Free Locked Doors by Blake Crouch Page B

clutching her with one hand, he brushed his black hair from his eyes.  
    Karen felt gravity pining for her, a waterless undertow.  
    She upchucked on his windbreaker but he did not let go.
    “Karen,” he said.   “Now do you believe?”  
    He released the belt of her robe, watched her fall.  
    She screamed for two seconds, then the rope silenced her.  
    Back and forth she swung, still fifty feet above the lawn, a pendulum for the lighthouse.

19
     
    AT two in the morning the Impala streaks south on Ocracoke Island, a ribbon of land less than a half mile wide.   To the west the Pamlico Sound yawns out into darkness.   Oceanside the Atlantic shines like black blood under the jaundiced October moon.
    In the trunk, Elizabeth Lancing sleeps and she does not dream.
    Behind the wheel the smiling driver is tired and happy, the window down, his hair whipping across his pale face.   He inhales deeply, the tepid air redolent of kelp and saltwater and driftwood and the carcasses of fish on tidesmoothed sand.
    At last he sees it beyond the dunes that now hide the sea—his hometown, a faint incandescence on the black horizon.  
    And he wonders, Old Andrew, since I’ve shown you the way, will you come?

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    V I O L E T

20
     
    THE last Wednesday of each month is unfailingly baked spaghetti night at Lighthouse Baptist Church.   It is tradition, a comforting inevitability for this Christian community.  
    The congregation slowly progressed from the kitchen into the fellowship hall much as it had done every Wednesday evening for the past twenty-two years.   Each churchgoer carried a paper plate laden with baked spaghetti, a yeast roll, a salad of wet lettuce and shredded carrots, and a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.  
    They dined with their brothers and sisters in Christ at the circular foldaway tables, happily consuming the insipid meals, the fellowship hall resounding with myriad conversations and rampant children, while praise music flowed from speakers on the stage, an auditory warmth.   Through tall windows the dying sun funneled weaker and weaker, now only a suggestion of purple in the late October sky.  
    Violet King sat at a table with her parents, Ebert and Evelyn, and a friend of her parents named Charles.   Charles was thirty, single, and on fire for Jesus.   Violet disliked the way he looked at and spoke to her, as though he were privy to some secret she had not disclosed, as though he were something more than a shallow acquaintance.
    Charles had been monopolizing the conversation for the last five minutes, narrating his attempt to witness to a “troubled black youth.”  
    But Violet wasn’t listening.   She just stared at the cube of baked spaghetti on her plate.
    “…and I told him, ‘Jesus died for you , little fella .’”   Charles’s bottom lip had begun to quiver, his voice gone soft and earnest with emotion.   “And you know what he said to me?   It’ll break your heart, Ebert.   He said ‘How come God loves me?’   And I told him, I said… You with me, Violet?”
    Violet looked up into those small lonely eyes across the table.
    “Yes, I’m with you, Charles.”
    “I told him, ‘God loves little black boys just as much as He loves little white boys.’”
    A four-year-old boy ran over and stopped in front of Violet, a chocolate icing ring around his smiling little mouth.
    “You’re pretty,” he said, then ran away shouting, “I did it, guys!   I did it!”
    The young woman laughed.
    “Where’s Max, Violet?” Charles asked.
    “Same place he was when you asked me a week ago,” Violet responded but she did not say it bitterly.   “He’s coaching cross-country this fall.   They had another meet today.”  
    Is that all right with you you freaking weirdo?
    “Just don’t want to see him backsliding on us.   You start skipping Wednesday nights, what’s next?”
    “My son-in-law ain’t no backslider, Charles,” Ebert said.   “You know I