Silent Pledge

He grasped the knob and tried to turn it, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kendra!” He banged on the pane. “Open up! What’re you doing in there?”

No answer. And she had the only key to the garage—she’d lost the spare one last month.

Buck bent over and grabbed a broken piece of amethyst crystal about the size of his fist from Kendra’s rock garden. He swung the chunk of rock against one of the windowpanes and shattered the glass, avoiding the shards that flew in every direction.

He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside, then shoved his way into the garage. “Kendra!”

His worst nightmare came true as he caught sight of her golden-brown hair splayed across the backseat, the car door open, her pale skin illumined by the overhead light in the car. The heavy fumes tried to drive him backward.

Choking, eyes tearing, he rushed over and knelt beside her still body. He touched her face, her neck, felt for a pulse, and raised her eyelids to check her pupils. She groaned. She was still alive!

Gagging from the filthy air, Buck reached between the bucket seats in front and switched off the motor, then gathered his wife in his arms. He had to get her to help fast.

Delphi Bell peered out the small front window of the cluttered living room and saw her husband’s hunched, brooding form on the porch steps, silhouetted by the moon. All he had on was an old pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve. Like a fifties greaser—dirty, stringy hair falling down over his forehead and into his eyes.

He might freeze to death. A girl could always hope….

She saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then saw his shadow move as he turned and looked at the window. She knew he saw her, and she stepped backward fast.

He’d been like that all night, quiet and glaring. She got scared when he acted like this. Sometimes the air around him seemed dark, just like it got outside before a bad storm that tore trees up by their roots and blew the shutters off houses. And he didn’t even drink much anymore. He wasn’t drinking tonight, but that didn’t make much difference, not since he got out of the hospital. And that whole thing had been her fault. He kept reminding her of that.

She thought of the duffel bag under her side of the bed. Inside were a jacket and sweater, and she’d been saving her tips from her job.

A thump on the porch startled her just before the knob turned and the door swung around and crashed into the side of the coffee table. Delphi cried out and jumped backward.

Abner loomed in the threshold. “What’s the matter with you?”

She hunched forward with her arms over her chest, afraid to breathe. She shook her head.

He looked around the front room, and his face twisted in disgust as he stepped in and allowed the cold air from outside to swirl around him. “Why don’t you get busy, then? What a pigsty. Get me some food.” He kicked a pile of dirty clothes out into the center of the floor and got his foot tangled in one of Delphi’s two pairs of jeans. “What’s this stuff doing in here? Can’t you do anything right?” He grabbed up a handful of clothes and slung them across the room, then turned on her again, arms out to his sides like a fullback getting ready to block a move.

“I…I been working, Abner,” she sputtered, averting her gaze from those devil’s eyes she saw more and more often lately.

“So’ve I!” He swung around and slammed the door shut, looked over his shoulder at her and gave her an evil leer, then deliberately snapped the door lock.

Delphi’s thoughts scrambled. That was what he did the last time, just before she ran to her so-called friends from work and begged them to take her in. He’d smacked her a good one then, cut her lip and blackened her eye and nearly broke her arm before she could get away. And they’d turned her back over to him as if she were some annoying stray dog they didn’t want around.

“Come ’ere,” he muttered, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of him.

She took a step backward.

His expression didn’t change. “I said come ’ere.”

Delphi thought again about the duffel bag beneath her bed. She would take it after he went to bed—if he went to bed tonight; sometimes he didn’t when he got like this—and then she would head to another town and never come back.

“You been talkin’ to that Richmond doctor, haven’t you?” His voice deepened and his words slurred, though there was no smell of booze. “Dr. Mercy,” he mocked in a singsong voice. “She been telling you to leave me again?”

Delphi knew the surprise showed on her face before she could stop it. She’d run into Dr. Mercy at the store the other day, and they’d talked a few minutes.

Abner snorted, his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his yellow-brown eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “She don’t know nothin’! She know you’re the one who banged my head into the garage floor last fall?”

“Yes.” Delphi felt that rush of guilt she got every time he reminded her of what she’d done. He’d been drunk and yelling at her and hitting her. When he fell and passed out, she’d tried to make sure he’d passed out for good. She couldn’t help herself. But he was smart. Or at least tricky. Maybe he hadn’t really been passed out at first. Maybe he’d been testing…

Suddenly his eyes narrowed, and his whole body surged toward her like a black cloud. His right arm rose, and she ducked as his hand came down on her shoulder. She winced and cried out and tried to get away. He grabbed her by the back of her shirt and jerked her toward him. She wrenched away and tried to run, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her.

She fell face-first onto the wood floor. Pain hammered her right cheekbone and elbow as she closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth, waiting for a kick in the side or a smack in the head.

He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked back. Hard.

She flinched, but by now she was used to pain. As he lifted her, she drew her feet under her and swung up and around with her left elbow and slammed him in the jaw.

He grunted and let her go.

She stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself and kicked him hard, low in the gut. Without waiting to see what he would do, she ducked past him and ran for the kitchen, holding her hand over her eye.

He screamed a curse and came for her. There was no time to grab a coat, let alone the duffel bag. She just ran out the back door and down the steps and kept on running. She didn’t care where to.

Chapter One

T he crunch of tires on gravel echoed across the unpaved parking lot as Dr. Mercy Richmond drove into the apartment complex where Odira Bagby lived with her great-granddaughter, Crystal Hollis. A bare lightbulb glowed over the small concrete front stoop at the door nearest the alley so she’d know which apartment was Odira’s.

Mercy pulled as close to the steps as she could and reached over to turn up the heat in her car. The curtain at the window beside Odira’s front door was open, revealing a front room with an old threadbare sofa and a straight-backed chair crammed into a ten-by-ten-foot space, along with an old TV resting on a nightstand. An off-white lace doily topped the TV. Mercy had never been here before, but she knew the sixty-six-year-old woman supported herself and seven-year-old Crystal on social security. She couldn’t get a place at Sunrise Villa, the retirement apartments, because the new management didn’t want children.

Before Mercy could shift the gear into Park, the front door opened and out lumbered Odira, all two hundred seventy pounds of her, with wraithlike Crystal beside her, bundled all the way to her nose in a thick quilt.

As Mercy stepped out of the car into the icy wind and hurried around to open the door for them, Crystal started coughing again—the same hoarse, dry sound Mercy had heard in the background when Odira called a few minutes ago. It was typical of a child sick with bronchitis, maybe even pneumonia, brought on by the specter of cystic fibrosis.

“Hope you didn’t have to leave your own little girl at home alone for this,” Odira said in her booming baritone voice that always seemed to shake the walls when she came to the clinic.

“No, I dropped Tedi off at my mom’s on the way here.” Mercy got Crystal and Odira settled in the car, slid into the driver’s seat and pulled onto the quiet street for the five-minute drive to her clinic.

At the first stop sign, she noticed Odira sniffing…great, heaving sniffles. Tears, which she obviously could not contain, paraded down her cheeks. Odira was known to talk more than she breathed, a counterpoint to Crystal’s silent watchfulness. But not tonight.

Mercy cast a second concerned glance at the woman, where the dash lights illumined her broad, heavy face and rusty-iron hair that looked as if it had been cut with a pair of dull scissors. Beside her, Crystal’s face was thin and pale, filled with a sad knowledge. She raised her hand to cover her mouth when she coughed, just as Odira had taught her to. Her stout, clubbed fingers demonstrated the effects of oxygen deprivation to her extremities throughout her battle with CF.

“Are you two warm enough?” Mercy asked.

“I’m plenty warm.” Odira looked down at Crystal and wrapped a thick arm around her. Worn patches at the sleeves of her thirty-year-old coat had been carefully mended. “You okay?”

Crystal nodded and ducked her head into her great-grandmother’s side.

“What’s Crystal’s temperature?” Mercy hadn’t bothered to inquire about that over the phone because she knew that if Odira was desperate enough to call for help, Crystal was sick.

“Hundred and two.” Odira’s voice sounded like a solid mass in the confined space. “Couldn’t get her temp down, and the coughing just kept getting worse. Think she might have pneumonia again.” She sniffed and wiped at her wet face with the back of her hand. “Sorry…just couldn’t figure out nothing else to do but call you.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Odira.” Mercy laid her heater-warmed hand on Crystal’s face. Yes, it was hot. Crystal’s underdeveloped body was always fighting some kind of an infection. She’d had bouts of both bronchitis and pneumonia since Odira took over her care last year. Who knew what nightmares the child had suffered before that? She talked more now than she had when she first came to Knolls after her mother disappeared. She was healthier, too. That didn’t surprise Mercy. Love and kindness had great power over illness, and nobody could envelop a little girl in love the way big, awkward Odira Bagby could.

Mercy shared the hope with Odira that they would see Crystal live to adulthood, maybe even into her forties, with the new treatments and increased knowledge about this debilitating genetic disease. And by the time Crystal reached her forties, maybe they would have a cure.