by Nancy Rue
Una put both hands to her mouth.
“What?” Sully said. “Did she say something to you?”
“She said she didn’t really want to die, but she couldn’t see how she could go on living the way she was . . . so imperfect.”
“She told you that?”
“I thought she told you, too, Sully, I swear I did. Her therapist— I can’t remember the woman’s name . . .”
“Belinda Cox.”
“Lynn said she told her to pray about it . . . that suicide was a sin, and she needed the power of God.”
It was harsh, clear, and Sully pushed through it as he rose from the bench. “She knew? That woman knew Lynn was thinking of killing herself, and didn’t call me?”
“Yes.” Una’s face seized as she stood up to face him. “I’m sorry, Sully. I’m so sorry.”
Sully put his arms around her and let her sob into his chest.
“It’s all right, Una,” he whispered to her.
But he knew it would never be all right again.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Those TV people are all over the place. I just caught one drippin’ wet, trying to look in Sonia’s bedroom window.”
Deidre Schmacker turned from Sonia and me and drooped her eyes at Francesca. “I’ll send someone out to tell them to back off. The local police are on their way to try to keep some order.”
Francesca raked her fingers through her swing of hair. “Can I get ya’ll anything? Water? Diet Coke?”
“Why don’t you make these ladies some hot tea?” Deidre said.
I didn’t tell Francesca that no amount of the tea she rushed off to brew could calm what throbbed in me. In the two hours since Nina Richardson and I knew someone had abducted Bethany, my heart had not stopped drumming the beat of terror. There was no pit deep enough to bury that in.
Beside me on the couch in the Gathering Room, Sonia still clutched my arm in the vise grip she’d had on it since Francesca and the FBI and I had arrived at the house. She’d said very little after the initial battering of horrified questions, but the fear she couldn’t show on her face pulsed in her fingertips.
Deidre set her pad aside and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “The thing we have going for us is that her abductor didn’t have much of a head start, and we have the make and model of the car, if it is indeed identical to your Escalade. We’ve put out an Amber Alert.” She looked up at the doorway. “What do you have?”
Agent Ingram joined us, face showing nothing.
“I think Nina Richardson has told us everything she can,” he said. “It was raining, so she didn’t get a good look at the face through the windshield.”
“Why didn’t she make sure it was Lucia?” Sonia said.
“Bethany evidently got into the car with no hesitation. The teacher saw her smile at the driver. There was no reason for her to check.”
“There was a reason! She knew Bethany was at risk.”
“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine,” I said. “If I had been there on time—”
“Both of you listen to me.” Deidre’s voice was mother-firm. “The fault lies with the person who went to the lengths to obtain a vehicle identical to yours, choose a day when visibility was low, and be at the front of the line when school let out.”
She looked at each of us in turn. “We are talking about someone who planned this very carefully, someone determined to make it happen. Short of staring at the child 24/7, nothing that you, Lucia, or Bethany’s teacher could have done was going to prevent it.”
She glanced at Ingram. “If anyone is at fault, it’s us for not being able to apprehend the perpetrator sooner.”
“Then it’s the same person who tried to kill me, is that what you’re saying?” Sonia’s voice rose. “Some professional assassin has my child?”
“No,” I said. “I know Bethany. She wouldn’t get in the car with somebody she didn’t know. She wouldn’t even stand in the doorway when the mailman came.” My voice broke. “She told me, ‘If someone wants to take you, they will.’ And they did.”
I jerked away from Sonia and staggered to the window, where I could choke down the sobs.
Sonia turned on Deidre. “If what you’ve been telling me all this time is true,” she said, “it doesn’t matter whether she knows him or not. I supposedly knew him, and he tried to kill me, so now he’s going to kill her—”
“Stop it, Sonia. Just stop.”
The three of them turned to me as one. I wrapped my arms around myself to keep from flying out of my skin, but I didn’t try to stifle what wouldn’t stay back.
“They’re doing everything they can,” I said. “They have been for weeks, and you refused to do anything to help them. All you could say was that God’s hand was in it.”
“Don’t talk to me about God.” Sonia’s voice was dead. “I devoted my life to Him, and He still allowed this to happen to me. I can’t believe in a God like that.”
Deidre gave me a full look before she turned her eyes back to her pad. Ingram cleared his throat.
“Let’s not assume that our kidnapper is bent on hurting Bethany,” he said. “He may be after money now. He could feel like we’re closing in on him, and he wants cash to leave the country.”
Deidre nodded with him. “We’re set up in case either of you gets a ransom call. We need to go over what you’re to say and not say.”
“I will give him whatever he wants,” Sonia said. “I’ll call my accountant.”
I didn’t tell her that she no longer had an accountant or that a big chunk of her money was gone. Nor did I demand to know why she was suddenly willing to give everything up for her daughter, when until now she had let that baby girl sacrifice her whole being for her. That wasn’t what tore at my throat and shook my soul.
I wanted Bethany on the floor at my feet, with her tongue at the corner of her mouth and her precious rag around her neck, drawing a picture of Harry the Heron. I groaned inside to have her look up at me and say, “Aunt Lucia Mom, do you want to see?” For that I would rip out my heart again and put her into Sonia’s arms and this time teach my sister how to have what I had with her child—what I would give up once more and never have again, just to see her red bow mouth.
“Here’s our tea,” Deidre said. Her eyes sagged at the tray Francesca placed on the ottoman coffee table. “You ladies drink and try to rest. We’re set up in the dining room if you need us.” She touched Francesca’s elbow. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, Ms. Christie.”
When they were gone, neither of us touched the teapot snuggled in its lace-trimmed cozy. Even the attempt at comfort caught in my throat. Was the kidnapper taking care of Bethany’s needs? Did he know she liked warm milk with nutmeg before she went to sleep? Would he tell her how many more wake-ups before she could come home?
“Dear God,” I said. “Dear God, please.”
“I said don’t talk to me about God.”
I didn’t look at Sonia. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Him.”
“Why?” Sonia folded her arms across her cave of a belly and rocked. “You can’t trust Him. What is He doing right now?”
“He’s stopping me from slapping you right across the face.”
Her head came up.
“And,” I said, “He’s keeping me from losing my mind.”
“Don’t count on Him for that. He tried to take mine away.”
Sonia stopped rocking and bulleted her eyes to the wall. I took a step toward her and, despite the palm she put up, another.
“What happened with God while you were in the hospital?” I said.
“I faced reality, Lucia.”
“What reality?”
“That I am going to look like a freak for the rest of my life. That all the people I trusted have abandoned me. That one of them did this to me.” She formed the misshapen smile. “Dr. Ukwu thought I’d made such progress in coming to terms with all of it. I thought I did too. I’m scheduled for my first autograft next week
to try to create a face that won’t drive people screaming from the room. I worked on my physical therapy so I could achieve some expression other than this zombiesque stare. I talked about my disaster of a childhood so I could learn how to be a decent mother.”
She turned her eyes to me. “All because I finally discovered that God is going to do nothing for me. I thought He was in total charge, but I found out He wasn’t—or if He was, He was a cruel, heartless being, and I could not let myself believe that. But now—”
Her mouth spread into a stiff slot. “Now I know He is. I was ready to make everything up to Bethany, and He took her from me.” A long, deep growl tore from her throat. “And I can’t even cry. My face won’t let me. My eyes won’t let me. God won’t even let me cry, sorella.”
“Then I’ll cry for both of us,” I said.
“You can’t cry for me!” Sonia beat her fists against her thighs. “I can’t make you live my life for me anymore!”
“I didn’t say for you. It isn’t all about you. I’m crying for us. For our Bethany. And if we don’t see this through together, she has nothing worth coming back to.”
Sonia’s eyes fired at me. “And how do you think we’re going to do that?”
“The same way I’ve gotten through everything else in the last month: by saying Dear God over and over until something comes out of me that makes sense.”
“Pray? Look what praying did to me.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said. I was crying so hard my words came out in agonized chunks. “I just know I’m still holding it together because God hears me.”
Sonia dug into me with her eyes. “You don’t really think God’s going to send her back to us.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know He’s with her.”
Sonia fell against the sofa back. Turning her eyes to the ceiling seemed her only way to shut me from her sight. She wrapped herself in her own arms, and I went back to the window, where I sobbed a prayer for us. For we.
GH
Sully didn’t know how he’d gotten to the bridge, or how long he’d stood there pressed into the railing before its unyielding steel cut off his breath. Below him the Cumberland was brown and churning in the wake of the storm. He couldn’t blame it anymore. It had only taken what Lynn had given it.
So. The turn down Why Road was the wrong turn all along. It led nowhere. He would never know—and perhaps Lynn couldn’t even explain it if she came back at that moment. She was sick. She didn’t have the help she needed to heal the pain she didn’t understand.
Sully strangled the railing with his fingers. One thing he did know. For the first time, he understood why Lynn or anyone else would choose oblivion in a green, ugly river over this kind of suffering. Could he blame her for not being able to live with it, when right now he didn’t know if he could either?
“Why couldn’t you come to me?” he whispered to the water. “Why did you listen to that woman instead of to me?” A sob caught in his throat and would come no further. “Why did you believe everything was your fault?”
Why do you, Dr. Crisp?
Sully looked over his shoulder before he realized the voice came from inside himself—and yet not himself. He leaned over the railing, body tilted to the river.
The pain is in the blame, it said. But there is no blame, Sully. There is only Me.
Sully heard it, as clearly as the train whistle and the swish of a bicycle and the drip of leftover rain from the girders. As he pulled back from the railing, he knew. It wasn’t the river’s voice in him. It was God’s.
“You all right, sir?”
Sully looked over his shoulder again and this time saw a young policeman who had pulled onto the overlook on a bicycle.
“Are you?” Sully said.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you all right?”
The boy-cop’s hand crept not too subtly toward the radio on his belt. “I’m fine, sir. I’m more concerned about you.”
“I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you mean.” Sully turned his back to the railing. “Stay fine, my friend. Hold on to fine as long as you can—because this world can break your heart.”
“I’ll do that.” The officer beckoned to Sully with his fingers. “I’d feel a lot better if you’d step away from there.”
“I think I will.” Sully gazed once more into the Cumberland. “There’s nothing more for me here.”
He was almost to the Buick, with the policeman still keeping a cautious distance behind him on the bike, when his cell nagged from his pocket. Sully let it ring a second time. He was no longer waiting for information he thought he wanted to know. That itself was an empty realization that made him fish the phone out and answer it, just to fill the aching space.
“How is Sonia?” Porphyria said.
“Sonia,” Sully said. He tucked the phone under his chin and pulled out the car key. “I didn’t see her when she got home from the hospital. I’m headed back to her place now, but I thought I’d let her sort of reenter the atmosphere before I—”
“You don’t know, then.”
Sully stopped, key in the lock. “Know what?”
“I hope you aren’t too far away,” Porphyria said. “Because they’re going to need Sullivan Crisp at that house.”
The sunset silhouettes of journalists and their cameras set a surreal scene when Sully pulled up to the driveway. No less eerie was the police barrier that blocked his way, or the accusing light thrust into his face when he opened the car window.
“Mrs. Cabot knows I’m coming,” Sully said. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand. “I called ahead. Sullivan Crisp.”
“May I see your ID, please?”
As Sully fumbled for his wallet, a second voice barked from the other side of the flashlight. “We’ve got some guy out here, says he’s Sonia Cabot’s father.”
“Is he for real?”
“I doubt it. He looks like a loser.”
Sully nudged the arm resting in the car window with his license. While the officer examined it, he craned to see the person the second cop treated to the glare of another Mag light—a bulky man, perhaps formerly muscular but now spongy with age and inertia. His hardgray hair curled over a forehead plowed into deep creases, and his eyes addressed the glare with a squint Sully suspected was more from halfmad worry than the insult of the light itself. The knot of a mouth cinched it. If he wasn’t Lucia Coffey’s father, he should have been.
“Sorry, dude,” the officer said to him. “Mrs. Cabot didn’t say anything about her father. You get permission from her and we’ll talk.” “You’re clear, Dr. Crisp,” Sully’s officer said. “Sorry for the delay. We just have to check everybody out.”
“Of course.”
The policeman shot the light away from his face and went toward the barrier. Sully leaned out the window.
“Mr. Brocacini?”
The bulky man jerked his head toward Sully. “Yeah?” His voice had the pinch of a man near panic. “Do I know you?”
“No,” Sully said. “Do you want me to tell your daughters you’re here?”
“Dr. Crisp, move on, please, sir.”
Sully let the car drop into gear and looked in the rearview mirror. Tony Brocacini’s face collapsed as he nodded.
GH
Sonia and I were sitting across from each other in the breakfast nook, over a plate of fruit and cheese Francesca had assembled, when Sullivan brought Dad in and disappeared to the kitchen.
Though grayer and more lined than he had been at our mother’s funeral, our father looked less beaten. I knew it was fear, not alcohol, that made his eyes seem unfocused.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to come.”
Sonia only stared at him.
“I got something to say, and then you can throw me out if you want.”
“I don’t have the energy to throw you out,” Sonia said.
“And I don’t want to,” I said. I slid further into the booth and patte
d the seat. “Sit.”
Dad looked at Sonia. When she didn’t protest, he fell heavily onto the bench beside me.
“I know this ain’t the time to play the prodigal father,” he said. “You got enough to handle.” A sad something bleated from his throat. “I wouldna come if Chip hadn’t called me.”
“Chip called you?” I said.
“He does every now and again.” He grunted. “Recovering addicts understand each other.”
It was my turn to stare.
“He’s all the way up in Oregon. He wanted me to make sure you were okay.”
“Where were you?” Sonia said.
Dad studied his hands, which he’d spread on the tabletop, I suspected to control their trembling.
“I been here in Nashville since before you got home from Philly. Been staying at a motel.”
There was no attempt in his voice to coax out guilt, but it stabbed me just the same.
“Chip just wanted me to tell you it’s gonna be all right.”
“I love these reassurances based on absolutely nothing,” Sonia said. All the strain crowded into her eyes, because it had no other place to show itself.
“Why didn’t Chip call me himself?” I said.
Dad winced, pinching the pleats beneath his eyes. “Said he didn’t know if you’d be so happy to hear from him.”
I couldn’t hope for happy. But the thought of comfort swept over me like a wave of homesickness. I wanted Chip there to tell me a lie: that the passing hours of nothing did not mean that Bethany was lost to us forever. I would have believed him.
Dad pulled a battered receipt from his shirt pocket. “He gave me this phone number for you to call him when you’re ready to start that new life.”
I stared stupidly at the pencil scratchings. “This isn’t his cell phone,” I said.
“That’s what he gave me.”
“All right—we have some news.” Deidre Schmacker swept into the room with Ingram behind her, spattering words like shotgun fire into his cell phone.
“We’ve picked up Derrick Garrison in Mount Juliet, just east of here.” She nodded at me. “He’s your Pencil Whiskers.”