A Scarlet Cord (34 page)

“Sure. It’s just two houses down,” Karly told her. She turned to Jerica. “Just tell the boys to make sure it’s okay with Tad’s mom first, okay?”

Jerica nodded soberly.

“You stay with the boys, okay?” Melanie said. “And if you want to come home you ask Brock to walk with you. Don’t come back by yourself.”

“Okay.”

Brock stuck his head through the open door. “C’mon, Jerica. Hurry up. Tad’s waiting for us.”

She started through the door, then stopped and cocked her head in her cousin’s direction. “Does Tad have a dog?”

“No, dummy. C’mon!”

“Brock!” Karly chided. “You do not speak to Jerica like—”

“Sorry.”

Jerica shrugged him off.

“Hurry up!” Jace’s voice echoed from just inside the door.

“Okay, but wait a minute,” Jerica told her cousins. “I gotta get something first. Bye, Mommy.”

“You be good,” Melanie called after her. Her words were drowned in the slam of the door as Jerica followed her cousins into the house.

“Is she still afraid of dogs?” Karly asked.

“Terrified. Except for Erika’s little Biscuit. She tolerates him.” Melanie was preoccupied, remembering Jerica’s bewildered look. What had they been talking about when she came out to the deck? She frowned. “Karly, how long do you think Jerica was standing there? Do you think she heard us?”

Karly shook her head and cringed. “I don’t know. I didn’t even see her come outside. But I think she was okay, don’t you? Maybe she was just worried about the dog situation.”

“I hope that’s all it was,” Melanie sighed. Still, Jerica’s distressed expression wouldn’t leave her. “Oh, Karly, I’m so tired of this.” She bit her lip and pounded a fist impotently on the upholstered deck chair. “I’m so sick and tired of this whole thing. Matt is right. It’s been a year. Why can’t I get over this? Why can’t I get over
him?
”

Karly patted her arm gently, tears welling in her eyes. “Because you loved him, Mel.”

The insistent cries of a newborn wafted from inside the house. Karly offered Melanie an apologetic smile, rose from her chair, and went inside.

Melanie stayed on the deck, thinking about what Karly had said. Her friend had spoken in the past tense, but the truth was, her love for Joel was as strong as it had been that day she had tearfully cleared the last of Rick LaSalle’s shirts from her closet.

I still love him
, she thought.
In spite of every thing, I still do
.

Twenty-Nine

It was a cold, grey day in Silver Creek, Missouri. Darlene Anthony sat enjoying a cup of coffee and a break from her secretarial duties at Cornerstone Community Church. She took a final look at the master copy for Sunday’s bulletin, satisfied that she’d banished every last typo and grammatical error from the pages. A shadow crossed her desk, and she looked out through the office window to see an officer, dressed in the uniform of the county sheriff’s department, heading up the sidewalk to the church’s entrance.

Startled, Darlene quickly dialed Don Steele’s extension. “Pastor, there’s someone here. I … I think he’s from the sheriff’s office. Should I send him in?”

“Do you know what he wants?”

She heard the wide front doors creak open, then close again. Within seconds, the towering man stepped into Darlene’s office, removing his hat as he ducked through the doorway.

Darlene covered the receiver with her hand and gave him a nervous smile. “I’ll be right with you.”

Before she could say another word, Pastor Steele opened the door to his adjacent study and stepped into Darlene’s office. He extended his hand to the lawman. “Hi, I’m Pastor Don Steele. How can I help you?”

Darlene quietly replaced the receiver in its cradle and busied herself with some paperwork on her desk.

“Tom Stanton.” The man introduced himself as he accepted Pastor Steele’s outstretched hand. “Deputy Stanton, from the county sheriff’s office. I’d like to speak with you for a moment if I could, Reverend Steele”—his eyebrows leaned in Darlene’s direction as he finished—“alone.”

“My office is right this way.” Pastor Steele led the deputy into his office, pulling the door partially closed after the officer had ducked inside.

From her desk, Darlene could barely hear their muffled voices. Quietly, she got up and went over to the copy machine in the corner behind her desk and switched it off. Without the hum of the copier, the two men’s voices carried quite clearly.

Darlene sat back down in her padded desk chair and pretended to proofread the bulletin.

“… what we discovered after talking to Mr. Ellington’s brother is quite interesting,” Officer Stanton was saying.

“You’re sure about this?” Pastor Steele asked.

“Well, we have a couple more leads to follow up on. We don’t want to scare him off before we have the evidence we need to convict, but I think we are just days away from bringing him in.”

Darlene sat perfectly still, straining to hear the rest.

She heard defeat in Don Steele’s voice. The minister sighed heavily, and Darlene could almost picture him hanging his head the way he did when one of his flock went astray. “I’d always hoped they were wrong about Joel.”

“I didn’t know him, of course,” Stanton said. “Read the stories though. Seemed pretty cut and dried to me. Just a matter of finding the guy.”

“Will he be brought back here to the county for trial?”

“Well now, he hasn’t been officially charged, but if—”

The rest of Stanton’s sentence was lost as the motor of the water
fountain down the hall kicked on. Darlene could feel her heart galloping, and a fine film of perspiration beaded her upper lip. They must have found Joel. And now it sounded as if he was going to be charged with taking the money for the building fund.

It was awful to think of him being found guilty. She wondered if it would make any difference when the authorities learned that the money had long since been replaced by the insurance and several generous donations, including a contribution of three thousand dollars that she herself had given from her mother’s life insurance policy.

Her shoulders sagged at the thought of her mother. Not a day went by that she didn’t weep over the senseless death of the wonderful woman who had given her life.

Melanie’s thoughts drifted, and she succumbed to the warmth of the morning sun and the comfort of the deck chair. She started awake when Karly came back out with the baby in her arms.

“Oh! I must have fallen asleep,” Melanie said, yawning and stretching. “Here, let me have him.” She held out her arms, and Karly transferred little Parker into them. “Does he need to be burped?”

As if on cue, the baby emitted a rumbling belch.

“Not anymore,” Karly laughed.

Melanie stretched Parker out on her lap and cooed senseless baby talk to him. There was something so hopeful and reassuring about a tiny new baby.

“I’m going to make a pot of coffee,” Karly said. “Do you want some?”

“Sure, I’ll take a cup. Are the kids back yet?”

“No. You apparently haven’t seen Tad’s backyard.” Karly described the Swiss Family Robinson–like tree house Tad Goldstein’s father had built in the neighboring yard. “I think Brock and Jace would just move in over there if we’d let them.”

“Oh, Jerica will think she’s died and gone to heaven.”

While Karly rattled dishes in the kitchen, Melanie watched the infant with fascination, trying to remember when Jerica could possibly have been this small. Parker’s bright little eyes already tracked the exaggerated movements of her head, and he seemed to be mimicking the faces she made at him, working his round O of a mouth with furrowed forehead. Amazing. What an incredible miracle babies were.

Karly brought a tray out, and they sipped coffee and admired the baby, soaking in the rare spring sunshine. The sun was high in the sky when their reverie was interrupted by the distant slam of the front door and the clatter of sneaker-clad feet across the kitchen tile.

Melanie looked at Karly with a knowing smile. “It must be lunch time. Here, I’ll go fix some sandwiches.” The baby was dozing now. She gave him back to Karly, then gathered the coffee mugs and magazines that had collected on the deck before going into the kitchen. The boys were standing in front of the open refrigerator jostling for front and center.

“Hey, guys. You hungry?”

“Starving,” Jace declared. “Can we have pizza?”

“I think your mom and I decided on sandwiches. Can you handle that?”

“Sure,” Brock said, with a tough-guy shrug. “PB and J?”

“If that’s what you want. Where’s Jerica? Did she like the tree house?” Melanie asked.

“I dunno,” the boys said in unison.

“What do you mean … She came back with you, didn’t she? From Tad’s house?”

They both shook their heads matter-of-factly. “She never went to Tad’s,” Brock said. “She said she had something else to do.”

“What? You mean she’s been here all this time?” Melanie hadn’t heard a peep out of Jerica all morning. She glanced at the digital clock on the microwave, and her heart lurched. It was 11:30. It had been
almost two hours since the boys had gone to play at the Goldsteins’.

“Hmmm,” she said, pushing away a spasm of alarm. “She must have fallen back to sleep. Would one of you guys go back and tell her that we’re making lunch?”

The brothers raced each other down the hallway yelling. If that didn’t wake Jerica up, nothing would.

But just as quickly, they came back out to the kitchen. “Jerica’s not there.”

“What?”

“She’s not in the bedroom.”

Melanie’s stomach clenched. “Are you sure?”

“Yup. She’s not there,” Brock declared.

“Well, she has to be somewhere.” It came out as a bark, and she could see by the crestfallen expression on Brock’s face that she’d spoken too harshly. But now her fear took over. She hurried back to the bedroom. It was empty. Retracing her steps down the hall, she looked into the bathroom and poked her head into each of the other bedrooms off the hall. All were empty.

Panic pumped adrenaline through her veins. She raced down the steps to the basement family room. The lights were off and the television screen was black and silent.
Where else could she be?

Melanie took the stairs two at a time back to the kitchen, shouting Karly’s name.

Her sister-in-law came in from the deck, cradling Parker in her arms. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t find Jerica, Karly!” She heard the hysteria rising in her own voice. “The boys said she never went with them to the neighbors’—to Tad’s.”

Karly looked from Brock to Jace. “Jerica didn’t go with you?” she repeated.

They shook their heads again, faces solemn now, as if they were afraid they were in trouble.

“Let me put Parker down,” Karly said, her face grim. She took the baby back to the nursery, and when she came back a minute later she knelt in front of her eldest son. “Brock, this is important. Do you know where Jerica is?”

“No, Mom. I haven’t seen her since this morning.”

“Jace?”

The five-year-old’s eyes were wide. “I don’t know where she is, Mom. She was gonna go to Tad’s with us, and then she said she had to do something.”

Melanie bent to join Karly at the boys’ eye level. “What, Jace? What did she have to do?”

“I dunno. She didn’t tell us.”

Melanie looked at Karly. “Where else could she be?” She rose to her feet and started down the hall again. “Jerica? Jerica Beth! Can you hear me?” Karly and the boys followed suit, parading through every level and room of the house shouting for Jerica—to no avail. They gathered back in the kitchen several minutes later, quiet and sober.

Karly took charge. “Brock, you and Jace go look around the neighborhood. Maybe she tried to follow you guys to Tad’s and got lost. I’ll check the yard. Mel, you go through the house one more time. She’s got to be somewhere.”

When they’d left, the dead silence of the house told Melanie with certainty that Jerica was not inside. She walked through the house again, this time listening for a telltale sound instead of shouting Jerica’s name. Finding not so much as a clue, she began to search in ridiculous places. She opened cupboard doors and rummaged through clothes hampers. Macabre images swarmed her mind like angry hornets.

She remembered that Matt had caught the kids making forts out of the bunk-bed mattresses a couple nights ago. Melanie went to the boys’ room, cleared away the lumpy quilts and lifted the mattresses off the platforms, dreading what she might find. She went to the other bedrooms, doing the same.

She walked into the guest room where Jerica had slept last night. The quilts had been pulled up in a lumpy heap, and the decorative pillows were propped neatly against the headboard—Jerica’s feeble efforts to make the bed after she’d crawled out of it that morning.

Melanie went to the end of the bed, spread her arms wide, and grabbed two corners of the quilt, giving it a shake to make sure that none of the lumps in the blankets were child-sized. The comforter settled back onto the bed, and at the edge of her vision, she saw something flutter against the pillows.

She took a step toward the head of the bed and held her breath as a tentacle of raw terror snaked up her spine.