Uncharted (45 page)
Mark’s legs broke free of their paralysis and carried him away from the scene at the rocks. So by some miracle of fate, Karyn had managed to avoid breaking her neck—the woman had freakishly good luck. But she was still wrong. There was no way on earth Mark Morris could be dead. Kevin couldn’t kill him; no man could. Death would not come for him until he was good and ready to accept it.
Still—the others had been repulsed by his words on the beach; he’d felt a chilly breeze radiate from them when he wanted to take charge of Karyn’s body. He’d thought Lisa would understand, but even she had withdrawn from him, a look of sick realization on her face.
His heart had sunk with disappointment when she’d pulled away. He hated to admit it, but over the years he had depended on these friendships. He’d told anyone who happened to be around in the afternoons that he knew Karyn Hall, aka Lorinda Loving of
A
Thousand Tomorrows
. He’d kept a photo of Susan on a corner of his desk, and he’d told his employees hundreds of stories about his escapades with Kevin and David . . . probably because they were the only friends he’d ever had.
With one hand pressed to his aching ribs, he stood at the edge of the glittering black beach and stared up into the obscuring cloud bank. What was with those clouds, anyway? What lay behind that curtain? Nothing but blue sky and beyond it the sun and stars and a couple of hundred thousand galaxies. Nothing else waited out there, no God, no devil, no heaven, no hell.
John Watson had been only an eccentric old man desperate to see his name in print. He’d written a story no reputable company would publish, so he’d taken it to a vanity press and hired desperately poor college kids to push the books on their friends and neighbors. The book, the dream of David, the strange atmosphere of this island—none of those things were connected.
Bottom line: he and his friends were stranded on a polluted, poisoned, and uncharted Pacific island. Because he alone seemed to have the courage and willpower, he’d have to find a way to escape.
When he did, maybe the others would respect him again.
After helping Kevin settle Karyn inside the shelter of the cave, Susan meandered down the passageway, following whichever trail appealed. After several minutes of wandering, she stopped in front of a low opening in the rocks, then sank to the sand like a patron of a bizarre movie theater. After a moment of brooding silence, another of her secrets began to take form in the darkness beyond.
As Susan watched herself injure an innocent friend by flirting with the woman’s husband, Lisa approached and sat by her side. She said nothing as she hugged her knees, but her shoulder touched Susan’s, a bittersweet comfort.
Still . . . Susan winced when the omniscient camera revealed a heartrending scene in her friend’s bedroom. When the woman accused her husband of being attracted to Susan, he admitted the truth. “In fact,” he said, his voice coagulated with sarcasm, “if you were half the woman Susan is, I wouldn’t be tempted to fantasize about other women. You’ve let yourself go, Cheri, and I don’t know why I stick around.”
Anger hung in the air between them like an invisible dagger, then he whirled and left the room. Cheri’s face twisted; her eyes clamped tight to trap the rush of tears, but there were too many. They streamed over her cheeks until she fell on the bed and buried her tears in a pillow.
Susan’s fingertips rose to the gash disfiguring her features. Even through the stiff organza, she could feel the cruel outline of its raised welt.
Yet this scar was nothing compared to the wounds she had inflicted on others.
What had happened to her? She’d been so idealistic in college, so eager to embrace opportunities and make a difference in the world. She had loved John Watson like a father and enjoyed selling his book. She sold more than four dozen copies that first quarter . . . before she grew tired of the work.
By graduation, she’d stopped selling altogether. She’d shifted her focus to Houston, knowing her parents would support her until she married.
Lisa propped her cheek on her knees. “Did you sleep with that man?”
Susan shook her head. “I told myself it was all harmless flirting. But did you see how she looked at him? The trust between them was gone. She knew he would have slept with me, given a chance.”
“But you didn’t give him a chance. You weren’t serious.”
“Doesn’t matter. I hurt them all the same.”
The vision faded to darkness, then Lisa lifted her chin and gave Susan a wry smile. “My life seems to be playing a few caverns down. Want to watch?”
“Sure you want to share?”
“You’re going to know everything sooner or later. Why wait?”
Susan tilted her head. “Did you ever do anything nasty to me?”
“I’m sure I did. It’s human nature to undercut those you envy, isn’t it?”
Susan released a hoarse laugh. “But you don’t envy me now.”
“No.” Lisa’s gaze darted to the mutilation under the veiling, then her eyes softened. “Not now, I don’t.”
“I didn’t think so.” With great effort, Susan pushed herself up from the sandy floor. “You got popcorn?”
“Oh yeah. Dripping with butter.”
Kevin sat cross-legged in the mouth of the cave, a few feet from the spot where Karyn was resting. She wasn’t sleeping—none of them had slept a moment in this place—but she lay on the sand with her eyes closed, her hands beneath her cheek.
Before closing her eyes, she had pulled a slender blue volume from the pocket of her slacks. “I found this on the beach,” she’d said, pressing the book into his hand. “I’ve seen dozens of copies scattered about. Maybe things will make more sense if you read what John wrote.”
As Karyn rested, Kevin opened the book and read it for the first time. When he finished, he exhaled softly and stroked the stubble on his chin. How could the words of a slender blue book make such a significant difference in people’s lives? John had cryptically described it as the story of how he went from “little boy lost to man with a mission,” but the people who sold it couldn’t even agree on what it said.
Kevin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He didn’t want to believe his life was over, but he couldn’t argue with what he had seen and heard on the rocks. Before lying down, Karyn had told him how she’d glimpsed the grand palace they would never be allowed to enter.
If she wasn’t delusional, John’s enigmatic little story was more accurate than any of them had known.
As for the knights and the farmers and the entrepreneurs, they were exiled
to a bleak territory called Haden . . .
John’s rumbling words passed through Kevin, shivering his skin like the breath of a ghost.
When Susan wandered off, Lisa sat alone before the opening to a cavern, watching another evening of her life ripple on the heavy air. The scene was a church committee meeting; she was at a table with Joe Dennison, her pastor; Ethel Herman, the president of the women’s missionary society; Don Harris, the senior adult pastor; and Lindsey Tuttle, the church secretary. The conversation was muted, but Lisa’s thoughts echoed through the room like an auctioneer’s prattle.
Who does he think he is, scheduling that senior adult trip on the date I’ve
planned a volunteer luncheon? I checked the master calendar and the seventeenth
was clear, so he must have done it to spite me. Well, we’ll see who’ll win
this one. I’ve got the pastor on my side. If I can convince Miss Righteous over
there to see my point of view, my luncheon will be a done deal. We don’t need
a senior adult pastor anyway; our lay staff can handle the geezers.
With each thought that spilled from Lisa’s brain, a bloody slash appeared in the senior adult pastor’s shirt. The on-screen Lisa sat in perfect silence as the meeting continued, hiding her murderous thoughts behind a tight smile.
Outside the cavern, Lisa buried her face in her hands. Neither Pastor Joe, Ethel, Don, nor Lindsey would recognize the bitter woman in this vision, but Lisa knew her all too well.
She lowered her hands and studied the wooden plaque resting by her crossed legs. She had found it half-buried in the sand outside the cave. She would have passed it by, but the familiar script caught her eye.
To Lisa Melvin, with appreciation for your dedication to the preschool
department of Seattle Baptist Church.
She wasn’t surprised that the plaque was here. Her pastor had been fond of quoting that verse about hypocrites who called attention to their acts of charity. “I assure you,” he always said, stirring the congregation with a voice like rolling thunder, “they have received all the reward they will ever get.” This was her reward.
She shivered as a cold coil of remorse uncurled in her breast. She could see clearly now: her service at Seattle Baptist Church had been offered always and only for herself. She had kept busy doing and giving while she’d neglected the truths that would have made a difference to her soul.
She’d spent her life yearning for the approval of others, not God. She had longed to be acknowledged as a good person; she’d needed to be known as virtuous. When a woman reached the ripe age of forty-two and was still unmarried, she desperately wanted others to believe she had chosen to remain single in order to serve.
Her pride would not allow them to know that the man she loved did not love her in return.
She rubbed her hand over her sunburned face, knowing that deep lines of strain bracketed her mouth while dark half-moons shadowed her eyes. They all looked like disaster victims.
She roused herself from the numbness that weighed her down and stumbled toward the sea, then leaned against the rocks at the front of the cave.
On the beach, the man she loved was helping Karyn—Lisa’s good friend and dearest enemy—sort through trash in the fruitless search for a pot. Lisa could no more stay away from Kevin than a child could resist warm cookies.
Yet each time Lisa was compelled to reach for him, she would experience the exquisite agony of rejection. Since she’d declared her feelings, Kevin’s easygoing affection for her had shifted first to avoidance, then to outright dislike. Now his eyes simmered with resentment every time she caught his gaze.
Surely this was a kind of hell.
Kevin had no idea how to measure time on the island. He sat and stared out at the empty sea for what felt like hours; he searched for water in the cavernous tunnels for what seemed like days. Seconds stretched themselves thin as he argued with Mark about building another raft; with Karyn he mourned Sarah in an endless afternoon.
The sun, if it even existed, remained locked behind the clouds; sunrise never came, darkness never fell. Moments dropped like oak leaves, one after the other, indistinguishable and unremarkable.
He wandered the beach and found a page from a book he recognized—he’d had a copy of Judith Guest’s
Ordinary People
on his dormitory bookshelf. A line leaped off the page: “
That is the nature of
hell, that it cannot be changed; that it is unalterable and forever.”
Yet Lisa said this wasn’t hell; it was only the waiting room.
He made a point of avoiding Susan, whose pitiful moaning drove him to distraction. And he was uncomfortable around Lisa, who stared at him with naked yearning in her eyes. He could endure Karyn only for short periods; after a few words of shared sorrow, they fell into destructive patterns of blame and resentment.