CHAPTER TWELVE
ELIZA COOK
Three weeks earlier
The church’s playground was empty or almost so. A lone boy sat on one of the swings, his fingers curled loosely around the chains, his head drooped, his body sagging beneath some unseen weight.
It was too early for most of the congregation, mass still more than an hour away, the tranquility of the morning unbroken, dawn a golden-tinged memory but not so far off as to call it day yet.
Eliza caught herself midstep, her arms loaded with the quilt that Rachel had wanted her to take out to the truck. A deep melancholy saturated the very air around the boy so that Eliza thought she might be able to draw in the dust it left behind. She dropped the blanket off and then detoured to the swings.
Noah Dawson’s ratty blue sneakers dragged through the wood chips at his feet, creating and then erasing a pattern over and over again in the few minutes it took her to cross to the swing set.
Instead of saying anything, Eliza sat next to him, her palms finding the cool metal chains of her own swing, holding on tight. She rocked her body once, then again, to get it into motion.
The freedom—the kind that came with the pump of legs, the smooth arc as the body fought gravity and inevitably lost only to surge up to the sky once more, trying again, always trying again—was addicting. It popped in the bloodstream like Fourth of July fireworks, tasted like cold popsicles on hot summer days, delighted like fireflies and birthday cake and everything good in the world.
The wind whipped at her cheeks and she was all of five years old, grinning too hard, the cold morning air harsh against her exposed teeth.
“Come on,” she cried out to Noah, who was watching her, big eyes and a shy smile that tucked itself into the corners of his mouth so as not to be obvious. “Come. On.”
He didn’t say anything as she swung by him, just shuffled his feet against the wood chips some more.
Her legs kicked out, harder, harder, harder, as her body bent back farther, farther, farther. “I’m going to go over the bar.”
“You’re not,” Noah yelled back, laughing as he finally pushed off the ground, trying to match her rhythm. “You can’t.”
“I’m gonna do it,” she hollered to the sky more than to him, wild and carefree—or was it careless? Did it matter? In that heartbeat, she knew nothing of the bounds of reality, knew only that she could at any minute cut herself free of the chains that kept her tethered to the earth.
Noah whooped beside her, little-boy joy uncontained, matching her irreverence laugh for laugh.
A door slammed, a car backfired, and reality returned. The service would be starting soon. Uncle Josiah would want to know where she was. Her chains would never be so easy to cut.
Eliza let her feet hang so that they brushed the ground with each pass. The light dimmed in Noah’s face as he followed her example.
When they both finally slowed to a stop, she didn’t bother looking at him, just twisted herself so that the chains wove together above her head. “What’s up, buttercup?”
It was what Hicks asked her sometimes, and it always made her feel better for a stupid reason she couldn’t name. Maybe it was the silly rhyme, or the nickname. Maybe it was that someone cared enough to ask at all.
Eliza kept twisting her chains as Noah stared hard at his shoes some more. That was okay. It was okay if he didn’t want to talk; he should know that, too.
The metal squeaked an angry protest as she turned and turned and turned, and she kept going until the rubber of the seat squeezed at her hips so hard she wondered if there would be bruises. Then she let go.
The world blurred into silky color and muted sound as she spun. Her blood, her stomach, her brain went along for the ride, protesting as they did. She laughed again at the rush, and realized it was the most she’d done so in months. Years, maybe.
Finally, everything righted itself and then settled and she was once again just sitting on a swing, gravity still intact, the trees and houses where they should be and standing still.
Eliza smiled at Noah, but she recognized a brick wall when she saw one. She was just about to stand, to leave him to his sulk, when he started to speak. It was just a squeak at first, not even words, but enough to get her attention. She stayed where she was.
“Do you . . .” Noah tried again. “Do you remember the other day how you said . . .”
It took her a second, and then she remembered. At the grocery store. When she’d been helping his mom. Poor Mrs. Dawson had looked about two seconds from fainting straight to the floor. Molly had to . . .
No. Eliza didn’t want to think about Molly. Not right now.
“I remember.”
“You said . . . You said if I needed your help, I could ask.” Noah scuffed his foot against the ground once more and then turned to look at her. When he did, he seemed old, so much older than he should. “I think I need it now.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LUCY THORNE
Friday, 4:00 p.m.
Sheriff Hicks had insisted that it would be easier for him to come get Lucy and drive her out to the Dawsons’ place when she was done interviewing the Cooks. He didn’t say anything about the obvious fact that she’d all but ditched him for that interview, but this was clearly a proactive step to prevent it from happening again.
Or so she’d thought.
By the time they’d turned down the third poorly marked path, she reconsidered that assessment. Maybe he really had been onto something about her getting lost—there was no way her cell phone GPS would work out here.
“You said Noah was homeschooled?” This certainly wasn’t a trek a bus could be expected to make every day.
“A lot of the kids in the Church are,” Hicks said. “The public school curriculum’s not exactly what you would call liberal, but it does teach evolution and such. Most of the elders in the Church warn against sending kids there. If one of the parents can’t stay home, they send the kids to another Church family during the day.”
“Josiah Cook’s an elder, right?” Lucy asked. Hicks’s fingers flexed at the mention of the man’s name. And once again she was struck with the thought that this was personal to Hicks. Lucy knew that in fights like this, where beliefs became politicized, everything was amplified and all bets were off.
But there was something more to this for Hicks. It made Lucy want to pull at strings to find where this particular knot started.
“Yes, Josiah’s an elder.” The response was careful, neutral. She wondered if he’d had to control it, the way he was controlling his hands right now, forcing them to unclench.
“Seems to be quite popular. Josiah.”
Hicks hummed, low in his throat. “He’s the pastor. That means a lot around here.”
“Care to elaborate?”
The answer could not be more obviously no. His hat shielded his face still, the low afternoon light sliding along his scruff. “Man can do no wrong, it seems.”
“You don’t agree with that?”
“He’s defending the shield laws with everything he’s got,” Hicks said slowly. “Puts us at odds.”
“Why does he do it?” Lucy asked. “The laws can’t really have that much effect on their daily lives that he’s putting up this much of a fight.”