“For the police to come,” Joe said. “But they didn’t. Esther found Neil standing over the body and he confessed. I didn’t know”—he looked at his wife—“we didn’t know how to react.”
“By telling the truth,” Iris said grimly. Before they could respond, she added, “But I’m not in a good position to throw stones on that front. If I’d told the truth straight off, about Pastor Matt molesting me, then maybe he would never have had the opportunity to victimize Gabby. Even if everyone called me a liar, maybe if I’d spoken up sooner, you’d have been more alert, Gabby would have been more wary. Who knows?” Weariness draped itself over her and she leaned against the booth.
“When I started this,” she said, letting her head fall back so she was talking to a spot somewhere between the Ulms and the ceiling, “I wanted to discover the truth to get my father out of prison. It was some kind of quest I set myself to make up for all the years I was gone. It wasn’t my fault that he confessed, thinking I had attacked Pastor Matt, but I felt responsible. I could make it up to him, redeem myself for giving in to Pastor Matt, for not telling the truth immediately, for God knows what other sins, by setting him free.”
“Do you want me to tell the police the truth?” Joe asked. He looked straight at her, his expression bleak. “I’m ready to do that. I should have done it twenty-three years ago, but I didn’t want anyone to know that that bastard had raped my Gabby, that she and he had—”
“Joe!” Debby put a hand on his arm as if to keep him from marching off to the sheriff’s office.
“A part of me was glad to think my father had done what you did,” Iris confessed, looking at Joe. “I’m not proud of that. I was actually disappointed, hurt even, to find out that he truly hadn’t believed me, hadn’t exacted revenge on my behalf.” She paused, letting her gaze rest on a tabby cat sitting on the sidewalk. Her eyes swung back to the Ulms. “It’s not my place to condone what you did or condemn you, but my father has already served twenty-three years for what you did.”
Debby leaped to her feet, knocking over the salt shaker. “You can’t make us—. Joe’s been sorry every day for—.” Her shoulders shook violently and she glared at Iris.
“Sorry isn’t enough,” Joe said, reaching for his wife’s hand. She yanked it away.
“Don’t do this, Joe. Gabby! Everyone would know she, that Pastor Matt and she—. Don’t let her talk you into—”
“No one here’s talking me into anything, Deb. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit’s been trying to talk me into for a quarter century.” Joe slid out of the booth and took his stiff wife in his arms. She struggled, but then subsided against his shoulder. Iris watched uncomfortably as he stroked her hair and murmured to her. With his eyes shut, Joe Ulm looked resigned, even peaceful, as he comforted his wife, and Iris regretted that her father’s freedom might come at the cost of his.
“You might not even have to do time,” Iris said. “Esther confessed to letting her mother die, after all, so the only charges would be related to Pastor Matt’s beating. Any judge or jury would sympathize with your motive, and with a good lawyer …” She hoped his confession and his knowledge of the crime’s details would be enough to outweigh her father’s earlier confession. Something Debby had said niggled at her. Barely daring to hope, she asked, “Do you still have the cross? You said you ‘hid it.’” She leaned forward, tensing as she waited for an answer.
Debby and Joe exchanged a look, Debby’s resistant and Joe’s commanding. Finally, Debby gave a tiny nod. “That night, when Joe came home with the cross that looked like it’d been dipped in blood, I knew we needed to get rid of it. But it didn’t seem right to bury the symbol of our Savior in the dirt, or toss it in a Dumpster like it was just … just trash. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I wrapped it up and drove over to my parents’ house in Canon City that very night. I hid it in their attic. They’re in their eighties—they haven’t gone up in the attic in decades. I check on it sometimes when we visit them.”
It was more than Iris had dared hope for. “Thank God,” she breathed.
She slid out of the booth, suddenly anxious to get away from the Ulms who were standing side by side with clasped hands, from
the past, from Lone Pine. She planned to phone Cade as soon as she got outside so he could mobilize the police to search Debby’s parents’ house and find the cross. She trusted Joseph Ulm to do the right thing, but she sensed Debby was intent on protecting her husband, possibly even against his wishes. She didn’t completely blame her, but she couldn’t let her jeopardize her father’s bid for freedom. Giving the pies a wistful look as she passed their glass domes, Iris pushed through the door and into the sunshine, lifting up her face to its warmth. She’d call Cade and then the airline, to book a ticket home.
forty-nine
iris
One month later
Iris climbed from her car outside Eclectica and carefully removed the boxed and tissue-swaddled award from the passenger seat. Carrying it into the store, she hugged the box to her chest and waited for Jane to get off the phone. She had recovered well from her surgery, Iris thought, and although she was still doing physical therapy several times a week, she’d returned to her home a week earlier, days after Iris’s return. Iris had stayed in Colorado until a judge vacated her father’s conviction after Joseph Ulm turned himself in with the bloodied cross that bore Matthew Brozek’s DNA, and the district attorney declined to file new charges against Neil Asher in “the interests of justice.” They were still working out a plea deal for Joe Ulm. Volunteering to hang out with Angel for a weekend, Iris had given her mother and father some alone time when he was released from prison. Then she’d spent an awkward day with the three of them in Lone Pine and flown to Portland, unbearably glad to be home.
Jane hung up and peered over her glasses. “Well, are you going to show me?”
With a rustle of tissue paper, Iris unwrapped the foot-tall award and placed it on the counter. “Ta-da.” She stood back, waiting for Jane’s reaction.
It was unlike anything Iris had ever done. For one, it wasn’t a piece of jewelry, but a sculpture set on a granite base. She ran her fingers across the three-inch squares of clear glass, with lead solder to denote panes, assembled in an overlapping way so that from one direction they almost looked like birds taking off, and from another they were clearly windows. A sprinkle of tiny stones, clear quartz, made the panes shimmer, as if splashed with raindrops. A hand constructed from intertwined metal wires like an armature rose from the granite base and supported the sculpture with a cloth draped beneath the palm.
“It’s windows,” Iris explained, too anxious to wait for Jane’s reaction. “Green Gables is a construction company, so I thought windows would work. And the hand polishing the windows—well, that’s the hard-working employee who’s getting the award.” The piece had almost constructed itself upon Iris’s return, even though she’d had to consult with a friend who did stained glass to get some tips on working with the glass panes.
“It’s stunning,” Jane said quietly. “Stunning.” After another moment of walking around the piece, studying it, she looked up with a glint in her eye. “I foresee a lucrative new aspect to your design career, my dear.”
“Spoken like an agent,” Iris said, laughing. “How are you doing?”
“My physical therapist is a sadist,” Jane scowled, “but I’m moving easier.” To demonstrate, she took several steps across the gallery, leaning only lightly on the handsome cane her son had given her, and returned to lower herself onto a settee positioned in front of a large canvas. She patted it and Iris sat beside her. “How about you?”
“Better. I’m closing on the house in two weeks. Jolene’s coming for a visit after school lets out and Greg’s helping me get the yard in shape before she arrives.”
“You’re spending a lot of time with that young man.” Jane’s smile was knowing.
“We’re
taking it slowly. We’ll see where it goes.”
“Still committed to celibacy?”
“For the moment.” Iris blushed, feeling a bit foolish.
Jane patted her leg. “Good for you. If you last another twenty-seven days, I win the pool. Lassie didn’t think you’d go a full week.”
“A pool? You started a pool?” The thought both amused and appalled Iris. She brushed Jane’s hand off her leg with mock-exasperation and stood, stroking a finger along the sculpture’s granite base. Lasting. Granite was made to endure, as were some relationships. Iris thought with wonder and ruefulness of her weekly Skype sessions with her parents and Angel. Angel did most of the talking. Iris was wary of opening up to her parents—it wasn’t easy moving past twenty-three years of resentment and betrayal—and stuck mostly to the kind of chitchat she’d make with a stranger in a coffee shop, but at least the lines of communication were open. She hoped they wouldn’t close up when Angel rejoined Noah and Keely in a few months. Six weeks ago, Iris wouldn’t have risked a 2mm freshwater pearl on the chance that she and her mother would ever speak to each other again. But now …
A stray sunbeam sparked off one of the tiny window panes. It was too soon to know if she and Greg would be together long-term, but Iris felt good about him, about them. Their relationship might not—yet—be granite-strong, but they were strengthening it daily with their conversations, honesty, laughter, and kissing. World-class kissing. Maybe apatite or feldspar. She imagined the look on Greg’s face if she told him she was pretty sure their relationship was as strong as feldspar, and laughed.
When Jane asked what was so funny, Iris shook her head. “Just thinking about stones,” she said. She sobered. “Did I tell you they identified the remains found in the pond as Penelope’s?”
Before she left Colorado, Iris had gone to see the Welshes and suggested they drag the pond in the alpaca field. They’d found the skeletonized remains of a young girl. A crack in the skeleton’s skull suggested she’d been struck with something, a shovel maybe, and then dragged into the pond to drown. The girl’s bracelet had apparently come off when Esther was dragging her to the pond, investigators speculated, and when the rockslide occurred that same day Esther had had the presence of mind to half-bury it among the overturned rocks. Iris shivered at the thought of Penelope lying at the bottom of the pond all these years, staring up into the blue.
“Hopefully, being able to bury their daughter properly will give her parents some peace,” Jane said.
“Hopefully.”
“And Pastor Matt? Is there any hope that he’ll awaken again?”
Iris shrugged. “Jolene says they’ve moved him back to the nursing home. I guess if a miracle can happen once, it can happen again, but for now …”
“I’m sorry you never got to confront him the way you wanted to.” Jane gazed at her over the tops of her purple glasses. “Cowardly man to duck back into his coma before you could give him what-for.”
Iris managed a small smile. “I let him take too much over the years—my virginity, my peace of mind, my self-image, probably relationships I could have had. I’m not giving him anything more—not ‘what-for’ and not even a stray thought. Whether awake or not, alive or not, Matthew Brozek belongs to the past.”
The future, she thought, was a sleek curve of possibility she could shape, not without rough spots, but bright with the jewels of work and friendship and love.
epilogue
Jolene Brozek and Marian Asher sat in the chintz-decorated reception area of the nursing home, chatting in the easy yet superficial way of people who have known each other for decades but never sought intimacy. Jolene still visited her father-in-law weekly from a sense of duty and because it made Zach happy. She and Zach came together sometimes and sat, hands linked, near the bed. Zach spent most of the half-hour visits praying. Jolene wasn’t sure what he prayed for and hadn’t asked. For his father, she figured, and for his father’s victims. For healing of all kinds and the grace to forgive. At any rate, that’s what she prayed for. For Marian, sitting with the comatose Matthew Brozek was the hair shirt she had donned years ago. She had long ago given up having mental conversations with him and was now content to let her mind drift where it would when she sat with him—to her grocery list, the chores she needed to tackle at the church, the email she’d received from Noah, the funny things Angel said. Today, she’d brought Angel with her and parked her in a corner of the room with crayons and a coloring book. When she had stepped out of the room to purchase a bottled water from the vending machine and run into Jolene, she’d had no qualms about spending a few minutes chatting with her, knowing Angel was occupied with her coloring.
As Jolene was telling Marian about her trip to Portland, the patter of running feet drew their attention to the hallway. Angel burst into view, dark hair flying, eyes round. “Nana, Nana! Pastor Matt woke up! He talked to me. Come see.” She grabbed Marian’s hand and tugged.
“Now, Angel,” Marian said, corralling the girl with an arm around her waist so they were face to face. “Pastor Matt can’t talk. Remember what I told you about a coma?”
“But he is awake. He is. He said my name and talked to me.”
The women exchanged glances and, as one, moved toward Matthew Brozek’s room. It brimmed with light, the setting sun blazing through the open windows and bleaching the walls pure white. The sheer curtain billowed outward, pulled by a breeze lighter than a butterfly’s wing flap. Angel’s abandoned coloring book was splayed open in the corner. Matthew lay motionless under the single sheet drawn over him, as unaware as ever of their presence.
“See, he’s not awake,” Marian told Angel as they approached the bed. She studied the unmoving figure on the bed, her eyes drawn to the hand nearest her, blue-veined and still as marble on the sheet. Her gaze flicked to his face with the colorless lips barely parted, the chin stubbled. Something new about his stillness startled her. Holding her breath, she watched for nearly a minute but didn’t see his chest rise and fall. She beckoned Jolene over. They studied Matthew’s face.
“I think he’s gone,” Marian whispered. A breath of air stroked her bare arms and she shivered.
Jolene felt for a pulse in her father-in-law’s neck and, after a long moment, nodded her head, conscious of no feeling but gratitude. “May God have mercy on his soul.”
“He talked to me,” Angel said crossly, folding thin arms over her chest. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“What did he say?” Jolene asked, humoring the girl.
Angel approached her gratefully. “He said, ‘Angel! So beautiful. Angel, Angel.’ I said, ‘Thank you,’ like Nana told me I should when someone says I’m pretty or smart. Then I came to get you.”
“He doesn’t even know your name,” Marion pointed out, trying not to sound testy.
Understanding seeped into Jolene. “‘Angels,’” she breathed. “He said ‘angels.’”
The wonder of it held her motionless. Later, she would ponder the presence of angels in Matthew Brozek’s room, of all places, and question what it meant, what it might say about forgiveness and God’s grace. For now, she stared at the little girl, then at the husk of the dead man, then up and around, turning in a dizzying circle so her gaze swept the corners where the walls met the ceiling, the bed, and the open window, as if one could see angels merely by looking for them.
the end
Author’s Note
I have taken some liberties with the topography near Colorado Springs in writing this novel. Although the city itself is largely as I’ve described it, there is no hamlet of Lone Pine and the ravine and rockslide do not exist in Black Forest. The landscape has more ravines and canyons 20 to 30 miles north, near Castlewood Canyon State Park, and I have simply transplanted some of that topography. The idea for the rockslide came from a visit to Slide Lake, Wyoming (near Grand Teton National Park), where 50 million cubic yards of rock and dirt shear
ed off and slid across the Gros Ventre River in 1925, creating a natural dam 225 feet high and a mile wide. The acres of boulders and rocks, studded with trees carried away by the slide, are much as I’ve described them in this book, although I’ve made the book’s rockslide much smaller in scale.
Acknowledgments
When I set out to write this book, I knew very little about comas, jewelry-making, prisons, or how to work the legal system to get someone out of prison. I am greatly indebted to several people for enlightening my ignorance.
Ruben Manuel, award-winning jewelry designer, shared expertise, techniques, and anecdotes that helped me create Iris Dashwood, jewelry designer and maker. I hope I have been able to transfer some of his passion for his art to Iris. (I’ve actually gotten interested enough in jewelry-making to take a metal-working class.) I also found the books Complete Metalsmith by Tim McCreight and The Encyclopedia of Jewelry-Making Techniques by Jinks McGrath very helpful.
My brother-in-law, Robert DiSilverio, offered his legal knowledge and advice on such subjects as what kinds of charges would result in a conviction long enough to keep Neil Asher in prison for twenty-three years, and how to free him once Iris realizes he is innocent. He did a lot of research on my behalf and made it possible for me to set up a scenario in this book that won’t make legal professionals groan too loudly (I hope). Any slip-ups, inconsistencies, or errors are, of course, mine. If you’re in the Bay Area of California and need a great attorney, Robert DiSilverio is your man.
I am also supremely grateful to Dr. Carroll Ramseyer, M.D., Board Certified Neurologist, who helped me understand “comas” just enough to put Pastor Matt into one and awaken him briefly, and return him to a minimally conscious state. As Dr. Ramseyer continually reminded me, it’s extremely rare for someone to emerge from a minimally conscious state after many years. However, it does happen. For those interested in reading about an individual who “awoke” from a coma after nineteen years, I refer you to the case of Terry Wallis of Arkansas.
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