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  He had calmed down sufficiently to answer her questions as they walked down the hallway.

  “What happened, Jarrod?”

  “Will hit me with the hammer as hard as he could,” the boy whimpered.

  “He surely didn’t do it on purpose?” She wasn’t at all confident of her implied assumption.

  “Yes, he did!” Jarrod practically shouted. “He bet me I couldn’t pull my finger out in time before he hit it. And then he didn’t even say ‘on your mark, get set!’ He just slammed the hammer down.” The boy grabbed his thumb as though it had been smashed anew and the tears started again.

  They'd arrived at the nurse’s doorway. “Jarrod, you stay here with the nurse, and I’ll talk to Will.”

  Claire explained to the school nurse what had happened, and by the time she got back to the classroom, it was nearly time for the final bell to ring. The students were quiet and cooperative and had the tables cleaned up before it was time to go. When the bell rang Claire quietly asked Will to stay after for a few minutes.

  He hung his head but he couldn’t conceal the defiance in his eyes.

  “Will, Jarrod’s finger is hurt pretty badly. I want you to tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I don’t know. I was just standin’ there and all of a sudden he starts screamin’ like crazy.” He scuffed the toe of his shoe on the floor. “I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t! I didn’t do anything—”

  “Will, I heard some of the other kids say they saw you do it.” She gave him a chance to confess.

  “Well, they’re liars!”

  “Will, look at me.”

  He peered up at her from under long, shaggy bangs. “Will, Jarrod told me you bet him he couldn’t pull his finger out before you hit it. Is that true?”

  Silence.

  “Will?”

  “He shouldn’ta made the bet if he didn’t think he could win!”

  “So are you telling me you did hit Jarrod’s thumb with the hammer?”

  “It was an accident. I didn’t do it on purpose!” He started to whimper.

  Claire had the strangest desire to pull the little boy into her arms and hug him. Oh, how she could relate to his anguish over the web of deceit in which he'd tangled himself. And yet, he’d told a serious lie . . . one meant to absolve himself of responsibility for hurting another student. She couldn’t let him get away with it. She couldn’t.

  But she’d gotten away with it, hadn’t she? All these years later and nobody had ever known the truth. Except Gretchen and Tim—and she didn’t even know where they were now. They’d probably forgotten all about it. But she hadn’t. It followed her everywhere. It haunted her dreams, it—

  She forced herself back to the present. “Will, I think we need to tell Mrs. Hammond about this. We’ll call your mom and dad and see what they think we need to do.”

  She walked Will to Marjean’s office and together they called his parents. She would help William Frederick do the right thing so he wouldn’t be haunted by his lie the way she'd been haunted by hers.

  That evening she drove slowly away from the school toward home, replaying the events of the afternoon in her mind. Distractedly, she carried her things into the house and plopped into a chair.

  For the first time, Claire forced herself to willingly think about the lie—her lie—that had conceived the darkest secret of her childhood.

  Joseph had turned nine the week before. It was early in June but already the weather was scorching. Her father was home from work and had set up the plastic wading pool in the backyard. They'd invited Gretchen and Tim and Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord. Nana was there, too, Claire remembered. Nana had brought presents, and so they were turning the afternoon into a belated birthday celebration for Joseph.

  Her father was cooking steaks—and hotdogs for the children—on the patio grill. Her mother was in the kitchen fixing cold drinks for everyone. Myra Anderson had been very sick—in bed for so many days Claire could scarcely remember her any other way. But today she was up and dressed in a pretty pink summer shift. She was thin and her hair hung limp against her neck, but she was smiling a little.

  Like always, Joseph sat off by himself away from the other children. He was wearing the new bright green bathing trunks Nana had bought him, but he'd not been in the water once. Tim and Gretchen, and even Claire—though she knew better—had tried to get him to join in, but he just sat on the corner of the sandbox with elbows on his knees, mindlessly drawing circles in the sand with a crooked stick.

  The other three children splashed and played while the grown-ups sipped drinks on the patio. After a while Claire noticed that most of the water had splashed out of the pool, making soggy puddles in the grass. With her wet hair dripping into her eyes, she tiptoed over the gravel drive around the side of the house and turned on the faucet to which the garden hose was connected. The end of the hose was lying near the pool where they'd used it to fill the pool earlier in the day.

  As soon as she'd cranked the faucet as far as it would go, she hurried back around the house and grabbed the end of the hose, surprising Tim and Gretchen with an icy blast of water.

  “Hey!” they squealed in unison.

  “Kitty!” her father hollered sternly from the patio, “put the hose down.”

  “But, Daddy, we need more water. Look. It’s all splashed out.”

  “Fine, but leave the hose in the pool.” He turned back to his conversation with the adults.

  Claire still wasn’t sure why she did what she did next. Maybe she was showing off in front of Gretchen and Tim. Perhaps she was a bit jealous of the pile of birthday presents waiting for Joseph on the picnic table on the patio. Maybe she was just trying to get some kind of reaction out of her brother.

  Whatever it was, she did it. . . did it almost without thinking. She picked up the hose, and putting her thumb down hard over the nozzle, she turned and aimed it in Joseph’s direction. The full force of the water hit his bare chest, drenching him with its cold spray.

  What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion. Joseph arched his back and opened his mouth. A wild howl, like that of a wounded animal, came out. As one, Joseph and her father jumped from their seats on opposite sides of the yard. Joseph was closer and he reached Claire first.

  With the stick from the sandbox still in his hand, Joseph tried to grab the garden hose from her. But the wet hose slipped out of his grasp and the stick sliced across Claire’s bare arm, opening a long ragged gash. Bright red blood oozed from the wound, mingling with the water and running in red rivulets down her hands and onto her legs. Claire had never seen so much blood. She thought surely she was bleeding to death.

  Claire’s father got to the pool just as she started crying. By now Joseph was standing horror-struck, looking from the stick in his hand to the blood covering Claire.

  “My arm! My arm!” she screamed in panic. “He cut me! He cut my arm.”

  “No! I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to . . .”

  It was the most Claire had ever heard Joseph speak in one sentence. In any other circumstances, she would have been awestruck to hear him become so vocal. But now she was too furious to care . . . and too terrified by the bleeding wound on her arm.

  Her father held her in his arms, trying to calm her. He knelt down and reached into the pool to splash water on the gash. With the worst of the blood washed away, the cut was not nearly so gruesome, but now his white shirt was damp with a mixture of blood and water.

  “Joe, what happened?” Raymond Anderson asked calmly, looking into the boy’s eyes.

  “She started it!” he shouted vehemently.

  “No!” Claire protested. And for the first time in her life, Claire told a deliberate lie. She looked at the rage on Joseph’s face and knew he deserved to be angry. But then she looked at her father’s face and she knew she'd disobeyed him. He would be so disappointed in her. And she knew she would be punished. Besides, Joseph had hurt her. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything” she repeated
, as if to persuade herself.

  Raymond Anderson turned to Joseph. “You go straight up to your room, young man.”

  Joseph stood there, as though about to speak in his own defense.

  “Do you hear me? Get to your room this minute!” Now her father was losing his temper.

  Gretchen and Tim stood at the center of the pool like statues, watching the little family drama unfold. They had both seen exactly what happened, and Claire knew it. Now they bent their heads, obviously embarrassed to be in on Claire’s deceit. But neither of them said anything.

  Nana ushered Joseph hurriedly into the house. Claire’s father started to lead her to the house when her mother came through the back door carrying a tray of fresh drinks. When she caught sight of the blood-stained shirt and Claire’s stricken face, she turned pale and let the tray slide precariously onto the edge of the picnic table.

  “Oh no!” she breathed. “What happened? Oh, Kitty! Darling . . .”

  From that moment Claire was the center of attention. Her mother bandaged the wound, cooing comforting words to her “baby.” But all the while, Claire’s mouth was set in a tight, angry line.

  Joseph was finally allowed to come down for a hotdog. But the party had been spoiled. He opened his presents in silence, mumbling perfunctory thank-yous, and instead of playing with his toys afterward, he piled them into his arms and retreated to his room.

  The Gaylords and Nana left before it was dark, and that night, her arm swathed in a cocoon of gauze, Claire slept between her parents in their big bed.

  Claire shuddered. What had transpired afterward was too much to think about tonight. Feeling drained of every vestige of energy, she forced herself to get out of the chair. She trudged wearily into the kitchen to grade geography papers.

  Chapter 7

  Almost two weeks went by and the questionable file languished in a deep compartment in Michael Meredith’s briefcase. The day after he brought the file home had been one fraught with problems at work. While the staff of the nursing home scurried to fill out admission forms and help three new patients settle in, a long-time resident of the assisted-living wing fell and broke her hip. Beth VanMeter, the assistant administrator, was in St. Louis in classes for the day, and Michael was pulled from one crisis to the next without so much as a coffee break.

  By the following Friday night, he'd all but forgotten the questions the file had aroused. But at home on a Sunday afternoon, as he sat on his bed sorting through his briefcase in preparation for the upcoming week, the slim folder materialized from the leather recesses of the attache case.

  He felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach when he opened the file, and the problem stared him in the face once again. Regardless of the hectic weeks he’d had at work, he could not justify putting this off any longer. He knew he needed to look over the information again and make a decision. It was really quite simple, he told himself. Either the papers were perfectly in order and could be filed away forever, or the information warranted further investigation.

  Sighing, he laid the folder aside on the bed and hurriedly returned his other papers and office supplies to the briefcase. He snapped the case shut and set it on the floor in his closet, then picked up the importunate folder and carried it down the hall to the makeshift den in the apartment’s second bedroom.

  As he leafed through the file folder for the second time in as many weeks, his cell phone rang.

  Distracted, he answered in a monotone.

  “Hey, baby brother!” His oldest sister’s bright voice brought instant cheer into the room.

  “Sarah! Hi!”

  “I figured you’d be out playing in the snow or something.”

  “Yeah, right. When was the last time I had time to play?” His words surprised him. He hadn’t meant for them to come out with such bitterness. Sarah didn’t deserve that.

  But she didn’t miss a beat. “Working pretty hard, huh?”

  “Oh, no harder than anyone else, I suppose. Don’t mind me. It’s just been a rough week.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “It’s really no big deal.” He hoped he was telling her the truth. “So what’s up at the Iverson house?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject.

  She laughed. “Nothing too exciting. Mallory lost a tooth and Eli swallowed the two dimes we put under her pillow.”

  “Are you kidding? He swallowed both of them? Did you have to take him to the doctor?”

  “No. He’s fine. He . . . well, let’s just say everything came out okay in the end. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘diaper change,’ though!”

  Michael threw back his head and laughed at his sister’s wry telling. Sarah was a CPA who had put her career on hold to raise her and Evan’s three active children. Michael had always thought Sarah had missed her calling as a comedian. She could always make him laugh.

  “Have you talked to Mom and Dad lately?”

  “Mom called Friday. They were getting ready to go out to Uncle Warren’s for an early Christmas, so we didn’t talk long, but it sounded like everything was fine. You know how Mom is, though. She wouldn’t tell you if she was calling from her deathbed.”

  “I really need to call them,” he told her guiltily. “I phoned a couple weeks ago, but Mom wasn’t home, and you know how it is to try to talk to Dad on the phone.”

  Jim Meredith had become quite deaf over the past few years, and though Michael’s mother had seen to it that he owned the best hearing aid money could buy, she didn’t seem to have much control over whether or not her husband put the thing in his ear. Michael’s parents lived near Evan and Sarah in Springfield.

  Talking to Sarah made him homesick for his family. It was a two-hour trip, and he hadn’t felt he could afford to take more than one day off at Thanksgiving, so he'd stayed in Hanover Falls and missed the family’s traditional get-together.

  “I should try to get back more often,” he said, thinking aloud.

  “Well, you’ll be home for Christmas, right?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t miss it.”

  He visited with his sister for half an hour, then talked in turn to Evan Jr., Mallory, and Eli.

  When Sarah came back on the line, she asked him teasingly, “So brother dear, have you met any nice women in that little Podunk town of yours?”

  Michael recognized her serious sisterly attempt to pry personal information out of him. “Hey, I happen to like this little Podunk town.”

  But Sarah wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “Quit changing the subject, Michael. Answer the question.”

  He laughed. “I’ve met a lot of nice women, thank you very much. Trouble is, most of the ones I meet are a little old for me. Like about fifty years too old.” He hoped his joke would sidetrack her.

  She laughed but persisted. “You know very well what I mean. Have you had even one date since you moved to Hanover Falls, Michael?” She knew he hoped to marry one day, and she was clearly exasperated with his failure to produce the requisite girlfriend.

  Not really ready to talk about his feelings, but wanting to get his sister off his back, he told her about his date with Claire Anderson. “And if you must know,” he concluded, “we had a very nice time.”

  “Michael, that’s wonderful! Have you asked her out again?”

  He smiled at the eagerness in her voice. “It’s only been a couple weeks. Give me a break. I’m working on it.”

  “A couple weeks! Good grief! She gave up on you a long time ago.” Sarah growled her frustration. “Men!”

  “All right, all right, I’ll call her. I’ll call her.”

  “Hang up and do it right now! I mean it.”

  He pressed End, still laughing at her motherly admonition.

  Maybe he would call Claire. They truly did have a good time together. He smiled to himself as he thought of Claire with her unruly strawberry curls and those expressive hazel eyes that had captivated him from the first time he’d met her that night at Millie Overman’s
. She’d made him feel so comfortable, so at ease with himself in her presence. Conversation had flowed easily between them. Until . . .

  He remembered again how he'd clammed up when their conversation had come too close to things he didn’t wish to talk about. He knew exactly when he'd closed himself up to her that night. It had happened a dozen times with a dozen women. Why couldn’t he get past it? He was who he was. Any woman who might ever come to love him would have to know and understand that. He knew in his heart that Michelle had understood and accepted who he was—sordid past and all. She'd not rejected him for any reason other than that she'd realized she was already in love with someone else. He knew that. Oh, at first he'd been devastated. But God had used the experience to strengthen him in a miraculous way. For the first time in his life, he'd understood that not every rejection was a direct reflection on him, on his character, his worth.

  But Michelle was the only woman he’d ever come close to loving, and sometimes the old fears and doubts came back to haunt him. Was he a faulty human being, undeserving of love? Imperfect, certainly. But, no . . . He shook his head to clear away the condemning thoughts. He should have conquered this long ago. He would not allow the negative feelings to overcome him.

  Putting his head in his hands he prayed, “Oh, God, I don’t want to go through these doubts again. I have so much to be grateful for. I know my worth is because of you. And I sit here daring to question you. Forgive me. I have no right to feel sorry for myself. Help me not to dwell on something I can’t ever change.”

  He raised his head, and his eyes rested on the ominous folder from Riverview. Well, he thought, opening the folder, I guess here is something bad to take my mind off of something worse.

  He spread the various documents out across his desktop. The papers in his possession were copies, made by the nursing director in order to avoid any undue delay in processing and finalizing the original documents.

  His first vague misgivings had surfaced when Vera Johanssen, the director of nursing at Riverview, had nervously asked him to look over the medical charts of a certain resident of the manor’s nursing care unit.