The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense (28 page)

forty-eight

iris

Lone Pine felt deserted
when Iris drove in. There had been no cars in the Sleepytime Inn’s parking lot when she passed, and even though a couple of vehicles were parked along Center Street, no one strolled down the sidewalk, mowed a lawn, or rocked on a front porch. In the middle of a weekday, the residents were either at work or on the bus returning from the prison. It felt like a ghost town, Iris thought, parking in front of Debby’s Café. Taking a deep breath, she pushed through the door, wanting to rip down the annoying bell, and stood by the counter with its pile of damp plastic-coated menus, apparently newly wiped.

“Coming.” Joseph Ulm’s voice came from the kitchen. He emerged a moment later, his welcoming smile shrinking when he spotted Iris. “Oh. Hi, Iris.”

“Joe.”

They faced each other silently for thirty seconds.

“Gabby called last night,” Joe finally said. He scratched a spot behind his ear.

Iris nodded.

“We thought we might be seeing you.”

Debby Ulm’s voice came from Iris’s left and she turned to see the petite woman come out of the restroom, drying her hands on her apron. Iris tensed, not liking to have to split her focus, but then Debby crossed to her husband and put her hand on his shoulder. Her face was set, defiant, the strong brows pinched in. Iris rotated her shoulders, wincing when the injured one objected, and gestured toward a booth. “Maybe we could sit?”

The Ulms moved as one to the booth she indicated and slid onto the bench, with Joe on the inside, closest to the window. Iris sat across from them and folded her hands on the table. Something about the way Debby Ulm held herself made Iris say, “I should tell you that I left a letter with Cade Zuniga after I talked to Gabby yesterday. It says I intended to come here and talk to you.”

Joe looked blank, but then his eyes widened as he realized what he was saying. “Good God, Iris, we aren’t the kind of people who—”

“I didn’t think so,” Iris said, looking not at him but at his wife who glared at her with ill-concealed fury. “If you were, you would surely have found an opportunity to finish Pastor Matt off sometime during the past twenty-three years, especially after he woke up.”

“When we heard he was awake—” Debby Ulm gripped her husband’s hand on the table.

“That must have scared you,” Iris agreed.

“But then it seemed as if he didn’t remember anything, or couldn’t communicate it, if he did,” Joe said. His left hand played with the sweetener packets in their small rectangular dish, lifting them half out of the dish and stuffing them back down. “We felt safe again.”

“Until you came back,” Debby said flatly. “I tried to persuade you to leave—”

“The phone call? My car?”

Debby nodded. “And I trashed your room.”

“The rockslide?”

She hesitated, then gave a tiny nod. “I thought it would just be the one rock. I didn’t anticipate that avalanche. I was at Mary Welsh’s for the knitting circle when I saw you drive in and leave again. I followed you, thinking I’d convince you to go home, I guess. When you pulled over and started hiking, I … I waited and then drove to the north rim …”

Iris was anticipating an apology, but none came.

“Debby!” Joe gaped at his wife.

“She was going to dig it all up, Joe,” she snapped. “I did what I had to do to protect you—us.”

He pulled his hand away and faced Iris. “What did you tell Gabby?”

Iris found herself wanting to reassure the man who had beaten Pastor Matt and let her father go to prison for his crime. “I didn’t tell her what I suspected. I told her I’d looked her up for old time’s sake. She seemed glad to see me.”

“She always looked up to you,” Debby Ulm said, as if puzzled by her daughter’s lack of judgment.

“I worked the conversation around to the reckoning stones and she fell apart, telling me that my ‘bravery’ in telling the truth had given her the strength to tell the truth, too. To you.” Iris let her gaze rest on Joe and then on Debby. “She told you Pastor Matt was molesting her.”

Debby sank her face into her work-roughened hands and Joe mangled a sweetener packet so that the white crystals spilled onto the table. He concentrated on poking them into a pile with his forefinger.

“She told you the day after the ritual, the day Pastor Matt was beaten. She hasn’t connected the dots, or if she has, she’s repressing the truth. But I see it.” Iris put both palms flat on the table and leaned forward. “You went to the Brozek house that night, outraged and heartbroken, planning to confront him or—who knows?—planning to kill him.”

“No!” Debby’s voice cracked. “Joe isn’t like that. He wouldn’t—”

“Either Gabby told you she was supposed to meet him in the cottage, or you saw him headed that way and followed him. Did you talk to him, or just go in swinging?”

Joe cleared his throat. “He … he said Gabby was lying, that you and she were both liars. I knew my little girl wasn’t lying. She was nearly hysterical, crying, when she told me what he’d done to her. She blamed herself.” He fisted his hand and put the knuckles to his mouth. “My innocent little Gabby thought something she’d done or said had made that wicked pervert want her. She was only thirteen! He started to say something about the reckoning stones and Gabby, and I told him I was through with the Community, that I was going to the police. He grabbed that iron cross off the wall and took a swing at me, cut my cheek open.” He rubbed his cheekbone. “I got it away from him and then … I couldn’t seem to stop. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Silence settled over the café as Joe finished talking. A dishwasher gurgled from the kitchen and an insect flew into the window with a tiny
thuck
.

“You let my dad go to prison for something you did,” Iris said.

Joe nodded. “Yes. I made it home somehow and told Debby what I’d done—”

“I took one look at him and knew,” Debby said, memories of that night darkening her eyes. “He was spattered with blood and almost catatonic, still clutching the cross in his hand. I got him cleaned up, burned his clothes, hid the cross. And then we waited.”

“For the police to come,” Joe said. “But they didn’t. Esther found Neil standing over the body and he confessed. I didn’t know”—he looked at his wife—“we didn’t know how to react.”

“By telling the truth,” Iris said grimly. Before they could respond, she added, “But I’m not in a good position to throw stones on that front. If I’d told the truth straight off, about Pastor Matt molesting me, then maybe he would never have had the opportunity to victimize Gabby. Even if everyone called me a liar, maybe if I’d spoken up sooner, you’d have been more alert, Gabby would have been more wary. Who knows?” Weariness draped itself over her and she leaned against the booth.

“When I started this,” she said, letting her head fall back so she was talking to a spot somewhere between the Ulms and the ceiling, “I wanted to discover the truth to get my father out of prison. It was some kind of quest I set myself to make up for all the years I was gone. It wasn’t my fault that he confessed, thinking I had attacked Pastor Matt, but I felt responsible. I could make it up to him, redeem myself for giving in to Pastor Matt, for not telling the truth immediately, for God knows what other sins, by setting him free.”

“Do you want me to tell the police the truth?” Joe asked. He looked straight at her, his expression bleak. “I’m ready to do that. I should have done it twenty-three years ago, but I didn’t want anyone to know that that bastard had raped my Gabby, that she and he had—”

“Joe!” Debby put a hand on his arm as if to keep him from marching off to the sheriff’s office.

“A part of me was glad to think my father had done what you did,” Iris confessed, looking at Joe. “I’m not proud of that. I was actually disappointed, hurt even, to find out that he truly hadn’t believed me, hadn’t exacted revenge on my behalf.” She paused, letting her gaze rest on a tabby cat sitting on the sidewalk. Her eyes swung back to the Ulms. “It’s not my place to condone what you did or condemn you, but my father has already served twenty-three years for what you did.”

Debby leaped to her feet, knocking over the salt shaker. “You can’t make us—. Joe’s been sorry every day for—.” Her shoulders shook violently and she glared at Iris.

“Sorry isn’t enough,” Joe said, reaching for his wife’s hand. She yanked it away.

“Don’t do this, Joe. Gabby! Everyone would know she, that Pastor Matt and she—. Don’t let her talk you into—”

“No one here’s talking me into anything, Deb. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit’s been trying to talk me into for a quarter century.” Joe slid out of the booth and took his stiff wife in his arms. She struggled, but then subsided against his shoulder. Iris watched uncomfortably as he stroked her hair and murmured to her. With his eyes shut, Joe Ulm looked resigned, even peaceful, as he comforted his wife, and Iris regretted that her father’s freedom might come at the cost of his.

“You might not even have to do time,” Iris said. “Esther confessed to letting her mother die, after all, so the only charges would be related to Pastor Matt’s beating. Any judge or jury would sympathize with your motive, and with a good lawyer …” She hoped his confession and his knowledge of the crime’s details would be enough to outweigh her father’s earlier confession. Something Debby had said niggled at her. Barely daring to hope, she asked, “Do you still have the cross? You said you ‘hid it.’” She leaned forward, tensing as she waited for an answer.

Debby and Joe exchanged a look, Debby’s resistant and Joe’s commanding. Finally, Debby gave a tiny nod. “That night, when Joe came home with the cross that looked like it’d been dipped in blood, I knew we needed to get rid of it. But it didn’t seem right to bury the symbol of our Savior in the dirt, or toss it in a Dumpster like it was just … just trash. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I wrapped it up and drove over to my parents’ house in Canon City that very night. I hid it in their attic. They’re in their eighties—they haven’t gone up in the attic in decades. I check on it sometimes when we visit them.”

It was more than Iris had dared hope for. “Thank God,” she breathed.

She slid out of the booth, suddenly anxious to get away from the Ulms who were standing side by side with clasped hands, from
the past, from Lone Pine. She planned to phone Cade as soon as she got outside so he could mobilize the police to search Debby’s parents’ house and find the cross. She trusted Joseph Ulm to do the right thing, but she sensed Debby was intent on protecting her husband, possibly even against his wishes. She didn’t completely blame her, but she couldn’t let her jeopardize her father’s bid for freedom. Giving the pies a wistful look as she passed their glass domes, Iris pushed through the door and into the sunshine, lifting up her face to its warmth. She’d call Cade and then the airline, to book a ticket home.

forty-nine

iris

One month later

Iris climbed from her
car outside Eclectica and carefully removed the boxed and tissue-swaddled award from the passenger seat. Carrying it into the store, she hugged the box to her chest and waited for Jane to get off the phone. She had recovered well from her surgery, Iris thought, and although she was still doing physical therapy several times a week, she’d returned to her home a week earlier, days after Iris’s return. Iris had stayed in Colorado until a judge vacated her father’s conviction after Joseph Ulm turned himself in with the bloodied cross that bore Matthew Brozek’s DNA, and the district attorney declined to file new charges against Neil Asher in “the interests of justice.” They were still working out a plea deal for Joe Ulm. Volunteering to hang out with Angel for a weekend, Iris had given her mother and father some alone time when he was released from prison. Then she’d spent an awkward day with the three of them in Lone Pine and flown to Portland, unbearably glad to be home.

Jane hung up and peered over her glasses. “Well, are you going to show me?”

With a rustle of tissue paper, Iris unwrapped the foot-tall award and placed it on the counter. “Ta-da.” She stood back, waiting for Jane’s reaction.

It was unlike anything Iris had ever done. For one, it wasn’t a piece of jewelry, but a sculpture set on a granite base. She ran her fingers across the three-inch squares of clear glass, with lead solder to denote panes, assembled in an overlapping way so that from one direction they almost looked like birds taking off, and from another they were clearly windows. A sprinkle of tiny stones, clear quartz, made the panes shimmer, as if splashed with raindrops. A hand constructed from intertwined metal wires like an armature rose from the granite base and supported the sculpture with a cloth draped beneath the palm.

“It’s windows,” Iris explained, too anxious to wait for Jane’s reaction. “Green Gables is a construction company, so I thought windows would work. And the hand polishing the windows—well, that’s the hard-working employee who’s getting the award.” The piece had almost constructed itself upon Iris’s return, even though she’d had to consult with a friend who did stained glass to get some tips on working with the glass panes.

“It’s stunning,” Jane said quietly. “Stunning.” After another moment of walking around the piece, studying it, she looked up with a glint in her eye. “I foresee a lucrative new aspect to your design career, my dear.”

“Spoken like an agent,” Iris said, laughing. “How are you doing?”

“My physical therapist is a sadist,” Jane scowled, “but I’m moving easier.” To demonstrate, she took several steps across the gallery, leaning only lightly on the handsome cane her son had given her, and returned to lower herself onto a settee positioned in front of a large canvas. She patted it and Iris sat beside her. “How about you?”

“Better. I’m closing on the house in two weeks. Jolene’s coming for a visit after school lets out and Greg’s helping me get the yard in shape before she arrives.”

“You’re spending a lot of time with that young man.” Jane’s smile was knowing.

“We’re taking it slowly. We’ll see where it goes.”

“Still committed to celibacy?”

“For the moment.” Iris blushed, feeling a bit foolish.

Jane patted her leg. “Good for you. If you last another twenty-seven days, I win the pool. Lassie didn’t think you’d go a full week.”

“A pool? You started a pool?” The thought both amused and appalled Iris. She brushed Jane’s hand off her leg with mock-exasperation and stood, stroking a finger along the sculpture’s granite base. Lasting. Granite was made to endure, as were some relationships. Iris thought with wonder and ruefulness of her weekly Skype sessions with her parents and Angel. Angel did most of the talking. Iris was wary of opening up to her parents—it wasn’t easy moving past twenty-three years of resentment and betrayal—and stuck mostly to the kind of chitchat she’d make with a stranger in a coffee shop, but at least the lines of communication were open. She hoped they wouldn’t close up when Angel rejoined Noah and Keely in a few months. Six weeks ago, Iris wouldn’t have risked a 2mm freshwater pearl on the chance that she and her mother would ever speak to each other again. But now …

A stray sunbeam sparked off one of the tiny window panes. It was too soon to know if she and Greg would be together long-term, but Iris felt good about him, about them. Their relationship might not—yet—be granite-strong, but they were strengthening it daily with their conversations, honesty, laughter, and kissing. World-class kissing. Maybe apatite or feldspar. She imagined the look on Greg’s face if she told him she was pretty sure their relationship was as strong as feldspar, and laughed.

When Jane asked what was so funny, Iris shook her head. “Just thinking about stones,” she said. She sobered. “Did I tell you they identified the remains found in the pond as Penelope’s?”

Before she left Colorado, Iris had gone to see the Welshes and suggested they drag the pond in the alpaca field. They’d found the skeletonized remains of a young girl. A crack in the skeleton’s skull suggested she’d been struck with something, a shovel maybe, and then dragged into the pond to drown. The girl’s bracelet had apparently come off when Esther was dragging her to the pond, investigators speculated, and when the rockslide occurred that same day Esther had had the presence of mind to half-bury it among the overturned rocks. Iris shivered at the thought of Penelope lying at the bottom of the pond all these years, staring up into the blue.

“Hopefully, being able to bury their daughter properly will give her parents some peace,” Jane said.

“Hopefully.”

“And Pastor Matt? Is there any hope that he’ll awaken again?”

Iris shrugged. “Jolene says they’ve moved him back to the nursing home. I guess if a miracle can happen once, it can happen again, but for now …”

“I’m sorry you never got to confront him the way you wanted to.” Jane gazed at her over the tops of her purple glasses. “Cowardly man to duck back into his coma before you could give him what-for.”

Iris managed a small smile. “I let him take too much over the years—my virginity, my peace of mind, my self-image, probably relationships I could have had. I’m not giving him anything more—not ‘what-for’ and not even a stray thought. Whether awake or not, alive or not, Matthew Brozek belongs to the past.”

The future, she thought, was a sleek curve of possibility she could shape, not without rough spots, but bright with the jewels of work and friendship and love.