The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense (20 page)

thirty-one

jolene

Braiding her hair Tuesday
night, Jolene watched from the bed as Zach stepped out of his slacks and draped them over a hanger. His lightly furred belly protruded a bit more than when they married, but he was still an attractive man. He stepped into the bathroom and the dental floss rattled as he snapped off a length. She’d never slept with anyone else and hadn’t felt the urge to in many years, not since she’d had a crush on Nicholas Eccles, the geometry teacher, not long after Rachel was born. She cringed to remember how she used to time her visits to the teacher’s lounge for when he was likely to be there, how she’d tingled if she bumped into him unexpectedly in the halls. They’d shared nothing more than some intimate conversations, but still she felt like she’d betrayed Zach. She’d put it down to postpartum hormones and the seven-year itch, and eaten lunch in her room for the rest of the year to avoid him once she’d recognized how foolish and sinful she was being.

Now, she got out of bed, eased the door closed and locked it. Zach would take that as a signal that she wanted to make love, but she wanted to tell him what Rachel had said without Rachel overhearing. She had flat-out refused to repeat her story about the Naylors to Zach, saying he wouldn’t believe her, and Jolene had agreed to bring it up first. Zach emerged from the bathroom, wearing the lightweight flannel pajama bottoms he always wore to bed, and smiled when he noticed the closed door.

“We need to talk,” she said, patting his side of the bed.

His weight dented the mattress, rolling Jolene slightly toward him as he got into bed. He reached for her, smelling of toothpaste, and said, “I thought maybe we could—”

She batted his roving hand away, annoyed, and told him about Leland Naylor beating his children. He lay beside her, not interrupting, for the ten minutes it took her to relay what Rachel had said and how she’d come to say it.

“Rachel told you that Leland Naylor hurts his daughter and that she was stealing from the co-op to help finance Jenny’s running away?”

She hated it when he did that—repeated what she’d said back to her, a habit he’d picked up from some counseling course he’d attended. She knew it was supposed to assure her that he’d been listening, but somehow it frequently came out as slightly disbelieving.

“Yes. Well, she told Iris and Iris talked her into telling me.” It still grated that Rachel had chosen Iris as a confidante.

Zach thought for a moment and then said, “There’s no proof that Leland’s been overly harsh with his daughter.” He massaged his ear between his thumb and fingers. “He’s a good man. He’s served the Community well for many years. He’s been an elder, and our treasurer and—”

“Rachel has seen Jenny’s injuries.”

“We’re supposed to take the word of a teenager who is a self-confessed thief?”

Zach was using what Jolene thought of as his heavy voice, the one that sagged with disappointment, that said someone had let him down. She tried to get him focused on the Naylor problem, rather than on Rachel. “The hospital will have records.” Once she’d started thinking about it, Jolene remembered the times Jenny had worn a cast or a sling, far more than her peers. The girl had always referred to herself apologetically as a klutz. “We have to believe Rachel,” she added, unconsciously parroting Iris’s words.

“I’ll have a conversation with Leland—”

“We have to tell the police.”

“I’ll decide after—”

“I’m a mandatory reporter,” Jolene said, already disgusted with herself for not picking up on the clues and helping Jenny sooner. “I’m talking to the police tomorrow. Jenny’s well-being has to be our first concern, not how the Community will react.” Her fingers plucked at the thread tufts patterning the ecru bedspread.

Zach struggled up from his supine position, supporting his weight on his elbow as he faced her. A throw pillow got in his way and he tossed it off the bed. “I am responsible for the spiritual guidance and the welfare of the Community. As my wife, you share in that responsibility.”

Jolene shook her head from side to side, watching anger twitch a muscle in his jaw. “Not this time. My responsibility is to our daughter. I am not going to let what happened to Iris happen to her. God has given me a second chance, Zach, a chance for redemption, and I’m not going to throw it back in his face.” Jolene hadn’t known that thought was in her until she heard the words come out of her mouth, but she knew they were true. She’d failed Mercy, failed to speak the truth, and the consequences still haunted many people. She wasn’t making the same mistake a second time.

“I am your husband. We are one flesh.”

“Now and always, Zach.” She reached up to stroke his cheek, filled with compassion for his confusion and hurt, but he jerked away from her hand. She let it fall, grieved by his response, even though she’d known he might react this way, might force her to choose between supporting Rachel and him, between Rachel and the Community. He’d grown too apt, of late, to conflate himself and the Community, talking sometimes like they were one and the same. She suspected she’d be unable to convince him she hadn’t sided with their daughter against him, but had chosen to speak the truth aloud, rather than remaining silent.

“This is Iris’s fault,” he bit out.

“It’s not about Iris,” she said, surprised. “It’s about protecting Jenny and her brothers and sisters.”

“Before Iris returned, you respected me, and shaped your will to mine, as the Bible commands.” He plumped his pillow too roughly. “Now, within days of her return, unmarried, un-churched, living a life that is about no one and nothing but herself, you turn against me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.” Turning his back, he socked the pillow again and then laid his head on it, facing the door. His shoulders were stiff and unyielding.

Anger pushed out the compassion Jolene was trying to hang onto. “This isn’t about you, Zach,” she said to his back, “or the Community. Not everything is.” She got out of bed and unlocked and cracked the door so she’d hear if Rachel needed her during the night, then slipped under the covers, her back to Zach, and tried to fall asleep.

thirty-two

iris

Wednesday morning dawned with
loud knocking on Iris’s door. She sat straight up in bed and checked the clock. Eight. She’d returned to the motel after seeing Pastor Matt, and gone for a punishing run, wishing every step of the way that she had her bicycle. After an alcohol-free dinner at the sports bar up the road, she’d gone to bed early but lain awake until after four a.m., unable to shut her brain down. If there’d been a “Privacy, Please” placard, she could have put it on her door so Mrs. Welsh wouldn’t be rousting her so early.

“Come back later,” she called, collapsing back against the pillow and snuggling the coverlet up to her chin.

“Iris?”

Her eyes popped open. Aaron. Breakfast. She’d forgotten. She slid out of bed and opened the door, glad she’d worn actual pjs to bed now that the heater wasn’t acting up. He wore a tentative smile and his eyes were uncertain. His goatee was slightly scruffed, as if he’d been plucking at it.

“I got your voicemail about breakfast and tried to call you back,” he said. “I left messages?”

“I turned off my phone,” Iris said, not confessing that she hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, not even Jane, after the day’s events. “I overslept. Give me ten minutes.” Leaving the door open so he could come in or not as he chose, she grabbed yesterday’s jeans and a clean shirt and panties and disappeared into the bathroom to shower and dress.

She had slid one leg into her jeans when there was a soft knock on the bathroom door and Aaron said, “Iris, the police are here. They want to talk to you.”

She almost fell over, but caught herself with a hand on the sink. “Be right out.”
Esther. Esther called them and told them about me, that I attacked Pastor Matt and caused his wife’s death.
She hadn’t thought the woman would really do it, or that the police would pay attention after so long. Bracing herself, she zipped and emerged from the bathroom.

Two men in suits stood facing her, one Asian and slim, the other white and stocky. Neither smiled. They were not uniformed, as she expected, but wore suits. She looked a question at Aaron, who sat at the desk, and he shrugged. “I’m Iris Dashwood,” she said, offering her hand to the Asian cop.

“Detective Ko,” he said, shaking her hand briefly and releasing it. “This is Detective Harrison. We’re with the Colorado Springs Police Department.” They displayed their badges.

Raising her brows, Iris silently invited Detective Ko to state his business.

After a pause, where he seemed to be waiting for her to say something, he continued, “What was your purpose in visiting Matthew Brozek yesterday evening?”

“Why?”

“Just answer the question.”

Iris shrugged. “I was a member of his church years ago. I went to see him.”

Detective Harrison puffed his cheeks out and then let out the air with a disbelieving
pft
. “Various staff members allege that you attacked him.”

So it wasn’t about the attack twenty-three years ago; it was about yesterday. “I didn’t
attack
him. I didn’t even touch him.”
Surely, shaking someone’s bed isn’t a federal offense?

“We’ve got more questions for you. At the station. Please come with us.”

Aware of Aaron staring at her open-mouthed, Iris fought down a flare of panic. Could Pastor Matt have died? He couldn’t be dead. If he was, she’d never get the opportunity to confront him rationally and calmly, get him to admit what he’d done. She’d squandered her chance yesterday, letting her emotions get the best of her. Her fingernails bit into her palms. She might never be able to design again, to make jewelry, if—

“Now,” the detective prodded her.

“Of course.” She gave Aaron a thin smile. “Take a rain check?”

Aaron nodded and followed her and the cops out of the room. The last thing Iris saw as she got into the waiting car—unmarked, she noted with relief—was Mrs. Welsh staring from the office doorway, mouth open and eyes wide.

It was almost one by the time the detectives let Iris leave the police station. They’d grilled her about why she went to the hospital, what she and Pastor Matt had said to each other, and why she’d shaken his bed. Having already discovered that her father was in prison for the original attack on Pastor Matt, they made ugly insinuations about Iris trying to finish the job he’d started.

“No one would blame you for wanting to take the guy out permanently,” Detective Harrison said, thumping a folder that lay in front of him on the interview room’s small table. He’d mentioned that it contained her father’s court transcript. “Not after what he did to you. Guy’s a perv. Deserves to die.”

Sickened by the knowledge that details of her abuse had apparently come out in her father’s court appearance, and that these two strangers knew what had happened to her, Iris could only repeat that she hadn’t meant to harm him and that shaking the bed had been a spur-of-the-moment reaction. When she asked why she was being questioned, the detectives refused to answer. After enduring their repetitive questions for an hour, she’d called Cade Zuniga. It’d taken him twenty minutes to get to the police station, and another hour to effect her release. He’d managed to get Detective Harrison to tell them what had happened.

“He relapsed into the coma, the docs say. He’s unresponsive. Brozek’s daughter put us on to your client.” Harrison jerked a thumb at Iris. “We checked with the hospital staff and they confirmed that Ms. Dashwood attacked Brozek yesterday afternoon. His doctor says it’s possible that the injuries he suffered during her assault caused his relapse.”

“I rattled his bed,” Iris said before Cade could shush her. “I didn’t lay a finger on him.”

“Let’s go, Iris,” Cade said. “The DA isn’t going to go near a courtroom with this. I’m no doctor, but I know enough to realize that there’re probably half a dozen reasons Brozek could’ve ended up back in a coma. No way can they prove that anything you did caused it. This is frivolous,” he told the detectives.

From the looks they exchanged, Iris got the feeling they agreed with Cade. A
whoosh
of relief blew through her.

It was short-lived as the four of them stepped out of the interview room to find a seething Esther Brozek waiting in the corridor. It was linoleum-floored and so narrow that Esther’s bulk blocked it entirely. A black skirt and jacket with a white blouse gave her a funereal aspect. Low-heeled pumps cut into the fleshy tops of her feet. Tear tracks through her makeup and a red nose testified to an earlier crying jag, but she had composed herself. She looked like she had aged overnight, Iris thought.

“Murderer.” Esther spit the word at Iris who shrank back involuntarily until she bumped into Cade’s warm chest. His hand at her waist steadied her.

“That’s enough, Ms. Brozek—” Detective Ko started.

Esther’s eyes traveled from the detectives to Iris and Cade. Realization hardened her features. “Wait. You’re letting her go?”

“We’re still looking in—”

“She tried to kill my father! She killed his mind, pushed him back into the darkness, away from me.” Esther’s voice rose and a couple of uniformed officers appeared at the end of the hall. “You can’t just let her go! She tried to kill him twenty-three years ago and now she’s finished the job. It wasn’t her father, it was her. It was her all along. Murderer!”

“Let’s get out of here.” Cade maneuvered Iris past the detectives and started to hustle her down the hall in the opposite direction.

“I’m sorry,” Iris whispered over her shoulder to Esther as the detective stepped between them to keep Esther from following.

“You will be,” Esther said through clenched teeth, craning her neck to glare at Iris over Detective Ko’s head. “You most definitely will be.”

Iris was shaking by the time she and Cade exited the police station. They stood in a parking lot from which Iris could see a baseball stadium and unending blue skies stretching to the east.

“What if I—” she started. The thought that she could have caused Pastor Matt’s relapse sickened her, even though it was nothing more than he deserved. She tried to hold onto her anger, but it slipped away in the face of her probable culpability, harder to grasp than fog.

“Ssh.” Cade put his fingers across her lips. “You didn’t. There’s no way to know. Don’t torture yourself.” His hands went to her shoulders and he gave her a little shake, peering into her face, his brown eyes full of concern. “I’m missing my son’s soccer game. You okay?”

She nodded tentatively, then more firmly. “Yes. Go. And thank you.” With a grateful kiss on Cade’s cheek, Iris watched him leave. Realizing she didn’t have a car since she’d ridden into town with the detectives, she flagged a taxi and settled into the back seat, too mentally drained to try and think through the morning’s events. She tried to call Jane, but her friend didn’t answer. She left another message as the cabby pulled up in front of her motel room.

There was no sign of either of the Welshes and no eviction notice on her door, which she’d been half afraid there might be, given the way Mrs. Welsh had looked when the police carted her away, so she inserted the key in the lock and was surprised when the door yielded immediately. Maybe she’d forgotten to lock it in the confusion of being hauled off by the cops. She stepped across the threshold and immediately stopped, catching her breath.

The room reeked of violence. Downy feathers coated every surface, stripped from the eviscerated quilt. The sheets were flung on the floor and her few clothes were strewn about the room. The words “Liar” and “Murderer” and “Leave” were written in what looked like red Sharpie or magic marker on the wall behind the bed. The thin-ness of the letters didn’t take away from their potency. Shock held her still for a moment, but then she stepped into the room and reached for a sweater which had landed on the radiator. She held its fuzzy warmth against her cheek.
Stepping carefully over the debris, she approached the bathroom door and pushed it inward with a stiff finger. A litter of broken glass and the scent of lavender shampoo greeted her. The intruder had smashed all her toiletries and squeezed toothpaste and shampoo and lotion over the walls and sink. She turned away. Worst of all, her jewelry-making tools and supplies lay twisted, broken, and scattered around the room, faceted semi-precious stones twinkling inappropriately in the light from the open door.

Tears started to her eyes and she pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes to thwart them. What was the point of such wanton destruction? Theft, she could understand, but this? If it was meant to scare her away, it was not going to work. Other than the sweater, she had touched nothing, and she backed toward the door, determined not to disturb anything so the police would have the best chance of catching whoever had done it.
They’d better hope the cops catch them first
,
because if I get my hands on them …

“Oh, my.”

The soft syllables came from behind her and Iris whirled to
see Mrs. Welsh standing in the open doorway, peering in with rounded eyes.

“Who did this?” Iris demanded.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Welsh said, sounding genuinely upset. She twisted her hands together. “I don’t know. I took Mrs. Dorfmann to a doctor’s appointment today. I only just got back myself fifteen minutes ago and was about to start cleaning the rooms. Maybe Quentin saw something. Someone.” She faced her house, where her husband was once again working in the garden plot, jabbing a pitchfork into a wheelbarrow and shaking mulch in neat rows. He seemed to feel her gaze on him for his head came up, he made a visor of his hand, and looked their way. She beckoned to him and he leaned the pitchfork against the wheelbarrow and started toward them.

“Quentin, look,” Mrs. Welsh said when he drew near, bringing the scent of loam and cedar on his overalls and work boots. She stepped aside so he could see into the room.

He stared at the destruction and the thin red words for a long minute, not attempting to enter. When he finally turned around, Iris could read nothing on his long face.

“I guess you’ll be wanting to leave us then, Miss Dashwood. Mary, make out her bill.”

Astonishment held Iris still for a moment, but then anger moved her forward. “What I want,” Iris said, blocking his way when he would have walked off, “is to find out who did this. I think you know.”

Quentin Welsh scratched a spot behind his ear. “You’d be wrong,” he said. “I don’t.”

Iris narrowed her eyes. “Maybe not for sure, but you’ve got a good idea, don’t you?” Mrs. Welsh made a bleating sound, but Iris kept her gaze pinned on Quentin. His large hands hung at his sides, grime caked under his nails, and he made no attempt to push her aside.

“I went to visit your father once,” he said, voice low, red-rimmed eyes fixed on Iris’s. “Not long after they put him away.”

“You did?” Iris had figured that the Community had shunned her father after he was convicted of attacking Pastor Matt. “Why?”

“I know what it’s like to lose a daughter,” he said. “I thought maybe I could help him with that. He’d committed a terrible crime against the Brozeks, yes, but a man shouldn’t have to cope with losing a child all on his own. We talked—about you, not about what he’d done—and we prayed. I know that man prays for you every day, just like I pray for my Penelope.”

Too stunned to respond, Iris finally said, “He didn’t ‘lose’ me … not in the way you’re talking about. I didn’t die. I’m back now. I’m trying to help him, to free him. Someone’s obviously trying to stop me.” She gestured toward the destruction.

“Only God’s forgiveness can free us from the weight of our sins.” With a nod, Welsh stepped past her, headed back to the garden.

Frustration rose in Iris as she watched his back. Could no one in the Community do anything except mouth religious platitudes? Welsh knew something. He might even have wrecked the room himself. To make her leave? To punish her for causing her father grief? Before she could puzzle through all the angles, Mrs. Welsh reclaimed her attention by saying in a resigned voice, “I suppose you want the police again?”