Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (27 page)

Sherry nodded, but I wasn’t sure she cared whether Jasmine understood or not. I tried to keep my voice out of what-the-devil-is-the-matter-with-you range.

“Your dad seems to be doing so well. Do you really need to stay with him 24-7? You look like you could use some real sleep.”

“I just don’t want to bring anything else down on my Sisters,” she said, egg in her cheek. “You saw those drawings on the wall. Whoever did that is after
me
.”

“We were all up there,” I said. “Why would you think it was specifically an attack on you?”

“They could have done it anywhere. But they did it at C.A.R.S.”

She pushed the plate away and covered her mouth with the napkin. I suspected most of the eggs were coming back out. She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t take care of her basic hygiene. Couldn’t eat. She was suffering from a classic case of fear I could feel in my own marrow.

“Sherry,” I said, “what did you wash off of the drawing of you before I made you stop?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I saw the eye patch.”

“Yeah.”

“Sultan has an eye patch now.”

The look she gave me was brutal. “I told you I’m not interested in talking about him.”

“Neither am I. So let’s consider who else might be behind it. Who besides you and Zelda had access to those keys?”

Sherry set her jaw. “No one.”

“No customers could have gotten to them?”

She started to shake her head, but she stopped and looked at me, eyes following again. “They might have. Some people do kind of hang out when Daddy’s working on their car. OSHA would fine us for that if they knew, but he likes the company. He says it’s like the good old days.”

“Anybody recently?”

“I’ll have to think about it. I’ll go through the files …”

“What?” I said.

She put both hands behind her and leaned back into the chair. Something had stirred her to go back into hiding. “For a minute I forgot,” she said.

“Forgot what?”

“That maybe I won’t be around that much longer.”

“I’m sorry?”

“As soon as the sale of the shop goes through, I’m going to get Daddy settled someplace comfortable and then I’m going to go … somewhere else.” She set her jaw again. “Don’t you think I’m ready to go out on my own soon?”

“That would be your choice.” I ran a finger around the top of my coffee cup to disguise the fact that I had no idea what to do with this, and I was getting no God-help. “Any thoughts on where you’d go?”

“Far away.”

“Are you sure you want to go far away right out of the gate, Sher?”

“I can’t do this anymore, Miss Angel!”

The blurt and the tears and the sheer panic in her eyes came so out of nowhere I didn’t have a chance to put a thought together before she jerked forward in the chair and pulled my wrists so that I had to come across the table.

“You’ve been trying to get this out of me for a long time,” she said, “so before I go I’m going to tell you.”

“Sherry—”

“I saw them taking his body away.”

“Sultan’s,” I whispered.

“After he got shot and you got away, they came out of nowhere and—”

“They?”

“I couldn’t see. Just his people. I heard somebody say he was still alive.”

“Did they know you were there?”

“I don’t think so. I was hiding.”

Memories flipped through my head like old Rolodex cards. Sherry telling me to leave it alone. Sherry fighting the proof that Sultan wasn’t dead. Sherry now believing that the attack on C.A.R.S. was about her.

This revelation wasn’t a surprise. The secrecy of it was.

“What kept you from telling me about this when it happened?” I said.

“Because I didn’t think he’d live. I never thought he’d come back.”

“But when he did—”

“What difference did it make then?”

We were hissing back and forth across the table, but whatever the passersby couldn’t hear they could certainly see. A maintenance guy mopped in slo-mo under the next table, and a bag-eyed new father looked up more than just curiously from his text message.

“Let’s go someplace a little more private,” I whispered.

“No,” Sherry said, “I’m done.”

She scraped the chair back so hard it fell against the one behind it, startling two women in scrubs to their feet. But I didn’t go after Sherry as she stumbled across the cafeteria and disappeared into the elevator. I just stitched my way among the people trying not to stare at me, bussed Sherry’s tray, and headed for the exit. Pain clutched at my throat.

“Ms. Chamberlain?” a voice behind me said.

I didn’t recognize it, and I would have pretended not to hear it, but it was persistent. Again, “Ms. Chamberlain, right?”

I found myself looking into a face that was unfamiliar only for that moment it takes to recognize someone you’ve met once, in the dark.

“Yates Chattingham,” he said, offering his hand.

“Right. The new pastor.”

I shook his hand only because I didn’t have the energy not to. I also didn’t have the energy to make small talk, so I just stood there. He seemed unruffled by that.

“I’d like you to meet my wife. Christine,
this
is Allison Chamberlain.”

The woman who took my hand looked as if she already knew me. I was sure I’d never seen her before, and I was struck now by the fact that she would be fairly homely if she didn’t know how to make the best of what she had. She obviously refused to be plain.

She let go of my hand just at the moment I was about to withdraw it. “Yates told me he met you the other night. You made quite the impression.”

I didn’t have to recall my exact words to know I’d pretty much let him have it between the eyes.

“I’m glad we saw you here,” he said.

I waited for a toothy smile, maybe a pastoral invitation to join them for coffee, but he said instead, “We won’t keep you, but I do want to talk to you, soon, about what’s going on on that corner.”

“We can do that, but only if you’re ready to get some of it on you.”

He moved his fingers as if he were beckoning me forward. “Talk to me about that.”

“I’m not interested in chatting about the problem unless you really intend to get in there. You can’t do this from a distance.”

“That would be hard since it’s right in my yard.”

There was nothing condescending about the statement, but I was already fired up from—everything.

“You have to get to know those kids and let them get to you.” I flattened my hand to my chest. “In here.”

“Well,” his pretty-homely wife said. “Yates told me you were passionate.”

He nodded toward the exit I’d been going toward. “I know you need to get out of here, so if you want, you could come out tonight and join us for drinks and pizza—”

“I don’t think so—”

“At the Hot Spot,” Christine said. “I did it last night and the boys all took off and the girls weren’t that happy with me, but they ate, and I told them I’d be back tonight.”

“We have a lot in common with you. More than we have with the congregation, unfortunately.” Yates gave the exit another nod. “If we don’t see you tonight we’ll connect another time.”

I almost had no choice but to turn around and go. I did so feeling like the schoolyard bully whose target just brought her a batch of cookies.

I put that encounter in my Things To Sort Out Later pile and picked up Flannery at Second Chances, where a new batch of one-of-a-kind skirts and dresses hung over the balcony, tempting the shoppers below. She didn’t seem that unwilling to go to Ms. Willa’s for tutoring while I took care of some things. She was, in fact, out the door ahead of me, but Ophelia caught me by the arm before I could follow.

“Miss Angel,” she said in that soft velvet voice that could charm a snake and probably had a time or two. “We’re worried about Zelda.”

“I’m sure she’s still pretty shaken up.” I probably would be too if fifteen other things hadn’t happened since I’d had my portrait done in blood on a wall.

“She just can’t get past Sherry’s father thinking she gave somebody those keys,” Ophelia said.

“Zelda told you about that?”

“She can hardly talk about anything else. We said she needed to put that behind her, but she’s just having a hard time. Could you …?”

“I’ll talk to her. Y’all just keep praying with her and supporting her, okay?”

Ophelia nodded but her warm hand stayed on my arm. “She needs more than us, Miss Angel.”

She wasn’t talking about God. She was talking about me. I pushed aside the guilt that was going to get me nowhere and hugged her neck and promised to see that Zelda got all the attention she needed. Before I reached Flannery at the bottom of the steps, I texted Liz and asked her if she’d see to Zelda until I could talk to her.

I still expected Flannery to give me just a little bit of grief about Ms. Willa and penmanship, but as we threaded our way through the shoppers in the Heritage Walk Mall, the shortcut to where I’d parked, her face was pensive. When we reached the Harley, she hugged the helmet to her chest instead of putting it on.

“Something you want to say?” I said.

“Something I want to ask.”

If it was Kade’s phone number she wanted, I was ready.

“Do you think you could find out what’s happening with Tango?”

How many times in one day did I have to be called on selling people short?

“I can try,” I said. “It might be hard, not knowing her real name.”

She lifted that chin. “I was telling the truth when I said I didn’t know.”

“I believe you. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Then I believe you, too.”

I tried not to stare as she strapped on the helmet and climbed onto the bike.

I didn’t go to the Hot Spot that night because I wanted to stay near Flannery and give Desmond some much-needed attention. Chief and I took them to the Santa Maria so they could feed pita bread to the catfish, where we all pretended we were a normal family until it wore us out.

Chief didn’t stay when we got back because he was taking Desmond home with him. We made arrangements to meet up at the F. A. Café Sunday afternoon after the HOG ride.

That was fine because I needed to get my head straight for the next day. I did call Liz to thank her for faxing the signature form to Kade’s office, just in case Brenda did decide to turn Flannery over to me.

“I got your text message,” Liz said. “I’ve been spending as much time with Zelda as I can, but it’s not as much as she needs.”

“I hear that,” I said.

“But I did ask Bonner to fill in some and he said he would. Is he the best
man
, or what?”

“He’s pretty good.”

There was a tiny silence. “I want that for you, Allison.”

“Hey listen.” I switched the phone to the other ear. “Would you mind keeping your eyes open for another exploited teenager? She goes by the name Tango. Flannery knows her and she’s worried about her.”

“Do you have anything more than that?”

“No. But she’s here in town, at least she was Wednesday night, down at the …”

“At the what?”

“Just hanging out with some kids. Let me know if you see her come through the system, will you?”

“Oh, Allison, you have the biggest heart.”

“Right back at ya, babe,” I said before I hung up. I wasn’t feeling so big-hearted. Mine didn’t seem nearly large enough to hold all God was asking it to hold.

I couldn’t dwell on that at the moment, so it went into some pile while I took a chamomile tea to the red chair and considered the two things that had come to me during my conversation with Liz.

One, if Tango went back to the Hot Spot, she might meet up with Christine Chattingham. I hesitated to call the pastor’s wife, though. It sounded like they were on the same page I was, or at least somewhere in the same chapter, but I needed to be sure. What were they planning to do if they gained the kids’ trust? Turn them over to the system with all good intentions? Maybe I should call the Reverend Yates C. for a talk.

In my spare time.

The other was more a longing than a thought. I was missing Nick Kent. Before Detective Kylie called him on the carpet, I could have asked Nick to keep an eye out for Tango too, and bring her to me instead of taking her in. But I refused to pull him in any deeper. I was trusting Kylie less by the minute.

It wasn’t a good thought to fall asleep on.