Safe Haven

by Hannah Alexander

  She turned and strolled away from him a few feet, gazing up at the sky. “I guess it could be possible that I’ve tried to use my father as a scapegoat all these years to explain why I’ve been avoiding God.” Her words sounded casual, as if she were repeating something she didn’t necessarily believe—even as if someone had said those words to her sometime in the past, or that maybe she’d read them in a book.

  “So why have you really been avoiding Him?” Taylor asked.

  She tested the gate, then pushed it open and walked through. “I guess you would probably think it was because I’ve wanted to hold on to my bitterness all these years, and I know that in order to have a good relationship with God, I’d have to release that bitterness.” Again the casualness, but this time he caught a thread of tension underlying the words, as if the casualness was feigned.

  “Sounds like you’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it.”

  “I have an aunt who calls me every few weeks from California.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “She’s my mother’s older sister. She’s quadriplegic, and she has a lot of time to interfere in family problems.”

  “It sounds as if she also has a lot of time to pray. And to think. Do you ever listen to her when she interferes?”

  “Usually I can keep her off the subject, but lately she’s been harping on me a lot.”

  “She sounds like a wise lady.” Taylor followed her through the gate. Oh, Lord, is that what I’ve been doing all this time? Hiding behind my bitterness? Blaming You for something someone else did? Please forgive me. “You know, it’s possible God’s always been there, always waited patiently for us.”

  “Waited for what?” Karah Lee asked. “I’m a believer.”

  “You’re estranged from God, you said so yourself. What kind of a relationship is that? Maybe He’s just waiting for you to admit you want to restore the relationship. Maybe He’s just giving us both a chance to get over ourselves and realize that what matters in life is really how we handle all the baggage.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.

  “Our churches could have helped us heal, but we rejected the help,” he continued.

  “What about the jerks who made us feel unwelcome?” she asked. “That wasn’t a healing experience.”

  “Could be some are the tares among the wheat. People who weren’t planted there by God, but are there to disrupt and destroy the true body of believers. But for the most part, the ‘jerks’ are just fallible believers like us, who make mistakes and misjudge.”

  A breeze blew those same strands of hair across her face again, and this time he did reach up and smooth them away. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t withdraw.

  “You never told me how your son died,” she said.

  He’d expected to feel pain at the question, but he didn’t. It was perfectly natural concern, and it was a relief to share the facts about Chip’s death. “He fell from a ladder when he was painting the eaves of our house.”

  “Did you have a tall house?”

  “No, he just fell wrong and hit his head. He’d been doing a job I was supposed to have done months before, but I was too busy working overtime when we were short-staffed.”

  She stepped around a tombstone and paused at another one, reaching out to trace the dates on it. “This person died fifty years ago,” she said softly. “He was eighteen. I wonder if his father took the blame for his death, as well.”

  Taylor caught the gentle inflection and nodded. “It’s difficult not to. A father’s supposed to nurture and protect his children.” Here he was, spilling his guts to Karah Lee again. He wondered what nightmares would attack him this time. “Tell me about your father,” he said, needing badly to change the subject.

  “There isn’t much to tell. It’s the typical family divorce story. We lived in the tiny burg of Rockwell, on the shore of the Missouri River, just a few miles from Columbia, where everyone knows everyone else. It all fell apart when Dad filed for divorce the summer after I graduated from high school. He’s tried to make up for it ever since, but he’s gone about it totally wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “By using his influence to make sure I got into the right school, got good grades, got the residency I wanted.”

  “You didn’t want him to do that?”

  “I didn’t even know he’d been doing it until my first day on the job here.” She turned away from the tombstone and strolled across the grass toward the old church building. “I understand that he wanted to try to make up for the divorce, but now I’ve got all these…I don’t know…all these doubts about myself. I mean, every time I get a challenging case, I agonize over whether or not I’ll be able to handle it. If my father didn’t think I was capable of earning my medical degree on my own—and he’s in a position where he has to be able to judge people, judge abilities—then what if he’s right about me?”

  “Why don’t you take your eyes off your earthly father for a while and turn your attention to Someone who knows a lot more about you?”

  She turned and looked up at Taylor, and the play of emotions across her face went from confusion to gradual understanding to—

  She glanced suddenly toward the road, and all expression froze. She grabbed Taylor’s arm. “That’s the man I told you about. That’s ‘Detective’ Withnell.”

  He automatically scanned the late-model gold Buick sedan and studied the face of its occupant as he drove past. The man had a long, brooding face, dark features, and he wore a dark suit. “That’s the guy who claimed to be a federal investigator?”

  “It’s him.”

  Taylor automatically read the license plate, repeated it in his mind, then repeated it again as the man drove away. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him a couple of times today.” He pulled his cell phone from his belt, flipped it open and hit Greg’s speed-dial number.

  When the sheriff answered, Taylor explained the situation to him briefly, gave him the license number to check out, disconnected.

  “What’s up?” Karah Lee asked.

  “He’s going to check it out, see if he can come up with anything. Want to take a walk up to the square? Apparently, Tom’s mingling somewhere with the party-boat crowd, and the first tour just returned a few minutes ago. I think we need to compare notes.”

  “I’ll hang around here for a while.”

  Taylor glanced around them. “In a cemetery? It’s getting dark.”

  “I’m a big girl.”

  Taylor glanced along the road where the car had disappeared. Could be the man was just headed out of the area for the evening. But what if he wasn’t?

  “I don’t think so,” Taylor said. “Why don’t I walk you back to the house. That man may suddenly decide he wants to ask you a few more questions.”

  “I’ll tell him the same thing I told him before. And I want to stay here for a while.”

  “Why?”

  Her quick grin surprised him. “Would you relax and stop trying to take responsibility for the whole world? You’re acting spooked.”

  “With good reason.”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to just relax in your peaceful Ozark silence and be alone?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “I’m not going to get that back at the lodge, even up in my room, with all the commotion downstairs. If you’re so sure God is watching over us in spite of ourselves, then give Him a chance to work with me, okay? Now go. I’ve got some thinking to do.”

  He nodded and left her to her thoughts.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Karah Lee stood in the churchyard watching Taylor walk away, and it seemed to her as if the very air around her grew still. She couldn’t believe she’d actually listened to a sermon for the first time in over a decade, and it had been preached right here in this cemetery by a man who, like her, also avoided church.

  Talk about a miracle.

  According to Taylor, God was waiting for her to speak. She could pour her heart out to Him right now, in thi
s quiet place.

  She’d known that since she was a little girl, but it had taken Taylor to remind her.

  How did one make contact with God again after so many years of estrangement? All her upbringing reminded her she would have to apologize first, confess all her sins, and…and that could take all night. She wouldn’t even get a chance to say hi.

  She’d been raised to believe that she could pray anytime, anywhere, but the peacefulness of this place was especially conducive to prayer. In her suite at the house, she would have to keep her windows open and the fan going because the air-conditioning hadn’t been installed yet, and the noise of the crowd could be distracting. So this was a better place for her to pray.

  She just didn’t know where to start.

  She glanced toward Taylor’s retreating figure. He had a long, powerful stride, wide, muscular shoulders and, even more important, he had a strong streak of honesty that was more attractive to her than all those physical attributes combined.

  A car approached from behind Karah Lee on the road, and she turned to find that same gold Buick sedan cruising back toward town, coming a little too slowly past the cemetery again. Withnell’s gaze skimmed over the tops of the tombstones toward the thicket of trees between the church grounds and the lake, then he looked at Karah Lee.

  He was not smiling.

  She didn’t smile either.

  His car slowed further, and he glanced toward the driveway, as if he might pull in. Taylor chose that moment to pause and turn, then casually take a couple of steps out into the road, hands on his hips, ranger hat pulled low over his face, though the sun had long ago settled past the tree-lined horizon.

  The phony “investigator” cruised on past the church and continued his drive to town.

  Karah Lee gave a relieved sigh and looked heavenward. “Thank you, Lord.” She’d needed that gentle but powerful reminder that God was involved in every situation in her life. “I’m not feeling very talkative right now, and I don’t even know where to start. I know you haven’t left me the way Dad did, and yet it’s been hard not to think that way.” Taylor was right—she was the one who had left.

  She thought about Taylor’s grief over his son. Had God grieved that way when she withdrew from Him? “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I never wanted to cause you pain. I was only thinking of my own pain. When my own father rejected me, it seemed as if You rejected me then, too.” But her human father wasn’t God. Just because she’d felt she was unlovable by human standards, she wasn’t unlovable by divine standards.

  “Life’s been confusing,” she whispered to Him. “Especially where my faith in You is concerned.” She closed her eyes and remembered a passage of scripture she and her sister had both been taught by a charismatic youth leader in their early teens. “For I am convinced that ‘neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons’…nor something else I can’t remember…‘nor height nor depth’—which is a big deal because I’m scared of heights—‘nor anything else will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ That means Dad, too, doesn’t it? He can’t separate me?”

  But she had allowed her dad’s choices to impact her own in a destructive way, by convincing her that she had, indeed, lost God’s love. And though nothing God created could separate her from His love, what if she just walked away from it? How long would He wait for her to return?

  And what if she didn’t return? Would she still be bound for heaven when she died, or had she walked away from that, too?

  But none of that mattered for her any longer. “Lord,” she whispered, feeling a long-lost sense of peace settle over her, “I’m back.”

  Taylor watched the Buick drive past, then called the sheriff again, still strolling with what he hoped was apparent casualness toward his Jeep, parked on the square.

  “Yeah, Taylor,” Greg said.

  “Did you find any information on the plates?”

  “Nothing outstanding, but that car isn’t registered to any federal agency, or anyone named Withnell.”

  Taylor could have told him that. “I tried calling Tom and couldn’t reach him. Do you know if he’s still downtown?” He scanned the crowd of visitors who were presently boarding the paddleboat.

  “He hasn’t told me he was leaving, but he might have his phone turned off. You could probably find him at the construction site. Unofficially.”

  Taylor watched as the gold Buick rounded the curve at the far end of the square and then pulled onto the grass beneath a tree and parked. “I’ll let him snoop for a while. I need to keep watch on this guy. He was showing a little too much interest in Dr. Fletcher a few minutes ago.”

  Greg chuckled. “Taylor, I’ve never seen you jealous before.”

  Taylor shook his head. The lack of professionalism around here was occasionally frustrating. “The man we’re discussing entered the clinic claiming to be a federal agent seeking information about a patient who came in last Friday on that bus of sick folks. And now it appears he’s lying about being a federal agent.”

  There was a thoughtful pause. “Well, that’s a bad deal, I know, but why are you suddenly so hot about it?”

  Taylor hesitated. “You know that young woman we were discussing Sunday?”

  “The murder suspect?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about her?”

  “That’s who he was looking for.” As Taylor neared the square, the man got out of the car and closed the door, glanced around at the crowd, then immediately fell into step behind a group of tourists headed for the beach.

  “You’re talking about the woman Karah Lee had us searching for the other day?”

  “That’s the one,” Taylor said, clamping the phone tightly to his ear as he hurried to catch up with the suit.

  “What’s your take on her?”

  “I think that kid was no murderer.”

  “I’m not asking you to be judge or jury, I’m asking if you think that kid was actually the woman who’s been accused of killing her boyfriend and the hotel employee. Fawn Morrison.”

  Taylor was not a liar. He said a silent apology to Karah Lee. “I think it could be the same person whose picture’s been circulated, but there’s a lot more to this case than we’ve heard. A lot more. This investigator could be dangerous. Dr. Fletcher wouldn’t have mentioned him if she hadn’t felt it was significant.”

  “In other words, you think Fawn Morrison has been in Hideaway.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we never found that patient the other day, remember? If that woman ever was here, she’s long gone now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Taylor said. “She could be hiding, or in disguise again.” He thought about the woman Junior Short had spotted entering Dane’s feed store, and about the “child” who had apparently broken into the clinic. “In fact, Greg, I think it’s likely she’s still around somewhere.”

  “Obviously, so does the man with the gold Buick. Maybe you’d better tell Doc Fletcher to stay away from the guy.”

  The suit stopped at the dock, and for a moment Taylor was afraid he would get on board the paddleboat. But he didn’t. A familiar-looking man stepped from the boat—the guard who had evicted Taylor from Karah Lee’s destroyed rental last week.

  “I think I’d better give Lieutenant Milfred a call,” Greg said.

  “Maybe you should.” Taylor signed off and plunged through a crowd of laughing partyers who had apparently been on the previous boat cruise and had chosen to hang out on the shore and continue their party.

  He brushed past a man wearing an indiscreet racing swimsuit that did nothing to hide his love handles or his paunch.

  “People get weirded out on that boat, don’t you watch them?” the man was saying to a woman in a one-piece. “I was standing right over there on the dock when somebody jumped overboard, and the boat went on without him, like nobody even noticed.”

  “What happened to the man overboard?” she asked.

  “Swam ashore, shook off the extra w
ater and walked away.”

  “You saw all that?”

  “Sure. The party sounded like it was getting a little wild, if you know what I mean, but still, you’d think they’d keep a better watch on their guests.”

  Taylor heard no more as they walked away. Evening had deepened to the point that he couldn’t see the cemetery in the gloom, and when a rowdy group of teenagers jostled past him, he lost his quarry. Withnell was gone.

  Taylor rushed across the lawn toward the place he had last seen the man. Nothing. He had disappeared. Taylor’s radio sounded the alert for a first-responder call. There’d been an accident at the construction site.

  He had no choice. The ambulance was twenty minutes away. He had to answer the call.

  As he ran back to his Jeep, he dialed the bed-and-breakfast and asked Edith to ring Karah Lee’s room. Maybe she’d had the sense to return.

  There was no answer.

  By the time Edith came back on the line, Taylor was in the Jeep driving through town with his siren blaring and lights flashing.

  “What on earth’s that racket?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a call. Edith, I need your help.”

  “Help me!”

  Fawn awakened and realized she had cried out. Her throat felt as if that hot sand filled it. She tried to lick her lips. Her tongue felt crackly-dry.

  She opened her eyes to see the treetops looming over her in the blackening sky, and for a few seconds she didn’t know if it was really the sky or if she was delirious.

  The sound of a motorboat reached her from the distance, and the familiar wash of water from the paddleboat she’d seen earlier. What she wouldn’t give to be under that splash of water right now. She was so thirsty.

  The lake was only a few feet away…if she could only crawl down there.

  She struggled to get up, but she didn’t have the strength. Rocks dug into her back as she collapsed again.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Help.”

  Karah Lee watched the sky deepen from dusty rose to dusky purple. The stars flickered, demanding attention. Whoever thought a cemetery was a spooky place at night? Out here, the crowd didn’t chatter or clamor for attention, and she didn’t have to worry if she was going to get a case she couldn’t handle.