When Sparrows Fall (42 page)

“Jack, I asked him to come,” she said. “Remember?”

Numb, Jack nodded. He let go of her.

She faced Mason, who still stood on the porch. “This is my choice, not your revenge. So don’t enjoy it.” She dug into her pocket, pressed something into Jack’s hand, and brushed his cheek with her lips. “I know I can trust you to take care of the children.”

He found her house key in his hand. Finally, she’d given him his own key.

“Don’t lose it,” she added.

“Miranda, you can’t do this.”

“It’s done.”

“My car’s down at the road, Mrs. Hanford,” Dean said. “If you’d come with me, please.”

She gave Jack a hug so swift that he hardly had time to hug her back, and then she walked away, her head high. In jeans, with that cute haircut and her big purse slung over her shoulder, she could have been a suburban soccer mom, except a deputy followed her, slightly to her left and back a few paces. At least he hadn’t cuffed her.

“Lord, no.” Jack came out of his daze and started after them, but a firm hand clamped his shoulder.

“Wait,” Perini said. “Don’t run off. Let’s think it through. What can we do?”

Jack looked between Perini and his wife. “Can y’all vouch for the fact that Jeremiah’s death was accidental, at least?”

They shook their heads in unison. “I never even knew she’d had a Jeremiah,” Perini said.

Jack’s throat went dry, and he ran, his feet pounding down the slippery gravel to the road. The patrol car was double-parked beside a black pickup. Dean had already shut Miranda in the backseat cage like a common criminal.
He’d set her purse on the trunk of the car and was leafing through one of those file folders.

“Dean!” Jack skidded to a halt beside the car.

Miranda stared through the window, her eyes huge. He placed one hand flat on the cold glass. She matched her hand to his, just for a moment, then lowered hers and looked away.

He remembered his written statement.
I, R. Jackson Hanford, will not report Miranda Hanford to DFCS or to any other government agency, for anything, so help me God
. Fat lot of good that did now that she’d reported herself.

He turned to Dean. “Help me out. What can I do? Who can I talk to?”

“An attorney might be helpful.” Dean continued examining her papers. Slow as Moses.

“What’s in the files? Did she tell you?”

“Yep, she told me.” Dean closed the file and picked up her purse. It looked small in his big hand. “We’ll be at the station. On the back side of city hall, right downtown.”

No mention of checkers and coffee now. Dean was all business. He climbed into the car, slammed the door, and drove away. In the rear window, Miranda’s head bobbed like a bird’s as the car rounded the curve and caught a pothole. Then she was gone.

Hamlet’s words wept in Jack’s head.
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow
.

“Not my sparrow. No.”

He ran for his car.

thirty-one

A
lexander Whitlow was out of town, and Miranda declined to use another attorney. No legal advice could have swayed her into telling her story any differently.

She remembered the sheriff’s name from the last election. Dixon Sprague. Carl had voted for him. A good man, Carl had said. A believer, even if he didn’t have the whole truth of God.

As if anybody did.

The air was chilly in the conference room. Or did they call it an interrogation room? The walls were bare, and the floor was dingy. A bleak place. So many people must have sat in the same chair, clinging to hope. Or losing it.

About the same age as Thomas Dean, Sheriff Sprague had that same cautious, slow-moving way about him, as if he had all day to search for answers.

A female deputy named Lucy Silva had done most of the questioning. She was thorough but not harsh, and she had a way of biting her lip before she
asked the difficult questions. She’d already heard the whole story, but she kept circling back for more details.

Lucy bit her lip now. “Why, exactly, did Jeremiah run for the cliffs?”

Miranda had been dreading that particular question. “He disobeyed me about some little thing. He was afraid he’d get a whipping when Carl came home.”

“Was Jeremiah expecting a particularly severe whipping?”

“When Carl gave a whipping, he meant business. He wasn’t abusive though. He loved our children.”

Lucy Silva exchanged glances with the sheriff. “What did you do when you arrived at the cliffs and saw that Jeremiah had fallen?”

“I tried to reach him, but I couldn’t. I took Timothy and Rebekah and ran back to the house, screaming. Carl had just come home from work. I started to call 911, but he—he yanked the phone out of my hand and then pulled the line out of the wall.”

Sprague frowned and wrote something on his notepad. He hadn’t been talking much. Just frowning. Making notes. And referring to the files from Mason’s office over and over, although each one held only three or four sheets of paper.

“Carl ran for the cliffs.” A spasm shook Miranda. “He came back carrying Jeremiah.”

Sprague made another note. “Don’t go on until you’re ready.”

“Carl helped me prepare Jeremiah’s body. He built a little pine coffin that night and dug the grave in the morning. We had a funeral service while the little ones were sleeping. Carl said there was nothing morally wrong with what we’d done, burying our own child on our own property. Legally though …” She stopped, searching for the right words. “He was so afraid that DFCS would take the younger children. He was strict, but he loved them. And we knew of good families who’d lost custody of their children because of anonymous and false accusations. Carl said it would be even worse for us. Jeremiah’s home birth with an uncertified midwife was illegal. Not reporting his birth was illegal. So Carl didn’t report Jeremiah’s death either.”

Sprague looked up. “I don’t understand how you kept a five-year-old child’s life and death a secret. Didn’t anybody notice he was missing? Friends, family, neighbors?”

“We had just moved here. We hadn’t met the neighbors. We hadn’t found a church yet. We didn’t have family. We still hadn’t met Jack.”

“Was Jeremiah the only one whose birth wasn’t reported?”

“Yes. Starting with Timothy, we reported them all.”

“What made your husband change his mind about that?”

“I convinced him that we’d have problems if our children grew up without Social Security numbers, but he never reported Jeremiah’s birth. Carl was so afraid of the law.”

“Whew.” Sprague scanned his notes again. “Let me sum it up. Based on his religious beliefs and what I might call paranoia about the government, your husband neglected to notify the authorities when your first baby was born at home. Five years later, when that child ran from a whipping and died in a fall, your husband was afraid you would lose custody of the two younger children. He buried your son on your property and forced you to live as if your firstborn child had never existed. Is that accurate, Mrs. Hanford?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Was your pastor involved in that decision?”

“No, it was my husband’s decision. We didn’t meet Mason until later. Carl made me go to him for counseling.”

“Made you?”

“Carl thought I was suicidal. I wasn’t. I was grieving for Jeremiah, but Carl wouldn’t let me cry, even in our own home. Carl wouldn’t even let me say his name. He wanted Timothy to forget Jeremiah, so nobody at all would remember him.”

“Now you have six children, and none of them know about your first child?”

“I told them, not long ago, but they don’t know the details. Nobody knows all the details except Mason and me. Please don’t drag Jack into it. He had no idea that Carl and I did anything illegal.”

“And today, with most of the church assembled for a workday at your pastor’s home, he shared in public what you’d confessed to him in private. That you’d helped your husband conceal Jeremiah’s death.”

“Yes. I had just accused Mason of … moral failures. So I knew what was coming.”

“You knew he would retaliate by revealing the problems that you’d shared with him in confidence? And that’s why you’d already called my deputy?”

“Yes sir. I needed to get it off my chest anyway.” She inhaled so deeply that her ribs hurt like they hadn’t hurt in weeks. “Maybe I’ll go to prison, but at least my children will go to their legal guardian—a man I trust—and not to DFCS. And I won’t spend the rest of my life worrying that Mason will turn me in.”

“Because you beat him to the punch. My, my.” Sprague picked up the files and stood. “Excuse us for a few minutes, Mrs. Hanford.” He stopped at the door. “Can I bring you a cup of coffee? It’s always cold in here.”

“No, thank you.”

He and Lucy Silva left the room, closing the door softly behind them.

Miranda bent over the table, cradling her head on her arms. It was a mercy Auntie Lou had passed away. She wouldn’t have wanted to see her great-niece behind bars.

Miranda prayed for her children and for Jack. She prayed for Abigail and for Nicole. And for the church. It would fall apart, the sheep scattered for lack of a shepherd. Robert and Wendy might try to hold things together, but why bother? There were larger, healthier churches that could take in what was left of the flock.

She even tried to pray for Mason—
pray for those who spitefully use you—
but she couldn’t. Not yet.

It was a long time before Sprague and Lucy Silva entered the room again. He’d abandoned his notepad, but he carried Miranda’s files and her purse. His sandy gray hair stood on end as if he’d scrubbed through it with a horse brush.

“Mrs. Hanford, I’m sorry we had to put you through all that,” he said.

“It’s all right.” She hardly recognized her own voice, flat and faint.

“Small-town cops don’t always play by the rules. Thomas Dean, especially, tends to make up his own rules as he goes along.” Sprague sighed. “I’ve known him all my life, and he’s a good man. I remember the day his daughter died.”

“His daughter died?”

“Yes ma’am. Tom lost his little girl to an accidental drowning, and I remember what he and his wife went through when DFCS investigated.” He met Miranda’s eyes. “I’ve been chatting with Tom. The way he sees it, you’ve already been dealt a harsher punishment than any parent deserves. And any penalty given to you by the criminal justice system would fall on your children too. The last thing they need is to be deprived of your love and care.”

She nodded uncertainly.

“As Tom put it to me, you violated the law, but under duress and when you were in shock. One look at the contents of these files, and any defense attorney worth his feed would call this a clear case of psychological abuse. I may need to speak with the DA, but he’s an intelligent man, not likely to waste the county’s money on a shaky case like this when we’ve got real criminals to go after.”

“What are you saying?”

“I may need to contact DFCS. Or maybe not. We’ve already broken every rule in the book, so what’s one more?” He gave Lucy Silva a narrow-eyed scowl. “We don’t intend to let them ride roughshod over this family, do we, Lucy? We can’t let them do what they did to those folks over in the next county.”

“No sir, we can’t,” Lucy said.

“And I am inclined to protect this family from God only knows what might come down the pike. We’ve still got a secret grave on private property though. And I’m not sure what to do about that.” He slapped the files against his leg.

“Mrs. Hanford, I’d intended to write out a statement and ask you to sign it, but I’d prefer that we didn’t put any of this mess in writing, if that’s all right with you.” Sprague placed the files on the table. “These are yours. You might
want to hang onto them for a while, as evidence of what your husband put you through.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t make any promises, but I think you’ll come out all right, even if the DA decides there’s something worth prosecuting. I don’t suppose you’re a flight risk either. Not with all those kids. I’ve never seen such a lively bunch.”

“They’re here?”

“Yes ma’am, your gentleman friend brought them in to make a point, and he made it well. They’re happy and healthy and swarming all over my itty-bitty lobby like bees in a hive. You’d better mosey on out there and tell them they’ve got their mama back.”

“Do you mean …?”

“Yes, you’re free to go. The DA may want to speak with you next week, but he’s a reasonable man. He knows right from wrong, but he knows there are some shades of gray too.”

She stood, lightheaded, hardly noticing when Sprague placed her purse in her hands. He tucked the files into the purse.

“Don’t leave town, now, Mrs. Hanford.”

“I have never wanted to leave town,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Smiling, he waved her past Lucy and out the door.

A short hallway brought Miranda out to the cramped, drab lobby crowded with hard plastic chairs and wilting philodendrons. Jack and Dean stood watching her children as they milled around by the windows that looked out on the rear parking lot of city hall. It was all so small, so casual, so human.

But humans were all God had to work with, and how beautiful those humans could be.

No one noticed her; Jack and Dean’s backs were half-turned to her. Those stubborn, merciful men.

Dean looked neat in his uniform, but Jack was as unkempt as the teenagers she saw sometimes at Walmart. His shirttail was out, and his hair was wild.

“She’s a good mother, Dean,” he said quietly. “The kids are living proof, aren’t they? I wouldn’t haul a passel of young ’uns to the sheriff’s office if we had anything to hide, would I?”

“I don’t suppose you would.” Dean shook his head. “If it were up to me …”

His melancholy voice faded into silence.

Miranda was swimming in air or walking on water, her feet not quite touching the ground as she moved closer to her precious children. They could all go home. Together.

Timothy glanced her way. His eyes grew huge. He hurried across the room. “What happened? Do you have to go to jail?”

“Everything’s all right. I’ll tell you the whole story tonight. You and Jack both.”