Austin stopped beside him. “I won’t let anything happen to them.”
Sam straightened. “They’re good, strong people, Austin. Including Violet.”
No one needed to tell him about Violet. “If they stay in Texas, you can fly out for a visit or something.”
His lips curved, a smile’s ghost. “You haven’t thought of it yet either?”
“Thought of what?”
“Someone has to go down for the crimes of the network. The media won’t rest without a villain to show behind bars.”
Shoot. He was right. “Come with us, then.”
“Not enough room in the truck.”
“Sam—”
“It’ll take a few days to set myself up. If I do it right, they’ll have no reason to come after you and no legal justification even if they wanted to.”
“Lee’s going to—”
“She’s thinking about Marcus, and only Marcus, and that’s how it needs to be right now. Don’t you dare say a word.”
“Don’t do this, Sam.”
“Guard them well. That’s all I ask.”
13
The truck was loaded, including an air mattress from the exam room. No reason to move Marcus until Lee could assist him from one bed to another. She’d explained everything with as much detail as she could, then asked for permission to sedate him. Raw determination, anger, and maybe fear leaped into his eyes at the suggestion. As a compromise, she gave him an extra dose of Motrin. He didn’t argue, but jostling in the back of a truck for two days would put him in more pain than Motrin could dull, and he seemed to know it.
One thing remained before they could leave. Violet had driven down the road to the Vitale house, and in a few minutes, they’d be here, wrapping everyone in hugs and farewells. Lee knelt beside Marcus’s bed.
“What’s today?”
His voice startled her. Not the faint rasp of it, but the fact he’d initiated conversation.
“Wednesday.” Oh … that was an absurd answer. “October twenty-sixth.”
The seconds stretched without a reply.
“Marcus?”
“Couple days ago … I thought maybe … Thanksgiving soon.”
“Why Thanksgiving?”
“So it … didn’t snow then? When it was cold?”
Four nights ago, the record-breaking freeze overnight. How did he know about it from behind a locked door? Threads of her calm began to snap as the possibilities formed in her mind. Don’t ask him.
“No,” she said. “It hasn’t snowed yet.”
Violet appeared in the doorway. “They’re here.”
Marcus blinked slowly. “Violet?”
“Yeah. You saw me earlier. I helped you walk, remember? But maybe you were out of it.”
“Are you okay?”
“Me? Uh, yeah, of course. Did Lee tell you I live with her now?”
His eyes traveled between them. “What happened to … people, my … my—?”
His family. Fear inched into his eyes, as if realizing he should have asked before now and in not asking might have failed them all.
Violet leaned against the door trim, arms folded. “Chuck and Belinda are good. Mrs. Lewalski got released in August, so she’s good now, too. I haven’t talked to Clay or Natalia or Khloe since June, but we’re assuming they’re fine.”
Marcus’s lips pressed together until they disappeared. He nodded.
“There’s no word from anybody else,” Violet said, and he nodded again.
The rest of his church was, according to Sam, still in re-education. Lee had never met them, but Marcus had spoken their names. Jim, Karlyn, Janelle, Phil, Felice. All taken.
“Speaking of Chuck and Belinda,” Violet said. “They’re hoping you’re up to saying hi. And good-bye.”
His gaze fixed on the doorway.
“Do you wish to see them, Marcus?” Lee said.
He nodded.
Violet left and returned before Lee could brace herself. Belinda glided through the doorway with a tearstained smile.
A smile that froze and shattered.
“Marcus?” Her voice wobbled, the accent drawing his name out more than usual. When he didn’t respond, tears filled her eyes. “What’s happened to you? Where were you?”
The jagged questions.
Chuck pushed past her, and Violet followed him, and the crowd of them seemed to knock the breath from the room. At least Austin and Sam knew enough to keep away, wherever they were. Both Vitales stared down at Marcus, concern and disbelief and joy battling in their eyes.
“You’re here.” Belinda charged across the room, and Lee’s imagination hadn’t exaggerated. The woman was going to lean over him and hug him.
Marcus’s left arm snapped up, ready to deflect a blow. Belinda froze midstride, and her mouth opened, finally speechless. His eyes roved the room for … danger?
“Pearl,” Chuck said quietly. “Step back now.”
Belinda shuffled backward and bumped into her husband’s chest. “M-Marcus?”
Marcus’s gaze landed on Lee, and the silence now wasn’t new but wasn’t safe, either. This was the silence that had lengthened while she held her phone to her ear and Marcus drove home too late at night, both of them knowing that if he tried to talk, his voice would shake with the need for whiskey. His eyes pleaded. A piece of the ice surrounding her broke off and drifted away. You’re still there, inside. I’ll bring you back.
“Give us a moment, please,” she said.
Violet motioned Chuck and Belinda out first, then followed them without a look back. Thank you.
Marcus buried both hands in the blanket. Lee knelt beside the mattress, and one of his hands reached toward hers, then burrowed again. This close, his rapid breathing was audible. He rocked forward, white with pain even before the coughing started. When it was over, he leaned into the wall to stay upright. His breathing didn’t level.
He was a patient. She had to do what was best for him. She wrapped her hand around his warm wrist. Physical contact, of a sort, but … “Your pulse is racing.”
He reversed her hold on his wrist and wove their fingers together instead.
“Are you afraid?”
“Is—is this you?” He squeezed her hand.
Lee nodded, but he didn’t seem to notice. Her hand throbbed in a grip he shouldn’t be strong enough for. “Yes, I’m here. Marcus, is this a reaction to Belinda or something else?”
“I d-don’t know.”
She untangled their fingers and pushed aside the catch in her breath when he tried to hold on. She stood. “I’ll see them out.”
“No. Wait.” He rested his forehead on his good knee. “A minute.”
She waited at least that long. His breathing remained shallow but evened out.
“Okay,” he said. “They can come back.”
“This obviously isn’t beneficial for you.”
“It … is. Please.”
When the Vitales returned, the last vestige of Belinda’s makeup had been sobbed away, and Chuck kept rocking back and forth on his feet. Only when Violet brought them each a folding chair from the closet did the stiffness leach from Marcus’s shoulders. Lee and Violet sat on the floor against the wall.
Marcus asked if Chuck and Belinda were okay, then asked again. Before the next pause could become awkward, the couple launched into a holiday newsletter of conversation—their children and grandchildren and Belinda’s recent birdwatching excursion. Marcus didn’t speak, but his gaze never left their faces. Ten minutes passed, and Lee could imagine Sam outside the door, glaring at her for not being halfway to Toledo by now. She stood.
“Time to go?” Belinda said, and disappointment pulled her mouth.
“Yes.” Well past it.
Chuck stood up and stretched his back. He stepped close
to the mattress in the corner, squatted beside it, and held out his hand. “You’ll be all right, son. If it’s ever safe to contact us, we hope you will.”
Marcus gripped his hand and didn’t let go. “Thank you. For …”
“You’re welcome, but I’m just as grateful to you.”
When they parted, Belinda approached, more slowly this time. “There wasn’t time to fix any food, Marcus. I—I hope you get enough to eat on the way, and get there safe, and stay safe.”
Her words choked on tears. Marcus pulled in a deep breath. “Belinda. I’m okay.”
“I know, I do know that.” She swiped her palms over her cheeks and knelt to place a hand on his shoulder. Marcus lifted his hand and covered hers. “And you’re alive. Good-bye doesn’t have to be forever.”
He nodded. Belinda patted his shoulder but didn’t attempt a hug. She pushed herself to her feet with a small grunt and faced Chuck. Even her nod seemed to tremble with tears.
Lee clasped her hands together behind her back. When the others filed from the room, she turned to Marcus.
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
He nodded.
In the kitchen, they all stood silently as if waiting for Lee to emerge.
“He’s really sick,” Chuck said quietly. “Feverish, I could tell. And he looks half-starved.”
Lee nodded.
“But he’s not in any danger, not like that, I mean.”
“He’s going to live,” she said, as if she or anyone else could be certain.
Chuck pinched between his eyes and turned away from her. “Thank God.”
“Amen,” Violet whispered.
Lee left the room.
One foot in front of the other, step after step, to the other end of the house. Not far enough. She snatched her coat and draped it over her folded arms.
The night enfolded her with a brisk breeze and damp darkness. She doubled over with one hand braced on the side of the house, but she didn’t need to throw up. She needed to hold in, couldn’t stop now, not while people hovered so near, not while Belinda hovered so near.
They’re thanking You? For this?
She crushed the coat against her face and whispered into it. “You have never once watched over him, never once.”
She breathed deeply, but the squeezing, shuddering pain in her chest continued to build.
“This is what You do. Nothing. They didn’t deserve … They—they didn’t—”
They. No, no …
“You’re reading my mind, regardless. They deserved Your care. Both of them. And You don’t deserve anything from me.” She stood there, clutching the coat to her chest with both hands, like cradling an infant.
No time for this. She ground her palms over her face, under her eyes. Dry. Calm. It was time to go. She stood.
A few feet away, hunched in his gray jacket, stood Sam.
14
Snap at him, fend him off. Stalk past him into the house without a word.
No.
He was Sam, and she was leaving. Lee stood with her coat bunched in her hands and waited for him to speak. From the garage, the screen door slammed. Austin or Violet, loading final items into the truck.
“I’m sorry.” The shadow of the house obscured Sam’s face.
“Sorry?”
“I told you he was dead.”
“You believed he was.”
“I stopped looking for him.”
Her next question would not be fair or right. She ventured closer to deliver the blow. “Could you have found him sooner?”
Sam rubbed a hand over his graying hair. “He was within miles of me. Every day.”
Lee shuffled to the back porch steps and sank down on the bottom one a moment before her legs gave out. Sam watched her, while the screen door slammed once, then again, in quick succession. Tires ground over the gravel driveway and faded, Chuck’s car leaving. For good.
Ask the question.
“Where was he?” Her words might have been snatched by the breeze before he could hear them.
Sam stepped closer and hunkered down, one hand braced on the porch step beside her. “A house behind the admin building, vacant. I don’t think Jason was thinking past the next few hours, when he first left him there.”
Then the plan had been to kill him. “Vacant?”
“No utilities.”
No heat, as she’d guessed. No air conditioning, from June to August. “Was there light, at least?”
Still crouching, Sam shifted away from her. “From under the door.”
“Mayweather kept him in a closet?”
“Kitchen pantry.”
Lee inhaled the damp air, the faint scent of soil. She assessed her body, the hard step under her backside, the ground under her shoes, her feet in her shoes. Breeze lifted her hair from her neck. If she could concentrate on these things, she could block the image of Marcus, bruised and ill and shivering, eyes on the line of sunlight at the bottom of the door.
Heat surged in her cheeks, and she hid her face against her knees. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget fleeing, she should track down Jason Mayweather and … The top step creaked as Sam settled his weight, long legs parallel with her hunched back. His knee grazed her shoulder.
“Lee.”
She steadied her breathing and lifted her head. “You’re not to blame. You saved his life.”
“Before you go, I need you to hear some things.”
“We’re out of time.” She tried to stand, but he pushed her knee back down.
“So don’t make me repeat myself.”
Only the light from the crescent moon illuminated him, the whites of his eyes the most visible part of his face. She’d unscrewed the bulb from the porch light months ago, when she’d first had the electricity turned on. From the outside, the place still had to appear foreclosed.
“Now, you know I’m no mother hen. But for the next month, every time you feed Marcus, I want you to eat something.”
“Sam—”
“Hush, girl, and listen.”
Girl. He hadn’t called her that since … A rock lodged in her throat, and she blinked hard.
“I also want you to picture your uselessness if you try to stay awake for the next six weeks, or however long it takes broken ribs to heal. You’ll get sick, and you’ll be useless to him. So, sleep. Agreed?”
Lee nodded.
“About Austin, I know part of you thinks it’s unwise to include him in this. It probably is, to a point, but he’s in danger, and you’re going to need him. Still, I wouldn’t have suggested it if there was any chance he’d turn on you.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“He’s young, and overconfident, and a bit of an egghead, but—”
“I do, however, trust you.”
A slow smile curved his mouth, and laugh lines around his eyes created small shadows from the moonlight. “Well, then.”
Sam. “We should leave.”
This time, he stood with her. “This is going to be hard, Lee. But you’ve done hard before. You can do this.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
He was right. She’d known the difficulties already, yet she knew them better after helping Marcus into the truck bed. He wasn’t strong enough to hoist himself onto the tailgate, much less jump up with one foot springboarding from the bumper, as she’d seen him do countless times. Austin knelt inside the bed, reached down and took hold under Marcus’s arms, while Sam lifted him.
Bundling him too snugly could exacerbate the fever, yet he’d be without heat back here, and the temperature was dipping to the low fifties. Lee tucked two white blankets around him.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Are you all right? Can you breathe?”
Marcus nodded against the pillow.
>
“We’ll be stopping south of Toledo. No more than two hours.”
Another nod.
“Marcus, this will be painful.”
One hand shifted under the blankets. “It’s okay.”
She gauged the feet of distance from his face to the top of the cap. Its sides were opaque, the window at the rear heavily tinted. “Will you be all right in the … closed space?”
He nodded. She had no choice but to believe him.
Austin jumped into the truck bed and burrowed in among the duffel bags and an old sleeping bag Violet had brought to the clinic months ago from Chuck’s house.
“If he needs anything,” Lee told Austin, “pound as hard as you can. We’ll hear you.”
Sam shut the rear gate. Lee threw her duffel into the cab, and Violet climbed inside.
Nothing remained but to drive away.
Sam handed over the keys. “They’ll freeze everything within the next few hours, maybe already have. Your bank accounts, credit cards, everything.”
“I have cash.”
“Enough?” Ever the financial adviser.
“Almost forty thousand,” she said.
His eyebrows shot almost to his hairline.
“I’ve been withdrawing a little every week for a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Since last November. No one could do what Marcus was doing forever. It only made sense to plan for a time when we couldn’t access bank accounts.”
“We?”
“I’m known to plan ahead, Sam.”
“But he kept you out of most of it. They wouldn’t have gone after you, not then.”
The distinction made no sense. Any attack on Marcus was an attack on Lee. She would preserve him at the expense of everything else. Maybe she should explain, but these facts were elemental, not meant for words. She tilted an eyebrow at Sam instead.
He nodded as if she’d spoken. “Right, of course.”
“Sam, I …” That rock again, she couldn’t swallow around it. She sandwiched the truck key between her palms. “Thank you.”
He nodded. “You’ll be fine, all of you. Go on, now.”
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