This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (8 page)

But then the light coming in the window showed white paint on the man’s hands, and when he put his shoulders through I saw the old blue Braves cap, and by the time he’d pulled his legs through I saw the old paint-flecked blue jeans and the same green T-shirt he’d had on at the baseball field a couple weeks ago. I clicked on the light on our bedside table just as he stood up straight.

“Wade!” I said. “You ain’t supposed to be here!”

“Shhhhhh!” he said.

Ruby kicked the covers off her and jumped out of the bed like it was Christmas morning. “Daddy,” she said.

“No!” I said. I jumped out of my bed too and tried to stop her from going to him, but she was too fast. Wade picked her up and hugged her to him.

“Hey, baby,” he whispered. He squeezed her tight.

“Put her down,” I said. “You’re going to be in big trouble for this.” I moved like I was walking toward the bedroom door. When he didn’t sit Ruby down, I put my hand on the knob like I was going to open it. “You need to leave,” I said, “or I’m going to holler for Miss Crawford, and she’ll call the—” But he didn’t let me finish.

“Y’all have to come with me,” he said. He stood there holding Ruby and staring down at me. “I’m serious,” he said. “You ain’t even got time to pack nothing. We’ve got to go.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. I gave the knob half a turn.

“I’m serious,” he said. “This ain’t no joke. You can stay here alone if you’re hardheaded, but I’m taking your sister.”

Ruby still had her arms around Wade’s neck, and I knew her well enough to know it was going to take some real convincing to get her to turn him loose.

“We ain’t going to let them send us to Alaska, Wade,” I said.

“This ain’t about Alaska,” he said.

“Then what’s it about?” I asked. I let go of the doorknob and put my hands on my hips to let him know I meant business.

“I’ll tell you in the car,” he said. “But we need to go; I’m serious. It’s not safe here.”

When he said that, I pictured the man I’d seen standing off in the woods that afternoon: the smile he’d given me, his closed eye, the way his skin looked all saggy on his face. Then I looked all around our bedroom, at all the nice, new things we’d been given after we moved into the home. But then my eyes stopped on the open window Wade had just crawled through, and I pictured something else: snow piled up high enough to pour inside onto the carpet; voices I didn’t know that belonged to people I’d never met coming from rooms down the hall in a house I hadn’t seen before; the daytime gone as black as night outside our window.

I looked up at Wade where he held Ruby in his arms, and I don’t know why, but at the time, leaving with him seemed like the best answer. At the time, it seemed like the only safe thing to do.

I jumped to the ground, and then I turned around and waited for Wade to lower Ruby down from the window. When he held her out to me, I could see that his shirt was wet with sweat around the armpits. Ruby and I were both still in our nightgowns; all he’d let us do was put on some socks and shoes. We stood back from the house and watched Wade climb out of the window and jump to the ground. Three houses down, there was a car parked on the street, and Wade took our hands and led us to it.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he whispered. He walked fast, and I could tell he wanted to get as far away from that window as we could. He opened the back door on the passenger’s side and me and Ruby climbed in. When I slid past Wade I caught a whiff of him, and I could tell that he hadn’t had a shower in a while. He went around to the driver’s side and jumped in and started the engine. The radio came on and I heard men’s voices; they were talking about baseball. Wade left the headlights off and drove away from the curb. I got up on my knees and looked out the back window at the home, figuring I might be seeing it for the last time. I saw that Wade had left our bedroom window open and one of the curtains was hanging out. There was a little bit of light shining from the window where I’d left the lamp on by the bed.

And then, just as I was about to turn around, I saw something move in the bushes just to the right of the window, and as we went around the curve I saw Marcus step out of the shadows and into the yard. He was pretty far away, and I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like he was holding the card I’d made for him. I knew that he’d been there the whole time, and I knew that he’d seen us leave with Wade. I wanted to raise my hand and wave, but by the time I did we’d already gone around the curve, and he was too far away to have seen it anyway. I sat down and put my seat belt on, and then I looked over to make sure Ruby had hers on too.

Up in the front seat, Wade clapped his hands, and then he stopped at the stop sign at the end of the street and reached out and turned the radio down. “All right,” he said. He turned around and looked at us. His face was sweating, and his hat was dark blue where the sweat had soaked through it. He was pale, and for the first time I saw that he looked scared, but he still tried to smile at us anyway. “Did y’all hear that?” he asked. Even his voice sounded scared. He pointed to the radio. “Sammy got another one tonight; that’s fifty-five.” He stared at us for a second longer, and then he turned around and drove out of the neighborhood. I saw his eyes look into the rearview mirror like he thought somebody might be following us. “Fifty-five,” he said. “It’s all tied up.”

Brady Weller

C H A P T E R   8

T
he first child I was ever assigned was a newborn baby boy named Stephen. His mama had just come home from the hospital when her boyfriend showed up at the house and shot her twice as she was trying to run out the back door. He went back inside and set the place on fire. And then he shot himself out in the front yard. Maybe he never knew his son was in a crib back in the bedroom. If he did, he sure didn’t do nothing about it.

Almost the entire house burned down around that one bedroom before the fire department got there to put it out. But that little boy survived without a scratch on him.

People on the scene said it was some kind of miracle, especially after they found out how that fire had come to be started and what all had taken place that day.

Now, you tell me a child who survives something like that isn’t going to do something great with his life. Or mine. That little boy’s now living with his adopted family over in Belmont, about ten miles from the place where he should’ve died. He’ll start the first grade this year. There’s a little bit of happiness out there in this world, and sometimes these kids are lucky enough to find it.

Some folks find their way to being a guardian ad litem because they feel moved to help kids and families that can’t help themselves, but not me; that’s not how I got here. I found my way here by trying to undo something that can never be undone, and that will to undo it is probably why I’ve lasted as long as I have. Six years is a long time to watch families being torn apart, parents leaving their kids behind, babies without names being born into this world already addicted to the same things that got their mamas and daddies in trouble in the first place.

But I didn’t always see people as so worthy of being helped, and I certainly didn’t see myself as worthy of helping them. I never would’ve found my way to this place in my life if Judge Shelburne hadn’t called me into his chambers a week after my trial had ended. I’d been a police officer and then a detective for almost twenty years, and it was the first time a judge had ever asked to speak with me. I’d just tossed a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and stubbed it out with my shoe when I saw the judge swing a long black Town Car into a reserved spot across the street from the courthouse. I stood there waiting for him, but he didn’t look at me as he crossed the street slowly, cane in hand, not even giving a nod when he passed me on his way inside the courthouse. “Eight minutes, Weller,” he’d said over his shoulder. “Plenty of time to smoke another one if you need to.”

After going through security where only one of the guards acknowledged me while the other one just stood there with his eyes lowered, I slipped my car keys and loose change back into my pockets and took the elevator up to the third floor. Judge Shelburne’s secretary met me in the office and led me into his chambers; it was just like I’d thought it would be: tall bookcases lined with books, a big oak desk, the judge sitting behind it in suspenders, his sports coat hanging from the same rack that held his robe. He nodded to one of the chairs on the other side of the desk, and I took a seat.

It was quiet while the judge fished a cigar out of a box on his desk and clipped off the end. He stared at me through the flame, its light reflecting in his dark eyes. “You look like shit, Detective,” he finally said. He took a puff and leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.

“I’m not a detective anymore.”

“The hell you’re not,” he said. “You don’t stop being what you are just because some bastards raise hay until you quit. You think I’ll stop being a judge just because a couple jackasses want me to retire? If so, then you’d better think again.” He smiled and leaned forward, the sunlight through the window behind him glinting off his bald head. “They’d better think again too. I’ll stay as long as the people of Gaston County want me to stay. You should keep that in mind because you’re a damn good detective, and you’ve got a lot of friends in this community, especially from where I’m sitting.” He opened the cigar case and turned it to face me. My hand reached out, but I hesitated before picking one up. “These here won’t give you cancer as fast as those cigarettes, but at least you won’t feel like you’re sitting here wasting your time listening to me.”

He handed me the cutter across the desk, and I reached into my pocket for my lighter. “Why am I sitting here?”

“Because it’s time somebody talked some damn sense into your head,” he said. “And it looks like nobody else is willing to do it. So here you are. With me.”

I looked at him and took a puff off my cigar, and then I picked a piece of tobacco off my tongue.

“You’ve been off the job for six months,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

“Giving money to lawyers,” I said. “You know what happened.”

“Hell, everybody in this town knows what happened. But that don’t mean you need to plan on living your life like every day is the day after. That’s not going to do anybody any good, especially not you. You’re half my age, son. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

I took another puff off my cigar, and then I held it up and looked at the glowing end. “My sister’s husband needed somebody to lend him a hand.”

“Doing what?”

“Installing security systems,” I said. “A company called Safe-at-Home.”

The judge tossed his cigar into an ashtray on his desk and wiped his face with both hands. “Good God,” he said. “What the hell? You’re used to being the one who gets called to chase down the bad guys, and now you’re spending your time answering the phone when babysitters and cleaning ladies get the police called on them by accident.”

“What should I be doing?”

“The first thing you should do is stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself and start looking at how you can bring as much good out of this shitty situation as possible.” He stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray, and I thought that meant our meeting was over, but I was wrong. “Hear me out,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on his desk, his fingers interlaced like he was fixing to pray. “You probably know that our guardian ad litem program is made up of attorneys and volunteers, and on the volunteer side we could use somebody who needs another chance to do the right thing, especially somebody who knows the law and who’s seen the things you’ve seen. Most of our volunteers are country-club housewives, and these kids deserve more than that.”

“Nothing wrong with country-club housewives,” I said.

“Not until you drop them down into the middle of a couple of these shit situations. Then they break apart like china dolls. They love the kids, but they can’t take seeing them get hurt.”

I cleared my throat and sat up straighter in my chair. “Who’s going to want me around their kids after what happened?”

“People who don’t have a choice,” he said. “People who have lost their rights to lay claim to their children, people who may not have deserved that claim in the first place.” He stood up from his chair and walked around to the front of the desk and leaned against it, staring down at me the whole time. “Listen, Detective; that boy is gone, it was an accident, and nothing you can do or no prayer his momma and daddy can pray is going to bring him back. You can’t live for him and you can’t speak for him; but there are a lot of kids out there who need somebody to speak for them, and I think you’re just the man to do it.”

I said yes to Judge Shelburne mostly because it was the easiest thing to say at that time, and it took me a while to see myself as someone who could ever speak on a child’s behalf unless it was my own daughter’s. But I got used to it, and the years passed and it became easier and easier, seemed more and more natural. And then I was asked to speak for Easter and Ruby Quillby, two little girls, sisters, who didn’t have anybody else in this world to listen to them and give them a voice. And now they’d gone missing, and their voices were even harder to hear.

Helen Crawford, the woman who managed the home where the girls lived, had already called the police before getting ahold of me, and when I got there that morning I saw a young officer filling out paperwork in a patrol car in the driveway and a couple unmarkeds sitting half in the grass out at the curb. I parked behind Sandy’s old, beat-up Taurus, the same one we’d once shared back when we were partners.

He was coming up through the yard, carrying a cardboard evidence box with both hands, and when he saw me he raised it like he was bringing me a present and I’d gotten there too soon and ruined the surprise. At forty-three, he was three years younger than me and was just as tall and skinny as he’d ever been, and he wore the same kind of dark dress shirt and the same dark tie—loosened at the neck—he’d always worn. I climbed out of my car and watched him set the box inside his trunk and slam it shut. He turned around and stared for a second at the Safe-at-Home emblem on the breast pocket of my red golf shirt. “I hate to tell you this,” he finally said, “but if you’re here to install an alarm you’re too late for it to do any good.” He smiled and put his hands in his pockets.