Healing Stones (3 page)

“Silly me,” I said.

“Unless you want to take me to school,” she said into the cabinet.

Her wistfulness slapped me in the face.

“I can't today, Jay,” I said. “I have an early meeting.”

I'd made up half-truths so easily until now, but this lie stuck to my tongue like a frozen pole.

“What happened to Rachel last night?” I said.

“I don't know. She ditched me, I guess.”

“I'm sorry I didn't get your message right away. I had—a meeting.”

Jayne turned and looked at me over the top of the Rice Krispies. “Is that all you do—go to meetings?”

“Sounds like it, doesn't it?”

“Whatever.” She shook her hair back and turned the box upside down over a bowl. Two pieces of cereal bounced into it. She curled
her lip.

“So—how was rehearsal?” I asked.

I tried to listen as I filled my coffee cup and twisted the lid on. If I didn't get out of there, I wouldn't get to talk to Zach before his eight o'clock.

“I got a different part,” Jayne said.

I fumbled for the appropriate reply. “I thought you were playing Mary Warren.”

“Mercy Lewis.” She gave a disgusted grunt.

“Oh, so—who are you now?”

“Abigail Williams.”

The sudden light in her always-serious brown eyes made me hunt through my faded memory of
The Crucible.

“Isn't she a main character?”

Jayne nodded. The shyness that had disappeared with her twelfth year glowed on her face. I felt my throat thicken.

“Jay, that's amazing!” I said. “Congratulations!”

“Rachel didn't learn her lines and she kept messing around during rehearsal, so Mrs. Dirks bumped her and gave the part to me.” She tilted her head like a small bird, spilling a panel of wavy hair across her thin cheek. “Maybe that's why she left me last night.”

“Ya think?” I willed myself not to look at my watch. “Well, from now on, I'll pick you up from rehearsals.”

“What if you have a meeting?” she said, adolescence slipping cleanly back into place.

“I'm not going to be having so many meetings from now on.” The thickness hardened in my throat. I couldn't even say good-bye.

I'd just turned off Raintree Place when my cell phone belted out its disco version of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the ring tone one of my students chose for me. My heart sagged when the number on the screen wasn't Zach's. It was a college number though.

“Dr. Costanas, this is Gina Livorsi,” said the California-crisp voice on the line.

Dr. Ethan Kaye's assistant. As in president of Covenant Christian College. My boss and my friend. So was Gina. My stomach tightened. Since when was I “Dr. Costanas” to her?

“Why so formal?” I said.

“Formal occasion.” She sounded guarded. “Dr. Kaye wants to see you in his office. Soon as you can make it.”

It was already after seven. Zach liked to be in his classroom by seven forty-five—

“I have a class at nine,” I said. “I can be there after that.”

Gina paused—uncomfortably, I thought.

“He says to cancel your class and be here at eight if you can.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Unh-uh.”

“What's this about, Gina?”

“He didn't say.”

“He didn't have to,” I said. “You always know.”

“Can you be here by eight?” she said.

My fingers tightened around the phone. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

Why this summons? Something so secretive I couldn't even get it out of the secretary Zach and I had affectionately dubbed Loose Lips Livorsi?

I went cold.

CHAPTER THREE

Z
ach wasn't in his office when I arrived. Normally by seven-thirty there were several students hanging out with him, drinking Starbucks and discussing Habbukuk.

“Where's Dr. Archer?”

I jumped.

A lanky redhead in a hooded sweatshirt loped toward me— Brandon Stires, a junior who thought Zach hung the moon.

“You seen him, Dr. C.?” he said.

“It's not my day to watch him, Bran.”

“He's not in his classroom either.” Brandon peered into the narrow window in the door. “He's always here by now.”

“Is he?” I said. I felt more transparent by the second.

While Brandon continued to muse on the weirdness of Zach's absence, I headed for the only other place Zach would be this close to the start of class.

Freedom Chapel stood at the bottom of the gentle slope that led down from the back of Huntington Hall, the administration building. The chapel's position always bothered me, behind and below the ostentatious structure named after one of the college's original donors. Law overshadowed creativity as the stalwart stone and timber blocked Freedom's silvery-white, winged roof. On paste gray days like so many in the Pacific Northwest—like this one—I wanted wings, not tradition.

The glass doors sighed shut behind me as I stepped into the dim narthex. I saw no heads silhouetted in the weak sunlight seeping into the sanctuary. I ventured in further, knowing the minutes were ticking relentlessly toward eight o'clock. Sometimes, Zach told me, he would come here before a class and imagine Ethan Kaye preaching from the center of the aisle.

Ethan's sermons were an undercurrent in my thoughts as well. He urged us all, students and faculty alike, to eschew the God-talk that depersonalized God into an abstraction. “Go to the Gospel,” he'd tell us, “and listen to our Lord's speaking voice. He awakens our imagination so we can experience how His words work.”

A chill settled over the sanctuary, and I put my hands in my coat pockets and squeezed myself in. Didn't help. This cold signified the absence of something. Perhaps of Zach. More likely the gaping space where Jesus' voice should be. I didn't want to hear what He would have to say to me right now.

As I hurried up the hill toward Huntington Hall on the path lined with still-bare trees and the first pokings of daffodils, I wasn't particularly anxious to hear what Ethan Kaye had to say either. Ethan and I—and Zach—were friends, drawn together by our common ideas. One of the reasons I'd accepted the teaching position here four years ago was that he sat at the helm.

Ethan had a reputation for wanting his college to be a place where students could face their doubts and ask their questions in an attempt to make their beliefs and convictions theirs and not the dictates of parents or professors. “Doubt isn't the opposite of faith,” he said to some student at least once a week. “Doubt is an element of faith.” He refused to let the fear of the more legalistic faculty members turn CCC into a dogmatic prison of peer pleasing and rule keeping. That, he said, denied everything personal and free in a relationship with God.

Which accounted for the positive reception he gave Zach and me when we proposed the Faith and Doubt project. I buried my hands in my pockets and took the hill at a slant, only tangentially aware of the infant forsythia that promised spring. I remembered sitting in Zach's office one afternoon, early on in our friendship, studying the wet-gold leaves plastered to his window. We'd been listening to yet another student tell us over lattes that his early experiences in the church left him feeling less than Christian.

“Everybody talked about the joy you were supposed to feel in the Lord,” Brandon Stires told us. “I'd walk out of the church feeling like roadkill.”

“They're stuck, Doc,” I'd said to Zach. “These kids that were raised in strict homes think God gets mad at them because they even
have
doubts.” I'd looked at him—not expecting the liquid blue look I got back.

“Then let's get them unstuck,” he'd said. “Because if anybody can get them free, it's you.”

I stopped now, my hand on the knob of the back door into Huntington, the small door Zach and I always slipped through to
get up to Ethan at the end of the day, when he could take off his ever-present tweed jacket and his battle-weary face and hear us wax on about plans, process, results. This method was working—students were going out into the community and interviewing seekers, people who wanted God and were in various places on the path to finding Him.

Ethan stood behind the project even when faculty members like Kevin St. Clair saw it as creeping liberalism. Zach called him “Kevin St. Pompous” during our after-hours discussions over Chinese food in the president's office. Ethan always grinned.

I started up the back steps, planting my feet in the worn places in the wood where three generations of students had climbed. Each step grew harder to take, because I knew that as steeped in compassion as Ethan was, he took a hard line when people behaved stupidly. I tried to convince myself this urgent meeting had nothing to do with my recent stupidity, or with the possibility of Zach's horrible demise in the boat fire, but my insides were a large, gelatinous mass by the time I walked into the outer office. When I heard voices in obvious conflict on the other side of his door, I clung to the hope that Zach had been called to the president's office too.

I grabbed onto the corner of Gina's desk to steady myself. She didn't turn from her computer monitor.

“Who else is coming to this meeting?” I said.

“Don't ask,” she said. “Dr. Kaye said to go on in.”

“Gina—”

She twisted to look at me, face as white and expressionless as porridge. “This is one time I can't tell you, because I honestly don't know.” She glanced warily at the double oak doors. “All I can say is that I have never seen him lipid before.”

I blinked. “You mean livid?”

“Whatever. He's ticked.”

I swallowed hard to keep from throwing up.

Four faces swiveled toward me when I entered Ethan's office. None of them belonged to Zach.

Oddly, the one I noticed first belonged to the man sitting apart from the others. Andy Callahan. Attorney to the college. Thin man with the kind of unflappable manner you want in your legal advisor, though at the moment his presence fanned the flames of my anxiety. Why did this meeting require a lawyer?

Ethan himself sat on the edge of his wide desk, just shy of the stacks of files that were perpetually there. He looked the same as always—prematurely white hair brushed close to his round head, eyes direct over the Roman nose that gave his profile power, a permanent vertical line etched into the ruddy skin between his eyebrows. He wore the usual tweed slacks and hung clasped hands on the leg that didn't touch the floor.

I'd only seen Ethan Kaye angry a few times. I could add this to the list.

At least the fury didn't seem to be directed my way. In the instant before his eyes found me, they were drilled into the man in the padded Windsor chair to his left. I stifled a groan.

Kevin St. Clair was head of the religion department, so I saw him daily. But even if I hadn't, he bore too close a resemblance to a blowfish for me to ever mistake him for anyone else. His thick lips consumed the lower half of his face, and his eyelids nearly met the bags beneath them when he scowled, which was often.

“Dr. Costanas,” he said. His voice was the worst thing about him. He hailed from Ohio, but he always spoke like a Georgia preacher, as if he'd learned to speak Church in divinity school. “We've been waiting for you.”

Ethan shot him a look. “You're right on time, Demi. Why don't you have a seat?”

His
voice I loved. Ethan actually was southern, born and bred in Tennessee, schooled at Vanderbilt. He possessed a gentle firmness only true gentlemen from below the Mason-Dixon Line seemed able to master. Even with the tension in the room as thick as dough, I felt better as I took the chair opposite Kevin, next to the other man.

I didn't know Wyatt Estes very well. He was a sixtyish businessman with a large head of iron-colored hair that looked as if it had been commanded to shoot back in large waves. One of CCC's major financial donors with, according to Gina, money in his genes. Huntington Hall was named after his grandfather, Howard. Mr. Estes wasn't on the same side of the theological fence as Ethan, though he never pretended gentility the way St. Clair did. He was a straightforward Washingtonian to the core, the kind of man I'd grown up around.

He barely acknowledged my presence. He seemed far more interested in a manila folder on the low table between himself and Kevin. He ran his thick fingers along the edges as if he were trying to straighten them.

St. Clair cleared his throat. “To get back to what I was saying—”

“I think we've wrung all the juice out of that topic,” Ethan said. “Let's get this over with.”

Kevin slanted against the back of his chair, arms folded like a belligerent child. Ethan looked at me, reluctance in his eyes.

“I still say Archer should be here,” Kevin said.

“This doesn't hinge on his presence.” Wyatt Estes's voice was surprisingly high-pitched, like the bark of a terrier.

“You did try to get in touch with him?” Kevin said to Ethan.

Ethan turned to me. “Do you know where Zach is?”

The question wasn't accusatory, but the tone was grim. He knew. I sucked dry air.

“I haven't seen him today,” I said.

Wyatt Estes flipped open the folder. “Was this the last time you saw him?”

I stared at the contents he thumped with his index finger, and I gasped. It was a picture of me. It could only be me, though I'd never seen myself in a moment of passion before—eyes half closed, mouth half open in the expectation of ecstasy as Zach's hands gripped my bare shoulders and his lips hovered over mine.

Estes pushed that one aside to reveal another—my eyes startled like a doe's, hands holding Zach's head against my collarbone. Then another, showing more of me than a camera had ever captured before.

“All right.” Ethan slid the folder off the table and tossed it behind him onto his desk. “You've made your point.”