by B.R. Paulson
Chapter 12
We skipped breakfast.
Returning to the hallway for our things, I couldn’t help but try to look in the office for the dead guy again. But the door was shut tight. Snooping around the place hadn’t been mentioned in our plans anyway. I needed to keep my focus. Not deviate.
Shaking off the death of a man I’d never met, I followed Mom down the hall.
My stomach growled, returning me to my previous thoughts. Back at the door to the pit we called our room for the time being, I shook my head and muttered, mostly to myself. “I can’t believe we missed breakfast. Aren’t you hungry?”
Mom pushed open the door and stopped abruptly. I smacked into her back. No, I wasn’t paying attention because I had missed breakfast! “We have better food in our bags, Kelly.” Which was probably true, if they only served oatmeal in the dining area. Not that they were allowing women to eat. I remembered where we would be eating and the prospect dimmed my hunger.
Craning my neck to see around her and why we stopped, I stared at the full visual of the mattress leaning against the wall, the one blanket strewn about the floor and mingling with the contents of our bags all over. We entered gingerly, closing the door behind us.
Clothes mingled with mashed in sandwiches flung from their baggies. Our MREs and other snack items seeped from split seams of their packages. I stood in the middle of the massacre and stared with my jaw thrust to the side.
Stepping over our things, Mom crossed to the closet and turned to look inside. Reaching up, she pulled the handgun from its hiding spot. Looking around, she took in the mess.
Resolve pressed her lips into a thin line. She motioned me closer, speaking so quietly like she breathed the words. “They don’t trust us and they want us to know it. Let’s get this cleaned up and get everything repacked. We don’t have a lot of time.” She patted my back and ducked down, already moving past the fact someone had dug through our things, throwing them all over the place.
How did she get over the invaded feeling? But as I lowered myself to the ground and crawled over our things, the truth hit me. She probably hadn’t recovered from Charlie’s invasion the night before. The looting of our room paled when compared to that event.
Could she forgive those trespasses against her? Or had Charlie taken her ability to practice her faith when he stole her Bible?
