and recrimination—would you use that same word to describe his feelings for me? He raped me, after all. Held me down. Stuffed pine needles in my mouth—”
“Elizabeth. Sweetheart—”
“Don’t touch me.” Elizabeth stepped away, and her mother’s hand drew back. “Just answer the question.”
“You’re shaking.”
But Elizabeth would not be swayed. Dark wheels were turning; she felt them. “He worked at the church. On the grounds. In the buildings. You opened your home to him. You pray with him. You know him. Did he talk about me then? Does he talk about me now?”
“Tell me what this is about.”
“I can’t.”
“Then I’m not sure we can help you. We’ve worked so hard, you understand? To forgive the sins of youth, to build on the future. Harrison is not the boy you remember. He’s done such good things—”
“I don’t want to hear that!” Elizabeth couldn’t help the outburst. Even now, her feelings for her parents were complicated: pain and love, anger and regret. How could such things live side by side for so long?
Her father spoke as if he understood. “It wasn’t the choice you think, Elizabeth. I didn’t choose Harrison over you, but love over hate, hope above despair—the lessons I’ve taught you since birth: to embrace the difficult path, to accept hard choices and hard love, to be penitent and live in the hope of redemption. I wanted that for you and for him. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see?”
“Of course I can, but it wasn’t your choice to make! To forgive or not was up to me! Your job was something different, and you didn’t do it. You didn’t protect me. You didn’t listen.”
“Nor did I walk away from my family, the church.”
“Actually, you did. You did walk away.”
“And this is God’s punishment,” he said. “To see my only daughter grown bitter and hateful and hard.”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
“You never do. You can barely look at me.”
“Mom? May I speak to you in private?”
“Sweetheart—”
“Over here. Away from him.”
Elizabeth walked away from her father, found a place in the shade where she could turn her back and not face a burning sun.
Her mother touched her shoulder. “Don’t think this is easy for him, Elizabeth. He’s a complicated man, and he grieves. We both do, but it’s a hard world full of hard choices. He’s not wrong about that.”
“Don’t make excuses for him.” Elizabeth stopped her mother with a raised hand. “Just tell me if Harrison Spivey owns a farm or commercial property. A hunting cabin, maybe. Anything not easily found.”
“Just the house on Cambridge, and it’s nothing grand.”
Elizabeth looked at the steeple, at the white paint and the gold cross that looked as cheap as foil. “Was he obsessed with me?”
“He prays for you, here and at home. He prays with your father.”
Elizabeth felt cold fingers in the shade. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“Only that he was wrong, sweetheart, and that he has sought forgiveness with all his heart. That’s what makes you right in your way, and your father right in his. It’s what makes this all so awful.”
* * *
After that, Elizabeth was alone. She had a theory, and it was tied so deeply to her own past that she had trouble looking at it straight on. Harrison Spivey had an intimate connection to the church, to her, and to her family. He could be violent, obsessed.
The victims looked like her.
Was Randolph right about that? She didn’t know. Maybe some of them. All she knew for sure was that Channing was gone, and the clock was ticking. Arrest. Death. They were out there, spinning. And if a voice spoke of caution, it did so from the deepest corner of her mind. Too many years led to this, too many sleepless nights and buried hurts. The word Providence rose, yet even that felt dangerous. This was not about her, she told herself, but about finding the girl.
Then why did that voice, too, sound so distant? It whispered in the drive and drowned in the rush of her blood. She was on the porch of Spivey’s house, but it could have been the quarry or the church or the back of her father’s car as the boy laid a finger on her skin as if daring her to look up or say a word about the thing he’d done. Elizabeth felt all of that, bottled it, and directed it. No one had to get hurt, and no one had to die.
But, goddamn, she felt it.
The feeling took