Seek and Hide: A Novel (Haven Seekers)

by Amanda G. Stevens

  For a minute, she gazed at his hand as if trying to see the injury through the tape. Then she sighed. “Their only real evidence was my physical resemblance to the sketch. The foster mother attempted to identify me in a lineup, but she was less certain than she’d been in the hospital, under the stress of receiving sutures in her arm. She’s also African-American, and cross-racial testimony is considered less reliable. After the lineup, they were unable to obtain a warrant for my house.”

  Something like hope barreled toward him. “So what will they do now?”

  “Unless new evidence surfaces, nothing. I have no motive for involvement, no connection to the child’s mother. I have no alibi for the time of the kidnapping, but I do have proof I worked a double shift at the hospital the day and night before. That I would be sleeping at home is reasonable.”

  “Lee, are you saying … it’s over?”

  “Agent Mayweather doubtlessly intends to watch me. But yes.”

  “It’s—” The back wheels skidded. She was free, and he was going to kill her in a car wreck.

  “Pull over, Marcus.”

  “Just some ice.” Ice that had sent his truck into a ditch. Ice that had stolen Aubrey.

  Feelings swamped his chest. They’d been doing that too often since this morning, when he’d sipped coffee at the new dining table with Chuck and Belinda. Don’t feel it. But he had to. He couldn’t make it stop.

  “Marcus. Please.”

  He signaled, turned into the next lot, and parked.

  “At my house, Mayweather recognized you,” Lee said.

  “I contracted for him a couple times. Handyman stuff.”

  Surprise rippled over her face, but she nodded and turned to face the window.

  “He knew about the hair dye,” Marcus said. “Even though you darkened it back.”

  “He speculated based on the fact I didn’t fully match the description.”

  Yeah. Okay. Marcus tried to picture her with bleached hair, but it just didn’t fit. “You said you were wearing makeup, too?”

  “And Goodwill was happy to take the electric yellow suit.”

  A smile tugged at his face. “You should’ve taken a picture.”

  She smiled and stretched her legs under the dashboard, then settled back in her seat. But their last conversation hung like smoke around them. He waited, but Lee said nothing.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” he said.

  “I am.”

  “Nobody did anything to you?”

  “The lawyer’s presence diffused the situation. I’m all right, Marcus.” Her head turned slightly to gaze out the windshield. Lines of weariness pulled at her profile. But she was here. Free. Safe, from this. God had chosen to save her, and maybe from other things too, maybe soon. Thank You.

  “Good,” he said.

  “What about you?”

  “I couldn’t get you back. But now you are.”

  She turned to meet his eyes. “You seem wounded.”

  “It’s nothing. It didn’t bleed very long.”

  “The incompetent attempt to treat it looks disturbingly familiar. But I wasn’t referring to your hand.”

  He had to tell her, needed to, couldn’t, didn’t want to. Lee allowed minutes to fade away without words, without movement. She wouldn’t ask again. She’d let him choose to say it, or not. They sat in the truck till it started to get cold. Marcus turned the key and cranked the heat on high, then let her gaze hold his.

  “Today’s day three,” he said.

  The hands in her lap parted. The fingers laced together.

  “And … it’s …” He pushed out the rest of the words. “Hard, but I’m getting back up again.”

  She nodded, and a moment stretched, then snapped. “I had a role in this.”

  “You were right that I don’t listen. I didn’t listen to—”

  Lee arched her eyebrows, but then the curiosity drained from her eyes. Something else filled them, something that knew more than he’d said. “You’re not all right.”

  “No,” he whispered. Words crept from the hole inside him, up into his mouth. There they were, waiting. Aubrey’s gone. I tried, Lee. CPR. Maybe you could’ve brought her back. But I don’t think so.

  “When you’re ready, please allow me to help.”

  He nodded. His mouth opened to say the words, but he swallowed each bitter syllable back down, and other words poured instead. “We … when we talked, before, you said …”

  She stiffened instantly. She seemed to lean away from him, closer to the truck door.

  “I want to help too. With—what happened. To you. But I … you’re right. I don’t know what you need.”

  Her voice sliced quietly but without ice. “I don’t need assistance with the past.”

  Didn’t she? God, I don’t know what to do.

  “Please trust me in this,” she said.

  Her eyes weren’t hiding behind a cold mask. Maybe she was okay. “If you do need to talk, or anything, you’ll tell me?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m here.”

  “I know. Thank you.” Her fingers relaxed.

  If he reached for her hands, pulled them close, they would clench. They would pull away. The moment she’d looked at him as more than a patient, more than a friend—maybe he’d seen what he wanted to see. He put the truck in gear and pulled out onto the road.

  “Come over. Tonight. We’ll eat the lasagna.” Maybe then he’d be able to talk.

  Lee’s forehead furrowed. “You wouldn’t prefer my house for a discussion?”

  Oh. Of course. “There’s … nobody at my place now. Just me.”

  “Is this connected to the loss of your truck?”

  The road seemed to narrow. Marcus focused on the patch of wet blacktop up ahead, kept the truck moving toward it.

  “Is Aubrey responsible for the accident? Is she with the Constabulary?”

  “No.”

  “Where else could she find a haven, especially with an infant?”

  “I-I’ll tell you. But I have to get the words.”

  Lee turned to look out the window. “All right.”

  Marcus inhaled the silence around them, weighted but still easier to breathe than air clogged with endless words, trying to heal and tearing more things open. The pounding in his head settled to a vague throb, not hard to ignore. His hands slowly eased on the wheel.

  “I’m not going to stop,” he said quietly.

  Lee continued to face the window. “I assume you’re referring to your resistance movement.”

  The words seemed too impressive for skulking around yards and knocking on doors to offer warnings. But a fugitive’s child hid this morning in the home of strangers. An arrested woman’s Bible hid in a free woman’s storeroom.

  “I’ve got to do this.”

  “I didn’t expect otherwise.”

  “But you’re staying out of it.”

  Lee shifted to face him again, her eyes like lakes under sunshine. “That was the agreement.”

  “Okay.”

  Marcus coasted through a nearly red light, straight ahead when a right turn would have chopped ten minutes off the drive to Lee’s. She slid a glance at him, then leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Well, this road was pretty straight. He’d keep track of it in his peripheral vision. Lee’s eyelashes feathered over her cheekbones. Her hair drifted against the back of the seat and bared her neck. Soft. He didn’t have to hold her to know. Silence eased alongside them and warmed the spaces that didn’t need words.

  Epilogue

  Marcus didn’t last an hour into the film. Before Stewart and Novak shared their first kiss, Lee’s peripheral vision caught the twitching of his hands. He was a limp mass, shoulders tilted back against the couch, head lolled to one side. She should perhaps wake
him before that pose stiffened his neck, but the exhausted lines had eased from around his eyes, and she didn’t wish to bring them back.

  Her own eyelids felt swollen with needed sleep, but she could not allow herself to drift. The last thing either of them needed was for Marcus to witness a flashback nightmare. He wasn’t even aware they occurred. She stretched her legs, pointed her toes, and yawned. She curled deeper into the stuffed chair and attempted to refocus on the film. Marcus was right about one thing: these characters deserved no pity.

  The second incarnation of Novak turned out to be no more tolerable than the first. Willingness to throw one’s identity aside for a man was hardly a laudable trait.

  Identity. To distract herself from the characters that deserved everything they got, Lee studied Novak’s two looks. Very different, but she wore both well. Lee’s own recent attempt at makeup had been purposely more dramatic. She had cringed at her reflection, especially the lipstick, some hue between crimson and fuchsia and designated “Garish,” so aptly that Lee couldn’t help choosing it. She’d set out for the foster home aware of the possible consequences, yet not truly prepared when they knocked on her door in the form of Agent Mayweather.

  She’d sat in the Constabulary office for an entire night, waiting for the emergence of handcuffs, the uttering of Miranda rights. Yes, the guilty—even the unremorseful—often escaped justice, sometimes even after an interrogation by law enforcement; but this escape seemed unlikely for herself.

  And then, abruptly, she had escaped. Whether Lee had her own impassive face, that insufferable lipstick, her lawyer, an unreliable witness, or all of the above to thank—she didn’t care.

  Stewart and Novak began to yell at each other. Lee lowered the volume and darted a glance at the couch, but their outburst hadn’t wakened Marcus. Perhaps nothing would, now, until morning. That would be best for him.

  But no, as “The End” filled the screen, Marcus’s right hand jerked against the cushion. A gasp distorted his whimper.

  “Aubrey,” he said.

  Oh.

  Lee crossed her arms. The room had grown chilly over the last two hours. He jolted forward, and his gaze shot around the room. In search of Aubrey?

  “Marcus,” Lee said.

  The eyes that found hers held confusion, then recollection as they sprang to the TV. “Oh … I … missed the end.”

  “And the middle.”

  “Sorry. What did you think?”

  “They were all insufferable. I don’t see why you own it.”

  He rolled his shoulders, not a shrug but an attempt to loosen them. “Jimmy Stewart, I guess. And Hitchcock. But I never watch it.”

  “You could have mentioned that fact.”

  “Hey. I said you’d hate it.” His mouth should curve, tried to and failed.

  “Was your dream unpleasant?”

  His gaze tore away. Not unpleasant at all, then? Too pleasant to verbalize?

  Comprehension dripped into her mind. Here it was, the issue of which he couldn’t speak.

  “Your concern for my feelings is unnecessary,” Lee said. More sensible to open this topic, like a clean incision. If she didn’t, it would continue to fester.

  “What?”

  “You are … exploring possibilities with her?” Aubrey could give him a normal, healthy relationship. Most likely, she could think about intimacy without almost throwing up. He’d given Lee a decade to overcome herself. It was time for him to reach for someone else.

  Aubrey could give him children.

  Lee’s chest throbbed. She curled her fingers against her palm, trying to squeeze the stubborn life out of the part of herself that wondered how thick his hair would be between her fingers, how broad his palms would be against hers.

  He was staring at her. “Lee … what’re you talking about?”

  “You spoke her name as you woke up.”

  His face filled with shock, then with something she couldn’t name; he turned away too quickly. He lurched to his feet, shuffled the few steps to the low table, and pawed for the remote. For Lee, he switched the table lamp to a brighter setting before turning off the television. Then he stood in the center of the room, too still.

  “Marcus, obviously, I want you to find …”

  Happiness? Distress more accurately described the bow of his massive shoulders.

  “I hope you intended to tell me,” she said. “As a friend, I should be informed of—”

  “Aubrey’s dead.”

  The dull words trapped time and Lee’s breath, then released both at once. “Are you certain?”

  Was that a nod, or did his head simply duck to his chest?

  “If she’s vanished, there may be other—”

  “I found it. Her. The body.”

  In his home? She hadn’t been ill. So she was party to the loss of his truck, and perished in the accident?

  Marcus straightened and crossed the width of the living room, then slowly turned and paced back, likely unaware of his own movement.

  “Where is your truck? Can the Constabulary link you to the accident? To her, to … Is the child dead as well?”

  “No. Hiding. With some people. And it’s in the woods. The truck. And everything. It’s all in the woods.” His words dropped toward the floor, sluggish like a concussion victim’s, heavy like the treading of his feet.

  “Marcus, look at me.”

  When he finally did, his eyes held something that didn’t belong there, something that drained his essence.

  “Surely there were witnesses,” she said. “A car accident always involves—”

  “It was a dirt road, nobody saw. Everything’s hidden.”

  “Everything, including the body?”

  “She laid there. Until we found her.”

  “We?”

  “Me. And Chuck.”

  Was he working with someone else, then, after his vehement refusal of Sam’s assistance? “Would it be possible for you to start at the beginning?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I need you to elaborate.”

  Several times, Lee nearly allowed him to terminate the story. He struggled for every phrase. Halfway through, his pacing feet stopped midstride, and he sank onto the couch. She had no right to demand that he speak of this, but she had no choice, either. He might have overlooked a danger to himself.

  Finally, long minutes later, he lifted his head. Lamplight caught the sheen of his eyes. “Lee? Do you think she … hurt?”

  “No. She was likely unconscious.” Cerebral hemorrhage was more detail than he needed.

  Marcus bent double, stared at the carpet. “She’s buried in the woods, behind Chuck’s house. No stone or cross or … just in a tarp, wrapped up, in the ground. She should have a grave. She shouldn’t be dead.”

  No, she shouldn’t be dead, not with an infant to care for. Yet he would continue to trust the God that had permitted her to die. The God that might as well have swatted Marcus’s truck into the ditch and crushed it with an omnipotent finger.

  “I know it’s here,” he whispered. “The plan. I know I can’t screw it up, but—but I did. She’s dead because … if I just would’ve … sooner.”

  “Sooner what?”

  “Listened. To people. But I didn’t and now she’s …” A minute passed, then another. His hands curled up and surely pulled the raw skin, which she’d rewrapped with gauze before they started the movie. But he didn’t wince, merely sat, stonelike.

  Lee stretched her feet to the floor and sat forward but couldn’t tug his gaze to hers. “Do you believe yourself capable of defeating the Constabulary single-handedly?”

  “No.” The word snapped quietly.

  “Do you believe they can be defeated?”

  “They’ve got to be.”

  “Then allies are a necessity.”


  “Lee, I know. I’ve got some now. But she’s still dead.” He stood and trudged to the kitchen.

  Minutes later, he wandered back to the couch but did not sit. Steam wafted from the mug that both his hands encircled as if seeking warmth. Lee folded herself further into the chair and rested her chin on her knees. He might choose to speak, or he might not. Regardless, she would stay. If he wished her to leave, he would say so.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said quietly. “I know she had family. I should try to—”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t meet with them. I’d send a message. Or something.”

  “The risk is too great, Marcus. They would search for the child, as well as someone to blame. Either search might lead to you.”

  Marcus gazed into the mug he had yet to sip from. “Somebody should know.”

  “You know,” Lee said.

  “I met her a week ago. Somebody should do something for her, somebody that mattered to her.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  He slammed the mug down. Coffee sloshed onto the glass coaster, which might have just cracked.

  “Your attempt to memorialize her holds no meaning for her. You’d be doing it for yourself, prioritizing the dead before the living who still seek a haven.”

  He nodded. His face crumpled before he turned toward the wall. His promise to safeguard Aubrey lay across his bent shoulders, a yoke like a mountain.

  All of this on day three. “You’re thirsty. Right now.”

  He ducked his head.

  “Marcus.”

  “I … can’t talk anymore.”

  Her hand felt again what she’d done to him only days ago, the stunned yield in the turn of his jaw, first against her palm, then against the back of her hand. She’d known exactly how to break him down. What sort of person did that?

  He reclaimed his mug from the end table and sank back onto the couch. The thumb of his bandaged hand rubbed the mug’s handle. He’d split it almost exactly along the old scar, consistent even when breaking down. At least this time, he’d volunteered to let her rewrap it.

  “I’d have gone to the hospital. If it got bad.”