Betwixt Two Hearts (Crossroads Collection)

by Amanda Tru

  She slid the book into the seat pocket in front of her and let out a loud breath. Her husband’s last words before he moved out of their home and out of her life echoed in her ears. “Enjoy being alone with nobody but that God of yours.”

  She’d known he was ready to move out. Sensed months earlier that her marriage was already dead, and yet still his departure had felt like a shock. She hadn’t been ready. She’d been praying. Day and night, she’d begged God to soften Calvin’s heart. It would take a miracle to save her relationship with her husband, and in spite of all her prayers, heaven was woefully out of miracles.

  Drisklay swung around in his chair and reached for the pot of coffee, which had grown cold hours earlier.

  “I’m taking off, boss.” His junior partner Alexi sounded far too chipper, especially for this late in the day. “Have a good evening.” Alexi gave a playful salute, his smile never diminishing.

  Drisklay didn’t look up but stared at his computer screen. There were too many unanswered questions. That was the problem. Too many unanswered questions, not enough clues.

  “Why her?” he asked himself, staring at the photograph of the murder victim. Rebekah Harrison wasn’t exactly the kind of nineteen-year-old Drisklay’s colleagues on the force would classify as high risk. She was a pastor’s daughter fresh out of a twelve-year homeschool curriculum. On her dating profile, she listed her favorite hobbies as crocheting blankets and reading Jane Eyre. By all accounts, she’d led a quiet life. Good grades, steady employment at a Christian bookstore, not so much as a parking ticket.

  Now she was dead.

  Drisklay turned away from his computer and perused the scribbles in his notebook. He’d already followed up on the guy she’d met on the dating website. A cold lead. Fake account set up from a laptop at a public library. Whoever he was, he wasn’t making it easy to trace his steps.

  But Drisklay wasn’t going to give up.

  With the tepid coffee sloshing around contentedly in his stomach, he grabbed a file that had been serving as a coaster for a few old Styrofoam cups and half a stale Danish. After dusting the crumbs off the envelope, he pulled out the crime scene photographs, then took a bite of the Danish, washing it down with a gulp of cold coffee. Wiping his hands on his pants, he stared at the photographs, poring over details he’d seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of times before.

  “Alexi!” he shouted. His junior partner was notorious for dilly-dallying for twenty or even thirty minutes after he closed his work station for the day, and Drisklay hoped he was still around.

  Sure enough, Alexi bounded around the corner. “You need something, boss?”

  Drisklay opened a new Danish wrapper. “Get another pot of coffee going. And hurry.”

  Without pausing to watch while Alexi scampered off, Drisklay spun his chair around, tossing the photographs of the murdered young woman onto the table behind him. This secondary workstation was only slightly less cluttered than his desk, but it offered more room to spread everything out.

  “I’m gonna get you,” he whispered into the empty office, then glanced at his clock to calculate how long it would take before he had a fresh cup of coffee on his desk.

  He’d need it for the night ahead.

  “Coffee?”

  Caroline glanced up at the flight attendant. “No, thanks. Just water.”

  The woman passed her a small cup and turned to the passengers on the other side of the aisle.

  Caroline let out her breath. Ninety more minutes before they landed in Seoul. She’d never been so far from home. This mission trip would be frightening enough to undergo on her own even if she didn’t have all of Calvin’s taunts racing through her mind.

  Which she did.

  If you get arrested overseas, it can take weeks for the US Embassy to sort everything out. Remember those two college students imprisoned in China?

  That was Calvin’s problem. Decades of police work had hardened his heart. He didn’t trust anyone, not the government, not the Lord, not even his wife.

  You’ll get into trouble and won’t know how to get yourself out.

  In a way, it was true. Caroline had rarely traveled outside of the States, spending the vast majority of her life tucked away safely in New England suburbs. She’d only been to the West Coast once, and that was for a teachers’ convention almost ten years earlier.

  Now she was preparing to land in South Korea to volunteer at a Christian orphanage. Caroline was grateful for the chance to fit meaningful work into her summer vacation. But her determination to head to Seoul ended up sealing the lid on the casket of her marriage. It wasn’t that Calvin needed her around. He’d been so busy working the case about that murdered pastor’s daughter that Caroline could have spent several months away from home without him noticing.

  His problem wasn’t the fact that she was traveling. His problem was the fact that she was traveling to help at a Christian ministry. Ever since she’d been saved, Calvin hated Caroline for being involved at church in any capacity. Before the fight that preceded his moving out, the two of them had come to an unspoken truce of sorts. Caroline would go church for one service on Sunday, but any other church functions during the week weren’t worth the additional verbal assault from her husband.

  Caroline would have loved to have joined the Tuesday night women’s Bible study led by her pastor’s wife, Sandy. It had been Sandy who led her to Christ in the first place, and Caroline always felt her soul rejuvenated after they spent time together. Unfortunately, that time together was hard to come by, not only because of her busy work schedule during the school year but because of her husband’s ridiculous stubbornness.

  Not that he had the right to care what his wife did in her free time, especially since so many of his evenings were tied up tracking down murderers throughout the Boston area. It might have been different if she’d taken up some other hobby—basket weaving or continuing ed classes for her teacher’s license—but church functions were definitely out.

  She took a sip of water, curiously surprised that she didn’t feel better about the weeks ahead of her. She and Mrs. Cho, the director of the orphanage where she was going to serve, had connected online several years earlier. After her salvation, Caroline wanted to find something she could do to serve the Lord. It was her pastor’s wife and her mentor, Sandy, who first told her about Korea Freedom International, an organization that ministered to North Korean refugees resettled in Seoul. The nonprofit needed a newsletter editor, something Caroline could do in her own home on her own computer without Calvin ever realizing it. Soon, Caroline went from a volunteer proofreader to one of the Korea Freedom newsletter’s most regular newsletter columnists. Caroline loved the opportunity it gave her to speak with Christians on the other side of the world, Christians like Mrs. Cho.

  Mrs. Cho had spent the past several decades, nearly the last half of her life, caring for children in a Seoul-based orphanage where she lived, worked, and ministered. Caroline’s relationship with the old woman was only supposed to last as long as it took to come up with a five-hundred-word column, but she and Mrs. Cho had shared a connection of sorts and would chat every so often by email.

  Mrs. Cho didn’t know anything about Caroline’s marriage, didn’t even realize how young of a believer Caroline actually was. Which was exactly how Caroline wanted it. Even though she’d been attending Pastor Carl and Sandy’s church for the past three years, she could never walk through the doors without feeling like the newcomer. The one who didn’t really belong.

  It was the same feeling she saw in the eyes of students who transferred into her class from another district right in the middle of the school year.

  The same feeling that swept over Caroline any time she had to drop something off for her husband at the police station, with all its sprawling hallways, dim lights, and uniformed workers she didn’t know or recognize.

  The feeling of being an outsider.

  Caroline tightened her seatbelt when a jolt of turbulence rocked the plane. She glan
ced over at Grandma Lucy. The old woman was still sleeping with her colorful handkerchief draped over her eyes. Caroline had made a little more progress in her book, but she’d spent far more time wondering if there was any point in finishing it. She’d bought dozens of titles like this before and already knew what they were going to say.

  Pray for your husband. Don’t be a nag. Leave the changing up to God, and be such a good example that your husband will automatically fall on his knees and accept Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.

  That was what all these authors said, paraphrasing or sometimes quoting each other directly in chapters that hardly varied in style or subject.

  Pray. Be a good witness. Sit back and watch God work.

  Caroline shut the book then reached for her phone, so she could double check her hotel arrangements. She’d wasted enough time on this flight already on books that wouldn’t help, offering empty promises that could never come true.

  Drisklay leaned back and let out a belch that tasted like old coffee and stale Danish. He rubbed his eyes, refusing to lift the post-it note he had placed on his computer screen to cover the time. On nights like this, it was too much of a distraction to pay attention to how late (or early) he was working.

  For hours, he’d been looking up every known fact about Rebekah Harrison, searching in vain for missing links to connect her to some known criminal or suspect. Missing links that simply weren’t there. He shook his head, thankful yet again for his good sense to never have children of his own. Who would want to bring anyone into a world as cruel and dangerous as this?

  A few years ago, four Boston women were murdered after responding to online dating ads, but that suspect was already behind bars, waiting while the prosecution got their act together to give him the stiffest sentencing possible. Those women were all a specific type. Outgoing. Flirtatious. The kind who post photos online with their hips jutted out and their lips all pouty and their cleavage spilling over like a celebrity wardrobe malfunction just waiting to happen.

  Rebekah Harrison, also murdered after joining an online dating service, was nothing like that. She was apparently the only individual under twenty-five in the state of Massachusetts who wasn’t addicted to a daily social media fix. She could go weeks without posting, and the posts she did share were mostly to wish her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and homeschooling friends a happy birthday. Every once in a while, she’d also pass along one of those sappy sweet pictures of Jesus standing on someone’s front porch like a vacuum salesman waiting to be let in, and that was all.

  Drisklay took another sip of cold coffee. Why was she dead?

  Her murder could have been completely random. Maybe not even connected to the dating website at all. Wrong place, wrong time. That’s it.

  Yet his gut told him otherwise.

  Drisklay rapped his pencil against the side of his desk. “Who killed you, Miss Church Mouse?” he muttered to his screen. “And why?”

  Caroline had just finished emailing Mrs. Cho at the orphanage in Seoul when one of the flight attendants addressed the passengers on the loudspeaker. Another twenty minutes and the plane would land at Incheon Airport. To the locals in Seoul, it was around four in the afternoon, but since Caroline’s internal clock insisted it was the middle of the night, she was going to go straight to a hotel to rest up, so hopefully, when she met Mrs. Cho tomorrow morning, she’d feel at least somewhat human.

  She let out her breath, trying to convince herself there was nothing to be nervous about. The uneasy feeling sloshing around in her gut was the same feeling she got when her brand-new husband was a rookie on the police force out patrolling the streets in the middle of the night. Sometimes Caroline would wake up certain Calvin was in trouble. Even though she’d spent most of her married years as a non-Christian, she would still pray. Without knowing how or why she’d beg God to keep her husband safe.

  And he had.

  Calvin had been involved in more dangerous and high-profile cases than Caroline could remember. He’d advanced solidly up the ranks so that now he was the most senior detective in the homicide department. In his career, he’d brought down mafia bosses, human traffickers, and would-be homegrown terrorists. He’d solved cases involving murdered politicians and kidnapped children.

  But he was never happy. Maybe it was because all he saw was the darkest side of human nature, but even just a few years into their marriage, Caroline watched helplessly as her gallant husband turned even more cynical. Even more depressed.

  It hadn’t been easy, but she’d managed all right. She’d made enough friends with other police wives to realize her situation was normal. Somebody had to patrol the Boston streets, and rocky marriages were apparently the price that the spouses of these heroes simply had to pay.

  She’d married young, but Calvin’s penchant for working every overtime case meant she had extra time on her hands. As a newlywed, she’d started working part-time as a school aid, saving her paychecks until she could put herself through community college and eventually wind up with her teaching degree. Even though she’d qualified last year to retire from the district with full benefits, she had renewed her contract. It wasn’t as if she and her husband would buy an RV any time soon and start traveling the country, so what else was she supposed to do but continue the job she loved?

  Things would have been different—significantly different—if she and Calvin had ever had children, but a car accident when Caroline was only a child made that impossible. Well, perhaps not impossible. When Caroline was recovering from her injuries and all throughout her teen years, she assumed she would one day adopt.

  She just hadn’t accounted for Calvin’s stubbornness.

  So here she was. No children, no grandchildren. Her only family was a husband who’d regularly put in a hundred hours of work a week without thinking twice about what his schedule was doing to his health or their relationship. If you were to ask Calvin, all their marital problems began when Caroline became a Christian.

  The thought would be laughable if it weren’t so depressing.

  A flight attendant passed up the aisle, apologizing as she reached across Caroline to tap Grandma Lucy, still sleeping in the window seat. “Ma’am, will you please raise your seat and make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened?”

  Grandma Lucy removed the handkerchief from her eyes and smiled. “Are we almost to Seoul?” Her voice was surprisingly youthful. Caroline wished she could feel even partially as refreshed as the old woman sounded.

  Grandma Lucy clasped her hands in front of her chest. “Thank you for such a hearty nap and such a safe flight.” She was still staring at Caroline, so it wasn’t until she breathed, “Amen,” that Caroline realized she was praying and not addressing her directly.

  “Did you enjoy your flight?” Grandma Lucy asked. “Did you finish that book you were reading? Did it bring your heart encouragement in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

  Caroline was momentarily flustered by this outpouring of questions and couldn’t decide which to answer first, but apparently, Grandma Lucy wasn’t waiting for a response. Instead, she reached over, took Caroline’s hand in hers, and began to pray.

  “Lord, I thank you that every step of my young sister’s life has been ordained by you from the beginning of time. I thank you that not a prayer of hers has gone unheard. I thank you that she is stronger than she knows because her faith and her hope are firmly grounded in you.

  “I sense such a tremendous longing in my sister’s soul, Lord Jesus, and I pray that if it has anything to do with her sadness at her husband’s hardness of heart that you would be working miracles in this situation. For you are the Sovereign God who desires all men to be saved, and so we claim his salvation in the great and powerful name of Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose from death to deliver us from an eternity separated from you. Yes, Jesus, for this was your good will and purpose, and it’s in your name we pray and ask all these things.”

  Grandma Lucy’s voice had risen
incrementally so that she was practically shouting by the time she finished her prayer. Caroline offered a weak smile and resisted the urge to glance around and count how many passengers had turned to stare. She cleared her throat, adjusted her seatbelt, so she had some way to occupy her hands, and hoped that the plane would land soon.

  Her most recent argument with Calvin, the one before he finally moved out, rang through her ears. She mentioned something about Seoul, and soon her husband was lamenting that he’d lost all respect for her after she joined up with that Jesus cult, as he called it.

  Her response had been far from gracious.

  Now here she was, on a plane thousands of miles away from home, just three weeks after her husband left her, complaining about how much she’d changed since Christians “brainwashed” her.

  She felt guilty about that argument, particularly her response to it. Maybe she should have tried harder to encourage him to stay. Sometimes she even felt guilty about continuing on with her plans to go to Seoul. What right did she have to work for God when the corpse of what had been her marriage wasn’t even yet cold?

  But more than anything, she felt guilty because when she looked deep down into her psyche, into the darkest parts that she didn’t want to admit to anyone else, she was tired of life with Calvin. Tired of the angry tirades, the shouting matches where he accused her of being a brainwashed fool.

  She was tired of being married to a man like that, and the past three weeks since he’d moved out had been the most peaceful she’d known in years.

  She’d asked God to save her husband. She’d asked God to save her marriage. Now, she just wanted to spend her time in Seoul serving the Lord and forgetting all the heartache of her failed marriage. The chance to serve God before starting another busy school year back in the States. Was that so much to ask?

  Yes, she’d loved Calvin once, and maybe if his job hadn’t made him so hard and cynical, there would still be love there. Now, all she found was exhaustion.