Redemption Road: A Novel (28 page)

“You don’t have to say a word.” Elizabeth started walking. “Just stay beside me. Watch his face.”

They moved up the sidewalk, and in spite of what she’d said to the girl, Elizabeth felt the narrow finger of her own shame. She was a cop and a grown woman, yet even at a distance suffered the memory of his weight and the taste of pine, the heat of his finger on the back of her hand. She’d had nightmares for years, come close to killing herself from shame and self-loathing. But none of that mattered, anymore. This was about life after, about strength and will and lack of compromise. It was about Channing.

“Hello, Harrison.”

He was walking head down and twitched as if her voice carried a live current. “Elizabeth. God.” His hand covered his heart as his feet dragged to a stop. He licked his lips and looked nervously at his office door. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing, really. It’s just that it’s been a while. This is my friend. Tell her good morning.”

He stared at Channing and flushed bright, hot red.

“Can you say hello?” Elizabeth asked.

He mumbled something, and sweat beaded on his face. His eyes flicked from Channing to Elizabeth, then back. “I really need to … uh … to … you know…” He pointed at his office.

“Of course. Business first.” Elizabeth stepped aside and gave enough room for him to edge past. “Have a nice day, Harrison. Always great to see you.”

They watched him shuffle to his office, open the door with his key, and disappear as if sucked inside.

When he was gone, Channing said, “I can’t believe you just did that.”

“Was it cruel?”

“Maybe.”

“Should I be the only one to remember what he did?”

“No. Never.”

“What did you see when you looked at his face?”

“Shame. Regret.”

“Anything else?”

“I saw fear,” Channing said. “I saw a great, giant world of fear.”

*   *   *

That was the point, and it sank into the girl as Elizabeth drove them to an old diner on a stretch of empty road on the far side of the county. Blacktop ran off, unbroken, the sky domed above them.

The girl ate in neat bites, smiled twice at the waitress, but in the car, later, looked drawn. “If you tell me everything will be okay, I’ll believe you.”

“Everything will be okay.”

“Do you promise?”

Elizabeth took a left and stopped at a light. “You’re just wounded,” she said. “Wounds heal.”

“Always?”

“If you’re strong.” The light turned green. “And if you’re in the right.”

They rode in silence after that, and the day seemed brighter. Channing found a song on the radio; let an open hand drag in the rush of air. This would be a fine day, Elizabeth decided, and for a while it was. They returned to Elizabeth’s house, and the minutes folded around them. The porch was shaded, the silence between them easy. When they did speak, it was of small things: a young man on the street, a hummingbird on the feeder. But when Channing closed her eyes, Elizabeth recognized the tightness in her lids, the way her arms banded white across her ribs. Elizabeth remembered the feeling from childhood, and it was one more thing between them, this sudden fear of flying apart. “Are you okay?”

“Yes and no.” The girl’s eyes opened, and the chair stopped rocking. “Do you mind if I take a soak?”

“Take your time, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Promise?”

“Open the window if you like. Call me if you need anything.”

Channing nodded, and Elizabeth watched her enter the house. It took a minute, but the window scraped open, and she heard water run in the old porcelain tub. For long minutes she tried to find her own peace, but that, too, was impossible.

Her father made certain.

She watched his car ease down the shaded lane and tried to stifle the deep unease its presence created. He avoided parts of her life. The police station. This street. When they did meet, it was in her mother’s presence or on some neutral ground. The policy suited them both. Less resentment and raw nerve. Less chance of an argument. Because of that she met him now as far from the house as she could, and he seemed to want it the same way, stopping twenty feet from the porch and shading his eyes as he climbed from the car.

“What are you doing here?” Her words grated harshly, but they often did.

“Can’t a man visit his daughter?”

“You never have.”

Tapered hands went into the pockets of black pants. He sighed and shook his head, but Elizabeth wasn’t fooled. Her father did nothing without purpose and wouldn’t be at her home without some powerful reason.

“Why are you here, Dad? Why now?”

“Harrison called me.”

“Of course,” she said. “And he told you of my visit.”

Her father sighed again and fastened his dark eyes on hers. “Is compassion still beyond you?”

“For Harrison Spivey?”

“For a man who has known nothing but regret for sixteen years, for a decent man struggling to rectify the sins of his past.”

“Is that why you’re here? Because I’ve seen no struggle.”

“Yet, he raises his children and is charitable and seeks only your forgiveness.”

“I won’t be lectured about Harrison Spivey.”

“Will you talk about this?”

He pulled photos from the front seat and dropped them on the hood of his car. Elizabeth picked them up and felt a twist of sudden nausea. “Where did you get these?”

“They were given to your mother,” he replied. “Who is now heartbroken beyond any power to console.”

Elizabeth flipped through the stack, but knew what images were there. They came from the autopsy and the basement, full color and graphic. “State police?” She saw the answer on her father’s face. “What did they want?”

“They were inquiring about odd behavior, confession, expressions of regret.”

“And you let them show these to Mom?”

“Don’t be angry at me, Elizabeth, when your choices alone brought us to this place.”

“Is she okay?”

“Your vanity and need to rebel—”

“Dad, please.”

“Your obsession with violence and justice and Adrian Wall.”

The words were loud enough to carry, and Elizabeth glanced at the house, knowing Channing must have heard. “Please lower your voice.”

“Did you kill these men?”

She held the stare and felt the weight of his condemnation. It was like this between them and always would be. The old and the young. The laws of God and those of men.

“Did you torture and kill them as the state police claim?”

He was tall and straight and so ready to believe the worst. Elizabeth wanted to share the truth if only to prove him wrong, but she thought of the girl in the house behind her and remembered how it was to be helpless in the dark, to be a child again and nearly broken. Channing saved her from that fate, from monsters that go bump in the night and the emotion that wept like blood from every part of her. That mattered more than her father, her pride, or anything else, so Elizabeth kept her back straight. “I killed them, yes.” She handed the photos to her father. “I would do it again.”

He sighed deeply, frustrated and disappointed and sad. “Do you know nothing of regret?”

“I think I know more than most.”

“Yet, what you sound is prideful.”

“I am only what God and my father have made me.”

They were bitter words, and he looked away from them. His daughter was a killer, and unrepentant. That was the truth he accepted. “What shall I tell your mother?”

“Tell her that I love her.”

“And the rest of it?” He meant the photographs and Liz and her confession.

“You once told Captain Dyer that the cracks in me are so deep God’s own light can’t find the bottom. Do you really believe that?”

“I believe you are but a short fall from hell itself.”

“Then we have nothing to discuss. Do we?”

“Elizabeth, please—”

“Good-bye, Dad.”

She opened his car door, and the moment ended badly between them. He glanced a final time at her face, then nodded wearily and slipped into the car. Elizabeth watched him back onto the empty street and drive away. When he was gone, she looked at the bathroom window, then crossed the yard and sat again on the porch. When Channing came out, she was in the same clothes, but her hair was wet and her face flushed with heat. She kept her eyes on the dusty floor, and that’s when Elizabeth knew for sure. “You heard all that?”

“Bits and pieces. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

“It’s okay if you did.”

“I’m a guest in your house. I wouldn’t do that.” The girl sniffed and showed the big eyes. “It was your father?”

“Yes.”

“You lied to me,” Channing said.

“I know I did. I’m sorry.”

“You said you never told him what that boy did to you.”

“You’re upset.”

“I thought we were friends, that you understood.”

“We are. I do.”

“Then why?”

“Why the lie?” Channing nodded, and Elizabeth took a moment because some doors were hard to open, and others impossible to close. When she spoke, it was done softly and with care. “I came up in my father’s church,” she said. “Raised on prayer and abstinence and piety. It was a spare childhood, but one I believed in, God’s love and the wisdom of my father. I didn’t realize I was so sheltered, that I was naïve in a way kids today could never understand. We didn’t have television or the Internet or video games. I didn’t go to movies or read fiction or think about boys the way another seventeen-year-old girl might. The church was my family, and it was very close. You understand? Protected. Insular.” Channing nodded, and Elizabeth turned her chair to face the girl straight on. “After Harrison attacked me, I didn’t tell my father for five weeks, and only then because I had no choice. When I did it, though, I felt dirty and small. I wanted him to make it right, to tell me I would be okay and had done nothing wrong. Mostly, I wanted Harrison to pay for what he did.”

“Did he?”

“Pay? No. My father called him to the church and made us pray together, the two of us side by side. I wanted justice, and my father wanted some kind of grand redemption. So we spent five hours on our knees asking God to forgive the unforgivable, to fix a thing that could never be fixed. Two days later I tried to kill myself at the quarry. My father never did call the police.”

“That’s why you don’t get along?”

“Yes.”

“It seems like more. So many years. That kind of poison.”

Elizabeth stared at the girl, marveling at her perspicacity. “There is more. Why we don’t speak. Why I went to the quarry.” Elizabeth stood because, after so many years, this was the meat of it, the thumping, blood-filled core. “I was pregnant,” she confessed. “He wanted me to keep it.”

17

Gideon woke in a hospital bed, the room dim and cool around him. For an instant he was lost, then remembered everything with perfect clarity: the morning light and Adrian’s face, the pain of being shot, and the feel of an unmoving trigger. He closed his eyes against the disappointment and listened to the voice that rose from the corner of the room. It was his father, who was quiet at times, but not always. Gideon heard the mumbling and the disjointed words and wondered why he felt such sudden pity. Other than the pain from being shot and the bed in which he lay, nothing had changed since the night he’d set out to kill Adrian Wall. His father was still useless and drunk, and talking to his dead wife.

Julia,
he heard.

Julia, please …

The rest of it was all mumbles and mutterings. Long minutes of it, then an hour. And all the while Gideon lay perfectly still, feeling the same strange and poignant pity. Why was it like that? The curtains were pulled so it was dark in the room, his father more a shape than a man. Long arms around his knees. Shaggy hair and jutting elbows. Gideon had seen the same shape on a thousand nights, but this was different somehow. The old man seemed desperate and harder and sharp. Was it the mumbled words? The way he said her name? The old man was … what?

“Dad?”

Gideon’s throat was dry. The bullet wound ached.

“Dad?”

The shape in the corner went quiet, and Gideon saw eyes roll his way and glint like pinpricks. The odd moment felt more so for the length of it. Two seconds. Five. Then his father unfolded in the gloom and turned on a lamp.

“I’m here.”

His appearance shocked the boy. He was not just disheveled but gray, the skin hanging on his face as if he’d lost twenty pounds in a few days. Gideon stared at the deep lines on his father’s cheeks, the crueler ones at the corners of his eyes.

He was angry.

That was the difference.

His father was hard and bitter and angry.

“What are you doing?” Gideon asked.

“Watching you and feeling ashamed.”

“You don’t look ashamed.”

His father stood and brought a stale smell with him. He hadn’t bathed. His hair was greasy. “I knew what you were going to do.” He put a hand on the bedrail. “When I saw the gun in your hand, I knew.”

Gideon blinked, remembering his father’s face, and the crown of flowers in his hands. “You
wanted
me to kill him?”

“I wanted him to die. I thought for a minute it wouldn’t matter how that happened, whether you killed him or I did. When I saw you with the gun, I thought, well, maybe this is right. It was a flash of a thought. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But then you ran and were gone so damn fast.”

“So you do hate him?”

“Of course I do, him and your mother.”

There was the anger, and it wasn’t just at Adrian. Gideon ran the last hour in his head: the way his father had said her name over and over, the thrust of it like a blade. “You hate her?”

“
Hate
is not the right word—I loved her too much for that. That doesn’t mean I could forgive or forget.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You shouldn’t. No boy should.”

“How could you hate her? She was your wife.”

“On paper, maybe.”

“Stop talking in riddles, okay!” Gideon rose up in the bed, pain spreading under the bandages. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to his father or expressed his own frustration. But so much of it was inside him, the filthy house and poor food and distant father. Mostly, though, it was the silence and dishonesty, the way his father drank himself stupid, yet had the stomach to curse and groan if Liz came by to help with homework or make sure milk was in the fridge. Now, he was talking about
on paper
as if he were not some kind of paper man, himself. “I’m fourteen years old, but you still ignore me when it comes to her.”