Sacred Trust

by Meg O'Brien

He licks a finger. “No. I guess I just thought…Aunt Helen?”

  She is behind him, tidying up the room, though it’s relatively neat. Justin turns to look at her.

  “Mary doesn’t know,” she says, giving me a look.

  “Aunt Helen tried to reach her,” Justin supplies, “but she couldn’t find either her or my dad.”

  That’s because they’ve been in Rio, dammit.

  “Justin,” I say, “I just saw your mom and dad. They had to go away, they thought, to protect you. It’s a long story, but they thought they were doing the right thing.”

  His face clears. “Oh, so that’s what happened. When I first got away, I went home, but the place was all locked up and dark. The car and a lot of my parents’ clothes were gone, and finally I called Aunt Helen. She told me to come out here and she’d take care of me.”

  He looks at her and smiles. “Aunt Helen’s great at spy stuff, you know. She sneaked me in, in the middle of the night.”

  “Did she, now?”

  He nods and grins, as if proud of their caper. Then he sobers. “I’ve been real worried about my mom, though. I guess I just always thought my mom, at least, would be there.”

  “Your mom, at least? What about your dad?”

  He looks at Sister Helen.

  “You might as well tell her,” she says.

  “Well, see, the thing is, Aunt Helen wanted to make sure, first, that my dad would be gone.”

  I sit opposite him at the table. “Why gone?”

  Again, his eyes flick to Sister Helen—dark eyes, full of questions, and so like Marti’s.

  “My dad…” he begins, his voice cracking as he lays down the piece of chicken, apparently losing his appetite.

  “Paul Ryan,” Helen interjects, reverting to her waspish tone, “is up to his neck in harassing The Prayer House into bankruptcy. He’s the lawyer who filed the suit that could close us down. And guess who he’s doing that for?”

  I sigh. “My husband. I just found out about that tonight.”

  “Well, maybe you didn’t know this,” she says. “It’s because of your husband’s blackmail that Justin found out he was adopted.”

  I look at Marti’s son, who never should have had anything but joy in his life. “Can you tell me,” I say gently, “what happened?”

  He shrugs. “I heard them talking one night. My dad and some guy, some guy he called Jeffrey. Aunt Helen says that was your husband?”

  I nod.

  “Well, anyway, this was back in July. This guy Jeffrey told my dad he knew I was adopted, and if my dad didn’t do something for him, he’d tell my real dad where I was, and then it would be all over the papers and my real dad would take me away from him, plus I’d find out my dad wasn’t my real dad—”

  He breaks off, and his hand forms a fist. “I didn’t know until that night. That I was adopted, I mean. I was pretty shook up, I guess, that they’d lied to me for so long. So I took off.”

  “You ran away?”

  He swallows hard and nods.

  “What about Mary?” I ask. “What did she say about your being adopted?”

  “My mom wasn’t home. She was at some prayer meeting at the church, and I didn’t feel much like sticking around till she got home. Like I said, I just took off.”

  He falls silent, and I give him a moment, then ask, “What happened after that? Where did you go?”

  “I ran. I ran as far as I could over 68 and then up Route 1. From there I hitchhiked to Santa Cruz and knocked about on the streets for a while.” He shrugs, trying to sound tough about it, but his eyes tell me different.

  “That must have been scary,” I say.

  “I guess so. But there were other kids out there my age. A lot of them, more than people think. So for a while it wasn’t too bad. They helped me out, told me where to go at night to sleep, how to score some food. I could’ve gone on that way for a lot longer, but then this guy grabbed me in some alley one night and shoved me in his car. He took me to some cabin up around Felton, I think, in the mountains. I don’t really know that’s where it was because he had me blindfolded, but it was in the mountains, and it didn’t take him too long to get there. Anyway, he kept me locked up in a room there for maybe a week.”

  I look at Sister Helen through tears that fill my eyes, and see that she is faring no better. Justin’s chin trembles, and I know he is trying not to lose control as he retells this horrible tale.

  “Did he hurt you?” I ask, dreading the answer. “This man. Did he…did he do anything to you?”

  Justin shrugs again. “Not really. He wasn’t there most of the time, just left me tied up in a room. He took pictures of me. I could hear the camera, and I figured he was going to send pictures to my parents with a ransom note or something. Most of the time I just couldn’t sleep at night because it hurt, being tied that way. And he didn’t feed me much.”

  He gives me a shy, embarrassed look. “But the worst part was not knowing. What he was going to do, I mean. I thought he brought me there to do things to me, at first. That’s what some of the kids on the street said happens sometimes. But he didn’t, so then I thought he must have changed his mind and didn’t know what to do with me. I figured he’d probably kill me eventually, because if he let me go I’d be able to identify him. So I started to think about ways to get away before that happened.”

  “Oh, Justin…” I reach over and stop short of grabbing his hand, not knowing whether my touch would comfort or frighten him after such an ordeal. “I am so sorry. I had no idea these things were happening to you. Your mother would be so proud of you for being so brave.”

  He gives me an odd look. “Are you talking about Mary? Or my real mom?”

  “Both,” I say. “Mary is just as much your real mom. And she loves you a lot.”

  “But you said both. Do you know my real mom?”

  “Yes. We were friends all our lives. She was my best friend, in fact. She was a wonderful woman, Justin, very brave. And you are just like her.”

  Helen gives an almost imperceptible shake of her head to me. But it’s too late.

  “Was?” Justin says, his eyes widening. “Did something happen to my real mom?”

  I realize the mistake I’ve just made. Helen hasn’t told him. He’s been here in this room with no television or radio for news, and no one to talk to. He doesn’t know Marti is dead.

  But maybe that’s for the best. This can’t be the time to tell this poor kid, who’s been through so much, that the woman who gave birth to him died a week ago, in a terrible way.

  “I just haven’t seen her for a long while, that’s all,” I improvise.

  “But she’s all right?” he says eagerly. “I can see her again when all this is over?”

  “See her again? You’ve seen Marti?”

  “She’s been here several times,” Sister Helen interjects. “I told her Justin was here the minute he turned up.”

  “I can’t wait to tell her I’ve met you,” Justin says to me, grinning. “She talked about you a lot.”

  “She did?”

  “Sure. Mostly she told me how you helped her find a good home for me, and good parents. She said you were the best friend she ever had.”

  He looks at Sister Helen. “Well, next to Aunt Helen, I mean. She said she didn’t know how she’d have gotten through life without both of you.”

  His face clouds over. “When I told her about the guy who kidnapped me, though, she said she’d find out who did that and she’d see he paid, if it was the last thing she ever did.”

  Oh, God. Is that what happened, Marti? Did you find him—and did he kill you instead?

  My heart goes out to Justin, and I can’t help it. I go around the table and enfold him in my arms. My love wraps itself around him, and it is almost as if Marti is here, holding him with my arms.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll get him, Justin. We’ll get him and make sure he pays.”

  I am anxious to know how Justin got away from his kidnapper
and what he remembers about him. Before getting into that, however, I urge him to eat his meal. When it comes right down to it, Marti’s son is just a kid. A kid who’s been through more than most adults and come out of it with his spirit intact. For this, I give credit to Sister Helen. She’s been with him since he got away, looking after him, an advocate for both body and soul.

  It’s been said that there are only two basic emotions—love and fear. Where one exists, the other cannot. Sister Helen, it seems, has been operating on fear since Justin disappeared and later showed up on her doorstep. Her focus has been on protecting him any way she can, so for her there have been shadows in every corner. At times they may even have driven her near the edge.

  But she couldn’t shut out the love. So she’s been swinging back and forth, balancing both with the skill and now-and-again awkwardness of a tightrope walker.

  She finishes her straightening up, then leaves me alone with Justin while she takes her scraps out to the compost heap. His appetite has returned, and I pretend not to watch as he eats the food we’ve brought. Still, I can’t help smiling when, like any healthy teenage boy, he wipes the chicken grease from his mouth with his fingers, then wipes them on his jeans.

  “You sure you don’t want some of this?” he asks, pushing the plate my way.

  “No, thanks. I’m not very hungry.”

  The truth is, my stomach is in knots. I still haven’t fully recovered from the shock of finding him here, even though the idea began to form subconsciously, I suppose, the day I saw Helen stumbling up this hill under the weight of her pails of scraps. When she was up here for so long, I wondered why. Then, last night when she was out here in the storm supposedly “picking vegetables,” that somehow didn’t feel right. While Helen might have penances to pay, as Sister Pauline said, I really couldn’t buy a woman with arthritis clumping around in mud and a driving rain just to save a few heads of lettuce.

  More likely, I thought—especially when I saw that full larder in the kitchen—she was out here checking on her young charge, making sure he was warm and dry.

  Even so, she might have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the humming. It takes a lot to make a woman like Sister Helen hum.

  When Justin is finished eating he scrapes his plate into a small bucket in a galvanized sink against the wall. Then he rinses it, and dries it before putting it back on the table and sitting across from me.

  “May I ask you some questions?” I say. “I don’t want to upset you, but—”

  “It’s okay. You want to know about when I was gone, right? That’s what my mom—Marti Bright, I mean—kept asking me. You could sure tell she was a good reporter. She wanted to know every detail.”

  “I can imagine. Justin, could you identify the man who held you prisoner in that room?”

  “I’m not sure. I mean, I never got much of a look at him, just the first night when he grabbed me. Even then, he wasn’t anything more than a dark figure in back of me, and he got me blindfolded before I could even get a chance to fight him off.”

  “But you said you thought he might kill you to keep you from identifying him.”

  “I just thought he might be worried about that, but like I said, I didn’t really see him.” He pauses. “I did hear him, though. That might be one way.”

  “You heard his voice?’

  “Just once, on the phone in some other room. He was saying something about somebody being after him, on his tail. I thought he might mean the police, like maybe one of the kids in Santa Cruz saw him grab me and called the police. That’s what I kept hoping, anyway—that somebody got his license-plate number and they were looking for me.”

  “Is that all you heard?”

  He reddens. “Well, no, there was something else, but it sounds pretty stupid now.”

  “That doesn’t matter. What was it?”

  “I just thought he said something like, ‘Tell the president.’ And then I heard, I thought, ‘oval office,’ but he might have said “in his office,” or something like that. I mean, he probably just meant the president of some company, right?”

  I close my eyes briefly. The picture is coming clear, too clear. “Justin…what about the man’s voice? Did he sound the same as the man you heard talking to your dad that night about your adoption? The one your dad called Jeffrey?”

  Justin shakes his head. “That’s what my mom asked, but I’m just not sure, because he was talking so low. But the thing is, I heard that guy, Jeffrey, tell my dad, Paul, that night, that he thought he knew who my real dad was. He said if he was right, my real dad had lots of money and was in politics. That’s why he said it would be all over the papers if word got out, and my real dad would come and take me away. So when I heard this guy talking on the phone in the cabin, I got this weird idea he was talking to the president of the United States. Pretty dumb, huh?”

  I don’t know how to answer that, except to say softly, “No, Justin, it’s not dumb. Not at all. Could you tell me, do you think, what kind of car this guy had?”

  “I’m not sure, but it must have been expensive. The engine purred like a kitten.”

  Or like a Mercedes? I wonder.

  Jeffrey is on the run. The police are on his tail. And Jeffrey—could he possibly have kidnapped Justin himself?—might have been running some scam on Chase.

  Or for Chase.

  If Chase is Justin’s real father, that is.

  A bigger question: If Jeffrey is the one who grabbed Justin in Santa Cruz, what did he plan to do with him? How long did he plan to keep him hidden? Until after the election?

  Or was this all about keeping Paul Ryan under his thumb? Did it have nothing to do with Chase’s reelection, and all to do with Jeffrey’s scheme to bankrupt The Prayer House?

  Either way, I doubt very much he would have let Justin go when either of these things were over. More likely, he’d have disposed of him when he was no longer of use.

  My bones feel deep-down cold, and I pull my jacket more tightly around myself. “How did you get away from this man?” I ask.

  Justin grins, clearly proud of himself. “I tricked him. It was the only way I could figure how to do it. I started to scream like crazy. He had my mouth taped, but I screamed in my throat, on and on. He came running in and tore the tape off. I told him I had a terrible pain in my gut. He didn’t believe me at first, but I screamed so much and so long, I almost lost my voice. I told him I thought I was dying, and finally I stopped and just kept still. I acted like I was dazed, really out of it.”

  “You didn’t worry that he might just kill you, if you were that sick?”

  “Sure, I worried about it. But I figured the alternative was just to wait till he killed me anyway some day.”

  I shake my head. “Justin, you are truly amazing. So what did he do?”

  “Untied me so he could straighten me out and look at me better. He poked around at my stomach and muttered something like he knew something about medical emergencies, and there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with me. That’s when I popped him one in the eyes with my thumbs.”

  The grin grows wider. “Boy, did that feel good. I got him by surprise, just like he got me that first night. I didn’t even take time to look back, just pulled my blindfold off as I was running to the door, then slammed it and locked it. There was a dead bolt on the outside, so there was no way he was getting out real fast. I saw a bunch of photographs of me on a table in the living room, and I grabbed one so I could prove what had happened to me. There weren’t any keys to the car, though, so I figured he had them in his pocket. In fact, I couldn’t even find the car. It was probably in the garage, but I just ran.”

  I smile. “Good thing you were a track star, huh?”

  He looks pleased. “You know about that?”

  “Yes. I know about that.”

  “You know, you look familiar to me,” he says. “Have I seen you at my school?”

  “I’ve attended some events there,” I say. “I saw you run once or twice.”
/>   “Well, you’re right,” he says. “It’s a good thing I could do that. But if I’d been smarter, I’d’ve at least looked at him before I ran off. I just didn’t think I’d done all that much damage, and it felt like he was right on my heels till I locked that door. I ran all the way down that mountain to Santa Cruz, staying off the road and in the trees in case he came looking for me in the car. When I got to Santa Cruz I hitched a ride back to Pacific Grove and then out here, to Aunt Helen.”

  “So, Justin, you were in Santa Cruz for maybe three weeks, and then at that cabin for what, another week? And you’ve been out here at The Prayer House ever since you got away from this man?”

  “That’s about it.” He looks around at the small room, so overflowing with books. “Aunt Helen’s been sort of home-schooling me. She comes out here every chance she gets at night, when no one can see her do it. She sure is a good teacher.”

  “I know. She taught me.”

  “Really? Gosh, she must be pretty old.”

  I raise my brows. “Pardon me?”

  He laughs. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I just mean she must have been teaching longer than I thought. She’s supposed to be retired now, you know, and it’s a good thing, with that asthma—”

  He breaks off. “Come to think of it, that’s the other way I thought I might be able to identify that guy.”

  “Other way?”

  “By his breathing. He wheezed a lot sometimes.”

  “You mean, you think he might have asthma?”

  “Something like that. I heard him bringing in wood from outside one day, and then building a fire. It sounded like he could hardly breathe.”

  It is only now I remember that this is the one memory I have of the person who pushed me over the choir loft railing.

  As I tried to fight him off, he was wheezing—the way I remember Jeffrey wheezing, when he’s been up in the attic searching for his clothes.

  21

  I leave Justin in his “Aunt Helen’s” capable hands and head home from The Prayer House late in the afternoon, my mind bending like crazy around all the things I’ve learned in the past twenty-four hours. Before leaving, I asked Helen why she didn’t go to the police after Justin got away. Why didn’t she take them the photograph Justin had brought home with him, as proof of what had happened to him?