Waking Lazarus (6 page)

Late that night at home, Jude sat watching the local newscast. Sometime—he wasn’t quite sure when—he had returned home and melted into the single chair in front of his TV. Where had he been? What had he done? It was there, perhaps, if he wanted to strain for it. But he didn’t. These memory lapses, these blackouts, were just a side effect of the old paranoia. Somewhere deep inside was his huddled psyche, trying to turn off all sensory information and lock out the world.

He knew this, and he accepted it. Still, the blackouts seemed to be getting worse. And more frequent.

Jude ran a hand over his face. He
wanted
to black out the visit from the woman who had knocked at his door and pulled him back into the skin of Jude Allman (what was her name, anyway?), but her image kept rattling around inside his head.
‘‘God gives some people special
gifts,’’
she’d said. Right. Her God had given him nothing; instead, He’d taken everything away. Starting with his mother.

Jude tried to run a mental eraser over it, tried to throw that soft, comforting blanket over all the memories again. But now those memories were ablaze, and every blanket fueled the flames instead of smothering them. His headache was a constant roar in his ears.

Keep it secret, keep it safe
.

The news blared a breaking story about a missing girl in Big Timber. She’d been at the city park playground with a few other kids, just half a block from her house, when she suddenly disappeared. The image of a tear-filled mother filled the screen. She could see her daughter at the park, she said, and had been looking out to check on her every few minutes. One checkup, she was there. The next checkup, not more than five minutes later, she was gone. Vanished.

Jude watched, trying not to think. He wanted to clear his mind of strange visitors, of Jude Allman—he was Ron Gress now, after all— of everything.

The phone rang.

He hurried toward the phone and looked at the caller ID. The readout told him it was
Rachel Sanders
of
Red Lodge, Montana
calling. He watched the readout, making sure it didn’t change. His machine picked up after four rings.

Rachel’s voice blared. ‘‘Ron. It’s me. Pick up the phone.’’

He grabbed the phone and put it to his ear. ‘‘Hello?’’

‘‘Why do you always wait for your answering machine to pick up, Ron?’’

‘‘I . . . I just want to make sure it’s you.’’ Jude looked back at the TV. A graphic on the screen showed a map of Montana and Wyoming, with white dots appearing where children had gone missing.

‘‘Yeah, well, that’s what Caller ID is for,’’ Rachel said. ‘‘And I know you have it. If you hear the phone ringing, and you see my name on the Caller ID, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s me.’’

‘‘I guess.’’ Jude looked at his front door, wondered if all the locks were secured. He quickly went over, phone between his ear and shoulder, and started checking them.

‘‘Anyway, I’ve been trying to call you for a couple hours now. Where you been?’’

‘‘Out.’’

‘‘Out where?’’

‘‘Just out.’’

‘‘Okay, well, I guess it’s none of my business anyway. Good for you for getting out. I just promised Nathan we’d call to remind you about dinner tomorrow. He wanted to talk to you himself, but he’s in bed now.’’

‘‘Tomorrow?’’

‘‘Dinner? Your son? About four feet tall, five years old, blond hair. You’ve met him.’’

‘‘Yeah, yeah. Okay. I just . . . is everything—’’

‘‘I’ll sterilize everything three times and make sure the secret service has the place under surveillance. Give it a rest.’’

Jude frowned. He wanted to ask about Nathan, make sure no one had been around to bother them. If what’s-her-name had found him, she could also find his son, and (
Kristina, her name was Kristina
) he was sure there was something more going on. Something that made his stomach slowly roll, like the drum on one of those giant cement trucks. Still, this wasn’t the time or place to go into all of it with Rachel, who was obviously in her usual bad mood.

‘‘Okay. I’ll be there,’’ he finally said. He hung up the phone without waiting for an answer.

6

UNLOCKING

When Ron hung up the phone, Rachel immediately felt like a witch. She sighed, gently replaced the receiver in its cradle, then sat down and began to pray. She couldn’t control her emotions with him. He was like the pathetic little puppy who’d been kicked around. Sometimes she felt sorry for him. She could tell he had stowed away deep, dark secrets from his past, unwilling to unlock the chest even to look at them himself. And in a lot of ways, she was fine with that; everyone had a few sins tucked away.

At other times—usually any time he was around for more than five minutes—she just wanted to shake him, slap him on the face, and tell him to pull himself out of the pity party. ‘‘Life goes on,’’ her grandmother had always said after any setback. ‘‘So should you.’’

She knew she shouldn’t feel that way about Ron, of course. She’d changed dramatically since first meeting Ron; she had accepted God’s grace and forgiveness, so she should be able to extend that acceptance to others in her own life.

By and large, she could. Except when it came to Ron.

Rachel sat quietly, trying to clear her senses and open herself to God’s direction. Why was she always this way with Ron? Every time she thought of him, a tight ball wrapped in fear, anger, revulsion, pity, and other emotions sat at the top of her chest. Was God trying to say something to Ron through her? Maybe. But if He was trying to use her, she was being a poor vessel.

Even now, in this time of prayer, she felt herself resisting. She relaxed, willing her body to overcome those feelings and release the pressure.

She had met him in a previous life, of sorts. A life in which she looked for her salvation in the bottom of a glass tumbler.

The night she’d spotted him in the bar, tucked safely into a dark corner, she’d already had five margaritas. Not a record night, to be sure, but enough to keep the dull, disconnected buzz humming steadily in her brain. He had seemed so helpless, so much in need of someone. And she remembered her first thought:
He’s even more pathetic
than I am
.

Looking back now, she felt maybe it
had
been the sad-puppy syndrome that first made her walk around the bar and sit next to Ron. He had been abused by his previous owner, and now all he needed was a bit of love to make things better. That sort of thing. Yeah, that had been part of it. But she also had to admit something else was there. A part of her searched for the people who were so obviously haunted by demons. Being with someone worse made her feel better about herself, if only for a night.

She shook her head and brought herself back to the present. She whispered an ‘‘amen,’’ then went to Nathan’s room, cracked open the door, and peeked inside. His towhead lay on the pillow, his mouth open as he slept. She smiled and went into the room to turn out the light on his night table.

Sometimes, of course, mistakes could be turned into something unexpected and wonderful. She and Ron had made a mistake that long night some six years ago. But God had used the mistake and brought her Nathan.

Nathan, in his perfection, had also brought her out of that hazy realm of drunkenness. Once she had found out she was pregnant, the clouds cleared from her mind. It wasn’t just her own miserable life anymore; it was another life, and she wanted to do everything right for that other life. She stopped drinking, started opening her eyes to the world around her. Started opening her eyes to eternity and realizing there was much more to life than, well, this life.

Now, a few short years later, she was a respected member of the Red Lodge community and such a regular churchgoer that the pastor knew her name. She owned a small jewelry shop—Rings n’ Things— in a charming brick building along historic Main Street. She had a wonderful son who filled her life with light and color.

Still, there was Ron. He troubled her, without even trying. Maybe he was just too painful a reminder of her past. Maybe he brought to mind sins she couldn’t quite leave behind. Maybe he needed something from her, and she was just unwilling to do anything about it.

Or maybe God wasn’t using her to teach Ron at all. Maybe He was using Ron to teach her.

Rachel closed her eyes and breathed deeper, telling the knot in her chest to loosen its grip.

7

READING

Mike Odum, chief of the Red Lodge Police Department, sat at his desk and stared at the front page of the
Carbon County News
. ‘‘Child Missing in Big Timber,’’ the headline proclaimed. ‘‘Red Lodge Next?’’

It was a question he’d asked himself before, but it still infuriated him that James Flynn, the local editor, had the nerve to put it in the paper. No, not in the paper,
on
it: good old James had put this right up front.
If it bleeds, it leads
.

Odum knew James well. One of those people who preferred the proper ‘‘James’’ to the more informal ‘‘Jim,’’ a bit of pretense that usually bothered him. But he could cut the man some slack. James had actually been the first person to welcome Odum to Red Lodge the previous year. The town had interviewed several candidates for the Chief of Police position. For most folks in town, a local boy already in the department was the sentimental favorite, but Odum managed to get the position. James Flynn had been unabashedly in the local boy’s corner, although that didn’t stop him from showing up at the office the first day with a nice bottle of Scotch. James even did a flattering interview for that week’s edition, a fine piece asking folks to welcome the new Chief of Police.

Red Lodge was a good move for Odum. He had needed to get out of North Carolina. It wasn’t that he disliked North Carolina— quite liked it, in fact, with its lush green undergrowth and the mountains— but Mike Odum was a travelin’ man. He didn’t stay in any one place and cool his heels for long. That made a police officer soft, mushy. Pretty soon you started worrying about yourself, and it was all over then. He didn’t plan on worrying about himself for a good long time yet.

Odum picked up his coffee cup, read the lead-in paragraph for the story again. Man alive. James would have everyone in town panicky, convinced their children could be snatched at any moment. Of course, in this day and age, that was certainly a possibility. But people didn’t need to be reminded of it all the same. Especially people in
his
town. Maybe he’d have to call James and chew him out a bit. Couldn’t hurt.

Still, it wasn’t really James bothering him. Odum was misplacing his anger by directing it at James, an easy and convenient target. Odum had been thinking about the child disappearances quite a bit himself. He knew the pattern of the disappearances, the towns, the dates. All of it was committed to memory. Once he heard or saw something, he never forgot it. Never.

Odum put down the paper after reading the story for the fifth time, then grabbed the coffee. He had, of course, already memorized all of the text, filing it away in his head. But something compelled him to keep rereading. He put down his coffee, brought his hands to his face, and rubbed his eyes. Not even ten o’clock in the morning, and he already felt tired.

Odum had been tracing the kidnapping patterns for several weeks now. Again and again he pulled the names and faces of victims into the foreground of his mind, examining them from every angle. He didn’t share any of his work with the Feds out of the Billings office, who of course were working the case because of multiple disappearances. The Feds hadn’t bugged him yet, because no children had disappeared in his town.

But they would, he was quite sure of that. He was in the mind of the killer. None of the bodies had been found, so no one had really named the perp a killer. But Odum knew. He
knew
.

It was terrifying, in some ways, knowing how the killer thought. But at the same time it was crucial and energizing. So Odum embraced it—had to embrace it, knowing that doing so would keep him on the edge and ready.

Right where he wanted to be.

8

THINKING

Jude mopped the floors of the school in the morning, playing thoughts of Kristina over and over in his mind. Normally Jude didn’t mop during the school day, but today he wanted to be near other people. Be near the students. So he mopped the hallway while students sat in classes no more than twenty feet away.

He flipped his mop out of the bucket, ran it back and forth across the white and green linoleum. He tried to make himself think of other things, anything.

Keep it secret, keep it safe
.

He called an image of his son to mind, reminded himself of dinner at Rachel’s after work. But after a few minutes, the image of Nathan dissolved, displaced by the face of Kristina. Overnight she had become the five-hundred-pound gorilla battering through his waking thoughts. And, although he rarely remembered his dreams, he was pretty sure she’d rampaged through his subconscious mind the night before, as well.

He wheeled the mop and bucket down the hallway. One of the sticky wheels moved grudgingly, sounding something like a rusty hinge. Frank, his supervisor, had asked him to fix it numerous times, had even taken a can of oil to the wheel himself once. But still the squeak persisted. Every time Frank heard the wheel, he told Jude it was a sound that ‘‘made the monkeys moan.’’ Jude wasn’t quite sure what that meant—wasn’t quite sure what a lot of Frank’s colorful little quips meant—but the general gist was clear enough: it aggravated Frank. The sound didn’t bother Jude at all, but he really wished it would stop squeaking just to keep Frank happy. If Frank was happy, Jude was happy.

Jude stopped the bucket, then went back up the hallway to retrieve the Wet Floor sign. Just as he grabbed it, the bell rang. Recess time. Kids seemed to materialize out of nowhere, making a quick sprint for the doors and the playground beyond.

Jude stood mute, holding his Wet Floor sign as the kids milled about. He thought of Kristina, sitting in the chair, looking at him the whole time. Yes, she really
had
stared at him the whole time, hadn’t she? Whenever he had chanced a peek in her direction, she was looking right at him, and her eyes weren’t afraid.