Finders Keepers (31 page)

S
EVENTEEN

“Nick, whom did you give the Bible to?” Elizabeth set her hands on her hips and glared at her son. “Do you remember who it was?”

The little boy squared his shoulders. “I don’t like that Bible.”

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about it. That Bible was not yours to give away. You weren’t even supposed to touch it. Now who has it?”

“That Bible made you mad at me in the park.”

“Only because I’d told you to leave it alone, and you disobeyed me by putting it in your backpack.”

“It made Zachary mad, too. I think the Bible made him mad at you, because he threw it on the porch swing, and I saw him do it. It was not a good Bible. It gave us all trouble. I wanted to cut it up with my scissors and burn it in the fireplace or throw it in the toilet and vanish it forever.”

“Nikolai Hayes!” Elizabeth tried to control her fury. The old Bible contained the only family record of Zachary Chalmers’s birth. It was part of Grace’s legacy to her son. Her heart’s deepest feelings had been written onto the margins of its crinkled pages. If Zachary were ever to have any hope of understanding his mother, he would need her Bible.

“Nick,” she said, “did you cut up the Bible?”

Guilty yet filled with resolve, he avoided this mother’s eyes. “That Bible was bad.”

“It was not bad. It was Grace’s Bible, and I want to know—”

“I’m not talking about the other Bibles in our house, Mom! Those are the good ones, and we take them to church and read them at night. I like those Bibles. But that one of Grace’s was bad, Mom, and you should be happy I got rid of it.”

“Well, I’m not happy with you. I’m not happy at all.”

She looked across at Zachary. He was standing, hands in his pockets, looking as glum as she’d ever seen him. “I’m not sure we’re going to get a straight story,” she told him. “I’ve been through this kind of thing with Nick before. Sometimes I just can’t understand the logic he uses before he acts.”

“He’s told you the logic behind what he did. He saw the Bible as the source of trouble. So he got rid of it. Makes sense to me.”

“But it might still be around here somewhere, if we could only get him to tell us what he did with it.”

“Elizabeth,” Zachary said, “your son was right. He saw the truth. That Bible opened a can of worms in my life. I wish I’d never seen the Chalmers family tree. I was better off believing I’d been dumped by my parents. At least that situation was concrete, something I could get fixed in my mind and deal with. Now, all I’ve got is a mystery about some Southern belle who sat around on a gold settee and drank tea while her servant waited on her.”

“But that’s not nearly all there was to Grace!”

“It’s all I need to know about the woman. All I want to know.”

“There’s no mystery to Grace. She was wonderful and kind, Zachary. She cared about everyone in this town. She did all she could …”

“The mystery is not just my mother. Who was my father? Where did he come from? Where did he go? Why didn’t they marry? Too many unanswerable questions. I’ll do better if I just forget the whole thing.” He reached down and gave Nick’s hair a rumple. “Don’t worry about the Bible, kiddo. Your mom likes to look backward and hold onto the past. Maybe she even wants to live in the past a little bit, but I learned a long time ago never to do that. The past is gone. It doesn’t matter. I’ve always headed forward with my life. And that’s what I’m going to do now.”

“Forward?” Nick asked. “Which way is that?”

“Good question.”

“Mrs. Wrinkles taught me under, over, inside, outside, upside down, through, around, beside, beyond …”

As Nick puzzled over what Zachary had said, Elizabeth knelt and drew her son into her arms. She knew very well what Zachary meant. He was moving on. He would leave the past—including her and Nick—behind him in his quest for a future. Though her heart was breaking, she knew she must concentrate on neither past nor future. Nick was the present, and right now her child needed her.

“Backward is there,” Nick said, thrusting a thumb over his shoulder. “So forward is …” He pointed out the window of Finders Keepers. “Are you going away, Zachary? Are you going to leave us?”

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the gentle thudding of Nick’s heart against his mother’s ear. She knew all too well the pain that this loss would cause the little boy. Somehow he and Zachary had connected from the very beginning. Nick had chosen Zachary to be his father as surely as Elizabeth had once chosen a small, green-eyed Romanian boy to be her son. Such bonds of the spirit were hard to break.

“I’m going back to my apartment,” Zachary said. “Thanks for showing me around the mansion, Elizabeth. And for telling me about Grace. And thanks for all the rest of … of everything.”

She shut her eyes and nodded. “You’re welcome.”

As Zachary’s footfalls echoed through the shop, Elizabeth snuggled her son close. Her frustration and anger with the child seeped away in the sweet boyish smell of his hair and skin. His small fingers began to play with her hair, lifting it up and letting it fall. From the moment God had given her this child, Nick had loved to play with her hair, touching and smoothing and letting it comfort him.

“Mommy?” he said as he picked up two handfuls of her dark hair and pressed them against her cheeks. “Are you still mad at me?”

“I want you to learn to obey me, sweetheart,” she said. “But even more important than that, I want you to know that no matter what you do, I’ll always love you.”

“Always?”

“Always and forever.”

“Backward and forward?”

“You bet.”

He leaned over and planted a wet kiss on her cheek. “Mommy, why does Zachary always go to his apartment? Doesn’t he have a real home anywhere?”

Elizabeth considered the rambling old house across the lawn, the tidy but half-furnished apartment down the road, the series of foster families, the trailer park.

“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think Zachary has a place he would call a real home of his own. I don’t think he ever has.”

“I wish we could adopt him to be in our family. Then you could put your arms around him and love him forever and always, backward and forward.”

“Well,” Elizabeth said, “Zachary is a grown-up, and I don’t think he wants to believe that anyone ever loved him—or that anyone could love him now. I really don’t think Zachary wants to be in a family, Nick.”

“That makes me very sad,” he whispered against her neck.

“Me, too, sweetie. Me, too.”

Zachary walked down the last three steps in the narrow corridor and pushed open the glass door that led out onto the square. He breathed in a chest full of fresh air to cleanse his lungs of the musty, dusty pall that clung to his office upstairs. It was going to be good to move out of those cramped quarters above Sawyer-the-lawyer’s offices and into his own brand-new work space.

As he passed the stores that lined the square, he felt once again the sense of jaunty joy that had given a spring to his step for the past three weeks. He was a man with a plan. His new mission had given him direction and purpose. From the moment he’d figured out the path he was to walk, he had moved forward with all the jet propulsion of a rocket. Nobody and nothing could stand in his way.

And the reason for his inner certainty came from the best place of all.

The night he’d left Elizabeth’s place, he had gone home in a funk that wouldn’t lift. Unable to sleep, he’d meandered out onto his balcony, and after a while, he’d begun to pray. It wasn’t just random praying either. This had been a focused, intent discussion with the Christ to whom he was surrendered. By the time dawn began to send its pink mist across the river, he knew what he was supposed to do.

It was right. It was a plan. And with God’s help, he would accomplish it.

“Hey there, Zachary Chalmers!” Pearlene Fox called. She leaned on her broom and gave him a wave. “Long time no see. We’ve missed you in church. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

“Taking care of business.” He crossed the street toward her. “I spent the last couple of weeks in Jeff City.”

“Did you? Well, I’ll swan. I hope you’re not thinking of moving back there after that last council meeting and all. I know folks are all up in arms about the mansion these days, and Phil thinks he’s got himself a big enough wave to ride all the way to elections.” She rolled her eyes. “As if
parking
was the be-all and end-all of everything in this town.”

“I read in the newspaper that parking is the main topic on tonight’s council agenda.”

“Parking, my foot. Everybody’s gearing up to talk about the fate of that old eyesore over there. You want to know what I think? I think there’s nobody but Phil Fox himself who gives a rip about the parking situation in Ambleside. I think what everybody wants to talk about is Chalmers House. Who’s going to wind up with it, what’s going to happen to it, what ought to be done with it—you name it. That place has got folks speculating up one side of the street and down the other.”

Zachary nodded. He’d heard more than an earful about it himself. “I guess people have to talk about something.”

“In this town? Boy howdy, that’s for sure.”

He chuckled. “Pearlene, I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I ought to. I got myself into a peck of trouble by giving Liz a copy of that old town charter. Phil like to killed me. Not really, of course, but he was hoppin’ mad. Hoo, was that man steamed!”

“This one shouldn’t cause you any problems. It’s about Elizabeth Hayes.”

“Liz? What about her?”

Zachary tried to steel himself. He knew he was speaking to the queen bee in the gossip hive of Ambleside, Missouri. Once he told her his concerns, his personal business would belong to the town. But no one could help him better than Pearlene, so he’d have to risk it.

“Well,” he began, “I’ve been trying to get in touch with Elizabeth for … for a while now. Maybe a week or more. I’ve called her house, and I tried the shop. She’s not answering. I thought I’d drop by and check on her, but maybe you know what’s going on.”

“Of course I know what’s going on. Why didn’t you ask me before? Liz and Nick went on a vacation.”

“A vacation?” Zachary felt as though the sun had just been knocked slightly off-kilter. Elizabeth Hayes didn’t take vacations. She didn’t like change. She wanted security and home and the sameness of Ambleside. She was supposed to be right where Zachary had left her last—dependable and certain.

“Liz finished that big Jeff City contract she was working on,” Pearlene explained. “You know those three houses she was furnishing? Apparently they liked what she did so well, they gave her another contract. She told me she’s going to be doing good to keep her shop open and work on that second contract both. I suspicion she’s going to have money flowing in like summer rain in a leaky basement. There was a time when I figured Liz would marry the first man who came along and could offer her and Nick some financial security. But not anymore. No, sir. She’s making her own way in this world, and I’m sure proud of her. Anyhow, Liz finished her first contract about the same time Nick got done with summer school, which, by the way, turned out real good according to Liz. He’s adding double-digit numbers now, did you know that?”

“Double digits,” he said blankly.

“And he’s been reading almost at grade level, which Liz says is better than everybody expected. She’s just as tickled as she can be.”

“But … about the vacation. Where did she go?”

“Florida.”

“Florida!”

“Well, it’s not the moon, you know. Liz wanted to show Nick the ocean, which I’ve got to say is more than I’ve ever seen of this old world. Anyhow, she packed him up and shut down her shop and off they went. Like I say, they were both at a point where they could take a little break, so they just up and did it. Boompah’s checking on her house every other day, bringing in the mail and the newspaper. He’s getting around a lot better these days, in case you hadn’t noticed that either. Luke Easton is mowing Liz’s yard and watering her flowers. And I’m keeping her sidewalk swept.”

Zachary stared at the darkened windows of Finders Keepers. Elizabeth couldn’t have gone off without telling him. That didn’t fit into the plan at all.

OK, so maybe he’d been a little overly focused on putting things in motion. Maybe he’d been a little driven. Maybe … maybe he was back to his old way of caring more about things—plans, goals, ambitions—than about people. It’s just that he’d counted on Elizabeth staying right where he wanted her until he was ready to tend to that situation.

But Elizabeth wasn’t a situation, was she? She was a woman he’d thought he knew pretty well. And he knew she wasn’t supposed to change.

“When is she coming back?” he asked.

“Nobody knows,” Pearlene said, giving her broom a little whack on the curb to knock off the dust. “She told Boompah she’d come home when she was good and ready. Now, doesn’t that beat all?”

Zachary let out a breath. How could it be that just when he thought he’d been getting his surrender to Christ down pat, he had let his focus on people go straight out the window?