“Yeah right, Ballard. Just try.”
So he did. He held the flashlight in his teeth and reached in. He caught one.
And then he caught another.
The fish was writhing between his palms when someone shouted, “Hey, there’s some man standing over there on the shore. He’s shining a light on us. He’s gonna see the boat.”
Several of the kids on shore began to run. “Get rid of the fish and turn the flashlight off, you doof. Come on, Ballard. Let’s get out of here.”
“Here, little fishy,” Tommy sang out. “Little fishy going to fly.”
One of the girls screamed, “Don’t hurt it,” just as Ballard threw it with the same exactness and strength as he would have thrown the last-inning fastball, the last out, to send the Shadrach Legion team into the District playoffs.
The fish hit the man square on the left leg and then foundered its way back into the water. From the distance, a dozen teenagers heard the clatter as the man dropped his fishing pole against the rocks. “No-good kids,” he bellowed. “Got no business having a party out here.”
“Hey, grandpa,” Tommy yelled. “Chill. It was just a fish.”
Sam grabbed Tommy’s shoulder. “Hey, take it easy, okay?”
“We got as much business out here as you do,” Tommy hollered.
“You got business with that stolen boat?”
“This isn’t a stolen boat.”
“Ballard, stop.”
“Funny. It looks just like the one my friend Bartlett donated last month so the church could auction it away. Don’t reckon you’re the one who bid on it in the auction, are you?”
“Whatever. This boat’s mine.”
The old man started wading out toward them, his lantern high overhead. “You bring in that boat.”
Sam tried to stop them both. “Hey, wait. Don’t come out here. We’ll bring the boat in.”
But it was too late. In anger, the man stepped off the shore and surged toward them, sloshing through deeper and deeper water.
“Hey, grandpa. Go back,” Tommy yelled. “We’ll give back the boat. I was just messing with you.”
The boat emptied fast. Everybody bailed out and started swimming, wading, running for shore. The kids scrambled and hid, trying to get away.
Sam was the only one who noticed when the man stumbled and went down.
“Ballard!” Sam shouted from where he was thrashing toward shore. “That old guy’s gone under. He fell down or something.”
“Did not. He’s hiding. Trying to freak us out.”
For one night, Sam was finished listening to his friend. “That’s where all those old roots are.”
Will shouted, “He’s got his leg tangled.”
“Come on!”
It took precious, long seconds for the boys to find the old man’s head and lift it above water.
LYDIA HAD DONE plenty of thinking while she and Shelby had driven home from Lichen Bridge. Thinking how trusting God was the same sort of trust you had to follow when you came down a flight of stairs. Thinking how you put one foot down, knowing the next step was going to be there.
Of course, the return drive had been bittersweet. Lydia was so happy that Charlie wasn’t to blame, she could almost forgive Shelby her terrible lie. But to love this girl as much as Lydia had begun to love her also meant to hold her accountable.
“You have to understand what you’ve done, Shelb,” Lydia had said to her. “You’ve accused an innocent man.”
“You wanted me to tell you who it was that day. You kept asking me and asking me,” Shelby told her. “I wanted to tell you. But my mother said I could never talk about it to anyone.”
“Dearest girl…”
“You believed me, Miss P. You were the first person who would ever really listen.”
And Lydia found herself afraid to speak, afraid of what she might say.
“I saw Mr. Stains walking by the window right then outside and suddenly I got desperate. His name was the first one I could think of. I knew he would never… he would never… he’s been so nice to me, Miss P; he’s the one out of everybody that I could trust.”
“Shelby.”
“I knew he wouldn’t e-ever hurt me.”
Regret, as powerful and numbing as anything Lydia had ever known, overcame her.
But why didn’t I know that?
Why didn’t I think that, out of everybody, Charlie was the one I could trust?
Now, it’s too late. I’ll always be the one who didn’t stand beside him when he needed me the most.
“Every time I told my mother about it, she said she didn’t believe me, that I mustn’t talk like that. She wouldn’t listen, Miss P. So I was glad when I said it was Mr. Stains, because then she had to hear.”
“Shelb, what are you telling me?”
“Kids know how to tell people when it’s a teacher or somebody like that. But when it’s somebody in your own family, that everybody protects, there isn’t anything you know how to say.”
Lydia bit her bottom lip and tasted blood. She would wait until the girl was willing to offer more information. She didn’t want to make the same mistake twice, trying to push for a name. Lydia gripped the wheel, and wondered if the abuser could be Shelby’s uncle, or her real dad, or Tom.
As they made the last turn toward Shadrach and began to round the Brownbranch toward Viney Creek, they passed a car pulled off to the shoulder of the road.
A gleaming white 1976 Pontiac Catalina.
Lydia applied her brakes. There couldn’t be another one like that anywhere in St. Clair County.
“Shelb, I think that’s your grandfather’s car. We ought to stop and make sure nothing’s wrong.”
“It’s okay. We don’t have to stop.” The girl said it without ever moving her face. She sank down in the seat and stared straight ahead.
“You don’t want to?”
“No.”
“But, I think we should.” Lydia signaled, checked her rearview mirrors and hung a U. She turned the wheel hand over hand, stunned by Shelby’s reaction. “You can wait in the car if you’d like.”
“No. Please, Miss P. Would you just drive?” Her voice went even more shrill as the car slowed on the gravel. “Please, let’s just go.”
“Why don’t you want to go check on him, Shelby?”
“I just don’t.”
Lydia braked completely, turned toward her. “You’re afraid.”
Shelby looked straight ahead. She wasn’t panicked, but she wasn’t exactly serene either.
“Shelb?”
Shelby crossed her arms and began rubbing the points of her elbows. “He…” The words came out in a dusty croak. She licked her lips and tried again. “He took all my stuff out of my locker. He came in there to make sure there wasn’t anything in there that would make him look bad.”
A chill rushed the length of Lydia’s spine. Something unimaginable began to form in her head. Shelby didn’t want to go anywhere close to her grandfather.
When they parked this close to the edge, they could see emergency lights down below. “There is something going on down there, Shelby, but we aren’t going to get out of the car, okay?”
“Okay.”
“There are people down there taking care of things. We’re just going to talk.”
“Okay.”
Oh, Father, I need your words. I need your gentle understanding. If this is what I think it is . . .
And Lydia touched, barely touched, the thing she’d begun to suspect. “So it’s your grandfather who’s been doing this to you, isn’t it?”
Silence.
“You told your mother about your grandfather a long time ago, didn’t you? And she said you mustn’t talk about it. She said she didn’t believe you.”
No words came from that side of the seat. Shelby was biting her lip. On her cheeks, the bright flush of shame.
“Is that what happened to you? Is your grandfather sexually abusing you and your mother won’t let you tell an
yone?”
Shelby, nodding her head. And Lydia, finally knowing.
Because a mother who has to admit that her father had done this to her daughter has to admit that the same person has abused her, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The whole time during Shelby’s grandfather’s funeral, Sam could not take his eyes off the back of her head. She sat in front of him in the designated family pew of Big Tree Baptist with her hair pulled back in a navy ribbon.
He had caught glimpses of her when she’d first walked into the sanctuary. With her hair like that, wearing that dark navy skirt and standing beside her mother, she looked like she was about eleven years old.
By now, of course, everybody in Shadrach knew what Shelby’s grandfather had done. It was lucky that he and Tommy and Will and Adam B. hadn’t known about that the night the old man got tangled up in tree roots on the bottom of the Brownbranch. Maybe they wouldn’t have tried so hard to save him, to breathe air into his lungs, if they had known.
But, then again, they probably would have tried just as hard. Pastor Joe Douglas was standing beside a closed casket right now talking about forgiveness. He was talking about God, how everybody falls short and that there’s nothing anybody can do to make themselves good enough. He was talking about God being a righteous judge who demands the death penalty. He was talking about God being a loving father who, on the other hand, paid the death penalty for everyone, himself.
If a person would just be willing to accept that God had given his own son that way. That—because a man named Jesus died—everyone got the chance to ask God questions and to grow close to Him and to feel Him loving them when bad things happened, and when good things happened, too.
That’s all you had to do, if you wanted it, was ask.
Sam wondered if Shelby’s grandfather had ever thought about that.
At the end of the service, when he brushed past her during the potluck supper, Sam hung back, hoping she would grab his arm.
She did.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she told him. “It means a lot to me.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging. “Everybody’s here.”
He was right. At least thirty Shadrach High School students had come to pay their respects and to show Shelby that they were trying to understand. Even though people were subdued, they still gathered in groups around the room and talked about Lydia Porter and how she’d found a lost baby in the woods.
“I’m sorry about how I acted after the dance,” Shelby told Sam. “I shouldn’t have run away from you.”
“It’s okay.”
“It was really hard.”
“Yeah, I think it would be, too.”
“There’s some of my friends that are still mad at me, aren’t there? For accusing their favorite teacher?”
He nodded. “I guess so. But there are a lot of people who are looking at your side, too, Shelb. They get it. I’ve heard them talking. It must have been horrible, having somebody in your family do something like that. I’ve heard people talking in the halls. They said, if it was them, they would have tried to be free of it any way they could. Just the way you did.”
They stood there for a minute, looking at each other.
“I’ve got to do community service for stealing Mr. Stains’s boat. We all do.”
“What kind of community service?”
“We have to paint all the wooden campground signs down by the lake.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“It won’t be.”
Their eyes met again.
“Tom and Mom say I don’t have to go back to school yet, if I don’t want to. Since I’ve already told the truth to Mr. Nibarger and the police.”
“Do you want to come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m still thinking about that, I guess.”
He picked up a napkin from one of the tables and set it back down again. “I don’t think you need to stay away too long.”
“Why?”
“They’re going to forgive you, you know. Since they’re so happy that Mr. Stains is coming back.”
“But there’s just so much—” She stopped again.
“Just so much what?”
“You know.”
“What?”
She whispered, stepped back, waited. “About me.”
For a moment, all that she meant hung in the air between them. “You mean, about what happened to you?”
“Yeah.”
He thought about it. “You are who you are, Shelb. That other stuff doesn’t make any difference.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to you, maybe. But it does make a difference to me.”
“I guess it would.”
“Yeah. And to talk about it, to admit it happened and call it by name. That helps a little bit. I’ve still got some things to work through.”
“I’ll miss you until you’re there again.”
She smiled at him, touched his arm. “It won’t be too long,” she said. “Because if you feel that way about it, Sam, then maybe everything’s going to be okay.”
LYDIA EYED THEIDLING MOTOR on Charlie’s Pride with no small amount of skepticism. “I’m afraid you’ll get me in the middle of the Brownbranch and throw me overboard,” she said. “I don’t know if I want to go.”
Charlie kept his hand on the throttle, ready to power it up.
“You can trust me,” he said and, right now, that was no small thing to say. You can trust me. “The middle of the lake is a good place to talk.”
Beside the Coca-Cola cooler at the marina, Charlie could see Cy shading his eyes and watching them. After everything that had happened to his niece, Cy Porter wasn’t letting Lydia out of his sight.
Once she had climbed into his boat and had pointedly strapped herself into a life preserver, Charlie directed them away from shore. “Look, Lydia,” he said over the throbbing engine, the churning water. “We’ve fished enough people out of the brink for one week. This isn’t anything that you really need to worry about.”
“Okay.” She focused somewhere past his left knee. “I’ll stop.”
“You can drive this thing better than I can, anyway.”
She didn’t argue with that. “I can.”
Charlie knew her well enough to know she’d wait until they got to Humbert’s Finger before she asked any more questions. And he was right. That’s exactly what she did. She picked words carefully.
“Are you ever going to be able to forgive her?” she asked.
One beat. Two. “I don’t condone the lying. But I think she may have taken the only route that was possible for her to take.”
Then, after another long, uncomfortable silence, “Are you ever going to be able to forgive me?”
This was the same question he’d been asking himself for days. Now that it was all over, could they go back to the place they had been? He had to wonder.
Once Charlie had driven the boat to a protected place where the Brownbranch rocked them and the birds serenaded them and the breeze danced over their heads, he cut the engine. “I have to be honest, Lyddie. If we had switched places, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“That’s something you never do know,” she said, “until it happens.”
A mallard flew overhead, whistling with its wings. They both watched it. He said, “You had to believe her. It was your job.”
“Don’t let me off the hook like that, Charlie. I had to believe her because I had to believe her. Somebody needed to.”
“I knew there had to be something behind what she’d said. That’s why I wrote her that note that day. I wanted to talk to her.”
“And I stopped you from that, too.” Lydia shoved her hands inside her pockets.
“Yes. But you had to.”
“I’m a different person than I was a week ago.” Lydia gazed at the sky. “All of us are.”
Charlie hazarded a sharp l
augh at that. “Glad you counted me in on that.” Another duck flew overhead.
“I can’t be everything you wanted me to be, Charlie. I failed you everywhere.”
“I’ve thought about things, Lyddie. How we looked at each other once. How we see each other now.”
“Which way do we turn, Charlie? I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s a bigger test of faith to stand by someone when you have doubts.”
“And maybe it isn’t. I took the human way out.”
“You didn’t take any outs at all.”
She was silent.
“I have to think about that a lot,” he said. “I’m trying to see it through your eyes.”
“Now that it’s over, I’m not sorry. There are things in Shelby’s life that have been brought to light. There are things in my own heart that have been healed.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Someday. Maybe when it isn’t quite so fresh and tender. In spite of her mistakes, Shelby took me down a road I needed to follow.”
“It won’t be easy.” He ate a sunflower seed out of a bag and spit the hull into the water. “But I still care about you, Lyddie.”
“You’re right.” She stared at the water. “It won’t be. But maybe in time…”
“I’d like the chance to sort through everything that’s in my heart. Will you give me that chance?”
“I’m the one, Charlie, who ought to be asking for second chances.”
Charlie was looking at her in an odd way. “You may have saved Shelby, because you stuck by her. Do you realize that?”
“I didn’t know I deserved to be cared about the way you care about me, do you know that? I didn’t know I deserved to be loved the way He loves me.”
“Well,” Charlie said very quietly, finally reaching across the orange block of life jacket and touching her face. “Now, you do.”
“Yes.” And her eyes met his head on.
RUMORS FLY FAST in Shadrach because it is the way of every small town. Everyone along Main Street today felt the buzz in the air. Of course the news had started at the counseling office at the high school. Spine-tingling, if it was true.
In the windows at the bank, the tellers counted money with a little less snap and a little more smile. Patrice Saunders’s dog even got two dog bones at the drive-through window instead of one. Cy Porter, who usually wouldn’t leave Viney Creek Marina as long as there was a chore to be done, could be seen mid-afternoon just strolling through town with Jane at his side. Mo Eden carried her basket full of bandages across the road for health class and, when the wind came up and took a few, she laughed and strewed a few more.
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