Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (41 page)

“I shot you once, Sultan,” she said, tone now calm as death. “And I’ll do it again. Only this time, I’ll make sure you don’t come back.”

“Sherry, don’t do it,” I said. “He isn’t worth it.”

She didn’t turn to look at me. It was as if she’d known it was only a matter of time before I would appear so we could come full circle.

“That’s right, Miss Angel,” she said. “There’s nothing left there but evil. I just want to take it out of this world.”

I waited for the warning click I’d already heard twice that day, but it didn’t come. I still had a sliver of time.

“It’s not about him, Sher,” I said. “It’s about you. If you do this, he still wins.”

“How do you know that?” she said.

“Because I feel it. You can too. You told me you know things just like I do.” I moved up another step. “You know this, Sherry.”

At last she turned to look at me and nodded. And then her eyes startled and her hands flew up. I saw the gun hit the porch and slide as Chief’s arms came around me and pulled me with him off the steps. Bodies rushed past us and I heard a door open.

“Hands up, Lowery—it’s over.”

It was the first time I had ever been glad to hear Detective Kylie’s voice.

By the time the sirens and the questions and the exits with people in handcuffs had faded, Hank was there with Jasmine and Mercedes and Gigi. Ophelia had arrived with India, Bonner and Liz with Zelda. Flannery had fallen into Kade’s arms when he brought Desmond, and I sank against Chief as he held my son and me to his sides. There was silence among us all as we stood by the koi pond and watched both our homes being wrapped in crime-scene tape.

It was as if the houses were being held back from the urge to fight evil with anger and hate, just as I was. And it was in Sherry and Kade and Flannery and perhaps Detective Kylie. I knew that in some lingering, grasping way, it had been in Troy Irwin’s insane plan as well.

As I crossed my arm over Chief and watched Officer Man-Child clank a padlock on the door to Sacrament Two, I knew something else. We would all stay locked up, unable to get to the world we so wanted to change, if we didn’t give in to loving another mile. No matter what that meant in the lives of the six women who clung to each other now—or to the six of us who worked every day to give them hope.

“I wanted to live there, but now I don’t think I can.”

I looked at Flannery. She stood apart from Kade now, small and ashen and drained of the fight that had held her together.

The Nudge pushed me toward her.

All right God,
I answered as I reached my arms out to Flannery.
But this is as far as I go.

I could have predicted God’s reply.
You’ve come too far to say far enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Things To Be Sorted Out Over The Next Several Weeks pile resembled a sizeable landfill. Or, as Owen put it, we had more issues than the United Nations, more mysteries to solve than Sherlock Holmes. Et cetera.

Owen himself was one of them. We didn’t discover—until he asked the paramedic who was attending to Rochelle to check out a nick in his side—that he was suffering from a flesh wound caused by a bullet.

“Is there anybody who
didn’t
have a gun pointed at him today?” Nick Kent said.

We finally pieced together from Owen, who gave us far too many details, and Rochelle, who offered almost none, that they had been working in the garden in the back part of Sacrament Two’s backyard when they heard someone, who they eventually discovered was Flannery, screaming inside the house. Rochelle saw, to use her few words, “a big bad-looking white guy” cross the street to Sacrament One, while Owen got a look in the window at Two and witnessed Sultan holding a gun on Flannery, forcing her to go to the front window and keep watch.

“I told Rochelle to stay there and I’d go in and help the little girl,” Owen said.

When we pointed out that Sultan had a
gun,
he said he thought he could handle a paraplegic with one eye. He obviously couldn’t. He wasn’t in the door half a minute before he took one in the side.

“You’re lucky he missed,” Nick Kent said.

Owen looked at Flannery. “Luck had nothing to do with it. This little girl saved my life jumping him from behind.”

I pushed aside all thought of how that could have turned out. What
did
happen provided enough angst. When Rochelle heard the shot she ran to Sacrament One to call the police. According to Flannery, Sultan sent Elgin across the street to Two to find out what Troy was doing. Elgin must have seen the back door open and gone after him just before Rochelle got there.

I spent that first night in the hospital with Desmond, where they insisted he be observed because he had been unconscious for over twenty minutes. It had certainly seemed like longer to me. After that a number of things demanded our attention. Brenda Donohue’s funeral was one of them. The legalities of putting Flannery in my care as a foster child was another.

By far the most nerve-racking was Chief petitioning the DA not to charge Sherry with the attempted murder of Sultan a year before, since she had done it to save my life, or with intent to kill, which, Chief argued, was an attempt to save Flannery’s life. While the DA looked into it, Bonner used the money he’d offered me to bail her out so she could take care of Maharry. There was no bail set for Sultan or for Elgin, but I still had to call the jail daily to reassure Flannery that her former pimp was still in the cage he belonged in.

Six days after what we began to call D-Day, Chief and I went with Sherry to get Maharry from the Wildwood Convalescent Center in Palatka where, just as he’d told me, Sultan’s people had taken him. Chief was there at the request of Tara McClanahan, since Sherry was leaving the city proper, and to notify the manager that he had filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Nelson. Maharry looked little better than he had the day I was there, and I wasn’t sure he was going to survive weeping and wheezing in his daughter’s arms.

The day before our trip to Palatka, I had wondered out loud to Chief why Sultan had involved Maharry in the whole ransom thing.

“He was probably just messing with your head while he was waiting for the call from Troy Irwin telling him to bring Desmond to Sacrament House.”

“He succeeded,” I said.

Chief reached across the bistro table and pulled me toward him by my elbow. “There’s no messing up your head, Classic.”

If there was more he wanted to say, it was cut short by Flannery, presenting us with Desmond’s latest caricature. It showed her with Desmond and me, her wild tendrils falling over the two of us like the leaves on a weeping willow.

“Nicely done,” I said to Desmond who was standing beside her, face headed toward a pout. “So what’s with the face?”

“She sayin’ this missin’ somethin’.” His voice pitched upward. “I didn’t miss
nothin’
.”

“Yes you did, bro.” Flannery turned the drawing to him and poked at it. “Hello, where’s Mr. Chief?”

Desmond’s eyes went straight to us. “I don’t know,” he said. “Where you at, Mr. Chief?”

I didn’t know even now, as I stood in the hallway with Sherry waiting for a doctor to finish examining Maharry for his release, how Chief had answered that. I’d escaped from the kitchen, claiming a pressing urinary issue. I had no idea where Chief was at anymore, and as more time went by, I was more afraid to find out.

“Miss Angel?” Sherry said.

“I’m sorry,” I said guiltily. “What did you say?”

“I said there’s something else I need to tell you.”

I had already accepted the fact that the stream never ended, so I nodded her on.

“It’s about Sultan.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t think he knew I was the one who shot him. That wasn’t the reason I wouldn’t tell you. I was just afraid he thought it was Daddy, you know, because of where the shot came from.”

“He had to know Maharry couldn’t have done it from that distance.”

Sherry shook her head. “He never really knew Daddy. But I figured something out.”

“Okay.”

“You know that big Lincoln we had in the shop for a while, the one the guy said nobody else in town could fix?”

“I remember that, yeah.”

“When they were booking me last Sunday, I saw the guy who brought it in. He was being booked too.”

“Elgin,” I said.

“Then it
was
Flannery’s pimp. I guess Sultan sent him in there to get a closer look at Daddy.”

“And to gank the keys,” I said.

She gave me a puzzled frown.

“Too much time with Desmond,” I said. “So … how do you know Sultan decided it was you who shot him?”

“Because.” Her gaze swept the floor. “The day we found those horrible pictures on the wall … the one of me had a bullet hole in the forehead.”

I felt as if one had gone through mine. I reached for Sherry, but she leaned away.

“You need to let me finish before I chicken out,” she said. “I wasn’t the only one Sultan was after, but I
was
the one who shot him. I thought if I left town it would draw him away from all of you and Daddy.”

“Where did you—”

“I took the money from Daddy’s drawer, and the gun, and I took a bus to Jacksonville because after what Flannery told us, I thought that was where he might be. It took me a while, I don’t know—”

“Nine days,” I said. “Jasmine was keeping track. You were gone nine days.”

Sherry closed her pale eyes and took a few breaths. “I had to do it, Miss Angel. I knew where to find the street women, and I paid them some of the money to get information about the local pimps.” She nodded as if she wanted me to nod with her. “I also told them about us and where they could come when they’re ready to give up the life that wasn’t a life. Anyway, I finally found out where Sultan was working with some other pimp named Topaz, and when those girls told me they were into child prostitution I almost found Sultan and shot him then. But then one of them told me he and Topaz left town, and I knew he was coming back here. I had to take the bus, though, so it took me too long to get here.”

“I’m thinking you got here just in time,” I said.

“But I left Daddy at the hospital. I thought he was going to be there until the money came from the sale of C.A.R.S. But I still left, and they almost killed him. It’s just too much, Miss Angel.”

I put my hand to her face. This time she didn’t pull away.

“You think I don’t have that feeling just about all the time, Sherry? It’s just one thing after another after another in this thing. Every Monday I say I’m going to quit, but then I don’t.”

“Why? Nobody would blame you if you did.”

“It’s not a matter of blame … or shame or guilt. It’s a matter of making the choice between loving and hating. And you do it over and over and over again. And just when you think you’ll never hate again, somebody like Jude Lowery comes back from the dead and you have to face it one more time.”

“So it
doesn’t
end.”

“I know it will someday.”

“When?”

“When we love our way to the root of it.”

She was quiet for a moment. I was sure she was musing just as I was about where those words were coming from.

“I never could get into working with Mr. Schatz in the garden,” she said.

“You and me both,” I said. “I’d kill every tomato on every vine, just walking past them.”

“But I heard him telling Rochelle something one day that … well, I’m not good at saying stuff like this the way you and Mercedes are, but he said every plant was meant to grow, but if you let the weeds get to the roots, they don’t have a chance.” She pulled her shoulders to her earlobes. “Do you think there was ever any good in Sultan? Because if there was, maybe somebody could have loved it out.”

“If anybody could have, it was Geneveve,” I said, “and that didn’t happen. I think the weeds got to him and choked out his soul long before any of you met him.”

The door opened and a nurse with a smile that said,
I have been threatened with unemployment if I’m not nice to you
told us Mr. Maharry was free to go. I prayed that very soon, Sherry would be too.

On Monday the first of October, a week and a day after D-Day, Hank and I decided it was time to pull all of us together at Sacrament One, which was now back open. We used chicken marsala and the Telling of Their Tale as the context, but all of us who loved them were more concerned about their being spread out all over St. Augustine in the interim. There was no room for them all to move into Sacrament One, which was their first choice. Jasmine was staying temporarily with India, and Sherry was with Maharry in an apartment Rex, Ulysses, and Stan got her into. An advance on the C.A.R.S. deal, Rex said, although I was sure they would never accept repayment from Sherry. As for Rochelle, Zelda volunteered to stay on with Liz to make more room, but Owen wouldn’t hear of it. He practically remodeled his entire upstairs so Rochelle could stay up there and be close to me.

But I didn’t like her being separated from the Sisters just when she was beginning to talk. I didn’t like any of them not being with the others. They weren’t ready for that, and the near-frenetic way they hugged and kissed and pulled at each other when they came together that night was proof of it.

The feasting on yet another D’Angelo Special did scrape them off the walls and each other so that we could at least hear what had happened to them on D-Day while the rest of us were, as India described it, “Being held hostage and shot at and rescued like y’all were in a Clint Eastwood movie.”

“Who?” Flannery said.

“Lord, I’m getting old,” Bonner said. “Let’s hear it. Somebody start.”

Ophelia raised her hand. “Right after Hank left Flannery with us up at Second Chances—”

“Before I could even get the door
locked,
” Hank said.

“That man came in.”

She covered her mouth with her hands, and India slid an arm around her shoulders, bracelets dangling in the sudden silence.

I shrugged at India.

“Troy Irwin,” she said quietly.

“I just lost it,” Ophelia said. “It was like it was all happening to me again.”

Suddenly it was happening to me, too. “Ophelia, I am so sorry—”

“Me and Mercedes, we were trying to get between him and Ophelia,” Jasmine said, “’cause we was thinkin’ he come up there after her.”

Mercedes let out her signature, “Mmm-hmm. We so focusin’ on her, we didn’t even see he was takin’ Flannery till they was out the door.”

“My turn,” Gigi said. “I was out on the porch waiting on a table, and I saw them, only I didn’t know what was going on. The guy was all talking to Flannery, telling her he was just taking her back to you so I thought it was okay.”

“I don’t see how you could be thinkin’ that,” Zelda said.

I touched Gigi’s shoulder. “I do. Go on, Geege.”

She shook her head and pointed at Kade. He turned his head and nodded at nothing in particular.

I had been worried about Kade all week. No one had been there to witness him holding a gun on Troy except Chief, Desmond, and me, and we assured him that first night that we saw no reason for that information to go any further than us, especially since Troy was still in intensive care and would likely go to prison if he did recover. I suspected Nick Kent had an idea, but when I was questioned later, nobody said anything about the damage to the ceiling. Maybe it was assumed to be part of the general abused condition of the whole building.

But even at that, Kade had kept his distance since D-Day. When I called he was pleasant but reserved and apologized for being tied up right now. Chief said he stayed in his office during the workday. Even Flannery mentioned to me that he must be mad at her because he wasn’t answering any of her texts with his usual funny retorts.

This was the first time I had seen him in person since that day, and I was disturbed by the sallow look of his skin and the difficulty he was having meeting anyone’s gaze. Now with everyone’s eyes on him, I watched him shrink into himself and I knew why. Shame could take many shapes, but it was always impossible to hide completely.

“Okay so Mr. Kade got there right after that,” Gigi said, obviously impatient with the delay, “and he was going upstairs and I told him Flannery already gone with a guy that—and I said this, now—that looked like him only older.”

I was frankly amazed that Kade didn’t get up and leave. He didn’t actually have to. He pulled so far into himself, nothing remained of my son but the shell he now hated, because it looked like Troy Irwin’s.

“So what happened, Kade?” Flannery said.

“No big deal,” Kade said. “I called Nick Kent and gave him Irwin’s phone number. I figured it had GPS.”

“How come you knew his phone number?”

“Flan,” I said, “let him tell the story.”

“By the time he called me back Irwin was at C.A.R.S.” He shrugged. “You know the rest.”