Page 102 of Villains Series

TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO

THE FIRST HOME

ELI sat on the porch steps and looked up at the sky.

It was a beautiful night, the strobe of red and blue lights painting the house, the lawn, the chapel. The ambulance and the coroner’s van parked in the grass. One unnecessary, the other waiting.

He pressed a worn old Bible to his chest while the cops and medics moved around him as if in orbit, close but never touching.

“Kid’s in shock,”

said an officer.

Eli didn’t think that was true. He didn’t feel shaken. Didn’t feel anything but calm. Maybe that was shock. He kept waiting for it to wear off, for the steady hum in his head to give way to terror, to sadness. But it didn’t.

“Can you blame him? Lost his mother a month ago. Now this.”

Lost. That was a strange word. Lost suggested something misplaced, something that might be recovered. He hadn’t lost his mother. After all, he’d been the one to find her. Lying in the tub. Floating in a white dress stained pink by the water, palms up as if in supplication, her forearms open from elbow to wrist. No, he hadn’t lost her.

She’d left him.

Left Eli alone, trapped in a house with Pastor John Cardale.

A female medic brought a hand to Eli’s shoulder, and he flinched, half from the surprise of contact, and half from the fact the latest welts were still fresh under his shirt. She said something. He wasn’t listening. A few moments later, they wheeled out the body. The medic tried to block Eli’s view, but there was nothing to see, only a black body bag. Death made clean. Neat. Sterile.

Eli closed his eyes and drew up the image of his father lying broken at the bottom of the stairs. A shallow red pool spreading around the pastor’s head, like a halo, only in the dim basement the blood had looked black. His eyes wet, his mouth hinging open and closed.

What had his father been going down there to do?

Eli would never know. He opened his eyes and began to absently thumb the pages of the book.

“How old are you?”

asked the medic.

Eli swallowed. “Twelve.”

“Do you know your next of kin?”

He shook his head. There was an aunt somewhere. A cousin, maybe. But Eli had never met them. His world had been here. His father’s church. Their congregation. There was a phone tree, he thought, a communication network used to spread the word when there was a celebration, a birth—or a death.

The woman slipped away from his side and spoke to two of the officers. Her voice was low, but Eli caught some of the words.

“The boy has nothing.”

But again, she was wrong.

Eli didn’t have a mother, or a father, or a home, but he still had faith.

Not because of the scars on his back, or any of Pastor Cardale’s less physical sermons. No, Eli had faith because of how it felt when he pushed his father down the basement stairs. When the pastor’s head struck the basement floor at the bottom. When he finally stopped moving.

In that moment, Eli had felt peace. Like a small sliver of the world made right.

Something—someone—had guided Eli’s hand. Given him the courage to place his palm flat against his father’s back and push.

The pastor had fallen so fast, bounced like a ball down the old wooden steps before landing in a heap at the bottom.

Eli had followed slowly, taking each step with care as he drew his phone from his pocket. But he didn’t dial, didn’t push Call.

Instead, Eli sat down on the bottom step, safely away from the blood, and held the phone in his hands, and waited.

Waited until his father’s chest stilled, until the pool of blood stopped spreading, and the pastor’s eyes went empty, flat.

Eli remembered one of his father’s sermons, then.

Those who don’t believe in the soul have never seen one leave.

He was right, thought Eli, finally dialing 911.

There really was a difference.

“Don’t worry,”

said the medic, returning to the front porch.

“We’re going to find somewhere for you to go.”

She knelt down in front of him, a gesture clearly meant to make him feel like they were equals.

“I know it’s scary,”

she said, even though it wasn’t.

“But I’m going to tell you something that helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Every end is a new beginning.”

She straightened.

“Come on, let’s go.”

Eli rose to his feet and followed her down the porch steps.

He was still waiting for the sense of calm to fade, but it didn’t.

Not when they led him away from the house. Not when they perched him on the edge of the unused ambulance. Not when they drove him away. Eli looked back once, and only once, at the house, the chapel, and then he turned, facing forward.

Every end is a new beginning.