by T. L. Hines
At other times—usually any time he was around for more than five minutes—she just wanted to shake him, slap him on the face, and tell him to pull himself out of the pity party. ‘‘Life goes on,’’ her grandmother had always said after any setback. ‘‘So should you.’’
She knew she shouldn’t feel that way about Ron, of course. She’d changed dramatically since first meeting Ron; she had accepted God’s grace and forgiveness, so she should be able to extend that acceptance to others in her own life.
By and large, she could. Except when it came to Ron.
Rachel sat quietly, trying to clear her senses and open herself to God’s direction. Why was she always this way with Ron? Every time she thought of him, a tight ball wrapped in fear, anger, revulsion, pity, and other emotions sat at the top of her chest. Was God trying to say something to Ron through her? Maybe. But if He was trying to use her, she was being a poor vessel.
Even now, in this time of prayer, she felt herself resisting. She relaxed, willing her body to overcome those feelings and release the pressure.
She had met him in a previous life, of sorts. A life in which she looked for her salvation in the bottom of a glass tumbler.
The night she’d spotted him in the bar, tucked safely into a dark corner, she’d already had five margaritas. Not a record night, to be sure, but enough to keep the dull, disconnected buzz humming steadily in her brain. He had seemed so helpless, so much in need of someone. And she remembered her first thought: He’s even more pathetic than I am.
Looking back now, she felt maybe it had been the sad-puppy syndrome that first made her walk around the bar and sit next to Ron. He had been abused by his previous owner, and now all he needed was a bit of love to make things better. That sort of thing. Yeah, that had been part of it. But she also had to admit something else was there. A part of her searched for the people who were so obviously haunted by demons. Being with someone worse made her feel better about herself, if only for a night.
She shook her head and brought herself back to the present. She whispered an ‘‘amen,’’ then went to Nathan’s room, cracked open the door, and peeked inside. His towhead lay on the pillow, his mouth open as he slept. She smiled and went into the room to turn out the light on his night table.
Sometimes, of course, mistakes could be turned into something unexpected and wonderful. She and Ron had made a mistake that long night some six years ago. But God had used the mistake and brought her Nathan.
Nathan, in his perfection, had also brought her out of that hazy realm of drunkenness. Once she had found out she was pregnant, the clouds cleared from her mind. It wasn’t just her own miserable life anymore; it was another life, and she wanted to do everything right for that other life. She stopped drinking, started opening her eyes to the world around her. Started opening her eyes to eternity and realizing there was much more to life than, well, this life.
Now, a few short years later, she was a respected member of the Red Lodge community and such a regular churchgoer that the pastor knew her name. She owned a small jewelry shop—Rings n’ Things— in a charming brick building along historic Main Street. She had a wonderful son who filled her life with light and color.
Still, there was Ron. He troubled her, without even trying. Maybe he was just too painful a reminder of her past. Maybe he brought to mind sins she couldn’t quite leave behind. Maybe he needed something from her, and she was just unwilling to do anything about it.
Or maybe God wasn’t using her to teach Ron at all. Maybe He was using Ron to teach her.
Rachel closed her eyes and breathed deeper, telling the knot in her chest to loosen its grip.
7
READING
Mike Odum, chief of the Red Lodge Police Department, sat at his desk and stared at the front page of the Carbon County News. ‘‘Child Missing in Big Timber,’’ the headline proclaimed. ‘‘Red Lodge Next?’’
It was a question he’d asked himself before, but it still infuriated him that James Flynn, the local editor, had the nerve to put it in the paper. No, not in the paper, on it: good old James had put this right up front. If it bleeds, it leads.
Odum knew James well. One of those people who preferred the proper ‘‘James’’ to the more informal ‘‘Jim,’’ a bit of pretense that usually bothered him. But he could cut the man some slack. James had actually been the first person to welcome Odum to Red Lodge the previous year. The town had interviewed several candidates for the Chief of Police position. For most folks in town, a local boy already in the department was the sentimental favorite, but Odum managed to get the position. James Flynn had been unabashedly in the local boy’s corner, although that didn’t stop him from showing up at the office the first day with a nice bottle of Scotch. James even did a flattering interview for that week’s edition, a fine piece asking folks to welcome the new Chief of Police.
Red Lodge was a good move for Odum. He had needed to get out of North Carolina. It wasn’t that he disliked North Carolina— quite liked it, in fact, with its lush green undergrowth and the mountains— but Mike Odum was a travelin’ man. He didn’t stay in any one place and cool his heels for long. That made a police officer soft, mushy. Pretty soon you started worrying about yourself, and it was all over then. He didn’t plan on worrying about himself for a good long time yet.
Odum picked up his coffee cup, read the lead-in paragraph for the story again. Man alive. James would have everyone in town panicky, convinced their children could be snatched at any moment. Of course, in this day and age, that was certainly a possibility. But people didn’t need to be reminded of it all the same. Especially people in his town. Maybe he’d have to call James and chew him out a bit. Couldn’t hurt.
Still, it wasn’t really James bothering him. Odum was misplacing his anger by directing it at James, an easy and convenient target. Odum had been thinking about the child disappearances quite a bit himself. He knew the pattern of the disappearances, the towns, the dates. All of it was committed to memory. Once he heard or saw something, he never forgot it. Never.
Odum put down the paper after reading the story for the fifth time, then grabbed the coffee. He had, of course, already memorized all of the text, filing it away in his head. But something compelled him to keep rereading. He put down his coffee, brought his hands to his face, and rubbed his eyes. Not even ten o’clock in the morning, and he already felt tired.
Odum had been tracing the kidnapping patterns for several weeks now. Again and again he pulled the names and faces of victims into the foreground of his mind, examining them from every angle. He didn’t share any of his work with the Feds out of the Billings office, who of course were working the case because of multiple disappearances. The Feds hadn’t bugged him yet, because no children had disappeared in his town.
But they would, he was quite sure of that. He was in the mind of the killer. None of the bodies had been found, so no one had really named the perp a killer. But Odum knew. He knew.
It was terrifying, in some ways, knowing how the killer thought. But at the same time it was crucial and energizing. So Odum embraced it—had to embrace it, knowing that doing so would keep him on the edge and ready.
Right where he wanted to be.
8
THINKING
Jude mopped the floors of the school in the morning, playing thoughts of Kristina over and over in his mind. Normally Jude didn’t mop during the school day, but today he wanted to be near other people. Be near the students. So he mopped the hallway while students sat in classes no more than twenty feet away.
He flipped his mop out of the bucket, ran it back and forth across the white and green linoleum. He tried to make himself think of other things, anything.
Keep it secret, keep it safe.
He called an image of his son to mind, reminded himself of dinner at Rachel’s after work. But after a few minutes, the image of Nathan dissolved, displaced by the face of Kristina. Overnight she had become the five-hundred-pound gorilla battering throug
h his waking thoughts. And, although he rarely remembered his dreams, he was pretty sure she’d rampaged through his subconscious mind the night before, as well.
He wheeled the mop and bucket down the hallway. One of the sticky wheels moved grudgingly, sounding something like a rusty hinge. Frank, his supervisor, had asked him to fix it numerous times, had even taken a can of oil to the wheel himself once. But still the squeak persisted. Every time Frank heard the wheel, he told Jude it was a sound that ‘‘made the monkeys moan.’’ Jude wasn’t quite sure what that meant—wasn’t quite sure what a lot of Frank’s colorful little quips meant—but the general gist was clear enough: it aggravated Frank. The sound didn’t bother Jude at all, but he really wished it would stop squeaking just to keep Frank happy. If Frank was happy, Jude was happy.
Jude stopped the bucket, then went back up the hallway to retrieve the Wet Floor sign. Just as he grabbed it, the bell rang. Recess time. Kids seemed to materialize out of nowhere, making a quick sprint for the doors and the playground beyond.
Jude stood mute, holding his Wet Floor sign as the kids milled about. He thought of Kristina, sitting in the chair, looking at him the whole time. Yes, she really had stared at him the whole time, hadn’t she? Whenever he had chanced a peek in her direction, she was looking right at him, and her eyes weren’t afraid.
The hall emptied as quickly as it had filled. Jude stood, alone again, with his sign.
He placed the sign back in the same place, then returned to the mop and bucket. He wheeled the squeaky-wheeled contraption to the section of floor he’d just finished and began mopping to cover the fresh footprints.
Ron Gress was a head-scratcher for Frank, one of those things (and there were a few) he couldn’t quite figure out. Like those blasted word puzzles in the newspaper, for instance. He could fill in the right answers here and there, but never all of them. Never. Each time in frustration he told himself he’d never do another. Yet he always did, because a different part of him inside demanded it.
So maybe that’s what Ron was, too: one of those word puzzles with a five-dollar word for the answer. The guy wasn’t your average village idiot, Frank could tell that. Ron was pretty smart, a lot smarter than himself, though that wasn’t saying a whole lot. The bottom line was, Ron shouldn’t be here, because . . . well, he just shouldn’t. Ron should be doing something else, something that qualified as True Work.
Frank, himself, had some True Work. Something he was born to do. He’d always hidden the results of his True Work in the basement. But maybe he could, maybe he should , show Ron. Inspire him a bit. It would be a good deed, and the truth was, he wanted to show someone else his True Work. Lately he’d been having trouble keeping it locked up inside his home, locked up inside his brain. The time was coming when he’d have to let the world see what he’d been doing down there. After all, it needed to be seen to be appreciated. Ron, he’d probably be a good place to start. And it would show him there was more to life than just janitorin’.
Of course, if Ron wanted to be a janitor, well, that wasn’t Frank’s biscuit to butter. It wasn’t as if he himself had set out to be in this position; so many people end up in places they never dreamed they would. And Frank had to say that being a janitor wasn’t all bad. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as his dad always used to say. Janitorin’ gave him time to clear his mind, because these days, with everything on the TV, with the newfangled cell phones and gadgets and computers, even with those godforsaken newspaper puzzles, well, there was too much to fit in your mind, wasn’t there? Jani-torin’ gave him a chance to let loose all those jumbled thoughts. That, and his True Work.
Most people hated their day jobs, but Frank wasn’t one of them. It gave him a chance to be around kids. Especially the young ones, kindergarten age or so. A janitor was just as fascinating to them as an astronaut, and they were always full of smiles and questions. And Frank, for his part, made sure he was full of answers. Oh, sure, he acted as if he didn’t care for the kids when he was around Ron and other adults—it was so much easier to do that, because adults never trusted anyone who genuinely loved being around children—but deep down he was drawn to the young kids. They were, after all, what his True Work was all about.
Overall, being a janitor had a good beat, and you could dance to it. Frank gave it an 87.
Ron, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be happy anywhere. He walked through life in a cloudy daze, like that kid in the Charlie Brown cartoons who always had the storm of dust swirling around him. Frank knew a lot of kids picked up on that kind of thing, but he doubted Ron did. Or cared. Sometimes Frank would just sit Ron down and tell him the way things worked. In a small-town school such as this, you had to deal with kids of all ages.
And while Frank genuinely loved the small children, the older ones were a pain in the pants. Once they got up around middle school age, an orneriness leaked into their personalities. With these older kids, you couldn’t be friendly. You had to be firm, in control. Frank knew that; any blooming idiot would know it. Ron, on the other hand, was always in some world far away, and the middle school kids liked to take advantage. If Ron heard his name, the haze lifted for a few moments; once the conversation at hand was done, the haze always returned.
Frank watched as Ron emptied garbage cans, obviously nose-deep in his own little dream world. A group of middle school boys—that snotty, uncontrollable age—walked by Ron, and one of the boys kicked over a full, as yet untied, garbage bag. Refuse scattered in every direction. The boys snickered as they walked on, and Frank waited a few seconds. Maybe Ron would say something. Maybe he’d take control of the situation. Had to happen some day, didn’t it?
Instead, Ron simply bent down and started picking up the garbage, then stuffing it back into the bag.
Frank sighed. ‘‘Earth to la-la land,’’ he said, a bit torqued that Ron had let the middle school kids get away with their stunt. That meant they might try other stunts. Maybe even with him.
Ron’s eyes focused briefly.
‘‘Sorry, Frank. Just . . . uh, thinking.’’
Frank smiled. Yeah, thinking. Maybe that was Ron’s True Work. He grinned, picturing Ron’s head on that famous Thinker statue.
That thought, in turn, made him think of his own True Work again.
And his smile grew.
9
COUNTING
That night, Jude stood on Rachel’s porch, unsure of what to do. Rachel invited him over frequently—he was thankful for the chance to see Nathan, even if he’d never told Rachel so—but he always felt so awkward just before knocking on the door. Every time he felt like he should just turn and run. And keep running.
He knocked. He expected to wait for a few minutes before Rachel answered, but the door swung open almost in mid-knock.
Rachel stood in the doorway, looking surprised. ‘‘Oh, it’s you,’’ she said. Jude couldn’t quite tell if she had been expecting someone else or if she just couldn’t think of anything else to say right away. ‘‘You’re early.’’
‘‘First time for everything,’’ he said, trying a joke. She looked somewhat puzzled by his statement but then smiled before swinging the door open and inviting him to enter.
Rachel retreated to the kitchen while Jude found his way back to Nathan’s room. He peeked around the door and saw Nathan on the floor playing with toys from his own childhood: good old Lincoln Logs. Jude smiled as he watched his son. Every time he saw Nathan, a warm wave of pride always washed over him; he could scarcely believe he had been a part of something so beautiful. But soon after the pride came the shame. He wasn’t much of a father.
Frightened, weak, and yes, paranoid. He knew he was paranoid, knew he felt he was being watched more often than he actually was. But he couldn’t just turn off those feelings at the spigot; even if he could, some of the paranoia would still leak through, anyway.
Tonight, however, another emotion came as well. Call it resolve. Jude vowed he was going to change for Nathan. After Kristina
’s confrontation, he somehow felt . . . freed. Soon she’d probably let the world know that Jude Allman lived, ha ha, and he’d have to face the constant hounding once again. But until then, in this brief afterglow, he was free from a chain he’d been dragging around the last six years.
And maybe, just maybe, this was what he needed to turn the corner. Recently he could feel he was getting stagnant, the paranoia steadily worsening. The blackouts, he felt, were part of a deeper sickness, something he didn’t want to face. When he was younger, he had always assumed mentally ill people couldn’t know they were sick. After all, if you were sane enough to recognize you were crazy, how crazy could you really be? But now he knew that wasn’t the case. He had always been able to feel the paranoia creeping into his own brain. Felt it crawling like a low slug, and yet he was powerless to stop it.
‘‘Hey, squirt,’’ Jude said to Nathan. Nathan immediately turned and grinned; he jumped to his feet, then ran over for a hug. Jude was always uncomfortable being touched, but he never stopped Nathan. Never. As they embraced, Jude thumbed through his memory banks, trying to find similar images of his own father. Memories labeled ‘‘father’’ were there, part of the buried trash he’d tried so long to abandon. He knew that much. But he didn’t want to dig deeper and risk launching another headache. Not tonight.
They heard Rachel call to them from the other end of the home. Jude looked down at Nathan. ‘‘Ready for some chow?’’
Nathan nodded. ‘‘It’s your favorite, Daddy. I asked Mommy to make it.’’
‘‘What’s my favorite?’’
Nathan furrowed his brow. ‘‘Spaghetti, acourse.’’
Jude smiled and rubbed the top of Nathan’s head. ‘‘I think that’s your favorite, if I remember right.’’
