Leaving Yesterday (11 page)

Louisville Sluggers had to be the most common bats around. Kurt was a very athletic boy; he’d probably joined a softball league or something. Of course that must be it.

When I reached down to pick it up, I wrapped my hand around a shirt first—it wasn’t that I was concerned about fingerprints, because I knew there was a reasonable explanation for what I was seeing. I think I’d just watched one too many police shows.

I held the bat up, closer to the overhead light of the room. The grain of the wood was worn, chipped on the end, in fact. Years of playing baseball would likely do that to a bat. I rolled it over, noting that it looked perfectly normal. Until the very last of the rotation. A couple of darker areas of the wood caught my attention. I grabbed another towel from the laundry pile and rubbed it across the grain, praying that it wouldn’t pull away blood red. It didn’t. In fact, nothing came off at all. Of course it wasn’t blood, just an old stain, for crying out loud. What had even possessed me to think along those lines? It was a little stain—likely mud. If it were blood, then it would be red, instead of this pale dirty brown. No, this was just dirt.

I knew I was blowing this out of proportion, so I looked into the box to see what remained. I pulled up a towel—completely stiff with dirt—and beneath it found a pair of cleats and a deflated basketball. Sports equipment. Of course. Just like the bat was.

But now what? I hesitated and weighed my options. Put it in Kurt’s room, leaning in a corner, like it was a treasured memento? Hide it away until I knew for sure? Or should I call Detective Thompson and tell him to come take a look?

After several years of teaching at grief seminars, I knew the official answer I would give to a woman in my position. You call the detective. Now. If there is nothing to this, then you sleep easier that night knowing that you’ve done the right thing. If this is indeed the murder weapon the police have spent the last couple of months searching for, then your son has some serious explaining to do, and likely some consequences that he rightly needs to pay.

Only the truth would set you free.

But there was no “you” here.

Only me. Only
my son.

Fourteen

The first thing the next morning, I found myself standing on Lacey’s front step. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder as I pressed the doorbell. Illogical as I knew it was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the entire neighborhood knew I was here right now, and they all knew why. I saw no evidence to back this up. Not a single person was outside. But I saw a flash of movement at an upstairs window inside the Coles’ house. Someone behind the curtains, perhaps?

“Well, this is a pleasant surprise for a Friday. Come on in.”

I startled at the sound of Lacey’s voice and spun around. She didn’t seem to notice, and I was glad about that. Until I looked at her, anyway.

The circles under her eyes were darker than usual, or was her face simply pale? The hair at the back of her head stood out in all directions as if perhaps she’d been lying in bed.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t just drop by like this. Were you sleeping?”

“Of course you should just drop by. You know I’m always happy to see you. And no, I wasn’t asleep. I was lying in my bed watching some of that daytime trash television. You know, the kind that actually kills brain cells every time you watch it.” She coughed a quick laugh. “What’s left of my mind thanks you. Now, come in, sit.” She turned and walked toward her kitchen, never even looking back to see if I followed. Our friendship was such that she just trusted that I would. “You want something cold to drink? Or some coffee?”

“No thanks. I can’t stay long. I just have to ask you about something.”

She dropped into a chair at her kitchen table, as if the effort to walk to the front door and back had been overwhelming. “Ask away.”

“Well, the good news is, Kurt came for dinner last night and it was wonderful. He looked so much better than he has in a long time. He was happy. He’s really determined to make it work.”

“Sounds good so far.”

“Yeah, that part’s great. It’s the rest of it that gets a little fuzzy.”

She smoothed her hand across the white linen tablecloth. “Let’s hear it.”

“Kurt’s former landlord brought by some of his things a while back. I’ve been storing them for him. Last night, after he left, I realized he would need the things in those boxes. I decided it would be a good time to go through everything, wash all his clothes, iron and fold them, you know, the mother instinct kicking in.”

Lacey leaned back and draped her arm across the empty chair beside her. “Let me guess, you found something you wish you hadn’t, and now you’re wondering what to do with it.” Her eyes locked on me, but otherwise her expression showed no sign of alarm whatsoever. Beneath her fragile shell of a body lived the mind of an incredibly sharp woman.

“How do you do that?”

“It’s not that hard to figure out. The boy was an addict who all but lived on the streets for the last couple of years. There’s bound to be some skeletons in his closet, and it only makes sense that some of the skeletons would be evident in his personal effects.”

I could tell by the flip tone of her voice that she had not followed the path all the way to its true conclusion. She must have assumed I’d found drugs or paraphernalia, and I wasn’t ready to correct that assumption yet. “What do you think I should do with what I’ve found?”

“Get rid of it.” She waved a dismissive hand as if the subject wasn’t even worth further discussion.

“But isn’t that illegal?”

“Listen, there’s legal, and there’s what’s right.” She leaned forward on her elbows. “In this case, your son has pulled his life, which was basically a train wreck, back up on the tracks and started it moving in the right direction again. Whatever you found is from his past. That was yesterday, now he’s living in today. The thing to do in a case like this is to clear the debris and let him move, leave all the goop from yesterday behind. Get rid of it.”

“It just feels so … wrong.”

“Hey, you’re the one with the Christian sensibilities, not me. But doesn’t the Bible say something about moving our wrongdoings way beyond the east, or something like that?”

“Huh?” I looked at her for a moment, wracking my brain for what she might be talking about. Then it occurred to me. “Well, there is a verse about Him removing our sins as far as the east is from the west.”

She pointed at me and nodded. “Bingo. That’s the one I’m talking about. Seems to me if God forgives, forgets, and moves on, you ought to be able to do the same thing without much call for conscience. The way I see it, the old Kurt doesn’t even exist anymore. Why should his baggage?”

There were a few flaws in her argument, I knew that there were. But she was giving me an answer that I desperately wanted to hear—even throwing in some biblical wisdom. Maybe God was speaking to me through her. I supposed He could speak that way if He chose to.

I wanted to ask more, to keep her talking until she convinced me fully. But I knew that if I did, she would eventually figure out exactly what I’d found. I didn’t want Lacey, or anyone else, to know that until I decided for sure what to do with it.

“Thanks, Lacey. I knew you’d have the answer.” I stood and hugged her, trying my best to pretend that everything was just fine now.

When I walked back inside my house, I continued to turn all the scenarios over in my mind, as neatly and efficiently as I’d turned the bat in my hand. I went so far as to find the Bible verse in question. I marked the spot in my Bible. It was from Psalm 103:12:
“As far as the east is from the west, so far has
he removed our transgressions from us.”
Yep, the Bible would back me up. Right? Even Lacey knew that. Finally, I reached my decision.

I tossed a load of Kurt’s laundry into the washer, then opened the crawl space to our attic. I climbed the short set of stairs, pulling up with my right hand, holding the bat in my left. Even before I reached the attic space, I felt as if the roof was closing in on me, suffocating me. The entire space was coated with a thick layer of dust that almost obscured the pink rows of foam insulation beneath. I took slow, deep breaths and crawled back across the beams for as far as I dared. When the fear of falling through the ceiling overwhelmed my fear at what I had in my hand, I stopped and pulled back a layer of insulation. I pushed the Louisville Slugger down into the remaining insulation until it lay almost flat, then made sure that it was fully covered when I put the top piece back down. I even used my hand to spread the disturbed dust. Slowly, I retraced my journey and crawled out of the attic.

The obvious best decision was to make no decision at this point. I didn’t have all the facts, and I hadn’t seen my son in a long time. I needed to know if he really had played a role in Rudy Prince’s murder, or if the bat was simply a piece of sports equipment. If I suspected the former, I needed to see how deep and how real a change he had truly made in his life. I promised myself I would put this piece of wood completely out of my mind until some sort of clear answer came to me.

Jana, one of the church secretaries, stood up from her desk the minute I entered the office. “I can’t believe you did that.”

Logic told me there was no way she knew anything I’d just done, but apparently guilt doesn’t listen to logic any better than grief does. “Did what?”

“Called and left a message that you’d be a couple of hours late, without so much as one clue as to what happened. How did dinner go last night? We want to hear everything.”

I looked around the empty room and tried to smile. “We?”

She pushed a couple of buttons on her phone and spoke into it, “Carleigh, Beth, Ken—Alisa’s here.” Then looked up and nodded. “Yes, we.”

Beth ran to her desk and sat. The children’s ministries director came flying into the room, panting like she’d just run a marathon. She dropped into a wing-backed chair against the far wall and clutched her chest. “Didn’t want to miss anything.” She looked around, “Where’s Ken?”

“I’m here.” He leaned against the doorway and offered his usual good-natured smile.

I held up my hands and shrugged, pretending to be as excited as I would have been just twelve hours ago. Before I opened the boxes. I knew that bat was harmless, knew it with all my heart, but an ugly voice deep inside kept telling me otherwise. Now was not the time to listen to it; now was the time for a good appearance. “What can I tell you? He looked great, he’s committed to staying clean and sober, and it felt like old times.” I paused for a minute and gave a true shrug here. “For the most part.”

Beth leaned forward across her desk and reached for my hand. “Was he upset when he found out that Rick and you are separated?”

Rick’s and my separation had seemed like such a huge issue just yesterday. This morning … it felt insignificant. “Uh, we haven’t told him.”

“Are you crazy?” Her hand flew away from mine and up to her mouth in a split second.

I flicked my gaze toward Ken Maddox. His face showed neither approval nor disapproval, an expression he had mastered in his years as senior pastor. Maybe that worked well for the average member who needed counseling, but I wanted to know what he thought about this. I made a mental note to ask him later, when I’d regained enough composure to remember why it mattered.

“I am so sorry,” Beth said. “You know I didn’t mean that like it just came out. It’s just that, he’s bound to … I mean, I just assumed … well, I thought you would tell him.”

Much of what she was saying was correct and I knew it. But there were other things to consider. “I suppose we probably should have. It’s just that we didn’t want to mar his homecoming with bad news.”

“What if he hears it somewhere else first?”

“That won’t happen. I’m going to visit him this weekend up at my sister’s. I’ll tell him about it then. It’ll be easier after he’s had a few days to settle into life outside of rehab.” I hoped I would have settled into an answer for how to discuss the bat with him by then, too.

Ken Maddox nodded. He looked at me as if he wanted to ask more, but he didn’t. We would talk later, and I both looked forward to and dreaded that. He had been the one constant during the storm that had become my family life, and I valued his opinion. Then again, he knew me so well that I was afraid he might realize I wasn’t telling him everything. Still, there was no way he would ever guess my secret, I was sure of that.

I realized that everyone was still looking at me, still waiting for me to say more. I knew what they were waiting for. We’d come to the place in the conversation where I was supposed to give God the credit for saving my son. As much as I knew it was true, something about saying the words simply because it was expected felt wrong to me. Especially when I now realized that God may have saved my son a little too late.

Still, I took the cue. “God has blessed us immensely by answering this prayer.” The women nodded but continued to look at me as if they expected me to say more. This was a time to bring it all home. “You know that neighbor friend of mine that I talk about? Lacey Satterfield? Well, she’s even surprised me by talking about the Bible some because of Kurt’s homecoming.” Okay, that was a bit of a stretch to the truth, but still, the words themselves as spoken were not a lie.