The Edge of Recall

by Kristen Heitzmann

  Donny grabbed himself in his arms, stood up, and circled. “No, no, no, no, no. He can’t go. They’ll find me. This is my place.”

  “They’re going to take it. Rumer Gaston has already taken it. It’s only a matter of time.”

  His hands clenched. The tendons in his neck stood out like ropes. He circled faster.

  “They won’t be nice, Donny. Let me call Dr. Brenner. He’ll work with the authorities and do everything he can for you.” She knew he would. He’d be fascinated by this case. Donny’s physical deformities might earn him the protection of advocacy groups. Working together, they might help Donny out of this pit.

  “No. You’re trying to trick me, trap me, fool me.”

  “Talk to him yourself. You decide.”

  He slowed, eyeing her over his shoulder, then came to a halting stop. They studied each other in silence while Smith labored to breathe. Then Donny’s shoulders slumped even farther, his spine curling. “Only talk.”

  She took out her phone, speed-dialed Dr. Brenner, who thought she was having a psychotic break with reality. This should shake his world a little. She got his answering machine. “Dr. Brenner, it’s Tessa. I need you to call—”

  “Tessa, this is Marianne. Please hold a moment.”

  He must have instructed his assistant to interrupt if the crazy woman called.

  “Hello, Tessa.”

  “Dr. Brenner, I need your help.”

  “I’m so glad you’ve—”

  “Not for me, though.” She looked across at Donny. “It’s for the person I told you about, the one who stabbed Smith.”

  His silence irritated her so much she didn’t wait for his measured response. She explained what had happened and where she was. “Smith needs a hospital. But Donny needs an advocate. I told him you would be that person.” She might possibly have shocked him speechless at last. “I’ll let him tell you himself.”

  She stood up and put the phone to Donny’s ear, put his hand up to hold it there.

  Gripping his patchy pale hair, he said, “You can’t trick me.”

  But then he listened. They talked back and forth as Dr. Brenner must have found words at last.

  Tears rose in her throat as she dropped down to Smith, touched his clammy face, then reached around and untied his hands and feet. She choked back her sobs as she eased him upright against the wall of books. “Smith.”

  His eyelids flickered, then opened. He rasped, “Chin up, Tess. I’m alive.”

  Smith groaned in pain and frustration. Somehow Donny had lured her into the pit. Now they were both caught, except he realized his hands and feet had been untied and she didn’t seem frightened, although her concern for him was thick enough to spread on toast.

  He looked up and saw Donny on the phone. “Who?”

  “Dr. Brenner.”

  “Your … shrink?” He’d have laughed, but his wound hurt like blazes. He wanted nothing more than a bracing dose of pain meds. And to get out of there, to get Tessa out. How could she not be terrified?

  “He’s coming,” Donny half whispered.

  “Good.” Tessa took her phone back. “He’ll know what to do. He’s helped me for a long time.” She turned. “Now, help me get Smith out of here.”

  Donny gulped twice. “You won’t let them in. You won’t let them see.”

  “No one will see.”

  Smith couldn’t believe it when Donny moved to obey. Tessa had tamed the monster. Admiration flooded him. She wasn’t weak at all; she was the most amazing person he knew. Their eyes met, and she clearly saw everything he felt—including the pain when he tried to move.

  “Lean on me.” She slid her arms around him.

  He had no choice. Pain screamed in his chest and fresh blood streamed when they took his arms and moved him to the base of the log-and-branch ladder. Eight rungs. He had to climb them all. Tessa went first and removed the lid, then lay on her stomach on the ground outside, reaching down.

  Sweat beaded his forehead, but he would only grow weaker if he waited. He dug deep for the strength and pulled himself up the rungs while Donny pushed from behind. He couldn’t help hollering with each of the last three rungs. He rolled onto the ground and almost blacked out. Tessa dragged his legs free as Donny slid the disk back into place, disappearing inside. Tessa tugged the vines over the disk, then knelt beside him in the mud. Thankfully, the rain had stopped.

  “Honey, can you walk?” she murmured in his ear as she might encourage a child or wounded pet. He must have looked dreadful to earn that tone. But he’d do anything she wanted. Anything but climb. Or throw the discus.

  He struggled to his feet, leaning so hard she might collapse beneath him. It took everything he had not to cry out with every jar, but she kept him going until he gasped, “Need to … rest.” Without her arm firmly around his waist, he would have sunk to the ground, and he was not sure he’d get up again.

  She took the moment and dialed 9-1-1, but before she connected, the wail of sirens reached them. She looked up. “Bair must have gotten through. They’re coming.”

  His relief approached euphoria.

  “Smith, you can’t say anything about Donny. Not until Dr. Brenner gets here.”

  “What?” He pressed a hand to his bloody chest.

  “They know you were stabbed. Just don’t mention Donny or where he is until Dr. Brenner can speak for him.”

  “Tessa.”

  “I promised they wouldn’t put him in a cage.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “How else could I get you out of there? And he’s … oh, Smith, he’s so pathetic.”

  She’d made a deal with the devil, but he was too knackered to argue. Blessedly, the emergency team met them where they were with a stretcher. Tessa squeezed his hand in reminder as they carried him away. Prone, his chest was too swamped for speech anyway.

  Standing with Bair, the sheriff, and a handful of searchers, she couldn’t stop the tears as they carried Smith away. He’d lost so much blood and lain on that damp stone all night. If Sheriff Thomas had listened—but Donny would have kept Smith hidden or been discovered himself when searchers crawled over the property. Maybe for Donny’s sake this was how it was meant to be. Smith might say God had intended it. She recognized a divine symmetry, Donny’s line crossing theirs at the exact point it needed to for them to be tools of his deliverance.

  And if God had his hand in that, might he have it over Smith as well? She had given up begging when her mother died, and just yesterday doubted God’s very existence, but now, with Smith alive, she dared to reconsider.

  Bair turned to her. “What happened, Tessa? When I saw the trailer empty, the door hanging open, I thought the worst.”

  “I couldn’t wait any longer. I went to look again.”

  The sheriff planted his hands on his hips. “And just happened to find Mr. Chandler wandering around?”

  His tone unnerved her. Now that they’d found Smith, did he still not believe her? “He called me to meet him at the field, and I …”

  “Well, which is it?” The sheriff narrowed his eyes. “He called, or you couldn’t wait?”

  She’d already changed her story. Why did he rattle her so much? “He called and I ran to find him.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think about it, I just—”

  “Show me the phone, please.”

  She gulped. How would she account for the time they’d been in the pit without revealing Donny’s hideaway? She handed over her phone.

  “Almost two hours from when he said to meet him before you called for help?”

  “I was … looking.”

  The sheriff perused the field. “You searched this field for two hours and he never called out or so much as raised a hand?”

  Her stomach dropped. No wonder he doubted her if that was the best she could do.

  “Were you expecting his call?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not. I thought he’d been killed.�
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  “So it surprised you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought you’d finished him off?”

  “What?” She and Bair said it simultaneously.

  “Proved a little hardier than you expected?”

  Stunned speechless, she looked from him to Bair.

  Bair stuttered. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s in love with the man.”

  She flushed. “I’m not—”

  “Making it more likely, not less.” Sheriff Thomas crossed his arms over his chest. “Did you have a falling-out? Lovers’ spat?” He turned to Bair. “How would you describe their relationship? Rocky? Tempestuous?”

  Bair groped for words.

  Tessa sucked in her breath. “I did not hurt Smith.”

  “I understand he got a call from his ex-girlfriend. And you were angry enough to stay out in a thunderstorm.”

  “How did you—” She turned to Bair.

  Bair sputtered. “He asked why I left.” He turned to the sheriff. “That doesn’t mean she—”

  “Did she call again, come visit?”

  She shook her head. “I mean, yes, but—”

  Back to Bair he said, “Didn’t you say this young woman has harbored a grudge for years?”

  “Don’t … twist my words. I … I said—”

  Sheriff Thomas turned. “Tessa Young, I’m bringing you in for questioning in the attempted murder of Smith Chandler.”

  She gaped.

  Bair drew himself up. “What reasonable cause do you have?”

  “Her doctor’s diagnosis of a psychotic condition.”

  Psychotic? He was the one out of touch with reality. But she kept quiet. She could not defend herself without betraying Donny. She had promised he wouldn’t be put in a cage. Fine. She could handle a cell. How different would it be from Cedar Grove?

  CHAPTER

  30

  Smith opened his eyes in a metal-barred bed. A plastic oxygen tube was snugged into his nose, feeding him a brisk stream of air. Something had numbed the pain in his chest, but a sack of cement lay across his sternum. He turned and saw Bair crammed into the chair beside him. “What are you doing here?”

  Bair raised his eyes. “Where else would I be?”

  “Off with Katy.”

  “Now, don’t rub that in.”

  Smith managed a smile, then touched the bandages on his chest.

  “Your surgery went brilliantly. The pneumonia not so much.”

  So that was the weight on his chest. “Where’s Tessa?”

  Bair’s face reddened. “The sheriff took her in for, um, questioning. He kept her overnight.”

  “He arrested her?”

  Bair looked miserable. “Her story didn’t match up, and she’d been so volatile.”

  Smith dropped his head back, grimacing. “Let me talk to him.”

  “She said for me to tell you not to break her promise. Whatever that means.”

  Smith groaned. “She can’t be serious.”

  “Anyway, you’ll have to wait until morning. The sheriff’s gone home for the night.”

  But not Tessa, who sat in a cell somewhere because she wouldn’t tell what had really happened. Wasn’t she the one who wanted monsters locked up?

  Bair hunched forward. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  Smith didn’t know where to start without exposing Donny. He hadn’t seen, couldn’t remember? Both lies, and Bair would see through him anyway.

  Bair frowned. “Sheriff Thomas thinks Tessa went bonkers and attacked you, then tried to make out like you’d both been jumped.”

  Smith scowled. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Her psychiatrist told him she might be having a psychotic break.”

  “Why would he say that?” Tessa depended on him overly much, but that was Dr. Brenner’s fault and certainly didn’t make her unstable. She’d shown remarkable courage and sense.

  Bair shrugged. “She was hysterical the night it happened, something about a monster coming out of nowhere. And there’s a lot of time unaccounted for today.” He clenched his hands. “Did she try to kill you, Smith? Are you protecting her?”

  If he were, he’d be rousting everyone out of bed and demanding she be set free. Instead he was protecting the miscreant who’d stabbed him. “She’s telling the truth.”

  “She can’t be. Not the whole truth.”

  No, but that was the promise she’d made, and he’d agreed, tacitly if not audibly.

  Bair loomed over him. “You know who did this. And you’re not saying.”

  “Not tonight.”

  Bair threw out his hands. “I drive down here, thinking you’re dead, spend hours searching for your body in the soaking rain, hours getting grilled by the sheriff, and you won’t say where you were and what happened?”

  Smith sagged into the pillows. “Just don’t go back to the trailer.”

  Bair stared. “He’s out there, is he? The one we never reported?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Bair scowled. “He’s out there free and you’re lying here with a hole in your chest.”

  “Tomorrow, Bair.” Smith cracked his eyelids open. “Where’s Katy?”

  “Back where she belongs. And don’t worry, nothing happened.”

  A smile pulled Smith’s mouth as he surrendered to the drowsiness. He’d almost been killed and Tessa was in jail, but the strongest thing he felt was gratitude and a sense that things were in better hands than his.

  Tessa lay on the steel bed with a blanket in the holding cell, replaying the twists that had put her there. Yesterday she’d been upset that Danae had come to see Smith. She’d been distraught that God had let her down like everyone else. Somehow finding the cross had seemed terribly important, but then Donny had attacked, and …

  She couldn’t think of him that way, springing up behind Smith, teeth bared, knife flashing. Even in that moment she saw his fear, but that didn’t change the fact that he had plunged a knife into Smith’s chest. If Donny’s anatomy had not been wrong, Smith might be dead. How could she feel compassion?

  She’d spent formative time with misfits and people like herself whose issues overwhelmed their capacity to cope. She’d seen the difference between patients with true pathologies, and those who’d been broken by life. She didn’t know Donny, but she had responded empathetically to his plight. Having seen her emptiness, she could ache for his. Maybe God had not been silent after all. Maybe he’d heard and answered in a way she could not have imagined.

  “God is not a cosmic force. He’s a true being who wants you to know and love him, as he knows and loves you.”

  When she’d heard Smith pray, it had sounded like a communication of true connection, not something she’d allowed herself when so many pleas had gone unanswered. He was right that she’d kept God in the labyrinths, a mystery, a divine source of wisdom like Superman’s kryptonite-crystal-encased ancestors. It was always her decision to enter—and hers to walk away. She had thought she opened herself, and maybe she had, but on her terms, seeking knowledge, growth—not relationship.

  Smith’s words had startled and disturbed her. “You’re searching for some cosmic force of a God when what you need is the Father who loves you.”

  She shifted on the hard bed. It still disturbed her. If she allowed a relational God, a Father, how could she know she wouldn’t lose him too?

  “God is faithful, even when we’re not.”

  Why had that bothered her so much? Smith had said he didn’t mean her specifically, but as he’d said it, she had felt a stab of faithlessness, something she couldn’t identify. Had she failed God—or someone else, someone Smith’s words illuminated? Her daddy?

  Panic seized without warning. Tears choked her. How could she have failed him when she hardly remembered him? Her mother had told her time and again that she was not to blame for his leaving, yet the feeling persisted stronger than before. If she had failed her own daddy, how could she stand before a Father God?


  Tears burned her eyes. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe she wasn’t expected to.

  “God wants to give you what you need.”

  Smith had said she needed more than any man could give. But God? Could God fill the emptiness, the wretchedness she’d seen inside herself? The aching hunger, the crushing guilt. The abandonment. Was that the real monster she feared?

  “God vanquishes monsters.”

  She had no path to walk, no meditational prayer, no thoughts or feelings to examine. She lay in the darkness, afraid to sleep, afraid to surrender. When she thought Smith had died, she had almost surrendered to despair. Could she submit to hope?

  Smith rode a slow spiral to wakefulness. He felt worse than the last time he’d opened his eyes and wouldn’t have opened them now but for the persistent voice calling his name. He woke to a man in a gray dress shirt and pale yellow tie, a tidy mustache and goatee, intense brown eyes that seemed to know him, even though they’d never met.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, Smith, but some idiot has locked Tessa in a cell.”

  Smith blinked in the morning light coming through the slatted window blind.

  “Dr. Brenner.” The man extended his hand.

  Smith didn’t take it. “You told that idiot she was psychotic.”

  “Given her hysteria, I thought it possible.”

  “Who were you to make that call without even seeing her?”

  “She’s been in my care a long time. With her history …” He spread his hands. “Anyway, she refuses to clear herself until you tell me where to find our friend.”

  Smith dragged air into his lungs, scrutinizing the person Tessa put so much faith in. “Seven point eight miles past the Brockhurst Inn, you’ll come to a gate. I don’t know if it’s locked, but there’s a key in my jeans pocket.” He motioned to the closet and the doctor found the keys.

  “You’ll have to walk from the office trailer to the meadow just visible through the woods.” Again it took moments to catch his breath. “Past the Bobcat you’ll see a mess of vines. Beneath that, a bronze disk. The disk covers a cistern and he’s inside.”

  “All right.”

  “He’s dangerous.”

  “Yes, I gathered that.” Dr. Brenner clasped his hands before him. “Tessa said he has your phone, so I can let him know I’m there before I open the hatch.”