“This favor. You need to be smart and do it right.” The reverend pushed a phone into Gideon’s hands. “Call her. Tell her you want to see her.”
Gideon felt the wrongness piling up: the eagerness and dry lips, the sudden, fierce intensity. “I don’t understand. Call who?”
“Elizabeth.” The preacher took the phone from Gideon’s fingers and dialed a number. “Tell her you need to see her. Tell her to come here.”
“Why?”
“Tell her that you miss her.”
Gideon kept his eyes on Reverend Black and waited for Elizabeth to answer the phone. It took five rings, then Gideon said what he’d been asked to say. There was a silence after his words; in the hesitation, he said, “I just miss you is all.”
He listened for ten more seconds, and when she hung up, it felt like part of the wrongness. Why he was home. Why he was calling her.
“What’d she say?”
Eager fingers took the phone, and Gideon felt a strange regret. “She said I shouldn’t be out of the hospital.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“She’s coming.”
“Now?”
“Yes, sir.”
The preacher got up and paced the room twice. He took Gideon’s arm and led him to the bathroom. “The next thing is really important.”
“What?”
He squared up the boy and put heavy hands on his shoulders. “Don’t scream.”
Gideon didn’t know the girl in the tub. Silver tape covered her mouth and was wrapped around her head two or three times. Her wrists were taped, too; but Gideon stared mostly at the swollen eyes. She was chained to the radiator, wrapped in a tarp. “Reverend…?”
The preacher put him on the toilet seat and knelt as the girl struggled. “You don’t want to do that.”
Gideon, watching, knew he’d never seen anyone so frightened in all his life. The girl was wide-eyed and grew still. He tried to understand, but it felt as if the world had changed while he slept, as if the sun had set one day and come up dark the next. “Reverend?”
“Stay here. Stay quiet.”
“I’m not sure I can do that.”
“Do you trust me, son? Do you believe I know what’s right and what’s wrong?”
“Yes, sir.” But he really didn’t. The door closed, and Gideon sat still. The girl was watching him, and that made it worse. “Does it hurt?” he whispered.
She moved her head up and down, slowly.
“I’m sorry for the reverend,” Gideon said. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
34
Elizabeth drove because she had no other choice. She couldn’t stay at the house, couldn’t leave the county.
So she drove.
She drove so the warden wouldn’t find her, and not the cops, either. She stuck to the gravel roads and the dirt, to the narrow lanes that led to forgotten places. The movement was all she had left, just that and worry and the fear her courage would break. Elizabeth dreaded prison with the kind of fear born bloody from knowledge of what happens when helplessness becomes the final rule. Prison was powerlessness and subjugation, the antithesis of everything she’d fought to be since she’d first known the bitter taste of fallen pine. She’d denied that for a long time, but all she had to do was look at Adrian to know the truth of it. So she drove as she had as a kid, wind-struck and wild and untouched. Yet with every intersection came a choice, and every choice took her west. She didn’t even notice until she hit the county line, then she turned east because the children were east, and those were the bars of her cage-Channing and the boy, the county map with its unforgiving lines.
The call, when it came, was a tortured blessing.
Gideon sounded bad.
Something was wrong.
It took time to work her way back into town, and for the first time in her life she regretted the old Mustang. Cops knew it. It stood out. Turning at the shuttered plant near the tracks, she worked farther east and then down, passing the same chalk-yellow house and bending right at the creek. It was dim in the draw, and she drove as fast as she could, the hillside piling up on her right, old millhouses looking down.
The car at Gideon’s house was rusted and battered and unfamiliar. She didn’t think twice about it until she saw blood on the paint.
“I hit a whitetail out on one fifty.”
Her father stepped onto the porch. His face was crooked, the eyes somehow dull and impenetrable. Elizabeth straightened from the car, ran her fingers over the metal. “No dents.”
“He was already gut-shot when I hit him. Not much of an impact, really. Just bumped the car and slid off. I suspect he’s dead by now, lost in some field or another.”
She touched the blood. It was dry, but still sticky. “What are you doing here, Dad? Whose car is this?”
“It’s a parishioner’s car. I’m here for the boy.”
“And your neck?”
“I was doing some work around the parsonage. A bucket fell off the ladder. What’s with all the questions?”
“You know how I feel about this.”
She meant the boy, and her father knew it. Gideon liked church for good reason, but Elizabeth had her own demons, and the rules had grown clear over time. Church was for Sundays. The rest of the week her father stayed away.
“How do you feel about his private room? Or the money we’ve raised for his medical bills? You don’t think his father has that kind of cash, do you? That’s the church at work, your mother and all the people you no longer see fit to value.”
Elizabeth shrugged off the guilt; it was nothing new. “Did you ask Gideon to call me?”
“Things have taken a turn.” He shrugged. “Complications. Timing.”
“I don’t know what any of that means.”
“It’s all wrapped up together, childhood and innocence and trust.” He opened the door and held it for her. “Come on inside.” The dirt was as she remembered it, the greasy rags and bits of engine. “He’s in the bathroom.”
“I’ll wait.”
“It’s not like that.” He indicated she should walk with him. “Not in the shower or anything. The boy felt unwell and wanted to be in there just in case. He knows you’re coming.” Her father gestured again and let her move in front. He was to the left, one hand reaching for the knob as she settled into the hollow place between his arm and the door. “There’s such love in a child,” he said. “And that’s the thing I tell myself. Everything that happens. The road that leads from here.” His hand touched the knob. “It’s all about the innocence.”
“Are we still speaking of Gideon?”
“Gideon. Family. The next hour of your life.”
Her father opened the door, and Elizabeth saw it like a blur: Gideon and an injured girl, blood and skin and bright, silver tape. She saw it all and, in the span of a heartbeat, felt the world collapse to something inexplicable and cold. She didn’t know what was happening; couldn’t possibly. But the battered eyes were Channing’s, and that meant nothing in the world was as she’d thought. She moved on instinct to duck and turn, to find space to figure this out. But he was behind her and ready. He drove her into the doorframe with one hand and used the other to push something hard and slick against her neck. She got a foot on the frame, but knew even then she was too late. Energy ripped into her neck, and he followed her to the floor, keeping the charge against her skin as she twitched and drummed and felt a scream that never left her throat. Her body was burning, on fire. She smelled the charge and through the bathroom door saw Gideon, openmouthed, and Channing, the girl, whose own scream was every bit as trapped as hers.
The preacher stood, breathing hard. He felt old, but the feeling would pass. What he’d told Elizabeth was true. It really was about the love-what he’d done, what he was doing-and nothing was stronger than a father’s love for his daughter.