Alaskan Refuge Christian Suspense Box Set

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6

She stared at the door for several minutes after he left. She didn’t want to go digging for her thrift store Bible, so she opened up a Scripture website on her phone. What verse had he said? Jeremiah 29:11. It had been so long since she and Sandy had read the Bible together over milk and cookies at the Lindgrens’ dining room table. She couldn’t even remember which testament she should look in. Thankfully, the webpage made that part easy enough for her. Her phone took some time to load, and she glanced around her apartment. Other than the cup of cider on the table, was there any proof Raphael had been there? She glanced at her cell, wondering if his name and number would be there in her contacts list if she were to look it up.

Jeremiah 29:11. The verse finished loading. She read it slowly. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

A future? What kind of a future was there for her as long as she stayed in witness protection? A future away from Carl and Sandy, the only parental figures who had ever really loved her. A future in Glennallen, a town with absolutely nothing going for it except for the fact that it was remote and catered to tourists in the summer. A future working at the daycare until she lost every ounce of patience with the children and was forced to quit. And then what? Getting a job at Puck’s grocery store? Bagging canned goods and stocking shelves the rest of her life?

Hope and a future. Until tonight, Lacy hadn’t really allowed herself to hope for anything besides a mild winter. There was Kurtis, of course, and his proposal. Just a little bit ago, she had all but thrown herself at him, begging him to ignore her initial rejection. But he knew she hadn’t meant it. Not really. And now, if he found out about Raphael …

The sting of that last kiss burned her lips. Shame congealed in her veins. What had she been thinking? How would Kurtis feel if he found out?

She glanced at the verse on her screen once more. “For I know the plans I have for you.” Well, at least somebody did. She was embarrassed to think about how thoroughly she had turned her back on God since she moved here. When she first got to Glennallen, she had gone to the chapel because she missed Carl and Sandy and thought being in a church on Sunday might assuage a little bit of her homesickness. But she got bored. She was tired after working long hours at the daycare. She went back to the chapel when she started dating Kurtis because it was important to him, but other than that hour and a half on Sunday mornings, she rarely thought about the Lord.

How many times had she gone over that evening with Raphael? They could have gone to any pier in North End. They could have dined at any restaurant across the entire Boston-Cambridge area. Why there? Why then? And if God really had a plan for her life, couldn’t he have stopped them?

Well, what if that verse was right? What if witnessing the murder on the pier really was part of God’s plan? That meant he wanted her in Glennallen. He wanted her to suffer the loneliness, the heartache. Why? So she could meet Kurtis? Then why had he thrown Raphael back into her path?

And if God wanted her to marry Raphael, why had they been separated for these past four years? Even if the Lord wanted to grant them a dramatic reunion after all they had been through, why didn’t he stop Kurtis from coming into the picture, complicating everything with his patient understanding?

The phone was heavy in her hand. It was too much to think about tonight. Yet again, she felt that God must be punishing her for some horrible thing she had done in the past. And if he was God, that was probably his right. But why were there people worse than she, people who beat their children or were strung out on drugs, whose lives weren’t thrown into chaos? She never doubted God’s existence, not really. But it made so much more sense to think of him as a benign being in some far-away universe, too busy to care about the day-to-day affairs of an East Coast foster girl.

Too busy to intervene when Lacy needed him the most.

Well, the answers weren’t going to magically appear on her phone. She closed the Bible website and stared at the screen. Should she call someone? Who? Raphael had just left. She could call him now, ask him to take her away with him to Anchorage. Go back with him to Massachusetts. In a day or two, she could be home with Carl and Sandy.

But where would that leave Kurtis? At least his wife was really dead. Renee had died in the hospital. He had seen her buried. He hadn’t lived the past several years wondering, dealing with the nagging suspicion, the spark of hope that was almost too painful to acknowledge. But what if she was magically found to be alive? Wouldn’t it be his right to dump Jo and spend the rest of his life with his first love?

She should call Kurtis. He was so level-headed. So thoughtful. Even just talking through things with him would help. But to do that would mean revealing her past. What would he say when he learned her entire identity was a fabrication? Somewhere in his vast reserves of compassion, there must be an end to his patience and forgiveness. If he found out the truth, if he found out she wasn’t a foster kid from Michigan who moved out to Alaska to fulfill a lifelong dream, what would he say? What would he say if he discovered she hated the cold, hated mosquitoes, hated the claustrophobic, isolated feeling that came from living in a town of four hundred?

What would he say if she told him that she was in love with Raphael? That she had never stopped loving him? That she had known deep in her heart he was still alive even while she was dating someone else? Kurtis was a saint. But she couldn’t expect him to sympathize with that. And if he did, if he looked at her with those tender eyes and told her he understood and forgave her anyway, she would feel even more wretched.

Why had Raphael come? Why had they ever gone to that pier in the first place?

“For I know the plans I have for you.”

Well, that was all fine and good and poetic, and Lacy figured that people like her foster mom Sandy would read a verse like that and derive a great deal of comfort from it. But it only made Lacy feel worse. If God had a plan for her, that meant he wanted her in witness protection. He wanted to ruin her life. And then, just because he was all-powerful and just because he could, he was going to throw Raphael at her right after Kurtis proposed.

Some plan.

She shut off her phone. It was late. The sky was still bright enough you could drive without headlights even though midnight was less than an hour away. She plodded to her room without bothering to brush her teeth or change into her pajamas. She closed her curtains, but the light still spilled in through the sides. She plopped onto her bed and threw the pillow over her face. Two mosquitoes buzzed in her ear.

Alaska sucks.

She rolled onto her side and tried to sleep.