Unspoken Fear

by Hunter Morgan

  "Come on, buddy, you have to help me out here." Noah glanced out the open door of the car, then back at Mattie. "Mallory tells me you can talk when you want to. You think you'd like to try it out on me? Because you know, there's nothing I can think of that would make me happier than to hear what you have to say. To know for sure, for once, what you want. What you need."

  Noah heard someone enter the garage, and he turned to see Mallory walking up along his side of the car, a plastic plate of cookies in her hands. Rachel followed her.

  "No luck, huh?" Rachel asked.

  Noah shook his head.

  "Well, Mallory wants to give it a try. Mind?"

  Noah shrugged, sliding out of the car to let Mallory in.

  "Howld this," Mallory said, pushing the plate into his hands. "And no eating!"

  Noah looked up at Rachel, grinning. "Yes, ma'am."

  Mallory climbed into the car. "You have to go," she said rather sternly.

  "We have to go?" Rachel looked at Noah.

  "We have to tawk," Mallory explained. "Mattie and me."

  "Mattie and I," Rachel corrected.

  "That's what I said" Mallory declared indignantly.

  Rachel met Noah's gaze, and without a word passing between them, he knew what she was asking.

  "She'll be fine," he said gently. "Come on."

  Rachel and Noah walked out of the garage and stood ten feet back, in the driveway. At once, they heard Mallory talking, but her voice was muffled inside the car so they couldn't hear what she was saying.

  "What do you think she's telling him?" Rachel crossed her arms over her chest.

  "Probably something profound like he doesn't get any cookies if he doesn't come out of the car." Noah flashed a grin at her.

  Rachel chuckled. "It would work with me."

  "You always were a slave to chocolate."

  She smiled and they both stood there watching the car. A minute later, the door opened on Mattie's side. Mallory popped out the other door. "Come on, we can go in your fort," she called in her sweet voice. "Come on, Mattie. Jump out, just wike me."

  Mattie thrust one leg out the door, then the other.

  Mallory came out of the garage. "He's coming now. We're going to go sit in his fort and eat cookies if that's awright, Mom. Mattie wikes to go to his fort when he's scared."

  "How do you know he's scared?" Rachel asked.

  "He towld me." The little blonde took a cookie off the plate Noah was still holding and bit a piece out of it.

  "He told you that?" Rachel asked skeptically.

  "Mmm-hmmm." Mallory munched on her cookie.

  "What's he scared of, Mallory?" Noah decided there was no sense addressing the topic of Mattie's speech abilities again, even though they hadn't heard a word from Mattie inside the car. For all they knew, the four-year-old was making it all up.

  "He doesn't know." Mallory stuck out her tongue to catch a smear of chocolate on the corner of her mouth. She walked around to the other side of the car. "Come on, Mattie. Wet's go eat our cookies in the fort. I'w tewll you a story so you won't be afraid." She looked at her mother over her shoulder, lowering her voice just as Mattie appeared from the car. "I'w tewll him about the prince who fights the dragons to save the princess, just wike you tewll me when I'm scared."

  Mattie lumbered by them, not even glancing up. Mallory grabbed the plate of cookies and fell into step behind him, making a beeline for the barn.

  "You think it's okay?" Rachel murmured, looking up at Noah. "I know he'd never hurt her. I'm sure he wasn't going to hit me. I just startled him, that's all. You know he's sensitive about being touched."

  "She'll be fine," Noah assured her. "I've got some things I can do around house though, some cleaning up so I can keep an eye on them. How about if you go inside and change and I'll hang out here?"

  Rachel looked up, meeting his gaze, her green eyes warm with appreciation. "You like her, don't you?"

  "Like her," he said softly. "I've known her less than a month and I love her like she's my own."

  Rachel pressed her lips together, and for a moment he thought she might cry. She turned away from him. "I'll be back out in a few minutes. I'll work in the garden and keep you company." As she walked away, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it before she let go.

  Noah could feel his heart swell in his chest.

  * * *

  "What do you make of it?" Snowden asked. They were in his office, with the door open, of course, but the station house was quiet because it was a Sunday afternoon. Most of the officers on duty were on patrol, and the dispatcher worked in a soundproofed room that also served as the receiving desk to the general public when they entered the building.

  "What do I make of it? What is there to make of it except the obvious?" Delilah said in her unmistakable southern drawl. "Johnny Leager was steppin' out on his wife with Pam Rehak, apparently."

  Snowden pushed back in his comfortable executive's chair behind his desk, placing his hands behind his head as he thought. "Which brings us back to Mr. Parson as the prime suspect."

  She perched on the arm of one of the two chairs in front of his desk. It was something Snowden had noticed about her. She was a percher rather than a sitter. Too much nervous energy to sit, he supposed.

  "Or the grieving widow," Delilah offered. "Wife finds out about the affair, decides to end it permanently and cash in on the life insurance."

  "It's only twenty thousand dollars." Snowden frowned. "By the time she pays the funeral expenses, she'll be lucky if she has ten left."

  Delilah shrugged her petite shoulders. "You saw the house. Ten thousand dollars cash probably sounds like a lot of money to Stacey. Especially when she gets rid of her no-good cheatin' husband in the deal."

  "I don't know." Snowden let his hands fall to his lap as he shifted his weight forward in his chair. "The handwritten note left at the Leager scene didn't look like her handwriting, according to our lab. We can send it off to a handwriting expert, but I'd guess it would come back not a match. Even I could tell that the writing was more masculine than the sample of the wife's that we kept with her written statement."

  Delilah popped off the chair and began to pace behind it. "If I were goin' to kill my man and leave a note to throw off the police, I'd disguise my handwriting." She raised a finger. "In fact, I might get smart on the next one and rip the page right out of the Bible and just underline the verses."

  "But why kill the woman two weeks later? We weren't even looking at Mrs. Leager as a suspect. And the notes suggest some kind of religious zealot. She attended church regularly at St. Paul's, but she didn't strike me as even particularly religious."

  "Hard to say why people do the things they do, Chief. Maybe she killed him thinkin' it would make her feel better and it didn't." Another shrug. "Or maybe she enjoyed it and wanted to try it again."

  "But these are such gruesome murders," Snowden said, thinking out loud. "I've been doing a little research from some files sent from the FBI in Quantico, and women don't usually kill this way. They don't like a mess."

  "Always exceptions to every rule, I suppose."

  Snowden found himself meeting her gaze and he looked away, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable, alone with her like this on a Sunday when the station house was practically a tomb. He couldn't stand even a whiff of suggested impropriety. There were people on the city council who hadn't wanted to make him the chief to begin with, and he knew they were aching to fire him. Two unsolved murders were already two strikes against him. He certainly didn't need another.

  "Well, listen, nothing else we can do today." Snowden reached for a file on his desk and flipped it open. "Go home, enjoy the rest of your day off, and we'll get on the case tomorrow. If Stacey Leager did this, she won't get away with it."

  Delilah stepped into the doorway, one hand high on the doorjamb. She was dressed in jeans and a little pink T-shirt. It was perfectly respectable, covered her completely, but it was form fitting, making it quite obvious that, out
of her uniform, Sergeant Swift had a mighty fine figure for such a small woman.

  "I'll run over to the cup plant first thing in the morning, have a talk with personnel."

  "You come into the station house first, hook up with Lopez."

  She frowned. "I can do this myself, Chief. I don't need an escort."

  "I said you were no longer in training. That doesn't mean you've been on the force long enough to ride on your own." He grabbed a pen out of the center drawer of his desk. "We go by the book here, Swift."

  He didn't look up, but he knew she was making a face. She was very expressive when it came to her thoughts, especially when she disagreed.

  But she didn't argue with him, and when he glanced up, she was on her way out the door. "See you tomorrow, Chief."

  "Yup," Snowden called after her as she disappeared down the dark hall. And then, unable to resist, he added, "Good work, Delilah."

  * * *

  That night, Noah lay in his single bed, unable to sleep. A little afraid to sleep. He felt strange, anxious, as if something was going to happen, something bad, but he didn't know what.

  Maybe he was just afraid of another blackout. They came without rhyme or reason, and there was no telling how long they would last. Sometimes it was just like a blink, just a moment of blackness, but even then, there was no denying it had happened. He came out of them feeling disoriented, confused, worried, never sure how long he'd been out or what he'd done. Where he'd gone.

  When he first arrived in prison and sobered up, he'd lost whole days to the blackouts, but his roommate could relate to him things he had said or done during them. He would apparently go to the gym, to the mess hall, or to the library to work, without knowing he was doing it. It was just like the memory was gone from his mind. But that was why they called them blackouts, wasn't it?

  Remembering those early days made him think of his roommate, lifer Clancy Jones. Clancy was there for killing his wife and his best friend with an axe after catching them in bed together when he was twenty-eight. He'd celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday a few months before Noah's release. The old man had been good to him, helped him adjust as well as anyone could to prison life, but Clancy had had his quirks.

  Clancy Jones, a black man, had found God in prison and attended services held daily by various volunteers from the outside. In the five years that Noah had been in, the old man had never given up, asking each day if Noah wanted to attend service with him. No matter how many times Noah said he wasn't interested, Clancy would tell him that it didn't matter if Noah had given up on God because God hadn't given up on Noah.

  Right now Noah almost wanted to believe it.

  But what would make him believe a crazy man, and Clancy had certainly been crazy. It had been the old man's belief that Satan had entered his body the night he murdered his wife and friend, that Satan had killed them, using his human form, and that he was, actually, an innocent man.

  Noah sighed, glancing at the digital clock beside the bed that said it was 2:04 a.m. Blaming Satan for the murders had always seemed like an easy out to him. Like him blaming hereditary alcoholism for what he had done.

  In counseling while in prison, one of the things Noah had heard over and over again was that in order to recover, he had to take responsibility for his own actions. He was responsible for drinking. He was responsible for killing the Marcuses. He was responsible for the divorce between him and Rachel. That little girl wasn't his because of things he had chosen to do.

  However, he was not responsible for his parents' deaths. That was another part of recovery. They'd talked about it the other day at his AA meeting. The speaker said that recovering alcoholics sometimes became so enthusiastic in their willingness to meet their own failings head-on that they took on blame for things that weren't theirs to begin with. He was certainly guilty of that after his mom and dad were killed. It was part of the reason why he'd started drinking more.

  Somehow, it had made sense in his alcohol-crazed mind. He'd given his parents the trip for their anniversary. It was something they had always wanted to do—a mission trip to Central America; it had sounded so perfect. It had been perfect until their Jeep caravan had been stopped by rebels with machine guns and his mom and dad had been murdered execution style.

  Noah squeezed his eyes shut, a lump rising in his throat. He missed them so much.

  He took a deep breath and opened his eyes, staring at the tiled ceiling, thinking he really did need to go to the churchyard and say good-bye. He wondered if Rachel would go with him. Maybe they could visit their boys' graves, too.

  Well, maybe he wasn't ready for that yet, but he was definitely making progress. With a grim smile of satisfaction, he rolled onto his side and turned off the light. Rolling onto his back again, he closed his eyes and tried to let his mind drift toward more pleasant thoughts. He thought of the rows of grapevine trellises, the sunshine on his face, the smell of the grass that lay between the rows, freshly cut. And then, almost of their own accord in his mind's eye he saw Rachel and Mallory, hand in hand, coming toward him, and they were smiling.

  Chapter 11

  Noah walked down the porch steps Monday morning to see Joshua Troyer coming up the driveway in his old pickup. Joshua took his time, window down, arm resting on the edge. As he turned around in front of the house, sending ground-up oyster shells skittering, he nodded in Noah's direction.

  When Joshua pulled up in front of the porch, Noah opened the passenger's side door and climbed in. "I appreciate you doing this for me, Josh. Not a lot of people I feel like I can ask."

  "Eeh-ya." He slipped the truck into gear and started back down the driveway. "Glad I can help you out. Know you'd help me out if I needed it."

  "You're right, I would." Noah stared at the long rows of grapevine trellis running on both sides of the driveway. The vines were really beginning to leaf out and grow thicker and hardier as the days lengthened and the temperatures rose. He glanced back at the Mennonite man next to him on the bench seat. "But I still want you to know that I appreciate what you're doing for me and I appreciate your friendship."

  Josh gave a nod. "Eeh-ya." He stopped at the end of the drive, looked both ways, and then eased out onto the road. "Guess you heard the news from town. They say we made CNN."

  "About Pam Rehak, yes. It's terrible. I can't imagine what's going to happen to her child."

  "Took the man she was livin' within for questionin'," Joshua said. He lifted his arm off the window's edge to stroke his wiry beard. "Think he did it?"

  Noah stared out through the windshield. "I don't know."

  "Weren't married." Joshua made a clicking sound between his teeth. "Bible says a man lives in sin pays the price."

  The Bible said no such thing, that Noah could recall, but he didn't want to be rude and argue with the man willing to drive him to his parole officer. Besides, he'd learned a long time ago not to debate religion with Josh Troyer. The man was a fundamentalist who had never actually read the Bible himself, preferring to hear God's word in church services. He had some rather interesting takes on what it said, but Noah had learned a long time ago not to judge others by their interpretations of the Bible. Joshua was a good man who served as an elder in his church, was a leader in the Mennonite community, and had stood by his wife, despite the importance put on families and the fact that his Trudy couldn't have children.

  "Bad thing to raise a child in an evil house like that," Josh continued. "Woman with a child should have known better."

  Noah couldn't resist. "So what?" he said, turning to the older man. "Are you saying she deserved to die because she was living with a man who wasn't her husband?"

  "God speaks against fornication." Josh gripped the steering wheel stubbornly.

  "He also speaks of tolerance and not being judgmental."

  "Not my place to judge."

  "No, no, it's not." Noah turned to look out the window at the wildflowers growing along the road. There was something about Josh's words that made him uncomfo
rtable. He felt so bad for Pam, who had never been one of his parishioners, but who he had seen in town on occasion. She'd been a pretty enough girl, but one who clearly seemed to be drifting through life, looking for something. Looking to be loved by someone. She had never come in for counseling with Johnny, but he had spoken of her several times, and he had obviously had feelings for her beyond sexual.

  It had, of course, been Noah's job to insist that Johnny put an immediate end to the affair. Noah had talked a lot about Stacey, about Johnny's commitment he had made to her on his wedding day and his responsibility as a parent. That didn't mean Noah hadn't felt for the young woman, so desperate for love that she was willing to take another woman's husband to her bed.

  His gaze drifted to the neat, white, turn-of-the-century houses that lined both sides of the road as they entered town. It looked so quaint, so peaceful. It was hard to believe two people could have been murdered so ruthlessly in such a short period of time.

  Noah tried to block his next thought, but before he could control his line of reasoning, there it was again. Was it a coincidence that Johnny and his lover were dead? And if it wasn't, who had killed them? He knew it was none of his business, none of his affair.

  So why did he, somehow, deep in his gut, feel it was?

  * * *

  Delilah hit the receive button on the cell phone mounted in a holder on the dash of the cruiser. "Sergeant Swift," she said, her voice transferring through the speakerphone. The department still relied on police radios for a great deal of communication, but cell phones for limited use had been added to the cars the previous year.

  "It's Chief Calloway."

  "Yes, sir." She stopped at the stop sign and then slowly pulled out onto Route 1, headed south toward Lewes, where the local hospital was located.

  "I understand you left the station without a partner this morning," Snowden said.

  She resisted a smile, afraid it might affect the tone of her voice. "Yes, sir. Lopez called in sick. Strep, I understand."