Authors: Donna Fletcher Crow
The men left the room to give Laura time to dress. Glenda brought her a skirt and sweater from the closet. “How are you holding up, Glenda? Did you and Kyle have the talk he promised?”
She shook her head. “We tried last night; then when Darren didn’t come home … I keep hoping things will get better. But they just keep sinking worse and worse. Now Kyle will never have time for me. He’s talking about taking Darren away, to give him a fresh start with new friends, get him in a school with accelerated classes and a good computer science program.”
“Kyle would give up his practice here to help Darren?”
“He’ll do anything. And I feel so selfish because I know he’s right. Darren has too much potential to waste, but we have potential too—Kyle and me together. We could build something really great.”
“I wish I could help.”
“You are helping. Just listening helps. And here you are, getting out of your sickbed to go rescue the kid who put you there.”
Laura laughed at the heroic image. “No, no. I’m feeling all right. And Darren didn’t hit me.”
On the way to the church, though, she wondered just how she did feel. Not merely physically. Her headache was barely perceptible—at a level she wouldn’t bother taking an aspirin for. And she had no dizziness as long as she didn’t move too suddenly. But what about her involvement in all this? Of course, she wanted to help her friends, and she felt a real affection for the bright, confused boy, caught midstep at his most appealing vulnerability between boy and man. Her heart went out to him as she thought of him hiding in some corner of a dark, cold stone cathedral. She knew the pain inside him was far worse than her headache, even at its sharpest.
But what about that other pain? The one in her heart. The one they had come to Victoria hoping to heal. Was it to the level that she no longer needed to take aspirin for it? There was no way to know until she and Tom could be alone to talk—and maybe more than talk. But at least Tom had said he wanted—needed, even—to talk to her. Even his saying that showed progress. Didn’t it?
But first she had a job to do. She faced the massive gray stone building. Christ Church Cathedral was huge. Where would she find one small boy in there? Could she go in and call? Would he come to her? What if the door was locked?
As she stood contemplating, two women entered a side door carrying flowers. Must be the day for the altar guild. So much for the idea of going in and just calling Darren’s name. He wouldn’t show himself in front of other people. Tom had tried to insist on going in with her, but Kyle thought that would undermine the whole exercise.
And Laura agreed. The last thing they wanted to do was frighten the lad into going into deeper hiding. She followed the women into the church. The nave echoed as the door clanged shut behind her. In spite of the small group arranging flowers and dusting pews down front, the building seemed empty.
The whole enterprise suddenly struck her as silly. That note could have meant anything. And it couldn’t have been meant just for her. Tom was right; they should have gone to the police. After all, they had Tiegs, so Darren was in no danger now. Not in danger from that thug, at least. But he was still in danger from his own turmoil.
Laura remembered her own feelings at that age, the pain from the harsh things that had been done to her, her reaction to her mother’s austerity … Darren’s situation was entirely different. And exactly the same.
She looked around. Would he be under one of the pews? In one of the side chapels? Why hadn’t she thought to ask Kyle if the church had a crypt? What about a baptistery? There must be hundreds of nooks and crannies here. Which one would he choose?
Then she thought.
Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Glenda had said. Quasimodo lived in the bell tower. She turned to the small door in the back corner of the nave. It creaked as she opened it. Laura surveyed the narrow stairway before her. The pain at the back of her head reminded her that there were few things in the world she wanted to do less than climb a dark stairway to a tower where someone just might be waiting to hit her over the head again.
No, that was silly. That overactive imagination Tom was always accusing her of. But then, maybe it wasn’t imagination. Maybe it was good sense. She forced her feet upward, stiff-legged, one step at a time. “Darren?” She tried calling out in a wavery voice.
Did she hear a soft scuffle above her head? She told herself it could be mice. But the thought wasn’t comforting. “It’s me. Laura.” Her voice echoed.
Her feet scraped the stones, each wedge-shaped tread circling upward. Another sound that could be a whisper. Or the sound of wings. Were there bats in this tower? She resisted the impulse to throw her arms over her head. The stairs curved around the tower, getting narrower as they went up. Laura grasped the cold iron handrail and carefully placed her foot on each worn stone step.
The stairway wrapped around two more turns, then Laura stepped out on a bare wooden floor in a small square room. Enough light filtered through the slatted vents to leave no doubt that the space was empty. She turned around slowly, looking for candy bar wrappers or footprints in the dust—any possible clue.
Then she saw, in the dimmest corner, a wooden stairway, really just a ladder, leading to a trap door in the floor above. Well, she’d come this far. She wasn’t backing down now. “Darren.” The sound of her own voice made her jump. “I’m coming up. Don’t be afraid. If you’re there.”
The plank was heavy. Laura pushed up on it. It was probably locked. They wouldn’t want vandals or pranksters getting up here playing the bells at odd hours. She gave one more shove. The covering above her head yielded so suddenly she almost lost her balance. It slammed back onto the overhead flooring, raising a cloud of dust. Laura sneezed violently.
A hand reached down the yawning aperture to help her up. She ascended the last three steps and came out on the landing with a flourish. Then she stopped, blinking. “Who are you?”
A girl with long blond hair and wide, frightened eyes faced her on the other side of the opening.
“Janelle is your girlfriend from Calgary?” Glenda asked as she handed around the Big Macs and fries.
Darren nodded, wolfing half of his sandwich in two bites. They’d been over all the ground once, but it was so hard to take it all in, it seemed they needed to ask every question twice.
“I just don’t see why you couldn’t have told me.” Kyle’s hamburger cooled, untouched.
“You would have made her go home.”
“Not if what you tell me is true.” Apparently the badgerings that Lewis, Janelle’s older half-brother, had plagued her with as a child were turning to more sinister demands now that she was growing up. And her singleparent mother, who doted on her bright and shining son, would not take the girl’s complaints seriously. Darren had given a rather cryptic account of the situation, and Janelle had said almost nothing. The whole matter would take months—maybe years—of talking and counseling. “You should have told me, Darren. There’s no way I can help you with something I know nothing about.”
“Help? You mean you’ll help Janelle too?” Darren had explained that he had agreed to work for Tiegs to get money to help Janelle. Several of his acquaintances at school did such things routinely to make money to buy drugs. Darren had reluctantly agreed to talk to the police.
But that could wait until these poor starved waifs had eaten their fill. And until the six of them had all their questions answered.
“Of course I’ll help. What on earth did you think you were going to do, anyway?” Kyle’s voice clearly showed the tug-of-war he felt between anger at Darren’s behavior and anguish over his love for the boy.
“We were going to go away together.” It was the first time Janelle had spoken.
“Away? Where?”
“I don’t know. Vancouver, maybe. Someplace we could get jobs.” She dropped her head and the straight blond hair covered her face like a veil. “I could lie about my age. I look older, and Darren said—”
“I said I could take care of her!” There was a fierceness about the boy/man that almost made one think he could do it.
“Darren.” Kyle gripped his brother’s shoulder. “Is Janelle pregnant?”
“No! It’s not like that. I haven’t touched her.”
Janelle’s shoulders started to shake. Glenda put her arms around her.
Laura looked at Tom. “I think we should leave them to sort this out as a family.”
Tom stood and offered his hand to help her from the booth. “Right.” Tom turned to Kyle. “So long. Thanks for everything.” He stuck out his hand. “We’ll keep in touch. I’m sorry we have to get back to Boise, but it’s business. We’ll leave depositions—or whatever they want—with the police.”
Laura couldn’t believe she heard correctly. She just meant go back to the hotel. Not turn their back on everything. “Tom, wait—” He hurried her from the restaurant.
A few minutes later Laura was once again ensconced in the big bed in their Empress suite. But she was far from relaxed. “Tom, we can’t just run out on our friends like this.” Glenda was the first girlfriend she’d ever had. Classmates, writers’ club associates, neighbors—but this was different. “We should stay for the hearing. We can help.”
Tom’s laugh was more of a snort. “If the all-wise Dr. Larsen can’t take care of his own family, what do you suppose we could do?”
Laura’s heart dropped. She had hoped—a tiny, forlorn hope, but a glimmer nonetheless—that she could still get Tom to agree to counseling if she could postpone their departure. “That’s unfair, Tom. Kyle couldn’t help anyone who wouldn’t talk to him, even in his own family. You can’t judge him for not having helped Janelle. He didn’t even know she existed.”
“Hmph.”
She pressed her point. “We shouldn’t have left them like that. We can’t just go off and never see them again—” Tom started to reply, but she rushed on, “What will happen now? They won’t lock Darren up, will they? They can’t put him in jail like a hardened criminal—” her voice rose.
Tom turned to her sharply. “That’s enough. You’re working yourself into a state, and you’re barely convalescent. Now listen: I don’t know what they’ll do about the runaway girl, but Darren will likely be released to Kyle’s custody until his hearing. And it’s a good thing if the kid does sweat over what he’s done. He was involved in a very, very serious thing. Making it too easy for him now is the worst thing that could happen.”
“Tom, he’s just a boy. He doesn’t have any parents. He needs love, concern, guidance …”
“Please. Spare me more of this psychological mumbo jumbo.”
“But Darren—”
“Darren is a young hoodlum who has broken the law and almost broke my wife’s skull. And he needs to pay for his crimes.”
“Tom! You’re heartless. Besides, he didn’t hit me.”
“Laura, he was an accessory. They were all in it together. Oh, sure, if you’d been killed, the guy swinging the pipe would get first degree and your darling Darren might get off with second. But do you really think that matters?”
Laura shook her head, tears of weakness forming at the edges of her eyes. She just wanted all those people to be happy—Darren and Janelle, Kyle and Glenda, Kevin and Gwendolyn. She wanted happiness for them as much as she wanted it for herself and Tom. But she was too tired to argue. Tom would never understand how she felt. She leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes in defeat.
She took the painkiller and a glass of water Tom held out to her. “Good,” he said. “You sleep. You need it. We’ll talk later. But we do need to talk. When you feel like it.” Tom turned out the light and left the room.
Laura tried to protest. If Tom wanted to talk, she wanted to listen. But she couldn’t fight through the weight of sleepiness to say so …
I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
Laura woke sometime near midnight remembering how endearing Tom had looked in the hospital. How different. Surely something really important had happened. She had said they needed a miracle. Maybe it had happened. And here she’d been too involved in Darren’s problems even to listen to Tom. No wonder he was so sharp in his approach to the boy’s situation last night.
She heard the clacking of Tom’s computer keys through the French doors even before she opened them. “Hi. Working late?” She grinned at him as he looked up.
He stood up, rubbing his eyes. “Oh, my goodness, how the time gets away. You look better.”
She stretched luxuriously. “Mmm, nothing like a good nap. Want to talk?”
Tom followed her back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed facing her. “So much has happened, and we’ve talked so little, I hardly know where to start …”
She cozied back into the covers, waiting for him to get past the preamble, waiting to hear the good news. She smiled softly.
The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
“… and then Phil called …” Suddenly she focused on Tom’s words.
Phil? That was business. In the middle of all this turmoil with everyone’s future hanging in the balance—the last night of their honeymoon—Tom wants to talk about business?
“It’s a disaster, Laura. The whole Kansas City project has fallen apart. I offered to fly home, or fly to K.C. to try to pick up the pieces, but there aren’t even any pieces left to pick up.”
“What happened?”
Tom ran his fingers through his hair—an indication of how upset he was. Tom never ruffled his hair. “It’s all my fault. Phil didn’t say so—you know what a perfect gentleman he always is. But I was so anxious for the whole thing to go. I guess I pushed too hard. All those phone calls … I meant to be encouraging them, shoring everything up, but I scared them off. They’ve decided to go with a local developer—a more conventional plan. Not as good a deal, but there it is.”
He sat for a moment, looking at his hands. “I just don’t know what we’ll do now. We had banked on this so heavily—literally—and put in months of work, even turned down some smaller clients. We usually have several projects going at once, but this one was so big … I guess we made the mistake of putting all our eggs in one basket …”