The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense (12 page)

Although the words seemed combative, Marian spoke quietly, without hostility, and Iris heard acceptance in her voice. She expelled a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “Okay, then. He’s innocent. We need to prove that. Every day he spends in prison is—”
Is flaying me with a whip.
She couldn’t say that—Marian and Cade wouldn’t understand the guilt she felt, the responsibility she had to free her father. “Where do we start? I’m going to investigate, ask some questions,” Iris said defiantly when her mother remained silent. “There’s a limited suspect pool. We know I didn’t do it and Dad didn’t do it … it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out who did.”

“Do what you want,” Marian said, pushing back from the table with a scraping sound. “You always did.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Iris stood so rapidly her chair would have toppled over if Cade hadn’t caught it. “You—”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

Iris saw her mother through a veil of anger, like the multi-hued light dots that popped behind her eyes if she knuckled them hard. “Is that all you can do? Spout the Ten Commandments? Maybe if you’d ever actually
listened
to me, had a conversation, instead of falling back on Scripture every time I tried to talk to you, tried to tell you—. Maybe everything would have turned out differently. Ever think of that?”

Marian drew her mouth into a tiny knot, sucking in air with a thin hiss.

Cade put a hand on Iris’s arm. “Walk me out, Iris. Mrs. Asher, I’ll be in touch soon.”

Iris turned and banged through the nearest door, instinctively taking the half-flight of stairs that led to the churchyard, rather than the ones that opened near the worship area. Cade caught up with her as she marched down the path leading to the columbarium where engraved stones memorialized the people whose ashes were interred below them. Yellow forsythia frothed over a stone wall and a robin tugged at a worm in a manicured patch of lawn that, Iris imagined resentfully, her mother trimmed by hand, probably blade-by-blade with a pair of nail scissors.

“Iris, wait.”

Iris halted but didn’t turn, realizing with fury and chagrin that she was close to crying. She never cried. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, and then wiped her sleeved forearm under her nose before turning. “Well, on a scale of one to ten, I’d rate that reunion as a minus two,” she said, with an attempt at lightness. Her muscles wouldn’t respond when she tried to force a smile.

“Iris.” Cade pulled her into his arms and hugged her tightly.

“She doesn’t care. She’s sorry I came back.”

Cade made soothing noises and rubbed her back. It was several minutes before she relaxed under the spell of his hand stroking her spine. Her face rested on his shoulder. If she angled her head just a bit, her lips would press against his neck … She pulled away, wiping moisture—not tears—from her eyes with the hem of her shirt. Cade’s gaze rested on the expanse of tight abdomen she exposed.

“Sorry for falling apart on you,” Iris said, working hard to make her voice sound normal. She met his gaze and smiled faintly. “I usually cope a little better.”

“It’s an emotional time.”

Iris smiled wider at the understatement, and brushed away a wisp of hair caught at the corner of her mouth.

Cade said, “Look, I’ve got an appointment I can’t blow off. Meet me later? Drinks at Nosh? It’s on Tejon.”

“Remember when you introduced me to beer? I’d never had alcohol before.”

“You didn’t like it.”

From the look in his eyes, Iris knew he was remembering what came after her first half-bottle of Coors. “I like it better, now.”

“Six thirty?”

“Won’t that make you late for dinner?”

“Lila and I are separated.”

“But still married.”

Cade nodded, his gaze skimming the sharp line of her cheekbones, the way her dark hair sprang back from her temples, the indention above her upper lip. “Maybe not for long. She cheated on me. With an intern at the firm.”

Although he tried to hide his pain by delivering the words dispassionately, Iris could almost feel the hurt and anger and betrayal seething inside him. “That sucks.”

He barked an unamused laugh. “Understatement.”

“Do you still love her?”

Running a hand down his face, Cade said, “I love my family.” He forced a smile. “But that’s neither here nor there. What about that drink? I promise not to bore you with the sordid details of my marital troubles. I want to hear about you.”

Iris forced herself to shake her head, feeling an almost tangible pain, like yanking a chunk of hair from her scalp. She knew what would happen if they met for drinks. Alcohol plus her emotionally charged state plus the lingering desire rippling between them would add up to bad decision-making. She didn’t sleep with married men. It was a line she didn’t cross. “Drinks are a bad idea,” she said baldly, “and I don’t want to be revenge sex.”

Cade put out a hand and cupped her chin, his thumb moving lightly along her jaw and then across her mouth. “It wouldn’t be like that. I don’t think I ever stopped loving you.”

She turned her face away from his hand with a pinch of anger. “Stop it, Cade. We’re not teenagers anymore.”

His hand dropped. “No.” He sounded so sad, Iris wondered what the last twenty-three years had brought him besides a cheating wife, two kids, and a legal career. For the first time, she noticed the hint of pouches beneath his eyes that seemed to drag them down at the corners.

It would be so much easier if they were still teenagers, Iris thought as he turned and walked away, instead of adults with a minefield of experiences and mistakes, memories and false expectations, booby trapping the space between them. She opened her mouth to call him back, but shut it and let him go.

twenty

iris

Iris watched until Cade
disappeared around the corner of the church, his pace increasing the farther he got from her. Almost like he was running away. She could have met him at Nosh, had a beer, and let him pour out the story of his failed marriage. That, in her experience, was the only thing newly divorced men wanted to talk about once they downed a martini or three. If she and Cade ended up in the sack, his not-quite-ex-wife would be right there with them. No wonder she stuck with younger men, Iris told herself, kicking at an acorn on the path. The bed was a lot less crowded.

With annoyance, she realized she hadn’t even asked her mother the questions she’d come to ask: Where were she and Neil that night and what had they been doing? What time had her father left the house? The acorn dribbled to a stop on one of the granite blocks marking the site of a buried urn. The date of death made her curious: the day she ran away. Using the toe of her shoe, Iris lifted the rambunctious crocus that arched over the name. She had to cock her head and bend forward to read through the shadow that made the letters hard to make out. G, L … Glynnis Brozek.

“Oh, my God.” Iris spoke the words under her breath. How had she forgotten that Mrs. Brozek’s first name was Glynnis? Probably because children in the Community back then called adults Mr. or Mrs. Whoever, not “Miss Heather” or “Mr. Jim” like kids did today. Her phone message from the morning no longer felt like a wrong number. Someone was warning her that she might end up like Glynnis Brozek: dead.

Suddenly feeling creeped out despite the sunshine and a swallowtail butterfly gliding toward a daffodil, Iris hurried toward her car. Her boots scuffed dully against the paving stones and the sound of a door closing carried. Iris looked up to see a man locking the church office. He straightened. On the short side, he carried himself tall with shoulders squared. Even at a distance, Iris could feel a sense of purpose about him. As she drew closer, she recognized him. His light hair had darkened to an indeterminate brown and receded, but the long nose was the same, as was the smile. Glasses gave him a professorial air.

“Zach.” She held out her hand. She’d always liked Zach Brozek better than his sister, Esther. She smiled, surprised by how nice it was to see him. He had matured into what had always been a precocious seriousness, a level-headed way of viewing his peers and his circumstances.

“Mercy.” He unexpectedly swept her into a bear hug, squeezing her against the doughiness of a slight paunch. He smelled like deodorant soap and coffee. Releasing her, he smiled and said, “No, it’s something else now. Starts with an I. Irene?”

“Iris.”

“That’s right. Esther told me. It suits you.”

“Thanks.”

He slid keys into his pockets and said, “Walk with me. I’m off to visit old Mrs. Dorfmann. Remember her? She’s blind now and I read to her a couple of times a week.”

Falling into step beside him, Iris said, “Wow. I thought she was ancient when we were kids. She must be what—a hundred and twelve?”

Zach laughed. “Ninety-seven last month. She hardly leaves the house now, but people are kind. Her son Steve and his wife have tried to talk her into moving in with them, but she wants to stay at home.”

Iris had no reply to that and a silence fell. A barbed-wire fence, new since Iris’s time, bounded a field two feet from the dirt path. Tufts of brown and tan hair clung to some of the barbs and Iris puzzled over them before the sight of an alpaca in the field clued her in. It gazed at them, blinked once, then trotted toward its brethren drinking from the wind-riffled surface of the pond. Bees burrowed into the clover dotting the verge and buzzed, pollen-laden, to the hives hunched in the middle of the field. Their hum reverberated inside Iris, helping her relax.

Zach paused and turned, studying her face. “Why did you come back, Iris?”

She got a sense that he didn’t approve of her return or, at least, that he had reservations about her presence. “I wanted to see your father, now that he’s awake,” she said baldly. “And mine.”

“Esther said she found you in his room.”

Iris nodded. “You don’t seem quite as opposed to my presence”—
as out of your gourd hostile
—“as your sister.”

“This was your home. It could be again.” When she made a slight gesture of denial, he continued, “I’ve always been sorry that you were driven away from it, that you left without the ritual of reconciliation. It’s not too late.”

“Oh, yes it is.” Iris had no intention of reconciling with the Community in the service that welcomed back sinners after they’d been punished with the reckoning stones. It was supposed to occur one month after the stones, to give the sinner time to truly repent in the face of being banned from the church, shunned by friends and neighbors, cast into social purgatory. Mr. Carpenter had eagerly embraced reconciliation, eyes streaming with tears of joy, at the ceremony a month after young Mercy watched him disappear into the woods. Even at fifteen, Iris would rather have eaten glass than accept reconciliation, let the Community pretend they were good and generous to welcome her back to the fold. The idea was equally repulsive now.

Zach resumed walking. “It’s a miracle that my father woke up,” he said, not ducking the topic as Iris had thought he might. “God must have a purpose. I don’t presume to know what it is, but perhaps it’s the opportunity for healing and forgiveness.”

“I didn’t come to forgive him,” she said.

Zach stiffened. “I meant that
you
could receive
his
forgiveness for what you said about him. Accepting forgiveness can lead to healing and spiritual growth.” He paused. “You might be able to offer forgiveness as well. Although my father was a righteous man, he could be … harsh on occasion when meting out punishment. Since the Community made me pastor, we haven’t used the reckoning stones.”

His last words were clearly an afterthought, meant to appease her. She strode several steps ahead, stopping shy of Mrs. Dorfmann’s house, and then turned, arms crossed over her chest. There was no point in reiterating her innocence and Pastor Matt’s guilt. “I don’t believe in that—in God, in prayer—anymore.” She wasn’t sure she ever had. Her childhood prayers and church attendance had been no more than obedience to her parents and the Community, a reflex. Answered prayers were coincidence; unanswered ones were not God saying “No,” as her mother would have it, but simply the universe going about its business unheeding of individual pleas, hopes, and desires. To stop him from arguing the efficacy of prayer, she added, “My father didn’t do it.”

Zach looked grave. “He confessed, Mercy.”

She let the name slip go. “He lied to protect me, but I didn’t even see your father”—so much easier to think of him that way, as having no link, not even that of “pastor,” to herself—“that night.”

“Mercy—” He put a hand on her shoulder, his face a mask of understanding and pity.

That’s how he’d look at someone who told him she’d been abducted by aliens
, Iris thought. “Iris.”

“Right. Sorry.” He squeezed her shoulder and reminded her so much of Pastor Matt in that moment that her stomach lurched.

She stepped back, and his arm fell. “Where were you that night?” she asked, to cover her distress. “Did you see anyone at your house?”

Turning away from her, he mounted the single step to Mrs. Dorfmann’s porch and rapped on the door. He glanced at her over his shoulder. “We all doubt, Iris. Now and then. Sometimes for long, dark periods. But God, in his mercy, shines bright enough to dissolve the doubts, or, at least, to thin them so we can see him through them.”

What the hell did that have to do with her question? Her brows twitched together. Was he deliberately refusing to tell her where he’d been that night, or was he so accustomed to using pastor-speak, that he couldn’t respond straight-up? Another thought occurred to her. “Are you saying you have doubts about what happened to your father?”

Zach sighed and knocked louder, not looking at her. “Don’t go digging up the past. We’ve all come to peace with what happened. There’s no point to—”

A thin voice called “Who is it?” and Zach broke off to answer. “It’s Pastor Zach.” Looking down at Iris, he said, “You haven’t been reconciled.”

It took her a long moment to realize he was saying she couldn’t enter Mrs. Dorfmann’s house, that she was no more welcome in the Community than sewage in a pristine river. The exclusion stung more than she’d expected.

“Damn, Zach. Rigid much?” She considered forcing the issue, pretty sure Mrs. Dorfmann would be delighted to see her, but then decided it would be unfair to put her on the spot. She started to leave, but turned back to say, “I’m surprised you spoke to me. Weren’t you afraid of being contaminated?”

A slight flush colored the tops of his ears, but he said levelly, “Jesus went among tax collectors and prostitutes in order to save them.”

“Well, I’ve never been a tax collector, at least.” Not waiting to see how he took that, she walked away as the door squeaked open behind her.

“Who was that, Pastor Zach?” Mrs. Dorfmann’s quavery voice asked.

“A stranger,” he said. “Lost. So, are we going to read another chapter of
The Secret Life of Bees
today?” The screen door banged shut.