Cape Refuge (12 page)

 

T
he cast itched, and Sadie's arm ached. Gritty sand had worked its way into the cast, and it coated her clothes and her skin. Hot sun lasered down on her with blistering intensity, but she couldn't seem to escape it.

She had spent the afternoon walking along the beach, picking up change left by sunbathers. A quarter here, a nickel there. Once, she had found a dollar rolled up inside a paper cup. She managed to collect a little over ten dollars, half of which she spent on a hot dog and drink. Strength seeped back into her muscles and bones with every bite, but dread overwhelmed her. Night would fall soon, and she still hadn't found a job or a place to stay.

And who in their right mind would hire a girl who hadn't bathed in days, who looked as if she had been in a fight and lost, who didn't have a toothbrush or clean clothes or a hairbrush?

Back home in Atlanta, there were homeless people all over the streets, sleeping in doorways, begging on the curbs, walking the sidewalks, looking for cans or change or handouts. She had walked down those streets with fear and distaste, thinking there was something wrong with people like that. Why don't they just get a job and a place to live like everyone else, she had often thought. If they spent half as much time looking for legitimate work as they spent begging or digging through trash cans, they'd have nice homes and plenty of food.

Now she knew better. She was one of them, a homeless stray hunting for nickels and pennies. She had often guessed what she would do in their position, how she would rise above her circumstances, how she would never allow herself to get that low.

But she had been proven wrong.

Weary, she sat in the sand and watched a group of children playing in the surf. The waves were too tall for them, and she worried that they had gone out too far. She searched for their parents, saw that the mother was on her feet, yelling for them to come back.

The ocean's response was to slap more waves on the shoreline, its loud roar mocking the lone voice of the mother. But the children came back, jumping and challenging those waves, laughing and splashing.

Overhead, a gull squawked in a flat, off-key note. Behind her, someone played a radio too loudly, a vulgar, angry rap song.

Her first sight of the beach, just yesterday, had filled her with such hope, as if nothing bad could ever happen in a place like that. Now it seemed violent and unforgiving, threatening her hope and weakening her resolve. She longed to get away and find a place without sand where she could sleep tonight.

She tried to get her thoughts in order. First, she needed a bath. She needed to wash her hair and get presentable. Then she needed to wash her clothes. Once that was done, she might be able to get someone to hire her. If it was in a food place—a fast-food restaurant, maybe—at least she might be able to get her meals for free. If it was in a hotel, she might be able to get them to let her rent a room.

She turned around and looked at the motel just off the beach. Rooms faced the water, and maids moved with their carts along the rail of the upper floors. She could be one of them, she thought, if she could only convince the manager that her broken arm wouldn't hinder her work. Maybe she could do that work in the daytime and get something else at night.

Armed with purpose, she got up and walked to the concrete sidewalk that led around the pool to the stairs. She went up one flight and looked along the walkway that led in front of the doors. A maid was coming out of a room to drop dirty towels into her cart.

“Excuse me,” Sadie said.

The Latino woman had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a crisp gray uniform, with a white apron. “Yes?” she asked.

“I'm looking for a job,” Sadie said. “I wondered who I could talk to about working here.”

The woman grabbed a stack of white towels to put into the rooms, and Sadie eyed the cart. A bucket of shampoo bottles, soaps, hand lotions were piled there. “My boss, she on the third floor, behind vending machines,” the woman said in a thick Mexican accent. “She not hiring, though.”

“She's not?” Sadie asked. “Why not?”

“She have all she need,” she said.

“Okay,” Sadie said. “I'll try somewhere else.” She started to walk away, then stopped and turned back. “Uh . . . would it be possible . . . I mean . . . would you mind . . .” She cleared her throat. “I was wondering if I could take one of these bars of soap and a shampoo? I could really use a bath.”

The woman eyed her for a moment, then finally gave her the ones in her hand. “That's all I can give,” she said. “I get in trouble.”

“Sure, of course. Thank you.” Sadie unzipped her backpack and stuffed the items down into it. Now, if she could just find a place to shower.

She went back down the stairs but stopped before descending completely. Her eyes scanned the beach, looking for a shower. There was one near the pool of this very hotel, meant for washing off sand. There were probably others, she thought. She could wash her hair there, and scrub the sand off of her skin.

But then what would she wear?

Her eyes fell on a girl strolling down to the beach, wearing a breezy, pale blue sundress. Her blonde hair flew in the breeze behind her, and her skin was bronze, as if she came here daily to soak up the rays. She looked like a homecoming queen, Sadie thought with admiration. Like a cheerleader or a lifeguard.

She probably had a pink bedroom with flowered wallpaper and a mother who waited up for her at night. She probably talked on the phone for hours each day, went to movies, had boyfriends.

She watched the girl drop a towel onto the sand. Then she shed that dress, revealing a bikini beneath it. She kicked off her sandals, left them there with the dress on the towel, and headed for the water.

Sadie's heart quickened. If she had a dress like that, she knew she could get a job. It would be easy. With her hair washed and those clothes, she would look so much more respectable. That girl probably had twenty others like it in her closet. She probably had a pair of shoes for every outfit.

She hurried down the stairs and out across the sand, intent on taking the girl's clothes while she was in the water. She had never stolen before, so her hands trembled and her heart raced, but she told herself there was no other way. She just wanted a job, a place to stay, food to eat.

Basic things. Wasn't it all right to steal for basic things?

She reached the sand, and her step slowed as she watched the girl get doused by a wave. She stood there, sweeping her hair back.

She had sworn she would never wind up in jail like her mother. Not for anything, she had told herself. It was easy to avoid. All she had to do was keep the law.

But that dress was what she needed, and those sandals that hadn't yet been covered with sand. She would look pretty in them, clean, respectable. Not at all like a runaway.

Her mouth went dry, and her legs grew weak. The girl dove into a wave, came up on the other side, and swam out toward the next one.

There was plenty of time, she thought, and no one was looking. But if they were—if someone saw her—that police chief might have to arrest her, and he would shake his head and say he might have known, that nothing good could come from a girl sleeping on the beach. . . .

She reached the clothes, stood over them, and watched the girl swimming further. The clothes lay in a wad at Sadie's feet. She could swoop them up, stuff them in her bag, walk on, as if nothing had happened. She could just reach down . . .

Her body froze, and she thought of her mother in jail, warning her never to break the law.
Don't wind up like me, Sadie. You're better than that.

Her resolve suddenly melted like chocolate in the sun.

She would have to find another way.

As if she feared being caught in her intentions, she turned and ran down the beach, away from the dress and the shoes, away from the girl who probably dominated the pages of her high school yearbook, away from the eyes that might have seen her, had she succumbed.

And as she ran, she began to cry, for she didn't know what to do next.

 

T
hey held the funeral service two days later in the Calvary Baptist Church on the island. Jonathan was not allowed to leave jail, so Morgan and Blair clung together, alone on the front row of the church. The city council sat near the front like government dignitaries, as if no one remembered that, just three nights ago, they had been trying to ruin those for whom they mourned today. But the congregation of their warehouse church, and most of the town of Cape Refuge, turned out and sang praise songs exactly the way Thelma and Wayne would have directed them.

Morgan closed her eyes and sent her mind on a mission to pull up every Scripture verse she knew to get her through this moment.

Absent from the body, present with the Lord.

We do not grieve as those who have no hope.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.

Her mind captured one after another, like lifelines keeping her from sinking into the muck of despair.

She had Blair's hand in hers and thought how cold it was. Her sister's face was pale and expressionless, a blank slate for fertile imaginations who would gossip that Blair had not cried at her own parents' funeral. But they hadn't seen her in the library that night.

The preacher addressed the two of them as if they were the only two in the room, with sweet stories about her parents that made the crowd chuckle nostalgically.

But Morgan couldn't laugh. She wanted to leap up and scream out that they could come here and wipe a tear or two, tell a funny story, laugh, change the subject, network, gossip, catch up, then go home and sit down to eat with their families. Their lives would go on. It was too cruel.

She had often wished that God offered us each one chance to turn back time, one chance to do things over. She would have wasted hers years ago, when she dyed her brown, curly hair blonde and it came out orange, or when her tenth-grade boyfriend broke her heart. Or if she had made it to the age of twenty-eight without using it, would she know how far back to turn the clock to prevent her parents' murders? Would one day do it? Two days? A week? Or had it started years ago, when they began their ministry and started taking risks for the Lord?

God was merciful for not giving us that time-turning option, she supposed. She wasn't wise enough to use it well.

The very act of sitting in this building with this sniffing crowd indicated her acceptance of their deaths. But she did not accept it. Her heart lashed out now with the same screaming, crashing fury that Blair had shown in the library. Only no one knew it.

She quenched her loud, heartbroken, raging grief in quiet nods and weak smiles, as if there wasn't a hole burning right through her center.

We do not grieve as those who have no hope.

If hers was the grief of hope, then she knew that her sister's grief was even more consuming. Blair had no hope.

She squeezed her sister's hand more tightly, trying to warm its icy chill.

But Blair sat stiff, like a statue, vacant and blank and pale, except for the crimson color of her scar.

 

 

B
lair came back to herself about a mile from shore, as Jonathan's boat took them out to bury the bodies at sea. They had only invited a handful of people to join them—the preacher conducting the funeral, Jay Riley to pilot the boat, and a few of Thelma and Wayne's closest friends.

They rode out for two hours into the deeper ocean, then had another short service. The men Morgan had chosen as pallbearers lowered the coffins over the side of the boat. The friends and loved ones who had been granted the honor of coming out with them came by Blair and Morgan and paid their respects in turn.

When it was finally the crusty boat pilot's turn, he took off his hat and held it over his heart. “I'm sorry for your pain,” he said awkwardly.

Morgan took his hand and thanked him. Blair thought he smelled like fish, and she wondered if he hadn't bothered to wear clean clothes for the funeral.

But the boat, itself, had a rank fish odor. Morgan had gotten some friends to wash the deck and clean up the boat before they used it, but the smell was impossible to get rid of.

Jay came to Blair next and took her hand. “Your parents were good people,” he said.

He sounded like he was reading a script, and the thought made Blair angry. She'd rather he said nothing at all.

“Ironic, ain't it?” he said to both of them.

“What is?” Morgan asked.

“That we'd take Jonathan's boat out to bury his victims.”

Morgan's mouth fell open, but that scar on Blair's face reddened instantly. “Jay,” she said. “why don't you just go back and drive the boat, since that's the only reason you were invited to come?”

He looked shocked at her outburst, then shaking his head, as if he didn't know what had set her off, he went back to the helm.

Later, as she and Morgan sat side by side in the back of the boat, Morgan looked over at her. “Everybody thinks he did it.”

“They ought to have sensitivity training for people like that before they allow them to walk around in public,” Blair said.

Morgan started to laugh quietly, and finally Blair joined. They leaned against each other until that tired laughter played down.

“I'm sorry I thought he did it at first,” Blair said. “I know Jonathan didn't kill anybody.”

“Thank you,” Morgan said, her eyes growing serious again.

“We're going to get him out of there,” Blair said. “And we're going to find who did this.”

“I know we are,” Morgan whispered.

As they pulled back up to the dock, their faces sobered again. “I've got a lot to do tonight,” Blair whispered. “I've got to put the library back together.”

Morgan was quiet for a moment as the dock grew closer. “You're not going to have to do it alone,” she said. “I'll be there to help you.”

Blair looked over at her and registered the statement. Somehow it seemed right that her sister would be there beside her, picking up the pieces, putting them all back together. Quietly, she accepted that as the trip to bury their parents came to an end.