Redemption Road: A Novel (3 page)

She’d been in darker places a thousand times, but it felt different without the badge. The moral authority mattered, as did the sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. It wasn’t fear, but
nakedness
might be a decent word. Elizabeth didn’t have boyfriends or lady friends or hobbies. She was a cop. She liked the fight and the chase, the rare, sweet times she helped people who actually meant well. What would remain if she lost it?

Channing,
she told herself.

Channing would remain.

That a girl she barely knew could matter so much was strange. But, she did. When Elizabeth felt dark or lost, she thought of the girl. Same thing when the world pressed in, or when Elizabeth considered the real chance that she could go to prison for what had happened in that cold, damp hole of a basement. Channing was alive, and as damaged as she was, she still had a chance at a full and normal life. A lot of victims couldn’t say that. Hell, Elizabeth knew cops that couldn’t say it, either.

Grinding out the cigarette, Elizabeth bought a newspaper from a machine beside an empty diner. Back in the car, she spread the paper across the wheel and saw her own face staring back. She looked cold and distant in black and white, but it could be the headline that made her seem so remote.

“Hero Cop or Angel of Death?”

Two paragraphs in, it was pretty clear what the reporter thought. Even though the word
alleged
showed up more than once, so did phrases such as
inexplicable brutality, unwarranted use of force, died in excruciating pain.
After long years of positive press, the local paper, it seemed, had finally turned against her. Not that she could blame them, not with the protests and public outcry, not with the state police involved. The photograph they’d chosen told the tale. Standing on the courthouse steps and peering down, she looked cold and aloof. It was the high cheekbones and deep eyes, the fair skin that looked gray in newsprint.

“Angel of death. Jesus.”

Tossing the paper in the backseat, she started the car and worked her way out of the bad parts of town, driving past the marbled courthouse and the fountain at the square, then toward the college, where she slipped like a ghost past coffee shops and bars and loud, laughing kids. After that she was in the gentrified section, moving past condo lofts and art galleries and renovated warehouses turned into brewpubs and day spas and black box theaters. Tourists were on the sidewalks, some hipsters, a few homeless. When she found the four-lane that led past the chain restaurants and the old mall, she drove faster. Traffic was thinner there, the people’s movements smaller and more subdued. She tried the radio, but the talk channels were boring and none of the music fit. Turning east, she followed a narrow road through scattered woods and subdivisions with stone-columned entrances. In twenty minutes she was outside the city limits. In another five, she started climbing. When she reached the top of the mountain, she lit another cigarette and stared out at the city, thinking how clean it looked from above. For a moment, she forgot the girl and the basement. There were no screams or blood or smoke, no broken child or irredeemable mistakes. There was light and there was dark. Nothing gray or shadowed. Nothing in between.

Stepping to the edge of the mountain, she looked down and tried to find some reason for hope. No charges had been filed. She wasn’t looking at prison.

Not yet …

Spinning the cigarette into the blackness, she called the girl for the third time in as many days. “Channing, hey, it’s me.”

“Detective Black?”

“Call me Elizabeth, remember?”

“Yeah, sorry. I was asleep.”

“Did I wake you? I’m sorry. My mind these days.” Elizabeth pressed the phone against her ear and closed her eyes. “I lose track of time.”

“It’s okay. I’m taking sleeping pills. My mom, you know.”

There was a rustling sound, and Elizabeth pictured the girl sitting up in bed. She was eighteen years old, a doll of a girl with haunted eyes and the kind of memories no child should have. “I was just worried about you.” Elizabeth squeezed the phone until her hand ached and the world stopped spinning. “With all that’s going on, it helps to know you’re okay.”

“I sleep mostly. It’s only bad when I’m awake.”

“I’m so sorry, Channing.…”

“I didn’t tell anybody.”

Elizabeth grew suddenly still. Warm air rolled up the mountain, but she felt cold. “That’s not why I called, sweetheart. You don’t—”

“I did like you asked, Elizabeth. I didn’t tell a soul what really happened. I won’t. I wouldn’t.”

“I know, but…”

“Does the world go dark for you, sometimes?”

“Are you crying, Channing?”

“It goes a little gray for me.”

The voice broke, and Elizabeth could picture the girl’s bedroom in her parents’ big house across town. Six days ago Channing vanished off a city street. No witnesses. No motive beyond the obvious. Two days after that, Elizabeth led her, blinking, from the basement of an abandoned house. The men who’d taken her were dead—shot eighteen times. Now, here they were: midnight, four days later, and the girl’s room was still pink and soft and filled with all the possessions of childhood. If there was a message there, Elizabeth couldn’t find it. “I shouldn’t have called,” she said. “It was selfish of me. Go back to sleep.”

The line hissed.

“Channing?”

“They ask what happened, you know. My parents. The counselors. They ask all the time, but all I say is how you killed those men and how you saved me and how I felt joyful when they died.”

“It’s okay, Channing. You’re okay.”

“Does that make me a bad person, Elizabeth? That I was joyful? That I think eighteen bullets was not enough?”

“Of course not. They deserved it.”

But the girl was still crying. “I see them when I close my eyes. I hear the jokes they told between times. The way they planned to kill me.” Her voice broke again, and the break was deeper. “I still feel his teeth on my skin.”

“Channing…”

“I heard the same things so many times I started to believe what he said. That I deserved what they were doing to me, that I’d ask to die before they were done, and that I’d beg before they’d finally let me.”

Elizabeth’s hand went even whiter on the phone. Doctors counted nineteen bite marks, most of them through the skin; but Elizabeth knew from long discussions it was the things they’d said to her that hurt the most, the knowingness and fear, the way they’d tried to break her.

“I would have asked him to kill me,” Channing said. “If you hadn’t come when you did, I’d have begged him.”

“It’s over now.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“It is. You’re stronger than you think.”

Channing grew silent again, and in the silence Elizabeth heard the raggedness of her breath.

“Will you come see me tomorrow?”

“I’ll try,” Elizabeth said.

“Please.”

“I have to talk to the state police tomorrow. If I can make it, I will. If not, then the next day.”

“Do you promise?”

“I do,” Elizabeth said, though she knew nothing of fixing broken things.

*   *   *

When she got back in the car, Elizabeth still felt disconnected, and like other times in her life where she’d had nowhere to go and nothing to do, she ended up at her father’s church, a humble building that rose narrow and pale against the night sky. She parked beneath the high steeple, studied small houses lined like boxes in the dark, and thought for the hundredth time that she could live in a place like this. Poor as it was, people worked and raised families and helped each other. Neighborliness like that seemed rare these days, and she thought a lot of what made this place so special came from her parents. As much as she and her father disagreed on life and the living of it, he was a fine minister. If people wanted a relationship with God, his was a good path. Kindness. Community. He kept the neighborhood going, but none of it worked unless it was done his way.

Elizabeth lost that kind of trust when she was seventeen.

Following a narrow drive, she walked beneath heavy trees and ended at the parsonage where her parents lived. Like the church, it was small and plain and painted a simple white. She didn’t expect to find anyone awake, but her mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She had the same cheekbones as Elizabeth, and the same deep eyes, a beautiful woman with gray-streaked hair and skin that was still smooth in spite of long years of hard work. Elizabeth watched for a full minute, hearing dogs, a distant engine, the wail of an infant in some other far house. She’d avoided this place since the shooting.

Then why am I here?

Not for her father, she thought. Never that.

Then why?

But she knew.

Tapping on the door, Elizabeth waited as fabric whispered behind the screen, and her mother appeared. “Hello, Mom.”

“Baby girl.” The screen door swung open and her mother stepped onto the porch. Her eyes twinkled in the light, her features full of joy as she opened her arms and hugged her daughter. “You don’t call. You don’t come by.”

She was keeping it light, but Elizabeth squeezed harder. “It’s been a bad few days. I’m sorry.”

She stood Elizabeth at arm’s length and studied her face. “We’ve left messages, you know. Even your father called.”

“I can’t talk to Dad.”

“It’s really that bad?”

“Let’s just say I have enough judgment coming my way without the heavenly kind.”

It wasn’t a joke, but her mother laughed, a good laugh. “Come have a drink.” She led Elizabeth inside, put her at a small table, and fussed over ice and a half-empty bottle of Tennessee whiskey. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Elizabeth shook her head. She’d like to be honest with her mother, but had discovered long ago how a single lie could poison even the deepest well. Better to say nothing at all. Better to keep it in.

“Elizabeth?”

“I’m sorry.” Elizabeth shook her head again. “I don’t mean to be distant. It’s just that everything seems so … muddled.”

“Muddled?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, bullshit.” Elizabeth opened her mouth, but her mother waved it closed. “You’re the most clear-minded person I’ve ever known. As a child, an adult. You’ve always seen more clearly than most. You’re like your father that way, even though you believe such different things.”

Elizabeth peered down the darkened hall. “Is he here?”

“Your father? No. The Turners are having troubles again. Your father’s trying to help.”

Elizabeth knew the Turners. The wife drank and could get abusive. She’d hurt her husband once, and Elizabeth took the call her last month in uniform. She could close her eyes and picture the narrow house, the woman who wore a pink housecoat and weighed a hundred pounds, at most.

I want the reverend.

She had a rolling pin in her hand, swinging at shadows. The husband was down and bloody.

I won’t talk to nobody but the reverend.

Elizabeth had been ready to do it the hard way, but her father calmed the woman down, and the husband—again—refused to press charges. That was years ago, and the reverend still counseled them. “He never shies, does he?”

“Your father? No.”

Elizabeth looked out the window. “Has he talked about the shooting?”

“No, sweetheart. What could he possibly say?”

It was a good question, and Elizabeth knew the answer. He would blame her for the deaths, for being a cop in the first place. He would say she’d broken trust, and that everything bad flowed from that single poor decision: the basement, the dead brothers, her career. “He still can’t accept the life I’ve chosen.”

“Of course he can. He’s your father, though, and he pines.”

“For me?”

“For simpler times, perhaps. For what once was. No man wants to be hated by his own daughter.”

“I don’t hate him.”

“You’ve not forgiven, either.”

Elizabeth accepted the truth of that. She kept her distance, and even when they shared the same room, there was a frost. “How are you two so different?”

“We’re really not.”

“Laugh lines. Frown lines. Acceptance. Judgment. You’re so completely opposite I wonder how you’ve stayed together for so long. I marvel. I really do.”

“You’re being unfair to your father.”

“Am I?”

“What can I tell you, sweetheart?” Her mother sipped whiskey and smiled. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”

“Even after so many years?”

“Well, maybe it’s not so much the heart, anymore. He can be difficult, yes, but only because he sees the world so clearly. Good and evil, the one straight path. The older I become, the more comfort I find in that kind of certainty.”

“You studied philosophy, for God’s sake.”

“That was a different life.…”

“You lived in Paris. You wrote poetry.”

Her mother waved off the observation. “I was just a girl, and Paris just a place. You ask why we’ve stayed together, and in my heart I remember how it felt—the vision and the purpose, the determination every day to make the world better. Life with your father was like standing next to an open fire, just raw force and heat and purpose. He got out of bed driven and ended every day the same. He made me very happy for a lot of years.”

“And now?”

She smiled wistfully. “Let’s just say that as rigid as he may have grown, my home will always be between your father’s walls.”

Elizabeth appreciated the simple elegance of such commitment. The preacher. The preacher’s wife. She let a moment pass, thinking how it must have been for them: the passion and the cause, the early days and the great, stone church. “It’s not like the old place, is it?” She turned back to the window and stared out at rock-lined gardens and brown grass, at the poor, narrow church wrapped in sunbaked clapboards. “I think about it sometimes: the cool and the quiet, the long view from the front steps.”

“I thought you hated the old church.”

“Not always. And not with such passion.”

“Why are you here, sweetheart?” Her mother’s reflection appeared in the same pane of glass. “Really?”