It was Christmas Eve and Beth had grown tired of her police guard. She wanted to be alone. If Thornton wanted to get at her, so be it, she decided. She called Michael and insisted Smoot and Reynolds be allowed to leave. After much coaxing he agreed, with the understanding that she use the cell phone he had left her with to call the second anything out of the ordinary happened. She now felt more relaxed than she had in days as she placed the simple gifts she’d bought for Trudy and Kenny beneath the tree. There were even presents for Michael, Janice, and the girls—purchased in a moment of weakness. It was, after all, a season of love, she told herself.
She took a large heavy box from the kitchen pantry and pulled it upstairs to Kenny’s room. She turned on the light and shut the door. She took the wrapping paper she’d put aside for this, and began cutting and taping, topping the package off with a large red bow. Now she placed the neatly wrapped package in the center of the room. Michael is sure to throw a fit about the new computer. Then she stopped herself, remembering that the relationship had changed. It isn’t his business anyway. I’m the one that worked overtime.
Beth sat at Kenny’s old computer and, for some unknown reason, turned it on. The computer screen appeared before her with Kenny’s desktop full of icons. She recognized most of them as games, but surprisingly a few were actually educational. The desktop also included a word-processing icon and an encyclopedia. Where did all these come from? I didn’t buy them. She went into the word processor and began rummaging through his file folders. Most were school papers, but her eyes fell to the one marked “personal.” She figured opening this file would be violating her son’s privacy, but the mouse seemed to have a mind of its own as she clicked on it anyway. Any guilt she might have been feeling disappeared as the password box popped up. “Password?” Beth muttered. She didn’t know such a thing existed for a word processor. She didn’t know enough about computers to get around the process, so she banged on the keys for almost an hour, considering every possible password she could think that might represent something important to Kenny. Realizing this file might provide information about his disappearance, she was determined more than ever to get into it.
* * *
“You’re cold,” Ryan stated as he watched Jessie pull the blanket tighter around her body.
“Well, this isn’t the warmest room in the house.” Jessie smiled.
“True. Let me find you another blanket.” Candle in hand, he began walking back toward the loft.
Jessie reached for his arm. “I’ll be fine, Ryan. What are we doing in here? Ken’s already told me that this room doesn’t have an emergency outlet anywhere, so I’m inclined to believe we’re not here to play games.”
“Come over here.” Ryan guided Jessie to the other side of the room. It was a vast, almost empty space. Its only contents were back-to-back folding chairs on the wall to her left, along with a painting of a rose that Ryan had repainted twice. Through the filtered light, Jessie stared at the soft, lavender-colored roses. Ryan wasn’t as talented a painter, but his techniques could be improved easily with her help, she decided. She remembered the first time she’d learned of this painting. It had once held only two roses representing Ryan and Rebecca. After Rebecca died, he’d removed one rose and painted the background black, reforming the isolated rose to a wilted and lonely state. It was just the previous summer that he was able to lift the spirits of the remaining rose by adding four more to the bouquet. The roses were symbolic of his reasons to appreciate life. He’d told her who four of the roses stood for, but the fifth rose he’d left unidentified. But she was intuitive enough to figure it out on her own.
“Okaaaay . . .” Jessie held a blank expression, looking at Ryan, then at the painting and back at Ryan again.
“You remember who the roses represent?”
“Yes. One for Rebecca, one for your son Joshua, one for Ruth, and one for Gramps,” Jessie replied proudly.
“And the last one?” Ryan leaned his shoulder on the wall and looked directly at her.
Jessie began fidgeting with the blanket. “Well, I suppose I could make an educated guess.”
“Go ahead.”
Jessie furrowed her brow and then suddenly broke into a grin. “Nelly?”
Ryan shook his head and sighed.
“Okay, okay. Me?” Her voice was low and her breathing became rapid.
“Very good.”
“So what happens when I leave? Will you take a rose out, like you did when you lost Rebecca?” She instantly wished she could take it back.
“First of all, you’re not going to leave. And secondly, I didn’t remove Brecca’s rose. I removed mine, remember?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that . . . what do you mean I’m not going to leave?” The humility she’d felt was beginning to wilt in the presence of her rising temper.
“You’re not going to leave because you want to stay.”
“Ryan! Haven’t you heard one word I’ve said?”
Ryan stepped in closer and took Jessie’s hands in his. “Heard every word but tuned in more closely to your body language. It said something completely different.”
Jessie yanked her hands from his. “See, there you go again, thinking you know everything.” She dropped the blanket to the floor, the robe over her pajamas falling open. The heat from her anger now sufficed to keep her warm.
Ryan suppressed his laughter. There before him stood an attractive, intelligent, and competent thirty-two-year-old psychologist—housed in what appeared to be reindeer-covered sweats. “It’s time that—”
“No, Ryan. Stop. It’s Christmas now, and I want to unwrap presents, eat fudge without nuts, and pack.”
“You want to know why I stopped going to Church?”
“Oh, sure, throw that out there,” Jessie chastised. “You think that after you tell me that, I’m going to just spill it all and miraculously morph into whatever it is that you need me to be? You’re soooo off the mark, Blake. I don’t even have my stupid tea!” Her unspoken need to move now pushed her around the room like an Indy-500 race car.
Ryan slid to the floor and leaned against the wall beneath the painting. He folded his arms across his chest and waited.
“Go ahead and spill it. Just don’t expect me to follow suit,” Jessie blurted.
Ryan’s eyes followed her laps about the room. “I never felt good enough to be a Mormon.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Jessie could see Ryan’s chin lower to his chest. Good move, Blake. Whatever you do, Jessica Nicole Winston, do not, I repeat, do not, fall for this strategy . . .
“My mother and father were Latter-day Saints. I don’t think you knew that,” Ryan said. “My dad joined the Church when he and my mom began dating. She was a strong member and had her sights on a temple marriage. But after a year of being together every day, their teenage hormones took over. It wasn’t long before her dreams were shattered—I was the result. But they were in love, so they married civilly, convinced that after a year they’d get to the temple.”
Jessie’s demeanor instantly softened. “Which never happened because she died giving birth to you.”
“Yeah.” Ryan watched as Jessie’s pacing slowed and her tensed body relaxed. He continued, “When I found my mother’s old paints, I also ran across a notebook she used as a journal. I skipped a day of school to read it in its entirety. While my dad loved my mother, his testimony was solely based on his desire to please her.”
“So when she died, any desire he had to continue on in the Church died with her,” Jessie supplied. “But wasn’t Ruth a good support?” she asked, now completely engaged in the conversation.
“I’m sure she was. But more than likely my dad was simply going through the motions. He had never been converted. And if you’re not converted, all the efforts of the well-intentioned will get you nowhere. With no real sense of who he was or what the gospel offered, and a kid who reminded him daily of what he’d lost, he cracked. He hung in there for five years, though. I have to give him credit for that.
“I went through Primary just fine, which is the Church’s organization for children. The kids wondered why I didn’t have a mom or dad . . . but the things they said were never too big a deal to me. But as I grew older, kids were meaner, and for some reason I was the victim. I didn’t handle it as well.
“When I was fifteen—this was after I’d read my mother’s journals—a kid named Randy and I had a fight at church because he’d been ripping on my dad. As I look back on that, I’m sure that all the remarks from the years previous must have just built up inside, and with Randy’s stupidity, they erupted. When our teacher asked what happened, every boy in the room said that I had provoked the fight—Randy hadn’t done anything wrong. I was strong and had worked him over pretty well. The teacher, who happened to be Randy’s father, sent me out of class and talked with Gramps and Ruth. He told them that I was welcome back as soon as I apologized. Not only to Randy but to the entire class.”
“Ouch.”
Ryan mustered a smile. “You can imagine how well that went over with me.”
“Yeah.” A good portion of her angry tension was now dissipating, leaving Jessie short on energy. She slid down the wall closer to where Ryan was, careful to remain at a “safe” distance. “So you stopped going?”
“Yes and no. I went to sacrament meeting and then came home. I didn’t go to the other meetings, and I never went to activities.”
“I thought you stopped going altogether before Rebecca came along.”
“Yes, I did. Remember the burning incident when I was seventeen?”
“Yeah. I kinda figured that played into it somehow.”
“The plan was just for me and this kid Robert to help our friend Paul get back at a guy named Mark. Mark was going out with a girl that Paul insisted should have been his girlfriend. I got along well with Robert and Paul. They never hassled me—let me be who I was. So I didn’t mind causing a little mischief on their behalf. That night, though, Robert brought another guy along.”
“Ah, let me guess. Randy?”
“Yep.” Ryan turned slightly toward Jessie. “I considered leaving, obviously the wiser choice, but I didn’t want to appear spineless to my buddies. Randy was the reason the small fire we started got out of hand.”
“I thought you said the wind picked up and it spread out of control.”
“Yes, it did. But it wouldn’t have if Randy hadn’t soaked the surrounding area with gasoline to ‘give it a kick.’”
“Oh, Ryan—like you didn’t see him holding a gas can?”
Ryan raised his eyebrows and looked directly at Jessie. “No, Gramps, I didn’t know about the gas can—it was dark at the time.”
“Sorry. And so after the fire spread to the house, everyone ran—except you.”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you never tell anyone who the other boys were?”
“I took responsibility for what I did. It wasn’t my place to rat out those who didn’t.”
“Wow. Remarkable constitution at seventeen.”
Ryan stretched his legs and offered a weak grin. “I was raised by Gramps, remember? Although if my constitution were so remarkable, I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“So you were ticked at the boys, had to rebuild Mark’s house, and then said, ‘No more church for this guy’?”
“There’s just one more thing. Robert confessed about a year later—his guilt got the better of him. But Paul and Randy never came clean. Paul’s dad was our stake president, and Randy’s dad—”
“Was your old Sunday School teacher,” finished Jessie.
“Yeah, but at that time he was in the bishopric as a counselor.”
“Ah,” replied Jessie. Although, if truth be known, she hadn’t a clue as to what a counselor was. She knew being a bishop was a big deal, so a counselor must be too, she decided.
“Those two guys got away with a lot of things because nobody ever wanted to tell on them,” Ryan continued. “They both went on missions and were continually praised for their greatness. In truth, I learned they didn’t serve well at all. Both their fathers knew what kinds of things they’d done, but let it go. By the way, Randy’s last name is Grant.”