Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  I went out once in the Jeep, to pick up a pound of his favorite French roast out of a thready hope that the aroma might lure him downstairs. When I pulled into the driveway on the return trip, I saw a movement in our bedroom window. Rich was backing away from the glass, caught in the act of watching for me. His broad shoulders looked shrunken in that instant, shriveled in loneliness. At least we shared that.

  That kept me hanging on to the frail possibility that once the week started and our routine resumed, a piece of our life would fall back into place and I could begin to stitch it back together.

  The only place I could start was with closure at Covenant and with Zach. I spent most of Sunday night composing my letter of resignation, and before eight o’clock Monday I was cleaning out my desk and bookshelves at the college.

  I got into a saving rhythm that kept my thoughts from spinning out of control, until I came to the Faith and Doubt binders. Then I sank to the floor with a pile of my past in my lap.

  Each pristine white notebook was labeled with titles Zach and I collaborated on with the students around a piled-high platter of fried calamari and fries at Tweeten’s. I could see the kids working them over, their eyes narrowing and springing open in the gleam of neon fish signs. Early Images of God—No—Infant Images. Bursts of inspiration rose from prayer and shared purpose and unbridled laughter.

  I ran my hand over the binder we’d finally labeled Off His Lap and into the Trenches.

  “We were so close to God,” I whispered.

  The distance now left me hollow.

  I stacked the binders as carefully as teacups on a chair by the door. The rest of my current teaching materials I dumped unceremoniously into a copy paper box. F&D had been the most meaningful thing to me at CCC that semester—since Kevin St. Clair had saddled me with teaching the ultra-dry “Religion in the Pacific Northwest” and two sections of Religion 102.

  “What happened to Speaking in Parables?” I’d asked St. Clair when the preliminary schedules came out. “I thought we’d agreed I’d be teaching that.”

  “I’m still developing a sense of your take on the parables, Dr. Costanas,” he said. The blowfish lips were fully operational. “I can’t tell if you’re a literalist or something else.”

  Beyond that, he’d refused to discuss it. That was the biggest obstacle in this relentless battle among the faculty. Zach, Ethan, and I—we all wanted to talk, to find out what common ground we had to work from. Kevin’s camp always answered, “We have taught the Word as it was meant to be taught, and there is no reason to allow anyone to put a different slant on it.” I would never forget the faculty meeting when Kevin himself had said, “The next thing you know someone will be declaring that the Prodigal Son was the victim of a wealthy workaholic father who never paid any attention to him.” I guffawed right across the table.

  The thing was, all Zach and Ethan and I, and a few others, wanted for our students was a chance to grapple with the possibilities, to pray together over interpretation.

  A lump the size of my fist formed in my throat. I hadn’t shed a tear over any of this, not even in the endless darkness of three AM. Now every one I’d been holding back threatened to break free, just as three girls, led by Brandon Stires, crowded into my office.

  “So what’s the deal, Dr. C.?” Brandon leaned a bony shoulder against the empty bookshelf. “The note on Dr. A.’s door says some new guy’s taking over his classes.”

  Chelsea Farmer’s eyes, perfectly framed in eyeliner, widened at the box I hoisted off the desk. “Are you leaving too?”

  “Irreconcilable differences with the university,” I said. “I was going to send out an e-mail, but—” I dusted off my hands. “Here you are.”

  I attempted a smile, which no one appeared to buy, and they all exchanged loaded looks.

  “I’ve been asked not to discuss it, guys,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Brandon elbowed his way past Chelsea, Marcy, and a new girl who’d transferred from Olympia in January. I thought her name was Audrey. Now I’d never know for sure.

  “You can’t even tell us what’s gonna happen to F&D?” Brandon said.

  Marcy’s wide face flattened. “We talked about writing monologues we could perform. What about that?”

  I tried to swallow. “I’ll get together with Dr. Archer, and we’ll set up a time to discuss it with you.”

  Brandon folded his arms. “What do we do in the meantime?”

  “Keep meeting, interviewing people.” For no reason that I could think of, I nodded vehemently at the dark-haired, diminutive Audrey. “You’ll be okay, and I promise you, we won’t abandon you. We’ll get you a new advisor—”

  “Like who?” Marcy said with a sniff. “Dr. St. Clair?”

  “Dude—no! It’ll go from the Faith and Doubt project to the Mandatory Faith Edict.” Brandon jerked his head. “He’ll want to rename it You Better Believe It.”

  I winced. “All right, so maybe we—maybe I could act as an outside consultant.”

  “That would work,” Chelsea said. “What about Dr. A.?”

  I’d come to the end of what I could pretend. “I can’t speak for him,” I said.

  Marcy nodded. “You guys are a team.”

  I turned to an empty box and resisted the urge to stick my head in it.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said again.

  Nobody appeared to believe that. Least of all me.

  When they were gone, everything was packed except two books that belonged to Zach—Speaking in Parables by Sally McFague and Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. We’d talked about both of them, in those early days before we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

  The theology department “secretary”—a round senior named Sebastian who never looked up from his NKJV when any of us made a request—let me use the master key to get into Zach’s office to return them. I probably could have told him I wanted to rifle the place and he wouldn’t have cared, or remembered two minutes later.

  The aura of the tiny room overpowered me as I closed myself in— Zach’s musky scent and herby-smelling tea stash and slicing wit still lingered in the air. Each word we’d spoken—beyond the yearning whispers to the real exchanges that led us to know that we thought and believed and doubted in identical ways—screamed now from the pages of the books he’d left behind.

  Along with everything else. The electric kettle, the canvas bag he used to carry his overflow of papers, even the twenty-pound, leather-bound Oxford Annotated Bible were exactly where they’d always been.

  I shoved my knuckles against my mouth. He wouldn’t leave all this here.

  So where was he?

  When I got to Ethan Kaye’s office, Gina took one look at me—told me I looked awful—and went directly into the inner sanctum. She was back before I could sink any further and ushered me in.

  Ethan didn’t have to tell me to sit down. I couldn’t stand up. I barely made it to the Windsor chair before I broke down. Hard, from the pit of myself.

  Ethan and I didn’t have the kind of relationship where I poured out my personal soul. In fact, I didn’t have that kind of relationship with anyone—except Zach. I choked myself back and buried my face in the handkerchief he tucked into my hand.

  “It’s finally hit you,” he said.

  “Rich knows. My kids know.”

  He let a short silence fall. “That’s rough.”

  “I deserve it.” I looked up. “I’m trying to tie up loose ends—I brought my letter.”

  “No hurry.”

  “I need to know—Ethan, where is Zach?”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “I don’t want to see him for—that,” I said. “But we need to get closure with the kids on the Faith and Doubt project.”

  “I have no idea where he is.” Ethan’s voice flattened. “And neither does anyone else. As of this morning, his e-mails are bouncing back. His cell phone service has been discontinued. To my knowledge he hasn’t been seen since you left him on the boat Thurs
day night. I’ve talked to the police, the fire inspector—there’s no trace of him in the—remains of the boat.” He cleared his throat. “They’ve had divers in the inlet.”

  “What about whoever took the pictures? He would know.” I choked back another threatening sob. “I should never have had a relationship with Zach, Ethan, but I can’t just shrug off the fact that he’s disappeared. Something has happened to him.”

  Ethan ran his hand across his mouth. “Or he simply left.”

  I stared at him. “Right or wrong, Zach loves me. He wouldn’t abandon me to take the fall for both of us.”

  Ethan said something that I didn’t hear, because I put my face into the handkerchief and wept until it hurt.

  When the strange woman inside me finally shuddered out the last of it, Ethan handed me a glass of water.

  “Drink this,” he said. “And I want you to listen to me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to do this. I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not fine, and you won’t be until you get help with this. Hear me out.”

  I nodded and took a sip. He half-perched on his desk. The lines on his face drew long.

  “I have a friend who’s a therapist,” Ethan said. “He’s a well-known Christian psychologist—has a syndicated radio talk show, has written a couple of books. You may have heard of the Healing Choice Clinics.”

  I shook my head.

  “Anyway, he’s gifted. He doesn’t see clients much anymore, but he would talk to you if I asked him to. We go way back.”

  “I can’t go to—wherever—” My intellect seemed to have drained out with my tears.

  “You wouldn’t have to. He’s on sabbatical up at Point No Point. That has to be a God-thing.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Ethan, but I can handle this.”

  His silence clearly said he didn’t agree.

  “All right, give me his name,” I said. “If I feel like I need to, I’ll call him.”

  “Dr. Sullivan Crisp. He was a student of mine twenty years ago, when I taught at Vanderbilt. I thought he was going to be a theologian. He turned traitor and became a psychologist.”

  I folded the handkerchief into a tight square in my lap and pushed it into my purse. “I’ll wash this and get it back to you.” I pulled out a white envelope. “Here’s my letter.”

  I stood, and Ethan rose with me.

  “Call me if you change your mind about Dr. Crisp.”

  “I will.” It was a safe promise because I wouldn’t reconsider. A new resolve was taking shape in the space I’d sobbed free.

  I didn’t go to the yacht club until the next day. Since my last night there, I’d discovered that the key must have dropped out of my jacket pocket. I was going to have to get someone to let me in, and there would be a better chance of that on a day when it wasn’t freezing— outside my house or in it.

  I still clung to the hope that my family would thaw, given a little time. But the passing of moments only drove Rich further into his cave and carved Christopher’s disgust deeper into his face. Jayne couldn’t seem to bring herself to look at me.

  Rain or shine, I’d have to find Zach and put this behind me, before my entire life slipped away.

  Both the sun and Ned Traynor were out when I hurried up to the yacht club gate the next morning. He was the one with the lovelorn Yorkshire terrier. His wife—a chatty lady who hung a wreath on the door of their slip for every occasion including Groundhog Day— wasn’t with him, which was good. I didn’t have time for a long conversation about the Yorkie’s yearning to produce a litter.

  “Hey, pretty lady!” Ned said. “I don’t usually see you here this time of day.”

  “Which is probably why I walked off without my key,” I said. “Would you mind?”

  “So sorry to hear about Zach’s boat.” He shook his head as he gallantly swung the gate open for me. “We’ll miss him around here.”

  I looked at him sharply, but he was busy shutting the gate with a flourish.

  “Any idea where he’s going to live now?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  Ned turned to me, hand jingling in his pocket. “You tell him he’d better swing by and at least say good-bye. You need me to jimmy the lock on the slip?”

  I told him I did have that key. I didn’t add that I planned to throw it into the inlet as soon as I was done.

  Hurrying down Dock C in daylight was strange. Sunset was the closest I’d come in a while to seeing light shimmer on the narrow strips of Sinclair Inlet that showed on either side of the narrow walkway, and even that had been a risk. The few times I’d come before dark were at Zach’s insistence that he wanted to see me with the “critters” again.

  The sea critters, he called them. He said he’d never noticed the secret life that existed under the dock until the day last June when he took the whole Costanas family for a day-long fishing trip. Before he and I were us.

  I’d confided in him that Rich had lost interest in everything, including me. Even the twenty-seven-foot Regal I’d bought him with my mother’s inheritance money sat on its trailer in our backyard, forgotten like the rest of him. Zach offered to try to wake him up with an outing. Rich and Christopher had indeed both been entranced with the cabin cruiser, built in 1941 and restored by Zach.

  Jayne, on the other hand, barely got two slips down Dock C before she was on her belly, pulling up a pregnant kelp crab. I plopped beside her, suddenly ten years old again, peering between the planks at the anemones waving like feather dusters and the sea stars groping with their suckered feet for something to hold onto.

  Then Zach was there too, as enchanted as I, and Jayne lectured him on the ecosystem he was seeing for the first time. I propped my chin on my hands and basked in a contentment I thought I’d lost completely.

  I never went out on the Sound with Zach after that day. The trysts that began in September took place right there at the dock, at night, pocketed in the cabin of The Testament. A few times, though, Zach convinced me to come when there was still light, so he could watch me flop on my tummy and bring up sea critters for him. He touched his first silken jellyfish with my hand holding his, saw his first shrimp swim, right across our side-by-side palms. To see me that way, he said, was worth the risk of someone spotting us.

  I hurried over that hidden world now and let myself into Zach’s slip. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

  The handsome vessel I knew was gone. In its place was a black skeleton, a lifeless tangle of ribs. The dock itself was remarkably uncharred—though not so surprising, considering Rich had been here to fight the flames. Every fire was a beast to him, he always said, a cruel, insatiable persona that had to be reckoned with. He fought never to let one take what didn’t belong to it. Even the piece of white cloth hanging from a hook on the wall was unstained by smoke.

  How, actually, could that be? It had to have been put there after the fire . . .

  Hope quickening in my chest, I hurried to it. When I picked up my own cream silk blouse, the one I’d worn that night and obviously dropped, a sickening panic rose in my throat.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, clutching silk and trying to breathe. It was long enough to confront what Ethan Kaye had tried to make me see.

  Zach had left. Deliberately.

  Unless someone else has hung this here, my pathetic desperation said to me.

  The fire inspector or the police would have taken it as evidence. This had been left for me—by a man who knew I’d come back for it—for him.

  Then where was he? And why would he leave me to deal with all this on my own?

  Estes and St. Clair had to be involved. Maybe because he was a man they’d cut him a break and given him the option to leave town rather than face Ethan.

  Maybe they’d forced him to go—because he’d caught their photographer red-handed and knew they’d set us up.

  That was patently ridiculous. No one knew we met on Zach’s boat. No one knew we met at all.

&
nbsp; Which led me back to the photographer—and the pictures in Wyatt Estes’s file folder—and Zach leaving his burned home without a word. Not even to me.

  I had the sudden urge to rip a life preserver off the wall and hurl it into Sinclair Inlet. I actually might have, if someone hadn’t banged on the door to the slip.

  “Mr. Archer?” a voice demanded. “Port Orchard Police. Open up, sir!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I considered several options on the way to the slip’s outer door— among them, hurling myself into Sinclair Inlet. In the end I opened up and said, “Can I help you, officer?”

  Actually, there were two of them. One didn’t look much older than Christopher and had less swagger than my son. The other one was tall and straight-backed, half-balding, and faintly familiar. I probably knew him from high school.

  He flashed a badge from the inside of his nylon jacket and said, “We’re looking for Zachary Archer.”

  “Me too!” I said. My voice sounded high and chipper and completely ridiculous.

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  “We teach together at the college,” I said. “And he hasn’t shown up for class so I thought I’d come—look for him.”

  I felt like I was committing perjury under oath—and he knew it. He squinted at me and nodded to the square-shaped kid, whose hand hadn’t left his holster since I opened the door.

  “Go check it out,” the older one said.

  Boy Cop nodded and hurried toward the boat carcass like an eager trick-or-treater. The other cop fixed his eyes on me.

  “I’m Detective Updike,” he said. “And you are?”

  “Demitria Costanas—Demi,” I said, only because I couldn’t think of an alias. “The door was locked,” he said. “How did you get in?”

  My tongue thickened. “This door?” I said.

  He glanced back at it and then at me, eyebrows raised.

  I know, buddy, there isn’t any other door. I patted my coat pocket. “I have a key,” I said. “Zach—Dr.—Mr. Archer gave me one—in case I ever—”

  I let my voice trail off. Detective Updike lifted his brows again. “In case you ever what?”

  “Needed to let myself in,” I said.