Redemption (25 page)

“Jane?” Kit’s voice was full of apprehension. No response. “
Jane!
” Now there was more aggravation. Nothing.

Kit’s ears perked up as she heard the distinct sound of metal clicking. Her heart raced. She took several steps toward the car. “Jane P.! What are you doing?”

The silence was broken by the clink of a piece of metal spinning into the air and landing in the hard dirt. Kit’s hesitation faded, replaced by frustration. “Jane! Answer me!” She moved closer to the Mustang, standing in the blinding beam of light. Another piece of metal catapulted through the air, landing in front of Kit. She leaned down to retrieve the object. It was one of Jane’s sobriety chips. “Jane!” Kit yelled into the darkness. “Where are you?”

Jane answered by tossing the snakestone toward Kit. Collecting the stone, Kit moved around to the rear of the Mustang.

Jane sat with her back supported by the bumper and her legs sprawled in front of her. In her hand, she clutched a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Oh, dear God,” Kit whispered. “Give me the bottle.”

“I’m not done yet,” Jane slurred as she ran her fingers through her stringy hair.

“Oh, you’re done. You are beyond drunk!”

“No. I can still feel, so I’m not toasted yet.”

“Jesus! You’ve drunk half a bottle!”

Jane unsteadily slid her body up the rear of the Mustang. “Oh, you know the AA saying, Kit: ‘One bottle is too many. A hundred bottles aren’t enough.’” She lifted the whiskey bottle to her lips just as Kit swiped it from her hand.

“You drove in this condition?” Kit yelled. “How dare you! You could have killed someone or yourself!”

“On
this
road? I might have nailed a jackrabbit or two, but aside from that, traffic was pretty clear. Give me the bottle!” Jane tried to snatch the whiskey, but Kit was too quick for her and hurled the sloshing bottle into the darkness and sagebrush. She took an angry step toward Kit. “Well,
fuck you
!”

Kit responded with a violent slap across Jane’s face that sent her into the dirt. “Shame on you, Jane P.!” Kit stood over Jane’s prone body in a menacing pose.

 

 

Jane shook off the rush of heat that stung her cheek and looked up at Kit. “Well, I’ve been here before! Why don’t you start kicking? Kick me as hard as you can! Kick me until I bleed! Go on! Obviously, I bring that desire out in people!”

“How could you know as a kid that you reminded your dad of his own father?”

“And that gave him the right to do what he did to me?” Jane yelled.

“Of course not! But it finally gives the whole mess some kind of context.”

“
Context
? This is not a fucking intellectual argument!
This is my life!
”

“Your dad was following an unconscious pattern—”

“Fuck you!”
Jane screamed into the darkness.

“You triggered the anger in him.” Kit refused to be cowed by Jane’s drunken rage. “Maybe it was a word, or a look, or the shake of your head that was just like your grandfather—”

“Spare me the psychobabble
—
”

“Just like
he
probably triggered something in his own father’s eyes. Don’t we all just follow patterns our entire lives? Aren’t you following an old pattern right now? Life gets too real and so you have to kill the pain with a whiskey bottle?”

Jane struggled to her feet. “My father is
not
a victim! He could have chosen not to do what he did to us! Carl’s telling me all this shit about my dad and the voice starts in my head again.
His voice
! ‘Get up, you stupid bitch! You’re
nothing
!’ That’s what I’ve been trying to drown out of my head for the last two hours!” Jane’s voice choked up with emotion as tears started falling down her face. “But then, there’s his
other
voice. His
younger
voice! And it’s screaming at his brother, begging him to stop kicking him in the balls. Which one of those voices am I supposed to listen to?”

“Both of them,” Kit softly replied.

Jane wiped the tears from her face. “No! He can’t be human. He
has
to be a monster! That’s the shoe that fit him! He can’t be both the victim
and
the perpetrator!”

“Sure he could. Lou Peters is both the victim and the perpetrator.”

“What about responsibility? He never hung his head for what he did to us. Up until the second he died, he was a twisted asshole. He didn’t pay enough!”

“That’s not for you to say. That’s between your father and God.”

“I can’t trust God to punish my father. God has too much mercy!”

“So, God’s weak?” Kit asked with an incredulous smirk.

Jane searched for a snappy retort but came up blank. “All I know is how to hate my father.”

“Let me tell you something, your hate is going to do
nothing
to him, but it’ll suck the life out of you. Take a good, hard look at me, Jane P., because
this
is
you
in twenty years. Maybe ten, if you really let that vengeance swell up and eat away at your liver or your lungs. And when you’re lying on your deathbed, dying of cancer, and staring at the ceiling and saying, ‘Why God?’ if you listen real closely you’ll hear God reply, ‘I didn’t do it to you! You did it to
yourself
!’ You with your unforgiving, single-minded hatred. Go on and hate yourself to death.” Kit turned, lost in thought for a second. “There’s a lot of sayings out there. One of them is ‘Find the
middle ground
and you will find peace.’ You really
can
live a life that doesn’t drown in the extreme of hatred or rage if you stop self-destructing long enough! There’s another saying: ‘Sometimes the only cure for cancer is death.’” Kit let that one sink in. “I can handle that. Death is not a theory for me. It stares me down every goddamned day. But when I take my last breath, know this: my heart will be at peace and not at war with my past. I will die with redemption.” Kit turned and headed back to the house.

“How do you stop the memories?” Jane asked.

Kit turned back to Jane. “You stop fighting.”

“If I stopped fighting, I would die.”

“Then you’ll be reborn,” Kit flicked the snakestone to Jane who caught it. “When you let go, you don’t fall into the void. You can fall into the hand of God.”

“When you close your eyes for the last time, are you gonna fall into the hand of God?”

“No, Jane. He’s already holding me.”

 

 

DECEMBER 30

Jane emerged from the bathroom, hair sopping wet and smartly dressed in a pair of dark denim jeans and a tan turtleneck.

“I’ll fix you guys an omelet,” Carl announced, “like none you’ve ever tasted. A midget in Morocco gave me the recipe. The only thing better than this omelet is sex.”

Jane crossed to the breakfast bar as Kit walked into the steamy bathroom and closed the door. Carl opened the cupboard and brought out a bottle of vitamins. He took four large gelatin capsules out of the bottle and handed them to Jane.

“What’s this?”

“Evening primrose oil. They shorten the duration of a hangover.” Carl slid a glass of water to Jane. “They also make your skin soft and supple.” He smiled and began breaking eggs into a large bowl.

“Is that what the midget in Morocco told you?” Jane downed the capsules.

Carl’s eyes twinkled, happy to have someone to share his repartee. “We should have spent a lot more time together when we were growing up, cousin!” He added butter to a skillet and a dash of half-and-half to the eggs. “Just to know you weren’t alone.” He brought out a series of spices. “The one thing I’ve come to understand since getting sober is the concept that there is no good or bad in this world...there just ‘is.’ In that ‘is’—that place of nothing—you find true peace.”

“Jesus, you sound like Kit.”

Carl poured the eggs into the skillet. “So, I checked on the Internet this morning about that kidnapped girl in California. You’re gonna walk into a circus.”

“It is what it is, Carl.”

“I know you’re keeping your role in this close to the vest, but my probing investigative journalistic penchant made me do a little checking.”

“Checking what?”

“Katherine Clark.”

Jane snuck a look toward the bathroom and heard the shower running. “What about her?”

Carl casually worked the omelet off the side of the pan. “I subscribe to a service that gives me access to reams of newspaper articles, old and new. I entered Katherine’s name and found one
with her photo on it from 1990. Had to do with her granddaughter who was kidnapped and killed.”

“That’s right.”

“From what I read, she knew the guy who did it. Lou Peters?”

Jane wasn’t sure whether her queasy stomach was due to her hangover or Carl’s questions. “She knew him. Look, I really can’t talk much about the case—”

“Did you do a background check on her?”

Jane glanced once again at the bathroom. The water was still running. “Where are you going with this?”

“I dug deeper and found that Katherine Clark is no stranger to the court system.”

The queasiness truly set into Jane’s gut. “Talk to me.”

“She was arrested in 1985, along with a group of radicals, for taking part in the bombing of a shoe factory in Monterey, California. Four innocent people who worked at the factory were killed. She was charged with aiding and abetting the ringleader of the group with materials that were used to make the bomb that blew up the factory.”

The shower water stopped running.

Jane leaned closer to Carl. “What was the upshot?”

“I’m not sure. I found that one article and the fact that she’s in the system.”

Jane tried to sort it all out and fight off an oncoming headache. “Five years later, her granddaughter’s killed.”

“What are you thinking?” Carl asked confidentially.

Jane said the first thing that came to mind. “Revenge....”

“The granddaughter was a revenge kill? By who?”

Kit opened the bathroom door, dressed in a pair of black pants and a blood-red, knit tunic. “Oh, Carl, the coffee smells divine!”

Thirty minutes later, Jane and Carl packed the last bags into the trunk of the Mustang. Kit settled into the front seat as Carl sidled closer to Jane.

“Remember, cousin,” Carl said in confidence, “there are no accidents. Just a series of non sequitur events that all serve to solve the greater puzzle in the end.”

Jane took a drag off her cigarette. “Sounds very Buddhist,” she said warily.

Carl smiled as he embraced Jane with a hearty hug. He spoke in confidence to Jane. “Everybody in this world has something to hide, cousin.
Everybody.
” Jane considered Carl’s portentous remark. “I’ll light a stick of incense and ask that you be protected on your journey.”

“Throw a penny in the pond and a dash of salt over your shoulder, too,” Jane said, heading to the driver’s seat and tossing the cigarette into the dirt.

“Will do!” Carl said brightly. He waved to Kit. “Take care of yourselves!”

As they drove away, Jane looked in the rearview mirror. Carl’s hands were clasped in a prayer pose and pointed toward the car.

 

 

Jane figured it would take a little over eight hours to get to Oakhurst. Was it worth it to speed to a destination that might end up being a subterfuge? If she was being played by Kit, was it wiser for Jane to confront her now or hold back and wait to discover Kit’s true purpose? But the question that spun endlessly in Jane’s head as they neared Oakhurst was whether she was traveling with a woman who had more nefarious motives planned and was covertly using Jane to execute a criminal plan. The questions layered one on top of the other with no answers.

Jane turned on the radio so she could hear something else besides the sound of her own thoughts. She slowed the Mustang as she curved down the two-lane road that led into Oakhurst. It was the top of the hour and the local news station’s headlining story only added to her growing trepidation.

There had been an arrest in the kidnapping of Charlotte Walker.

And the perp’s name was
not
Lou Peters.

CHAPTER 17

The suspect’s name was Trace Fagin. He was a married, thirty-eight-year-old father of two children from South Dakota. As was typical, the media referred to him as a “person of interest,” which led Jane to believe they had some physical evidence that linked Fagin to Charlotte Walker. Immediately, Jane flashed on Charlotte’s red leather jacket. Kit and Jane listened intently to the sheriff’s voice on the radio as he gave the usual vague replies to reporters’ questions, prefaced by the words, “At this time....”

“At this time, we can report that Mr. Fagin’s vehicle has been impounded.”

“At this time, Mr. Fagin is considered a person of interest and is cooperating with both detectives and the FBI.”

“At this time, we are still considering this case open, but are very interested in any information Mr. Fagin may have regarding Charlotte Walker.”

“So as not to jeopardize our case, at this time, we are not releasing whether we found any physical evidence that links Mr. Fagin to Charlotte Walker.”

To Jane, it was your basic press conference—just enough information to appease the public, but not enough for an intelligent person to garner any use able data to determine Fagin’s guilt or innocence.

“He didn’t do it,” Kit announced.

“That remains to be seen,” Jane replied, turning off the radio and searching for a motel with a vacancy sign. A soft rain began to fall onto the water-swept streets.

“He didn’t do it, Jane!”

“Maybe he did. Maybe Lou is absolutely innocent.” There was a stinging tenor to Jane’s voice as she kept her eyes focused on finding a motel along the main drag. Her suspicion was more firmly planted upon Kit Clark and her past nefarious dealings. Carl’s unsettling disclosure of Kit’s arrest three decades ago in relation to a shoe factory bombing that killed four people was beginning
to seriously rankle Jane. The pervading thought that Kit was using her to instigate some kind of criminal objective was becoming more possible in Jane’s mind. Perhaps Kit was bent on revenge for Ashlee’s murder and this trip was a ploy for Jane to lead her right to Lou so Kit could kill him. She was dying of cancer and would never make it to trial for the murder. All that talk about forgiveness and compassion for Lou? Well, that was just New Age deception, as far as Jane was concerned.