Redemption Road(116)

“Damn it, Jacks! Why’d you do that?”

“They saw our faces.”

“Whose fault is that?”

Jacks ignored Olivet. He collected the casings, then closed the bathroom door and pulled Olivet from the smoke-filled silence. “Get in.” He pushed Olivet at the sliding door. “Just get in and shut the hell up.”

In the van and accelerating, Olivet skinned off the mask and watched the motel fade into the same, dull haze. He heard sirens rise and watched state police cars blow past in the other direction. There were four of them moving fast; and that’s how close it was, he thought.

Seconds.

By the time he turned around, Jacks had a cell phone to his ear. “It’s me, yeah. He wasn’t there.… No, I’m sure. Wrong motel, wrong room.” The needle crossed fifty-five, then sixty. “Tell your cop buddy the woman lied.”

*

Some people were blessed with the ability to forget bad things. Elizabeth lacked that particular skill, so if she chose to face the ugliness straight on, she could close her eyes and see the past with perfect clarity: the sounds, the slant of light, the way he moved. The memory was about after.

It was about Harrison Spivey and her father.

It was about the church.

*

Sunlight struck the cross, but it was rosy through the glass and made her think of blood: the blood in her skin, the memory of it between her legs. That color on the cross was wrong, but there it was, salvation and sin and the face of the boy who’d raped her. His reflection twisted in the metal, but it was real, like he was real, a hot-skinned, grass-smelling boy who used to play games and wink in church and be her friend. He knelt beside her as she listened to his lies and pretensions of remorse. He said the words because her father told him to; and like the follower she’d always been, Elizabeth said them, too.

“Our father…”

Damn you for letting this happen to me.

She kept the last part to herself because that’s what her life had become, a veil of normalcy stretched across a well of hurt. She ate and went to school and allowed her father to pray by her bed, to kneel in the dark and ask God to forgive her.

Not just the boy.

Her.

She lacked trust, he said. Trust in God’s purpose, and in her father’s wisdom. “The child you carry is a gift.”

But, it was no gift, and the boy kneeling in her father’s church was no giver. She could see him from the corner of her eye, the beads of sweat on his neck, the fingers squeezed white as he repeated the words of prayer and pressed his forehead so hard against the altar she thought it, too, might bleed.

They spent five hours on their knees, but there was no forgiveness in her.

“I want the police.”

She said it many times, a whisper; but her father believed in redemption above all things, so urged her to stillness and heart and greater prayer.

“There is a path,” he said.

But there was no such thing for Elizabeth. She had no God to trust, and no father, either.

“Take his hand,” her father said; and Elizabeth did. “Now, look in his eyes and tell him you find it in your heart to forgive.”

“I’m so sorry, Liz.” The boy was crying.

“Tell him,” her father said. “Show him your eyes and tell him.”

But she could not do it, not now and not ever, not if heat was salvation itself and she was offered all the fires of hell.

*

The painful memory filled Elizabeth with equally painful questions. She couldn’t see the whole picture, but possibilities were lining up: the church, the altar, the women who looked like her.

Could a teenage rapist grow into something worse?

Maybe.

But, had he?

After that day at the church, Harrison Spivey spent three summers working for her father. Mowing grass. Painting. Digging graves with the ancient backhoe. To him it was penance, and to her one more reason to leave. Yet he’d spent hours kneeling at that altar, knew every inch of the grounds and building. She needed to confirm something else, too—something to do with Allison Wilson. Elizabeth picked up her keys, surprised when she turned and bumped into James Randolph. She’d forgotten he was there.

It was the memory.

The burn.

“I can’t let you go just yet.” His hand settled on her arm. She looked at it. “Please, you need to see this one last thing.” Her eyes rose to his face. He looked old, but alert and scrubbed and sincere. “Here,” he said. “Sit.”

He took the other chair and looked out at the cops in the bull pen. He sat close enough for her to smell the aftershave, the mint on his breath. Were people watching? That was his concern. “There’s orders,” he said. “And then there’s orders.” His hand went into a jacket pocket. “You’re not supposed to see this. Dyer thinks you’ll freak or something, so he sent the word down. Me, I think you need to know. Safety and shit. Common sense.”

Elizabeth waited. The hand stayed in the pocket.

He flicked another glance through the glass, and when the hand came out, it held an evidence bag. Elizabeth couldn’t tell what was in it, but it was flat and small and looked as if it could be a photograph. “Beckett found this under the church. It was wedged behind a floor joist above the bodies. Only a few people know about it.” Randolph pressed slick plastic against her leg, said, “Keep it low.”