But now, his heart reached out to Amanda, as it always had. It opened full blossom. He would make a stand, again. And in the interim, he knew in his heart that Matt and Riley would do all they could.
Zachary scanned the incredibly beautiful mountains that surrounded him. He closed his eyes, clasped his hands together.
Lord, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for everything that you have given me. Please watch over my men, wherever they may be, and please, please, watch over Amanda for me until I can return to her.
Right now, right here, he decided, again, he would reclaim his child, and his life.
When he looked over his shoulder, he noticed the flashlights moving up the trail.
CHAPTER 38
Jake Devereaux had made the return trip from Sanford to Spartanburg after the brush up with the NC Bureau of Investigation. For a full day he dawdled around his house thinking about all that had transpired.
He was reluctant to call or text Amanda, fearing what her mother and grandmother might do or allege, not to mention that he felt someone had been keeping tabs on him since he left North Carolina. Neither did he want to discuss the situation with his father, an attorney, or his mother, who would worry.
It was Sunday evening and normally he would be taking Amanda to a movie or hanging with some of the other football players. He sat in his room wondering what he should do next and whom he might be able to talk to about everything.
His Droid phone suddenly moaned that he had a message. He had seen two others from Amanda telling him she was going to Dwyer’s house. The sending phone was listed as private. His instructions were:
Pick me up at Dwyers house. 112 Tryon St. Luv u.
He figured Amanda’s battery must have gone dead and she had texted him from Miss Dwyer’s phone. This would be a decent opportunity to talk to Amanda away from her mother and grandmother, but with a neutral third party present.
He bounced down the steps of his house, fired up his truck, and sped away. He followed his GPS, turned off I-77 and missed Tryon on the first pass, as it was on a cul-de-sac off the main road. Doubling back, he found the home, a nice two-story narrow brick house. It looked like a row home, only it wasn’t attached to another structure. It was free standing.
He parked in front of the house. Traffic whipped by on the main street just fifty yards behind him. There were ten homes he could see elegantly crammed into the semicircle. He didn’t know much about real estate, but he did figure that these homes, as small as they seemed, probably sold for close to a half million dollars. She must be doing okay, he thought.
The house seemed quiet. A dim light shone through the window that appeared to come from well into the back of the home. He walked along the sidewalk, which was lit by a single wrought-iron gas lamp.
Approaching the door, Jake sensed that the house was empty. There were no indications of movement that typically provided clues that the occupants were indeed present. No television flickering, no radio, no computer monitor.
He rang the doorbell, which sounded characteristically suburban, a double chime in reverse octaves. After a few moments, he pressed the dimly lit button again with his thumb. Lastly, he knocked on the heavy oak door, which surprisingly gave way and drifted open.
Jake looked down at the floor and then up as the door continued to open as if welcoming him on its own. A leafy plant was just inside the foyer to his right as he stepped through the threshold and into the wide foyer.
“Miss Dwyer? Anybody home?”
His voice sounded alien to him inside someone else’s home.
Jake looked at his watch. The time was just past 10 p.m. He had received the text message no more than forty-five minutes ago. Amanda should still be here.
“Amanda?” He spoke louder this time. “Amanda!”
The quiet house was eerie. The narrow rooms that funneled toward the rear were all dark and foreboding. He dared not venture any farther.
Turning, he placed his hand on the doorknob and immediately recoiled, as if bitten by a snake. The brass handle was slick with a dark substance that looked like paint, maybe.
Stepping back onto the porch, he pulled the door shut, trying to avoid the grease or paint he had touched. He realized that if Miss Dwyer had gone out jogging or something, he might have just locked her out. He nearly tripped over the gas lamp as he sniffed his hand.
He opened his truck door, turning on the dome light, and in the weak glow he saw red smeared across his palm and fingers. A sickening thought occurred to him as he was reaching into the glove box for the Purell hand sanitizer that Amanda always kept in there. That was when he saw the flashing lights behind his truck.
CHAPTER 39
Amanda slowly pulled into her mother’s driveway. It was nearly midnight on a Sunday. She had ignored what seemed like a thousand calls from her mother and grandmother over the weekend, staving them off with a text and a voicemail to the home phone. Now she worried about the wrath she might incur for having hidden out at Brianna’s for the weekend.
She saw her mom’s twin Mercedes in the driveway as she shut the lights and quietly slipped from the car.
Spending the night with Brianna had been weird. Her best friend had seemed distant, but they were all getting ready to graduate, so she chalked the oddness up to nervousness about the upcoming life change.
Amanda slipped quietly into the house, snuck up the steps, entered her room and locked the door. She leaned back against the door and shut her eyes, sighing heavily.
Shower. She needed a good, hot shower. She stripped off her clothes and turned on the shower, letting the steam build up. As the forceful flow beat against her skin, she replayed the sessions with Riley Dwyer in her mind over and over again, confused about what she was thinking. More troubling, though, was what she was feeling. Her emotions had ranged widely since receiving notification of her father’s death. Initially she was as emotionally responsive as a flatlined heart monitor on a victim of cardiac arrest.
As she was exposed to the terrain and physical surroundings where positive actions had actually occurred with her father, memories came rushing back to her. The recurrences were like a silent train emerging from a dark tunnel at breakneck speed. The tracks followed the wild zenith and nadir of an unpredictable sinusoidal wave. Amanda’s emotions chattered along as if on a roller coaster, at first plunging toward the depths of her anger and hatred for a man she was convinced was a deadbeat, only to be rocketed upward toward the peaks of what could only be described as complete and unmitigated love for a father she adored.
The memories only came to her, though, when prompted, as a stopped heart may only begin beating again when the electric paddles are applied. She still did not know what to make of Riley Dwyer. It was unsettling to follow her through the labyrinth of her father’s life. Yet, the memories of her father were but snapshots in time. The movie of her life, it seemed, was here in Spartanburg, devoid of her father and any connections to him. She had always believed that was intentional on his part.