When You Believe Read online

  “It’s hard, you know.”

  “Whatever it is that’s happened, Shelby, there’s probably a way to make it right.”

  “Not this.”

  “Try me.”

  “Sometimes there’s things that are just… impossible to tell.”

  Folks in St. Clair County, Missouri, liked to say that Lydia Porter had once had a gift. When she’d been a little girl, she’d been able to take her father’s hand, lead him into the hill country, and find deer hunters who had lost their way. They’d written up a story about her in the weekly Shadrach Democrat Reflex when she’d been ten and her father had brought her here to visit her Uncle Cy—the year Eddy Sandlin had turned up missing during Cub Scout Troup 517’s day hike.

  She’d helped find him sitting on a beaver dam in Yesterday Creek, snagging driftwood with his feet.

  They said she did it by listening to the trees. They said she walked along through the forest at the edge of town, guiding her way through the dusk, touching the heels of her palms against the shaggy, rough bark of the hickory and the smooth, overlapping blue-gray mottles of the sycamore, listening. Letting something bigger than herself guide her, thinking maybe it could be the Lord who whispered to her. For a long time, she’d been willing to hear Him with an innocent child’s ears.

  They said she heard things that grownups wouldn’t let themselves hear anymore.

  But that sort of thing hadn’t happened to Lydia Porter in a very long time. Except for the yellowed newspaper clipping her mother kept pressed in the family scrapbook between faded Polaroids of Border collie pups and her first communion, Lydia could hardly even remember.

  Lydia had learned to rely on other things now. She relied on asking the right questions.

  And so she kept asking questions now. “If there isn’t something wrong at home, is it anything to do with the boys?”

  A bloom of color burned Shelby’s cheeks. Lydia knew she was on to something. She tried to see into the girl’s downcast eyes. “Is that it? Boys?”

  The girl clenched her fist in her lap. “No.” Then she unclenched it again. “Maybe.” Tears glossed her waxy lashes. One escaped and ran down, leaving behind a track of eyeliner. “I keep thinking maybe it’s something I’ve done. Maybe it’s something I’ve said to him to make him think—”

  Lydia watched Shelby try to focus her attention anywhere but on a counselor’s face. She watched her stare at the square letters on the sign beside the desk that read LACK OF PLANNING ON YOUR PART DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY ON MY PART. She watched her play with the tiny gold promise ring on her left hand, with its almost-invisible diamond chip. She watched her snuffle and wipe her nose on the back of her wrist.

  “Well,” Shelby said at last, “you know there’s Sam Leavitt.” In distress, she stopped and began to wiggle the ring back and forth until the tiny stone captured a prism of sunlight from the window. The reflection moved like a flitting bug against the wall.

  “You want to finish that sentence?”

  “I’m in family science this semester, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “W-we talked about abstinence, how it was the best thing to do to keep your body healthy, to be pure. We talked about signing a contract.”

  A tear fell onto Shelby’s hands. Another onto her jeans. Then another, leaving wet splotches on her denim the size of nickels.

  “See, I told you there wasn’t anything anybody could do.”

  “That contract makes you uncomfortable?”

  “I c-can’t sign something like that. Not after what’s—” The girl tucked her elbows hard against her ribcage and moaned. “Sam wouldn’t ever want somebody like m-me.”

  Instinctively, Lydia moved toward her. She was caught off guard by the flare of terror in Shelby’s eyes. Shelby tucked up her body to protect herself, warding Lydia off with her hands. Lydia was stunned. Hastily, she withdrew to the other side of the desk. “You can’t think that about yourself. Why would you?”

  Their eyes met.

  “Have you been”—how to pursue this, to be respectful and gentle with a child who had, perhaps, lost her innocence?—“active with someone? With this boy you like? Or with someone else?”

  “No.” The girl’s answer came quick and sharp. “No, of course not.” Then, “Not exactly.”

  “Well, what do you mean by that? Have you and this boy done some things?”

  Even as she asked the question, Lydia was afraid. Say yes, Shelby. Yes. Because anything else means something unthinkable is going on.

  “Oh no.” The tears came fresh and Shelby’s voice broke with regret. “No… no… no, no, no.”

  Lydia leaned to the edge of her chair, her mouth gone dry with dread. Suddenly she began to understand. “Is it someone else, then? Someone else being inappropriate with you? An adult?”

  No nod. No answer. Just a bitten lower lip, eyes that seemed to stare through the floor, tears streaming down the face of a girl who had always seemed so happy. Just the desperate, broken expression of a young lady with her shoulders shaking, who twenty minutes ago had seemed to have everything in the world on her side.

  Shelby found a gash in her fingernail and bit a sliver of it away, leaving raw, pink skin at the quick.

  “Shelby?”

  The girl covered her mouth and gasped like she was going to be sick. That one helpless gurgle told Lydia everything she needed to know.

  Lydia went numb, the silent air pounding heavy against her ears.

  Everybody in Shadrach knew everybody else. Surely no one in this little town would be capable of something like that.

  “You want to give a name, honey? You’ve got to tell me who’s doing this and”—she followed her professional training now, no leading with her words, no power of suggestion—“bothering you.”

  “I c-can’t.”

  “You can.” Lydia struggled against her own frantic need to press. Keep this girl safe. Keep this girl at ease, and talking. “I need you to tell me.”

  Shelby was an achiever, a girl they’d all known since she’d first learned to write in cursive and do long division and run the right direction on a soccer field. If there was someone capable of touching a teenager inappropriately in this town, the folks of Shadrach would find him out, punish him, put him away.

  “Then everybody will know, and he said… he said…”

  “It’s hard, Shelby. But it’s important. It’s appropriate that you would tell someone.”

  “. . . he said if they found out, nobody would believe me anyway. That they’d blame me for what happened.”

  From the hall came the wakening sounds of Shadrach High School as the minutes moved toward the bell—the hoots of girls in the corridor; a reprimand from a voice she recognized as Maureen Eden’s; the stale, wet-bread smell from the cafeteria creeping under the door. A door opened and, through the window to the hallway, Lydia could see the blue plastic easel with brochures that read JOIN THE AIR FORCE. AIM HIGH.

  “He said if I told, he would say I was lying. He said something horrible would happen to me.”

  “We can only keep you safe if you’ll let us help you.”

  “I just want… I w-want it to stop.”

  “If you want it to stop, Shelby, you have to give a name. You can’t protect him.”

  The girl sounded as if she were trying to speak through a gag. But she repeated herself, and the meaning sank in. “I-I’m scared.”

  “We’re not going to let him hurt you. Do you understand that?”

  Shelby shook her head again. No.

  Who? Who would want to do this? Who would do this to some young girl who just wanted to stay pure?

  “If you’ll just tell me—”

  A meeting of eyes.

  “—who did it.”

  Silence. Shelby leaned all her weight onto her hands. “He’s going to say it was me. He’s going to say he didn’t do it. That everybody ought not to believe me.”

  “If you’ll just tell me what went on
, we can keep this man from… from hassling you again.”

  “He… he touches me when I don’t want him to. And he makes me touch him back.”

  “You have to tell me who this is.” Lydia knew she was pushing, but she couldn’t hold herself back any longer. Hearing these things, she couldn’t keep herself from pressing on.

  Shelby stared out the window as if she was uncertain what to do next. Out of the corner of her eye, Lydia noticed a shadow, probably one of the teachers walking by outside. Shelby studied the person walking by outside. She studied her thumbnail, first one angle, then another. Finally, after all that waiting, she said it so quickly that Lydia almost didn’t realize what was happening. She spoke in a child’s voice, telling secrets.

  “M-Mr. Stains. It was him.”

  Lydia took a full five seconds to realize what she’d heard.

  The first blow, when she understood Shelby wasn’t accusing someone in the community. She was accusing someone in the school.

  The second blow, when her brain registered his name.

  For one of the few times in her life, Lydia experienced a physical reaction to words. Adrenaline jolted through her, deserted her, leaving her faint. The silence roared. She couldn’t think past the ringing in her ears.

  “Who?” she asked, her voice gone weak. “Who did you say?”

  But she had heard. At his name, something war-torn and leaden had taken hold in her chest.

  “You heard me, didn’t you?” Shelby said, holding up the second thumbnail to compare it with the first. “You know who he is?”

  In the silence, Lydia made a choking noise. Step by step into the dark journey she went, the weight of horror pitching forward and slamming her. Not Charles Stains.

  Lydia stared hopelessly at the empty ring finger on her left hand. “Yes. Yes, of course I do know him.”

  “The woodshop teacher.”

  “I know who you’re talking about.”

  “The one everybody calls ‘Mr. S.’”

  “I know who he is, Shelby.”

  On the outside, her words sounded as calm as a lapping lakeshore evening, the precise moment of stillness as the stars set in and the breeze dies away.

  On the inside, Lydia felt as roiled up and out-of-control as the water that churned between the bluffs of Viney Creek.

  No. Oh, please, God. No.

  Oh, no no no.

  Let it be anybody but Charlie.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Folks in Shadrach, Missouri, liked to say their town had high ground and low ground, with nothing much in between.

  Along the northeast edge of town, where fingers of Brownbranch Lake poked between high hills, bald eagles chose the heights to build their nests. In the lowlands that fell off to the south, the mist sank and skirted each swell of land, dropping heavy as maple syrup into each draw.

  From the high places to the low places, from the crests of the sycamore trees to the tangled brambles of hawthorn and Sweet William in the bottomlands, the sun never really got the chance to sift through.

  “This Shadrach land,” a travel journalist from the Kansas City Star had written once, “is nothing more than a mess of hollers and knobs.”

  Yes, Lydia thought. A person was either always standing at the top looking down or standing at the bottom looking up. There was no such thing as level ground in St. Clair County.

  When Lydia had visited as a girl, it was her Uncle Cy who had always brought her here to this place, from his old clapboard house on the hill to the gloss-smooth lake that lay below it. On the water, Cy had taught her how to coax the decrepit Evinrude motors to life on the rental boats. She had yanked the cord until her small arm throbbed, then twisted open the throttle so the ancient outboard could sputter to life. When the engine caught, the air billowed with acrid, blue smoke. Then the water slid away beneath the hull like murky, satin skin, alive above the propeller.

  Lydia had learned long, long ago to take her problems to the Brownbranch.

  A fifteen-minute drive carried her east from the high school to the marina. Her decade-old LeSabre crunched on the gravel and, when she turned the engine off, above its hot ticking she heard only the chortling of scaups and mallards, the lapping of wavelets against the shore.

  She climbed out and looked around for somebody. “Uncle Cy? Jane?”

  Cy hadn’t paid much attention to women after Lydia’s Aunt Donna had died. Until Jane Cabbot stumbled up onto Cy Porter’s doorstep one rainy afternoon seven years ago, looking to rent a boat, and never left. Soon they had become a couple and later they’d married. Lydia thought it mildly romantic when she watched them gassing up and hiring out motorboats together, coaxing the outboards with language she hadn’t known people like Cy and Jane understood. Together they sifted through damp dirt in search of the most luscious night crawlers. They sold wooden plaques carved with jokes and mottos, fishing licenses and Spin-a-Lures and stink bait. They pointed out the Polaroid photos on the wall labeled with the length and weight of bass that had come out of the lake, pictures of fish carcasses and bodies—all remembrances of that one summer in 1979 when someone had a camera.

  Of course those people in the photos were long gone. But, no matter. It was the fish everybody wanted to talk about anyway.

  Lydia watched the couple with yearning every time Jane skirted the display of Rapala reels and gave her uncle a fond pop on the rump with her chamois. And every time Lydia saw the tender expression in Jane’s eyes when she sidled up next to her husband behind the cash register, laid a possessive hand on his shoulder and announced, “There’s not anybody I know who can sink a bait hook better than Cy Porter.” Each time Lydia thought, Surely God intended for someone to love me that way. Surely there’s somebody in the world God wanted me to have, too.

  Lydia was proud of being a Porter. “Like a porter on a train,” she’d heard her father introduce himself dozens of times. And nothing had seemed more exotic and exciting when she had been a little girl than that—being named after a porter who worked on an eastbound train all the way to Providence, on the westbound train clear through Missouri into Kansas, a man whose face shone like rock polished in a tumbler, deft gloved fingers barely touching the tickets while he nicked their corners with a punch.

  Nothing had seemed that exotic or exciting, that is, until Maureen Eden, the school nurse, began gossiping about Charlie Stains in the teacher’s lounge last year.

  “When he was a kid, all he wanted to do was get out of this place.” Maureen had stood in the doorway with a CPR mannequin draped like a carcass over her arms. “Now, why on earth would an English Lit professor come back to teach woodshop in Shadrach?”

  “How are you doing, Mo?” the art teacher asked. “You’re supposed to talk about yourself before you walk in and start talking about somebody else.”

  “I’m losing my mind is how I’m doing. I was on my way for something and I don’t remember what.” With the entire length of rubber body, Maureen gestured her loss.

  “Anything to do with”—Lydia nodded toward the mannequin—“that?”

  Maureen had stared down at it as if she’d never seen it before. “Oh, yeah. Wiley wanted this. I was taking it down to vocational. Health occupations.” She sighed and turned to leave. “What can I say? I’m going through menopause. I live in the present because I can’t remember what happened five minutes in the past.”

  “Everybody around here has known Charlie forever.”

  “It’s good he’s coming home.”

  “Charlie Stains was a professor? At a college?”

  Everyone nodded. “University of Missouri. In St. Louis.”

  “Left here the year he graduated from Shadrach and said he never intended to be back.”

  “Hm-mmm. Well, you know the only thing that’s ever constant is change. Maybe Charlie needed a change of life, too.”

  “That’s what he thought he was getting when he left here.”

  “Anybody see him downtown? He doesn’t look like a college profess
or.”

  “Well, he doesn’t look like a woodshop teacher, either.”

  Lydia had opened the refrigerator door and searched the aluminum shelves for the raspberry yogurt she’d brought in yesterday.

  Mo said, “My dad has known the family forever. Good people. Such a nice young man, he says. You can’t have too many people like Charlie around.”

  “Still, it’s interesting.” Brad Gritton, the journalism teacher, also worked as a freelance reporter for the Shadrach Democrat Reflex. They teased him at the school all the time about being a fact worshiper. “When you don’t know what somebody’s been doing all these years…”

  Lydia’s yogurt had vanished. Somebody had eaten it. She shut the refrigerator with a little snap. “So, you tell us, Mo. What’s a woodshop teacher supposed to look like?”

  Maureen rose to the challenge. “He’s supposed to look like Dave Whitsitt when he was framing in the snack bar at Fire-Rattler Stadium. You know, with his knuckles bunged up, scabs on his arms, and his hair all full of sawdust. You’ve seen woodworkers’ hands before. Rough as Taum Sauk Mountain.”

  “Hands. Now that’s what I notice about a man first. Big, wide, working hands.” Patrice Saunders warmed her fingers around her favorite coffee mug, with TEACHERS DO IT WITH CLASS emblazoned all the way around. “You just get to see those other things, Mo, because you’re the school nurse.”

  That’s when they turned to Lydia with a conspiratorial expression in their eyes, as if they’d just realized the possibility; all of them except Brad Gritton.

  “What about you?” Mo asked. Smiles passed around. No matter what Charlie Stains had come back for or what he’d been doing, they each knew that a new man in town might mean a new chance for Lydia. “What do you notice first in a man, Lydia?”

  Five pairs of eyes had locked onto her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, staring them down.

  Jean Lowder aligned her latest pop quiz in the copier. The machine began to click and whirr, and pages began to feed out of the other side like a pile of drifting feathers. “First thing I noticed about my husband was his Adam’s apple,” she said. “Darney was out on the basketball court in Springfield and I thought ‘That boy’s got the biggest Adam’s apple I’ve ever seen.’ It was even knobbier than his knees.”