Six
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It wasn’t Thatcher’s mental state I worried about. It was mine.
Capri
It took me a moment for it to register that there was light on in the room. I squinted against the bright fluorescents and covered a yawn before I could focus enough to see my father sitting in the chair opposite the sofa I had slept on last night. So much for slipping out of here before he got to his office. I wasn’t sure when I went to sleep last night, but it had been late.
My father raised the dark blue mug with the words “World’s Best Pastor” to his mouth and drank his coffee as he watched me. He didn’t have to speak. I saw the condescending “I told you so” in his gaze. He was assuming things. Most were wrong, but I would guess he might be accurate in a few.
I sat up, dropping my feet to the floor, and sighed. A confrontation I wasn’t ready for but had no other option. I had come here and, in doing so, opened the door of communication once again with him.
“Your old room might be a guest bedroom now, but it’s still empty. I expect it is more comfortable than that sofa,” he informed me.
He was na?ve. Clueless. I had come here to protect him and mom. We might be on rough speaking terms, but they were still my parents, and I didn’t want to bring Thatcher to their door.
“Oh, I don’t know. This sofa is nice and worn in. Quiet, no one trying to tell me what to do. The Lord left me alone,” I said, then stifled a yawn.
Dad’s expression hardened some, but not much. He didn’t like me making jokes about the Lord.
“Your pride needs checked,” he informed me.
This wasn’t about my pride. It was about my sanity.
“You are making assumptions, Dad.”
He took another drink from his cup, studying me. “I’m your father. I don’t have to make assumptions. And your mother is hurt but she does forgive you. She wants to hear you apologize to her face though.”
Yeah, well, that was not happening. I took the blanket I had used and began to fold it up. “Perhaps she should apologize to me,” I said tightly, standing up, already regretting that I had chosen to sleep here last night. It wasn’t as if I were broke. I had a bank account. I could have parked the truck in Atlanta then taken an Uber to a hotel. But I hadn’t, which was something I could admit this morning after having a night to sleep on. It was because, while I had needed distance, I hadn’t wanted to be that far away from Thatcher.
He had been a full-blown psycho yesterday. But after the time away from him and the sleep, I could see past the crazed gleam in his eyes to the other that had been there. He’d been afraid. He had one focus. Me. One goal- keeping me.
My chest ached. Had he slept last night? Had they calmed him down?
No. I wasn’t doing that. I could not let my love for him outweigh the rest—the idea of him sleeping alone in his bed, our bed. I closed my eyes and inhaled slowly as my throat tightened. Without me there to comfort him, who would?
“Don’t act like a child, Capri. As you pointed out to your mother and I, you are a grown woman. You make your own choices. Now, you’re faced with the truth that your parents know more than you gave them credit for. We’ve lived life, honey. We have experience. You may be twenty-seven years old, but you have been sheltered. Our fault. I can admit to that. But we were trying to protect you. I’d always believed you’d marry a man of faith. Live your life the way you’d been raised. But-”
“Dad, just don’t. Stop. I’m not here to get forgiveness. I needed a night to collect my thoughts. That is all. I had even planned on being gone before you got here. And I am now leaving.” I informed him and headed for the door.
“Do you know who he killed?” My father asked as I reached the door.
I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep going. But the tone of his voice, there was something there. A heaviness or weight he was tired from bearing. It didn’t make sense.
“He wasn’t convicted. Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Funny thing about murders, they don’t get wiped under a rug. A man was, in fact, killed that day. Not only did Thatcher Shephard snap Beauden Redd’s neck, but he then lit a cigarette and waited for the cops to arrive. He didn’t even run,” he told me, his tone etched with… guilt. No. That made no sense. Why would my father have guilt over something he hadn’t done? I turned around and looked back at him.
“Then explain to me why he didn’t go to prison,” I said hesitantly because the look on my dad’s face wasn’t one I was accustomed to seeing. Was that pain?
Dad stood up and sat his cup on the table beside him. “One reason would be that the Shephard family is a part of the southern mafia. They weld power in high places.”
I didn’t respond. Although I had thought my parents suspected or after the media frenzy when Thatcher had drugged and abducted me, they had found out for sure what the Shephards were. Neither my mom nor dad had come out and said it to me. Not like this.
“But you know that, don’t you,” he said, his eyes still full of that remorse that confused me. “You knew it when you told the police he hadn’t kidnapped you.”
I remained silent.
He let out a heavy sigh. “This,” he said with a slight shake of his head. “This is my punishment. I had convinced myself over the years that the Lord understood my actions. But I had always known deep down that was a lie. One, I told myself. It made it easier to accept and forget.”
I was now confused. How had he gone from telling me about the alleged murder that Thatcher had been accused of years ago to something he had done?
“The other reason he didn’t go to prison was because he had a witness. A strong one. That said it was self-defense. The only witness but one that people trusted. The court trusted. But then the judge had been bought by dirty money. She’d just needed a reason to let him walk away free.”
I waited, studying my father, whose posture wasn’t as straight but appeared to be weighed down by something heavy. A slow trickle of uneasiness began to seep through me. Why did my dad know the specifics? Had he looked it up, done research, because I was with Thatcher?
“You see, even a pastor will do what must be done to protect his children. He will do things to better his church. Build the flock,” he said with a hollow laugh, and suddenly, the lines in his weathered skin seemed deeper.
The silence that followed was loud—so loud that I was afraid to breathe. But I waited, needing to know what I didn’t.
“You remember the years of therapy you went to?” he asked.
I tensed. That was something we never spoke about. I had managed to shove it deep into my past and never allowed it freedom.
“Why are you bringing that up?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“Three days a week for a year, then two days, until finally one day you didn’t wake up screaming in a cold sweat, trembling. Breaking my heart. Those nights when I witnessed the damage that had been done to you, I didn’t question my decision. I even found justice in what I had done. Because the man who had caused my little girl to live with night terrors had deserved to die.”
I didn’t speak. My throat was dry, my body felt as if it were slowly starting to numb. I only blinked.
“Beauden had pictures of you that covered a room in the basement of his parent’s house. They didn’t find it until later. Years later. It wasn’t something the media ever got a hold of, and I had been thankful for the Shephard’s power. No matter their sins. I had been thankful. Beauden Redd’s mother died from a heart attack in her home. His father had been dead for years. No one found her until the smell got too strong. Of course, the property was inspected for any foul play before her cause of death had been determined. It was then that the hidden room was found,” he paused and swallowed hard, causing his Adam’s apple to bob in his throat. “I was only shown the pictures taken of the room. A room where my little girl’s photos covered the walls. Floor to ceiling. Those of you on your bike, outside the church planting flowers, with your mother at the grocery store. And all the guilt that had haunted me. Was gone. Because I had wanted to be the one. Me. A pastor who taught about forgiveness and love. I had wanted to be the one to snap the bastard’s neck.”
I reached out to steady myself, gripping the doorframe. Flashes of moments came back to me. Those of the older boy who had always been there lurking, sneering, making me nervous. The times he had gotten close to me and said things about my clothing. Made fun of my glasses. All the memories I had managed to shut down, erase.
“The day, the one where he had grabbed you and held you against the dumpster. The things he said you refused to repeat. The moment that you would withdraw into yourself and rock back and forth when the therapist tried to get you to talk about it. That day. The last day you saw him.”
“The day he died,” I whispered. Because that was what I had been told, he had died. Nothing more. No details. The television in our house had been removed after that day. My parents had kept me home from church for weeks, telling people I had mono. It was the only time in my life that I could remember them lying.
“Thatcher Shephard witnessed it. He stopped it. Then, after you ran off, he followed Beauden Redd to his car and snapped his neck.”
A rush of air felt as if it had rocketed through my head, and I leaned on the doorframe, sucking in short breaths. My eyes locked on the ground at my feet, but I saw nothing. Until those eyes, the cold, furious expression of a younger Thatcher Shephard began to form in my mind. As if it had been behind a thick fog so dense I hadn’t realized it was there. Yet, the fog was thinning now, the clarity slowly becoming brighter.
“Ohmygod,” I whispered. “Ohmygod.”
“I testified that it was self-defense. That he’d found Beauden attacking you and went to stop him. Beauden got violent. And Thatcher had tried to hold him off. Control him. The snap of his neck was an unfortunate accident,” he paused, and I lifted my eyes slowly from the floor to look at his face. “The Shephard family, in return, kept you out of the media, from having to be questioned, and… and they donated three million dollars in cash to the church. Money we didn’t have to claim. Money that wouldn’t be traced. The money that built the life center. It paid off debt.”
My father had lied to a courtroom. Thatcher had killed the boy who had harassed me and threatened to do things to me I hadn’t understood when I was a kid, words I knew were sexual. The week before, he had pushed me against that dumpster, and it had escalated to him getting close enough to say things to me—things I understood now. I shivered with disgust at the perversion that had long since been locked away in my head.
“Beauden Redd deserved death,” my father said. “But the unattached, void of emotion, look in Thatcher’s eyes as he sat in that court chilled me. There is an evilness deep within him. One that controls his actions. He killed someone for you when you were a child. His wanting you now, his claiming that you are his. That’s as mentally disturbed as Beauden Redd. He sees you as a thing to have. Own. And I believe he has stalked you for years. Looking back at things I didn’t understand or thought were simply angels protecting you, I’m not so sure it wasn’t something closer to a demon.”
Still, no words. Nothing. Having been told that the murder attached to Thatcher’s name was because of me and the horrors from my past being let loose again to roam freely in my head, I was struggling to hold it together. It wasn’t Thatcher’s mental state I worried about. It was mine.