“Hello?”
“Would you step outside, please, Mr. Stains?”
Soundlessly, he did so.
“Mr. Charles Frederick Stains,” one of the officers recited in a practiced monotone. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“I have a warrant for your arrest on both felony and misdemeanor counts of alleged criminal sexual misconduct.”
They rocked him to one side and secured his hands behind his back.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right at this time to an attorney of your own choosing and to have them present before and during questioning and the making of any statement.”
“You’re arresting me? Because of Shelby Tatum?”
“If you cannot afford an attorney, you are entitled to have an attorney appointed for you by a court and to have them present before and during questioning and the making of any statement. You have the right to exercise any of the above rights at any time during any questioning and the making of any statement. Do you understand each of these rights I’ve explained to you?”
Dumbfounded, Charlie nodded.
As neighbors watched from their lawns and curtains were lifted or pulled aside in just about every front window on the street, one of the officers took him by the elbow and led him down the walk. Another officer opened the rear cruiser door, the one with no handle inside.
The city crest on the side of the door said, “The Welfare of the People Shall Be The Supreme Law.”
“Get in the car. Please, Mr. Stains.”
After he climbed in, the neighbors craned their necks to see him through the metal grate in the squad car. The Caprice pivoted, slewing dust in every direction. The two heads inside passed by in a flash. They caught only a glimpse of the officer with his cap cocked low over his eyes. But behind him they saw a stranger’s face, Charlie’s mouth set in a grim line, his eyes riveted to the rearview mirror.
LYDIA HEARD THE NEWS after third period on Monday.
During the morning break, she had conducted a meeting with Whitney Allen concerning the girl’s behavior at the dance Saturday night. She and L.R. had decided, if Shelby was willing, that they would bring in one of their honor students, a volunteer peer mediator, to oversee the differences between the two girls.
L.R. had been busy for hours in Mayhem Central, fending off the press. The police had been at the school early, asking questions. Now that an arrest had been made, the school was getting calls from as far away as California and Texas.
Missouri live-TV units were parked in the school-bus turnaround, vans with pole-like broadcast antennas cranked toward the heavens.
Rumors abounded that Shelby had arrived at school only to call her mother on the cell phone to take her home.
Nibarger had hired Larry Mortenson, a regular St. Clair County substitute teacher, to take over teaching Charlie’s class long term. But, although Larry had reported ready to teach a lesson on parquetry flooring, the police had asked that they be given access to Charlie’s classroom before students gathered there. So Lydia invited Charlie’s woodworking students to meet in a library study room, where she opened a discussion for the kids to talk.
“You heard he got arrested, didn’t you?” Adam announced.
“Yeah,” somebody else chimed in. “My mom saw everything out the front window.”
“Hey, man,” Johnny insisted. “Stains taught me how to design the sideboards for my truck. This reeks.”
If anyone had noticed Lydia at that moment, they would only have noticed a slight clench of her jaw, a lowering of her brows. She willed herself not to let them see her react.
“Somebody busted into Shelby’s locker. Did you hear that?”
“No way.”
“That’s why Shelby left this morning. Her parents decided to go ahead and press charges. She got here and all of her stuff was gone.”
The bell rang. The kids shoved their chairs back and gathered their notebooks.
Believe me, beloved.
As the children left, nobody noticed that Lydia sat down hard in her chair. She stared at the surrounding bookshelves without seeing them.
“Oh Father,” she said aloud.
I’m so tired of hearing all these many voices.
Everybody wants to tell me what they know.
Nobody knows anything.
Only Charlie knows, the thought came. Only Shelby knows.
She stood to leave the library. Cassie Meade popped up from behind the 759.4 Dewey Decimal shelf, which contained rows and rows of lavish art books, where she had been hiding.
Cassie clutched a book titled Picasso, The Art and Times of A Young Painter against her as she stepped forward.
“I want to show you something,” Cassie whispered. “Can I?”
“What?”
“It’s something about Mr. Stains,” she said. And Lydia’s blood froze in her veins. Not this. Not another girl telling me something else awful about Charlie.
Fear filled her throat. “What?”
“This.” From the pages of the book, Cassie drew a small pastel drawing signed only with her initials. C. M. The picture was a miniature, only three inches square, an oak tree in winter clinging to its leaves, sketched in tones of brown and gray, its limbs silhouetted like two lifted hands with outspread fingers.
“I wanted to tell you that he couldn’t have done it, Miss P. I know.”
Lydia fought the urge to grab Cassie’s shoulders and shout at her. How? How do you know?
“I know it in my heart,” Cassie said simply, and Lydia’s own heart, which had jumped so very high at that, now sank low. But Cassie was pulling another sheet of paper out of the book. “I know it in my heart because of what he wrote.”
“What’s this?”
“Judges’ comments from the art contest last spring.” And she pointed. “There. Right there. Look what he wrote.”
Yes, Lydia recognized the handwriting. The same scrawled, dark shapes that she had seen scribbled on Shelby’s homework last week, the same slanting bold print he had used to write notes to her and slip them inside her staff box.
“Go ahead. Read it,” Cassie said. And so, Lydia did.
Dear Miss Meade,
I am not an expert on art but, when they asked me if I wanted to add some comment here, I jumped at the chance. This picture reminds me of something I’ve read that I love, a verse in the Bible about trees growing with their roots deep in the water. Most people don’t know that oak trees do not lose their leaves in winter. You have done a lovely job here of showing both the season and the strength. I feel your picture. And that is the truest form of art that there can be.
Don’t ever let yourself shy away from your dream. Always remember that you are put here on this earth to do one certain thing. I guess all of us struggle a long time to find out what that one thing is. You are unique. There is not anyone else waiting in the wings to accomplish the job that you have been set out to do. The future that you wait for is yearning for you to find it. You are a wonderful artist.
Congratulations,
Charlie Stains
“See,” Cassie said. “Nobody could write anything like that and do what Shelby says he did.”
Lydia read the words again. Charlie’s own words. There is not anyone else waiting in the wings to accomplish the job that you have been set out to do.
Lydia felt her eyes filling with tears. What would that be for me, Father? What have I been set out for? If only I could believe that I was that important to you … that you had a plan like that for me . . .
“Will you tell me what I should do?” Cassie asked. “I can’t just stand around and let something like this happen to him.”
There is such a difference, beloved, between believing and knowing.
After all the times Lydia had asked herself the same question. After all the times she had struggled to figure out which way she should turn.
But that’s ju
st it, Lord, don’t you see? I’ve believed in you all my life. But it doesn’t feel like anything new anymore. It feels bland and old and irrelevant.
All this time, and she felt like she was reaching past it, around it, beyond it, like the sunglasses she hadn’t been able to find on top of her own head.
I thought there were so many things you wanted to give me . . .
Lydia spoke the words by rote, not because she believed them, but because she knew that they were the only ones she could say to Cassie at this moment. “It’s just like Mr. Stains wrote. The life you are called to is waiting for you. Some things cannot be changed, no matter what. Maybe it’s what you do with the unchangeable things that matters.”
“DID YOU HEAR?” Brad asked her when Lydia returned to her cubicle and found him waiting. “They’ve arrested him.”
Even one hour ago, she had tried to cover for herself. She had not let any of the students see her emotion. But Lydia just gazed up at Brad now, her face awash in misery, her heart vulnerable and open, for him to see.
“Did they fingerprint her locker?”
He nodded. “The thing had at least thirty distinct sets of prints on it, including most of Shelby’s friends and family. And if Charlie used a key, they’re saying he never had to touch the locker at all.”
“It wasn’t broken into?”
“No,” Brad said. “That’s the whole significant thing. It was either a teacher with a key or somebody who knew the combination. And it had to be somebody who knew which locker belonged to Shelby.”
Lydia stared at the jar of candy Kisses on her desk. She reached for the lid to offer Brad one, anything to break the silence and the aching between them. But the lid slipped out of her hand. It shattered on the desk top. They both jumped at once, stared at it for three or four helpless seconds before reaching for something to sweep up the glass. Then they both stopped.
He said, “I saw you talking to him at Big Tree Baptist yesterday. A person would have to be blind not to see what you feel for him.”
She gave up, just stared down at the broken splinters in front of her.
“A person would have to be blind not to see what I see in your face now.”
She bit her lower lip, looked up at him.
“There’s something between the two of you, isn’t there? Or, at least, there was.”
Lydia didn’t speak.
“Which explains why you’d come out to walk on the dock that late alone.”
She didn’t deny that, either.
“Are you going to tell me anything?” he asked.
She shook her head. No.
“Look.” He rose from the edge of the table where he’d been leaning. “I came by to thank you for helping get Taylor into the truck the other night. He didn’t wake up until morning. He wanted to know if we’d caught any fish.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I had to tell him we’d gotten skunked.”
“Poor thing.” A sad little grin.
“I was going to ask if you wanted to go night fishing with us again. But, I guess, no.”
“Brad.”
He poked his hand inside the open jar and took a fistful of candy. “I’m going to get answers for you, Lydia. I’m going to get answers about Charlie. About his past. I can do that much.”
“You don’t have to—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “You have to learn to let people do this. Did it ever occur to you that you ought not to feel guilty for what people want to give you?”
“But there isn’t any reason for you to do anything for me.” She rubbed the ball of her thumb over the bridge of her nose. “There isn’t any reason for me to take from you.”
“This isn’t taking.” She thought he was reaching for the jar again but he didn’t. He wrapped his big hand around her wrist instead, just to reassure her, just to touch her, something that only Charlie would have done. “It’s receiving. There’s a difference. If I want to, just let me help you.”
“But, I don’t—”
“What?” he asked when she hesitated. “Don’t what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What were you going to say?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Brad.”
“You don’t think you deserve it? Is that it?”
She shook her head.
Still, he didn’t let her go. “Lydia, I want you to tell me what you were about to say.”
She didn’t pull away from his grasp. She waited, searching. And when she realized the truth, she felt a scalding heat rush into her lungs. “Maybe. Maybe I was going to say that. Yes, maybe that was it exactly.”
For a long moment, they faced off against each other. Finally, he asked it. “Do you think that you don’t deserve something when you think that other people do?”
She whispered. “Yes.”
“Why is that, Lydia? Why do you feel that way? Do you know?”
She had begun to cry in front of Brad, and she hated herself for it. She backhanded her nose.
“Look,” he said. “I’m going to prove you wrong. I’ve got sources at the University of Missouri that I trust. Sources that other people don’t have.”
“Nibarger couldn’t get anything from the university when they called him back this morning. They told him that their past employment records are sealed.”
“Maybe I can get something opened,” Brad said. “With your permission, I’d like to try.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The two-year-old girl disappeared from the Humbert’s Finger Campground sometime after three on Monday afternoon. Lydia heard the police sirens as she dismissed a meeting of volunteers who would be helping her administer an SAT Preparation Workshop next month.
Lydia stood gazing out the window, examining the thing she had discovered about herself—What is it? What is it that Brad’s questions found in me, such a surprise that it made me cry?—when the chilling chromatic scale of the sirens began.
Her first thought was of Charlie. But, no, it couldn’t be anything to do with him. Not after he’d been taken into jail this morning. Lydia watched the cruiser lights flickering through the trees even in bright daylight, disappearing toward the outskirts of town.
When the young woman arrived at the school somewhat later to find her, Lydia didn’t know what to make of her. The young mother was shivering from shock, draped in a pale yellow quilt. “My husband wouldn’t come with me,” she said. “He’s still down at the campsite, searching through the brush. But I thought I would at least try.”
“Try what?” Lydia’s blood ran cold, because she already thought she knew, and it was impossible.
“I was reading a book in the tent and I fell asleep. I woke up and she was gone. She wandered away.”
“I’m so sorry.” Lydia gripped the door jamb. “I’m sure the police are doing everything that they can.”
“The newspaper reporter told me about you. His name was—”
“Brad? Brad Gritton?”
“No. Someone else. A Mr. Parker?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He was down there, and he said everybody knew your story. He thought that maybe you’d help.”
“I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.”
“We’re camped so close to the lake. No one knows whether to look for her on the hill or to look for her in the water. So they’re doing both.”
“I—I don’t know what to tell you. I-I’ll pray for you to find your child.”
“No.” And the woman gripped her arm and wouldn’t let her go. “I want you to do more than that.”
“There isn’t any more than that—”
“The newspaper reporter said that, when you were young, you once found a boy in the forest.”
“A lot has happened to me since I was young.”
“Come with me, please.”
LYDIA MADE NO COMPLAINT about how fast the woman was driving, but when the panel van skidded aro
und a corner, Lydia put her shoulder harness on. I can’t do this. I can’t do any of this. And it occurred to Lydia that her life had always been one long journey, longing for something that had once seemed possible, knowing that she faced a total powerlessness now.
“Jamie’s wearing a pair of red toddler pants… a little shirt with a bluebird on it. Her hair was in a ponytail, but it might have come down. You never know what has happened to it between then and now.”
Cars blocked the entrance to the shore at Humbert’s Finger. Lydia’s ankles twisted on the rocks as they left the van and stumbled down to the campground. What must have once been a peaceful picnic site was now littered with radio equipment and muddy footprints. “I’d say we’ve got a good two hours of daylight left for a search and rescue,” Judd Ogle was announcing, his hands shoved forlornly into the pockets of his pants.
The dogs had already gone out; Lydia could hear them baying to the west. When she appeared, they stared at her. “What are you doing out here?”
The woman stepped out in front of her. “I went to get her. I want her to try and find Jamie.”
Lydia said it so softly that not any of them could hear her. “I don’t think I can.”
“No sense hanging all your hopes on that,” another officer said over her. “That’s just some Shadrach legend. Things like that don’t happen around this place anymore.”
“Please,” the lady whispered to Lydia. “Don’t listen to them.”
As Lydia stepped toward an opening in the trees, the woman started to follow her. So did several other people who, for all their arguing against what she could do, seemed oddly interested in the direction she wanted to go. All she really wanted to do was hurry away from them.
She stopped. “I have to go by myself if I’m going to do this.”
“We’ve all read that article in the paper, Miss Porter. You had your father with you before.”
She ignored them, thinking only how impossible this was, and was gone. The trees closed in around her like a tunnel, the leathery curls of leaves unfurling beneath her feet. And with each step she took, it seemed like she stepped further and further toward something she didn’t understand, further toward something that she wondered if she could trust. Oh Father Oh Father Oh Father.
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