A Scarlet Cord (20 page)

Results weren’t conclusive yet, Toliver had told Joel, but they were confident that they would discover that the fire that killed Tori
was no accident. There were only four known eyewitnesses to the murder. The dining partner of the dead man was the third. He had disappeared. Joel was the fourth.

In the years since, Joel never had been able to recall the exact chain of events that followed. The Justice Department needed him alive … needed his testimony to convict a crime boss who had eluded them for far too long, at a cost of life far too great. They promised him protection. With only a small suitcase of clothes, he was whisked away to a safe house. Over the next nine months, a succession of safe houses became his home.

Finally the trial date came. And then the unthinkable happened. After fourteen days of testimony, the jury in the case announced that they saw no possibility that they would reach a unanimous decision. Astonishingly, the jury was split nine-three in favor of the defendant. The judge declared a mistrial. Two weeks after Joseph Bradford had sat in the witness stand and looked Stanley Difinni in the eye, fingering him as the murderer of Antonio Sartoni, the case had blown up in their faces like a bomb. The shrapnel had left Joe lethally vulnerable. In light of the fact that two witnesses were dead before the trial even commenced, the Justice Department believed there would be retribution.

Learning that he now had to disappear for good, Joel had confided in his brother. It was against every rule they’d imposed. But he had to talk to someone. Unbelievably, Tim had taken matters into his own hands. Worried that his brother’s disappearance would attract too much attention in Langston, Tim fabricated a fatal accident that conveniently happened after Joe Bradford was called to Connecticut to help Tim with an unnamed family emergency. The letters Tim sent to the college, and the obituaries he had published in the local papers, provoked an outpouring of sympathy for the popular young teacher. Though the newspapers reported that the funeral was in Connecticut, back in Langston, Foxmoor College had held their own memorial service in Joe Bradford’s honor.

After a few weeks, Tim showed up at Foxmoor, conspicuously in mourning, to retrieve Joel’s belongings from his office at the college.

Even Toliver admitted that Tim’s ruse had worked. If it didn’t fool Difinni and his ilk, at least it squelched the possibility of rumors in Langston about Joe Bradford’s sudden disappearance. Though to Joel’s dismay, Tim’s actions spawned new rumors that his death had been a suicide. Toliver had warned that any further involvement on Tim’s part would be considered interfering with the legal process. Tim backed off.

And Joe Bradford
became
Joel Ellington. They transferred him to a secret location near Washington, D.C., and he went through an intense time of orientation at the WITSEC center there. He completed the process in a haze of delayed grief over Victoria. And one day he and WITSEC Inspector John Toliver boarded a plane bound for St. Louis, Missouri. The city was the Justice Department’s choice because Joe Bradford knew not one soul within five hundred miles.

Joel remembered the flight as though it were yesterday. He had sat in the window seat. With his head against the partially open shade, he watched the city of St. Louis appear below the clouds. Thousands upon thousands of houses and hundreds of apartment buildings sat on a maze of nameless streets. He would dwell in just one of those residences. He bore a new name, a new birthdate, and a new Social Security number. He’d shaved off his mustache and cut his hair. The chances of anyone finding him here were almost nonexistent. And for a brief moment, he had felt elation.

Toliver had rented a car at the airport and driven Joel to an apartment on the south side of the city. Now the streets had names, the houses were numbered, and the world didn’t seem so large anymore. His sense of elation collapsed, and he knew fear as he’d never known it before.

Toliver and a WITSEC inspector whose name Joel could no longer remember were his only contacts with the legal system. His brother was the only link to his old life, the only contact he was
allowed from his past—and that was limited to arranged, secure phone calls and letters exchanged through a blind post office box set up by Toliver. At that point, it hadn’t mattered much to Joel. Tori was dead, and with her his whole world had crumbled.

The Justice Department paid his expenses until he found a job, but they strongly advised against a teaching position. “You cannot be anything that Joseph Bradford was,” Toliver told him. The orientation reinforced the need to remake himself completely. If Difinni and his henchmen learned that Joe Bradford was a handball player, they had the means to circulate Joe’s photograph to every major athletic facility in the States. Joel gave up handball.

If Joe Bradford was a teacher, Joel Ellington could not be. It was a small matter to access NEA membership file photos, or to obtain information from other professional organizations. Besides, according to Toliver, Justice drew the line at providing false references—too easily checked out, too many other people to involve. They would fund a new education or job retraining, but beyond a certain point he was on his own.

Five months after his move to St. Louis, Joel finally began to feel relatively safe in the obscure Midwestern area. He was off WITSEC’s dole and out of touch with the inspectors. He enrolled in classes at a small college, took business courses, and worked at a library at night, trying to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. But the longer he studied, the more he knew what he wanted to do. He
was
a teacher. It was in his blood. It was his calling. He had taught English and literature and even Sunday school classes in his church—and he was good at it.

One morning as he’d sat in his small St. Louis apartment, poring over the newspaper with his breakfast coffee, a classified ad caught his eye. A church in the suburbs was looking for a Christian education director. The job description said the position involved some teaching. It wasn’t academia, but it was a start.

Joel applied for the job and, after a congenial meeting with the
leaders of the church, thankfully found the committee rather uninterested in his references. They had been looking to fill the position for a long time. He later learned that they’d made a requisite call to the first reference he listed—a Tim Bradford, who had vouched that Joel had indeed worked with him at Foxmoor College, and that a finer teacher could not be found. Joel had been hired practically on the spot, and in spite of the deceit, his fortune had seemed to change that very day.

These last twelve months, life had seemed a sweet gift. And then the past had risen to haunt him again. He’d told Melanie things about his past that were lies. But they were lies that had strangely mutated into half-truths. They were Joel Ellington’s truth, designed to save Joe Bradford’s life. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what
was
truth anymore. And he couldn’t afford guilt. With Melanie in his life, it was almost as though his identity had been handed back to him. Though she knew him only as Joel Ellington,
he
was the man she had fallen in love with. What she knew of him went deeper than a name. She knew his spirit. And she loved him for it.

Now none of it mattered. He’d lost Melanie and Jerica. Everything that had made it all worthwhile had been taken from him.

Melanie barely slept that night, her thoughts a cacophonous jumble that she couldn’t seem to set aright. Joel was gone. What did it mean? What had gone wrong? She tossed and turned and finally got up and wandered through the house, scarcely aware of what she was doing.

But when Jerica came into the kitchen the next morning, she was waiting.

She stretched out her arms. “Come here, sweetie, Mommy needs to tell you something.”

Jerica climbed up onto Melanie’s lap, still smelling of sleep. Melanie combed her fingers gently through the tangled hair and hugged the little girl close.

“Are you awake?”

Jerica looked up at her and nodded solemnly.

Melanie took a deep breath. “Honey, I have some very sad news.” She pressed her lips together in a futile effort to quell her emotions.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Jerica cupped Melanie’s face in her small hands, and Melanie thought her heart would break.

“Oh, sweetie … Joel … Joel had to go away.”

“Go away? Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, Jer. He sent me a letter to … to tell us good-bye. Joel’s letter said that he loves you very much, and he will always pray for you.”

“But why? I don’t want him to pray for me. I want him to come and see me. Why did he go away?”

“I … I don’t know, Jerica. I truly don’t know.”

“Did Joel go away forever—like my other daddy?”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m not sure. Maybe … I just don’t know.” A sob caught in her throat and she bit her lip to try to stop the tears, but they came anyway. Jerica wrapped her arms around Melanie’s neck and patted her gently. They sat together that way for a long time.

Finally Jerica climbed down from her lap and went back to her room. When she didn’t return after a few minutes, Melanie went to check on her. She stopped short in the hallway outside of Jerica’s room. Quietly she peered into the room.

The little girl was curled into a ball at the foot of her bed, rocking back and forth, gulping back great hiccupping sobs, whimpering over and over again, “My daddy … my daddy. I want my daddy.”

Melanie went to her and sank to the floor beside the little bed. She wanted to curl up into a ball beside her daughter. Instead, she put a helpless hand on Jerica’s head and sat motionless, her back against the cold bedroom wall as she fought the pain that clawed at her chest.

Eighteen

Matthew Mason pulled into the driveway of his sister’s house in Silver Creek and parked the rental car in front of the garage. It had been a long flight with a two-hour layover. He turned off the ignition and expelled a deep breath, steeling himself to face his sister.

It killed him to think about what had happened to Melanie. Hadn’t she had enough pain in her life?

He rang the doorbell and immediately heard hurried footsteps on the entryway tile inside. The door creaked open an inch, then two. A dark little head appeared in the gap.

“Hey, Miss Jerica! It’s your Uncle Matt.”

Jerica gasped and raced back into the house, leaving him standing outside. He heard her voice echo through the foyer.

“Mommy! Mommy! Uncle Matt’s here!”

The door opened again, and Melanie drew him inside, then threw herself into his arms. After a long minute, she pulled away and looked into his face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but the twinkle they always held for him was still there, even behind puffy eyelids.

“Oh, Matt.” She gave him a strained smile. “I’m so glad you came. Come in, please. I’ve got a roast in the oven.”

Later they lingered in the dining room over the remains of dinner. Jerica had left the table to play, and for the first time Matt had a
chance to talk to his sister alone. He reached across the table and put his hand over hers.

“You honestly don’t have any idea why Joel would have disappeared?”

She shook her head and looked up at him with wounded eyes. “I can’t even make a decent guess.”

“He didn’t give you
any
clue why he might have … done this?”

“Matt, I have replayed every single conversation we ever had. I’ve tried to read between the lines of his letter. I come up with nothing. I have
no
idea what brought this on. I thought everything was fine. Now … I’m almost afraid to know.” She looked at the floor. “But I don’t think I can live with not knowing either.”

“May I see the letter?” She’d read most of it to him over the phone that night, but maybe he would see something she hadn’t.

She nodded and rose from the table. Looking as though she were carrying the weight of the world on her slender shoulders, she went down the hallway and came back a few moments later with a worn ivory envelope. Wordlessly she handed it to him.

He read the letter, then folded it carefully and slipped it back into the envelope. “Nothing seemed different between you during the last few days or weeks?” he pressed.

Melanie hesitated. “Maybe … a couple of things. He … Joel didn’t want to put our engagement picture in the papers. He said he didn’t care if I put the story in—or even just my photo. But for some reason he didn’t want his picture used.”

“That didn’t strike you as odd?”

“Of course it did. We argued about it.”

“Why did he agree to have a portrait made if he didn’t want it in the papers?”

“We didn’t go to a professional photographer. A guy from work took that picture of us at an awards banquet, and we liked it so well we had copies made. But when I started talking about using it for the papers, that was when Joel went ballistic.”

“Ballistic? You mean … violent?”

She glared at him. “No, of course not. He barely raised his voice. But he was insistent … He didn’t want his picture in the St. Louis papers.”