Fear Has a Name: A Novel (The Crittendon Files) Page 24

  “I don’t think so,” Archer said. “This whole thing’s gone under the radar. I’m talking with my station manager now about doing Satterfield as a whole sidebar to the McDaniel story. I’m ready to go with it, if they let me.”

  “Great job,” Jack said. “Listen, Archer, I’ve got a favor to ask. I’m in the middle of a family emergency and am going to be out of pocket.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry. Okay …”

  “After we met, I updated my latest story with a lot of the new info from you and sent it to my editor, Cecil Barton, and another reporter, Derrick Whittaker. Can I have them keep in touch with you on this thing?”

  “Sure, give ’em my cell.”

  “I’ll do it. Thanks, man. I owe you.”

  “There’ll be more coming out of the church in Denver,” Archer said. “People are starting to talk; they want justice. If it heats up like I think it’s going to, Satterfield’s gonna be facing serious charges.”

  “Okay, man. Derrick will be calling you on all that.”

  “No problem,” Archer said. “I hope everything works out for you.”

  After ending the call, Jack went on stuffing hairbrush, toothbrush, mouthwash, and other familiar items into the toilet kit, sure he was forgetting things. He made a mental note to call Cecil to give him Archer’s cell number.

  He threw a travel clock into the suitcase, flip-flops … what else did he need?

  The ping of the doorbell echoed through the still house.

  What now?

  He hurried to the steps, quickly got down to the foyer, and peered through the slats. Officer DeVry stood in uniform with his back to the door, hat in his right hand.

  Jack’s heart lurched.

  “Officer DeVry.” He opened the door and stepped out. “What’s going on?”

  DeVry turned to face him, but the expression on his face was sober, emotionless, unfamiliar.

  “Cleveland Heights PD was called to Granger Meade’s childhood home this afternoon by Granger’s father,” DeVry said.

  Jack’s insides twisted.

  “I hate to tell you this, Jack, but a red Honda Accord registered to your wife was found down an embankment along the driveway; she has not been found. We think Granger’s abducted her. We’ve—”

  “Wait, wait.” Everything spun. “Pam’s car, at his house?”

  DeVry nodded. “The father says Granger showed up there this afternoon. Local PD had stopped earlier in the day to warn the parents he was wanted and might be in the area. When he showed up, the dad phoned it in.”

  “Wait, what was Pam’s car doing there? What about the girls?”

  As the reality of each bad scenario became worse, Jack’s brain wigged out. He turned, entered the house. He had to get his things and get up there.

  “Jack.” DeVry’s voice came from behind, then a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Jack, calm down. Your girls are fine. They’re still at Pam’s parents’ house; they’re all fine.”

  “Pam never got back there?”

  “No, Jack.”

  “Do they know? My girls?”

  “I don’t think the girls know,” DeVry said. “When I called to check on them, I spoke to Pamela’s mother, Margaret. I did tell her what was going on. She … well, she broke down. Her husband had to take the call.”

  Jack almost collapsed. He gripped the back of the couch, nodded, and breathed, just focusing on deep breaths, getting air to the brain, lungs.

  “What was Pam doing at that house?” He realized he was hoarse, almost whispering.

  “No idea.”

  “Was there any sign of injury at her car?” He was thinking blood.

  “No,” DeVry said. “Nothing to indicate she was hurt.”

  “How’d her car get down there?”

  “Well, it was dented—”

  “This keeps getting worse,” Jack snapped. “Just spill it!!”

  “This isn’t easy, Jack. I’m getting there, okay? I’m not going to hide anything from you. The car tracks indicate she tried to get back up the embankment several times. They think she might have just barely made it back up when Granger came down the driveway and bumped her right front quarter panel, sending her back down.”

  Jack’s face whooshed like an inferno. “Then what?”

  “It looks as though Granger went down the embankment on foot and forced her to go with him, in his car.”

  Jack gave a cry as he swirled and smashed the wall, just beneath a mirror, with a crushing right fist. A fissure of pain sizzled up the top of his wrist. He covered it with his other hand and turned away. “Why?” he yelled to God. “Why would you do this?”

  “Jack.” DeVry’s voice came near. “We’ve got nationwide alerts out. We’re gonna find them.”

  Jack ripped around, still sheltering his aching right wrist and arm. “You’ve been saying that for how long?” he screamed and distanced himself again. “What did we do to deserve this? What did we do?”

  Without giving DeVry a chance to reply, Jack stormed out the back door and cried out in anguish to the heavens.

  Evan had driven and parked at various nondescript spots around the small town of Fort Prince, snoozing, moving the car each time he awoke, watching evening turn to night. His heart was as black as the streets beyond his window.

  He was parked diagonally on the town square in front of a sandwich shop that had closed hours ago. The bus station was a five-minute walk. He would leave the car there and head for the station in another ten minutes, no longer caring if his vehicle was found soon or not. That would get him to the station about thirty minutes before the bus left for south Florida and the place where things had always been right with the world. It would be the last place he would ever see.

  What had happened to him?

  Who had he become?

  He sat there, useless and pitiful, so unlike what he used to be even five years ago. Back then, his care and concern for others had brought him such joy and contentment—and he had been able to help so many people. Now the rug had been pulled out from under him. His church was in a hopeless downward spiral. Satterfield had done irreparable damage. At least two of his elders were crooks, and he couldn’t fix it or save them. He and Sherry had gotten way too close. And he knew if he even tried to go back and raise his boys, it would be a disaster.

  The life had been sucked out of him.

  The only thing that mattered was disappearing.

  The dim, yellowish light from the street lamps filtered into the car. The baggie and many pills and orange plastic bottles shined back up at him from the passenger seat.

  You got burned out. The ministry took its toll. You were spending more time helping other people—strangers, in many cases—than loving your own wife and boys.

  When he finally refused to get out of bed one morning, Wendy had insisted he go for a physical. His doctor, after performing a battery of tests, announced Evan was struggling from a combination of stress and depression; he suggested an antidepressant. “Why not?” Wendy had said. But something in Evan had told him not to get going on them, to try to work through it. After three weeks fighting that battle, he had never felt so sad and hopeless. He called his doctor and asked him to phone in the prescription.

  Years and several different prescriptions later, there he sat, nothing more than a dismal blob, a sack of potatoes, a hypocrite who had ruined the lives of a woman who had dedicated her life to him and three fine boys who would each deal with his demons as they became men.

  What was most depressing, most sickening of all was that he was the pastor. He was supposed to be the spiritual one, the one nearest to God, the one guiding others through their minefield of problems. Little did they know, Evan faced a bomb-riddled battlefield of his own. His failure and depression became an enormous secret, an albatross that wore him to the bone. He had become vulnerable and weak. A failure before God and his congregation.

  He reached around to the floor of the backseat and hoisted the duffel bag into his lap. Undoing th
e zipper, he reached in and found the cold steel of the semiautomatic. He got it out and held it in front of him in both hands, as if it were a valuable artifact.

  Would he be able to do it?

  He’d always believed it was deeply sad and disturbing when people took their own lives. He’d thought it a selfish and cowardly act. Who was anyone to declare when his or her life would start or end? That was up to God.

  Yet now, sitting there with the reality of it—the possibility of it—resting in his hands, he understood with clarity why a person would end his own life.

  Hopelessness, that’s why. Utter, bleak despair.

  If God was still listening to him at all, if he would look down on the situation and grant one last request, Evan would ask that he spare Wendy and the boys from ever hearing of the cabin in Springfield and what he was sure would become his supposed “affair” with Sherry Pendergrass.

  Lightning illuminated a gray sky whose ceiling was low and packed with thick, menacing clouds. Evan braced for the thunder, which jolted him when it cracked loud and long, making the car shimmy. No rain on the windshield yet.

  Time to roll.

  He took the keys out of the ignition and removed the silver keychain with “#1 DAD” engraved on it—the boys had given it to him one Father’s Day. He slipped it into his pocket. He removed the car’s remote so he would be able to lock the car then placed the rest of the keys in the glove compartment.

  Evan got out of the car. There was no one around. The night was thick with humidity, and a stiff wind assured him rain was coming. He leaned in for the duffel and hesitated as he examined the bag of pills.

  He left them, got out, threw the duffel over his shoulder, slammed the door, and locked it. Turning to the sidewalk, he lost his balance but steadied himself. Noticing a large metal grate on the ground by the curb, he stepped over it, stopped, held the remote in front of him and dropped it clanging through the grate into the dark sewer system below.

  No turning back now.

  Another fissure of lightning ripped open the sky. Thunder boomed. One by one, raindrops snapped at the sidewalk and pelted his head and shoulders.

  It would be an uncomfortably long bus ride if his clothes were sopping wet.

  He contemplated running but only sighed.

  Why bother?

  He began to walk.

  And he wished for the lightning to come closer, much closer.

  33

  Now that it was completely dark, Granger and Pamela were blazing a trail. Late on a Monday night was proving to be a darn good time to take a trip south.

  Granger was sticking mostly to highway roads now, I-77 to be specific. They were in the hill country of West Virginia. First Parkersburg, then Ripley, then winding past the romantically lit gold dome of the capitol in Charleston. Every time he had ever driven past, Granger always thought he could live there. It looked like an old mining town. Friendly. Peaceful. Blue collar—like him.

  He was doing about seventy as the green signs for Princeton and Bluefield and Wytheville shot by one at a time over the miles.

  “I remember one time when I was a kid,” Granger said, “we went on a vacation right around here somewhere. Galax was the name of the town; I’ll never forget that name. My old man rented this little junk camper. It was gonna be a real family love-in type thing.” He chuckled. “Man, did it go sour.”

  Pamela was hunched low in the passenger seat, but looking right at him, with her pretty mouth closed. Her body looked rigid. He wished she would relax.

  “We went to my cousin’s house,” he said. “The first night we got there, they had a big tent revival in Galax; you wouldn’t believe what happened.”

  Pamela just kept staring.

  “Some huge dude wearing a big old silver belt buckle and a leather cowboy hat got up in front of everybody and handled what they said was a poisonous rattlesnake. It was huge. My father was out of there so fast. He was furious at my aunt for taking us. We packed it in and took off, drove all night, all the way back home. The whole way he harped about that snake handler, how he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  Pamela’s expression didn’t change. She’d eaten a few cashews earlier and sipped her water, but that was it.

  Missing that husband.

  “We’re only gonna have a little time together.” Granger eyed her. “Can you just talk to me? That’s all I want.”

  “I told you I need to let Jack know I’m safe.” Pamela didn’t move in her seat. “I’m worried because I know he’s worried. Can’t you understand that?”

  “Okay, look, I told you we’re gonna stop again. It’s only been a half a day—”

  “Have a little sympathy, okay?” She sat up, crossed her arms, and glared out the passenger window into the blackness. “I have a family. Little girls. Parents. They’re worried sick.”

  She turned to him for a reaction. He drained the last of his Red Bull, tossed the can into the back, punched the lighter, and reached for the pack of cigarettes in the visor above his head.

  “Your problems are small, Pamela.” He put a fist to his mouth and belched silently. “Your world is small. You don’t know what it’s like to suffer—to be tormented in your mind. To be raised by tyrants.”

  It was dark and silent in the car for perhaps a mile. He opened his window, lit the smoke, inhaled deeply. He was about to mention his plan to stop at one of the upcoming exits so she could call, when she spoke.

  “I know you had it rough.” Pamela turned and looked straight ahead. “I heard different things. I don’t think anyone really knew what you went through.”

  “You’re darn right they didn’t.” He could almost feel the cold, damp mattress beneath him and smell the wet, frigid nights in the shack behind the house.

  “Bottom line,” he said, “they never wanted me.”

  The highway hummed beneath them.

  “But because they did have me, out of spite they decided to make my life miserable. Most of it was mental. ‘Thou shalt not lie. Thou shalt not steal.’” Granger imitated his mother. “They were so good at it, they made it seem like they didn’t even know they were doing it. I’m still not sure how much of it was done to purposefully hurt me and how much of it they really believed was true religion. I learned to let it roll off.”

  “What about once you left home?” Pamela looked at him. “Were you able to lead any sort of a normal life?”

  Her hands were trembling. At least she was trying.

  “I had a good job,” he said. “Had my own car, and place.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pffft.” He paused. “Relationships. People skills.” He spewed the words as if spitting in his parents’ faces. “Nobody taught me any of that stuff.”

  “But you know you have issues.” Her whole body turned to face him, and she curled a knee up on the seat. “That’s the important thing. You realize your parents mentally abused you, and you know you need help. That’s everything.”

  He looked at her. Even in the dark, her lovely face was radiant.

  She would have been so good for him. She would have made the difference—the difference between a good life, and this.

  “I went to see a doctor,” he said. “Not too long ago. Paid an arm and a leg. Was ready for help.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, we talked and did tests and looked at pictures, the whole nine yards; took a whole day. The entire time I was trying to figure out if what she was doing was truly scientific, if it would help, or whether it was all just a sham. Still haven’t figured it out.”

  “What’d she tell you?” Pamela twisted open her water and sipped.

  “Ah … that I was emotionally abused,” he said sarcastically.

  “What else?”

  “That my parents ignored me when I needed to express myself. They isolated me from healthy relationships.”

  Pamela shook her head.

  “She said that’s why I’m withdrawn … why I’m not good at relationships.” />
  “In high school sometimes you seemed okay. Even funny.”

  She looked away when he tried to make eye contact.

  “I knew you weren’t popular,” she said.

  The faces of the jocks, the incidents with the bullies seemed to come at him like obstacles in the road. “That stuff left scars, you know?”

  She looked over at him in silence.

  “It was bad enough I got it at home, but then at school—from everyone? And it was like a disease. Once the others saw or heard you getting harassed, they assumed that gave them the freaking license to do the same.”

  His voice broke.

  Stop it, you baby.

  “Granger, do you believe in God?”

  “Don’t even go there,” he snapped. “My parents lived and breathed that garbage.”

  “But you’ve got a skewed view of it. They weren’t true Christians,” she said. “I’m a Christian. Any compassion or interest I ever took in you was because God used me, that was God reaching out to you. Your parents might have ruined your concept of Christianity, but I can tell you for a fact, nothing will change you more than this book on the floor right here.”

  “I’ll tell you something.” He took a painfully deep hit off the Newport. “You are the only person on earth I would still be sitting next to after hearing that pitch. Now let’s cut it.”

  “If you read this book” —she picked it up and set it in her lap—“I guarantee it will pierce your heart and change you—if you’re open to it. Come close to God, and he’ll come close to you.”

  “I’ve read more of that thing than most people. I’ve tried to change.”

  Pamela shook her head. “It’s not about trying. It’s about not trying. It’s about letting go of life as you know it. Falling into his arms. Trusting him to carry you—and to supernaturally change you.”

  “That all sounds real good,” Granger said.

  “It can be.”

  “The truth is, Pam, the way I really feel is totally worthless—undeserving of anyone’s love or care—yours or God’s or anyone else’s.”

  “That’s because your parents rejected you!”