Why, even the morning I gave birth to Gwennie, I made our bed before leaving for the birthing center, she recalled with an upside-down smile.
Like reading her Bible each morning and then spending time in prayer, making the bed was a consecrated action ranking at the level with moral duty in Anna’s mind.
Dale had hustled her out the back door. The car was packed; Gwennie was in her seat and she was clipping her own seat belt as Dale threw the car into reverse when she remembered. The bed!
Dale had said, ‘Don’t worry! It’s not the end of the world!’ But he was wrong.
After that, everything went to pot: Earthquakes, missile attacks and absolutely useless credit cards.
Now, months later as she wound her way through the back roads of Kerkyra on an exceptionally warm morning with no aircon in the rental car, Anna acknowledged that leaving the bed unmade was not the trigger that had set all the other destabilizing events in motion. Initially, each setback, news report and argument seemed to stem from her leaving the bed in upheaval. She commiserated with Frodo from Tolkien’s trilogy who rushed out the door forgetting his pipe on the first morning of a long journey. The Hobbit’s experience was hers...
Anna reflected on her inner struggles concluding that God used the bed left messy as a personal object lesson. Slow to change, Anna was not simple minded but she was pragmatic. Yes, making the bed was keystone to routine and balance in her life but not if her schedule excluded interruptions from God.
Had my life, my lifestyle eliminated God’s supremacy as Lord or His leadership as Great Shepherd toward me?
Comparing her life now to the rigid routine of her recent past – a lifestyle of comfortable consistency, made Anna grimace. She had read once that foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of sound minds. Realizing that she had allowed her strict schedule to press God’s daily voice from her life, Anna concluded that she had become her own good shepherd.
There wasn’t much opportunity to see sheep or shepherds in action around Philadelphia but she had been to Greece a number of times. Not once did she see sheep alone or running about without restriction whether it be fence or dog or shepherd. Sheep did not shepherd themselves and if let alone, a single sheep was an imminently dead sheep.
Giggling from the now wide awake Gwyneth continued until Anna’s thoughts were thoroughly disrupted.
Grandpa Bernie said excitedly, “There is a street urchin peeping in the back window!”
Gwennie had wiggled free of her seat constraints. She was standing, facing the rear window waving and laughing. Bernie had cinched himself up to take a look at her humorous object when he saw the dust covered face of Guppo.
Pulling over, Anna and Bernie hopped out simultaneously from opposite sides of the car. Anna grabbed at the blurry figure of Guppo as he belatedly tried to make a run for it. Part hair and part ear remained in her grip and he let out a shriek as he struggled. When Bernie grasped the child’s arm, Anna shifted her hold.
She said, “Stop! Stop it! We are not going to hurt you. Hold still…” and other such commanding words in the Greek which caused Guppo to compose himself.
Bean got out from the front seat and came toward them with a package of baby wipes. Anna took one and made a clean circle on Guppo’s face.
Tears sprouted from his eyes when Anna asked, “Aren’t you the boy from last night? You ran to the inn ahead of us so they could prepare for our stay.”
He explained that he was the courier and then Guppo told Anna his desire to catch a ride to Avliotes.
Anna translated to Bean and Bernie their conversation. But it was growing hot standing in the sun and the older couple returned to the car.
After wiping him down with half a dozen wet wipes, Anna directed Guppo into the back seat next to Bernie. After some chit-chat between the Greeks, the boy grew silent and fell asleep.
Bean asked Anna for her mother’s Mousaka recipe and Anna patiently recited it as the other took notes. Afterward, Anna nonchalantly described Guppo’s encounter with the motorcyclist from the evening before. She hadn’t finished her tale when two motorcycles flashed by going in the other direction.
Guppo sat up, swiveling his head to watch the dust clouds behind them. He shouted at Anna and she shouted back. The boy opened the door and would have jumped from the moving vehicle if she hadn’t told him hotly that she would pull over.
Guppo wretched free from Bernie’s hold and ran from the slowing rental car. Mr Adams trotted after him the moment the car stopped.
Bean asked, “Well, what was that all about?”
“He was yelling that the man on the motorcycle would kill him if he caught him,” Anna said nervously.
“Really! Who was the man? And why would he want to harm a child?” Bean inquired, hoping to understand more of the unraveling mystery. She set her reading glasses aside and with resignation, placed her recipe notebook in the glove box.
Anna opened her door. She said, “I think they must be part of the New Dawn group and the boy misled them. He lied to them... about us.”
Sleek café motorbikes with men dressed in black leathers came screeching to a dusty halt in front of the car. Gwennie started wailing. She had been asking for water for some minutes but everyone had ignored her in the confusion of Guppo’s exit.
Anna handed the baby bag off to Bean and then turned to find a short thickset man standing intimidatingly near her.
In fluent Greek, she said, “Hello there! We’ve been waiting for you!”
Chapter 14 Karlo
Bernie came puffing and limping back, only to find a couple of shiny black motorcycles parked next to the rental car. Bean’s window was down and Gwyneth was climbing about the backseat singing a World War Two cadence that her great-grandfather taught her.
“Coffee in the arm-y… say its mighty fine but to me and my bud-dy… taste like iodine! Ohhh, Mommy I don’t want to go but I have too-ooo…” she wailed happily indifferent to all that was happening around her.
Nearby, standing in the shade of a busy cypress tree, Anna stood talking with two men dressed in black. When Anna’s eyes shifted to the approaching Mr Adams, the motorcyclists wheeled about to face him.
Speaking Greek, the stocky, shorter man who was simply called Karlo by his fellow agents asked Anna about the elderly man as Bernie drew near. She told him that he and his wife were traveling with her and the baby.
Karlo said, “Ask the old man where he hid the boy.”
Anna nodded and then said to Mr Adams, “He wants to know where you hid the boy.”
Clutching his side as he had a stitch from trotting after Guppo who easily outdistanced him, Bernie replied,, “Anna, you know! I didn’t hide him! The little chimp ran off.”
Anna told the men that Mr Adams had run after the boy but the short spokesman responded, “He lies. Americans are such liars. Ask him again. Where did he hide the child?”
So she asked again. Bernie said, “What a jackanapes… Tell him to go jump in a lake. No, don’t tell him that but ask him if he is a Frenchman…”
Hesitant, Anna interpreted the old man’s question.
Karlo nodded toward Bernie and said, “Yes, on my father’s side although I never learned the language. And how did you know I was French?”
Bernie was saying, “Yes, he is! I knew it! Yes, he is!” but Anna was redirecting the conversation to keep Bernie and all of them from further complications.
“As you see, he gets very excited… He loves the French meals… bouillabaisse and all that. We may be traveling through France on our way to Britain as we have friends in the UK,” she said hoping to derail an impending conflict.
Bernie decided to take the conversation into his own sphere and in French he said, “You jackanapes, go take a dive into a lake!” He laughed and then repeated his insult before Anna could explain to Bernie that they did not speak French although the tough, short one had a French father. Bernie, disgusted at this bit of information, turned back to the car. In the meantime, Anna
was left to explain.
Improvising, Anna said, “It seems he is very excited about the prospect of eating French food and it has worn him out. He is going to take an afternoon nap.”
The men laughed.
Bernie looked back and sneered at them but they took no notice.
Bean told her ex-husband, “They looked through the car. I was so relieved we left that bogus carry-on bag at the bed ‘n breakfast.” She held her booklet, Great Tips and Diverting Trivia in her left hand and a pen in right. “You haven’t lost your touch, Berlin Billie. I really don’t know what those two scoundrels would have done to us if they had found that bag… They said they were looking for the boy but surely, he is too large to be hiding in our suitcases!”
“They searched the car?” he asked with a shake of his head.
Bean nodded.
Bernie said, “The thickset one is a frog! He couldn’t find a noodle on a plate of pasta.”
Gwyneth had mellowed her song to a hum but when Grandpa spoke of pasta she stopped and climbed into her car seat to look longingly toward her mother. Her tummy and thoughts were distracted when her cushioned seat began to buzz.
Chapter 15 A Stone’s Throw
Late morning sunlight pushed through the shuttered windows above the sink revealing an empty kitchen. Everyone was gone, including the dogs. A half loaf of bread and a wedge of white cheese were on the table.
A cup of strong coffee… Greek coffee would be nice right now.
Dale found that there was no coffee but only the makings for tea on the counter. Mugs and plates had been rinsed. The dishes dripped next to the sink in the sun dappled light.
Next to the empty grocery basket, Dale saw his phone still plugged in from the night before. He wrapped the charger and pushed it into his jeans pocket.
Time to call Anna!
Dale sliced a chunk of cheese and pulled a large hunk of bread from the loaf. Juggling toward the back door, he rang Anna’s phone.
“Hellwhoa,” Gwyneth answered after several rings.
Dale got a lump in his throat and it wasn’t the coarse brown bread he was having for breakfast.
“Gwennie!” he squawked. “Gwennie, its Daddy! How you doing, you little tomato cake?”
There was a momentary silence before she answered with a giggle, “Tomato cake? You’re a potato pie!”
“Gwennie, give the phone to your mother!” Dale said realizing that the conversation was going down the typical father-daughter rabbit hole.
Dale could hear his grandparents debating argumentatively in the background as his daughter informed him, “Can’t. The bad boy has her.”
“Let me talk to Grandpa or Bean, please,” said Dale, throwing a rock with all his might in frustration.
“Bean says Papa always blames French fries but Papa says, no and…” Dale interrupted her diatribe.
“Sweetheart, Grandpa is funny about the French but just put him on the phone. It’s very important. Be a good girl and give him the phone.”
There was shuffling. Dale was sure his daughter had dropped the phone. He could hear Bean’s squeaky voice reciting a recipe for Mousaka and then the phones lost connection. Redialing, Dale concluded that his wife’s phone needed to be charged.
Grandpa Bernie’s phone was seldom used because the elderly man usually had it buried in the bottom of his luggage. Dale pressed Bernie’s number.
“Who is this?” Mr Adams asked suspiciously after the first ring.
“Uh… Oh, Grandpa, it’s me – Dale,” said Dale surprised by the unexpected and quick pick up from Bernie. “I was talking to Gwyneth and we got disconnected. I think Anna’s phone went dead.”
“Well, young man, we’ve been extremely worried about you. You’re not in the airport hoosegow as I suspected, then? Or did you escape?” asked Bernie.
“No… no, they didn’t catch me. I got away. There has been a big mix-up,” Dale responded.
“Yes, we realized that and apparently, somebody is looking for something and they think you… we have it!” Bernie said hotly. “That is why I answered my phone. Surprised you didn’t I? Well, this is no game.” Bernie shifted himself in the backseat of the rental car.
Outside, Anna was speaking with Guppo, the child who had been herding geese as they left the inn over an hour ago. The boy looked like a dust covered goblin, with his body and face smeared a dirty brown. Only his erratic smile and white eyes appeared clean. Charlie Brown’s comic friend, Pigpen came to mind. The boy had been deathly afraid of the New Dawn agents.
He had already told Anna about the man on the motorcycle from the night before. Bean and Bernie were alarmed at the news and because they hadn’t mentioned the misplaced treasures they had found, Anna had translated the episode indifferently. Not knowing about the cache, Anna assumed that the men in black were solely looking for Guppo. Bernie knew otherwise.
Dale said, “I know. I know. Can you get to Anna’s family and keep a low profile until I arrive?”
“Yes, sonny boy. That is our plan. I think we need to consider getting a boat out of here a.s.a.p… Like bats out of hell!” Bernie said. “Now I better hang up. Anna is returning with our tour guide and I don’t want to alarm her.”
“Hang on, hang on! I need to talk to her. I have no idea where her cousin lives, except it’s on the north part of the island,” Dale said hurriedly. He didn’t want another disconnect.
Reluctantly, Bernie handed his phone over to Anna after Guppo climbed in next to him. Anna’s face was all smiles as she spoke with her husband,
“Dale! Oh, Dale! Are you okay?” she asked before he spoke.
“Babe, I’m fine! I’m sitting on a patio overlooking the ocean and I’m eating cheese and bread for brunch,” he told her. Outside of the kitchen was a small herb garden and another larger enclosed vegetable garden grew beyond that. Stones inlaid with a mossy green between, stretched out a hundred feet or more in front of him. Although rundown, the grounds still held their majesty of better times. There was a skinny black goat tethered to a wrought iron chair off to the left. The animal munched complacently from the green and brown grasses growing as the lawn. Immediately beyond the yard, the ground fell away and vineyards and orchards could be seen below. The beach and Ionian Sea met the far horizon. A mixture of earthy manure and jasmine hung in the air. In the cool of the morning, Dale thought the smell not a bad combination.
“Great! While you’re relaxing at the country club, we are busy getting lost and hassled and then we found a stow-away riding our back bumper,” she responded trying to sound angry but she wasn’t convincing herself or anyone else.
As Bean turned to get Mr Adam's reaction to Anna’s tongue-in-cheek comment, the old man winked at Bean. She blushed. Grinning, he caught her confused look before she turned to face the windshield again.
Guppo did not understand English but he understood people. His teeth glowed in a grin at the old man which brought forth his own wink from Mr Adams.
A few minutes later, Dale sat listening to the hum of bumble bees and smelling the Jasmine aroma; the phone tucked away in his shirt pocket. He missed Anna, the baby and even his grandparents. It wasn’t a huge island. He should have remembered the village was named Evangelos after Anna’s cousins. The tiny town was just up the mountain, east of Avliotes and yet, Dale had no idea how he was going to get there.
God knows.
God had a plan.
Chapter 16 Sacred Sensitivity
“Why are you hiding?”
The old woman drew her scarf tight under chin before replying. “We hide because everyone hates us. Now there is a bounty on our heads. There is no place to go but home. It is not the first time. We hide to survive.”
A stone covered with thin, raw leather was placed in her hand. “If you insist on hiding, then take this.”
The woman looked at the rock. It was very familiar and yet, she was confused. She asked, “Is this a gift?”
The hooded figure replied, “No. It is not a gift but i
t is the key. When the door is before you, use the key. It is your escape.”
She examined the key. It certainly didn’t look like any key that would open a door. Turning the stone over for the third time, she asked the stranger, “And afterward? Good sir, do I give this key to others so they too may escape?” Looking up, she saw she stood alone with the cloaked figure walking away. He had gone some distance before looking over his shoulder at her. The cloak shifted revealing a brief glimpse of a sad face before disappearing again as he gave a negative nod in answer. But in her head, Bethania heard his words.
“Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. But if you want to enter into life eternal, keep the commandments.”
Bethania smelled jasmine. She liked that smell. Opening her eyes, she was startled as she realized she had been asleep… asleep and dreaming again.
The old woman had understood for many years that she was sensitive to the spiritual side of life. The hooded figure was often in her dreams but for the most part his words, the man’s instructions, were enigmatic. Not long ago, as Bethania dreamed, she questioned the man about her inability to understand because she knew she must comprehend his advice. It was imperative.
His reply, “You have a sacred sensitivity to God. It is a holy endowment even if you do not know how to wield the gift.” And then she woke up.
Her dreaming, the night visions were a gift but the stone covered in goat skin or sheep skin or… badger skin for all she knew, was not a gift… as he had said.
Hopefully, Bethania looked around. Nothing but the usual. Her little room opened unto a small balcony that connected to the master bedroom terrace. The tiny bedroom and the adjoining porch had been originally designed for a personal assistant. Early, she had milked the goat and after her morning toast and tea, she had come out on the bedroom terrace to sit in the cool and mend her sweater. The wooly red yarn was unraveling and the entire sweater would be ruined if she didn’t fix it soon. Cooler weather was coming and she would be wearing the warm red sweater everyday, soon. Kerkyra, and all of Greece - was busy during the fall and winter months. She would be busy too.
Desperado Dale (Scenic Route to Paradise) Page 7