Unspoken Fear
Silence is deadly.
by
Hunter Morgan
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www.epublishingworks.com
ISBN: 978-1-947833-68-5
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2006, 2018 by Hunter Morgan All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Meet the Author
Prologue
It was an ordinary night after an ordinary day. Dinner. TV. To bed after the evening news. Toothpaste. Toothbrush. The bathroom mirror. The same reflection.
The voice that seemed to come out of nowhere was completely unexpected. It had come before, but not for a very long time, and then only as a whisper.
"Azrael."
No! The toothbrush fell. Hands clenched the edge of the sink as the image in the mirror blurred. Suddenly, the single-bulb light fixture seemed to glow brighter. So bright, it was blinding.
Pain. Excruciating pain. Not up to the task.
"Azrael."
The voice was louder this time; it couldn't be ignored. "Azrael, it is time."
Azrael, the Archangel of Death.
"Azrael, my will must be done."
The voice was so loud that it boomed, reverberating off the walls. It could no longer be resisted, and Azrael fell under the attack. Knees hit the dull linoleum. Hands clenched the skull, trying to block out the light and the pain.
There was no need for struggle any longer. Azrael could not defy the command. Could not ignore the voice any longer. The voice of God.
Chapter 1
The chainlink fence seemed tall to Rachel, taller than the last time she was here, and the coiled barbed wire on top appeared even more menacing than she remembered. No one could scale that wall, could they? Not scale it and survive.
Her sweaty hands gripped the Volvo wagon's steering wheel, and she glanced through the links of the ominous fence to the old barn in the distance. It had once held dairy cows but now served as a workshop for inmates. A sign on the end door read “Furniture Barn”.
"Mama?"
Rachel glanced up at the guard in the cement block tower in the distance. Even from the highway, she could see the rifle in his hands as he paced.
"My hands awe sticky. Mama!"
Rachel blinked and reached up to adjust the rearview mirror to see her daughter in the backseat of the car.
"Mama, I need a wipe." Mallory waved her starfish hands. "Mattie wants a wipe."
Rachel absently reached for a container of baby wipes on the seat beside her, popped open the blue lid, and grabbed a handful. "Help Mattie," she told her daughter as she handed them over the seat.
Movement on the far side of the fence caught Rachel's eye, and her hands found the steering wheel again. Her knuckles turned white as she clenched it tighter, watching him walk toward her. He wasn't dressed in a teal jumpsuit as he had been the last time she had seen him. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a faded green T-shirt. He carried a blue gym bag.
She suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She glanced up at the guard in the tower and swallowed the sour bile that rose in her throat.
"Aw done. Aw cwean, Mama," Mallory sang from the backseat with the innocence only a four-year-old could possess. She was completely oblivious to what was going on, why they were here at the Sussex Correctional Institute, and Rachel wanted to keep it that way. Forever, if she could.
"Fine," Rachel whispered, unable to take her eyes off him. He was approaching the open gate, almost free of the fence. "Just throw them down on the floor. We'll pick them up when we get home."
"Mama, you said—"
"I know, Mallory," Rachel snapped. She made herself breathe before she spoke again, gently this time. "It's okay. Just throw them on the floor, sweetheart. We'll clean up the trash when we get home."
He turned the corner, came around the fence, and walked straight toward them. Through the windshield, even in the glare of the late-day sun, Rachel could see his handsome face clearly: the arch of his eyebrows, the tiny knot on his nose from when he had broken it when he was nineteen, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. But he kept his gaze cast downward, never looking up at her or back toward the guard tower.
Rachel was afraid she was going to be sick. The stench of the cold french fries coming from the backseat was almost overwhelming, and for a moment, she seriously considered shifting the car into first and taking off, leaving him there beside the road.
But she didn't move, and a moment later she heard the click of the car door's handle.
Hands on the wheel, she stared straight ahead as he climbed in and closed the door.
"Noah," she heard herself murmur.
"Rachel."
There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch to the point that it might break. A thousand memories flooded Rachel, the smells, the tastes, the sounds of the life she had once shared with this man.
An erratic pounding on the leather seat behind them shattered the silence. Mattie, belted in beside Mallory, beat on the seat with meaty fists, making guttural sounds.
Noah just sat there, gym bag on his lap, staring straight ahead.
Rachel glanced in the rearview mirror, shifted the car into first, and eased off the grass onto the right lane of the highway. "Yes, I know," she said, readjusting the rearview mirror so she could see the car behind them. "I know, Mattie. It's Noah. Noah is home, isn't he?"
"It's okay, Mattie," Mallory soothed. "It's okay,"
Rachel could see her sweet, round face in the rearview mirror as her head popped up.
"Mama, put the CD on. Mattie wikes the Arthur CD."
It was on the tip
of Rachel's tongue to refuse. It was May and she was sick to death of listening to Arthur the Aardvark's holiday music, which had been in the CD player since Thanksgiving, but Mattie was still beating the car seat with his fists, still crying out in that harsh, rasping voice that had never spoken a word, to her knowledge, in thirty-eight years. Anything to prevent having to speak to her husband in the passenger seat beside her.
Ex-husband.
She hit play on the CD player in the dash, and the Hanukkah song blared from the speakers. Mallory began to sing in her baby voice that was not so baby-like anymore, and Mattie quieted instantly. In the rearview mirror, Rachel could see him begin to play the notes with his fingers on an imaginary keyboard.
They rode a good five miles and into the next song before Rachel dared to look at Noah. Dared speak. "You could say something to Mattie. You have no idea how much he's missed you."
Noah pressed his lips together. "Thank you for coming for me."
"What was I supposed to do?" She spoke before she thought, turning east, off Route 113. "Tell you to walk your sorry ass home from prison?"
He glanced out the window at the picturesque small town they were passing through. "Nice language for a priest's wife."
"Ex-wife."
"Ex-priest," he trumped.
They were quiet again through another song, but Rachel refused to allow her thoughts to wander. She concentrated on the road, taking the Georgetown Circle, continuing to head east, and sang along with Mallory, knowing the ridiculous lyrics by heart. "We three kings ate boiling tar..."
Noah just stared out the window.
Several times she stole a glance at him; she couldn't see his brown eyes, didn't know what he was thinking. But then, it had been a very long time since she had been able to fathom anything Noah Gibson was thinking.
Rachel followed Route 9 to just west of Lewes and took a left, heading north. The countryside changed at once from small neighborhoods and businesses on the busy road to the beach, to pine woods and a rutted paved road barely wide enough for two cars to pass. Singing "It's Baxter Day!" louder than Mallory in the backseat, she took the left fork just over the bridge and headed into town. They passed the wooden sign, hand carved by Buddy Peterson, who made a decent living carving duck decoys and selling them at the beach resort souvenir shops. The sign announced Welcome to Stephen Kill with a date beneath it, 1698.
She drove down Main Street, passing turn-of-the-century Victorian houses that lined both sides, the small diner that served the best breakfast in the county, a new convenience store, and the post office housed in the old train station before Noah finally spoke up.
"Where we going?"
She signaled, turned, and pulled up under a giant beech tree, easing the hood of the car toward the crumbling red brick fence that surrounded the churchyard of St. Paul's Episcopal Church. Here, they had both been baptized as infants, married, buried their baby boys. It was the church where Noah had served as parish priest before life as they had once known it had ended.
She cut the engine and let her hands fall to her sides on the soft leather of the seat. "I thought you might like to visit your parents' graves. I know..." Her voice faltered, but she found it again. "I know it's been five years, but you never saw the headstones. I thought you—"
"No."
He was so abrupt that he startled Mallory into silence, mid-note. In the rearview mirror Rachel saw her little girl's lower lip tremble, and Rachel’s hackles went up at once.
"Don't speak to me like that, Noah," Rachel whispered harshly under her breath. "Don't you dare speak to me like that, not after—" She looked away, not knowing how to finish the sentence.
"I'm sorry." He lowered his gaze to somewhere around his knees, his arms tightening around the gym bag. "I'm sorry, but I just want to go home. Is that so terrible, Rachel?"
For a moment she sat there staring at the brick wall, thinking of the humble headstones on the other side, listening to Arthur the Aardvark continue to belt out another Christmas song. Such an ethereal moment.... She still missed Joanne and Mark so much; she knew Noah had to miss them too.
But who was she to tell him the proper way to mourn, a mother who did not visit her own children's graves?
She started the engine and backed up. She didn't speak again until they turned into the long, white, crushed oyster shell driveway that led up to the farmhouse where she and Mallory lived, three miles outside of town.
It was on the tip of her tongue, as she followed the familiar winding drive, to tell Noah that the grapevines that flanked both sides of the road looked good this year. She wanted to tell him that the new hybrid would make that excellent pinot noir his parents had dreamed of but had never seen realized. But she couldn't bring herself to speak again, not when she knew the place would be going up for sale soon, knowing she would soon be forced to take a serious look at the responses piled on her desk, unopened, that she'd received from the vineyards in Pennsylvania and New York she'd contacted regarding a job.
Noah closed his eyes, gripping the gym bag on his lap, unable to bring himself to look at the long, graceful lines of new, budding grapevines. He'd been dreaming about these orderly rows for days, weeks, months in anticipation of his release, and now he couldn't look at them. Would not. He had no right, not to the pleasure of the sight, not to any pleasure, just as he had no right to set foot on the holy ground of the churchyard.
The sound of a barking dog made Noah open his eyes. He knew that bark. Chester. To his amazement, he smiled. "He's still alive," he murmured.
"Yup. Still alive." Rachel pulled up in front of the detached garage that stood just beyond the cream and blue Victorian farmhouse. "Minus one leg." She threw the station wagon into park.
"Minus one leg?"
"Got twapped?" the little girl in the backseat offered. It was the first time she'd spoken since he'd snapped at Rachel. "Dr. Mawy cut it off."
Noah glanced over his shoulder at the little cherub face. She had Rachel's green eyes. Rachel's child, she had to be. But not his, because his children, his and Rachel's, were lying in the churchyard beside his mom and dad.
A lump rose in Noah's throat, surprising him. Just when he thought the last shard of emotion, of feeling, had gone from him forever, he found another. "What happened to Chester?" he asked Rachel, not allowing himself to contemplate who had fathered Mallory.
Rachel had climbed out of the car and gone around to the other side to open the back door and let the little girl out of her car seat.
"Got twapped in a muskwat twap," Mallory told him matter-of-factly as she lifted her arms above her head to allow her mother to release her from the harness that belted her into her car seat. Noah noticed she was wearing a pair of jean shorts with a pink tutu over them and a pair of fuzzy purple slippers.
Noah looked at Rachel. "Old Man Tewes still setting those illegal traps?"
"Was." She lifted the harness over the little girl's head, and the child scooted under her mother's arm and escaped out the door. "Till Snowden put him in jail." She reached for Mattie's seat belt and released it. "Go ahead, Mattie. Go up to the house with Mallory," she urged gently.
"Snowden has enough pull to throw a Tewes in jail?"
"I'd say so." She looked at him over the tan leather seat. "He's chief of police now."
"Snowden Calloway, chief of police?" Noah said it as much to himself as to Rachel. "Never thought that day would come."
She shrugged one shoulder. "Who said affirmative action would never hit Stephen Kill?"
Snowden Calloway was bi-racial, born illegitimately to Tillie Calloway, the town's librarian, and an African American man never identified. An indiscretion still considered an unpardonable sin in some small towns in southern Delaware. The citizens of Stephen Kill were subtle enough with their prejudice against Tillie for sleeping with a black man and Snowden for being one, but when Noah had returned home after college in California, he had realized that kind of prejudice could cut far deeper than outright bigotry.
"What happened to Chief Mears?" Noah still looked at Rachel over the backseat of the car. Somehow it offered some protection to him, serving as a buffer between him and the woman he had once known intimately. Once loved.
"Had a coronary over a stack of hotcakes at DJ's, triple bypass. He and Margaret moved to Florida more than a year ago." She climbed out of the car, slamming the door.
So much for the buffer.
But Noah sat a moment longer inside the Volvo, listening to the dog bark and Rachel call to Mattie, watching the pig-tailed girl mount the front steps. Obviously, he couldn't sit here forever; he just wasn't sure what to do once he stepped outside.
The idea of freedom after more than five years of imprisonment was still pretty remarkable and more than a little bit scary.
"You coming?" Rachel hollered from the wraparound porch.
Noah opened the door to find the old Chesapeake Bay Retriever that had been his father's, chuffing eagerly, headed straight for him. To his amazement, the old dog was still leaping and bounding, despite his age and the amputation of his right rear leg.
"Hey, boy." Noah reached out to pat his head, then scratched behind his ears. The dog panted with obvious delight, plopping down on Noah's sneakers the way he always had. "Good boy, good Chester."
Noah looked up to see Mattie standing on the porch, watching him, his big hands dangling at his sides. He wore the same thing he'd been wearing the last time Noah saw him, the same thing he'd been wearing for the last twenty years, spring through fall, temperature permitting: a men's white Hanes T-shirt, khaki-colored Dickies work pants, no-name athletic shoes, and a navy ball cap. Any ball cap would do as long as it was navy.
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