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“He’s in Kingsley bedroom. Third floor. Door at the very end of the hall.”
Grace stood up.
“I don’t think you’ll get much out of him, though.”
“Why not?” Grace asked from the doorway.
“He’s unconscious.”
“What?”
“Kingsley gave him a shot of something. Apparently Søren was going to call the cops and the rest of the world. Kingsley said it would be the worst idea ever.”
“Unconscious or not, someone should check on him.”
“He’s all yours.”
Grace started to leave but hesitated in the doorway. She turned back around, came to him and dropped a quick kiss on his forehead.
“She’ll be all right. I have faith in her,” Grace said, squeezing his shoulder. It was the first kind thing anyone had done or said to him all day. He could have wept from simple gratitude alone.
“Thank you,” he said, and could barely hear himself speak. Grace said nothing, either, merely smiled at him before leaving the room.
Alone in the front room, Wesley prayed. He prayed helplessly, not even knowing what to pray for other than a miracle. That’s what they needed now. A miracle. A sign from God. Something to tell them everything would be all right, Nora would be safe, the world hadn’t spun out of God’s control even if it felt like it had.
Somewhere nearby Wesley heard the sound of a car door slamming. He ignored it.
If Nora were here she’d tell him to relax, to take deep breaths, to take care of himself. Stop worrying about me so much, Nora would say to him, had said to him a thousand times. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.
But he was supposed to take care of her. Søren had entrusted Nora to him and he’d let her get taken by some lunatic with a thirty-year-old grudge. And now he felt forsaken. Losing Nora was his punishment for not taking better care of her while they were together. He’d thought she’d be so much safer with him than with Søren, and now she was gone. Stolen from him. He’d failed her, failed them all.
Please, he prayed once more. Give me a sign you’re still listening.
Wesley heard a sound then, a knock on the front door. He waited, not knowing if he should be answering the door in someone else’s house or not. But then it came again, louder this time. The door had a bell. Why was the person knocking instead?
He went to the door and opened it. A girl lay curled up on the landing, bleeding from a cut on her face.
She opened her eyes—bright blue eyes, intelligent and scared.
“Hello?” He knelt down and met her face-to-face.
“I have to deliver a message,” she said, her voice strangely accented.
“From who?” Maybe it had happened. Finally. A message from the kidnappers.
“From God.”
9 THE ROOK
Grace walked down the third-floor hallway, leaving the men of the house to their own devices. They were all terrified—Wesley, Griffin, who’d let her in the house, even Kingsley, although she could see he had much more practice at hiding his fears than the rest of them.
Nora … Grace prayed her name as she neared the bedroom she’d been warned away from. She could put together no other words for a prayer. All the possibilities she could pray against were too terrible to imagine. Wesley said Kingsley’s sister had Nora. His sister … a woman. Better a woman than being taken by a man. A woman kidnapped … surely his sister had help, had men around her. Impossible to think any lone woman could get the better of Nora Sutherlin. Dear God, Nora. It turned Grace’s stomach to even consider what might be happening to Nora right now.
Outside the door to Kingsley’s bedroom, Grace paused and wondered for a moment what she was doing. She merely wanted to see him … this man, this priest, the one person her usually fearless husband ever admitted to being afraid of. Nora seemed the ultimate free spirit to Grace—she trod across the world in leather boots with black sails flying. And yet when she spoke of Søren she called him the man who owned her. Owning Nora sounded as dangerous as owning a nuclear bomb. Valuable and powerful it may be, but who would want that sort of thing under one’s own roof?
Grace turned the knob on the door and peered inside. A small lamp had been left on and pale gold light filled the room. On the floor at the end of the grand red bed sat a man with his blond head bowed as if in prayer. The door made the slightest squeak as it opened but the man on the floor didn’t move. Whatever Kingsley had drugged him with clearly hadn’t worn off yet.
Shutting the door behind her, Grace moved closer to get a better look at the man. Her heart contracted with sympathy. He’d be in agony when he came to. Sitting on the floor had to be uncomfortable, and far worse, when he woke up it would be to a world where Nora was still gone. Kneeling on the floor at his side Grace studied his face.
Good God, Nora hadn’t been exaggerating at all. Is he handsome? Calling this man handsome would be like saying Einstein was fairly decent at his sums. He was so handsome she wanted to demand an apology from him. He had blond hair long enough to run one’s fingers through but still short enough to give him a civilized air. Nora had called him dangerous but Grace couldn’t see the threat at all. He was tall, definitely. Even sitting on the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back, Grace could tell he must have stood well over six feet. But no, certainly not dangerous. In fact, he looked rather kind, especially around his eyes. Nora often extolled his virtues as a priest to her—how he treated everyone at the church with equal respect, how he listened without judging, how he treated the children like adults and forgave the adults like they were children, how he gave and gave and gave of himself to them and asked nothing in return, only that they remember all blessings come from God, even the ones in disguise.
No, he certainly wasn’t dangerous. Perhaps only to someone who tried to harm Nora. But it was madness to have him locked up in this bedroom like some sort of wild animal. Surely she could find the key somewhere. She’d unlock the handcuffs, let his arms relax into a more natural position.
Grace stood up and looked around. There it was, the key to the cuffs hanging on a blue ribbon off the back of the door. When he’d woken up he would have seen the key staring right at him. Cruel of Kingsley to do that if he, in fact, had done it on purpose. And something told her he’d most certainly done it on purpose.
Once more she knelt at his side and reached behind him. It would be awkward getting the key in the lock from this position. She’d practically have to wrap her arms around the man. But he slept on, oblivious to her presence. So Grace turned toward the bed and pressed close to his body. She couldn’t resist breathing in the scent of him. He smelled cool, clean, like a new fallen snow on a deep winter’s night. Nonsense. What was she thinking? The fear and panic were clearly getting to her. Who on earth smelled like winter?
She took a deep breath, shook off her poet’s musings and started to bring the key around his hip. She found the cuffs on his wrist and felt the slight depression of the keyhole.
“Almost there,” she whispered to herself. “We’ll get these off.”
At that he raised his head and Grace found herself staring at the hardest eyes in the most dangerous face she’d ever seen in her life.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Gasping, she dropped the keys and scrambled back a few feet on the floor.
“Father Stearns,” she said, almost panting from the sudden scare. “I’m so sorry. I only wanted—”
“Welsh accent … you’re Mrs. Easton, yes?” Father Stearns raised his chin an inch higher and waited for her answer. She felt like an utter fool sitting on the floor trying to keep her skirt from riding up her legs while a Catholic priest studied every line of her face.
“Yes. I’m Zachary’s wife. I was on holiday and called Nora. Wesley answered …” The words poured out her in a wave of nervous energy. “He told me what happened, where he was going. I came straightaway.”
“Have we heard anything about Eleanor?”
Grace’s stomach sank. She would have given anything to be able to tell him any news.
“Nothing anyone’s told me.”
Father Stearns nodded and leaned his head back against the bed with his eyes closed.
“I’m so sorry,” Grace whispered. “Nora, we care about her, Zachary and I.”
“That’s very kind of you to say, Mrs. Easton.”
She smiled. “Please call me Grace. Nora’s told me a great deal about you.”
“No wonder you’re so nervous.”
Grace laughed nervously, proving his point.
“She’s only told me good things, I promise.”
He opened his eyes again and stared at her for a long silent moment, searching her face for something. For what, she couldn’t imagine. But she didn’t quite mind his gaze on her. It felt intimate without being inappropriate.
“I refuse to believe that,” he finally said. “I know Eleanor too well.”
“Well, perhaps it all wasn’t good per se. But nothing bad. Fascinating definitely. She did seem to imply you were the one usually putting the handcuffs on, not ending up in them. I could take those off if you’d like.”
“I would like. But as I said, I don’t recommend it.”
“Why not?” She moved a little closer to him, feeling a bit more comfortable now that they’d started talking.
“I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe nonconsensual violence is ever justified. I am trying to remember that I’m a pacifist so I don’t murder Kingsley where he stands.”
Grace laughed again, less nervously this time.
“I don’t think murder will help the situation.”
“It might not hurt it.”
The words should have been a joke but Grace heard no mirth in his tone.
“I’ll go now if you like.” Grace started to stand. “I didn’t mean to be so nosy, but I saw you on the floor and—”
“No. Don’t go. Please.”
He sounded so humble that Grace couldn’t help but sink to her knees again.
“Of course.”
“Stay and talk to me. Distract me from all the thoughts in my head.”
She heard a note of desperation in his voice.
“I’ll stay. I’ll stay as long as you want me to.” Grace moved a little closer to him on the floor. “Do you want to talk about the thoughts in your head?” she asked, as if she were talking to one of the children in her class. “If they’re half as awful as mine, it might help to get them out.”
He said nothing at first, only opened his eyes and stared at something only he could see.
“We’re all terrified,” Grace whispered. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. This doesn’t happen to people you know. This happens in movies, or in foreign countries and the stories get turned into movies, and it’s all madness. I almost died when I was nineteen having a miscarriage, and I’m telling you now, I’ve never been this frightened.”
“I was eleven years old when I looked death in the face the first time. In my early twenties I spent a few months in a leper colony. I have dug my fingers into a teenage boy’s sliced-open wrists to try to stop him from bleeding to death on the floor of my church. I thought I knew terror before today. I was wrong.”
“I keep telling myself to stay strong, that Nora would be strong for me so I have to be strong for her. Falling apart won’t help her. We can’t despair.” Brave words but all Grace wanted to do was dissolve into tears.
“Don’t despair? That’s usually my line.”
“I imagine even a priest needs words of comfort sometimes.”
“All the time, Grace.”
He fell silent after that and she feared the thoughts in his head as much as she imagined he did.
“I don’t want to know what’s going on in your mind, do I?”
“Terrible thoughts. Vengeance. Brutality. What I want to do to anyone who hurts my Little One.”
“You call her Little One?”
“I always have. She was a teenager when we met. A very ill-mannered teenager. She demanded to know why I was so tall. She insinuated I had grown this tall simply for attention.”
“Only Nora could be rude and flirtatious at the same time.”
“I explained to her that I was tall so I could hear God’s voice better. And since I was taller and could hear Him better, she should always listen to me. That didn’t sit very well with her. She retorted the next day with a verse from Psalm 114. ‘The Lord keeps the little ones.’ Her biblical proof that God prefers short people. I started calling her Little One after that. It helped us both remember she belonged to God first.”
“And you second?”
“A close second,” he said, giving her a quick but devilish grin.
“These are good thoughts. Keep telling me good thoughts. Maybe we can get you over your murderous inclinations and out of the handcuffs.”
“I have no good thoughts right now.”
He fell silent and closed his eyes. Grace knew that whatever was going on in his mind right now was nothing she wanted to know.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, his eyes still closed. “It’s not safe here. You should be with your husband.”
“Zachary’s at a conference in Australia. And I’m not going anywhere, not until Nora’s back. I don’t care if my husband divorces me, Kingsley has me arrested and I get fired for missing school, I’m staying.”
“Missing school?”
“I’m a teacher. School starts next week. But it will start with or without me.”
“What do you teach?”
“Year 11 English Lit. Teaching Shakespeare to seventeen-year-olds is not unlike herding cats.”
He smiled then and opened his eyes.
“I used to be a teacher,” he said. “I taught Spanish and French to ten- and eleven-year-old boys.”
“Sounds like hell.”
“It was. I rather liked it, though.”
“It is rewarding in its own way. If you get through to one student a year, see that spark of understanding, see that little hint of the adult they’ll become and you know you’ve somehow helped him or her along that path … it’s worth all the work, all the sacrifice.”
“It was like that with Eleanor when she was a girl. The moment I saw her at age fifteen, I saw exactly who she would become.”
