Tabitha shook her head. “No, that is all I had.”
“Very well, then.” Dr. Franklin stood tall, pulling Tabitha closer to his side. “I hope you got what you were looking for.” He began to walk toward checkout.
Mona was filled with a sinking feeling. There was more they could learn from Dr. Franklin. They’d learned more about Hope’s Mark from five minutes with him than they’d found in ten years. But she’d angered him, and now he was leaving them in the baked goods aisle.
“Wait.” Don’s voice called after the Franklins. They stopped and turned.
“I’m listening,” Dr. Franklin said, nodding to acknowledge Don.
“There is more,” Don continued, looking about nervously. “But here is not the place. We need to find someplace safer. Quieter.”
Dr. Franklin stared hard at them both. “Is any of this going to put my family in danger?”
Mona’s thoughts flickered briefly to the traffickers. There was no way they would ever connect the dots between Hope to the Franklins. Not when all they were talking about was the Mark on Hope’s neck. She brushed away the faint uneasiness that was wrapping its tentacles around her brain.
“No, you’re in no danger. I promise you.”
“Then meet us at our house. I trust you know the way?”
Mona nodded. “Behind the church. Right?”
“We’ll meet you there in ten minutes, then,” Dr. Franklin said, steering Tabitha out of the aisle.
Mona watched them go. Tabitha looked over her shoulder before they moved out of sight, giving a slight wave before she disappeared toward the checkout lanes.
The Bearer of the Key.
What did that mean? She abandoned her cart and began making her way to the door. If anyone would know, it would be Don. She was eager to talk with him, out of earshot of any nosy shoppers.
She climbed into the car. Mona punched Don’s number into the speaker phone, launching into her speech as soon as he picked up. She didn’t bother to hide the note of excitement in her voice. “She identified Hope’s Mark, Don. She translated it.”
“I always knew it had to mean something. And in a biblical language,” he murmured, awestruck.
She nodded, forgetting for a moment that Don couldn’t see her. “They said it says ‘The Bearer of the Key.’ Do you have any idea what that means?”
There was a long pause. Mona could hear Don’s breathing, heavy, over the line.
“Don,” she prompted, fear spidering up her spine, “Whatever it is you know, you have to tell me. Hope’s life may depend on it.”
She heard him gulp in air, shuddering, before he spoke. “Let’s wait until we get to the Franklins’ home. I don’t want to jump to conclusions. I’ll follow you over.” He hung up, his truck pulling behind her. Frustrated, she began the short trip to the Franklins’ house.
Mrs. Franklin opened the door to them, not waiting for them to knock. She was wrapped in a plush robe, apparently ready for bed, just like Tabitha had been.
“My husband told me you were coming. I’ve got coffee brewing. Please, come in,” she said, swinging the door wide.
She led them from the entry to the dining room. Dr. Franklin and Tabitha were already sitting, waiting for them. Mona and Don joined them as Mrs. Franklin disappeared into the kitchen.
They sat, staring at one another, listening to the loud tick, tock of the grandfather clock. Mrs. Franklin reappeared, bearing a tray laden with steaming cups of coffee. She passed the cups around, saving a glass of juice for Tabitha. Mona wove her hands around the handle of her mug, breathing in the aroma, staring into the inky depths of the coffee to avoid looking at the Franklins’ waiting faces. She looked up at the sound of a scraping chair as Mrs. Franklin took a seat next to her husband. They were arrayed there, in a row opposite her and Don, looking like a jury waiting to judge them.
“So.” Dr. Franklin looked at them expectantly. “Tell us.”
Mona cringed. She’d spent the last ten years trying to forget about Hope’s abduction. And now, he was asking her to go back to the very beginning, sparing no detail. She couldn’t see any way around it.
Don’s hand snaked up to take hers in his, startling her. He gave her a little squeeze. “Let me,” he said. Mona sank, relieved, into her chair.
“The tattoo you saw on Hope’s neck really isn’t a tattoo. We’re not sure what it is.”
Mona caught the spark of curiosity in Dr. Franklin’s face. It was a look she recognized. Those doctors from long ago had it. The FBI agents had it. The reporters, especially, had it.
“You see,” Don continued, “when Hope was a little girl, just four years old, she was abducted by a stranger.”
Mrs. Franklin clutched at the neck of her robe. “My goodness.”
“I was with her, at the park, when it happened. You know that park with the playground and the dog run? It was that one. I used to sneak off of work every now and then and take her there in the afternoons. It was her favorite. She liked the slides, especially. She liked to scare me, going down them in the most acrobatic ways possible, daring me to stop her.”
Mona looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was pale, his Adam’s apple bobbing, as he swallowed back the memories that were threatening to engulf him. He took a deep breath and kept going.
“That day, well, it was just like any other day, but we’d had a big system go down at work. A plant had shut down production and my boss kept calling me, asking me if I could check this and check that. I wasn’t paying attention to Hope. After all, we’d been there so many times and it was Dunwoody, for God’s sake. Dunwoody. I let her wander out of my sight. I lost her.”
Mona had never heard him tell the story like this. In court, their lawyers posed questions to which they always answered a simple yes or no. She knew he’d blamed himself, but for some reason she hadn’t recalled this note of anguish in his voice. Even now, after all this time, she realized with a start, he was hurting.
The Franklins squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs. Mrs. Franklin drew Tabitha in close; Tabitha reached searching fingers across her mother’s lap until it found her mother’s waiting hand.
“That’s before we lived here, isn’t it, Daddy?” Tabitha questioned her father, her voice grave. Dr. Franklin nodded back at her.
“If you’d lived here you would have remembered. It was a media circus,” Mona interjected, giving Don a respite. “People kept claiming to have seen a stranger, a man, hanging about the park, but nobody told the same story; nobody could describe him. It was as if she just vanished into thin air.”
“But someone called in a tip and we found her,” Don picked up the tale. “We found her, unharmed, thank God, holed up in some motel not far from here. But what we found there with her only deepened the mystery. Her abductor was dead—inside the motel bathroom. Hope was not molested,” he said between gritted teeth, “but we found her with that symbol—or I guess, those words—burned into the back of her neck. It was like a brand when we first saw it, raw and angry, and we thought she’d been marked as property by some human trafficker or a gang. But the symbols didn’t match anything the FBI could link to any crime ring. And as time passed, the burning quality faded, and it looked more like a tattoo.”
“We could never get rid of it. We tried tattoo removal and all sorts of things, but all it ever did was hurt Hope more. The Mark never went away. And no one could identify what it meant. Eventually we gave up,” Mona added. “We just wanted our little girl to have her life back, to have some normalcy.”
“That can be hard on a marriage,” Mrs. Franklin murmured sympathetically. “I can’t imagine.”
Don spoke up before Mona could answer. “It was. But not because of Mona. She never blamed me, not once. She never held it against me, that I was the one who lost Hope. She stood by me the whole time.”
Mona turned so she could look more fully into his face. His eyes were still heavy with the same remorse she remembered from all those years ago. She tangled h
er fingers in his more tightly.
“It was me who couldn’t let it go. Mona’s right. She wanted Hope to settle back into her routine, to put it all behind her. And there was a good chance it could have worked. After all, she was only four. She had already suppressed all memories of what happened during the kidnapping. So there was a good chance that it would fade into the background.”
“Like wallpaper,” Mona whispered, remembering their old arguments. Her face turned hard. “It was other people who kept it alive, with their stories and speculation.”
“It was me, Mona,” Don answered, shaking his head. “I just couldn’t let it lie. I was convinced the Mark and Hope’s abduction were not a coincidence. That there was something more to it.”
“Why would you think that?” Tabitha added, looking quizzically at them both, her dark eyes sparking with intelligence. Her father looked at her sternly. “Sir,” she rushed to add.
“That’s a good question, young lady.” Don drew his cup of coffee to his lips and took a deep drink. Mona noticed his hands trembling, a trickle of coffee sloshing over the edge of his cup as he set it down on the table. Whatever he was about to say was weighing on him.
“During the brief time we were searching for Hope, I leaned heavily on my faith. We hadn’t really been churchgoers up until that point, but I was desperate and terrified. Not to mention helpless. Hitting my knees seemed to be the one thing I could do.”
He shifted in his chair, untangling his fingers from Mona’s, so he could twist his hands together.
“I remember being there, alone, just me and a bank of candles, listening to the choir practice for an upcoming mass. It probably was a day and a half after she’d gone missing. I was there, alone, for I don’t know how long, when I was suddenly filled with this incredible sense of peace. And in my mind, I mean, directly in my mind, I heard this voice say ‘She is of the angels.’”
Tabitha’s eyes grew wide.
“Of course, at first I thought I was imagining it. But the voice got louder and kept repeating that. ‘She is of the angels.’ I looked around, but I was still alone. Finally, the voice told me, no, ordered me, ‘She is of the angels now. It is time for you to leave this place.’”
“You never told me this,” Mona stuttered, bewildered.
“Are you kidding?” Don answered, turning to face her where she sat. “I thought I was going crazy,” Don responded. “I ran out of there so fast I could have made the Olympic 4×400 team. I didn’t want to have heard anything. I was convinced it meant she was dead. How could I share that with you? How could I ever be the one to deliver that news? Besides, I didn’t want to believe it myself.”
“You said that was a little over a day after she went missing?” Dr. Franklin prompted.
Don nodded. “It was. It was later that evening when they found her in that motel.”
“Interesting.” The minister simply nodded, his hands steepled together on the polished dining room table. “Did your voices come again?”
Don nodded. “Later on, a few weeks after we had Hope back, I went back to the church. I felt I needed to say thank you. You know, thank God for bringing our Hope back to us. As I was lighting a candle the same voice began whispering to me: ‘She is of the angels, and her story is not done. You must prepare her.’ The more I ignored the voice, the stronger it became. It stayed with me, even after I left the church. It was like it was haunting me, torturing me to get me to act. I could barely keep myself together.”
“You didn’t keep yourself together,” Mona said quietly, finding a surge of sympathy in her heart for him. “You became obsessed with protecting her. No wonder you were so convinced it was God’s doing. You should have told me this, Don. You never told me any of these details.”
“I didn’t know how,” Don shrugged in his chair. He snorted a derisive laugh at his own predicament. “We were Tech grads—trained in rational, logical thinking. This was about as far from my personal beliefs as I could get. I was confused and scared. But I couldn’t deny it was happening to me. I even went to a psychiatrist to have my head examined. The pills he prescribed didn’t help, though. Nothing made it go away. It only stopped if I was with her, constantly watching and protecting her. It flew in the face of everything I believed about rationality, about science.”
Dr. Franklin interjected. “Actually, there is a long history of scientific inquiry being linked to angelic studies and visitations. Even the great Dr. Dee, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, claimed to have discourse with angels while he was compiling his natural histories. You are in good company, Don. I take it, Mona, that you did not sympathize with his views or behavior?”
“His convictions are what eventually drove us apart.” They didn’t need to know the details, she rationalized, feeling strangely defensive of her husband.
Mona gripped his hand even more tightly.
She cleared her throat. “So you can imagine how … disturbing we find her latest disappearance. And the fact that you actually could interpret her Mark after all those years of fruitless searching, well …” She left her sentence unfinished.
The Franklins were staring at them now, dumbfounded by all that they had heard.
“And now that you know what it says,” Dr. Franklin prompted, “what do you think it means?”
Mona looked at Don. He had some idea, she knew. It might be harebrained, but by his reaction earlier on the phone, he had a point of view.
“I’m not sure,” he wavered.
Dr. Franklin stared at him, hard. “I know from Hope’s time here that she has quite a handle on the Good Book. I have to believe that comes from you.” He darted an apologetic look at Mona. “No offense, but you don’t seem like the religious type.”
“None taken,” Mona conceded. “Don, go ahead. Say what you think. You’re in friendly company, if I’m not mistaken.”
Don hesitated.
Dr. Franklin challenged him. “Isaiah.”
Don drew a deep breath. “And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut, and none shall open.”
Mona frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Dr. Franklin threw down another citation. “Matthew.”
This time Tabitha answered. “Chapter 16, Verse 19. I shall give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
“Revelation,” Don parried back, the tremor in his voice unmistakable. “I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen. And have the keys of hell, and of death.”
Mona glanced around the table. Everyone else looked pale, in shock. All she felt, though, was confusion. It was as if she’d dropped into a dinner party where everyone was speaking Mandarin. She had no idea what had just happened.
Frustrated, she slammed her palm against the table. “All of you, stop speaking in riddles. What are you saying?”
Don looked at her before pulling his hand away. “You won’t believe me. You never have.”
“Stop it! We don’t have time for this. Are you telling me Hope is in danger?”
“It’s not possible,” he stated, his voice full of wonder. “She can’t be. There were no other signs. They never said, Mona. They said she was meant for something special, but never this.”
“Can’t be what?” Mona was shouting, the Franklins forgotten, willing Don to tell her what he knew. Her fear was so strong that she was bathed in sweat.
It was Dr. Franklin who answered her.
“Those verses are all about resurrection, Mona. Resurrection and death. The second coming of a Messiah. The apocalypse.”
Don interjected. “Don’t you understand, Mona? If Hope bears the keys of death …” He was talking so fast now that it was hard to make out what he was saying, his words tumbling forth from him with the power of a rushing waterfall or a gathering storm—unstoppable, unrelenting, undeniable; a force of nature.
; “Then she’s the Messiah? You’ve got to be joking.” Mona was angry now, gripping the edge of the table so hard her hands hurt. She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, wishing her impending headache away. “Don’t, Don. Not now. Please, not now.”
“Maybe not the Messiah. But in service to him. Part of the End,” he breathed. “Think about it, Mona. What else could it be?”
Disappointment flooded through her system. She’d hoped he would have a realistic answer. But she should have known she’d been hoping in vain. She’d been a fool to think he could change, a fool to think that he was anything but the crazy conspiracy theorist he’d turned into more than ten years ago. This latest idea just proved it.
She choked back a sob, pushing the memories of their recent night together far into the recesses of her mind.
“It’s not just me, Mona. Look, even the Franklins see it.”
She looked around. Tabitha’s wide eyes were darting back and forth between her parents’ faces. The fear in her face was unmistakable. Mohawk or no, her tough exterior had fallen away, abandoned like a snakeskin, so that she looked like a child half her age. But there was still a hint of skepticism, her fear quickly dissolving as her face folded into a look of intense concentration. The minister and his wife looked shell shocked.
“Do you?” She demanded of them. “Is this the only explanation you see?”
Dr. Franklin chose his words carefully. “It is an explanation. One that certainly fits with the scriptural references. There could be others,” he conceded. “But I must admit, the possibility is intriguing. How else do you explain the Mark? The fact that she was taken not once, but twice, under mysterious circumstances?” She looked into his eyes. They were beginning to shine with the zeal she recognized from years of arguing with Don.
“Don’t be seduced by it. Don’t,” she pleaded.
“Don,” the minister pressed, “Do you have any other reason to believe this to be the case?”
Dark Rising Page 23
