This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (13 page)

When he started his windup, he looked down at the sidewalk in front of him and brought his right knee up so high that I thought it would touch his forehead, and when he threw himself into the pitch I swear you could see his arms and his legs come loose from his body and freeze in the air for just a second before reattaching themselves. And I swear I heard something too: a sound like an ironing board unfolding or an old, squeaky gate being opened and slammed shut. But looking at it all, I couldn’t tell if Wade’s pitch was going to drop at his feet or bust through the curtain and fly down the street into the night.

As soon as the ball hit the curtain above the catcher’s right shoulder I knew it hadn’t been thrown as hard as any of Evan’s pitches. And I was right; the screen said sixty-four. I saw it before Wade did because he was bent at the waist and staring at the ground like he couldn’t stand up straight because he’d given that pitch all he had. The two boys saw the screen too. Evan just smiled, but the other boy clapped his hands like he was cheering on a batter that wasn’t there. “That’s all he’s got, baby,” he said. “That’s all he’s got.”

Wade stood up straight and massaged his left shoulder with his right hand, and then he shook his left arm like it’d gone to sleep and he was trying to wake it up.

“We can go on home,” the short boy said. “This guy’s done.” Ruby had been watching Wade, but now she whipped her head around and stared at the boys.

“No,” she said. “He’s got four more. Y’all have to wait.” The two boys seemed just as surprised by what Ruby had said to them as I was, and they stood there and stared at her until she turned back around.

“He’s got four more,” the short boy said, making his voice high and squeaky. Ruby acted like she didn’t hear him; she just stared at Wade. Sweat ran down his forehead from his hair, and he narrowed his eyes and wiped it away with his right hand. He looked exhausted after only throwing that one pitch. I wanted to tell him to stop, that he was too old and out of shape to be messing with kids half his age, that most grown men didn’t get a kick out of challenging high schoolers in pitching contests, that he was embarrassing me more than he already had. But then he turned his head and looked at me, and when he did I saw that he wasn’t having fun, that he hadn’t thrown that pitch to try to impress those two boys or show off in front of me or Ruby. He’d thrown it because he knew those two boys were laughing at me, at us. It was the first time in my life that I felt like Wade wanted to be my dad.

“Focus on the catcher’s mitt,” I said. “And bring your shoulder in so it’s pointing at him.” He smiled and nodded his head.

“You got it now,” he said. “I’m just getting warmed up.” Wade went through his windup a second time: the same scarecrow pose, the high knee, the crazy sound I thought I heard again. The ball hit the curtain right on the catcher’s mitt, and this time the screen said seventy.

“Yes!” Ruby said. The fat man on the stool raised his eyebrows and folded his arms across his chest again. He looked over at the two boys like he expected them to say something, but they didn’t. Wade turned back and stared down the cage at the catcher like he was thinking about his next pitch.

“Bring the heat,” I said. “Come on, Dad.” He didn’t look at me, but he smiled when he heard me call him that, and then he wiped the sweat off his forehead. I looked over at the two boys and saw that neither one of them was smiling anymore. Evan had his hands in his pockets, and the short boy had his arms folded across his chest, and his hips were rocking from side to side like he had to go to the bathroom.

Wade bent down and picked up another ball and went into his windup again, but this time it looked different, smoother, more like the pitchers you see on TV in the major leagues or on posters and baseball cards. It was the first time I could remember thinking of Wade as a baseball player instead of someone who just talked about playing baseball.

And I was right to think that, and I was right to think that pitch would be his best. I don’t know if it was a strike or a ball because I was staring at the screen, but I heard the pitch snap against the rubber curtain, and then I watched the screen light up and say seventy-eight.

Ruby saw it too, and she jumped into the air and ran toward Wade, but he stepped right around her on his way to the two boys. He reached out with both hands and snatched the teddy bear away from the girl, and he turned and handed it to Ruby so hard it almost knocked her over. He faced the two boys. “Y’all have a good night,” he said. “Don’t get in no trouble.”

Me and Ruby and Wade were already laughing by the time the taxi pulled away from the Pavilion. It felt like a movie, like we were leaving the scene of a crime after robbing a bank or holding up a gas station, and we didn’t care one bit if anybody’d seen us because we knew we were going to get away with it.

My chin rested on the teddy bear’s head, and I closed my eyes and buried my face in its fur. I could smell the perfume of the girl who’d been carrying it, and I could smell something else too—something sugary and sour—and I knew it was the lemonade that boy had been spitting into my hair. I prayed that those kids wouldn’t call the police or tell their parents about what Wade had done to them. And then I remembered that I’d gone and done that very same thing by calling Marcus. I closed my eyes even tighter and squeezed that bear as hard as I could. I wasn’t as ready to go home as I thought I was, but that didn’t make no difference. We were already on television by the time we got back to our room.

Brady Weller

C H A P T E R   13

O
n Wednesday, I met Sandy at a new place called Pepé Frijoles for lunch. While I waited for him I stood in the heat out in the parking lot, leaning against the hood of my car and staring up at the restaurant’s sign on Garrison Boulevard. A cartoon Mexican wearing a poncho and sombrero smiled down at me like an idiot.

Sandy pulled up beside me in the old Ford Taurus. When he got out I saw that he’d already loosened his tie and left his blazer draped across the passenger seat. His shirt was dark with sweat.

“The a/c out again?” I asked.

“Again? When’s the damn thing ever worked?”

He had a manila envelope in his hand. I nodded toward it. “Is that for me?”

“Depends,” he said. “You buying lunch?”

We found a booth in the back away from other people in the restaurant. Through the window, a couple of guys shot basketball across the street at Lineberger Park, wavy lines of heat coming up from the asphalt. Our waitress brought two waters and a basket of nacho chips and a little bowl of salsa. Sandy ordered a sweet tea. I opened my menu and looked up at him. “So, what’s in the envelope?”

“A present for you,” he said.

He opened it and pulled out a card made of construction paper; it looked like something a kid might’ve drawn in school. “You shouldn’t have,” I said.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Easter did.”

I dipped a chip in the salsa and popped it into my mouth, and then I took the card from his hands.

“Jesus,” he said. “Would you at least
act
like it’s evidence?” He gave me a rubber glove. I used it to hold the card between my thumb and finger.

“Is that Sosa?” I asked.

“It looks like him,” he said.

I opened the card and read it out loud. “ ‘Dear Marcus: I’m sorry. Can we talk tonight? Love, Easter, your girlfriend (I hope!).’ ” I looked up at Sandy. “So what?” I said. “It’s a love letter.”

“Look on the back,” he said. I turned the card over and saw a phone number written in pencil. “Easter’s boyfriend wrote that.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah, ‘boyfriend,’ ” he said. “Your Easter’s all grown up. The kid said the number was on the back of the perp’s shirt when he left with the girls.”

“How’d he see it?”

“He said he was walking by the house.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“He wouldn’t cop to it, but he was sneaking over there; his prints were all over the window.” I opened the card again and saw where Easter had written
Can we talk tonight?
It looked like she’d invited him.

“How’d you find this kid?” I asked.

“That’s the interesting part,” he said. “We didn’t. His dad called us. Turns out Easter called Marcus last night from Myrtle Beach.”

“Did she say who she’s with?”

“Wade Chesterfield,” Sandy said. “And this morning Marcus was able to identify him as the one who took the girls.”

“Just like we thought.”

“Just like we thought,” he said. “Looks to me like he wants his girls back and didn’t know what else to do.”

“Looks to me like he’s breaking the law.”

Sandy shrugged his shoulders. “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”

“Did y’all send anybody down to Myrtle last night?”

“No,” he said. “Sergeant’s not pulling anybody off this missing money. We called the Myrtle Beach PD. They put out an alert last night and got it on TV. They’re looking into it.”

“Yeah,” I said, almost laughing. “I’m sure they are.” I looked at the number on the back of the card. “You call this yet?”

“Of course I did,” he said. “I called it this morning. It’s a cell phone that belongs to a contractor named Lane Kelly.”

I held up the card. “Can I hang on to this for a little while?”

“Hell no, Brady,” Sandy said, snatching the card out of my hand. “It’s a valuable piece of evidence in a police investigation.” He dropped the card and the glove into the envelope and sealed it. “Besides,” he said, “Marcus wants it back.”

“Oh, Sandy,” I said, “you’re breaking my heart. I didn’t know you were so sweet.” I found an unused napkin and took the pen from Sandy’s breast pocket. I wrote the phone number down on the back of it. “Is that all you’ve got?”

“Is that all?” he repeated, laughing. “We found prints on the windowsill that matched the ones we have on file for Chesterfield, so we know this kid, Marcus, is telling the truth.”

“That’s a busy window,” I said.

“Tell me about it. They got out of there in a hurry. It looks like the father didn’t touch anything in the room, and nothing was taken: no clothes, no toys or books—nothing.”

“So, the girls have been out there for about thirty-six hours in their pajamas?”

“I guess so,” he said.

When we finished eating, I picked up the check and paid for lunch, and then I came back to the table and left a five under the saltshaker. I smiled at the waitress where she stood by the busing cart.

“Gracias,”
I said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, no hint of the accent I thought I’d heard earlier.

By the time I got outside, Sandy had already tossed the manila envelope onto the passenger’s seat, and he was standing by the open driver’s-side door.

“You got anything out on the dad’s car?” I asked.

“Nothing great,” he said. “We put out a call to the highway patrol in North and South Carolina to be on the lookout for a brown car driven by a white man with two white girls inside, and we’ve got a couple of officers tooling around town here. If we pull over every car matching that description then that’s all we’ll do all day; same for the guys in South Carolina. We just don’t have that much manpower right now, especially without any real leads except for what this kid’s given us.”

“I’ll take care of it for you,” I said, smiling. “The next time we talk it’ll be about where you can find these girls.”

“Right,” he said. “I look forward to it.”

I turned onto Franklin Avenue and then took a left into Franklin Plaza, a nearly abandoned strip mall that now only housed a discount store, a beauty supply chain, and my office. I parked out front and sat looking at the big glass window that made up the front wall of my office. White curtains kept people from looking in.
Safe-at-Home Security Systems
was spelled out in red letters, trimmed in white, and pasted on the glass. Under that were both the local number and the national hotline:
1-800-SAF-HOME.

I unlocked the front door, turned on the lights, and walked through the reception area. I tossed my keys onto my empty desk and pulled the napkin out of my back pocket and dialed the number the kid had seen on Chesterfield’s shirt. It went right to voice mail.

“You’ve reached Kelly Renovation, LLC,” a man’s voice said. “Please leave a message and someone will return your call as soon as possible. Thanks, and have a great day.” I cleared my throat before it beeped.

“Hi, Mr. Kelly,” I said, trying to sound as unthreatening and kind as possible. “My name is Brady Weller. I’m a guardian ad litem here in Gastonia, and I’m calling about two children who may be the daughters of one of your employees. If you have a minute, give me a call back.” As I was leaving him my number I realized that I’d been staring at the picture of Jessica and me the whole time I’d been on the phone. “I hope to hear from you soon,” I said before hanging up.

I sat and looked at Jessica a little longer and tried to see the sixteen-year-old’s face in the picture, but it was hard to do. I looked to her left, where the forty-year-old version of me stood beside her, still holding on to the saddle horn.

“Hold on tight,” I whispered to the guy in the picture.

The phone rang on the desk. I picked it up and looked at the caller ID: a local number I didn’t recognize.

“Hello?” I said. “Safe-at-Home.” The other end was quiet. “Hello?” I said again.

“Is this Brady Weller?” a woman’s voice said.

“Yes,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“My name’s Cynthia Kelly,” she said. “I’m Lane Kelly’s wife. You called him a second ago.”

“Hi, Mrs. Kelly,” I said. “Is your husband around? I really need to speak with—” She cut me off.

“He can’t come to the phone,” she said. “But he wanted me to call you.”

“Okay,” I said. And then she started asking me questions; her tone was formal and nervous, and the questions she asked seemed like she may have written them down or had somebody write them down for her.

“Why are you calling my husband?”

“I’m calling about someone named Wade Chesterfield. I’m not sure if he works for your husband or not, but I’d like to ask Mr. Kelly about him.” The line was quiet, and I figured she was either whispering my response so quietly that I couldn’t hear her, or she was writing it down under the question she’d just asked. I waited.