardon me, what was your name again?”

  “Deanne Brewer. My husband’s name is Max, and our daughter’s name was Annie.”

  “Mrs. Brewer . . . what did they do to her?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Did she bleed to death?”

  “No. They . . . well, they hurried too much, I guess. They left parts of the baby inside and perforated her uterus, and she got an infection and died.”

  Shannon’s voice was quivering and weak. She could have been crying. “How did you know to call me?”

  Deanne struggled for just a moment and then remembered John’s words: “Just tell the Truth.” She decided to do just that. “Shannon, my husband, Max, and I have been trying to find out what happened to Annie and who was responsible, and some good people from the TV station, from Channel 6, have been helping us. We just got a genuine copy of Annie’s autopsy report last night, and that’s the first real proof we’ve had. The clinic won’t tell us a thing—they’re hiding it.”

  “Channel 6?”

  “Yes, that’s right. They know there’s something going on at that clinic, and they’ve been helping us.”

  “I got a call from a Leslie Albright just a few nights ago.”

  Deanne could see Leslie getting anxious about all this truthfulness, but Deanne was going to go with it do or die. “Mm-hm. Well, Leslie’s here right now—she’s sitting right next to me.”

  “But . . . she said she was trying to do a follow-up story on me as the first recipient of the Hillary Slater scholarship.”

  Deanne had no answer for that. “Well, would you like to talk to her?”

  Shannon hesitated.

  “Maybe you can ask her about that and she can explain it to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Deanne held the phone out to Leslie.

  Leslie sank just a little, feeling she’d been cornered and caught. Well, time to come clean and die all, die merrily. She took the phone. “Hello, Shannon. This is Leslie.”

  “Hi. Are you the one who called me?”

  “Yes. It was Tuesday night, I think. We were talking about your being the first one to get the Hillary Slater scholarship and . . . well, I guess I—”

  “Do you still want that story?”

  Leslie perked up at that. “Um . . . well, Shannon, I have to tell you . . . I wasn’t really after that in the first place, I just—”

  “I’ll talk to you. And I want to talk to the other lady too.”

  “Mrs. Brewer?”

  “Yes. I’ve had time to think, and I know I have to talk to somebody. I can’t carry this . . .” Emotion overtook her. “Excuse me.”

  “Shannon . . .” Leslie could hear her crying, so she spoke gently. “I’m going to let you talk to Mrs. Brewer again, okay? She knows how you feel, more than anybody else does.”

  Leslie handed the phone back, whispering, “She’s crying.”

  Deanne felt she was reaching out to a daughter. “Shannon, I’m here.” Deanne listened to the girl weep and began to shed tears herself. “You go ahead and cry, honey. I’ve got my arms around you, hear? I’ve got my arms around you.”

  THEY MET AND embraced for real under a spreading oak tree in the center of Balen Commons, the centerpiece of the Midwestern University campus, a pleasantly meandering mall of groomed lawns, hundred-year-old trees, brick walkways, and gently rolling terrain. On all sides were the original brick buildings from the nineteenth century. Nearby a fountain with sporting bronze porpoises trickled and sprayed, and here and there bronze, marble, and granite sculptures jutted out of the evenly mowed grass like oversized toys. It was Saturday afternoon, a warm and pleasant day for October.

  “This is my husband, Max.”

  Max offered his big hand, and Shannon took it warmly.

  “I’m gonna take myself a tour of this place for a while,” he said, “and let you ladies talk. When you want to meet?”

  They consulted their watches and agreed on a time about an hour later. Max walked away, just taking in the campus and looking for something interesting to do.

  Shannon and Deanne found a bench in a pleasant little hideaway bordered by shrubbery alive with tiny, chattering birds. They talked for a while about themselves and their different backgrounds—Deanne, raised in the inner city by staunch Baptist parents, never well-to-do nor career-oriented, but happy to be the wife of a welder and a mother of four; Shannon, raised in a wealthy home by social-activist, Presbyterian parents, with the children of VIPs for friends, including the governor’s daughter, and now aspiring to study law and economics.

  And then they talked about Annie, not much younger than Shannon herself at the time of her death, a young lady with a bright future and the mind and will to tackle it. Understanding and appreciating her life was easy. Trying to derive some sense or meaning from her death and all the factors that caused it was another matter.

  Then Shannon said abruptly, “Please don’t hate me.”

  Deanne was shocked at that. “Shannon, why would I hate you?”

  Shannon looked across the campus as she gathered her thoughts and controlled her emotions. She was determined that they would serve and not rule her today. “It’s my understanding that, had I spoken up, had I said something, had that clinic been investigated, Annie could very well be alive today. Ever since Hillary was killed, I was always afraid that it might happen to someone else, and when you called . . . well, I knew it had happened. That’s what I’m having to live with now.”

  She returned her gaze to Deanne, her face tense with emotion, her eyes watery. “Mrs. Brewer, I’ve been under tremendous pressure not to say anything, I want you to understand that. And not being perfect, and having morals that are somewhat undefined at this point in my life . . . I did choose the easy route, or what I thought was the easy route. It’s been that way ever since April, when Hillary died. But I can’t go on with it. It just can’t continue. I’ve thought a lot about it and I arrived at two possible choices. I could stay quiet about it and die inside—just cease living as a true human being. Or I could speak up and probably ruin my educational future. But . . . since either course will be a kind of death anyway, I figured that last death I could live with.” She smiled at the paradox of the words.

  Then she looked away again. Just looking across the lawn and the leaves turning gold made it easier to think, speak, and hold her emotions in check. “I’m sorry if I don’t look you in the eye very much. I’m feeling a lot of shame right now.”

  Deanne reached over and touched her hand. “Honey, don’t carry any shame for me, or for Annie. I forgive you, and I know she would. And God will, if you just ask Him.”

  Shannon closed her eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath as her jaw trembled. For several moments she fought back her emotions, her hands frequently going to her face to cover it or to dab away tears. “I do appreciate that. I need to dig my way out of this pit somehow, and I do appreciate your understanding.”

  Then with trembling hands she reached into her carrying bag and produced a spiral notebook. “We really need to get into this while I still have the strength.” She opened the notebook in her lap and paged through it until she found the first of many pages of notes. “Do you want to record this?”

  Deanne shook her head. “Honey, this isn’t an interview. We’re just talking, that’s all. If you decide you ever want to talk to Leslie and John and do it for a camera or a tape recorder, that’s entirely up to you. Right now it’s just you and me.”

  She nodded. “Well, I could use a dry run anyway.” Then, sta
rting at the top of the first page, she pressed forward, purposefully forcing herself over rough and difficult emotional terrain. Deanne didn’t know what else to do but slide close to her and touch her whenever she needed it, which was most of the time.

  “Hillary Slater and I were best friends from the time we were little. We went to Bowers Elementary together, and then we both started fourth grade at the Adam Bryant School. I think it was because our fathers were both involved in politics and it was that kind of school, a school for the children of the elite, the influential. Hey, we were privileged kids; we had the best.

  “So Hillary and I grew up together, and we got to know each other’s family, and I always knew that Hillary’s dad was a driven man. If something didn’t bring him success or power or influence in political circles, he didn’t show much interest in it. And that’s how it was with his children. He drove them too. He was very demanding, and he expected them to play the political game with him. I can remember the whole family putting on the smiles and standing together for pictures and publicity during his last campaign, everything rosy and the wife happy and the kids doing fine.

  “But it was all public image. Hiram Slater can be cruel, and I saw him slap Hillary a few times to keep her in line, to keep her going along with his program. She was the governor’s daughter, and she had to perform and look good to make him look good, and for the most part she did that—she maintained the image.

  “Until she got pregnant. I know who the boy was, but that’s immaterial. He’s in college now, and I suppose he’s dating other girls, and all I can hope is that he’s learned a lesson, but who knows?

  “But I remember Hillary was really scared and kept talking about how her father would just kill her, and she didn’t want anybody to know about it, she just wanted to get it taken care of and go on with her life. Knowing her father and how publicly oriented he was, and how public everything was with their family, I didn’t blame her.

  “I remember on April 16th—a Tuesday—I was called down to Mrs. Ames’s office—she’s a counselor at the school. Hillary was there in the room, and she and I and Mrs. Ames had a private meeting, and that’s when I learned that Hillary was pregnant. She’d had a pregnancy test done by the school nurse, Mrs. Hunt, and the test had come up positive. So now Mrs. Ames had made an appointment for Hillary to get an abortion, and Hillary chose me to be the one who would drive her to the clinic and then take her home afterward. We had a lot of trust between us. We’d shared a lot of secrets, and now we were sharing this one.

  “Mrs. Ames picked the Women’s Medical Center because it was across town, in the south end, where the lower-income girls usually went. She figured that would be the best place because no one would know Hillary there, and we could get in and out of the area without being seen or noticed. They would even accept a phony name as long as you used the same one in all your dealings with them. So we picked out a false name, Susan Quinto. We got the idea from ‘Suzy Q.’ It was dumb, but that’s what we picked. So on Friday we both went to school like always, but then got excused from classes at lunchtime—Mrs. Hunt wrote both of us medical excuses—and we drove over to the clinic.

  “And that place was busy—it was just crammed. A whole van full of girls got there right before we did, and . . . everybody was quite stressed, there was a lot of tension. The clinic people were stressed and yelling at us, and . . .” Shannon drew a few deep breaths. “And the doctors were stressed as well. We could hear them yelling in the back, and we could hear some of the girls screaming . . .”

  Shannon couldn’t hold back her tears at this point. She wept, pulling out a tissue to wipe her eyes and nose. And she was angry with herself for crying.

  Deanne put her hand on Shannon’s shoulder and spoke earnestly. “No, now don’t you mind it. If you don’t cry you’ll break. You go ahead.”

  Shannon continued even though her voice was shaking and she spoke an octave higher. “And Hillary was so frightened . . . She just wanted to run, to get out of that place . . . She said . . . I remember her saying, ‘This is Hell—why do I have to go through this?’ . . . And I kept telling her to just be brave, just go through it, and then everything will be all right, it’ll all be over . . .” She blew her nose, tried to gather herself, and then pressed on. “And then her turn came, and the lady—I don’t know if she was a nurse or just a counselor or what—came and got her and took her through the big door, and the door closed, and . . . and I didn’t know what they were going to do to her. I didn’t know they were going to kill her . . .”

  “No, honey, of course you didn’t.”

  Shannon pulled herself together somewhat, at least enough to continue in a normal octave, though still shakily.

  “And it didn’t take long at all. I think it was maybe a half hour later, the lady—the same lady—came into the waiting room and told me to drive around to the back door to pick up Hillary—she was ready to leave. So I got the car and drove around to the back door, and they brought her out . . . the counselor lady and then some other assistant, one on each side of her to help her walk . . . and they said she should lie down in the backseat, so she did, and she had some birth control pills they gave her, and some instructions to follow . . .” She dug through her bag. “I’ve got those somewhere . . .” She leafed through a folder and pulled out a green sheet of paper, somewhat wrinkled, with text photocopied on both sides. Deanne received it from her and looked it over. At the top was the name and address of the clinic and then the title, “Post-operative Instructions.”

  “The lady gave me that copy so I could help Hillary remember what to do. Hillary was so . . . she was just . . . I can’t describe it. She just lay there in pain, just real sick . . . and it was like . . . like she was already gone, like she’d already died. She just wasn’t the same, and she just kept saying, ‘Take me home, just get me home.’ And the lady told us to watch the bleeding, that it would stop after a while, but we had to keep a fresh pad on it. She said to get Hillary home and get her to bed and everything would be okay, so I started driving her home, but the bleeding just got worse, and we had to stop and change her pads and . . .” Shannon buried her face in her hands. She spoke through them, her voice muffled. “And the blood was everywhere . . .”

  MAX HAD TAKEN a casual walk around the campus and now was returning to Balen Commons. He reached the top of the knoll where the big oak tree stood and from there could see Deanne and Shannon sitting together some distance away. It was obvious they were in the middle of something very intense. Deanne had her arm around Shannon, and Shannon appeared to be crying. It looked like he’d be taking another lap around the campus, which was okay with him. This was why they flew out here, to find out—Hold on.

  Max moved quickly behind the oak tree and tried to look casual as he carefully peered around it.

  Who was that sitting over there, that guy with the newspaper? He was close, not more than forty feet away, sitting on the edge of one of the big bronze sculptures, just flipping through the newspaper and trying to look casual. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, nothing remarkable, but his face was easy enough to see.

  And Max remembered that face very well. He’d had a close look at it moments before he planted his ham-sized fist right into it and knocked the guy down.

  That guy was at the rally! Yeah! He was one of those guys who started the big fight at the governor’s rally!

  And he was watching Deanne and Shannon!

  Max didn’t notice, but his hand had turned into a dangerous, tight fist as he stood there behind the tree.

  Shannon sat up straight, wiping her eyes and nose, and pressed on as steadily as she could. “I got her home, and the rest of the family was away. We knew they would be. The governor had some kind of speaking engagement, and Mrs. Slater and Hayley and Hyatt went with him, and they weren’t supposed to be back until that evening. We thought we could just get the abortion done and Hillary would be okay and no one would know the difference. That was the plan, but it didn�
��t work.

  “I remember how weak she was . . . just dragging. I could hardly get her up the stairs to her room. And by then I was getting scared, and I said maybe we should call somebody, but Hillary kept begging me not to, not to let anybody know, not to call anybody. She said she’d be okay, and so we just kept soaking up the blood and changing the pads and . . . and it just wouldn’t stop!

  “Finally I called the clinic, but the line was busy, and I called again, and the line was still busy . . . and Hillary just kept bleeding and getting worse and worse. She started sweating and gasping for air, and I called again, and somebody finally answered, and I told them the bleeding just wouldn’t stop, and . . . and that woman didn’t know what to tell me! She asked, ‘Well, are you following the instructions on the green sheet?’ and I said sure, but there was nothing on the instructions about this much bleeding, and then she said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t stop by tomorrow morning, give us a call,’ and she acted like she didn’t want to talk, like she didn’t have time, and . . . I think she was just putting me off, she didn’t want to talk to me, she was too busy. And she just hung up.

  “And then I looked at Hillary, and she was starting to turn blue, and she wouldn’t respond to me anymore. She was fading. So I couldn’t wait any longer. I called 911 and got help, and . . . and then the governor came home. I saw the headlights in the driveway and heard the garage door opening, and . . .”

  Shannon paused, looking out across the commons. “I . . . I think this is where I went wrong, where all this other trouble started, because I panicked and ran out the back door. I just dropped the phone and got out of there. I thought Hillary would be okay because I called 911 and they were going to send somebody . . . but I was scared. I didn’t want to be there when the governor came in and saw Hillary and all the blood and found out . . . I didn’t know what he’d do.