“Those times we talked on the phone, I was already here, trying to find that thug that thought he could double-cross me. But now,” she said, “I guess I’m getting what I really wanted. You. Suffering. That’s really all I wanted. Yeah, I am probably not going to make it out alive. You either. But at least I am going to get to see you go through what I’ve suffered for several years now.”
“Daddy!”
Vance rose, stepped toward the bathroom. “Stay put, Conner.”
But just as he felt his mind coming together, he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was heavy. He could feel the individual fingers press into his skin.
He whipped his head around. “Get out of here.”
It startled Erin. She raised her gun. “Who are you talking to, Vance?”
Nobody was there. But when he turned back to face Erin, the hand grasped his shoulder again.
If this was how he was going to have to live the rest of his life, he wasn’t sure it was worth living. He couldn’t imagine a constant toggling between reality and distortion.
The hand was increasingly heavy, so heavy that his knees buckled underneath him, and he dropped to the ground.
Erin’s eyes lit up with fury. “You’re as pathetic as I thought you were,” she said, and her arm stiffened, her fingers moving over the trigger of the gun.
Vance saw a shadow pass in front of the window. He looked at Erin. “I guess the question is, who’s crazier? You or me?”
Erin glared and aimed her gun.
And then he heard it. The bullet returned, whizzing right over his head. Glass shattered and crashed.
He looked at Erin as he dove to the ground. Her face turned the color of cement. Her mouth gaped open. Her eyes shifted sporadically, and blood soaked her chest. The gun fell with a thud to the ground, and Erin toppled forward, her head crashing against the bed frame. She was out of Vance’s sight.
Lindy stood in the frame of the glassless window, both hands on the gun. She lowered it and tears streamed down her face.
Vance stood and ran to her, his feet crunching against the glass on the carpet. At the window, he touched her bruised face. “Are you okay?” He gently took the gun from her.
She nodded. “I thought you’d lost your mind. Our window of time. One shot.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know how I understood.”
“I didn’t think I was making sense.”
“Somehow we always understand each other.” She smiled and leaned into his chest, over the windowsill.
“Dad!” The bathroom door opened.
Vance hurried to Conner and picked him up, pushing his head against his shoulder so he wouldn’t see Erin as he carried him out.
Outside the room, a gentle breeze cooled his neck as he wrapped his arms around his family.
Maybe he had lost his mind. But somehow reality had intersected with faith at the crossroads of insanity. And he had a feeling that two little hands squeezing together in a tiny motel bathroom made it happen.
35
“Can you please state your full name?”
“Lindy Graegan.”
“Your real name is Linda. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Your middle name?”
“Michaela.”
“Mrs. Graegan, do you know why you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve waived your right to an attorney. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And for the record, your husband is Vance Mitchell Graegan, correct?”
“Yes.”
“For your information, you are being tape-recorded.”
“Fine.”
“Mrs. Graegan, do you understand that you are being questioned in the death of—”
“I understand. I have nothing to hide. Just ask me the questions, okay? Can we just get on with it? Can I get a drink of water or something? Coffee?”
“We can get you a drink of water.”
“Thank you.”
“Let’s start from the beginning.”
“I’m tired.”
“I understand. But we need to piece together exactly what happened.”
“You can’t possibly understand it all. You can’t possibly know what this has done to my family.”
“If we could just start from the beginning.”
“Well, I fell in love with a cop. And that was my first mistake.”
The detective brought in a cup of water, set it on the table, then joined his partner.
“No offense, boys,” Lindy said with a subtle wink. “Wouldn’t trade him for the world.”
“Ma’am, I know I’m skipping ahead here, but how did you know where she would be? The drapes were closed.”
“Look,” Lindy said, leaning forward. “This is going to sound nuts to you, okay? But I have a little boy who prays a lot. And I mean a lot. It’s kind of embarrassing, but sort of wildly radical too. When they say you can move mountains, he believes it.”
“So what does that have to do with it?”
“I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that I knew my son was in the bathroom, and for the first time in my life, I had to completely trust my husband. I picked up that gun and I pointed it toward the window and I closed my eyes. I’m a good shot. As you probably know, every cop’s wife knows how to fire a gun—and pretty darn well if we’ve been forced to go to the range over and over. But nobody knows how to shoot at a blind target.” She looked at them. One was taking notes. The other was staring at her as if he needed more. “Is there an explanation for this? Yeah, I’d say there is. But you have to have faith to believe in it.”
Note Taker looked at Baffled. “Well, I’m kind of fond of cold, hard facts, but in this case, I’d have to agree. That was some kind of mountain you moved.”
“You see,” Lindy said with a small, tired smile, “that’s just it. It wasn’t me.”
* * *
Vance and Conner sat in a small holding room with fluorescent bulbs that flickered now and then. Vance couldn’t stop looking at his son. He wanted to take everything in, over and over. Despite what he’d just been through, Conner looked remarkably calm and unaffected.
“Conner, here in a little bit, the police are going to take you into a room and ask you some questions.”
“That’s where Mom is?”
“Yes.”
“What do I tell them?”
“The truth. Tell them everything that you saw.”
Conner nodded, but he was busy playing with his fingers, seeing how far he could twist them around each other. Vance wondered if he was hearing anything he said. He knew Conner was having a hard time sitting still. His leg was swinging under the chair like a pendulum on steroids.
“By the way, big man, thanks for the Etch A Sketch drawing.”
Conner’s face brightened up. “You got it?”
“Yeah. That’s how I found you.”
“I drew that—no kidding, Dad—in under five minutes. I pretended I was playing with my toys, and then I got that idea.”
“Yucky hotel was perfect.”
“Oh, Dad, it was so gross. I saw cockroaches. And did you see the pool?”
Vance nodded. “Disgusting.”
A little more silence passed.
“Buddy?”
“Yeah?”
“When we start our new new life over, Dad’s going to have to get some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Help I should’ve gotten a long time ago. Sometimes adults get prideful, and we think we can handle things on our own, but we can’t. I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to get my mind healthy.”
“What’s wrong with your mind?”
Vance was really hoping he wasn’t going to ask that. This was hard to explain, and he probably shouldn’t. It was too complicated for an eight-year-old to understand that his dad was seeing things, hearing things, feeling things that weren’t there, and that when he got stressed, his head felt like it was going to explode.
br /> Already Joan had put him in touch with a doctor who specialized in PTSD. A former cop, no less. And one who was willing to give him a financial break until they could get their feet under them.
It was a relief he couldn’t describe.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I understand needing help. It’s okay. I need help sometimes too. Like in that bathroom.”
“What do you mean?”
“I really wanted to come out. But I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“The hand.”
“The hand?”
“Yeah. There was a hand on my shoulder, and when I stood up, it sat me back down. Twice.”
Vance pulled his son near him. Emotion caught him off guard and he tried to wipe his tears away quickly.
“So maybe I’m not as crazy as I think I am,” he said, smiling at his son.
Conner smiled back. “Just remember, Dad, it’s like the TV preacher says about praying. Before all else fails, do this!”
But Vance was starting to understand something profound. Before everything, God’s hand had already been moving in their lives. Bullets and shattering glass. Etch A Sketch obsessions. He’d been there even before they needed Him.
Or wanted Him.
He clasped his hands together, finger through finger, as tight as he could.
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His day started out quiet and ordinary, the way he liked and assured himself of. The morning light of early autumn rose in the east and filtered through the old, cracked windows of the antique shop, carrying with it smells of dust and wood shavings and varnish.
Every morning for nine years, before the sun fully slipped from its covers, Clay had unlocked the old shop. The store was tidy and presentable, like a perfectly tailored suit, showcasing the uniqueness of all the antiques. Everything, as it always did, had its place.
This morning he stood in the midst of them, carefully surveying the room and inventorying what he might need to acquire this week. Some items he found at estate sales. Others, the more unique pieces, George brought his way. Most needed, at the very least, a good buffing; typically they needed much more. They came to him as trash. But with hard work—tried-and-true elbow grease—there was rarely anything that couldn’t be restored. There was no magic in it, but sometimes when he was finished, it felt otherworldly. A piece would arrive at his doorstep hopeless and pathetic and leave him one day treasured and beautiful.
Wax did wonders. So did sandpaper. And paint.
But the truth was, not everything could be fixed.
It was this early part of the morning that he loved so much, before the busyness of the day began. At the back part of the shop, through the swinging doors, was his little slice of heaven, where the smell of sawdust stirred in him a delight he’d never been able to fully explain to another soul.
Clay set his keys and coffee mug aside, keeping the front lights off because Mrs. Hartnett had a bad habit of dropping by before the crack of dawn if she saw a light on. He knelt beside the small rocker he’d been working on the last several days. An elderly man had dropped it off, hardly saying a word, paying for it in advance even though Clay insisted he didn’t need to do that.
“What’s your story?” he murmured, his fingers gliding over the now-smooth wood. The chair was a hard-bitten thing when it came in, chipped and cracked and neglected, smelling vaguely of smoke. Whenever he worked on an old piece of furniture—or anything else, for that matter—he found his mind wandering to possibilities of where it once came from and how it had gotten to where it was now. Most pieces had spent dark days in attics and basements and back rooms that never heard footsteps. Somewhere in their lives, they’d served a good purpose. The lucky ones stayed in the house but sat invisibly in a corner or by a couch, an annoying place to have to dust, a thorn in the side of someone who wished it could be thrown away, except for the guilt attached because it belonged to a great-grandmother who’d spent her very last pennies to acquire it, or some such story.
Yesterday he’d cut and whittled the rocker’s new back pieces and today he would stain them. Clay grabbed the sandpaper and walked to the table saw where the slats waited, lined up like soldiers. As he ran the sandpaper across the wood, he could practically hear the creak of the rocker and the laughter of delighted children in another century.
He sighed, rolled up his sleeves, and sanded more quickly. Sometimes he thought he’d been born in the wrong century. There was hardly a kid today who would care about sitting in a rocker on the edge of a porch and watching a spring storm blow in. The world that he once thrived in had become a noisy, clangoring, messy place. But here, in the shop, with sawdust spilling through shafts of dusty light, he found his peace.
The sandpaper soon needed replacing, so he went to the corner of the room where he kept his supplies and reached for a new package. Then he snapped his wrist back at the sudden and sharp pain in his hand. It hurt like a snake had bitten him. Blood dripped steadily from the top of his hand and he cupped his other hand beneath, trying to catch the droplets.
Clay searched the corner, trying to figure out what had snagged him.
There, on the old wooden gate he’d found in an abandoned field: barbed wire. The back side of the gate was wrapped in it when he’d found it, and he hadn’t had time to cut it off yet. He looked at the wound as he walked to the sink. It was bleeding so fast that it was actually seeping through his fingers, dripping on the floor.
What a mess.
He ran it under the water. It was more of a puncture wound but mightier than it looked. The blood poured, mixing with the water. And it didn’t want to stop, even for the phone.
The shrill ring cut through the still air, coming from the rotary phone he had mounted on the wall next to the sink. Keeping his wounded hand under running water, he answered it.
“Old Fashioned Antiques.”
“It’s me.”
“Lisa. Hi. I’m kind of—”
“I know, I know. Busy. As you always are. Why don’t you answer your cell? Do you even carry it with you? Don’t you text? People need to get ahold of you sometimes, you know. What if it’s an emergency? What about that kind aunt of yours?”
“She finds me through the postal service.”
“Anyway, I need to drop off the stuff for the thing.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to be there this morning? Silly question. Where else would you be?”
“The hospital.”
“What?”
“I might be. You never know. Maybe I got tangled in some vicious barbed wire. I might be bleeding out even as we speak, and here you are completely oblivious.”
Lisa sighed. She never got his humor. “I’m being serious. Can I bring it by?”
In the background, Clay could hear Lisa’s daughter, Cosie, screaming at the top of her lungs. “She okay?”
“She’s throwing a fit.”
“So she’s in time-out?”
“You know we don’t believe in punishment.”
“I know. I just keep thinking you’ll change your mind about that.”
“So I’m coming by later, okay? And remember, this is a total surprise. Not a single word to David about it.”
“I’ll make you a deal: I won’t tell David if I don’t have to come to the party.”
“Clay, he would be crushed.”
“You know I’m just there to boost your numbers, fill in the empty space.”
“True. But you’re still coming. And not a word. I’ll see you later.”
She hung up and Clay raised his hand toward the light. It had finally stopped bleeding. He put a Band-Aid on and started mopping up the blood droplets all over the floor.
It was a lesson every person learned one time or another in their lives—never cross paths with barbed wire.
“Look at that, would you? Look at it!” Amber let go of the steering wheel with both hands and
put her knee underneath to keep it steady. She gestured, glancing at Mr. Joe. “Nobody gets this. I realize that. I do. But see how the road winds, and then off it goes, through the trees? You don’t really know what’s around the bend, see?”
Amber put her hands back on the steering wheel, then gave Mr. Joe a quick scratch behind the ears. She’d temporarily let him out of his carrier, though he tended to get carsick if left out too long. “You’re unimpressed, as usual. But there’s something beautiful about roads. They’re so full of possibilities. . . . Of course, you can always die in a horrific crash, too. But mostly, it’s just about going somewhere. Anywhere. It’s about what’s around that bend, Mr. Joe. What’s there?”
Amber’s Jeep whizzed around the curve, clearing the trees as the road straightened. Her windows were down, the wind tearing through her hair so fiercely that it was going to take a good hour to comb it out, but she didn’t care. She turned the music up. “Lovely Day” was on the radio, and she nudged her cat like he might sing along with her.
Then she saw it. “Whoa.” She slowed and craned her neck out the window for a better view. “Mr. Joe, look at that!” Large stone buildings seemed to rise right out of the earth, sprawled across several acres. White concrete sidewalks disappeared into rolling hills and hazy light illuminated the branches of all the trees, like a scene out of some kind of fairy tale. The entrance read Bolivar University, but it looked like medieval England.
She leaned toward Mr. Joe and gave him a wink. “Apparently we’ve stumbled across Camelot. I told you I knew what I was doing when we hung a left back there.”
Mr. Joe meowed in agreement.
As she drove on, Amber squeezed the fingers on her right hand. Her wrist was starting to throb, probably due to the cast more than the injury. It should’ve healed up fine by now. On the top of the cast was Misty’s name, scrawled in red with little hearts.
She focused her attention back on the road. She couldn’t spend emotional energy missing those friends left behind. But as she passed Camelot, she had to admit, it was always hard not to glance in the rearview mirror.
Still, she had to be resolved to press forward, find whatever was around the bend. She kissed Misty’s name and left it at that.