Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers)

by Amanda G. Stevens

  No. Now, it was whoever the government decided might commit a crime like this one. But Pamela’s lips were forged down with resolve. Still not listening. He edged toward the door, toolbox in hand.

  “I should go.”

  Pamela sighed. “Thank you again for coming.”

  “No problem.” But time to get out of here.

  “I’d better go talk to J.R. Have a good night.”

  Marcus nodded, but halfway to the door, something weighted his feet.

  Five years old, waiting up in bed for Dad to come home. A rusty, long-forgotten spear jabbed his gut. It wasn’t the same. J.R.’s dad hadn’t been gone without a word for three years. J.R.’s dad lived here, and if Pamela was right, Jason was a decent father most of the time. Still, the ache didn’t let go. If right now, a floor above Marcus, a little boy sat with his spine against the headboard, knees up, counting minutes on the glowing clock …

  He turned to Pamela. “Um … do you think it’d help if I talked to him?”

  Her eyes widened a moment, green brightening in the kitchen light. “Would you? He thinks you’re a superhero.”

  “Sure.”

  “Mom doesn’t carry the same weight, you know? Jason will talk to him tomorrow, like he said. But since J.R. did this to prove your smartness …”

  Marcus followed her upstairs, into a darkened room brightened in one corner by a night light of some caped cartoon character. Sure enough, J.R. was sitting up in bed, covers pulled over his knees to his chin.

  Pamela sat on the side of his bed. “It’s way past sleep time, young man.”

  “I heard Dad’s voice downstairs. He coming up?”

  “Not right now, and I want you to go to sleep for tonight, okay? Dad’s still got a lot of work to do.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “But someone else is going to say good night.” She motioned Marcus past the doorway.

  J.R. jolted up to his knees and shoved away the covers. “Mr. Brenner! Did you fix that rail?”

  “Yeah.” Marcus stood at the foot of the bed and rubbed his neck.

  “And you got your toolbox!”

  Oh, heck. If J.R. asked to open it, he’d have to say no. Better detour the topic. “I’m going home, J.R., but I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Mom said I couldn’t watch you working because I was bad, but I didn’t mean to.”

  Marcus stepped closer. “I know. But listen, J.R., from now on, if you want to test if something’s broken, first ask your mom, and she’ll tell you a safe way. She doesn’t want you to fall or get hurt. And I don’t want you to, either.”

  “We’re friends, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How about you come over sometimes and play?”

  Pamela’s smile carried through the near-dark. “We’ll see, J.R. Now it’s time to go to bed.”

  “Okay, Mom.” J.R. lay down and pulled up the covers. “G’night, Mom. G’night, Mr. Brenner.”

  By the time Marcus climbed into his truck, the old ache had disappeared. He left Jason’s subdivision and didn’t stop driving till he was halfway home. He pulled into an empty parking lot, turned on the dome lights, and dug the crumpled pages from his toolbox. One was now smeared with a stripe of wood oil and sawdust.

  Ten minutes later, he’d deciphered enough of Jason’s writing to know who on this sheet had been arrested, who had a search warrant, and who was under surveillance. Search warrants were the most urgent, of course. Those homes could be raided at any time. Good thing this list contained addresses and not just names. Marcus chose one randomly, the only way he could choose, mapped it with his phone, and started driving. He’d warn them. Help them plan. Drive them to Ohio, if they couldn’t get there themselves. Whatever he had to do.

  The Constabulary was about to lose. And, Jason, you’re helping me win.

  29

  Aubrey should’ve gone to sleep in bed, so she didn’t have to drag herself upright on the couch when Marcus returned. It was 1:42. How did he function on less than six hours of sleep? Well, some people could. She just wasn’t one of them.

  He lumbered into the living room without switching on the light.

  “Hey,” Aubrey whispered.

  He didn’t jolt at her presence, but he didn’t answer, either.

  “I was getting worried.” Until she fell asleep, that is.

  He sank down on one end of the couch. The middle cushion lay between them. “Too late.”

  “For what?”

  Indy had followed him and now began the knee-nudging routine. Marcus leaned forward, and his palm rubbed the top of her head. A minute of silence said he wasn’t going to talk, but he didn’t get up to leave, either.

  “Marcus? I thought you’d be back in an hour or two. Where’d you go?”

  The silence tightened. Even in the dark, Aubrey could picture the tension that must have seized his jaw.

  “Tape,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Police tape. Yellow. Crime scene.”

  “What? Where? Somebody we know?”

  His hand abandoned Indy’s head, clenched around his neck instead. “No.”

  “Then who are they, how’d you find them?”

  No answer. Father God, please comfort those people.

  “Marcus? Were there … kids?” Babies, wailing for their mothers, dislocated from arms of love.

  “Just at the one house.”

  “Wait, how many houses did you go to?”

  He locked his hands behind his head and pulled, a slow, steady stretch of his neck. A long breath filled him, then released. “Three.”

  “And they were all … gone?”

  “No. Just one.” His jacket rustled as he worked his right hand out of the sleeve and let it slump to the floor.

  “But the other two—you got to them? You helped them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They must be so grateful. You saved them.” She skimmed her fingers over his shoulder, but he stiffened. Why the defeat? What did he expect—that he’d never lose?

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what to do. About your baby.”

  “You’re doing everything you can.”

  Sometimes, the automatic trigger of her words spoke truth she hadn’t understood until it entered her heart in her own voice. What this man was attempting was brave, was insane. She’d accused him of a lack of effort. Her cheeks burned.

  “I’m trying to find a way. To find him. He’s got to be in foster care. If I could get a list of the homes … but he could be anywhere.”

  That fact pelted her heart. “It’s been four days.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you a father?”

  He darted a startled glance her way. “No.”

  “Then you don’t know.”

  Quiet wrapped them up again, in a blanket too thin to keep out all the cold truths. Aubrey shivered and hugged her aching self. Minutes dripped away, and he said nothing. She should leave him alone.

  “Okay, well, good night.” She was halfway to her feet before his whispered words skewered the darkness.

  “It won’t be your fault. If she gets hurt.”

  A lurking weight lifted. He did forgive her. Then the subtext caught up with her relief. “You think it’ll be yours?”

  As soon as the question left her mouth, she knew he wouldn’t answer it. He laced his fingers above his neck again and pulled his chin to his chest.

  “Marcus,” she said. “Lee decided to help you. As a mature, intelligent adult.”

  She dropped back onto the couch, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “That whole ‘carrying the weight of the world’ thing doesn’t work for anyone but God, you know.”

  “Go to
bed, Aubrey.”

  “You actually believe the well-being of … everybody … is up to you?”

  A harsh sound broke from him, not a laugh. “Everybody? No. My family, yes. And Lee.”

  He’d said that before, about Christians, but she hadn’t realized … “Marcus, seriously, who made you responsible?”

  He turned his head, barely enough to meet her gaze, and frowned as if she’d asked a meaningless question. From the kitchen, the refrigerator cycled on. At Marcus’s feet, Indy yawned and sighed.

  Aubrey angled her knees toward his. “Come on. Let it go.”

  He lurched to his feet. “Good night.”

  He trudged toward the hall that led to the basement, one frail man trying to be more, shoulders bowed under the weight he wouldn’t relinquish. Aubrey closed her eyes. Dear Father God, don’t let him be crushed before he gives it up to You.

  30

  Cabin fever didn’t creep up on a person. It tackled when another nightmare chased her awake to stare at someone else’s ceiling, to realize this ceiling, these walls, this floor, were boundaries without a foreseeable end. Aubrey stood to one side of the window to raise it, struggling a moment with the awkward angle. The December sunrise slanted a chilly, red-tinged light into the kitchen. A hair-raising current rolled over her arm, but at least the air was moving. Her fingers ran along the wood sill. She wouldn’t even have to cross the house to the back door. She could pop the screen out, hop up there, drop down to the other side. Outside.

  Better stop tempting herself. She reached across and up to slide the window back down. As her fingers wrestled the stiff lock, joyous toenails sounded from the other room. That was Indy’s Marcus-dance, but Marcus was already gone. The couch was empty; she’d checked. Aubrey padded toward the living room.

  She rounded the corner and yelped. Facing the bookshelf, Marcus jolted. Some kind of figurine plummeted toward the floor, rescued by his left hand a second before impact. He straightened and whirled to face her.

  “You weren’t here.” Her words shot out like an accusation. “I looked. Where were you?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Basement.”

  “Working out?” She hadn’t missed the gym equipment across from his workshop.

  “No.” His mouth drew down. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

  Oh. His back. But he wore the same navy shirt from yesterday. “Um, did you sleep down there?”

  He gave a short nod and looked away. A few steps farther into the room shifted Aubrey’s line of sight. Part of the back of the bookcase lay across the shelf like a lowered ramp. The rectangular hole in the wall gaped only a foot across and maybe half as deep.

  “Quite a piece of work there,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Marcus set the figurine inside the space. A whole throng of them clustered atop a leather-bound book. He’d cut a hole in the wall to hide his Bible. Kind of extreme, but she shouldn’t be surprised. If Marcus did something, he did it to the hilt. And the figures … Aubrey came closer. Not resin as she’d first thought … wood. Smooth, some of them, but others barely represented people. Or animals. That was definitely a sheep.

  Ohhh …

  “You’re making a nativity scene,” Aubrey whispered, as if his neighbors could overhear.

  Marcus nodded.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I wanted one.”

  “But why? You can’t put it out.”

  Another shrug, and he turned to raise the panel over the little trove.

  “Wait,” Aubrey said. “Could I see them? Would you mind?”

  He looked surprised. “Sure. I mean, I don’t mind.”

  Wood in various stages of roughness grazed her fingertip. Some hadn’t been sanded yet at all. Each piece revealed its role as she studied it, though. The still faceless shepherds announced themselves by the hooks in their hands and the worship in their poses. One of them knelt. Joseph and Mary appeared finished, right down to the fingernails.

  “This is amazing, Marcus.”

  He shrugged again, but a satisfied light crept over his face.

  She drew out baby Jesus for a closer look. He was fashioned separately from the manger, a half-curled infant wrapped in detailed strips of cloth.

  “I started with Him,” Marcus said. “It made the scaling a little harder. But He was the reason everybody else was there.”

  “No halo?”

  “Well, it’s not in the Bible. And they didn’t need a halo to know Him.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me.” Aubrey turned the tiny figure between her fingers. Marcus’s baby Jesus slept with the slightest wrinkle between the eyebrows, caught up in a newborn dream. One hand lay open at His side, and one curled beside His head. The realness breathed from the wood. This could have been any baby, could have been Elliott, yet at the same time, His identity was carved into Him, something somber but peaceful.

  Aubrey set him back inside the wall’s space. In her fascination with the figures, she’d missed that more than one book composed their foundation. Marcus had three Bibles.

  “You distribute?” On top of all his other Constabulary crimes.

  Marcus’s gaze followed hers. “Oh. No. I don’t.”

  “Then—” Aubrey’s lungs paused. A braid of ribbons peeked from gilded pages. That wasn’t just any Bible. She tugged it from the middle of the stack before Marcus could stop her. “This is Karlyn’s.”

  In the moment of silence, Marcus’s face weighed options. Aubrey didn’t give him time to choose one.

  She yanked the bookmark farther into view. “There are eight ribbons, two each of burgundy, magenta, rose, and baby pink. Karlyn’s crazy about pink, every shade of it. I made this for her when we were in high school.”

  “Okay,” Marcus said.

  “Okay? How’d you—” Wait … surely he hadn’t … “Did you get these after the arrest?”

  “No.”

  Forgotten fragments fit together, but Aubrey’s brain stumbled over the complete puzzle. Karlyn hadn’t concealed her Bibles in a brilliant place. She’d gotten rid of them altogether.

  “I thought it’d make them safe.” Cynicism serrated his words.

  His hands, warm and rough in their momentary brush against Aubrey’s fingers, closed around the Bible to take it, to put it away. Aubrey held on.

  “This is Karlyn’s,” she said.

  Marcus nodded.

  “This is the Bible that—” Her throat closed around the past. “I found it. In Karlyn’s locker. I told her I was going to turn her in, and she said—my boyfriend’s name was Mark, and she told me, read Mark’s book first, and then if you want to turn me in, go ahead.”

  Barely a smile drifted over Marcus’s face. “That sounds like her.”

  “She called me Salmon sometimes. She said I wasn’t afraid to swim upstream.”

  Marcus nodded as if the name still fit.

  “It was a thing with her,” Aubrey said. “Animal nicknames.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait a minute, she gave you one?” He’d been more than a church acquaintance, then. Karlyn and Jim had been close to him.

  “Um.” Marcus broke eye contact, rubbed his neck. “Pit Bull.”

  “You gnaw on small children at unpredictable moments?”

  “Once I latch onto something, somebody’s got to pry my jaws apart. That’s, um, what she said, anyway.”

  Pit Bull. Yes. And of course, Karlyn would see it. Sometimes, she saw people better than they saw themselves. Aubrey’s hands trembled around the Bible. “God used her to save me. I always wanted to be used like that. I never was.”

  “Not yet,” Marcus said.

  God would never give her that kind of privilege now. Aubrey thrust the book at him and thrust the feelings to the back of her mind. “You can put it away.”

  He slid it inside the hole in t
he wall, tucked the ribbon back inside, and pressed the wood panel upward. The hole disappeared, even the seams. He had created a perfect fit.

  Marcus swiveled toward her as if seeing her for the first time. “Why don’t I know you?”

  “Why would you?”

  “If you’re Karlyn’s best friend, if you’ve been a Christian since high school, why were you never at the Table?”

  A flood of memories seared her cheeks. The dear people she’d disappointed. The verbal grenades Janelle had lobbed at her. The way Abe refused to meet her eyes.

  “You’re new, I take it,” Aubrey said.

  Marcus watched her and waited.

  “I … left. Before Elliott was born.”

  “Oh,” he said. “But you could’ve brought him, if you were careful.”

  “I was …” I was Judas. I was a coward. I was asked to leave. “I was really busy when he came.”

  After a weighing moment, he nodded. “Well, I’ve got to get going.”

  “Okay,” Aubrey said, but he was already halfway from the room.

  From the muted beating of the water, the man showered for less than five minutes. He then claimed the kitchen with more clatter than usual. If this was how he typically made breakfast, he’d been diligent in regulating the noise level the last few days. Aubrey chose the brick red sweater for today, got dressed, and ventured toward the aroma of eggs and sausage.

  “Want some?” Marcus said without looking over his shoulder.

  “I do, yes.” She peered around his arm into the frying pan. She preferred an omelet to over-easy, but if he wanted to cook for her, she wouldn’t complain. Five eggs. The man must crave cholesterol.

  The spatula flipped each egg without perforating the yolk.

  “I can never do that,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Anything I try to flip goes everywhere. Those things would be bleeding yellow by now if I was making them.”

  Crinkles formed around his eyes, somehow a deeper smile than any mouth could make. “Just takes practice.”

  Could she get his eyes to do that again? “Pancakes flop over and leak batter out the sides. Grilled cheese loses the cheese.”

  “Come on.”

  “I am a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad cook.”