Nobody knew, as he strode through the propped-open doors of Harbor Vale Bible Church, that Zac had not entered a sanctuary like this one in more than a hundred years. Nobody knew his legs were trying to turn him around and bolt. After all, he was Zac Wilson, and nobody knew a thing about him he didn’t want them to know.
He lagged behind a few others who dispersed with clear direction. The foyer was open, the west wall composed of windows from the floor up that faced a side parking lot and a row of elderly pine trees. Nothing about the space justified Zac’s reluctance to step into it. Behind a desk stacked with programs and papers stood a blond guy maybe twenty years old. He looked bored, but his smile was real enough as he saw Zac hesitate.
“Hey, dude, are you here for the pack-a-backpack thing?”
“Yep,” Zac said.
“Okay, see the hallway off to the right? All the way at the end, they’re in room 38.”
“Thanks.”
His legs quit fighting him as he fast-walked that direction. He hadn’t expected a lightning strike, but the wrongness of his presence here was permeating. God saw he wasn’t here to worship or repent, knew the lost cause Zac saw in the mirror.
“Zac?”
He pivoted toward the voice. Tiana Burton stood, hands on hips, at the mouth of the hallway he’d just entered. Her smile was one of the kindest Zac had known in all his years. He stepped toward her to absorb more of its warmth. They stood eye to eye, she tall for a woman and wearing heeled boots, he five-eight-and-a-half in his shoes.
“Well, fancy meeting you— Wait a minute.” He cocked an eyebrow. “This is your church, isn’t it? Yours and David’s.”
“It is. Welcome.”
“What are you doing here on a Friday night?”
“Service event. Somebody brought in a ministry for foster kids and matched donations, so we’re … Oh my word. Was it you?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of cluelessness.
Tiana laughed. “Does your fan base know about this?”
“I started it online. I wanted to do something local, and then the foster organization told me the backpack event was being hosted here.”
She sobered. “You wouldn’t have chosen a church for the venue.”
“Feels hypocritical.” The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, as if bridled electricity did indeed hover over him.
“I respect that. But I’m glad you came.”
“I initiated the thing. Figured I should show up.”
They walked side by side down a gray-walled, gray-carpeted hall with a ceiling high enough that his brain fabricated no threats to his life. The smell of cookies overwhelmed the recent use of lemon cleaner.
“Where’s David? Is this his idea of a date?”
She gave a quiet laugh. “He’s home practicing.”
He waited for the object of the sentence, but then he got it. “Piano.”
“He’s agreed to stand in as church pianist as long as Karen Scott is on maternity leave, and she’s due sometime before Thanksgiving.”
“They’ll never let him quit. The man could play Liszt with his hands tied behind his back.”
They reached the propped-open door, through which drifted the lively delight of human conversations. Zac stood to one side and studied the crowd. Sixty or seventy people mingled. At the back of the room, a long collapsible table was spread with plates of cookies.
“I wanted to come,” he said. “Money’s distant. Hands-on is more my thing.”
“Will you be swarmed by Zac Wilson autograph seekers?”
He rolled his eyes. “I highly doubt it.”
But when they stepped inside, more than a dozen occupants broke off their discussions and beelined for him. Guys and girls, twentysomethings, beaming.
“Zac!”
“It’s Zac!”
Tiana shoulder-bumped him. “News for you: church kids follow you too.”
He couldn’t help laughing. “Hey, everybody.”
As she moved away, Tiana squeezed his shoulder. A few of the girls watched her go, and he guessed at the things they would notice: the easy confidence and poise in Tiana, from her long-legged stride to the elegant black coils of her hair.
“Are you two …?” one of the girls whispered to him. “I won’t post it online if you are.”
“Tiana’s a friend,” Zac said. When the girl gave a doubtful squint, he added, “She’s also dating a friend. Maybe you know him? David Galloway.”
“The piano guy.”
“That’s the one.”
The voices around him continued. “Zac, I brought white chocolate chip cookies,” and “We saw your fund-raiser online and thought maybe it’s a sign you’re moving here,” and “Oh, I hope so.”
He flashed back to the line of thousands at Marble Canyon, autographs and awed faces, their relief as he described his rescue from certain death at the hands of an angel. Irreverent fiction, but they had swallowed it because they wanted to, because he was the one spinning the tale. He squirmed inside at the memory.
Movement at the front of the room drew their attention. A brunette woman in her forties waved for silence, and the room settled.
“Hey, all, in case you don’t know me, my name is Louise Pitts and I’m the ministry coordinator here.”
Ah. She had called last week and invited Zac to their event.
“It’s great to see so many of you on a weeknight. As you know, we’ll be packing backpacks for foster kids who are going into new homes, sometimes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. We underestimated the donations, which is a great problem to have. There’s a lot to sort and stuff, most of it purchased by Foster Gifts with the fund-raiser donations. We have a ministry founder here to tell us about them. Let’s welcome Jim DeClerck to HVBC.”
Applause rippled as a middle-aged bald guy took over. Louise caught Zac’s eye and smiled. He dipped his head in gratitude: she hadn’t given him away.
Jim DeClerck talked for fifteen minutes, his timing so precise Zac suspected a military background. Then the group split up. The twentysomethings who stuck by Zac decided to sort and stuff for ten-to-twelve-year-old boys and grabbed grocery bags labeled as such. On each table, someone had already stacked about a dozen backpacks. Their group upended bags of clothes and toiletries. Zac compiled and folded a wardrobe for one unknown boy after another—shirt, pants, pajamas, underwear, socks. Soft fabrics between his fingers, reds and blues, greens and yellows.
The shirt in his hands now would have fit his nine-year-old self the day he became man of the house, whether or not he wanted the job. The kid who would wear this shirt might have faced the same thing, might be entering an unknown family and calling himself a failure. Zac rubbed his thumb over the buttons before folding it and setting it on the pile. He picked up another, an Oxford shirt in orange and brown plaid, and smiled. To him plaid would always be a ’70s style.
A ponytailed girl took the place across from him. Her purple graphic hoodie bore a giraffe design, and she looked younger than the rest of their group. “Hi, Zac.”
“Hi.”
“I’m Crystal.”
He stretched his hand across the table. “Good to meet you.”
“Same. I thought I’d add toiletries to your stacks. I’ve got shampoo and toothpaste.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Most of the kids seemed to know each other well. At first Zac’s remarks amid theirs caused moments of deferential quiet. Then without looking he picked up a grocery bag from the bottom, spilled travel-sized tubes of toothpaste all over his feet, and laughed at himself. The kids laughed too, and as if a barrier had lifted, they plunged into a dissection of biblical themes to be found in Tolkien’s master works.
A grin split Zac’s face. Kids who appreciated something older than they were. The phenomenon became rarer with every generation.
“What did you read first?” Crystal said, glancing around the group. “I started with The Fellowship of the Ring because of the movies. I didn’t even know about The Hobbit until after.”
Answers varied, and then one of them asked Zac.
“The Hobbit,” he said, and a warm memory filled him: reading late into the night, squinting in the wavy light of the kerosene lamp to finish one more chapter.
“I’m sure he wrote that one after,” said a guy named Greg who had expressed half of the opinions aired at their table so far. “You can feel when you read it, he was returning to write the backstory.”
“Are you sure?” This from a quiet girl who had been adding notebooks and pencils to each backpack. She hadn’t said her name. “I don’t think that’s right.”
“Somebody look it up.”
Phones emerged, and Zac waved them off. “The Hobbit came first.”
Greg gave Zac a smirk that made him wonder how annoying his own could be. “Bet me.”
“Nah,” Zac said. “But The Hobbit was published in 1937, and The Fellowship of the Ring was 1954.”
The kids gawked.
Crystal went to her purse and returned with her phone held up. “I have to know if he’s right.” After a moment, she gave a quiet gasp. “You guys, Zac is a genius.”
He wished he could tell them what the story of a dragon’s defeat and a Dwarf-king’s courage had meant in a decade when the poverty around him and the age within him had weighed so heavily. He wished he could tell them how thirstily he had imbibed the great epic seventeen years later, national prosperity returned after a war that had torn the souls of men and women, his included.
Instead he fielded their quizzing as they discovered what they thought was a mere penchant for dates. They went on believing he was only as old as his face, their senior by years instead of a century.
At last the backpacks were filled, and Louise thanked everyone. Zac’s crew volunteered to load up. He sprang into the back of her van and took backpacks passed up to him. By the time they’d finished loading, the kids had invited Zac to Sunday morning service and Wednesday night classes and a book club that met monthly at the coffeehouse.
“I know where it is,” he said when Crystal tried to give him directions. “I had this town memorized thirty minutes after I got here.”
One of the guys laughed. “That’s about it.”
As they dispersed, Tiana jogged up to him.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got nowhere to be, and I’m guessing you don’t either.”
“Perceptive.”
“I cannot go to David’s and listen to another flawless run-through of ‘The Love of God’ and ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ and ‘In Christ Alone.’ Or I will pitch the hymnbook at his head—the one he never opens because, ‘It’s not necessary, love; I looked at the key signature.’”
Her attempt at a Scottish brogue was thoroughly butchered. Zac laughed. “I’m honored to be your alternate.”
“I thought we could get coffee and catch up.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
In the month since they’d met, Zac had seen her and David two or three times a week. Tiana was good company, and returning to his apartment held no charms. Three weeks renting a place did not make it home.
Halfway through their lattes, she set hers down and folded her arms on the table. “I want you to hear me out.”
Zac motioned her on.
“I know what you’ve got planned for tomorrow. David told me.”
He tried to take offense but couldn’t. “No big deal. I’m not dwelling on it.”
“Then you must be coming down with something. You ignored the cookies earlier, and you ordered nothing here but a drink.”
“Watching my sugar intake. Have to maintain my stunt guy physique, you know.”
“Chicago’s an all-day trip at least. David wants to be your backup driver.”
“Not necessary.”
“At least think about it.”
Shoot, even a flat refusal didn’t faze her. “No need.”
She rested her hand on his arm. “I know, Zac. Not just what happened in the park—David told me all of it.”
Saber flashing in David’s hand, blood on fallen leaves. Shovel turning in Zac’s hands, dirt falling into the grave. His arm stiffened before he could block the reflex, and she withdrew her hand and sipped her latte. But Tiana had known about Colm’s execution long before now. This was something else.
Zac had talked to David in the first hours of finding out what Colm had done. Maybe talked too much. “What did he say?”
Tiana’s voice dropped so low he had to lean in to hear her. “It wasn’t only one murder. He was a serial killer.”
Oh, that.
“Even with that I was … Angry isn’t the right word. I was concerned—not just about the law but for you, for all of you, having to carry something like that. But David said there’s no legal method of execution that would work on a longevite.”
In a less somber conversation, Zac would have smiled at her ease with his pet word for them. She had adapted to the science-fiction flavor of his life and David’s faster than any mortal he’d ever known in on the secret.
Her sigh was quiet, conflicted but comprehending. “And he said some of the murders were so long ago, the police would have asked questions—age and all that—dangerous for all of you.”
“Yeah,” Zac said.
“So the four of you had to carry out his sentence.”
“Yeah.”
She tucked her chin under the weight of her next words. “And his name was Colm, and to you and Simon and Moira, he was family. A hundred years of living as family.”
His mask was slipping. He could feel the slide of it, down toward a rise of feeling he refused to indulge. Colm would win something if he did, and Colm had won enough.
“And David said sometime before I was born, Colm told Moira everything for some reason, and said he’d framed you for the whole thing, to keep her quiet. Which was a lie, but it worked.”
Friendship and brotherhood thrown away. Zac himself thrown away, turned into an unknowing hostage. He had stood against a wall blindfolded while Moira and Colm took point-blank shots through the heart of his trust. Even now he wouldn’t know what they had done if David hadn’t joined them: a new brother with new eyes to see clearly.
Zac flinched. What a joke Moira and Colm had made him. But he was inconsequential. Colm had murdered innocent people. People who disappeared, were mourned by friends and family. This was the important fact. Not how it felt in Zac’s chest to be thrown away by a lifelong friend.
He looked up from where he’d been staring at the tabletop. “David talked a lot.”
“He thought I should know everything.”
She still didn’t, but neither did David. For the best.
“I’m really sorry, Zac.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He wasn’t letting it matter. “I’ll be fine.” He had to be.
“I know you will.”
Good. He’d fooled her if not himself.
“But I think you’re making my point.”
“How’s that?”
“David said you’re going to Chicago to get Colm’s things in order. That’s a lot to deal with alone.”
“Nah. He didn’t own property, just rented.”
She tilted her head at him, flinty challenge in the stare. “Zac.”
“Tiana.” He gave her a smile that held no cares. “It’s only an apartment.”