Not a Sparrow Falls (17 page)

The policeman arrived at the door and came into the hallway. As he began asking questions, Alasdair was transported back to another time when he’d answered those same sorts of questions.
“Did she seem upset when she left?” “Do you know where she was going?” “Who saw her last?”

“Do you have a current picture?” the policeman asked him now.

Alasdair’s inner screen was showing its own pictures, too awful to bear. He coughed and began shivering.

“I’ll find one,” Lorna said through her tears.

The knocker rapped. He and Lorna both bolted for the door, and Alasdair felt if it was someone from the congregation with some niggling complaint, he might knock them to the ground. He flung it open, and his relief was so great it rushed through him like a surge of heat. It was Samantha, with another policeman following close behind her and a woman behind him. He didn’t speak a word, just gathered her into his arms and nearly crushed her.

“What were you thinking?” he demanded, pushing her to arm’s length so he could look at her, hearing his voice, hoarse and loud.

Samantha began crying. Again. Her makeup was already smeared, her nose red. He wanted to stop shouting, to comfort her, but all the emotion he’d felt as illness and guilt, panic and anxiety, were finding their way out through this tunnel of anger.

“Alasdair,” Lorna murmured.

“What were you thinking?” he shouted again, his hands still on her shoulders. “Where were you?”

“At the Bag and Save,” she said through her sobs.

“There was a little problem.” The new policeman spoke, nodding to his comrade. They stepped away and began a murmured conversation.

Alasdair let go of Samantha. She took a step back. He shook his head. None of it made any sense. That fact joined the rest of his existence. Every day was beginning to have the same feeling. As though some cosmic mind took joy in dumping a handful of random puzzle pieces onto his head. “Here, see what you can make of these.” Blasphemy, he knew, but there it was. The truth of how he felt.

“Why were you at the Bag and Save?” He had visions of Samantha dawdling at the candy counter, looking at comic books, the things children do when they run off from school.

Samantha ducked her head. The second policeman stepped forward. “Your daughter was caught shoplifting—a bottle of wine.”

Alasdair’s stomach did a flip, and he wondered if he would be sick again right there in the hallway.

Samantha lifted her face to him. It was sad and bleak and perfectly matched his own feelings. “Go to your room,” he said. She turned and left, silent on the stairs for once.

The babies were screaming. He stood and stared at the wall behind the policemen, who were having another huddle. Lorna went upstairs to see to the children. The woman who’d been standing behind her came into view. She looked very familiar, but he couldn’t seem to place her.

“Sir, I think we’re finished here.” The first policeman spoke. “We won’t fill out a report on this unless the store manager insists.”

“I’ll handle the situation,” Alasdair said. “She’ll be punished.”

“Is that your solution?” the woman asked sharply.

Alasdair turned toward her. “Do I know you?”

The two policemen shifted their weight. Lorna came back down with a child on each hip. The woman who had spoken held out her arms to Cameron. He went to her, shuddering with sobs, and buried his runny nose in her hair. The woman nuzzled his neck and began making soothing circles on his back. Alasdair remembered her now. She’d been a guest for a meal. Thanksgiving dinner.

“Your daughter needs help,” she said, her voice lower but her tone still iron hard. “A man of your intelligence ought to be able to see that. Punishing her isn’t going to solve anything.”

How are you involved in this matter? he wanted to ask her. Why are you here? But nausea rose just ahead of the words. He turned and left the room. When he was finished being ill, the policemen were gone and the hallway was empty. He could hear voices from the kitchen. He climbed the stairs, feeling as
if each one was a journey in itself, passed Samantha’s door without stopping, and lay down on his bed without even turning down the covers.

Eleven

Bridie lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. There was no particular reason to get up. After all, she had no job. She jabbed her pillow and pulled the covers up so that just her nose was exposed. This was a fine mess she was in. Again. What was that her papa used to say whenever Mama wanted him to help somebody? No good deed will go unpunished? “You were right about that,” she said out loud to the empty room.

It had been a mistake to come to Samantha’s rescue. Another mistake in a lifetime of mistakes, beginning with Jonah. It had seemed like her only choice at the time, but it had only led to something worse. Then she’d thought that getting away from him would be the answer to all her problems. The one tiny little complication was that she’d decided taking his money would be a good idea, and then she’d been stupid enough to let it get stolen from under her nose. And the real insult to the injury was that for all the time she spent thinking about Jonah and Dwayne and being afraid of them, looking for them behind every bush, she might as well still be there.

The prayer she’d whispered long ago came back to mock her. “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm.” She gave a snort from under the covers. No matter how many miles she tried to put between her and her past, she couldn’t get away from herself. And she was getting tired of running.

What if? What if she’d never left with Jonah? What if Mama hadn’t died? She’d probably be a teacher right now. That’s what she’d wanted to be. She imagined herself with a classroom full of shiny-headed children looking up at her with love and affection as she taught them things—good things they would need to know. But that would never happen now. How could she march into the college and say, “Sign me up;
I want to be a teacher”? No. She would never be a teacher, or a nurse, or a mother, or have anything but a no-account job and a no-account life.

She might as well go back to dealing.

The thought shocked her chattering mind into silence.

Not that it hadn’t occurred to her before. But the suggestion had always been quickly dismissed, usually with a shudder. Now it presented itself as a logical option. She had no job. She had one friend—Carmen. Lorna didn’t count. Church people had to be friendly.

And there would be another benefit. If she wandered back to the old haunts, she could hook up with somebody scarier and badder than Jonah was. If she made herself useful enough to him, he might make good what she owed Jonah, or more likely, run him off when he got out of prison. She had enough saved to get back to her old stomping ground. Just barely—after she paid Carmen what she owed.

She lay there another moment and weighed her choices. Go back to dealing, or get up and read the want ads. Stay, or go back to the life she’d run away from. She felt like flipping a coin. She would throw her life up in the air and see where it landed. Why not?

Getting up to find a penny seemed like too much effort. She decided to make a wager instead. With God? With whoever was listening. She sat up in bed and nodded as she reached a decision. If she found a job by the end of today, she would stay here in Alexandria until it was time to put a little more distance between her and Jonah. If she didn’t find a job by the end of the day, she would wander back to the hills, make herself indispensable to somebody else’s operation, and let them deal with Jonah. By the end of this day, one way or another, her fate would be decided. She stood up and felt a little better, though it was a hard, brittle better. She looked around her room through narrowed eyes.

She didn’t bother to make her bed, just went to the bathroom, then padded through the apartment and took the
phone off the hook. Thank goodness Carmen’s door was closed tight and Newlee’s car was gone. Their ride to the reverend’s house had been uncomfortable, the conversation one-sided.

“Carmen’s concerned about you,” he had started out.

She had listened, arms folded, staring out the window, reminding herself of Samantha.

“If you’re in trouble, maybe I could help,” Newlee had offered, his voice concerned, too.

“Thank you,” she’d answered. “I appreciate that. I really do,” and for just a moment, looking at Newlee’s broad, honest face, she was tempted to tell him everything. To pour it all out and let things fall where they landed. What a relief that would be. The silence had drawn out between them and finally snapped. “This is something you can’t help me with,” she’d finally said.

Opening the front door now, she leaned out over the landing and retrieved the paper, then closed the door quickly against the morning, which like her mood was cold and dark. She thought of Samantha and wondered how her day was shaping up. Remembering Alasdair MacPherson’s stern face, she felt a stab of pity for the girl, and wished again that there were something she could do to help her. The words “lost soul” formed themselves in her mind, but oddly, it was Alasdair MacPherson’s face that accompanied them, not Samantha’s. It ought to be her own, she told herself, and resolved to tend to her own business.

She prepared coffee and went to perform her other morning ritual. Sitting down at Carmen’s computer, she booted it up and signed on, using Carmen’s Internet server. With a few clicks she was on the Virginia Department of Correction’s inmate locator for Jonah Porter. She did not click on the picture, just checked the release date, still comfortably far away.

The coffeemaker gurgled. The coffee was ready. She poured herself a cup and opened the want ads.

****

“It’s true influenza.” Fiona’s husband, the internist, had diagnosed Alasdair after a house call last night. “Bed rest and chicken soup,” he’d prescribed.

Lorna shook her head and wondered how they’d manage this new trial. She had stayed last night in the guest room to see to the babies, who still woke, crying and upset, several times a night. Like their sister and father, they seemed troubled by anxieties they couldn’t name. She’d taken last night and today off, to the displeasure of both of her bosses. There was no way she could hold this fort indefinitely.

She put another handful of Cheerios on each twin’s tray and checked her watch. It was almost time for Samantha to leave for school, and she hadn’t heard her stir since waking her up forty minutes ago. After moving the twins to their playpen, she climbed the stairs and pushed open her door. Samantha was still in bed, an immobile lump of sheet and blanket.

“You’re not ready for school.” Stating the obvious bought her time to think.

“I’m not going.” Samantha’s voice was muffled and distant.

“Are you sick?”

Long pause. “Yes.”

Lorna sighed. Closed the door. She checked on Alasdair and found him asleep. She went to the kitchen again. The twins were happy, so she let them be, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat down to think.

She remembered sitting in this very spot weeks ago, praying for poor Alasdair, and as she might have expected, her prayers had seemed to make an already bad situation worse. Alasdair still had his ministry troubles, amplified. Samantha had jumped a notch on the rebellion scale. Now even their friends were being drawn into their web of despair—just look at poor Bridie.

Lorna stood up and went to the sink. A casserole dish
from two nights ago was still soaking, the scalloped potatoes clinging in a determined, crusted ring. She plunged her hand in and retrieved the scrubber, her cheeks flushing at her presumption. She’d thought she heard God speak to her. Make promises. She shook her head. In this morning’s gray light even she, queen of denial, could see the truth. Alasdair was flat on his back in the dim room upstairs, his ministries left dangerously unattended. Samantha was huddled in a depressed ball in her bed. The twins would drift through another aimless day. No, she realized. None of this could be mistaken for an answer to prayer.

Hard times come, she told herself. Nowhere does God promise to take them away. She reached into the drawer for a spoon and began slashing away at the baked-on potatoes rimming the casserole dish. She felt as if her heart had been split by a huge wedge and someone was pounding on it, determined to cleave it. Of course
her
prayer would be the one to bring down the house, to knock out the last beam that was holding the whole thing up.
Her
prayer,
her
attempts to help.

She scraped and scrubbed and there, in the gray dishwater, without wanting to, she saw the vision again—Alasdair, his face open and smiling, Samantha laughing, the twins loved and cared for. She turned the hot water on full blast as if to wash it away.
This is what I’m going to do,
she thought she’d heard.
And you may help.

She tossed down the scrubber and braced her hands on the edge of the sink. She was hotly angry. She resisted the impulse to pick something up and break it, to fling that awful casserole dish at the wall and watch the suds and bits of potato slide down to the dingy floor.

Instead, she put away the clean dishes, made up the twins’ bottles, and switched on the radio beside the sink as she wiped down the countertops. It was time for Alasdair’s program. It would give her something to focus on besides these dark thoughts. The theme played, the announcer pitched the study Bible and latest book and said, “This week’s programs will
feature the best of MacPherson.” A series of sermons he’d given at the Reformed Theological Convention ten years prior. My, they were scraping the bottom. Scraping reminded her of the dirty dish. She went back to it with the spoon. Good grief, there was enough potato to feed another person still sticking to the sides and bottom. She made a face as she dumped the soggy heap into the garbage can. The musical theme, a bagpipe number, faded away, then came the catch-phrase, something culled from each day’s sermon and used as a teaser. Her brother’s voice boomed forth from the tiny AM/FM radio.