“Child.”
“. . . and h-he ran the eraser down my face and shirt. It wasn’t the little kind but the big long rubber kind that the janitors use. And he grabbed me and he kept laughing. I thought I’d better laugh, too, like there wasn’t anything more fun in the entire world. And he said ‘Now there’s more chalk on you than on the board’ and he rubbed me against him and all I could think of was how much chalk he had on his nose…”
The handkerchief had been replaced with a box of tissue. “Go on.”
“H-he said I made a C but that he thought he was in love with me and if I would come after school like this I would get a better grade on this test and he would get a divorce from you and… and…”
“. . . and you never told anybody about this,” Jolena finished the sentence for her.
The Kleenex had diminished to shreds. “I-I was so ashamed.”
This small, elderly woman, whom Lydia had been direly afraid of not ten minutes before, hugged her the way her mother had never done. Jolena Criggin surrounded her with everything, arms and shoulders and bosom. How wonderful she smelled. Like fresh soap and hydrangeas. How pillow-soft she felt, and how strong. As this woman held her, surrounded her, for the first time Lydia realized that she was surrounded by God’s love.
Jolena Criggin rocked Lydia the way Lydia had needed to be rocked when she was sixteen years old, when Lydia herself had thought she was too grown up for such a thing. Lydia hung on to that rocking hug for a long time.
Finally, she said into that soft and wonderful place, “I kept praying. And praying. And I never went in there again after school. I sat in the back row of class and I always had one of my friends with me. I hid in my room at home and read my Bible and I asked him, ‘Father, keep that from happening.’ They’d told me that God could do anything when I went to church. I kept thinking, ‘How could God let something like this happen because of me?’ And so I prayed, ‘Don’t ever let Mr. Buckholtz get a divorce because of me.’”
“And then,” Jolena said, “we divorced.”
Lydia nodded inside her grasp. “I heard teachers talking in the hall. That’s how I found out that he did.”
She felt the woman’s two small hands, one covering each ear, push her away. Lydia looked up; they met each other eye to eye.
“You have to understand something about Clive, Lydia. Do you think what he said to you was an appropriate thing for him to say? Do you think what he did to you was an appropriate thing to do?”
Shelby’s words. Her own words. Intermingled between the past and the present.
I must have wanted it or I would have stopped it somehow. I’m the one to blame.
Each time she had counseled Shelby, she had lifted someone else. Each time she had renounced Shelby’s condemning heart, she had allowed the same guilt to sink deeper roots into her own.
He had told her he’d fallen in love with her. Her. And they had to keep it a secret and she had to come to his room and she kept thinking that wasn’t the way love was supposed to be.
“I wanted my heart to be pure, and it couldn’t be,” Lydia told her.
“I want you to know something.” With each word she said, Mrs. Criggin jostled Lydia’s shoulders with her earnestness. “It wasn’t your fault. That was fifteen years ago. It wasn’t anything you did.”
“I know that,” Lydia said. “I know that with my words, but not with my heart.”
“And as far as our divorce was concerned, Lydia. There were other things going on in our lives.”
“Mrs. Criggin,” she whispered again. “I’m just so sorry.”
“For you, child, I want you to live absolved instead of living guilty. We had other things going on or he never would have said the things he said to you in the first place. You weren’t the only one that it happened to, you know. In a case like this, there are always others.”
In cases like this, there are always others.
There are always others.
That thought took hold of Lydia and burned her like a flame.
Because, if things were really the way they seemed to be in Shadrach, then where were the others?
“I prayed so hard.” Her voice a wisp, nothing more, talking about the past fifteen years, talking about the past week.
“Well,” the woman said. “In your entire praying, dear girl, did you ever stop to think that there might come a moment like this? A moment when a truth breaks through?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because that’s where true healing comes from. I know a heavenly Father who delights in the truth. It is so much more powerful than Him just making something go away.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Lydia’s old room in the house at Lichen Bridge, Shelby sprawled on the bed while Lydia leafed through the pages of her father’s most recent Reader’s Digest. “I love these stories in here,” Lydia said. “‘Drama in Real Life.’ They are always so unbelievable.”
“Next time we stop by 7-11,” Shelby said, “I need to get some Blistex or something. My lips are so chapped that they’re starting to peel.”
“We’ll get you some.” Lydia turned another page. “If you’re desperate enough, there’s some in my suitcase. Right there in the zipper compartment to the left of my toothpaste.”
“Oh, thanks. I’ll put it back.”
“You’re welcome,” Lydia said, focused on the story she was reading about a man who had a heart attack in mid-flight and his eight-year-old son who had to land the plane. She heard the sound of the Samsonite opening, the zipper, the hollow tumble of items being pushed around. “It’s there,” she called out after a minute. “I promise. Keep looking.”
Lydia flipped the next page and read more about the desperate landing, the dialogue of the air-traffic controllers to the little boy. She’d almost finished the story before she paused and hollered into the air, “Did you find it?”
No answer from Shelby.
“Shelb?”
And what she saw when she glanced up made her heart freeze.
Shelby stood over her suitcase with a bewildered expression on her face. In her palm rested not only the lip balm she’d been searching for, but a small velvet box from Hocklander’s Jewelers as well.
The box stood open. Shelby was staring at the ring displayed inside.
“This is so pretty!”
Their eyes met. Lydia felt her cheeks start burning. What to say to this? Trying her best to sound nonchalant, as if what was inside that box didn’t matter, “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
“Miss P?”
“Yeah?”
“What is this?”
Words wouldn’t come. Lydia laid the Reader’s Digest upside down on the bedside table.
“Is this what I think it is, Miss P?”
“No. It isn’t. Not really.”
“Yes, it is something!” And with every word Shelby said, she gestured with the glimmering diamond, the polished gold. “This is an engagement ring.”
Lydia chose her words carefully, as if she were picking her way down a steep hill, thrashing her way through a tangle of deadfall and underbrush along Viney Creek. “I would like you to put that back where you found it, Shelby. We won’t discuss this anymore.”
The box clicked shut. Snap. Shelby stood over the Samsonite, staring down at it, as if she was buying herself time to think.
“Miss P? Why did you lie to your mom and dad? If you had this, why did you tell them you didn’t have anybody in your life?”
“I didn’t lie, Shelby. What I said to my parents was completely true.”
“But that ring is the most beautiful engagement ring I’ve ever seen. It’s a thousand times bigger than my promise ring. You told them yourself that you weren’t dating anybody but you’ve got this ring. You are.”
When you watch a teenager think, it can be a frightening thing, seeing all those cogs turning. Lydia was suddenly terrified by the light flooding Shelby’s eyes.
Shelby took a step closer, fear gl
immering in her expression. “Miss P.,” she said very quietly. “I know who it is.”
“Oh no, you don’t.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“Shelby, that’s okay. I don’t want you to—”
“Even if there had been somebody in your life but it hadn’t worked, you would have told your mom and dad about it right then. Even if there had been somebody coming for Christmas but now there wasn’t, you would have said.”
“Shelby, it’s okay. Please.”
“There’s only one reason you would have said there wasn’t anybody, Miss P, and that is because of me.”
“Don’t—”
“And that’s because there’s only one person it could be—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Shelby, please.”
“—and the only person it could be is him.”
They stared at each other. When she said the word him they both knew who she meant.
“You’re in love with Mr. Stains, aren’t you?”
Jolena Criggin’s voice, gently saying this: The moment when truth breaks free.
The next events happened in such a jumble that, later, neither of them would remember in which order they came.
Lydia reaching for Shelby to give her that same sort of hug she’d needed from Mrs. Criggin. Her nodding yes against the girl’s hair. And admitting the truth, “Yes, Shelby. That’s who it is.”
Only this one thing. They would only remember this one thing. And they would each remember it forever: Shelby taking Lydia’s hand and saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Miss P.” And Lydia reassuring her, “No, Shelby. There isn’t anything for you to feel sorry for.” But Shelby kept saying it as she began to weep, “Yes, there is. Yes, there is,” her voice awash with anguish. Then, that same desperate, broken expression that had set everything in motion. “I have to tell you the truth, too.”
She covered her face with her hands. Then, when Shelby lifted her gaze to Lydia, her face was almost pitifully frightened. “It wasn’t him,” she said, as tears welled in her eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A handwritten sign taped to the outside of the office door announced “Miss Porter is out of her office for several days. Anyone needing SAT and ACT study booklets can pick them up from Carol Haucklin, Rm. 103.”
Two stacks of pamphlets, still bound in printers’ twine, one titled PATHWAYS TO THE FUTURE and another titled BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT had been tossed on the floor in front of the door.
Friday morning, Mo Eden was preparing for the time when she stepped into health class and taught students how different injuries are caused. Today in her box she carried a dozen local Missouri apples, which she’d bought at a roadside stand, and four hammers, which she’d borrowed from the woodworking room. Today the injury she would teach, using the apples to demonstrate, would be bruise.
In that very same woodworking room, the substitute teacher struggled to help students stay on schedule with their projects. This week the project was constructing a lodgepole pine chair. When the sub had difficulty figuring out how to start the router, Mr. Nibarger had to go in and help.
Sunday morning they would go off Daylight Savings Time. Winter kept moving stealthily closer. The colors seeped earlier from the sky, the jack-oak trees, the old road, and the shadows. And for days the Shadrach students had been passing notes and exchanging clandestine information by their lockers or in the halls, planning their one last bonfire and party beside the Brownbranch before the weather turned too cold.
Late that afternoon, as darkness moved in soft waves over the knobs and hollows, a group of boys scouted Humbert’s Finger, gathering driftwood from where it had floated in on the shore.
And, as often happens when high school seniors get together, plans for pranks began.
“It isn’t going to matter,” Tommy Ballard said. “Come on. Nothing’s going to happen. It’ll just be a lot of fun.”
“Fun is right. Fun in jail.”
“You’re going to end up in jail just like Stains.”
“Nobody’s going to get mad at us. Not after what he’s done. You go after a guy like that, nobody’s going to care.”
“Could egg the house or something. That would be easy.”
Adam Buttars lugged a huge tangle of cedar up and pitched it onto the pile. “Might want to leave it alone. There’s been a lot going on around this town.”
“Chicken.”
“The guy deserves it. Come on.”
“Sam, of all people, you ought to come with us,” Tommy said, his voice quiet but his words boring in. “She’s your girlfriend.”
“Was my girlfriend, until all this.”
“See, well, that’s what I’m trying to say.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “I’m in.”
EVERY YEAR, each graduating class at Shadrach High School bragged about being the one to invent the gathering. What they didn’t know was that these lakeside parties had been going on for over fifty years. Boys and girls both, fresh faced in the waning light, popping dry twigs in half, watching while the wood fibers furled with flame.
This year, a little before dusk on Saturday, kids began to gather on the gravel wash beside the Brownbranch.
Away from the flames, at the edge of darkness, the boys held a meeting.
“You owe me a big one, Ballard.”
“What’s that?”
“Dad didn’t want to let me borrow the truck.”
They glanced over their shoulders to see if anybody had heard them. No, didn’t seem like it. Everyone else was watching the fire, already talking about marshmallows on sticks.
“You ready?”
“How many trucks we taking?”
“Three.”
“Who’s driving? You? Devine?”
“You’re not taking yours, Buttars. Not unless you got a muffler.”
They made each other promise not to use flashlights. They made plans to park two trucks around the corner, get everybody to Stains’s house riding in the bed of the third truck.
“You’re the one hitching up, Buttars?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re ready as we’ll ever be.”
Drivers brandished keys. The others climbed in wherever there was room. They headed up the washboards at a good clip, throwing dust, before anyone had a chance to ask them where they were going.
CHARLIE TURNED THE GMC into his driveway after a late meeting with Tuck Herrington. He’d had his share of emotions these past few days, but nothing had come close to matching this one. Anger, picking apart his insides like a buzzard.
“Look, Tuck,” he’d said. “I will not do this. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“It’s late, Charlie. I know that. Think about it overnight. I can still set something up in the morning. It’s the weekend, but I can get Judge Foster over the phone tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to change my mind tonight. I’m not going to change it in a hundred years.” He and Tuck had been children together—Webelos, Mrs. Hammond’s third-grade class, the American Legion baseball team—in what seemed like a different lifetime. “I thought you believed in me.”
“This has nothing to do with what I believe, Charlie,” his friend said. “It has to do with what is legally smart. And this is legally smart.”
“For you, maybe. Not for me.”
“I could get the felony charges dropped. But you’ve got to agree to this prefiling agreement. You won’t have to testify. Neither will she. It will be a lot less messy.”
“You don’t want me to fight this.”
“You plead no contest to two misdemeanor counts of criminal sexual conduct. The charges aren’t denied but they’re not accepted, either. You get sentenced to a little community service. That’s it. It’s over. Save your reputation.”
“Guess I don’t see how telling a judge I don’t deny this is going to save my reputation.”
“Look, it won’t get you your job back. But, at thi
s point, there isn’t anything that’s going to do that. This will make it end sooner. You can go somewhere else, get a different job. Start your life over. Make people stop talking. And we all know that’s the real enemy we’re fighting against. People talking.”
Charlie had turned around and said it right before he shut the door in Tuck’s face: “I am an innocent man, Tuck. Just chalk me up as one of those crazy people who think the truth is more important than what other people say.”
Now, turning into his driveway, Charlie had another unpleasant surprise.
Tires had gouged out huge trenches in the front yard. Deep, fat treads had slashed the grass clear past the roots, leaving red soil exposed like a bare wound.
His headlights arced past the blank spot beside the garage.
The kids must be partying at the lake tonight. He knew it for sure because he’d seen the bonfire reflecting on the water.
And someone had stolen his boat.
ONCE THE GANG of boys got back to the bonfire with Mr. Stains’s boat, it took them at least five tries to get the trailer backed up to the water. They dented one fender of the trailer on a tree. They bottomed out the axle on a rock in the middle of the two muddy ruts someone had the nerve to call a road. Somewhere along the way they lost the license plate.
They backed one way and the boat went another. They backed the other way, and the boat went straight. Then, like a miracle, as everybody cheered, the boat was unfastened from the trailer and slid smoothly into the lake.
For an hour or so, the students took turns piling people into Charlie’s Pride. They shoved each other out. They jeered at the ones who swam by firelight toward the shore.
Tommy Ballard was first to discover the cool thing about the light and the fish. He played his flashlight, drawing designs out over the water. The brim beneath the boat followed the beam wherever it pooled.
“Look at these things,” he bellowed as he jabbed Adam Buttars in the ribs with his elbow. When he stuck his arm in, he could feel the brim glancing past his skin, flickering away. “They’re almost tame. I could catch these with my hands.”
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