In Search of Eden (6 page)

His territory ended here. Beyond this line was the county sheriff's jurisdiction, but from here in he did his part. He fulfilled his responsibility. The souls within this boundary depended on him and others like him to be able to carry on in peace and innocence, and he took up that responsibility again today as he did every day.

He drove slowly back to town and stopped in front of the Hasty Taste. The seven-o'clock regulars were there. He could see their familiar cars parked in the side lot. He parked the truck and stepped inside the restaurant to the jingling of bells. It was bright and warm with wood flooring and pies in a glass case. It smelled like breakfast.

Henry Wilkes, the county sheriff and his late father's best friend, was already there. Joseph walked over and slid into the vacant side of the booth. Their breakfast together was a daily ritual, as it had been when his father was police chief and Henry sheriff. Everyone, including the current chief, had expected Joseph to make a bid for his father's job, but he had surprised them all. Politics frustrated him, especially office politics. He had no desire to kowtow to the town manager and the city council, and why on earth would anyone sign up for more paper work? He liked staying busy, moving, and being where real events impacted real people. He liked running things to the ground, but Ray Craddock, the police chief, always suspected Joseph was after his job. Joseph knew it burned him like acid that he and Henry breakfasted together. He had long ago decided not to let that fact bother him. Henry was the closest person he had to a father and was his best friend. He was not likely to give that up just because his boss had an insecure temperament.

“Good morning,” Henry said, greeting him with a smile.

“Back at you,” Joseph replied, sliding into the booth and turning his cup right side up. He glanced toward Elna, who read his mind and came toward him with the coffeepot. She was
sixty-five and plump, with hair that was brilliant red down to a quarter inch above her roots, where it turned cotton-batting white.

“How's the back today, Elna?” Joseph asked her.

She tilted her head to one side but, as usual, gave a stoic reply. “I'm sitting up and taking nourishment, as my granny used to say. Menu?” she asked, filling his cup expertly with a swift swoop down and then up. Not a drop spilled or splashed.

“No need,” he answered. “I'll have two eggs over easy, bacon, and a short stack.”

She gave a nod of approval. Elna liked a man to have a hearty appetite.

“And you, darlin'?” she asked with a wink toward Henry.

“The usual,” Henry sighed. The doctor had told him his cholesterol was sky high. He was on a breakfast diet of oatmeal, bran muffins, and skim milk. Elna patted his shoulder sympathetically.

Joseph grinned and looked Henry over. He was nearly seventy. His hairline was a little farther back and a little whiter than it had been ten years ago when Joseph had come back from the marines. His neatly trimmed mustache was salted with gray. His face was weathered and lined, but his uniform was crisp with starch, and though the pale blue eyes were perhaps getting a bit faded behind the stronger lenses, they still missed little. Nothing got by Henry. Joseph supposed he would be retiring someday. He didn't like to think about it. He took a sip of his coffee. It was scalding, black as a bat's cave and strong enough to stand up and walk away, so the saying went.

Henry handed him a sheaf of papers, the report from the county's night shift. Joseph read, shaking his head at the things Fred Early, the shift commander, thought worthy of mention.

A suspicious incident was investigated on Crooked Creek Road. At 1:15
A.M
.
a passing motorist reported a noose hanging from the porch of a residence. Upon investigation it was discerned that the residents were not victims
of a hate crime, but the rope in question was a swing utilized by the minor children at the residence.

At 2:14
A.M
.
a call was received from Albert Johnson of 215 Old Mill Road reporting two juveniles standing on the Dry Creek overpass throwing projectiles onto vehicles passing below. Upon investigation the projectiles were determined to be horse excrement. The perpetrators were taken into custody and their parents called.

He smiled and handed the papers back, then sobered when he thought about the real crimes they had to deal with. At one time Abingdon had been a place removed from the world. Not anymore. Domestic abuse had always been around, as had alcohol-related offenses. But now drugs were more and more of a problem, methamphetamines especially. He felt a familiar pressure to
do
something. He wouldn't have his town invaded by evil. He would do whatever it took to stop it.

Elna brought the food, interrupting his grim thoughts. Joseph buttered his pancakes, drenched them with syrup, and dove in enthusiastically.

“What's up for today?” Henry asked, eyeing his own oatmeal with a frown.

“Oh, just the usual. Whitley has to testify at a trial today. Redding's on vacation. I guess I'll just hold down the fort.”

Henry nodded with understanding.

The weeks before Christmas had bare-bones staffing. It should be all right, though. They weren't exactly a hotbed of crime. Not yet, anyway.

“Think the storm will amount to much?” Henry asked.

Joseph glanced out the window and nodded. “A foot or so at least and starting soon.”

Henry smiled. “Is that from the weather forecast or from swinging a dead cat around your head in the graveyard during a full moon?”

Joseph took the ribbing. Henry liked to rattle his cage, but he
had been right often enough to make Henry a little more respectful. His father had taught him the weather signs, saying half were hogwash and half were science, and it was up to him to sort the two out. Joseph thought of his father again and missed him. Both men ate their breakfasts in peaceful silence.

Joseph was just finishing his second cup of coffee and preparing to leave when his cell phone rang. He looked at the number and didn't recognize the area code.

He flipped it open. “Lieutenant Williams,” he said briefly.

It was a woman's voice, poorly transmitted and trembling. It took him a moment to realize who it was, much less to understand what she was saying.

“Sarah?” he asked, not quite believing it.

Henry sat up and paid attention. Joseph barely noticed. He plugged his free ear, and his body tensed.

“Yes, it's me, Joseph.” Her voice bounced hollowly off the satellite and thinned as it streaked through the cold, cloudy sky. He hadn't heard that voice for nearly twelve years.

He braced himself, for just the sound of it cranked up the adrenaline levels in his blood. Sarah wouldn't be calling just to say hello. Not now. Not after all this time and space. Something terrible must have happened, and he braced himself.

“There's been an accident,” she said.

He had the odd sense of his brain rising above his pounding heart and quickened breath.

“Last night David was hit by a drunk driver,” she said.

Pain and cold shock spread through him. He had always known this might happen. That he and his brother would wait too late to get things right. “Is he dead?” He tried to moisten his dry mouth.

There was a pause that seemed to last forever.

“No. But they won't promise anything. His spinal cord is injured. They don't know how badly.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them immediately and switched modes. He could feel the emotions, dangerously close
to the surface, and he forced them to recede back down to safe levels. His heart slowed by sheer force of will. “How are you? How is Eden? Where are you?” he asked, remembering the unfamiliar area code. He was back in charge again, an officer taking stock of his troops after an attack.

“I'm at the airport in Minneapolis. Eden's all right. She's . . . she's being taken care of.” She sounded disjointed and confused. “Where is David? Where did the accident happen?”

“Here. He was here doing one of his seminars. He was on his way to the airport.”

An irrelevant detail right now. He was annoyed with himself for asking. “Do you have the best doctors? Do you know who to ask about things like that?” He didn't know, but he could find out.

“Yes, Joseph, all of that is under control. He's at Hennepin County Medical Center. It's the best trauma center in the area.”

“What can I do? Do you need me to come?” Even as he was asking, he knew what she would say.

“No. I don't know. . . . If I thought the two of you could—” She broke, paused, tripping over the old familiar barrier. “He isn't conscious,” she finally said. Her voice choked then.

His pain rose up. This had been the black outcome he had feared when he had let the silence rise between them like a great wall. What if the story ended before it was resolved? He had thought about that eventuality every now and then. And now it had happened, just as he had feared.

He brought himself back to fact taking. “How did it happen?”

“What?”

“The accident. How did it happen?”

“A drunk driver in an SUV crossed the median on the freeway. He hit David head on.”

Anger flushed Joseph's face and raised his voice. “What exactly are his injuries?”

He noticed Henry was leaning forward, his knuckles white on the coffee cup.

A sigh, a tremulous breath from Sarah, then a litany he could hardly bear to hear. “Crushed pelvis, broken leg and arm, crushed vertebrae. He's already been in surgery once to have something called an external fixator put on his pelvis. His leg needs more surgery, but they're waiting on that. Right now they're just trying to keep him alive.”

“I understand.” But he didn't. How could he understand? His light, bright brother was lying near death a thousand miles away. His brother.

A pause. Another tremulous breath.

“What can I do?” he repeated again, hearing a note of demanding desperation in the echo of his voice on the poor connection.

“Could you tell Ruth? I didn't want to tell her over the phone.”

“Of course. I'll go right away.” He thought of his mother beginning her day, suspecting nothing, not knowing that evil had once again invaded her world.

“And, Joseph—”

He waited, poised for another direction, something, anything, to
do.

“You could pray. You still do that, don't you?” she said, wistfulness rather than criticism in her voice.

“Of course I do,” he lied. He heard pain in his echo.

“Pray for him, then, Joseph,” she repeated. “Pray for us all.” She disconnected.

He closed the phone and sat there for a second or two before he grabbed his hat and jacket and slid out of the booth.

Henry stood with him. “Is it David?” he asked.

Joseph nodded and gave him the brief facts.

“Oh, God,” Henry breathed, and Joseph knew it was a prayer.

“I'm going to tell Ma.”

Henry nodded. “I'll let them know at your office. You do what you need to do.”

Joseph nodded, tossed a ten-dollar bill onto the table, and said an abrupt good-bye with one last glance at Henry's worried face.

The wind was sharper and biting when he stepped outside, the sky darker and lower. His premonition had been right. The first flakes of snow began to fall. He looked up and saw them rushing down, hard, fast, and inexorable.

chapter
5

R
uth Williams padded into her quilting studio in her slippers and flannel robe, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. She had spent some time with her Bible but wasn't quite ready to launch into the day yet. She stood before the window near the heat vent and looked at the sky with a practiced eye. It was dull gray and low and promised snow. In fact, as she looked closely, she could see that the first flakes had begun to fall.

She took a mental inventory of her readiness. All was well due to Joseph's almost compulsive need to make sure she was prepared for any eventuality. There was firewood stacked nearly ten feet high just outside the back door, and the cast-iron Papa Bear stove in her basement was piped into her ductwork and full of kindling, newspaper, and wood, ready to be fired up. That had been her son's contribution the last time he had visited.

The pantry was full of candles and cans of lamp oil, and her kerosene lamps were full with fresh wicks, neatly trimmed. Joseph had even checked her cupboard to make sure it was well stocked with canned goods and matches. What he saw had apparently satisfied him. She also knew that the rooms she customarily rented out to bed-and-breakfast guests were freshly dusted, with
clean sheets on the beds. And her closets were packed with quilts and blankets in case some of her neighbors weren't as well equipped as she. She glanced once again at the clouds and the more rapidly falling flakes and verified her prediction. The storm was here. But she was ready.

She looked out the frosted window onto the town. It had the idyllic Christmas-card look of a mountain village. The streets rose and gently fell, following the curves of the Blue Ridge Mountains they nestled against. The buildings were old red brick, the trim paint fresh, lights warm and welcoming. It was a Thomas Kinkade picture, a Norman Rockwell scene, and some, on seeing it, on being here amidst the peaceful faces and gentle accents of its people, might think it a place where no spiritual battles of consequence were won or lost.

They would be wrong.

She used to be involved in that battle. More so than now, she realized, fighting back a familiar feeling of uselessness, a well-worn lie that she was too old and irrelevant to be of use to God any longer. She was only sixty-seven, but she might as well be a hundred and seven for all the impact she made on anyone's life.

She had closed the campground when the family fell apart, and once again she wondered if she had done the right thing. But John had died, and David and Joseph had their split, and it had seemed as if she were the only one, struggling alone. Not alone, for her two most faithful friends had helped her run the camp for the rest of that year, since churches had already booked and made deposits, but she hadn't felt free to impose upon their good graces forever. Carol Jean had her quilt shop and Vi her artwork. So after struggling through the winter, she had finally closed down the camp. She had moved into town, into this place, her husband's family home. The campground was to have been her retirement.
“Sell it,”
a few friends had urged.
“You'd get a pretty penny for that land. Lakefront, mountain view. You'll be a wealthy woman.”
But how could she sell a piece of her life? The place she and her husband had poured their hearts into? The place she had raised her boys?
But that part of her life was over now, she told herself. Which brought her back to her initial complaint. The truth was, she was bored.