The Prophet

26

IF CHELSEA SALINAS WAS ANY happier to see Kent than he was to see her, she hid it well. There was a moment of frigid silence when she opened the door for him, and when he put out his hand, she hesitated. Held his eyes the whole time—she’d always been steady like that, so contained and cool, he remembered her at Marie’s funeral, remembered thinking, I wish that bitch would at least cry— but seemed not to trust his hand. Finally she took it, though, her grip stronger than half of his defensive backs’, and said, “He doesn’t want you to be involved, but you have to be.”

“It’s a felony, right? What he was charged with?”

“Right now.”

“It changes?”

“He can plead it down. He doesn’t want you to have to deal with it, but they set the bond high, and he’s got to put the house up. He can’t do that without you. Because you’re both—”

“I understand the situation with our house,” Kent said. He willed down the anger. He’d put so much behind him, he’d looked Gideon Pearce in the eye and told the man he was forgiven, and somehow the idea of doing the same with Chelsea Salinas seemed an impossible challenge. Terribly unfair, he understood that and always had, but the heart was not a fair thing, that was why you had to fight it. The heart was not pure; it required resistance. Demanded it. Follow your heart, people said, but people were wrong. Control your heart. That was the rule.

Adam wouldn’t have left her before you were there, Kent thought, studying the woman. He had his head on straight until you came along, he made the right decisions, he was devoted to the right things. There was never a more protective older brother in the world than Adam. Then you arrived, and he drove past her with you in the car, he drove right past her in the dark and the cold and you sat and watched and let it happen. Caused it to happen.

But Chelsea had been seventeen, too. Why couldn’t he remember that?

“So what do I need to do?” he said.

She walked past him and around the desk. She still looked good, tall and lean and firm, and if she covered up the tattoos and took the damned rings out of her eyebrow she’d be a beautiful woman instead of having that sad look of the middle-aged trying to preserve a fading and forgotten youth. You’re almost forty, he wanted to say. Why do you insist on looking like a roadie? It’s not even fifty degrees out and still you’re wearing a tank top?

She sat behind the desk, pushed her dark hair back over her ears, and said, “You really don’t like me, do you Kent?”

For some reason his first instinct was to tell her to call him Coach. Or Mr. Austin. Or sir. He simply didn’t like the sound of his first name on her lips.

Instead he said, “I don’t even know you.”

“You did once.”

“Not really. Now would you please tell me what I need to do?”

She looked at him for a moment, her gaze hardening, and said, “I wish you didn’t have to do a thing. I should be able to cover it. I’d put up my own house, but…”

“But it’s not your house. It belongs to your husband.”

For the first time, her granite façade showed fissures, and she glanced away, began shuffling through paperwork on the desk.

“You’ll have to sign over your share of the house. It’s not as if anything will happen to it. You won’t lose anything unless Adam skips, and that won’t happen, obviously. They set the bond very high. Higher than I’ve seen for similar cases. It’s because of the publicity that will be around this, probably.”

“How high?”

“A hundred thousand. There’s a cash surety, too. Ten thousand. We’ve got enough liquid cash for that. We can’t cover the whole thing without the property, though. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. You didn’t punch a police officer in the face.”

She looked back up. “He’s struggling with this. Do you understand how much?”

“I haven’t seen him since it happened. I imagine he’s not real proud, or pleased.”

“I don’t mean what happened today. I mean with that girl, with Rachel Bond. He’s breaking under it. Do you realize that? Do you talk to him enough to see it?”

“I’m seeing it happen,” Kent said. “More clearly today than before. I’ve already told him what I can tell him. I guess I can repeat it, but he ignored it then and he will ignore it now.”

There was a moment, right then, when the look she gave him could have come from Beth. A soft scrutiny that seemed too knowing, too intimate.

“Right,” she said. “So, you want to sign papers and get on your way, is that it?”

“Unless there is something else for me to do.”

She began to slide papers across to him. “No. I guess there isn’t.”

“Anything I need to understand about what I’m signing here that I don’t already?”

“It’s straightforward. Financial guarantee that he makes his scheduled appearances. As far as the court is concerned, you’re now responsible for him. Your brother’s keeper.”

He signed the last three pages faster, an illegible scrawl.

By the time Chelsea got Adam released, darkness had settled and the streetlights were on and a chill wind whistled through town. He was wearing only the T-shirt he’d had on that afternoon, when the sun was high and the fall air was warm. Chelsea had brought his jacket, handed it to him without a word. He pulled it on and started to zip it up but she slipped her arms inside the jacket and wrapped them around him and held him, put her head on his chest. For a moment he stood there awkwardly, wanting to step away from her touch, wanting to show that he did not need it, that he could bear this alone just fine, but the warmth of her and the smell of her hair got to him and he returned the embrace and lowered his face until his cheek rested against hers.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have gone there with you. I shouldn’t have let you go alone, not when I knew they were at the house.”

He tried to tell her not to worry about it, but words weren’t coming easily, and so he just stood there and breathed in the smell of her and did not speak. They swayed a little, and for a moment they could have been dancing together, cheek to cheek and happy and in love, somewhere far from here. It would have to be somewhere far from here. Then a door banged open behind them and he knew it was one of the cops and so he released her and began to walk.

“They set it awfully high,” he said. “I figured they would go fifty, not one hundred.”

“I know.”

“How’d you cover it?”

“Your house. I can’t sign over mine. I pay for it, but it’s still—”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“Your brother came down. He called me; I didn’t have to call him.”

Somehow this surprised Adam. They reached her battered car, an old Corvette that had so much rear-wheel-drive torque that it was absolutely impossible to drive in northeastern Ohio winters, a decision that said—Chelsea!— in flashing neon lights. It had been July when she bought it, and in July it worked great, so why worry about winter?

“I’m going to need to talk to him,” Adam said as she gunned the big motor to life.

“He didn’t put up any of the cash. Just signed what he needed to for the house.”

“I’m not worried about that. It’s about the reason all of this shit came down today. Whoever killed Rachel Bond doesn’t have interest in her father. He has interest in Kent.”

She turned to him. “In Kent?”

“The guy is contacting Kent for a reason.” In the side view mirror Adam could see a cop standing outside the jail, watching, and he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“You want to go home?”

“Eventually. First I want to see my brother.”

There were countless reasons that Kent loved his wife and that he’d been attracted to her from the start, but central among them was strength. The calm kind of strength, the most rare and most difficult to obtain. She’d fostered it in her career, of course, but it had been there for as long as Kent had known her. She was unflappable.

That night he came up the stairs and found her standing on the threshold of Lisa’s room, her hand tight on the doorframe and her head bowed. He knew the nature of the prayer, saw it in every tense muscle. She was praying against fear.

“They’ll find him, Beth,” he said.

She kept her head down for a moment, then lifted it and stepped away, leaving the door cracked open even though their daughter was adamant about sleeping with the door closed.

“I know they will,” she said. She had moved to Andrew’s door, and Kent joined her there, watched his sleeping son. A nightlight kept a dim glow, shadows around it. Earlier that fall, Kent had been talking on the phone while Andrew played in the driveway with a basketball that was far too big for him. It was getting on toward evening, and when Kent turned to the window he saw his son on the pavement with pools of blood spreading away from his head.

He dropped the phone in mid-sentence, and the plastic case cracked when it hit the tile floor. Was out the door with a scream in his throat when Andrew sat up and smiled at him.

It had been shadows, nothing more. The way he was lying there in the fading light, they’d looked like blood all around him. Kent carried Andrew in, picked up the phone, and apologized, tried to joke it off. “You’ve seen the kid’s balance—it was a reasonable concern.” Then he excused himself, went into the garage, and sat on the workbench stool until his hands stopped shaking.

Not my children, he’d thought that night, a desperate plea, not mine, not mine, not mine. Tragedy will make its daily appearance, I know that, but please, God, not at my door. Not again.

“What are you thinking?” Beth said.

That Sipes could have started with us, he thought. That instead of Rachel, it might have been Lisa.

“Maybe we should leave,” he said.

“What?”

“For a while. Until they sort it out. Give the police time to find him.”

“You want us to hide somewhere? Take the kids out of school? You quit coaching?” She shook her head. “If the police thought that was necessary, you’d know it.”

It was what he needed to hear her say, it was the return to the calm strength he needed, the kind she’d provided to him so many times over so many years. And yet, somehow, it didn’t steady him the way it usually did. She hadn’t met Clayton Sipes. She hadn’t seen his eyes.

Beth was saying, “We don’t even know for sure that it’s him,” when there was a hammering on the front door. Three rapid reports—thud, thud, thud.

For a moment they both looked at each other uneasily, and then a voice called, “It’s just me, Franchise,” as if Adam could see through the walls of the house and knew exactly how they were reacting, knew that they were scared.

“Adam,” Kent whispered, and when he turned to go to the door, Beth reached out and caught his arm. He looked back at her and said, “It will be fine,” though he wasn’t sure how he knew that. The last time Adam had come to their home it had not been fine.

He went downstairs and opened the door. Adam stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, and beyond him there was an old Corvette. Kent could make out Chelsea sitting behind the wheel. The engine was still running. Evidently they did not intend it to be a long stop.

“Hey,” Kent said. “I’m sorry. It unfolded fast, but I should have called you.”

Adam lifted his hands, palms out, a placating gesture. “Not a problem. Not a problem. It was a rough situation all the way around.”

There was something false in it. He was too conciliatory. Allowing access to Marie’s room was a cardinal sin, Kent knew that.

“You doing okay?” Adam asked.

“Yeah.” Kent hesitated, then said, “You? How serious are those charges?”

“Ah, we’ll figure it out, right? I mean, I’m clean, so they’ll plea bargain.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help…”

It sounded pathetically formal, stilted. Adam gave a wan smile, glanced back at Chelsea in the car, and then returned his focus to Kent, and the smile was gone.

“Who left the letter?”

Kent was silent. His only operating instructions from the FBI were not to disclose his suspicions about the identity of Rachel Bond’s killer.

Adam leaned his head to the side. “Kent?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit,” Adam said, and there was bite to his tone that made Beth come down the steps. He looked over Kent’s shoulder and saw her and there was a pause as they studied each other, Kent trapped in the middle of the gaze.

“Relax,” Kent said, and he wasn’t sure which one of them he meant to direct it to.

“Salter told me the guy who left you the letter was one of your buddies from the prison,” Adam said. “Someone who was in my home. Tell me who he is, Kent.”

Kent said, “I haven’t even talked to Salter.”

“No. You talked to the FBI.”

He knew that much, then. What detail they had provided to him Kent couldn’t guess beyond the obvious fact that they had not inquired about Clayton Sipes directly. Kent took a deep breath and said, “Adam, I’m sorry. For all of it. But you need to go home, keep your head down, and stay out of trouble. There’s nothing in this for you but—”

“He killed her, you son of a bitch,” Adam said, the words rising in volume but not in speed, no rush to temper, just a steady climb toward the summit of rage. “At least I’ll admit that I sent her to him, but you brought him here. How are you going to handle that? Are you going to pray with him again, Kent? He put a bag over that girl’s head and watched her drown inside it, do you understand that? Do you have…”

He had just taken his hands from his pockets and coiled them into fists when he came to a stammering stop. Whatever words—or punches—had been about to come were lost as fast as embers beneath rain. Kent saw the change and turned his head to follow his stare.

Lisa was awake. Standing at the top of the stairs in her pajamas, eyes bleary but concerned, staring down at them. Watching her uncle.

Kent said, “Beth,” but Beth was already moving, taking their daughter and shuffling her toward the bedroom, whispering that everything was fine. By the time Kent looked back to Adam, his brother was stepping away.

“You need to think about them,” Adam said, gesturing at Kent’s wife and daughter. “I know what you believe, Kent, I know how you are, I know who you’ll trust. Salter, the FBI. And I know that you look at me and you see… shit, I don’t even know what you see. But I can tell you that it’s wrong. What I’m thinking about is exactly what you should be thinking about. I’m going to have to answer for what I’ve done. You will, too.”

There was no heat to his words. His eyes were still on the spot where Lisa had just been standing, and he looked as troubled as Kent ever remembered seeing him, as unsteady.

“We’re both going to have to answer for it,” he said, and then he turned and walked off the porch and back to the Corvette.