The Life and Death of Lauren Conway (Mercy 2)

His own words echoed through his brain as he cut through the cemetery, his swift strides taking him past familiar, graying headstones that were nearly illegible, their names and dates and flowery scriptures slowly erased by time and now glazed with snow.

A few he remembered:

Abigail Monroe, Beloved Wife and Mother

Nathaniel Robbins, forever with The Lord

Pearl Edwina Jefferson, Darling Daughter

Lily Carver, In Loving Memory

There were others, of course. Sixteen graves still marked. People buried a hundred and fifty years earlier and long forgotten other than as notations in family Bibles or filled-in blanks on genealogy family trees.

No one had placed a flower on the unkempt graves in nearly a hundred years, no one visited the tiny chapel since the pandemic had swept across the globe and the “Spanish Flu” had wiped out the preacher and his small flock in 1918.

This decrepit church, hidden three miles from the campus, was a perfect cover.

He slipped his key into the back entrance, then shoved on the old door and stepped into a room that was little more than a closet. Six-by-ten, it backed up to the main body of this small church. He used the rear room for storage as well as his own private entrance. Dark and drafty it offered little protection from the storm that was brewing. Graying timbers, boards planed by hand, and a roof of heavy shingles that was finally giving way to the forces of Mother Nature were all that was left. The steeple had collapsed years before and the church bell, rusted, its clapper long missing, was half-buried near the broken fence of the cemetery where it had become home to a family of ground squirrels. Brambles and berry vines covered most of the walls, snaking up to the church and offering thorny protection while helping to keep the hand-hewn boards upright.

You have to give the order. You’re the leader. They all look up to you, depend upon you.

That familiar, icy current of deception slid through his veins again as he remembered seeing something Lauren had written on her computer, what he’d thought was a paper about obedience. However as he’d passed her work station, she’d quickly changed her laptop’s screen. Later, when he’d gone back to her desk and coded in a password to check, she’d not only erased the document, but somehow wiped it clean from the hard drive in the buried files he knew how to access.

What was she hiding?

Unfortunately, he knew.

And it burned him to his soul.

Chapter Four

She surreptitiously slipped the flash-drive into her bra and glanced at her computer. It killed her to destroy everything as she’d spent weeks collecting all the information that she’d masked so carefully behind the essays and reports and research information she’d used for her classes, but there was no other way to ensure her safety and the safety of the information she’d gathered. She had to erase the hard drive again.

She glanced at the clock and wondered if she had enough time to execute her escape before he came for her.

Eleven twenty-nine.

Dear God in heaven! Even now, he was making plans; she was sure of it.

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

¤ ¤ ¤

Me

ntally berating himself, he yanked his cloak from a peg and tossed it over his head. He adjusted his hood as the deadbolt on the front doors clicked open.

They were here.

But no one said a word; the only noise was the shuffle of booted feet on the worn floorboards as they entered this private sanctuary in the middle of the night.

Within seconds he glimpsed a bit of flickering light under the doorway. The signal that everyone had arrived. One coughed, another sneezed, but no one dared whisper a “God bless you,” or “Gesundheit.”

They waited.

He heard the creak of the front door of the chapel as it was pulled shut, then the soft thud and quick click of the newly-installed lock.

Good.