Looking for Miracles (18 page)

“Where? And how?” Lori challenged. “I’ve already shifted these children around twice in as many months. How do we handle things this time?”

Hank stopped pacing and folded his arms. “Gloria
and I have worked things out. I can’t tell you here and now where you’re going. If I did, it wouldn’t be protective custody.” Lori was ready to tell him that hospital nurses weren’t likely to be working for Hughes, or a drug syndicate. However, Hank wasn’t going to take the argument so she just listened.

He stopped pacing. “Rest assured nobody’s going to find you right away. And that’s important when you’re the main evidence we have on somebody as determined as Hughes.”

“Why did he do it? I still can’t imagine him throwing away everything he owns this way.”

“Crazily enough, he did it for the best reason you can imagine—love.” Hank shook his head. “He sent his little girl away to college and she did a whole lot of partying. Rehab didn’t help, and he didn’t want her getting street drugs from just anywhere.”

The thought sickened Lori. The man would supply his own child with drugs? It gave her chills. Hank read the horror on her face. “I know. It doesn’t make sense to me, either. I’ve got kids and I’d cut off my arm, or one of theirs, before I’d let them use anything illegal with my knowledge. But it made sense somehow to him. And he was bound and determined to keep things going. By the end,
even setting fire to your house to destroy the evidence made sense.”

It numbed her mind. Lori was past imagining all of this. “So you think that somebody might try to get to us again? We really need to hide out?”

“It’s not hiding out, exactly. This would be a perfectly comfortable place. It just wouldn’t be Gloria’s house, like you expected.” Hank looked around the room. “And I’m not saying any more here. Except that you’re leaving here in a squad car and you’re going where I take you. Got that?”

Lori sighed. “Got it. Will you be this tough on Gloria if you guys get married, Hank?”

The sheriff blushed. “Probably not. She can wrap me around her little finger worse than my baby Carrie can. But don’t tell her that.”

Lori felt a giggle ready to escape. “I won’t. Yet. But in trade we’re going to do a little negotiating on this safe house thing.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Hank sighed in resignation. “Let me carry some of this stuff so we can get out of here before I’ve negotiated myself into a corner.”

The next time Mike woke up in daylight there was a stack of yellow legal pads and a couple of sharpened pencils on his bedside table. And next to them, just so he’d know where they came from,
was a box of crayons. He smiled seeing it all, and promptly put the top legal pad to use.

Writing wasn’t easy. But he felt so much better with the fire demons on paper instead of just haunting him from inside. Some of the dreams or nightmares he could understand.

Those weren’t the ones that woke him in a cold sweat. He didn’t like dreaming that he was in Tyler’s room, it was on fire again and it had no door. But he could understand where the vision came from.

It was the same with the one with his father yelling at him in front of a burning garage. Not that his dad had yelled when he burned down his garage, or even when he’d charged out after removing the most explosive materials. Mike had been sure as a six-year-old that his dad should have yelled. That maybe if he had, that fatal heart attack wouldn’t have claimed him. When he spent long evenings watching his mother work at home after a long day at Martin Properties, he was sure as a grade-schooler that all their problems were his fault. So those scenes were understandable, as well. They almost made him feel better.

No, it was the scenes of the trailer, dilapidated like Lori’s, maybe even worse, swamped in flames that mystified him. Where did those come from? Why was he reliving scenes of absolute terror running
through a trailer? And there was the cage, too. Those were the worst. Those were the ones he wrote down several times.

Even telling it on paper made his forehead sweat cold droplets. He was peering through wire mesh, taller than he was. His hands clasped the mesh and on the other side was the sound of fire, the smell of smoke. And danger. Yet every muscle in his body urged him to climb that barrier and go back to the other side where the fire roared. He wanted to run to it. He could hear voices screaming, telling him not to move. He wanted to run so much. But the voices were telling him to stay put. And that was the scene that woke him up, playing behind his eyelids in a nightmare dance.

That one didn’t disappear once he wrote it down. He felt better, as if there were fewer gargoyles hunkered down on his chest, but the weight wasn’t gone. After a while he even got out Lori’s crayons and used a clean sheet on the legal pad. The crossed pattern of the cage mesh reminded him of something else, but he couldn’t figure out what. Coloring in the inferno behind the mesh, he began to understand why Tyler used this method of expressing himself. For things one lacked words for, color said a variety of things. After a few moments he could barely stand to touch the red and scarlet crayons.

There were patches of silver where the skin of
the trailer hadn’t burned yet, and deep blue night sky. This was all so real, somehow, but so foreign to anything he had ever really seen before. A half hour of writing and drawing went by in a flash. Putting down the pad he felt cleansed. His pain medication was wearing off, and he was feeling the effects of his first morning without supplemental oxygen. But after using Tyler and Lori’s crayons, he felt like he could take a nap without waking to horror from within.

When he woke, his mother was sitting in the bedside chair. She had apparently been reading what he’d written, looking at what he’d drawn. And she had been crying. Mike couldn’t remember seeing her so obviously disturbed since shortly after his father’s death.

“Hey,” he called softly, reaching out his good hand. “It isn’t that bad. I’m gonna live, Mom.”

She took a deep breath and opened her eyes wide. “I know. I’m not worried about that anymore. Now I have to admit I probably aged a decade watching those paramedics working on you outside the house. But I’m pretty sure you’re going to get through this with nothing worse than a pucker on one arm where that delightful skin graft is going to be.”

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to that one myself. At least the area they can harvest from is huge. I’ve
only got the one place bad enough to graft. That, as Lori would say, is one of life’s little miracles.”

His mother shook her head. “Those miracles. Where would we be if she hadn’t come into our lives? If you hadn’t brought her in, Mike?”

“You have this look on your face that says we’d be better off in some ways if I hadn’t.” His mother grimaced a little, as she did when he was right and she didn’t want him to be. “But honestly, I think it was God’s doing, Lori and Tyler and Mikayla coming into our lives.”

“You’re probably right. It’s just that if they hadn’t I wouldn’t be sitting in this hospital trying to find the strength to do something I should have done more than twenty years ago.”

Now he was truly mystified. He was ready for his mother’s regrets on Lori’s presence in their lives—what mother ever thought a woman was good enough for her baby, even if she didn’t cause trouble? But this was something different.

“Tell me what you mean.” He grasped her hand tighter, and she squeezed back. Was she trembling?

“First, let me say that I have loved you with all my heart since the moment I first set eyes on you.”

“I know that. Doesn’t every mother say that?” he said softly.

“I expect so. But you weren’t a few minutes old when I first saw you. You were two and a half.”

The room seemed to close down to a narrow tunnel, holding only the two of them. Mike could barely take in what his mother was telling him. Still, he nodded for her to continue, and she did, still gripping his hand so firmly that his fingers started turning white around the edges.

Her story went on, sometimes in long stretches, sometimes in bits she had to force out. “I didn’t think it was such a good thing keeping it all from you,” Gloria told him. Shortly after her first stunning pronouncement Mike had asked her to leave the room for a few moments, and against the advice of the burn nurses, he insisted on putting on the jeans and shirt that were in his small closet. He was not having the most important discussion of his life in one of those hospital gowns that opened in embarrassing places.

So now they sat in the two chairs in the room. He was still hooked up to an IV pole and other inconveniences, but he felt more like himself dressed and sitting up straight.

“How did you keep this big a secret? I mean, everything you did cannot be legal.” Mike ran his good hand through his hair. “I’ve seen my birth certificate. It says you are my parents, that I was born in Missouri, the whole bit. How much of that is true?”

“You were born in Missouri. And by the time
we adopted you, you had no living parents. John wanted to make sure of that. When he found out we couldn’t have our own children, it hit him hard. We hadn’t married all that young, and by the time we knew we had to adopt if we were going to have a child, I was past thirty-five. He was fifty.”

“Why was it so important that I didn’t have any other parents?”

“Have you ever heard of the orphan trains?”

Now where was this going? “Yeah, but isn’t that Civil War stuff? What has it got to do with us?”

“Everything. Those orphan trains brought children to Missouri much later than the Civil War. They brought one little boy from New York in 1929 who was old enough to remember the mother who had to give him up. And who never really did get a new family, just drifting from one foster situation to the other.”

“Dad?” This went a long way toward explaining this whole confusing mess.

“Yes. They even changed his name. He had been Erich Steinmetz in New York. In Missouri he was John Martin. The Martin part came from the second foster family, who almost adopted him. He always said no child of his would go through what he did as a child.”

“It’s going to take me a while to handle all this.”

“I’m sure. We did it out of love, Mike. You have to realize that.”

He got out of his chair and put his arms around his mother, no matter how much it pulled and hurt on his arm. “I know that. I could never doubt that. But it sure raises a lot of questions. Do you know anything about my life before I came to you?”

“Some. Not a lot. There was some hardship involved and the state thought it best if you knew as little as possible. Then your father—I guess I should just say John—” She faltered.

“No. My father. I never knew any other.”

“All right. Your father found a lawyer who would not only handle the adoption, but also for an extra fee handle a second set of paperwork that gave you a new birth certificate and other things that proved you were ours all along. I wasn’t so sure about that part, but John said it had to be that way. After that last heart attack he made me promise that I’d never tell you anything different.”

“Last heart attack? There had been more?”

“Several. He knew by the time you were four or five that it was a matter of time. That’s why he was adamant about not telling you. He was sure you’d have enough problems to deal with without another one.”

“Maybe he was right. Maybe not. Whatever the case, it’s in God’s hands now. Surely He wouldn’t
have brought me this far to let me handle something like this alone now.”

Gloria seemed surprised by his response. “You don’t hate me?”

He let go of her hands, and sat back in his chair. “Mom, how could I hate you? I just need time to figure this all out.”

“We have all the time in the world now that it’s out in the open,” Gloria said.

There was a knock on the door. “We’re sneaking in,” Lori said softly. “As much as you can sneak with this big a contingent.”

She slipped into the room, Mikayla in her arms. She looked wonderful to Mike, and the baby, noisily slurping one fist, was a picture. Tyler followed them into the room, carrying his ever-present fire engine.

“Hey, Mike. Can I hug you? Mom said I had to ask.”

“You can, but put that big old metal thing down on the bed first, Ty. Get up here on this side of my lap and let me look at you.” Tyler did what he was told and Mike looked him over. “Looking good, bud. You going home?”

“Yeah, sort of. Mom says we’re leaving the hospital, but we’re not going to your house.” His expression said what Tyler thought of that.

Gloria looked up at that remark. “What? I don’t
get my goat helper back? Hank, that is not what we talked about.”

Mike hadn’t noticed that Hank made up the tail of the parade until now. “Sorry, Gloria. There’s no choice until the grand jury convenes.”

Lori was next to him now. “Hank insists that we’re going to a safe house. I think it’s an awful idea, but he’s not letting me argue.”

Mike snorted. “Good. Anybody stupid enough to do…what was done the other night…” He softened his words, thinking of the boy on his lap. “We will know where you are, won’t we?”

Hank shook his head. “Not really. That’s why I let her come by here, Mike. I can’t have the whole county privy to what’s going on. Then it wouldn’t be a safe house, now would it?”

Mike started to protest, but looked at his mother. How would Hank Collins arrange a safe house without the help of the biggest property-management firm in the county? He raised an eyebrow silently and looked directly at Gloria. She gave him an enigmatic smile back. “All right. I’ll leave it there. But this place has a phone, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it has a phone. Or at least I’ll have a cell phone you can call that I’ll carry with me. And I’ll have a computer there so I won’t let Martin Properties get further behind than they are already. It won’t be forever. Hank says if things work out he’ll
let me have a police escort to the office and preschool real soon.”

Lori leaned down and rested her head on top of his. The move brought Mikayla down to hair-grabbing level. There wasn’t much damage she could do on Mike, but she tried. Those tiny fingers running through his hair were sweet.