Forgiven (16 page)

Katy pulled her navy sweater tighter around herself as she headed into the theater. Dayne wasn’t in love with Kelly Parker. She could see that as easily as if he’d pasted the news on his forehead. Never mind that the world saw him as Dayne Matthews— cool, confident, movie star. She could see the truth. Dayne was confused and searching and unsure about what to do next.

Searching for God? She frowned as she slipped her key in the door, opened it, and turned on the lobby lights. The red bracelet looked familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Several big-name Hollywood stars were part of the Kabbalah movement. Dayne had mentioned it, but she hoped his search wasn’t leading him in that direction. From the little she’d heard about the group, it was almost cultlike. She hoped. Dayne had enough training when he was a young boy to stay away from anything like that. She’d ask Jim and Jenny Flanigan. She knew they had once taken a course on modern religions, so they’d know about Kabbalah.

Not until she was inside the theater house area and sitting in her favorite spot—third row, center section, end of the aisle— did she let herself exhale.

How had she missed the fact that Dayne was coming to Bloomington to film the location scenes for his movie? He’d talked about it back when she was reading for the part, but once she was out of it, she figured he’d find somewhere else.

Seeing him tonight, watching him walk up to her was like something from a dream.

And she did dream about him, more often than she talked about or admitted to herself. He might as well live on Mars for how different their lives were. It was the

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reason she hadn’t returned his phone calls. There was no point holding on to whatever it was she’d felt with him last summer. Put him out of your mind, she’d told herself a hundred times.

Then maybe her feelings for him would fade.

But she’d been wrong.

That much was clear the minute she saw him in the parking lot. He had obviously waited, waited until Rhonda and the oth ers were gone. Whatever time they shared while he was in Bloomington would be kept between the two of them. She gripped the cool wood seat and stared at the empty stage. It was dark and shadowy, like her motives for agreeing to see Dayne in the morning.

Every bit of her common sense told her to tell him no. But common sense had nothing to say about the way he made her feel when they were together. The connection was strong, im mediate, the way it had been the first time she talked with him at the Los Angeles studio. In the end she figured it couldn’t hurt.

Spending a day with Dayne would make it harder to forget him, but it would be nice all the same. Walking with him, talking about his life and his curiosity about faith. Sharing about the accident and the funeral.

She could use a day like that, even if it never happened again. A draft came over her, and she squinted into the darkness. The heavy velvet curtain swayed ever so slightly, and shadows danced on the stage. She’d told Dayne the truth about coming back inside the theater.

She’d forgotten to have her own private goodbye where Sarah Jo Stryker was concerned.

The funeral had been beautiful. Several people spoke, and at the end, Alice Stryker made her way to the podium and told everyone in attendance to live for the day.

“You can’t find your way back to yesterday,” she told them. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she talked, but her voice was clear. “And you can’t know what tomorrow will bring.” She

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paused and looked around the room at the faces of parents and children who had become important to SarahJo in such a short time. “But you have today. Make the most of every minute, because.., because.., well, it might be your last.”

Pastor Mark Atteberry had given the eulogy. He talked about Sarah Jo finding her place in the choir of heaven, singing for Jesus, bringing a smile to His face.

The memory of the funeral service faded, and Katy swallowed back her emotion.

Pastor Mark was right. Sarah Jo was happy and free now, happier about singing than ever before. But that didn’t make her loss any easier to bear.

Katy stared at the stage, and her vision blurred. She was no longer sitting in a cold, dark theater by herself. Rather she was surrounded by fans, watching Sarah Jo take the stage on closing night. Her voice had a way of knocking people back in their seats, awestruck that so beautiful a sound could come from such a young girl. But that wasn’t all. In the time it took her to work through rehearsals and complete the run of the show with CKT, something had changed in Sarah Jo’s eyes.

On closing night for Tom Sawyer, Katy had seen it clearly. Sarah Jo had learned to love singing. No matter what her mother thought or how she’d been trained to think of every performance as a stepping-stone to something bigger and better, Sarah Jo sang that last night with reckless abandon, with all her heart, as if it

were the final performance of her life.

Which it was.

Trails of hot tears pressed their way down Katy’s cheeks, and she didn’t stop them. Whenever she was alone in this place she would always see Sarah Jo the way she looked that night, her eyes shining, voice ringing out for all of heaven to hear. But everyone would have to live with the saddest truth of all.

Forevermore, the rich sound of CKT would have one less voice in its mix.

And the song would never be the same again.

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Jeremy Fisher was alone in his jail cell, hunched over on a narrow wooden bench.

His fingers shook, rustling the old newspaper the warden had given to him.

Now—as they’d been for the past hour—his eyes were stuck on a front-page headline that read “Drunk Driver’s Tragic Past Recounted.”

Three times he’d let his eyes drop farther down the page into the article that told his story. But most of the time he just stared at the headline and tried to remember how to swallow, how to breathe.

Drunk driver? Was that really him, the one who had slammed his truck into a van full of little kids? He shuddered, and nausea welled up inside him. The cell smelled of urine and sweat, a constant reminder that yes, he really was that drunk driver. And this was his new reality.

His dad knew part of the truth now, but it didn’t matter. The old man was serving as an army commander in Iraq. Jeremy guessed he could get a leave if he wanted to, but he’d only wired a simple message saying he’d be home in three months. They could deal with it then. In the meantime there was no money, no one to bail him out or get him a lawyer.

Not that he deserved one.

He pushed his fingers up his forehead into the mass of brown curls. Since the accident, a million times each day he tried to remember what had happened, why he’d drunk so much in the first place and how come he’d thought he could make it home. But it was like it had happened to someone else altogether.

It wasn’t just the memories from that night that were gone. He couldn’t piece together anything from the week leading up to the accident, and he understood why. He’d been stone drunk for all of it, drunk to the point of blacking out.

A public defender had been by to see him today, and he’d said something that stayed with Jeremy. “Maybe you were trying to 131

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kill yourself.” The attorney was matter-of-fact. “Ever think about that?”

Jeremy hadn’t thought about it until then, but now that he had time to mull over the idea, the guy probably had a point. Or maybe he wasn’t trying to kill himself; maybe he was just trying to erase the loneliness. Not that he’d ever tell anyone else that. Loneliness sounded like an excuse, and there was no excuse for what he’d done. None whatsoever.

So what if his father had been called up in the first batch of reservists? Never mind the fact that less than a year before that he’d been laid off from his job as a sheet-metal worker, or that his mother had run off to New Mexico with an old boyfriend a few months after his father left. Lots of high school kids lived with little or no contact with their parents. So why had he started partying so hard? And why had he dropped out of school without telling his father?

The old man had e-mailed him every few days, but Jeremy never told him the truth. Not that he’d struggled in school or that he’d dropped out or that he couldn’t find his way from morning to night without drinking so much that he was surprised when he woke up each day.

Even now, his dad didn’t know all the details. He knew Jeremy had been arrested for drunk driving but not that two kids had died.

The nausea doubled.

Two kids. A little boy, six years old, and a girl—barely twelve. He’d driven his truck over the yellow line and shattered two families forever. He stood and moved to the bars that held him inside the cell. His fingers wrapped around the cold metal, and he hung his head. The system could spare him a trial. He was guilty as sin, guilty with no hope of forgiveness.

Whether they set him free or locked him up forever, the jail bars would stay with him. Each morning and at every breakfast, every time he climbed into his old jeans or brushed his teeth,

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every bit of every day the truth would stay with him like a demon on his shoulder.

He was a murderer.

Two kids were dead because of him.

A trial wouldn’t prove anything, it wouldn’t make things right for him and his father, and it wouldn’t bring healing to the fami lies who’d lost so much. It wouldn’t bring the kids back. He banged his head softly on the cell bars and gritted his teeth. A trial would never be enough and neither would a life sentence.

Only one thing would bring him release at this point—the one thing he’d hoped for since he sobered up that terrible Satur day morning. The only thing that would make everything right again.

His quick and certain death.

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THE DAY AFTER SARAH JO’S FUNERAL, Clear Creek High happened to have a late start scheduled. Jenny Flanigan was grateful. In the haze of sorrow and grief from the past week, she’d spent almost no time alone with Bailey. They’d been together in groups, and dozens of CKT kids had hung out at their house every day since Monday. But she and Bailey had a closer relationship than most mothers and daughters. They needed their time together.

Now it was eight thirty, and the boys were off to elementary school. Bailey came downstairs, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, her hair curled. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi.” Jenny was sipping coffee, sitting at one of the barstools along the kitchen island. She studied her daughter and felt a small burst of happiness.

The circles under her eyes told how hard she’d cried the day before, but this morning her eyes held

something they hadn’t for a week.

Fresh hope.

Bailey poured a bowl of cereal and sat at the bar next to Jenny.

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“I wish every day was a late start.” She blew at a wisp of hair and smiled. “I could get used to sleeping in until seven.”

Jenny slid her fingers around the warm coffee mug. “You doing okay?”

Bailey finished her bite of Corn Chex and nodded. “Better.” She glanced out the back kitchen window to the view of their pool. “Sad as it still is, it felt good spending a week with my CKT friends.” She looked at Jenny and rolled her eyes.

“Took me out of the real-life drama at school.”

“What do you hear?” Jenny leaned onto the counter, watching her daughter’s eyes.

Bailey told her everything. She knew who was seeing whom and which freshman was making the decision to drink or smoke marijuana. She and Bailey shared a code of honor, a trust that what they talked about stayed between them.

“Okay, get this.” Bailey shook her head and ate a quick bite of cereal.

“Melissa’s mom had a few of the cheerleaders over the other night.” Bailey waved her hand in the air above her. “Every one of their mothers thought it was this innocent sleepover, right? Well—” she paused, “the girls snuck into Melissa’s mom’s vodka, and they all took turns doing shots.”

“On a school night?” Jenny felt her stomach turn. “Which girls?”

“The usual drinkers, you know, half the cheerleader squad. But this time Abbie joined them.” Bailey’s expression fell. “Mom, she’s so stupid. She’d never had alcohol before.”

The sick feeling doubled. “Why did she?”

“She says it’s ‘cause I wasn’t there.” Bailey stirred her cereal. “If I was there she wouldn’t have. So I feel terrible, but what could I do? I had Sarah Jo’s funeral.”

“Honey…” Jenny put her hand on Bailey’s shoulder. “You don’t have to think like that. Abbie can’t have you by her side every minute. At some point these kids have to make the right decisions on their own.”

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“I know.” She planted her elbow on the counter and sighed. “Why do they think drinking’s so great?”

Conversations like this one happened more often with Bailey, and lately Jenny had wondered if she was making the right decision by keeping quiet about what she knew. She and Jim had talked about it, agonizing over the fact that if Bailey was out drinking they’d want someone to tell them. Still, at this age, most kids—kids without a strong family faith and even some with a strong faith—were lying to their parents. And the parents seemed to prefer being in the dark to knowing the truth about what their teenagers were doing.

Bailey went on. “Look how stupid they’re being, Mom. And they don’t even care.”

She exhaled hard. “Sometimes it seems that by next year, Tanner and I will be the only ones not throwing our lives away. I mean, what’s the big deal about drinking?”

“Especially after the accident.” Jenny sat straighter and finished what was left of her coffee. “Alcohol killed those kids, after all.”

Her eyes flashed at that. “No, Mom. Alcohol didn’t kill them. Jeremy Fisher did.”

“The drunk driver.”

“Yes.” Anger colored her tone, and she clenched her fists. “Some of the other kids at CKT and I want to do something, make an example of him.”

Bailey was right, of course. Jeremy Fisher needed to be punished. But the anger in Bailey’s voice worried Jenny. Bailey sounded as if the only solution for the young man was a cold, hard, determined revenge.