Words Unspoken (29 page)

“
Katy Lynn! Don’t you look swell? You are so beautiful in that dress!” His mind foggy, he reached out to pick her up and stumbled.

“Daddy! Daddy!”

Little Katy Lynn with her flaxen hair, her eyes the color of irises, her laughter like the sound of the handbells in the church choir.

“Daddy, play hide-and-seek with me!”

Running, Katy Lynn following in her light yellow dress, running through fields of sunflowers and screaming with delight when the butterflies took flight.

“Wake up, Daddy. Please get up! Mommy’s crying. Please get up and tell her everything is going to be okay.”

Katy Lynn, leaning down by his face. “Daddy, who’s that lady? Where are your clothes? Are you sick?”

Enough! If he let them, the memories would suffocate him, would nail him to a cross. Guilty, guilty, guilty. At his lowest points he wondered, what did it matter if God forgave him? He had lost his wife, his daughter, and his sister. Tate he could not get back. Annie he had won back with great difficulty. But Katy Lynn? He had almost single-handedly ruined her life. The next image landed in his lap as if the postman had delivered it along with Janelle’s aerogram: Annie’s letter from 1950, the letter he had read a thousand times, had memorized as a form of penance before he had set out after them.

I can’t live any longer with the drinking and the cheating and the lies.
Each time you sober up, you crawl back, begging forgiveness, only to start the whole cycle over again.

I’m taking Katy Lynn. Don’t look for us. We aren’t coming back. You’ve said you wanted freedom. It’s yours. Annie.

No amount of praying made the image go away. Not even reciting that verse, that wonderful verse in Galatians 5:
If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed
.

He held the aerogram and knew what Katy Lynn had shared with her sister. She had every right; it was her life, her truth. Why she hadn’t done it years ago was simply a matter of her cold refusal to be involved in her sister’s life. But now …

Ev read the signs of holy intervention as if they were printed on the pages of his worn King James Bible. He had lived through decades of being squeezed by God, and now the Almighty had placed his finger on that old, old problem and was saying, if not audibly, nonetheless clearly,
I will rebuild the ancient cities that have been devastated for generations
.

His whole life had been one desperate attempt to cover up the mistakes of long, long ago. There. He’d admitted it.

Dear Lord, help me. Help us all
.

________

Silvano watched from the store across the street as Stella Green entered the restaurant on West Fullerton in Chicago, with Edmond L. Clouse beside her.

Ha! She was no dummy,
he thought, snapping several photos with the zoom lens. No dummy at all.

Well, neither was he. He wasn’t about to show his face with his boss right there beside her. He observed them as they waited, checked their watches, came out in the street and looked up and down, went back inside and ordered lunch at the table he had reserved and to which he had paid the waitress a hundred bucks to attach the little microphone under the table.

This was much better than he could have possibly imagined! An hour’s worth of recorded conversation between the boss and Stella. And when, exasperated, they got up and left Stefani’s, he hailed a taxi and followed their car. He laughed out loud as they turned onto the exit for O’Hare. So Miss Green didn’t live in Chicago! Not once in the crowded airport did they turn around to see him slipping in and out behind other travelers. They stopped by a counter to secure their return tickets. Silvano followed them far enough to see which gate they were headed for, then scanned the nearest listing of flights and destinations. Flight 327 … to Atlanta. Atlanta! Did Miss Green actually live right down the street from him? How very convenient!

He went outside and hailed another taxi. When he stepped into Stefani’s, the waitress was waiting for him, the little tape recorder in hand and a smile on her face. She should be smiling. She’d just earned another hundred bucks.

________

“Interesting young man, Lissa, that Silvano. Seems to be bright, hardworking, wants to get ahead. You can hardly hear his accent. He’s a bit pompous, though.”

Her father looked up over the newspaper as Lissa munched on a piece of toast and gazed out the picture window in the breakfast room. A gray squirrel was posed on a tree, looking like he might leap into the air and fly off the side of Lookout Mountain.

“Yeah. You’re right—interesting and pompous.” She made her voice noncommittal, but the truth was that she had actually enjoyed her date on Saturday. They had laughed about Latin, spoken in Italian, had one of the best meals she could remember. She liked many things about Silvano Rossi—his beautiful Italian accent, his attention to detail, his knowledge of art and history. He had a fierce drive about him, a love of competition, which made them kindred spirits. Maybe if she hung around Silvano for a while, her own competitive drive would return.

The main drawback was his over-the-top cockiness. Pompous indeed. A name-dropper. Determined to get ahead in life. Still, something made Lissa not write him off immediately.

He wanted to see her again, next weekend. He even offered to take her to see Caleb—that information, about her horse and her father, had slipped out over dessert. Well, why not? She needed to get to the barn.

She reasoned that she could handle Silvano Rossi’s advances—he’d tried to kiss her two or three times—for the sake of Caleb and her love of Italy. She grinned even now, remembering his overtures. “Slow down, Mr. Rossi,” she’d whispered in Italian when the arm over her shoulder had traveled down to her waist. “I guess Italians are a bit more forward on first dates.”

“Maybe so. Or perhaps Southern belles just know how to make us wait.”

She’d make him wait. She wasn’t in a hurry for a boyfriend. Silvano had his faults, but he had a whole lot of pluses too: Latin and Italy and Rome and a car, a little car that could drive just fine from Atlanta to Chattanooga and back, with a stop at Clover Leaf Stables on the way.

On Monday afternoon, Lissa left the library with a smile on her face and a lilt in her step. For the first time since she had started driving lessons with Ev MacAllister, she actually felt a type of excitement and challenge at the thought of getting behind Ole Bessie’s steering wheel. Cammie’s words kept playing in her head.

Your father seems bound and determined to get rid of Caleb.

She answered back:
I’ll be more determined. Driving lessons. I’ll show him.

“Mr. MacAllister, I swear I’m ready to try the highway. Please. After all, it’s my eighth lesson, and I didn’t freak out at all the last time—or the time before. I mean, I like the Military Park just fine, but it’s getting a little boring.”

The old man motioned with his head to the passenger seat. “Lissa, you’ve only driven past the accident site once, and that caused a panic attack. So, no, you can’t drive on the highway, but yes, we will go there, and I will drive. Part of the battle plan.”

As they drove along Interstate 75, Mr. MacAllister seemed lost in thought. At least that was Lissa’s appraisal. Not once did he ask about her weekend or her journaling or her father or Italy. She had so many things she wanted to tell him, but without his gentle probing, she did not volunteer the information.

They were traveling south on I-75, which meant they would reach the accident site from the opposite direction from which it occurred. As they passed the exit Lissa physically braced herself, pushing her left leg into the front of the car, almost touching the instructor’s brake. Her arms were stiff on either side, gripping the old upholstery. She forced herself to look out the window, to look at the bridge and beyond, at the emergency lane.
I can do this for Caleb. I can.

“What are you thinking right now, Lissa?” Mr. MacAllister’s voice startled her.

“I’m seeing the hail. My heart is beating so hard. I’m terrified.” They swept under the bridge and out into the open again. “I’m thinking if only I hadn’t panicked so bad, Momma would never have needed to offer to drive. She wouldn’t have gotten out of the car. That’s what I’m thinking.”

Mr. MacAllister spoke calmly but forcefully, keeping his eyes straight ahead. “Anybody would panic if the car started skidding. And you remembered how to correct the skid. In the middle of panic, you had a good reaction, Lissa.”

He had turned off at the next exit, driven across that bridge, and gotten back on I-75, traveling north. Once again they drove under the bridge, this time on the side of the highway on which the accident had occurred. “What are you thinking now, Lissa?”

“I’m still thinking it was all my fault. It was my fault, Mr. MacAllister. It was! We were driving that day because I wanted to visit more colleges, and then I wanted to see Caleb. Momma did it all for me. It was my fault.”

He turned off at an exit and once again drove across the bridge, once again returned to the highway, now headed back toward Atlanta. When he drove under the bridge, he slowed the car and pulled into the emergency lane. “What are you thinking now, Lissa?”

“I, I don’t know. Just the same old things. Kinda.”

His intensity scared her almost as much as driving past the scene of the accident.

A final time he turned off at an exit and headed north, back toward Chattanooga. A final time he drove under the bridge and pulled off into the emergency lane, in the exact spot she had found herself with her mother all those months ago. He did not ask her anything. Instead, Ev MacAllister looked directly at her and pierced her with his pale blue eyes. She didn’t see compassion in them, but rather anger.
A holy anger
, she thought without knowing why.

“Lissa, it was
not
your fault. It was an
accident
. A horrible accident that no one,
no one
could have avoided. Hydroplaning happens when the highway is slick. Cars slide. It was horrible, but it was not your fault. It was an accident.” Now he raised his voice and his eyes were blazing. “There was nothing you could have done differently. You hear me? Nothing!”

Lissa shuddered. She forgot momentarily the horror of her accident, because she was not at all convinced that Mr. MacAllister was talking to her. It seemed to Lissa that he was talking to himself.

________

What a weekend! Both kids had been sick and Lin Su was in one of those foul moods where every word from her mouth came out like the knives used in those Asian flicks. Even her teasing had felt like tiny stabs.

“Why are you so fidgety, Mr. Million Dollar Club?”

Ted certainly couldn’t admit to her what the market had looked like when he had left the office on Friday afternoon. The Dow had lost a total of 260 points in the past three days of trading. Alarmed, Treasury Secretary James Baker had given a fine little speech outlining his concerns for the economy.

Well, isn’t that helpful,
Ted thought bitterly. Baker was simply giving all those already-jittery investors a whole weekend to worry.

As soon as the opening bell rang Monday morning, the trading systems were deluged with orders. Phones were literally ringing off the hook. Everyone was selling. Everyone!

By ten thirty every broker was cussing up a storm, loosening his tie as sweat proliferated under arms and on foreheads.

“We’re headed for a crash,” someone whispered, and all Ted could see were the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’d just traded in Dr. Kaufman’s account.
Illegally.
His crisp blue cotton button-down was drenched in sweat.

At eleven, Bob Turner, the office manager, his face a pasty white, gave a brief speech as he watched the prices evaporate on the computer screens right before his eyes. “There’s not enough liquidity in the market to handle all of the portfolio-insurance options. The credit is gone. Gone.”

“What do we do?” several young brokers begged, as if the boss had the slightest idea, as if this happened every few years. But it hadn’t
ever
happened before. Even the crash of ’29 had stopped before completely sliding off the edge.

The computer programs were going wacky. That was it, Ted was sure. They were sending masses of sell orders to the NYSE’s computer system. Trading volume was huge, having already surpassed the previous all-time record set on Friday. The delays in trading grew longer.

“The whole system is inundated,” Ted said out loud to whoever was listening. “Any minute now that baby’s gonna crash and burn.”
And us with it
, he thought. The whole system was about to collapse in front of their eyes.

Ted recognized the problem, as did other brokers. The program trading with those automated portfolio-insurance strategies that Goldberg, Finch and Dodge and all the rest of the institutional traders had been using to hedge their portfolios against the downswing of the market were kicking in with automated short sales. The pressure to sell felt enormous, and chaos reigned. Pure chaos. The Dow was in a free fall.

“I’ve been in this business for almost forty years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” a colleague muttered.

Several other traders were literally crying, bawling like babies before the ticker tape and computer screens. One of the brokers, a twenty-five-year-old already worth several million, suddenly let out an eerie, anguished scream. “I’ve lost two million bucks in thirty minutes!”

Ted half expected the guy to get out a gun and shoot himself. Instead, he ran toward the restrooms, but he didn’t make it before he had thrown up right on the slick office floor.

Individual investors were in a panic; it seemed every one of his clients was trying to call him at the same time. As soon as Ted hung up with one, the phone rang with a similarly horrified-sounding voice on the other end. And what could he tell them? “Sorry, Joe, I deeply regret to inform you that you’ve just lost four million dollars in the space of five minutes.”

Stop selling! Stop selling!
Ted wanted to scream, but no one would have listened anyway. The dam had burst, and the water gushed out. Every broker at Goldberg, Finch and Dodge was soaked, drowning. His clients begged him to sell, cashing in on their futures, grabbing for their insurance.