The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense (4 page)

five

iris

Iris padded barefoot into
the kitchen. Scrambling an egg with chives and nuking it, she ate, standing over the farmhouse sink and gazing absently out the window onto what was probably the most out-of-control yard in the greater Portland area. Almost a foot high in spots, and studded with dandelions and weeds, the grass could have hidden a tiger. A jungle gym, abandoned by a previous tenant, rusted near the back fence, swings jittering to the raindrops’ beat. Rose bushes rioted in a bramble of thorns, buds clenched. Lashed by the rain, it all looked even more depressing than usual, and Iris turned her back on it. She hadn’t planned to stay this long, so it hadn’t seemed worthwhile investing any effort in subduing the yard.

Maybe it was time to move on. She’d spent more time in Portland than anywhere else since washing up at Lassie’s pub two-plus decades ago, hungry, bone-weary, and willing to put out for food. She’d been here ten years cumulatively, interspersed with years in California and Europe, apprenticed to metalsmiths and jewelry designers, and months-long stays in other parts of the U.S. and the world, scavenging for stones or design ideas to incorporate into her jewelry. Santa Fe or Austin might spark new design ideas, lift her spirits. She was ready for a city with more sunshine.

The refrigerator hummed on, startling her, and she headed to the studio, the small spare bedroom she’d made into a work area. Tension eased from her shoulders as she crossed the threshold. Her tools—files and pliers, punches and scribes, Bezel rollers, clamps, mandrels, and others—hung in their places, ranged on a pegboard mounted above the counter she’d had installed when she moved in. The big drill press and the tumbler had their own table beneath the window. Semi-precious gems, wire, stones, and other materials lodged in clear plastic drawers. Design ideas seemed to flow more easily in an orderly space than in a cluttered one. Pushing aside the low stool, she crouched and dialed the combination of the wall safe set under the counter. Halfway through, she stopped. She was too jittery to work with the Weston emerald. She stood and picked up a half-finished cuff that lay on the counter. Hooking one foot around the stool’s leg, she drew it toward her and sat.

The two-inch wide strip of hammered copper had a filament of silver wire soldered at one end. Iris pondered it, then tried twisting the wire into various shapes across the top of the bracelet. None pleased her. Pulling a length of gold wire from a plastic drawer, she twisted it this way and that, twining it with the silver wire, encircling the smooth arc of metal. With a
pfft
of disgust, she returned the wire to its bin. Her original vision had been of intertwined lengths of gold and silver wire crisscrossing the copper, perhaps studded with a piece or two of polished agate, maybe tiger’s eye. Nothing faceted or sparkly. But it wasn’t coming together. Iris set the cuff down and her gaze slid to the computer on the other side of the room.

She knew why she couldn’t concentrate, why she couldn’t hold a picture of the bracelet in her mind’s eye, see the way metal and stones needed to come together. Pastor Matt’s face kept getting in the way. Damn him for waking up. Pushing away from the worktop, Iris glided on the castored stool to the computer and powered it up. There couldn’t be any harm in reading a news story or two about Pastor Matt’s recovery. Maybe learning the details would let her push the whole damn thing from her mind, get on with her jewelry making and selling, with deciding where to go from Portland.

The search terms “Brozek” and “coma” brought up hundreds of articles. After only a brief hesitation, Iris clicked on one at random. Pastor Matt’s face, unchanged from when she’d last seen him, filled the screen. He was smiling, the curve of his mouth pushing up the pads of flesh on his cheeks, squeezing crow’s feet around his blue eyes. His blond hair swept back from its part near his left temple, thick and straight, disciplined with mousse or hairspray. Her clenched teeth made Iris’s ears ache and she forced a yawn, assessing him from a distance of twenty-three years and two thousand miles. Unable to face his smile any longer, Iris scrolled down the page but didn’t find a recent photo.

Keeping her eyes averted from the snapshot, she read the text. “Matthew Brozek, 72, awoke from a twenty-three-year coma yesterday morning, astonishing doctors and convincing family members that miracles happen. ‘It’s a miracle,’ Brozek’s daughter, Esther Brozek, 41, said with tears in her eyes. ‘Our prayers have been answered. I always knew Daddy would come back to us.’”

Iris guessed Esther must never have married because she would certainly have taken her husband’s name if she had.
Hunh
. She’d been sure Esther would be married by twenty-one, maybe even to Noah, although their mother had been against his dating a girl who was older than him. Iris skimmed the medical gobbledy gook that followed, but the technical terms meant little. She’d already gotten the gist: Pastor Matt’s awakening after so long was a one in a bazillion, bona fide medical miracle. Yet another example of God’s—not that there was a God—warped sense of humor. Surely there was a saint, or at least a war widow and single mother of four, who deserved a healing miracle more than Matthew Brozek.

Iris’s hand trembled on the mouse as she closed the web browser and her fingers stroked the obsidian pendant at her neck.
I should visit Dad.
The thought had recurred a dozen times over the years, but she’d always pushed it aside. She hadn’t undergone four years of therapy, working to come to terms with Pastor Matt’s abuse and her family’s reaction, making her way baby step by baby step toward healing and closure, only to jeopardize her progress by exposing herself to the forces that had ripped her life apart. She shoved herself away from the computer and back to the worktop where the cuff waited.

Jewelry-making had given her a focus and maybe saved her life years ago. She felt half-silly thinking that, but it was true. As soon as she’d started training with the goldsmith Jane had introduced her to, she’d felt a sense of purpose that made her think she could be more than a runaway, more than a drifter, more than a victim. When she was engaged with a piece she had a pure focus that pushed aside everything else, that walled out worry and anger and anxiety. Wrapping trembling fingers around the cuff, Iris willed herself to connect with the metals, to
feel
how the design should proceed. She would not not not let Pastor Matt take this from her, too.

six

iris

Two weeks later, Iris
sagged on the stool in her workroom, half-drunk mug of coffee cooling at her elbow, discarded design drawings littering the floor where she’d missed the trashcan, and tools and supplies cluttering the counter. She bent her head to either side, trying to loosen the kink in her neck, and flexed her stiff hands. Scanning the counter, her gaze alit on her draw tongs, her loupe, her chasing hammer. Their shapes seemed alien today and she felt a moment of panic that she’d forgotten how to use them. Unconsciously, the fingers of one hand went to the bruise on her temple while the fingers of her other hand worried at the gem she’d removed from the safe an hour ago when she sat down to work.

She hadn’t meant to get into a fight last night. She took a sip of lukewarm coffee. Okay, maybe she had. She’d spent two frustrating weeks unable to complete a design she liked or even finish the pieces she already had started. Every time she tried to work, something kept her from focusing, hijacked her creative process. Panic had set in after a week—she’d never experienced this kind of block before. She had commissions due to individuals and a collection promised to Jane for a new opening. Even worse than disappointing customers and hurting her reputation and income, and letting Jane down, was the feeling—the
conviction
—that she wasn’t herself, wasn’t Iris Dashwood, if her brain didn’t sizzle with ideas and her fingers itch to mold gold and silver and other metals into settings that brought stones and gems to life. She’d fought the empty feeling with frequent sex with the more than willing Greg, and punishing bike rides that left her too worn out to think about what might be disrupting her creativity.

Last night, with Greg on the coast for a landscaping convention, she’d reduced the copper cuff she’d been working on to a shapeless lump with her acetylene torch and set off to a bar temptingly near the bus depot. Dismayed by her lack of interest in any man who wasn’t Greg, she’d been restless and frustrated and left after her usual two beers. It was midnight. Tossing her keys from hand to hand, she eyed her car in the bar parking lot, and then pivoted to walk toward the depot. She’d logged a lot of miles on buses before washing up in Portland, and the chug of idling engines and blasts of diesel exhaust brought a surge of old feelings: wariness, exhaustion, never-quite-extinguished hope that
this
town would offer something new and better.

Thrusting the memories to the back of her mind, Iris stood across the street and scanned the sidewalk outside the depot. Things hadn’t changed much since she’d last done this almost a year ago. She knew what kind of people trolled bus stations preying on runaways: scum, exploiters, lowlife pimps. A man caught her eye almost immediately. In a black leather car coat and jeans, he leaned against the depot’s wall, his shoulders and one foot propped against the brick. In the light shining through the glass doors, he seemed youngish, early twenties, maybe. He was smoking, the cigarette tracing a red arc as he raised it to his lips and lowered it again. A couple of people emerged from the depot, roller bags trundling behind them, and the man straightened and ground out his cigarette with his foot. When a young blond teen exited, looking around nervously, he headed toward her with a loose stride.

The burn began in Iris, starting in the pit of her stomach and moving through her limbs. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled and her vision seemed sharper. She’d been approached numerous times by pimps, had made the mistake of believing one once when he said he just wanted to buy her breakfast at a nearby diner. Remnants of fear and desperation, the headlong run through a strange city to get away from him when he tried to force her into his car, made her breaths come faster. When the leather-coated man put his hand on the teen’s duffel and she jerked it away, Iris started across the street, dodging a taxi cruising for a fare.

She stopped three feet from the couple and made eye contact with the startled girl. She couldn’t be more than fourteen, Iris thought, observing the braces. She swiped her tongue across her top teeth at the memory of twisting the braces from her teeth with a pair of pliers in a bus depot restroom in Topeka. The blonde looked clean and reasonably well-rested; she hadn’t been running long. Maybe Iris could talk her into returning home and buy her a ticket back to where she’d come from. “You don’t have to go with him, you know,” Iris said, voice gentle and reasonable, holding the girl’s gaze.

The man glowered at her. “What the fuck business is it of yours? C’mon.” He tugged on the girl’s arm.

“He’s a pimp,” Iris said. “Whatever he’s told you about buying you a meal or helping you find a place to stay, he’s lying.”

The man swung toward her, anger darkening a face that was all long nose and cheekbones like blades. “What the fuck—?”

Iris widened her stance and brought her arms up slightly so she’d be ready if he took a swing at her. Adrenaline buzzed in her veins, headier than any drug. She willed him to do it, visualizing how she’d take advantage of his momentum to catch his arm and pull him in closer so she could maximize the impact of her knee in his groin. That would probably put him down. If it didn’t, she’d—

“He’s my brother.”

It took a moment for the girl’s words to penetrate. When they did, a flush warmed Iris’s cheeks. “I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I thought—” She turned on her heel and walked away, hands pushed into the pockets of her jacket.
How did I get it so wrong?

“Loony bitch,” the man muttered behind her. “I told Mom not to let you take the bus. Too many weirdos.”

Iris ducked her head as if the words were missiles and hurried toward the bar parking lot. She burned with humiliation and was so caught up in berating herself for her stupidity that she didn’t notice the dark figure ooze out of the alley beside the bar until the man grabbed her arm and jabbed a gun into her ribs.

“Wallet and keys,” he rasped.

The sickly sweet rot of his breath and the way he jittered told Iris he was a tweaker. Her years of self-defense training took over automatically, and she stamped on his instep while pivoting and bracing her right arm to sweep his gun arm away. Savage exhilaration swept through her. Something clanked on the asphalt. Iris followed through with a palm strike, glimpsing red-rimmed eyes and stringy hair as the heel of her palm crunched into his nose. His hand flailed upward, thudding against her temple, and he crumpled to the ground. She stood over him, breathing sharply, almost hoping he would get up. The too-brief fight had left her unsatisfied, like sex that was over too soon. A sound like a cow lowing issued from the mugger and she knew he wasn’t getting up. Tension drained from her shoulders.

“Hey, you okay? I’m calling the cops.” A man had emerged from the bar and was hurrying toward Iris as he punched in 911.

Iris turned toward him and her foot stubbed something hard that skittered away. She bent to pick up the mugger’s weapon. Her fingers closed around smooth glass, not the heavy metal weightiness of a gun. A beer bottle. She huffed a laugh under her breath. She’d been held up by a damned Michelob bottle.

The ringing phone cut through her thoughts of last night. Iris eyed Jane’s number on the caller ID and answered reluctantly.

“Jack Weston called again this morning to ask about the ring,” Jane said, sounding carefully non-accusatory. Weston had inherited millions in lumber money and parlayed it into more millions with a gourmet donut emporium he franchised across the northwest. Landing the design commission from him was the ticket to doubling or tripling Iris’s income, as Jane had pointed out more than once. “He’s getting antsy. His girlfriend leaves for her Doctors without Borders stint next week and he wants to propose before she goes.”

“I know that!” Iris heard the sharpness in her voice and took a deep breath. “I know,” she said more moderately. “I’m working on it.” She fingered the 4.2-carat emerald she’d been staring at half the morning, tracing its smooth facets. The gem, with remarkably few inclusions and flaws for an emerald that size, glowed greeny-blue from her palm. Jack Weston’s beloved grandmother had given him the stone, set in a necklace, on her deathbed, and he’d kept it the twenty years since, waiting for the right woman to come along. Now almost fifty, he was ready to propose and he’d selected Iris to design an engagement ring setting worthy of the gem. It winked at her, having smugly rejected all her design efforts so far. She couldn’t blame the emerald—the designs had sucked.

“Really?”

Iris sat up straighter and winced, hearing something in Jane’s voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m worried about you. Since you heard about—”

“Not necessary. I’m fine.”

The exaggerated silence from the other end of the line said Jane didn’t agree.

“Really.” When Jane still didn’t respond, Iris said, “Look, I’ll have the ring done by close of business. All I’ve got to do is set the stone.”
And hope that it doesn’t look like total crap.

“Good.” Jane didn’t sound convinced, but Iris didn’t give her a chance to say any more, hanging up with a quick, “Gotta get back to work.”

She folded her fingers around the emerald, wishing it would give her an inspiration as stones sometimes did. She wasn’t surprised when it remained inert. With a sigh, she laid it on the counter and retrieved the ring she’d already made, finished except for the rectangular setting. The wide gold band had tiny leaves of gold, rose gold and platinum layered across the top. It was a variation on a design she’d used before and, thus, unsatisfying, but she couldn’t make any new ideas work. She’d fashioned the gold frames for the setting yesterday, cut spacers, and soldered the two frames together. Now, she cut strips from a 22-gauge gold sheet, scored grooves down their centers and bent the metal inward to form the prongs. She sanded the edges smooth and gold filings drifted to the countertop. Becoming aware that she was wielding the file with anger rather than joy, she set the tool and the band on the counter and pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. She hated feeling angry and frustrated with her materials. Part of her worried that her negative feelings would fuse with the metal and the gem.
Silly
.
Superstitious nonsense.
Taking a deep breath, she resumed filing more gently.

Time unspooled in a taut ribbon of concentration and precision as she worked an intricate design along the base of the setting and soldered it carefully to the band. The bitter tang of heated metal filled the workroom. She was vaguely aware of hunger, but felt like she was almost in the zone for the first time in weeks and didn’t get up for fear of dispelling the moment. Trimming the prongs, she soldered them into position and then attached the setting to the band. Done. Taking a deep breath and swiping her hair back, she picked up the emerald and lowered it toward the setting. Her hands shook slightly—low blood sugar, she told herself. Even as her fingers drew away from the unsecured gem, she knew it didn’t work. The setting looked cumbersome; it obscured the pure beauty of the stone, rather than enhancing it. Disappointment socked her, hollowing her stomach. The emerald deserved better than this.

Maybe in the sunlight.
She lifted the ring carefully and started toward the window, hoping the play of natural light would spark the stone to life. Halfway there, her foot caught against the edge of the acetylene tank strapped to the work bench’s leg and she jolted forward. The emerald sprang free and arced toward the window. Iris lunged for it, palm cupped, but it smacked against the glass and fell to the ground.
Oh, no! Nonononono
.

Iris sank to her knees and reached for the gem. Her fingers felt the conchoidal fracture blooming from one corner of the emerald before she could see it. Sickened, she stood and examined the snail shell-like whorls marring the stone. Rubbing her thumb across the roughness, she bit down hard on her lower lip, grieving for the emerald’s former beauty. It felt like a tiny death. It’s a gemstone, she told herself, a happenstance combination of beryl, aluminum, silicon and oxygen, not
a friend or even a pet goldfish. It didn’t help. She sniffed back the tears that clogged her sinuses, picturing Jack Weston’s face when she told him that his family heirloom, the emerald his great-grandfather had earned by performing some service for an Indian maharajah, was ruined. She tasted blood. Her insurance would pay Weston the monetary value of the stone, but its sentimental value was beyond price. She dreaded telling him what had happened.

Trying to summon language that would convey her sorrow and repentance to Weston, Iris let the truth seep in. Her problem wasn’t low blood sugar or carelessness or a temporary loss of inspiration. It was Pastor Matt. She wasn’t going to be able to focus, to work, to design the way she needed to until she’d confronted the bastard and told him he deserved to roast in hell with the devil ladling sulfuric acid sauce over him while turning the spit. It was time to take Jane’s advice. Feeling like herself for the first time in two weeks, she placed the fractured emerald in its cotton nest, rolled the stool to the computer, and logged onto an airline website.

Iris returned home late that evening, after a hideous meeting with Jack Weston, whose eyes had dampened at her news and whose quiet had been much harder to bear than rage and accusations would have been, and an almost as difficult session with Jane, who grieved with her for the emerald and reminded her in no uncertain terms that completing the piece for Green Gables on time and making it “brilliant” were now crucial to her future as a jewelry designer.

“Weston won’t keep quiet about this,” she’d said, eyes weary behind her glasses. “You can bet none of his friends will be asking you to design their engagement rings or anniversary presents. And it’s my reputation on the line as much as yours.”

Iris knew that and it made the burden of her failure that much harder to bear. As she got out of her car, drained, Greg Lansing pulled up. Dinner. She’d forgotten.

She greeted him with a light kiss and invited him into the kitchen, scuffing off her shoes at the door. “Look, I can’t do dinner tonight. I’m leaving for Colorado Springs in the morning. I’ve got to pack.”