This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (26 page)

I don’t know how long he’d been standing there when I turned around and saw him, but his eyes were red like he’d either been crying or was fixing to. He waved at me, and I waved back, and that was it—he was gone. I waited a few more minutes—until the bottom of the second inning when the Cardinals were up to bat—before I told Brady that I didn’t think Wade was coming back. He asked me if I was sure, told me we could wait just a little bit longer, but I knew there wasn’t any use. I was ready to let whatever was going to happen just go ahead and happen.

Brady Weller

C H A P T E R   33

G
astonia had exploded by the time I brought Easter and Ruby back to town on Tuesday afternoon, a full week after they’d gone missing. The armored car heist was all over the news again, and so was Tommy Broughton’s mug shot. It wasn’t just the local news covering the story; cable news was back in town too, and CNN and the morning programs had live feeds going around the clock showing agents up at the house on Calder Mountain, tossing chunks of drywall out the doors of the basement and carrying out black trash bags that I knew were slam full of millions of dollars. The only thing they couldn’t find was the missing driver of that armored car. He could’ve spent the past six months weighted down at the bottom of the Catawba River, or he could’ve been relaxing on a beach somewhere in Mexico, far away from Tommy Broughton and the mess he’d gotten himself into. But I knew Broughton would eventually cough him up; he wasn’t smart enough or hard enough to keep that kind of secret.

Some of his money was found with Robert Pruitt in St. Louis on Monday. They’d found a gun on him too, but that wasn’t what had bothered me: it was the picture of Easter he’d had folded up in his pocket that kept running through my mind. I’d been right in thinking it wouldn’t be too long before they connected him to the murder of Wade’s mother back in Charleston, and who knew what else they’d find once they started digging. He’d only been out of jail for a few months, but it looked like he’d made pretty good use of his time. And now he was back in jail, awaiting trial for murder. Who knows what he would’ve done if he’d been able to get his hands on those little girls.

Easter and Ruby were back under Miss Crawford’s care by Tuesday night, but their heads didn’t hit the pillow until I’d installed the Deluxe Delta 6000, which retails at $750 with a monthly subscription of $74.99. But of course there was no fee or subscription rate; it was all taken care of, courtesy of Safe-at-Home and my brother-in-law, Jim. The only hard part was showing Miss Crawford how to turn it off and on, but I wasn’t too worried about that because I knew that Easter and Ruby wouldn’t be there for long. Their disappearance had kicked their grandparents into overdrive, and once the girls were found, things started to move fast. It was only a matter of days before I was standing in their bedroom, broken-down cardboard boxes tucked under my arm, asking them what they wanted to take with them and what they wanted to leave behind for the other kids.

Once the dust settled, everybody and everything could easily be accounted for except for Wade Chesterfield.

And that’s when he called me.

“Do you still have my girls?” he asked. It was a few minutes before nine on Thursday morning, and Wade Chesterfield’s voice was the last thing I’d been expecting to hear when I came into the office that morning. I looked at the caller ID. The area code was 704. He could’ve been calling me from next door, or he could’ve been anywhere else in this part of the state.

“Is this Wade?”

“Do you still have my girls?” he asked again.

“No,” I said. “I don’t have them. They’re back where you found them three weeks ago. And it’s best if you leave them right where they are.”

“I got your number from the woman there,” he said. “She told me to call you if I needed anything.”

“That was before all this happened, Wade,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do now.”

“Were you the one at the game?” he asked.

His question caught me off guard. I never imagined that he’d seen me. “Yes,” I said. “I was there.”

“Thank you for taking care of my girls,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “But that’s what I’m supposed to do. You just made it a little harder than it should be.” I waited for him to say something, but the line went quiet. “Wade? Are you still there?”

“Can you see them whenever you want?” he asked.

“Why are you asking?”

“Because I’ll pay you. Two hundred and fifty thousand if you let me get them back.”

The bells on the Baptist church a block from my office started tolling for 9
A.M.
, and before I could respond to Wade I heard those same bells coming through the phone. I jumped up and ran to the windows at the front of my office and looked up and down Franklin Avenue, but there were no pay phones that I could see.

“Hello?” Wade said.

“I’m here,” I said. I opened the front door and stepped out into the parking lot. “Listen, Wade, there’s no way I can—”

“Three hundred thousand dollars,” he said. In the parking lot, the bells and the traffic were so loud that I almost couldn’t hear him, and the connection began to fade and static took over the line. I stepped back toward the building and held my free hand over my ear. “I need them to be with me. Please, just think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Wait!” I said. The bells had stopped chiming, and I realized that I was yelling into the receiver. “Wait. If you’re in town, somewhere nearby, maybe we could meet up and talk.”

But he’d already hung up.

I went back inside and checked the caller ID and dialed the number. It rang for almost a minute before somebody picked up.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

“May I speak to Wade?”

“Who?”

“Wade,” I said. “He just called me two minutes ago.”

“There’s nobody here,” she said. “This is a pay phone. I was just walking by, and it started ringing.”

“Thanks,” I said. I hung up and sat down at my desk, and then I leaned back in the chair, took a deep breath, and closed my eyes.
Wade called me,
I thought. Not the police, or the FBI, or the foster home. I was the only one who knew he was in town. I was the only one who knew what he was willing to do to get his daughters back.

When I opened my eyes they were already locked on the photo of Jessica and me that sat in the frame on my desk. I couldn’t help but think about what she’d said about nobody ever asking the kids what they want, and I pictured Easter’s face at the Cardinals game once she’d realized Wade wasn’t coming back for them. I couldn’t undo the things I hadn’t done right for Jessica, even though I’d spent years and years trying. Maybe I’d spent my life believing in second chances only because I was always the one who’d asked for them. But now I had to make the call about whether or not to give Wade Chesterfield a second chance, and I had twenty-four hours to decide what that call would be.

Easter Quillby

C H A P T E R   34

E
ver since me and Ruby had been back we hadn’t been allowed to go out to the playground after school with the rest of the kids, but on Monday Mrs. Davis came by the classroom where we’d spent the past few afternoons doing our homework and watching movies, and she asked us to line up with the rest of the kids. “Go ahead and bring your things with you,” she said. We put everything in our backpacks and followed her outside.

Brady was waiting for us out in the parking lot behind the school, leaning up against the front of his car with his hands in his pockets. He smiled and waved when he saw us. Me and Ruby waved back.

Mrs. Davis was at the front of the line, but she stopped when she got to Brady, and she looked over at Selena. “If anybody wants to go down to the ball field then y’all go ahead and follow Selena. The rest of you can head out to the playground, and I’ll be out there in a second.” Selena led some of the kids down the stairs to the field, and the rest of them started walking toward the playground. A couple of them turned around and stared at Brady while they walked off. I’m sure they were wondering who he was and why he’d been out there waiting on us. They’d had all kinds of questions for me and Ruby once we’d come back. They’d seen us on the news when we were missing, and a couple of them had brought in our pictures from the newspaper and showed them to us.

But Mrs. Davis already knew who Brady was. Right before school had started in August, Brady had brought me and Ruby to meet all of our teachers, and he told them about us having to move into the home after what happened to Mom. We’d even gotten to meet the principal.

Brady reached out and shook Mrs. Davis’s hand. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said, smiling. “I’m doing even better now that we’ve got our girls back home.” She reached down and squeezed my shoulder and put her hand on Ruby’s head. Ruby looked at her. “Y’all have fun,” Mrs. Davis said. She walked off toward the playground.

“Where are we going?” Ruby asked.

Brady opened the car door and folded the seat back. “I thought we’d do something fun, like go to the park,” he said. “Y’all are going to be leaving next week, and I figured this might be one of the last days we’ll get to see each other.”

Ruby climbed into the backseat and buckled herself in, and I pushed the seat back into place and got in the front. I’d ridden in the back with Ruby on the whole ride from St. Louis back to Gastonia, but now I felt like riding up front with Brady. His car was little and old, not quite as old as Wade’s, and it smelled a little bit like cigarettes. Brady started up the engine and rolled down the windows. Then he turned the radio on and looked at the clock. Then he looked at me. “All right, copilot,” he said. “Where to first?”

Our first stop was at the Dairy Queen right beside the school. Brady let me and Ruby both order whatever we wanted. I got a vanilla ice cream cone dipped in red shell, and Ruby got the same thing dipped in the chocolate. “Does Miss Crawford let y’all have ice cream?” Brady asked.

“Sometimes,” I said. “But only after dinner.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell her about this.”

We headed down Union Road and turned onto Garrison and headed toward Lineberger Park, but right when Brady turned on his blinker to pull into the parking lot, I decided I wanted to do something else first. “Can we drive past our old house?” I asked him.

Brady sat there with his blinker on for a second, and then he looked at the clock on the radio and turned and looked out at the park.

“It’s just right up the street,” I said. “It won’t take but just a second.”

“Okay,” he finally said. He flipped his blinker the other way, and he pulled back into traffic and turned left off Garrison and onto Chestnut.

As we turned I looked out at the pay phone on the corner of the parking lot at Fayles’ and saw that it had been fixed.

“What are you looking at?” Brady asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I turned back around and looked out at the houses as we passed them on the way to our street. “We ain’t seen our old house since we moved into the home.”

“I bet it feels like that’s been a long time,” Brady said.

“But everything looks the same,” Ruby said from the backseat. She’d taken off her seat belt, and she was leaning forward in between me and Brady and looking out the windshield. I thought about telling her to put her seat belt back on, but we were going so slow now that I figured it didn’t matter one way or the other whether she had it on or not.

I showed Brady which house had been ours, and he slowed down and stopped his car in front of it and leaned toward me to look out my window. It still looked like the same little white house it had been when we’d lived there. Aside from the plastic chair that was missing from the porch, it looked like we’d never left. And then I started to notice little things about it that were different. A set of pale blue curtains were pulled closed in the living room, and a red plastic cup sat on the windowsill on the other side of the glass. The screen was missing from the bottom half of the screen door, and a couple of old newspapers that still had the rubber bands around them had been left on the porch. There was no car in the driveway, which wasn’t any different because we’d never had one either, but in the high grass at the end of the driveway a new tricycle was turned over on its side. I figured it belonged to whoever was living there now.

We must’ve been sitting there for close to a minute when a man opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch in his bare feet, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. He was about Mom’s age, and he had on a white tank top and blue jeans. He used his shoulder to hold a portable phone up against his ear while he took out a cigarette and lit it. The three of us just sat there staring at him, and I figured he wondered what in the world we were doing out there. He nodded his head at us, and I waved.

“We’d better go,” Brady said.

“Okay,” I said.

Brady turned around in the neighbor’s driveway, and when we passed the house I turned around in my seat to look back at it, and I saw that Ruby was looking back at it too.

Something felt different when we pulled off our old street and turned left onto Chestnut. The day had changed somehow. Brady had turned off the radio and rolled up the windows, and none of us said a word on the way back down to the park. Maybe it was seeing our old house that made us so quiet, or maybe it was seeing a stranger standing on the front porch of a place where we’d never live again, especially now that we were on our way to Alaska, that made me and Ruby feel something that we didn’t quite understand.

But as soon as Brady pulled into the parking lot at Lineberger Park and turned off the engine, it was clear exactly what was on his mind. “I want to go ahead and let y’all know that you might see your daddy today.” He looked at me, and then he turned toward the backseat and looked at Ruby.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s here,” Brady said, nodding toward the park. “I mean, he might be here. I don’t know. I just wanted you both to know that you might see him. And I didn’t want it to scare you.”