“Like from chicken pox?”
Not really. “Sort of.”
J.R. jabbed at the mark. “Did you sort of get chicken pox?”
On Marcus’s hands, nine years of work had recorded themselves in nicks and slices and scrapes, in the occasional stupid gash or concrete burn. But yeah, the knuckle scar stood out the most. The only one Marcus couldn’t explain. “My best friend finally told me she was raped, years before I knew her. I couldn’t stop hitting things. Including a porch beam.” Definitely not the way to talk to a five-year-old.
“J.R., are you being a pest?” Pamela’s face popped into the doorway.
“No way, Mom.” J.R. straightened and lifted his face to beam at her. “I’m talking to Mr. Brenner so he doesn’t get bored.”
“Mr. Brenner, is that true?”
“Yeah.”
Pamela folded her arms. Shiny, pink nails tapped above her elbow. “Would you like to be bored for a little while?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t mind kids.”
“See, Mom?”
She smiled. “Don’t touch any of Mr. Brenner’s things, or get in his way.”
“I know. You making bread today, like you said?”
“Yes, I am. And if Mr. Brenner tells you he’d like to be bored, you come play with your brothers.”
“He won’t want to be bored.” J.R. hunched again to study Marcus’s tools, hands behind his back. “He likes me already.”
Over the next half hour, the yeasty aroma of baking joined the house-pervading scent of pine, and J.R.’s words pumped like a full-blast hose. His best friends at school were Mike and Mike, who didn’t actually have the same name, since they were Mike O. and Mike S. His favorite thing to eat was pizza, after he’d picked off all the toppings but the ham, but he only got to eat it on “special days.”
Probably a nutrition thing. Probably normal in a house where the mother baked bread from scratch rather than giving the kid her credit card and a collection of takeout menus. Well, Marcus probably hadn’t been ordering dinner by kindergarten. More like second grade. A year before he learned how to work the washing machine.
Some people might question her skills as a mom, but she’d been a good one, overall. He’d learned to be responsible, not only for himself, but for her, too. And responsibility was a thing every man should learn, as soon as he was old enough to understand it.
Marcus shoved history away and focused on J.R.’s favorite toy, a Lego pirate ship that he set on the bathroom counter.
“Don’t you have to go to work soon?” J.R. said after reciting his holiday wish list.
Marcus pressed the last tile in place. “I’m at work.”
“No-o, you’re at my house.”
“Your dad’s paying me to work for him. This is my job.”
“You going to come every day now, since it’s your job?”
Marcus leaned back on his heels and removed his kneepads. “I’ll only be here today. Tomorrow I’ll work at somebody else’s house.”
“You go to a different house every day?”
“Well, I stay till my work’s done. I’ll be done with your house today.”
“My dad’s a Constabulary agent.” The word fell easily. J.R. must have heard it a thousand times.
“I know.” Marcus stood and hoisted his toolbox. Next up, the closet door.
“Know what he does? It’s real important. He stops people when they got hate stuffed in ’em, so they don’t hurt no one. And he takes bad books away, and he takes the people to a place, and other people at the place teach ’em that hate’s bad. You know hate’s bad?”
Marcus fought to keep his balance in this conversation. “Yeah. I do.”
“Me too, but guess what, some people don’t know that. What’re you called, Mr. Brenner?”
“Um, I’m a contractor.”
“That’s important, too,” J.R. said. “If you didn’t come, people’s doors would keep getting stuck, and they’d keep saying bad words. Know what Mom calls me?”
Besides J.R. and all the rest?
“I’m her hoarder.” J.R.’s grin showcased a dimple. “Know what that is? It means I’m good at finding stuff. I’ll bring you some stuff I found, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll be in your brothers’ bedroom.”
“You going to fix the door that won’t shut?”
“Yeah.”
J.R. nodded, suddenly somber. “That’s the bad-words door.”
Tiles and a door weren’t the only issues with this house. Marcus washed his hands in the bathroom sink, and the water’s reluctance to drain gave away a clogged trap. Halfway up the stairs, he bumped the banister and it wobbled. Hadn’t anybody noticed this stuff?
The bedroom door couldn’t possibly have been installed by a professional. The slope of it caught at the top of the frame when it was only three-quarters closed. Marcus had barely started to adjust it when J.R. blew into the room like a dwarf tornado.
“Here’s some of my stuff! I keep it all hid, in different places. I even got some stuff buried outside, but don’t tell Mom. I’ll set it all out, and then you can look, okay?”
“Okay,” Marcus said.
“Don’t look yet, or I’ll take it all back.”
Marcus pawed through his toolbox for the electric screwdriver. These hinges would have to be reset. “I’m not looking.”
“Okay!” J.R. said half a minute later. “Turn around and see my stuff.”
Marcus turned. The shaggy green rug was littered. Two bird eggs and a nail file. The tail of some glass animal, probably a horse. A square yellow scrap torn carefully from a phone book. What looked like the back of an earring. And a photograph.
That wasn’t what it looked like.
Yeah. It was. Marcus snatched it up.
“You like it? I call her the Red Face Lady,” J.R. said.
His fingers threatened to crinkle the picture. A four-by-six glossy, not something printed from an Internet search. The girl’s extinguished blue eyes seemed to look at something over Marcus’s shoulder.
“Mr. Brenner! Where’re you going with my picture?”
In the kitchen, Pamela stood over the counter, sleeves rolled up, hands and arms caked with flour. She added some to her dough and worked it in with the heels of her hands. “How’s ev— Marcus?”
“J.R. gave me this.” His voice was like wire.
Her face jumped in recognition before Marcus turned the photo toward her. She knew where it had come from, who this young woman was with her face half lifeless and half obscured in blood. A storm cloud rolled into Pamela’s eyes as she snatched the picture from Marcus. Her thumbprint smeared the corner with flour.
“How did he get this?”
She posed her question to the air, not to Marcus. He couldn’t have answered, anyway. What kind of people kept a photograph of a brutalized corpse?
J.R. jumped over the threshold of the kitchen and barreled into his mother. “Don’t be mad, Mom, I just found her. She’s the Red Face Lady.”
“Where did you find her?”
“In Dad’s office.”
“J.R.” Pamela set the photograph facedown on the granite counter and knelt to meet her son’s eyes. “Did you go into Dad’s desk?”
J.R. tucked his chin.
“We don’t go into Dad’s desk.”
He balled up his hands and pushed them against his clenched eyes.
“If you do this again, you’ll be in big trouble, Jason Ronan. You understand me?”
J.R. nodded.
“It’s time to go play with Dirk and Kyle for a little while.”
The boy dashed from the room. Pamela remained on her knees for a long moment, then stood. She turned back to her bread dough and thumped the heel of her hand against it.
Marcus took a step back
. The yeasty smell soured at the back of his throat. Enemy territory. He should go back to work, collect his check, and get out of here. He shouldn’t say another word that Pamela could construe as suspicious and report to her husband.
He rounded the counter to face her. “Who is she?”
Not is, though. Was. The sudden violence of the woman’s death flashed in front of his eyes. And Jason kept a picture of that where his kid could find it.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking.” Pamela pressed a thumb all the way through the dough to the countertop. “But it probably is as bad as you’re thinking.”
A trophy. One less dangerous Christian on the streets. God, did he—?
One hand ruffled her curls and left behind a streak of flour. “I’m sorry, Marcus. All I can say is that Jason has … plenty of incentive to take his work seriously. And hopefully the future is safer than the past because of him.”
“Safer?”
“Obviously, he hasn’t fully succeeded yet, but statistics show improvement.” She shrugged and leaned her elbows on the counter.
She assumed Marcus was pro-Constabulary, of course. The sour taste crept into his mouth. How many more pictures did Jason have in his desk? Marcus had to search that office. Not to count the dead, but to protect the living. Jason must store information there, too, not only trophies.
Pamela straightened and stepped away from the counter. Understanding glittered in her green eyes. “It’s upsetting, I know. I had this friend in college who called herself a Christian, and … of course, back then, it was still legal. ‘Freedom of religion.’ Gosh, we were naive, weren’t we? Less than a generation ago.”
“Pamela, I—”
“But re-education is snowballing into a success. Maybe within my kids’ lifetimes, you know? I hold onto that.”
“Not everybody wants that.” He’d be under arrest by the end of the day if he didn’t shut up.
She dusted some more flour onto her hands and kneaded the dough, this time wearily. “You’re right, unfortunately, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll look back at our generation and say, yeah, there was resistance for a while, but they were always going to fail.”
She looked up at him and smiled.
Words would achieve nothing. Heck, she’d married a Constabulary agent. But that was okay. He didn’t need words. He had actions.
“I’ll get back to work,” he said, and Pamela nodded. “Oh, and you’ve got a loose railing halfway up the stairs. It could come off.”
She waved a dismissal. “I don’t think so. It’s been like that for a year.”
He could argue, but that would require more words. He’d run out. He returned to the closet door and attacked the job while her voice ricocheted in his head. Always going to fail.
No, he wasn’t.
He hadn’t failed Aubrey.
Not yet.
He finished in an hour. He packed up his tools, left them in the bedroom, and slipped down a carpeted hallway to the only room that could be Jason’s office. From the other side of the house, J.R. and his brothers reenacted a demolition derby with vrooming engines, screeching tires, and occasional shouts of, “Crash!” None of them would be sneaking up behind him. Or telling their mom what he was doing.
The French doors’ decorative glass blurred the room behind them. He could make out a desk, a painting on the far wall. Nothing else.
If the Constabulary really was executing people, who would know? Not like re-education prisoners were allowed visitors. If you never saw someone again, you assumed they were choosing a life in custody over a denial of faith. But what if …
His shoulders locked into a spasm. Jim. Karlyn. Frank. They could all be dead.
God, no. Please.
He had to know. He had to get more information, something on the other side of this door that would help him stop Jason. His hand gripped the door knob.
Locked.
What? How had J.R. gotten the picture? Pamela must have done this only minutes ago. The doors locked from inside, easy to pick with a paper clip. Too bad he didn’t have one. Or enough time to find one. He tried the other door, as if Pamela might have overlooked it. Locked, too. He ran his hand along the door trim.
No key, only dust.
17
By six o’clock, the thirst had become an ache in his throat. He parked the truck and marched across the parking lot to the automatic doors and into the grocery store. A bar would have been more ceremonial, but he didn’t care about ceremony. Anyway, the drive home passed this store first.
Almost nine years without a test of willpower. It was time.
He hadn’t come in on the grocery side. He walked down the main aisle between the greeting cards and the baby clothes, cut across through the shoe department. He passed other shoppers but didn’t see them. Didn’t see much of anything but the hanging red signs marking the grocery aisles, overhead and across the store, flags on his horizon. Especially aisle 6. Liquor.
This was better than a bar. He couldn’t order one drink here. He’d have to buy a bottle and pour one glass. Then he’d have to be strong enough to pour the rest out.
Call Lee.
He froze and almost got run over by a cart.
“Sorry,” muttered the cart’s owner, a spectacled kid in flannel pants and a beater shirt.
Call Lee.
What, did some part of him think he needed her permission? He didn’t. He started to walk again. His throat closed around the thirst and held onto it. His hand dug into the worn pocket of his jeans, pulled out the phone, and dialed.
“Marcus?”
His mouth opened, but no words came.
“Marcus, are you there?”
“Yeah.”
She waited, then, “Did you mean to call me?”
Not really. “I’m going to have a drink tonight. Then I’ll come over to your house. For ice cream or something. And you can see that I had just one.”
Yeah, this was a good plan. Should have done it a long time ago. His strides ate the distance to aisle 6. Soon, he’d hold the bottle in his hand. Ring it up. Drive home. Open it. Smell it and taste it.
“Marcus. Tell me where you are.” Her tight voice hit him like an open hand to his chest, pushing him back.
No. He wanted this. One drink. “I’m at the store. I’m going to buy some whiskey.”
“In your car? Or inside the store?”
“Lee, stop it. I didn’t call you so you’d talk me out of it.”
“Then you shouldn’t have called me.”
Good point. He closed the phone and shoved it back in his pocket.
Without her voice in his ear, he picked up his pace. He crossed another main aisle and entered the grocery section. Against his thigh, the phone buzzed. And buzzed. He let it.
Pick it up.
No, dang it. No.
Pick it up.
He pulled it out of his pocket and barked into it. “What.”
“You need to listen to me and do what I tell you.”
“I’m okay, Lee. This is good for me. A good test.”
“Stop walking.”
He halted at an end cap stocked with frozen pizza. “Okay, talk.”
“How many days?”
“I don’t need—”
“How. Many. Days?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, but the pain was somewhere else. “Eight years, ten months, sixteen days.”
“True or false: you are an alcoholic.”
His lungs shut down. He reached a hand to the frozen food case. “T-true.”
A sigh bled over the line. “All right. True or false: when you’re thirsty, you call me.”
“True.”
“Why do you call me?”
He should hang up. He was three aisles away from the goal. Did she think he was so pathetic
he couldn’t handle one drink? See, this is why he needed one. To prove to her. He was strong.
“Marcus.”
“I … I call you because … because I’m an alcoholic.”
“Yes.” The tension still gripped her voice, but something new held it too. Something gentle. “You are.”
“Lee.” He turned his back to aisle 6. His whole body shook.
“You need to walk out of the store, immediately. Focus on the door and don’t stop until you’re through it.”
He forced his feet to move. They were heavier now, as if he’d shifted from walking with the wind to walking against it.
“Marcus?”
“Yeah. I’m walking. Out. I’m getting out.”
“Good. Then you’re going to drive to my house, without stopping anywhere else.”
A last setting sunbeam hit his face as he stepped through the doors. His feet weighed less. He reached his truck and started driving.
By the time he pulled into Lee’s driveway, night had settled. She answered the door clad in a slate gray sweater and jeans. Fuzzy green house socks adorned her feet. She motioned him inside and locked the door behind him. Her eyes reflected the hint of blue in her shirt. They appraised him up and down, the way they probably scrutinized a trauma victim at work.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said.
A tub of chocolate ice cream, squeeze bottles of fudge and caramel sauce, and two deep bowls cradling spoons sat at one end of the counter. Miniature bowls formed a flawless line across the island. Chocolate chips, Oreo crumbles, nuts … everything but sprinkles, because she knew he wouldn’t eat them.
“Where’d you …?”
“The Kroger on the corner,” she said. “I shop the way you drive.”
“Lee.”
“Marcus.” Her mouth curved.
The mouth that would taste so right. He flattened the feelings before they could scrawl across his face for her to read. Lee. The things she gave him.
“Can you tell me what happened?” She pulled out the bar stools and motioned him to one, then perched on the other.
He let his body sink onto the stool, and everything hit again. He blinked against the images of Jim and Karlyn, shot or beaten or whatever had been done to that woman in the picture. A drink wouldn’t fix anything, but …
Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers) Page 12