The Letter Keeper Read online

  But when I pulled into Dallas, and the mother of that little girl who slept on the bench beside me clutching a dirty doll lifted her off the seat and sobbed as she held her to her chest, I knew I’d pay it.

  Ten thousand times over.

  Bones was right. Experience is not transferrable.

  A week before my academy graduation I submitted the final thesis required for my divinity degree. Forty pages on one verse in Scripture: Matthew 18:12. When Bones handed it back, he’d written one word on the last page. “Pass.”

  “That’s all I get? Pass?”

  He shrugged, wrote “Nice Job” next to it, and handed it back.

  “Oh, thanks. That’s so much better.” I held up the pages. “I put a lot of work into this.”

  “I can tell. And”—he raised a finger—“truth be told, you’re not a bad writer.”

  I would remember this in the years to come. And he is quite fond of reminding me how he recognized first what so many have since come to know.

  In obtaining my seminary degree, Bones had served as my only advisor and professor. When he handed me the diploma, true to his word, it had been made out to Murphy Shepherd. The fake me.

  “What good is this if I can’t take credit for it?”

  He responded, “You didn’t get that so you could hang it on the wall. You got it because you can’t fake it.”

  I raised a finger. “Correction. I got it because you made me.”

  “You could have quit at any time.”

  “You picked a fine time to tell me.”

  He smiled.

  That same day he handed me a box and said, “Inside are three things you might need. The first is something to help you arrive on time. Hopefully you’ll use it, because you’re always late.” Which was a lie. I’d never been late. But he knew this. “Second, there is a memento of our time together. Something to remember me by. On the other hand, you might need it. And third, a letter.”

  With that, Bones turned and walked away. No goodbye. No “Nice job the last four years.” No “Have a nice life.” No “Thanks for the memories.” Just his backside walking away. To be honest, I had expected as much.

  I opened the box and did in fact find three things. The first was a Rolex Submariner. The time had been set five minutes fast. A note attached to it read:

  There are two reasons for this. You didn’t quit when I gave you every reason. Your life would have been easier, but easy is overrated. You should get something for tolerating the hell you endured. Two, if you ever find yourself in a bad way and need to barter out of it, this will get you partway.

  The second item was a Sig 220. Another note:

  Do this long enough and you will find that the two worst sounds in the human ear are boom when you’re expecting click and click when you’re expecting boom. This one has always gone boom when I needed it, which has been a comfort on more than one occasion.

  The last was a key taped to a letter. The letter read:

  This fits two doors, both of which lead to the rest of your life. Unlock door number one and I’ll give you a recommendation for any job anywhere or grant you any military assignment you desire. You pick. Walk through this door and I can guarantee you a fast track to advancement and compensation on Easy Street. The world at your feet. You’ve earned it, and I owe you this much. In the years I’ve been scouring talent for someone like you, you’re the first not to quit. Congratulations. The previous thirteen bailed and told me where I could stick certain things. That makes you either crazy or just simply better. I’m still trying to decide which.

  Door number two is a little different, and before you unlock it you need to know that once you walk through, there’s no turning back. No “Can I get off now?” No “This isn’t what I signed up for.” No “Oops, I changed my mind.” You make up your mind here and now and you live with it. No matter the cost. For the rest of forever. That’s the price you pay. If you don’t like it or if this somehow offends your sensibilities or if it is hurtful to the child housed within you, then don’t insert that key into this lock. Because wrong motives, mal intent, or a half-baked, half-cocked, “Why not?” naivete only lead to a lifetime of regret. And probably you dead in some ditch or quarry or mine shaft on the back end of the earth with no one to hear your last breath.

  Given that you’re still reading, I gather I’ve piqued your interest. What then, you might ask, is the value of door number two? If door number one is cash, prizes, and life laid out on a silver platter, why would anyone in their right mind choose anything else? Why not just ride the gravy train into the sunset? Unfortunately, there’s only one way to know. I will tell you this, and I’m qualified to speak because I walked through the door before you: there is something more valuable than money. Although you will have to dig deep to find it. I cannot promise you that door number two will lead to all your dreams coming true. In fact, a few will be shattered. But walk through it and I can promise you this: one day you’ll look inside and amid the scars and the carnage and even the heartbreak, you’ll find something only a few ever come to know.

  While my class celebrated and threw their hats in the air, I stared at the locker in the dungeon. My life encased in a sweaty metal box. I turned the key in my hand and reread the letter several times. While I was not certain that door number two offered the answer, I was certain door number one did not. When I inserted the key, lifted the latch, and opened that locker door for the last time, I found a white robe, vestments, and a collar. Pinned to the robe was a note containing an address for a church in South Carolina and the words, “See you in a week.”

  Ellie sat up. “So you walked through door number two?”

  The fireplace had melted to coals and Gunner snored before the hearth. “I did.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “Just one.”

  She looked surprised. “What?”

  “Not being there when you were born. Watching you grow up.”

  She lay down against my chest and threw her legs over mine and then one arm. If I tried to stand up, I’d have to take her with me. Vines were less intertwined than the two of us at that moment.

  “Dad? We’ve got time.”

  Chapter 15

  The weekend rolled around and the seven of us—including Clay and Gunner—walked down Main Street en route to Bones’s latest show. A pajama-clad and slipper-footed crowd carrying sleeping bags and pillows had formed at the door of what we affectionately referred to as the Planetarium, where every month Bones revealed his latest pictures. The Planetarium had nothing to do with planets, but it was the closest word we could find that described what happened there. In the center of the room stood a robot-looking thing, constructed by the tech guys, that was actually a projector, or a bunch of projectors, which, like a spinning disco ball, simultaneously projected Bones’s slides onto the bare walls. The result was a constant and rotating chronological timeline that simultaneously broadcast more than a dozen pictures at once, all of which magically appeared like popcorn hanging or scrolling along the walls.

  The reveal occurred on the first Friday of every month as Bones added more pictures. The photos focused on the moments the girls shared with one another. Most everyone at Freetown came from broken homes or broken relationships. As a result, most had never had their picture taken. Most had never sat for a family picture and certainly not a portrait. The pictures they “sat” for were images taken by men who weren’t really interested in their faces. As a result, most of the girls were queasy around a camera when they first arrived. Bones knew this, so he was careful. But when they walked into the Planetarium and saw what he did with it, their comfort level grew.

  Bones made a point to leave no one out. He’d sit at a volleyball or Ping-Pong game, wait while they chopped carrots, or just sit idly on a bench on Main Street until he got the one pic of the one girl. And these weren’t staged or cheesy photos. They were organic moments of expressed emotion. Given Bones’s multiple and rather large lenses, he could sit at a distanc
e and not be intrusive. Most often he was invisible. They never knew he was there. Which made the reveal that much more amazing and fun.

  Because the slideshow played twenty-four-seven, Bones could walk into the Planetarium and find several girls, often groups, huddled together, laughing, watching wide-eyed. Giggling. Pointing. Oohing and aahing.

  Years ago, when he first showed me the architectural plans for Freetown, I had asked, “What’s this huge space?”

  “Every one of these girls comes out of a place where men who probably look a lot like us told them, in both verbal and nonverbal ways, ‘You’re nothing. Just property that can be bought and sold at a negotiated price. Here solely for my pleasure, so shut up and do what I tell you.’ I want to undo that. Write over it. I want to tell each of them they are Mona Lisa. Priceless. Beautiful and worth celebrating.

  “And,” he said, nodding, “the right kind of picture can do that. Most of what they see in their mind’s eye comes through a cracked rearview. They don’t like it and they never want to look at it again. So while I can’t erase their memories, I can give them something new to look at. Moments worth remembering. Memories that drown out the painful noise from before.”

  He smoothed the plans with his hand. “The walls of Freetown need to be covered with poster-sized pictures of every one of them. Every hallway needs to be one visual celebration leading to another. Every time they turn a corner, they need to be met with another moment that brings a smile to their face. Hope to their heart. We need to run out of wall space because”—he waved his hand across the plans—“we’ve covered it with them.”

  He tapped the architectural plans. “And this ginormous circular room, which in any other setting would be a total waste of space, is going to be our centerpiece. The epicenter. Everything revolves around this. We want to route as much of the foot traffic as possible through this very room. Got to get to the dorm? You walk through here. Visit the hospital? Walk through here. Going to eat? Work out? Hike? Catch a movie? All roads lead through here. And when they do, they’ll be met with a running, silent slideshow, which is just us screaming at the top of our lungs the truth about them. And to make it interesting, we’re accessing facial-recognition software so that when they walk in, the computer recognizes them and automatically shuffles the pictures so that an inordinate amount of them flash and scroll across the wall. Where random isn’t so random. Where every image tells them they are . . . beyond measure.”

  “Did you come up with this idea all by yourself?”

  He shook his head but offered little. “No.”

  It worked too. Day and night, girls curled up in sleeping bags, just staring as more than a hundred pictures scrolled across the walls and ceiling—a new one popping up every few seconds and then scrolling along like a shooting star.

  When the doors opened that Friday, we filed in. Piles of people soon developed, stretched out and staring at the walls and ceiling. We opened the theater concession stand, and everyone loaded up from the eight main food groups: popcorn, Skittles, Twizzlers, Swedish Fish, Milk Duds, Sour Patch Kids, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper. The coming sugar crash would be epic.

  Most residents of Freetown gravitated to Clay like magnets. Something about gray-haired, low-voiced, slow-talking, deep-laughing, paternal ex-convicts resonated, so Clay had become the grandfather everybody never had. When Bones started the show and the first few slides depicted Clay walking down Main Street in his tux and penguin wing tips, which he wore every Friday night to dinner, the girls went nuts and simultaneously jumped to their feet singing “Staying Alive.”

  A great way to start the show.

  The following few pics showed Gunner, who was currently making his rounds through the piles of people and letting his nose tell him what candy had fallen to the carpet. Gunner was even more popular than Clay. I called him the mayor of Freetown. Every picture showed several arms wrapped around or hanging on him and ear-to-ear smiles. His tongue was usually hanging out. In truth, Gunner had become one of the best and most significant therapies we employed at Freetown. Despite the fact that we’d rescued these girls from horrific circumstances, they were slow to trust men. Including me. Trust took time. But Gunner was different. They trusted him instantly. And he knew it and, to his credit, he milked it for all it was worth. Once we witnessed his effect on the residents, we got much more serious about our full-service pet shop on Main Street. Pets, specifically dogs, were able to crack open places in these girls that no therapy on earth could budge. This meant most everybody had a dog, and girls were knocking down the door to offer to work there. It also meant the landscape crew picked up a lot of poop.

  Bones let the slideshow play, and over the next hour we watched in wonder as the girls’ faces lit, as smiles and laughter spread like wildfire, and as tears welled and fell. I watched from the shadows, remembering where I was when I found each of them. Where they were. What hell they were living in and then lifted out of. Watching their faces, both live and in picture, I found myself shaking my head. I’ll never understand what happens in a man, or sometimes a woman—although it’s mostly men—to cause them to think they have the right to own another human. To force another member of the human race, made in the image of God, to do what they don’t want to and wouldn’t in ten million years. All for money.

  Staring at the sea of girls walking the road from broken to not, I whispered the question I’d never been able to answer: “What makes one man think he can enslave another?”

  Bones, standing next to me, shook his head and whispered back, “Where does that evil come from? How dark is that darkness?”

  Bones offered his slideshow to encourage and celebrate these girls, to etch new identities into the scars of their souls. But it did something else: it reminded me why we do what we do. And what’s at stake.

  I was pretty sure Bones knew this too.

  He was holding a bag of popcorn. While everyone else craned their necks and watched the show scroll along the white walls, he watched them watching. He was beaming. Feeding off the euphoria. He stood quietly several seconds, finally whispering, “It never ceases to amaze me . . .”

  I turned to him.

  He continued, “When light walks into a room, the darkness rolls back like a scroll.” He paused, his eyes narrowing. “It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And it has no counter for it.”

  Despite the wonder in their eyes, one face in the room was not watching the show. Her head was tucked into a pillow, arms wrapped around herself, eyes darting.

  Casey.

  Summer noticed Casey’s discomfort, sat alongside her, and wrapped both a blanket and an arm around her. The unofficial mom of Freetown.

  The story of Summer’s attempted rescue of Angel, how she stole the boat and headed off into the night in deep water while unable to swim, put her on a pretty high pedestal with many of the girls. And the fact that she’d voluntarily put on a dental floss bikini in Key West and baited herself to get Angel back, then took a ride on the Daemon boat, elevated her to mythical proportions. For most everyone sitting here, Summer rivaled Wonder Woman. All of them were now coming to Summer with questions they’d always wanted to ask their moms. From questions about boys, to questions about their own bodies, to what it’s like to go on a date with a man who doesn’t own you, Summer had become their confidante. The one they trusted with the stuff that, until then, they’d only told Gunner. It was a beautiful transformation. While Summer might have had a life and a successful career on Broadway, she’d found purpose on the streets of Freetown. I doubted I could drag her away.

  Summer leaned in and tried to draw Casey’s attention to the show. To her credit, Casey tried, even lifting her head, smiling, and offering a laugh.

  But there was no joy in it.

  I’d purged my own pain, or most of it, in the process of writing. But right there I began to wonder if my remedy would work for Casey. Was some pain deeper than the words could dig out?

  Chapter 16

  Ellie knew we w
ere approaching the end of the story. One final installment. A conclusion she both wanted and didn’t want to reach. Along the way, she had retold the story to both Casey and Angel with—I would later learn—considerable embellishment. Which made it all the more fun and made me look far more capable than I really am.

  That last night she walked in with Casey locked on her right arm and Angel on her left. Her partners in crime. Ellie assumed her cross-legged position in bed, while Angel and Casey pulled up chairs. Summer appeared moments later carrying bowls of popcorn, mugs of hot chocolate, and a glass of wine. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” She kissed my forehead and then did the index-finger-in-the-chest thing. “Hit it, Shakespeare.”

  After Bones found the vice president’s son, he was invited to join, and eventually run, an elite and unnamed government agency created by executive order decades earlier. An agency with a singular task: to seek out and return the loved ones of high-profile abductions. Meaning the children of powerful people.

  Bound by no geographical lines, the only rule was secrecy, which explains why Bones spent years vetting me. He had to know if he could trust me. That meant only a handful of people knew about the agency’s existence, which was both good and bad. It meant we could operate undetected without a lot of red tape and make situational decisions on the fly. It also meant we didn’t get a lot of help.

  Bones had taken the reins from the previous leader, who’d served several presidencies and begun his own impressive record of rescue and recovery. By the time Bones tapped me at the academy, he held a storied position among the Washington elite, where the rumors surrounding his abilities and successes had reached mythical status. As time passed and those forever grateful children grew into powerful people in their own right—men and women who owned powerful companies and took powerful jobs around the world—the extent and influence of Bones’s own reach exceeded the extent and influence of many of those who employed him.