The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense (18 page)

She wiggled away from his arm. He didn’t believe her either. Not really. He was going to side with her mother like he always did. A cold fury filled her, chilling her feet and migrating up her legs to her core and finally to her torso and head. When she spoke, her voice was icy calm. “Do you want the details? Do you want to hear about how he made me suck—”

“Mercy!” Marian’s hand slammed down, clipping the pan’s handle, and the sizzling onions and oil flipped off the stove, spattering Marian, the wall, and the floor. “Oh!”

Neil rushed to his wife’s side, guiding her to the sink and turning on the cold water. Mercy ran out of the back door, unnoticed.

The echo of Rachel’s “They won’t believe me!” hung in the store when Iris pulled her thoughts out of the past.

“Why not?” Iris asked. The power of her memories had chilled her and she rubbed her arms.

“Because … because her father is an elder. No one in Lone Pine will ever believe he beats Jenny.” Rachel paced three steps toward the window and three steps back. The girl bristled with nervous energy. “But I’ve seen the bruises. I’ve
seen
them. She had a broken arm last year and he made her say it was from falling downstairs. And a few months before that he broke three of her fingers and made her say she slammed her hand in the car door.” The words tripped over each other, running together.

Iris held up a hand to stop the flow. “I believe you.”

“You do?” Rachel paused her pacing and blinked back tears. “So you won’t tell?”

“I can’t promise that.” Part of Iris wished she’d never come into the co-op, that she’d gone door to door in Lone Pine instead, asking for Esther Brozek. She cut off Rachel’s protest with an upraised hand. “First of all, you’ve got to stop stealing.”

“I will.”

The words came too glibly and Iris gave the teen a pointed look. “And you’ve got to tell your folks about Jenny.”

Disgusted, Rachel turned away, but Iris caught her shoulder and forced the girl to look at her. “You have to, Rachel. Does she have younger siblings?” At Rachel’s reluctant nod, she said, “Do you really think he’s only hitting your friend and not her brothers and sisters?” Iris blinked away an image of Gabby Ulm’s slight figure. “You’re a good friend. You’re trying to help. But the only way to really help, to stop this man, is to tell. If not your parents, then the police.”

“I promised Jenny I wouldn’t.” Rachel sounded less sure of herself.

“This is one of those cases where it’s better to break a promise than to keep it,” Iris said.

A knock sounded on the door and an irate face peered around the “Closed” sign. Iris cursed silently. She’d been on the verge of convincing Rachel.

The teenager moved away from her toward the door. “I’ll think about it,” she said. She flipped the dead bolt and the sign, inviting the woman into the store with a smile and an apology.

twenty-eight

iris

After finding out that
Esther still lived in the old Brozek home, despite its being way too big and hard to maintain for a single woman, Iris left the co-op. She stood on the steps outside the store, grinding her teeth. Irrationally, she was mad at Jolene. Both her children were causing Iris heartburn, within hours of each other. Aaron was an adult and made his own decisions, so Iris wasn’t going to spend a lot of brainpower worrying about him. Rachel, on the other hand … Rather than staying uninvolved when she caught Rachel stealing, Iris had slipped the victim’s wallet back into her purse and saved Rachel from the consequences of her actions. Iris had learned valuable lessons from the school of hard knocks—why the hell had she intervened to keep Rachel from learning one of them? Then, she’d compounded her idiocy by demanding an explanation. She should have walked away. Once Rachel had told her the truth, she’d assumed an obligation.

Iris growled deep in her throat and started down the street toward the Brozek house. She’d give Rachel twenty-four hours to speak up, she decided. If the girl hadn’t told her parents by then, Iris would have to tell them about the thefts. And wouldn’t that go over well with Jolene and Zach? Iris tried to imagine the conversation but couldn’t get past, “Hello, I caught your daughter stealing a wallet.” They’d be furious, disbelieving, and inclined to shoot the messenger. They might even think she was out for some twisted kind of revenge, still upset because Jolene hadn’t spoken up years ago.

Her angry stride took Iris to the Brozek house in short order and she was up the six shallow wooden steps and ringing the doorbell before she had time to think. While waiting for Esther to answer, she glanced to her right, at Outback Cottage, and wondered if her mother was inside. The sight of the little building made her queasy and she faced the double doors again, swallowing hard. Although lovely windows of original leaded glass framed the doors, the slender columns supporting the porch’s overhang had been gouged by woodpeckers, hints of peach showed through the house’s chipped lavender paint, and strips of caulking curled away from the window frames. The signs of deferred maintenance made Iris wonder about the Brozeks’ financial situation.

A slight vibration and heavy footfalls warned of Esther’s coming before the door swung open. Esther stood there, veiled by the hallway’s gloom, ash-blond hair frozen in place and her body swathed in a men’s over-sized plaid shirt over loose-fitting denim pants. Narrow-plank wood floors that needed sanding and refinishing stretched across the foyer behind her, and a brass chandelier hung too high to illuminate the space. A gracious staircase wound upward. A clock ticked loudly from a nearby room and the odor of fresh paint drifted down the stairs. The signs of shabbiness made Iris think for the first time of how much Pastor Matt’s care must have cost.

“Mercy.” Esther’s tone and expression were unwelcoming. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“It’s Iris, now.”

“You’ll always be Mercy to me.”

Iris didn’t know what to make of that. Was Esther just being disobliging, or was she trying to say something? “May I come in?”

“I’m busy.” Esther set her lips into an unaccommodating line.

“What are you painting?” Iris was beginning to feel silly, hovering on the threshold while they talked.

“How did you—? My father’s room.”

“He’s coming home? Here?” Iris arched her brows.

“Eventually.” Esther’s face softened at the thought of her father’s return. “He was here for nineteen years, you know. The first year and a half he was in the hospital, back when they still hoped he might come out of the coma. When it became clear he had sunk into a minimally responsive state—that’s what doctors call it—they moved him here. When I got pneumonia a couple of years ago, Zach and Jolene insisted we had to move him to the nursing home.” She sounded genuinely grieved. “They said that caring for him was killing me.”

“You cared for him here for almost twenty years?” Iris tried to keep the astonishment out of her voice, but suspected she hadn’t succeeded.

Esther clearly knew what Iris was thinking. “Yes. It’s even more grueling than you might imagine: feeding tubes, catheters, cleaning him up after bowel movements, shifting him every couple of hours so he won’t get bedsores, and more.”

No wonder the woman ate. No wonder she got sick. It was enough to kill anyone. Iris felt the burgeoning of real respect for Esther, even as her flesh crawled at the thought of giving Pastor Matt a sponge bath. Sure, the woman was no picnic, but Iris doubted she would have had the fortitude or love to care for one of her parents at home if something similar had befallen one of them.

“I had help, of course, from Medicaid and state agencies. Zach and Jolene spelled me, as well, as did Aaron once he got old enough. He’s my father,” she said simply. “It was my honor to care for him, and I’m happy to do it again as soon as the doctors say he can come home. It will be easier now that the Lord has answered all our prayers and he is recovering.”

“Look, Esther,” Iris said. “You love your father and taking care of him is important to you. I respect that. Can you respect the fact that I’m trying to help my father, to honor him as the Bible commands?” She played the commandment card shamelessly, hoping it would sway Esther. “I just want to know what you remember about the night your father got hurt. Where were you?”

Esther’s knuckles whitened on the door. “I should have been here. Then it wouldn’t have happened. I was in the church basement cutting out construction paper whales for my Sunday school lesson. I didn’t hear a thing.” Her fleshy face sagged, pulling her small mouth into a red-rimmed O. “I walked past Outback Cottage on my way home and saw the door was open. I knew something was wrong—I just felt it. I ran in.” She stepped out the door, brushed past Iris and lumbered down the steps, heading toward the cottage. Iris followed, thinking how sad it was that the obese woman Esther had become wouldn’t be capable of running like her slim, eighteen-year-old self had.

Iris was relieved when Esther stopped halfway between the house and the cottage and pointed. “He was lying just past the entryway with Neil Asher standing over him. There was blood. Oh, dear God, there was blood.”

“It must have been horrible for you,” Iris said over the grousing of a flock of grackles searching for seeds nearby.

“I ran back to call 911—there was no phone in the cottage—and returned to Father, but he was gone. I thought he was dead. Neil didn’t even try to run off.”

Iris almost said, “Because he hadn’t done anything wrong,” but knew that antagonizing Esther would serve no purpose. “Where was Zach?”

Esther shrugged and returned to the porch, laboring up the steps. “Out looking for Jolene. I didn’t know that then. I screamed for him, for my mother, but no one came. It was only after the EMTs took my father, and the police arrived that we found my mother in the kitchen, dead. At first, we thought Neil had killed her, too, somehow, but the autopsy revealed she’d had a heart attack. We think she must have been with Dad when he was attacked, and run back to call the police. It brought on the heart attack.” Esther settled onto a bench by the porch rail, as if the effort of standing any longer was too much. The bench groaned. Inches of fabric got caught in the folds of flesh created by her overlapping stomach and thighs. “Can you imagine what it’s like to be eighteen and lose your mother?”

Esther meant the question rhetorically, but Iris answered. “Yes, I can. I lost mine, too.”

“Marian’s next door!”

“She might as well have been dead.” Her mother had not spoken a single word to her in the twenty-four hours between when the ritual had ended and when she left. Not one. Iris sometimes wondered, if she’d stayed, how long her mother would have subjected her to silence.

As if the interchange had reminded her that she hadn’t wanted to talk to Iris in the first place, Esther heaved herself to her feet. “I’ve got to get back to work. You’re not staying in Lone Pine much longer, are you?”

“Your spirit of hospitality is astonishing, Esther,” Iris said dryly, descending the steps. “I’m staying until I discover the truth and get my father out of prison.”

“Don’t you think it might have meant a lot more to your father if you were here for him the last twenty-three years?” Esther asked, the very reasonableness of her tone meant to needle Iris.
“If you’d been here to visit him and comfort him, to bake for him and bring him books to read? You swoop in a quarter century after the fact to orchestrate this ridiculous effort to free him. Is this some belated attempt to make up for what you did? For the lies you told that led your father to attack mine? Well, you can’t make up for it. You can’t bring my mother back, or repair the damage to my father. You can’t free
your father from the consequences of his sin, or give your mother back her husband and family.” A wing of blond hair fell across her cheek and she tucked it behind her ear. “I don’t know where your pretensions of saviorhood have come from, but I’m not buying it.
We’re
not buying it. We all see through you, Mercy Asher.”

Iris wanted to bat the words away, to keep them from penetrating, but they wormed their way under her skin, stinging and itching. The truth of much of what Esther had said reverberated through her. Maybe she should make everyone happy and leave Lone Pine.
The real attacker would appreciate that.
She wasn’t going to quit. Esther might be right on some fronts—Iris couldn’t change the past—but she was wrong, too. Iris had no delusions of being anyone’s savior, but she was the only one working to free her father and she was damned if she’d give up on him now.

Esther’s eyes glittered with triumph and she leaned forward, almost crowding Iris off the porch. “You keep saying Neil didn’t do it. If that’s true, then the only possible reason I can see for his saying he did is that he was protecting someone. You.” She jabbed a finger into Iris’s chest. Iris angrily swatted it away. “You hated my father. You made up lies about him. You disappeared that night. If Neil didn’t do it, then he knows you did.” Esther’s eyes narrowed and her words came more slowly. “You did it, didn’t you? You brought a shovel or a poker with you and you beat my father because he showed you up as the liar you are. Then you ran away and let your father take the blame.”

“That’s ridic—” Iris couldn’t say it was ridiculous; it’s what her own father had thought.

Drawing back as if sickened, Esther waddled to the doorway. “I’m calling the police. If you’re determined to get your father out of prison, you’d better be prepared to take his place.” She gently closed the door.

A wind gust rattled the loose gutters and Iris jumped. She descended the stairs and retraced her steps to where she’d left the car in front of the co-op. The woman was pure poison. Would the police listen to her? Of course not—they had their man safely locked up. She reached the rental and pulled out her keys.

“Miss Iris!”

She turned to see Rachel holding the store’s door open. A breeze fluttered the girl’s butter-colored hair and her eyes beseeched Iris.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come back.” She sucked in a deep breath. “I’m going to tell. Will you … will you come with me?”