Healing Stones (41 page)

He had me by both arms now, and he shook me. My head lurched back and my teeth slammed together.

“I gave up everything for you,” he said. “You think I wanted to lose my job—my boat—my reputation?” He shook me again. “Yeah, I did want to, because I thought it would get me you. Look at me.”

I did, but I didn't recognize the twisted face that forced itself at mine.

“You think you don't love me now—I get that,” he said. “But tell me you loved me then. Tell me I didn't sacrifice my whole life for nothing.”

The unnatural gleam in those eyes told me I should give him what he wanted and walk away, safely. But the whisper in my head curled above the words being growled into my face.

You have to, Demi. You have to.

I wrenched myself away. “You gave it all up for nothing, Zach,” I said. “And so did I. I never loved you—ever.”

Before the slap of my words could register, before he could grab me again, I bolted from the porch and down the steps toward the parking lot. When I got to the Jeep, I turned around to see him at the bottom of the steps, his arms outstretched as he shouted at me.

“Only a whore would do what you did for me in bed if she didn't love me. A cheap—”

I blocked out the rest as I dove into my car and squealed from the parking lot, leaving a sick man to proclaim my guilt to the Victorian Teahouse and the Good Word Christian Bookstore.

CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR

S
ully could almost smell Porphyria's lodge as he nosed the rental car up the road that snaked around the Smokies to her door. Always lit fireplaces, paths of wet leaves, maples and oaks in new leaf. It all pulled him forward until he was suddenly, magically there, on the washed-out gravel driveway. The sun spattered his windshield and soaked his face, and he waited for the comfort of being steps away from her wisdom.

But his veins still raced with the fear that any minute he would once again see flashing taillights and follow them over the precipice of his sanity.

His cell phone rang. Demi's number.

“Hey, there,” he said. “You okay?”

“I have no idea.” Her voice was like wire.

“What's going on?”

“Zach. He found me, Sullivan—at the tearoom. I don't know how. It's like he was stalking me.” She huffed. “Do I sound paranoid?”

“Tell me some more.”

She did—a breathless story of Zach Archer hiring the photographer and setting her up to get her away from Rich. Sully struggled to keep up, especially when she mentioned Van Dillon. Setting that aside for later rumination, he followed her to the tearful conclusion, when Zach shouted obscenities at her in front of a place that had been her refuge.

“I'm so sorry, Demi,” he said. “You're not thinking for a second he was right about that.”

She paused an instant too long.

”Don't go there. Don't even drive by.”

“How can I not? I did prostitute myself.”

“Why?”

“Excuse me?”

Sully turned sideways in the seat. “Why did you have sex with Zach even though you didn't love him?”

“I thought I loved him—which doesn't make it right.”

“We've established that. But what did you get in return? What was worth doing something you knew was wrong?”

She breathed, long and sadly. “The way it made me feel. Not just sexually, but—needed, wanted.”

“Ding-ding,” he said softly. “And you've already given all that to God, who has now wiped it away.”

“As if it never happened.” Demi's voice wavered. “I was starting to believe that.”

“What's stopping you?”

“Hello! He dredged it up and screamed it at me across a parking lot for half of Bremerton to hear!”

“You believe some guy with a borderline personality disorder over Jesus Christ?”

“What kind of disorder?”

“I can't be sure without observing him myself, but this whole thing of arranging your life for you, and his outburst when you said he was sick—it smacks of borderline.”

“It was creepy the way his whole face, his whole body, changed when I said that.”

“Yeah—if you see him or talk to him again, I wouldn't use that word.”

“I have no intention of talking to him again, ever. In fact, if he tries to get near me, I'm getting a restraining order. I'm going to have bruises on my arms from where he grabbed me.”

Sully sat up and leaned against the steering wheel. “I want you to document that—have somebody take pictures. And do not, under any circumstances, open the door to him.”

“He doesn't know where I live . . . I don't think.” She seemed to trip over it.

“I'm not trying to scare you,” Sully said. “Just don't take any chances. He's at the very least unstable.”

“Was I a complete idiot to ever trust this man?”

“No. He's very good at what he does, which is, obviously, manipulating people. You're apparently not the only one he's fooled.”

“He never mentioned an ex-wife. Way back when, he gave me this whole story about how he'd never found what he was looking for until me. And I bought that, like a moron.”

“Buzzz!” Sully said.

“I have to admit I was gullible.”

“Which gets you where? I think you ought to focus on how strong you were to walk away from him. You want to know how I see it?”

“Do I have a choice?” Wryness crept into her voice.

“I think you not only took away his future—this whole idea he had that the two of you were going to run away and live in bliss for the rest of your lives—you took away his past too. With you he thought he could actually love, unselfishly. But it was all about him, all the time, because that's the way with these people.” Sully shrugged. “You snuffed out his illusion about himself, and he can't take that.”

“He had to make it my fault.”

“Ding.”

After a heavy pause, she said, “Every door is closing, Sullivan. I haven't even told you about my last conversation with Rich—or what went down with Mickey.” She hesitated again. “I'll fill you in on all that when you get back. You have things to take care of. Go do it. I'm okay now.”

He curled his fingers around the phone. As soon as they hung up, he'd be treading emotional water again. There would be nothing to stall him from going inside and confronting himself with Porphyria. The thought enervated him to the tips of his toes.

Porphyria had been trying to tell him this for thirteen years. So had Ethan. So had God Himself. Now it ran through him like barbed wire. He couldn't ignore it anymore.

But there was still a trace of Demi in his mind as he made his way to the door.

So Van Dillon was the photographer after all. Either Zach Archer
was
a “moron,” as Demi herself would say, or Van Dillon
wasn't.
Tatum had pegged him as one, although Sully had seen evidence of his general cluelessness the night he'd attacked her in front of the bakery.

That still didn't explain how Estes and St. Clair got the pictures. Maybe Van saw a way to make even more money than Zach had paid him, and sold the photos to them too. It was an ugly thought, but one he couldn't dismiss.

Nor
could he bypass the possibility that Zach Archer was headed for a mental split. Manhandling Demi—exposing his dark side— verbally abusing her—those weren't signs that Demi was entirely safe.

Sully stopped at the top of the age-sagged steps. Maybe he should return to Washington and walk her through this. He'd made a commitment to her, and his own issues would still be here when he came back.

“I wondered when you were going to find the nerve to get out of your car.”

He squinted at the silhouette in the screen door. Ebony. Tall within. Expectant in that way that offered only two choices: go to her with the courage it took to be healed, or run like a rabbit and live in fear of those taillights forever.

“Now if I can find the nerve to get from here to the door,” Sully said.

“No need.”

The door swung open, and she strode toward him in two magnificent steps, arms open. Sully fell against her and sobbed.

“The good Lord has enough nerve for both of us,” she hummed in his ear. “He always has enough.”

Sully thought he remembered every inch of Porphyria Ghent—until he was face to face with her again. Now he sat across from her on one of a pair of matching red-and-gold chintz love seats worn shiny by years of sit-downs with those brave enough for her wisdom. He knew, as he always did at these back-again times, that there was no way to recall all the details of her complexity unless he was in her presence. It kept him coming back.

She sat on the other love seat, coffee-colored hands folded in her lap. Every few moments she nodded her close-cropped head, iced in white like a cupcake. Now and then she let a still-black eyebrow rise and fall. Always her eyes stayed on him, in wonder, like a child's. A child with a soul as old as compassion itself. He'd forgotten the two tiny exquisite vertical lines on either side of her mouth, the only trace of wear on her face. He hadn't remembered the way her chin sloped back to her neck like that of a marvelous knowing turtle. How had it slipped his mind that her depthless java skin was all one seamless piece, like her self?

“Looks like you've been holding that back for some time, Dr. Crisp,” she said finally.

Sully ran a hand under his nose and drew back mucus. He looked at her helplessly, fingers dripping.

“Kleenex is right there on the table,” she said. And then her lips, full enough for thirty smiles, parted and lit her face, and the room, and Sully's heart. “You're still an incorrigible kid, Sully Crisp. I'm glad to see it. Now we can get some work done.”

Sully blew his nose noisily and nodded toward his shoes. “You mind?”

“Take them off—and that ridiculous sport jacket. Did you think you were coming to a board meeting?”

“I thought I was a grown-up, Porphyria.” He shrugged off the jacket and tossed it at the rocker next to the fireplace. It slid to the floor and lay like a puddle.

“There was your first mistake,” Porphyria said. “It's the first one everybody makes.”

Sully worked each shoe off with the toes of the opposite foot and folded his legs up under him on the love seat.

“Now grab a pillow.”

Sully cocked his head at her.

“You'll end up hugging a pillow before you're through. You might as well go ahead and grab one.”

Grinning, Sully selected a yellow-and-gold striped one from the comfortable tumble of pillows on the floor. As he pulled it to him, the tears threatened again.

“Let them come,” she said. Her eyes were closed.

“You can feel them,” Sully said. “You can feel my tears.”

“And now so can you. Holding them back is the second mistake most people make.” She opened her eyes and widened them at him. “Now suppose you tell me about the rest of them.”

“The rest of the mistakes?”

“Starting with the last one you made—up there in Washington.”

Sully let his head fall back and gazed around the room as he filed through what now seemed like an endless list of wrong turns.

Every nook and corner of the room burst with a drum or a zany carved giraffe or a cane carved and waiting for her to need its assistance, which hadn't happened yet, not even at eighty. On a dim square of wall, crowded between an illuminated copy of the Lord's Prayer and a photo of a tribal African woman and her slip of a baby, a diploma from the Graduate School of Psychology, Purdue University hung.

Porphyria Ghent, Doctor of Psychology, 1956. In its plain black frame, it didn't announce that she was the first African American woman to receive an advanced degree at that university. Nor did she. The education of this wise woman had taken place wherever she went, wherever she touched lives, wherever she found truth.

Sully looked now for another piece he'd forgotten, and it was still there. The prayer stand, in front of the dining room window that looked down over the mountainside, now frosted in lavender. That was her true classroom—the place where she went to her knees and wept and cried out and whispered. And listened.

“I made the same mistake I've been making for thirteen years,” Sully said. He pulled his eyes back to Porphyria, who still watched. “I tried to help someone else find her answers, to keep myself from finding my own.”

“I'm sure you did more than ‘try to help.' I'm sure you immersed yourself into her issues like a fat lady in a hot tub.”

“I did. You know I did.”

“Well.” She refolded her hands as if they were handkerchiefs she'd just ironed. “Why didn't it work this time?”

He shook his head. “I don't think it's ever worked completely. I look back now, Porphyria, and I realize that with every new project I took on—the clinics, the radio show, the books—I tried to bury it deeper, but a little bit managed to seep out.” He gave her a wobbly grin. “I'm like a backed-up septic tank.”

“Now there's a lovely image.”

“I knew better. I would turn myself inside out not to let a patient do what I've done with my own stuff.”

“You finished?”

“Finished what?”

“The self-flagellation. I don't want to interrupt you until you've got the job done.”

Sully let his chin drop to his chest and watched his knees disappear in a blur. “That's why I'm here. If I don't stop, I won't be any good to anybody.”

“Least of all yourself.”

He looked up at her. She'd narrowed her eyes.

“You're saying I've had a death wish?”

“I'm saying you have had no regard for Sullivan Crisp, the man in pain.” She fluttered a hand at him, like the ruffled feathers of a disgruntled dove. “Hear me, Sully. Hear me all the way down into the bottom of your hurting self where you can't forget it. Like everybody else, until you're dead—you're not done.”