Found and Lost (14 page)

25

Tug-of-war between four seventh-grade boys produced a lot of grunting and a lot of sweat. Clay stood a few feet from his team of two and wondered if either of them had been taught to wear deodorant. He wouldn't be surprised if his own palms started sweating, embracing the elemental surge of survival that rooted his team's feet to the gym carpet. Their bodies angled backward, and their hands clamped around the rope that could burn their palms with one mistake.

“You've almost got them! You've almost got them!” the other team leader kept yelling, but Clay kept his eyes on his own team. Austin wasn't allowed to make Clay's palms sweat. Not over this trivial competition, not over anything else.

Gabriel lost his footing, skidded forward. Austin's team was going to tug Clay's right over the line of defeat.

“Hey!” Clay jumped into Gabriel and Cameron's line of vision. “Don't use your arms, use your whole body. Come on.”

His words drowned in the cheering and jeering from the rest of his team, but Gabriel nodded and heaved back on the rope, and Austin's boys staggered toward the line.

“That's more like it.” Clay stepped back.

Less than a minute later, his boys gave the rope a pull that yanked one of the other team members off his feet. Clay high-fived them both as they returned to their team line and the next two boys took their places at the rope.

Across the gym, two other teams battled through the same games. Which team played which was always random. Of course, this week, Clay had to oppose Austin. The kid's gaze had stalked him all morning long. But in fifteen minutes, Fishers of Friends ended. Two dozen seventh-graders would pour through the open gym doors and find their rides home, and Clay would escape to his bike.

If anything happened this morning, Natalia would text him.
Would you pick up some smoothie mix on your way home?
meant she'd heard from Khloe. She wouldn't, though, not with Marcus guarding their daughter's location like a Rottweiler. A request for pepper was a Constabulary emergency signal, but they hadn't worked out an exact plan. As if a plan could exist for one's imminent arrest.

Austin's team won the next round in less than a minute, as they did on every turn of Sean's. The kid was thin as string and had the soft, long-fingered hands of a piano prodigy. Too bad Clay's team's thugs-in-the-making had no appreciation for classical music.

“Why do we even let him play?” Gabriel stage-whispered.

Sean's face reddened, and he took his place at the end of the line. At that age, Clay might have volunteered to sit out, not from generosity but from shame. But Sean stuck out these pointless games every Saturday morning, all summer long. Had to step closer to serve the volleyball, got hit in the face with the dodgeball before he could catch it. Clay walked down to the front of the size-ordered line and faced Gabriel.

“If I hear that again,
you
won't play next week.”

Before Gabriel could mouth off at him, Clay walked away. He stood at the corner of his team line and watched Austin across the gym. The kid grinned, high-fived, clapped boys on the back. A natural, really.

Austin spun on his heel and caught Clay with his eyes. He tilted his head, a question. Clay shrugged back at him.
What?
As if they didn't both know.

He never expected to enjoy himself when Natalia suggested, almost a year ago now, that he join an Elysium ministry.
“You know, to help you fit in as a sincere believer.”
But normal Saturdays went by too fast. Turned out Clay enjoyed the connections he made with these kids, even the first session's classroom setting where he led them in a group discussion of whatever curriculum Elysium had meted out.

Today, the minutes couldn't melt fast enough. That silver shark charm of Violet's kept glinting in the gym's pale fluorescence. Every time it did, something like adrenaline spurted through Clay's body, some senseless rush that wanted to march across the game circle and rip the black cord off Austin's wrist.

The game leader finally blew the dismissing whistle, and Clay's boys gathered up their legal Bibles—the Progressive United Version, bound in paperback with multiple cover options. Most of his team preferred the adventure novel cover, but a few had the one that resembled a magazine. When they all clomped off, one PUV was left, set neatly against the wall. Clay stooped to pick it up and opened the cover, but teen boys didn't bother to write their names on things. He turned a chunk of pages to midway in.

In real Bibles, Psalms fell in the center, but so much of the Old Testament had been censored from these that the book opened to Luke. Clay skimmed. Jesus calmed the stormy sea. He fed five thousand people miraculously. The changes weren't noticeable until He started to talk.

“I tell you the truth, it is the will of God that you should save your life, not lose it. Do not deny yourself, for within yourself is access to God.”

No, Jesus had said the opposite. This was where “take up your cross” was supposed to go.
Well, God, I think I'm doing that right now. Can't be much heavier a cross than isolation from my daughter and danger from the Constabulary.
He couldn't put words to himself and Natalia, though she had to be a whole beam of his cross. She hadn't said three words to him this morning, hadn't touched him once.

“What's that you're reading?”

Clay jumped. Dang it. This kid wasn't allowed to startle him. He shut the book. “Somebody left their Bible.”

“You were engrossed,” Austin said.

Clay held out the book. “Want to take it to lost and found for me? No name inside.”

“Sure thing.” Austin took the book with his left hand, and the shark charm dangled against it.

“Thanks.” Clay headed for the gym doors. His hands itched for his bike's handlebars.
Be ready for me, baby, because we're going to ignite the pavement.

“Why are you here?”

Clay turned back. “What?”

Austin shifted the book from one hand to the other. “I'd think you would be home as much as possible. Just in case they returned.”

Oh. Crap. He schooled his face. “My wife's at home.”

“You're not very worried, for a guy with a missing daughter.”

“Of course I am.”

Certainty sparked over Austin's face. “Maybe they're not missing. Maybe you know exactly where they are, and you know they're safe.”

Clay half curled his fingers. Fists would give him away. So would open hands, trembling.

“Admit it.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Tell me Violet's okay.”

Clay met his eyes, then lowered his gaze to Austin's left wrist. “Full disclosure is earned, Delvecchio.”

He fled the gym without pause, even when Austin's voice followed him out the door. “Mr. Hansen, please.”

A text vibrated his phone, and he tugged it out while jogging across the parking lot to his bike. Maybe it was Marcus, telling him what time to meet by the mall fountain. Heat rose from the blacktop and warmed his feet through his shoes. He swung a leg over the seat, and his whole body thrummed in anticipation of the engine's power to take him away from here. He read the text first, though. Natalia. He gulped the words in search of only two:
smoothie mix
.

I actually do need something from the store. I let myself run out of soy milk.

Curse Marcus.

Whoa, where had that thought come from? Marcus couldn't be blamed for Clay's judgment errors.

But he didn't own the girls. Khloe should be allowed to call home. There had to be a safe way.

Clay drove to the store at a less-than-legal speed and was securing the quart-sized carton in his bike's side case five minutes later. Truth waited until then to grab hold of his gut. Natalia had sent him on an errand to ensure he would return home before tomorrow. Something she hadn't done, hadn't felt the need to do, in ten years.

He sat on the bike but didn't turn the key. Ten years weren't enough to prove that he'd changed. Maybe nothing would be. Fair wages for every time he'd gotten in their car and driven hours away to flee the fears of a new husband, then of a new father. Fears for a sick child, then for a dying child. He'd run from all of it, and now, when crisis knocked their family down again, he expected Natalia to trust him to stay?

Yes. He did. Ten years should be long enough to earn trust back.

“Excuse me. Clay Hansen?”

Clay's head snapped up from his chest. Directly in front of the bike, as if daring Clay to run him down, stood a man in a gray uniform. Close-cropped hair, a few inches taller than Clay. Agent Naebers. Clay turned the key and revved the bike, and Agent Naebers took a step back. Nice.

Clay lifted his voice above the engine's growl. “Are you only allowed to interrogate me once a day, is that it?”

“This isn't an interrogation.”

“Oh, good. I don't want the milk to spoil.”

“I'm here with information for you.”

“And you couldn't call? It's not like you can't get my number.”

“My boss wanted you to hear this in person.”

No. They were toying with him. They had to be. Clay put the bike in gear and coasted around Agent Naebers with more distance than necessary between them. No sense tempting the man to arrest him for endangerment of an agent on duty.

“We have Khloe in custody.”

The words hit him in the back like sniper bullets, armor piercing, through and through, searing exit wounds in his chest. He braked, shut off the bike, kicked the side stand into place. His body pivoted slowly, one leg swinging around. Both feet touched the ground on the same side, but he didn't stand. Couldn't stand. Couldn't breathe.

“My daughter,” he said.

Agent Naebers nodded. “She's being processed now, in preparation for—”

“Processed? She's not meat in a butcher shop!”

“Mr. Hansen, I'd like you to lower your voice, please.”

Calm. Think. Stand up. His legs wobbled, but he stepped forward. Something was wrong here. “You're telling me you have my daughter.”

“She'll be entering re-education by the middle of next week, Thursday at the latest.”

Five days from now. Or less. They'd put her in all-day re-education for the summer, then evening sessions after school started. If her progress wasn't satisfactory, they'd put her in a group home for adolescent offenders. They'd turn her home, her family, inside out in search of the root of her criminal beliefs.

No, stop it. Think this through.
Something isn't right, something is …
“Where was she? How did you find her?”

Agent Naebers spread his feet apart. “I'm not at liberty to say.”

“I think you're lying.”

Naebers studied him a long moment, then reached into his jacket pocket. He held out a clear, square baggie. “I thought you might find this hard to accept, Mr. Hansen, but let me assure you, it's the truth.”

In one corner of the bag lay a silver heart charm, a pink zircon in the center. Clay's heart seemed to stop. So this was the Constabulary now, kidnappers offering proof of abduction. His stomach balled up.

“What about Violet?”

“Excuse me?”

“Khloe's friend. Violet DuBay.” Marcus had said they were together. If the Constabulary had taken one of them, surely they'd taken both.

“I don't know anything about a Violet. I'm here to inform you about Khloe.”

But this couldn't happen. Khloe was safe. Marcus's best haven, he'd said.

“She'll be released to you in a week or two, once re-education is in progress.”

After they'd dug inside Khloe's head and begun to root out any truth Clay had managed to teach her.

“We'll be in touch with you, Mr. Hansen.”

Clay must have nodded. Agent Naebers strode across the parking lot and got into a gray squad car topped with green lights. It hadn't been here when Clay went inside the store.

He shuffled to the bike. Straddled it. His chin hit his chest. Khloe. Taken.

Smart or not, he had to talk to Marcus. He dialed, but the phone only rang and rang. “Hi, you've reached Marcus Brenner. Leave a message.”

Clay hung up. A sour taste filled his mouth.
I trusted you, man.

No more.

He let multiple cars weave around him on the drive home. If he accelerated faster than forty, he might not stop accelerating. He might not stop for the red lights or the state line. He might not stop ever again.

But he did stop. Parked. In the garage. Trudged up the steps, through the door. Natalia bustled around the house, a dusting cloth in one hand and the polish can in the other.

Atta girl, make the house spotless for the Constabulary's next visit.

“Just put the soy milk in the fridge,” she called without pausing.

Oh, soy milk, right. Cooking away outside. “Nat?”

“I vacuumed, steamed the floors, scrubbed the sinks and the bathtubs and even the walls. I know, it's ridiculous, but I can't stop. I keep finding other things to clean, like this can possibly help. Did he call you yet? When are you meeting him? If I didn't know she was with safe people, if I thought she was out in the woods somewhere, I think I'd lose it.”

Clay barreled into the living room, into her space, and gripped her wrist to still the dusting rag. Her eyes darted up to his face.

“Clay, what …”

“I can't do this.”

Wrong words. She stepped back, leaned back, and he tried to let go, but he couldn't.

“Nat, I …”
I let them take our child.

“C-can't do what?”

“Come with me.”

“Where? What're you talking about?”

“They're going to come here to talk to us, and I just can't be here waiting for them, I have to—I have to go and I want you to come with me.”