Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

She laughed. “This one does. It’s my single vice in life.”

The reverend was good at her vice; she drove the Miata on the rural roads beyond the decaying streets of Pahokee as if she’d had race training somewhere. I never got the chance to ask her if she had because she peppered me with questions about my life and my family.

I could tell by the end of the fifteen-minute drive that Reverend Maya was as good at probing for the soul of things as she was at driving.

“You’ve led an amazing life by any definition,” she said as she downshifted and turned through the narrow gate of a small cemetery out in the countryside. “I think Paul, uh, your father would have been very proud of you.”

I smiled, choked up, and said, “Thanks.”

Biting insects whirled around us the second she stopped the car. But then she reached into her glove compartment and pulled out two ThermaCell bug repellents. She clipped one to her purse. I put mine on my belt and was glad to see the thing worked.

We walked forward two lanes in the cemetery and took a left toward the chain-link fence and the dense vegetation beyond it. At the end of the row there was a simple reddish granite slab about the size of two bricks set side by side.

PAUL BROWN

DEDICATED SERVANT OF HIS LORD, JESUS CHRIST

I felt my shoulders slump a bit reading those words and then the date of his death below. I thought back through the years, wondered where I’d been when my father killed himself.

I’d been, what, twelve? Thirteen? Did I ever once think of him back then?

I doubted it, and that admission let loose a trickle of raw emotion that had been building since I’d come upon the gravestone of my dad. My head swung slowly back and forth. My lungs fluttered for air.

He’d killed my mother and escaped prosecution only to be consumed by guilt and grief. The dam burst in me then, and I gave into it all, the tragedy, the loss of my father a second time. Burying my face in the crook of my arm, I broke down sobbing.

I felt Reverend Maya’s hand rubbing my back.

“Hard thing,” she said. “Hard, hard thing.”

It was almost a minute before I could control myself. I sniffed and looked away from her, said, “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said in a soothing tone.

“I feel bad about all of it.”

“I think it would be natural. What are you most upset about?”

I thought about that and anger pooled in me. “I didn’t have a dad. That’s what I’m angriest about. A boy deserves a father.”

“He does, and I’m sorry,” she said, deep empathy in her expression.

“There’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” I said in a hoarse voice. “My father made his decision. I’m sure he thought it was the right thing to do.”

“But it’s still a hard thing.”

I nodded. “It was like a door slammed shut on him the night he died. And then, just in the past few days, that door was open, just for a second, and I caught a glimpse of a secret passageway, but it ended at another locked door. One that will stay that way forever.”

Reverend Maya seemed to feel my pain as if it were her own, and she didn’t speak for a moment. Finally she said, “Do you need more time alone?”

I gazed down at the gravestone feeling wrung out, and then I said to my father’s ghost, “I love you, Dad. I forgive you, Dad.”

Reverend Maya patted me on the back again as I walked away from the gravestone. We were quiet on the drive back to Pahokee.

“I hope I’ve helped to give you closure, Dr. Cross,” she said after I’d disentangled myself from the Miata.

“I wanted to know my father’s whole story, and now I do, and now I’ll have to learn to live with it, and so will my grandmother.”

Reverend Maya gazed at me for a long moment, and then said, “I have to go home and make dinner for my husband, who should be getting off work about now, but I wish you and your family all of Jesus’s blessings.”