by Brenda Novak
If only God would let him know what he should do with what he’d found. While trying to decide, he’d replaced the heavy table that had hidden the loose floorboard and tried to forget its existence, to forget what was beneath. But during the dark quiet hours of the night, when the pressures of the day began to dissipate, he remembered the contents of this hiding place, which conjured up images he wished he’d never seen.
After ten years, he was tired of the guilt, the nagging worry, the indecision. It was time to put the matter to rest. He pulled the paper sack from the hole and walked as quickly as his arthritic joints would allow to the small study at the back of the church.
A fire burned in the sparsely furnished room. He wasn’t as poverty-stricken as such a study might indicate. He could’ve afforded more elegant appointments. But he had no wife or children to make comfortable and eschewed all but the most necessary physical possessions. He craved knowledge and enlightenment, and believed that intelligence was the true glory of God. So he spent every dime he possessed, above what he devoted to the church and his flock, on books. They lined the room on three sides, residing on makeshift shelves he’d built himself, using unfinished wooden planks and cinder blocks.
It was a sacrilege to bring what he carried into this room. The words of some of the greatest men who’d ever lived—renowned philosophers and theologians—resided here. But the devouring heat and glimmering flames of the fire beckoned.
Portenski pressed closer. He felt as if the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels as he drew his hand back to toss the sack into the fire.
Do it! Throw it! his mind screamed. And never think of it again.
But he couldn’t. As much as he wanted to protect the church and the faith of his parishioners, he couldn’t in all conscience destroy what he’d found. Neither could he take it to the police. He’d waited too long. Besides, doing that wouldn’t change anything; it was too late.
Which brought him right back where he’d been for the past ten years: he was the guardian of a secret he could neither tell nor keep.
Slumping into his seat, he slowly opened the sack and spread several Polaroid pictures on the desk.
As penance, he forced himself to focus on each one—and then he threw up.
His mother was calling him.
Clay shaded his face with his arm and gazed toward the driveway that circled around to the chicken coop, barn and outbuildings. Sure enough, there she was, hurrying toward him in a red dress, a flamboyant hat and high heels.
“Stay there, I’m coming,” he called and dropped his shovel before she could break an ankle in the loose gravel. He’d been cleaning out irrigation ditches all morning. The exertion made his long-sleeved T-shirt stick to him, but it was actually a mild, overcast day.
“Have you heard?” his mother cried before he could reach her.
He didn’t know what she was talking about. If the shrillness of her voice was any indication, he didn’t want to know. But she wouldn’t have left the boutique where she worked unless it was important.
He braced himself for the worst. “What’s wrong?”
“Allie McCormick is searching for Lucas.”
He’d expected to hear Barker’s name. “Lucas?”
“Your father, Clay! Don’t you remember the name of your own father?”
With one sleeve, he wiped the perspiration rolling from his temple. Of course he remembered his father’s name. It was just that he didn’t think about Lucas anymore. He had more pressing concerns. But there’d been a time when he’d longed for his father on a daily basis—to the point of nearly making himself ill.
“Why is she looking for him?” he asked.
“Folks are saying I killed him! Can you believe it? He’s probably as alive as you and me, and a darn sight richer.”
He raised a hand. “Whoa, slow down. Why would Allie be interested in Lucas? He’s got nothing to do with Reverend Barker or Stillwater or anything else. He’s never even been here.”
“She thinks I’m some sort of black widow. Mrs. Little just told me.”
Mrs. Little owned the dress store where Irene worked five days a week. Although the Littles had been grudging with their friendship at first, and still kept the relationship mostly on a professional level, they were kinder to Irene than anyone else in town.
“So she’s searching for him,” Clay said with a shrug. “Let her. The more time she spends on Lucas, the less she can spend on Barker.”
“But what if she finds him?”
“Maybe she can collect the back child support he owes you.”
She made a face. “Stop being facetious. I’ll never see a dime from him, and you know it. Not at this late date. I don’t even want his money.”
Clay didn’t understand why she was so worked up. “What exactly are you worried about?”
“If she contacts him, it might bring him here. I don’t want that.”
“He won’t bother us, not after so many years.”
“He could see it as an opportunity to make amends,” she said. “Especially with you. You were the oldest. He knew you best.”
Clay brushed some of the dirt from his pants. His father had never come back. Not even for him. It was a wound that would likely never heal. But he refused to indulge in self-pity.
Anyway, something else was going on. He could feel it. “You think I’d welcome him back?”
“You used to worship the ground he walked on,” she said.
She was right. Lucas Montgomery had once been Clay’s hero. He was the man who showed up on payday and took them to town for an ice-cream cone. The man who waltzed Irene around the kitchen, or pretended her spatula was a microphone, making them all laugh. The man who held Molly on his lap until she fell asleep, then tucked her safely in bed. Clay’s life—and he assumed it was the same for the rest of his family—had been better, more complete whenever Lucas was around. He couldn’t lie about that.
But even when Clay was only five or six, Lucas had stopped coming home on a regular basis. And when he began staying away two and three days at a time, the fighting started. Clay could still hear his mother pleading with his father. “Lucas, you’ve gotta stop drinkin’ and carousin’, do ya hear? The water bill’s due. What we gonna do if we can’t pay the water?” and “You’ve got children to take care of now, Lucas. How’s Clay gonna learn to be a man if you don’t stick around and teach him?” His father always said, “It has nothin’ to do with drinkin’, Irene. I’m still a young man. I’ve got a lot of life to live, a lot of places to see. And I can’t do that strapped down to a wife and three kids.”
Clay had initially sympathized with his father. It was his mother who was wrong, who tried to tell his daddy that he couldn’t have any fun. She was the reason he didn’t stick around like he used to. Then Lucas abandoned them altogether, and Clay was forced to grow up almost overnight. As he worked for the local feed store, making less than half of what he would’ve been paid as an adult, Clay had realized which parent really loved him.
Occasionally, he still felt guilty for the way he’d blamed his mother during those years. But, as a child, he’d found it was difficult to fault the parent who was always smiling and saying, “I’m just funnin’, Irene, don’t get yourself in a state.”
“There’s no reason to worry,” he told his mother. “I don’t want anything to do with him.”
“It’s his fault, you know. We’d still be living in Booneville if it wasn’t for him.”
“I know,” Clay said. When his father walked out, he’d left Irene so destitute she’d almost lost her children. Without an education, she couldn’t make enough to feed them. Clay remembered eating nothing but oatmeal for one entire summer. So when Reverend Barker had asked Irene to marry him, she’d agreed mostly out of desperation. They all knew that. Clay suspected even Barker understood. How else could he have gotten a woman so much younger and so much more attractive than he was?
At least Irene had gone into the relationship determined to b
e a good wife, to make the best of what she considered a second chance. Clay remembered her treating Reverend Barker’s daughter, Madeline, the same as Grace and Molly, remembered her pulling him aside to say that the reverend might not be a handsome scoundrel, or make them laugh, but he had his priorities straight. He was a man of God, and they were finally going to be a complete and happy family.
Little did she know life would only get worse from then on….
“Talk to Allie, convince her to stop what she’s doing,” Irene said.
Clay blew out a long breath. “Why? Let her do what she wants and ignore it. If you react, she’ll know she’s struck a nerve and she’ll keep after it.”
“But she has struck a nerve! You need to explain how it was for us after Lucas left. Tell her not to bother with him.”
“Mom, you’re not making any sense. If Dad hasn’t looked back before now, what makes you think he’s going to? And even if he does, I’ve just told you it won’t make any difference to me. I’m sure Grace and Molly feel the same. You have nothing to lose.”
She clasped her hands tightly. “That’s not true,” she said, her gaze intense.
Clay narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“He called me once,” she admitted.
“When?”
“Not long after Lee died.”
“How’d he find you?”
“Everyone in Booneville, including his own cousin, knows I married a reverend and moved to Stillwater. I’m sure it wasn’t hard.”
Clay jammed a hand through his hair. “Okay, he called once. Why is that so significant?”
“I was at my lowest, Clay. I—I was inches away from a nervous breakdown. Grace was…you know what Grace was like after what that bastard did to her. She’d walled herself off from both of us. And Molly was just a little girl, confused but mostly oblivious. You were all I had, and you were only sixteen.”
Adrenaline began to pound through Clay’s veins. “Tell me you didn’t,” he said.
“Clay, I needed him. I—I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was so desperate that I pleaded with him to come back.”
His chest constricted. “How much did you tell him?”
“All of it,” she said. “I had to talk to someone, let the pain out. My head was going to explode if I didn’t. And I thought if he knew what we were facing and how unfair it all was, he’d stand by me and be the man I’d always wanted him to be. How could any man hear how his daughter had been abused, defiled by her own stepfather, and not support her?”
Anxiety made it difficult to speak. “What did he say?”
“He promised to come. He was living in Alaska, said it was beautiful and that he’d move us up there with him.”
Clay dropped his head in his hands. “Even if he’d kept that promise, we couldn’t have left,” he said. “You knew that. We still can’t. The moment we sell the farm, the police will get the new owner’s permission to search, and they’ll go over every inch.”
“Maybe he realized that,” she said softly.
“Because…”
Her gaze fell to the ground. “I never heard from him again.”
“God.” Clay squinted into the distance, out across the cotton fields. What was he going to do? If Allie tracked down his father and started questioning him, there was no telling what Lucas might say. And once the details of Barker’s death were revealed, they wouldn’t be hard to prove. The police would find Barker’s car in the quarry, where Clay had driven it. They’d get another warrant to search for Barker’s remains, and this time they wouldn’t walk away empty-handed. Clay had poured cement over the earthen floor of the cellar, but that wouldn’t stop them. “What if he’s told someone? What if he tells Allie?”
“He swore he wouldn’t.”
As if that counted for anything. “Can’t you get Chief McCormick to call off his daughter?” he asked.
“Are you kidding? He won’t even mention my name in front of her.”
“What the hell does he think happened to Barker? Has he ever asked you about it?”
“No. We’ve never discussed it. I don’t think he wants to know.”
Clay clenched his jaw. “You’ve heard from Dale recently, then?”
“He called me yesterday.”
“What did he say?”
“He misses me.”
Clay knew from the way she’d spoken that she missed him, too. “Did you tell him it was over?”
She cringed visibly.
“Mom!”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “It was the first time we’ve been able to talk in over a week. But I will. I promise,” she added quickly. “Just get Allie to quit searching for Lucas, okay? You have to stop her before she contacts him.”
Clay rubbed the whiskers on his chin. He had no leverage with Officer McCormick. She wouldn’t back off because he asked her to. Especially after the other night. “What can I do?” he asked.
“She’s lonely,” his mother volunteered.
He rocked back. “I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”
She straightened her hat, as if she needed to keep her hands busy. “Women like you, Clay. You can make Allie like you, too. You could even make her fall in love, if you wanted. A woman will do anything for love.”
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not. I won’t play with her heart.”
“But she’s attractive and—”
“No!”
“Okay, don’t go that far. Just…be nice to her, take her out a few times. Maybe you’ll enjoy her company. You never know. You could do worse than end up with a woman like Allie.”
Clay couldn’t believe it. “Are you insane?” he asked. “How long do you think it would be before she figured out the whole scenario?”
“It’s better to make her your friend than your enemy,” she replied. “You’re not opposed to having another female friend, are you?”
He said nothing.
“Come on,” she continued. “Madeline says she’s very nice.”
His mother didn’t need to convince him of that. He could already tell Allie was a good person. She’d certainly been fair with him the other night, despite the prejudice he faced from the rest of the community.
“I don’t know,” he said. He couldn’t imagine befriending a cop under any circumstances. He’d spent too many years avoiding them. But there was wisdom in the old adage “Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.” The more information he gleaned about her investigation—what she was finding and which direction she was going—the more he’d be able to protect himself and his family.
“I don’t like it,” he said. Her suggestion made some sense, but he’d be using Allie, and he didn’t feel right about that. He preferred to keep his distance.
“Can we really afford to hunker down and just hope for the best?”
No. He knew they couldn’t.
“Clay.” His mother touched his arm.
“What?”
“We have to do whatever we can.”
She was right. He couldn’t pretend Allie didn’t have the skills and determination to reveal what—so far—he’d managed to hide. Maybe he should spend some time with her, try to neutralize the threat. What better choice did he have? He could be careful, maintain just enough distance.
He wondered if he’d ever be able to throw off the yoke of the past. “Fine,” he said with a sigh.
His mother smiled in apparent relief, as if she thought he’d crook his finger and Allie would forget all about Lucas and Barker. Problem solved.
If only it was that simple.
5
That evening, after Clay stepped out of the shower and finished toweling his hair, he called his stepsister, Madeline, on the cordless phone he’d taken into the bathroom. He loved Maddy, talked to her often. Irene, Grace and Molly did, too. After her father “went missing,” she’d chosen to stay with them instead of going to live with Barker’s extended relatives and was as much a part of the family as
any one of them. They shared everything with her—except the secret destined to make her hate them if she ever found out.
“Hey, I ran into Beth Ann when I was getting gas today,” she said the moment she heard his voice.
He hung the towel on the rack behind him. “Am I supposed to be excited about that?”
“I thought you might want to know that I already heard what happened at the farm night before last.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” he said, leaving the steamy bathroom and heading into his bedroom.
“Well, maybe this will. The version she gave me is quite different from the rumors going around town.”
He twisted in front of the mirror to see how the scratches on his back were healing. “Is this good or bad news?”
“Good news.”
The scratches were almost gone. That was good news, too. “Then she didn’t tell you I tried to kill her?”
“She just said you broke up with her.”
“Even that isn’t true,” he muttered as he delved into his underwear drawer.
“How’s that?”
“There wasn’t any commitment between us to begin with.”
“She was hoping for one. She feels terrible about calling the cops on you, by the way. She claims she’s in love with you.”
He pulled on his boxer briefs. “Don’t worry. She’ll be in love with someone else next week.”
“You’re so cynical,” she said, laughing. “But maybe you’re right. She had John Keller in the car while she was crying over you, and he seemed more than willing to comfort her.”
“John Keller?” he repeated, not immediately recognizing the name.
“The guy who manages Stillwater Sand and Gravel for Joe Vincelli’s parents. Why? Jealous?”
“No.” He selected a pair of jeans. “I thought Joe managed the gravel pit.”
“He has the title. But he doesn’t do much other than chase women and drink beer. At least since he divorced Cindy. John’s the one who keeps the business afloat.”
If Madeline said it, it was probably true. No one knew Stillwater and the people living in it better than she did. It was her job to know. She owned the Stillwater Independent, a weekly paper she’d bought two years ago from the old couple who’d published it before.
