Shadow in Serenity

nine


Logan hadn’t expected to be an honored guest at Deep Waters Christian Church, but when Brother Tommy, the preacher, spotted him before the service, he introduced him to the deacons he hadn’t yet met.

It surprised him that the whole town actually set their alarms on Sunday mornings and showed up early enough for Sunday school. As they wandered in to find their places before the service, he was hit with the strange and unexpected feeling that they actually enjoyed being here. It was a social gathering, where people smiled and laughed and encouraged one another, where they wore their Sunday best and fixed their hair. Men who rarely shaved during the week were spit-polished this morning.

Logan didn’t know what Montague would have said about his being here, but he suspected he would have approved. As mercenary as he was, his old friend had always admired honor and decency, traits Montague vowed to adopt as soon as he made enough money. And as Carny had pointed out, what better place for him to get to know people than in their church?

Someone tapped Logan on the shoulder, and he turned to find Slade Hampton, smiling like an old friend and waiting to shake his hand. Jack, his dog, was at his side.

Logan stood and shook Slade’s hand, then bent to pet Jack. “They let you bring him in here?”

“Nobody’s ever said nothing about it,” Slade said. “I guess they’re so used to seeing us together, they’ve mostly forgot he’s not human. Besides, he enjoys it.”

Logan could see that the dog did, indeed, enjoy it, for every child that came by stopped to speak to him. Slade slipped into the pew next to Logan, and Jack followed, curling up at his feet. As he and Slade talked, Logan watched the crowds coming through the doors from Sunday School, waved at all of those he knew. But the moment he spotted Carny, he realized the real reason he had come.

She wore an outfit that spoke more of southern gentility than biker chick — a long, flowing skirt that stopped just above the ankles and a silky lavender blouse.

Logan tore his gaze away as Julia Peabody approached him, and grinning his most flirtatious grin, he told the printer’s daughter how glamorous she looked, complimented her dress — then glanced back at Carny. Her eyes briefly met his, then she looked down at Jason, walking at her side. It was almost as if she didn’t care that Logan was here.

Mildred Smith, her hair glowing neon-red from the dye job Lahoma had given her, started to play the piano, and Logan watched Carny and Jason move through the crowd still coming in. Her hair was pulled up in a loose chignon, with tiny wisps around her face. He swallowed. Man, she was beautiful. She made every other woman in the room look like a poor imitation of femininity. She was the real thing.

Carny came up the aisle and stopped when she reached him. “So you decided to come, did you, Brisco?”

Like the gentleman Montague had taught him to be, Logan stood and smiled. “A man has to worship somewhere.”

“I guess that depends on what he worships. Do yourself a favor and listen to Brother Tommy. You might learn something important.” Then she slipped into the aisle across from him.

Logan didn’t believe in God, and he rarely believed in goodness. And even though Carny clearly viewed Serenity as something of a paradise, he didn’t believe in heaven.

Still, as the preacher spoke in mesmerizing tones about the fallen nature of the world and the pain that sin caused in the hearts of young and old, he couldn’t help locking in. The man had a way of driving the point home.

As he stood to leave after the benediction, Logan realized that this was the first time he’d ever sat through a church service without nodding off. If he was still in town next Sunday, he might come back.


Monday afternoon, Carny sighed, almost disappointed, as she hung up from the last of the phone calls she’d made about Logan. Something was wrong. All the sources he’d told her to call — his former employer, his college, had all checked out. She hadn’t been able to reach a human at King Enterprises, though. A recorded voice transferred her around, but all she got was voicemail. She left messages asking about Logan, but no one had called back yet.

Carny had spoken to the secretary at A&R Marketing, who still remembered Logan and described him in an awestruck voice, leaving little doubt that they were talking about the same man. She described him as the best salesperson they’d ever had, and in a near-whisper, told Carny he’d been cheated out of his pay, and she hadn’t blamed him for leaving.

When Carny spoke to those of his professors who were still at the college, they’d described him to a T. Charming, with a devilish grin. Smart. Charismatic.

But it was the call to the Selma, Alabama, county clerk’s office that had given her the most insight into the man. Just as Logan said, his mother’s birth certificate was on file there, dated fifty-five years ago. When she’d asked the clerk about the woman’s only recorded child, she’d been directed to Human Services.

Telling the woman at Human Services that she was investigating a case, Carny persuaded her to find Brisco’s file. The woman read bits and pieces over the phone — enough to tell Carny that, from the age of five, Logan Brisco had been shuffled from one foster home to another until he’d run away at the age of fourteen.

That was the source of the pain in his eyes when she’d mentioned his mother. Carny couldn’t help feeling a little ashamed of herself. That kind of pain never went away. Pain like that had the power to mold a person into something he might never have been, to drive him toward the kind of life where he thought he was in control and created his own destiny. Where close attachments were rare, and abandonment was impossible.

Knowing about his childhood made her see him in a different light. For the first time, she allowed herself to wonder whether he really was the grifter she believed him to be. Nothing she had discovered about him suggested that he’d ever been on the wrong side of the law.

But there were giant holes in his life — from the time he’d run away at fourteen until he’d gone to college, and from his resignation from A&R until now.

She hadn’t found any evidence of Brisco’s duplicity. But as she gazed out her hangar window at Jason washing her Baron, she decided that didn’t matter. She still didn’t trust the man, and she couldn’t let her sympathy for his difficult childhood color her thinking. She rarely doubted her instincts, and she wasn’t about to give up on them now.

Jason was almost finished washing the plane. She smiled at the serious way he went about it, talking to himself the whole time, as his imagination rambled. She wondered what part he was playing today. Was it fighter pilot with his guns aimed at the enemy? Was it firefighter, putting out a monstrous blaze?

She went outside and headed toward him. When he saw her, he grinned and aimed the hose in her direction. Ducking, she reached for another hose coiled beside the hangar, turned on the water, and aimed her own spray at him.

Screaming and laughing, he ran behind the plane and sprayed at her over it. She ducked under it and got him good from behind. Squealing with laughter, he reciprocated by drenching her.

“I got you first!” he shouted. “If those had been bullets, you’d have been dead before you reached for your hose!”

“Flesh wounds, my boy,” she said in a bad English accent. “Mere flesh wounds. But your wounds were fatal.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I can take a few bullets without even feeling them.”

“Good,” she said, and pulled her hose back up into his face, spraying him at point-blank range. He screamed and wrestled with the nozzle, and by the time they collapsed on the tarmac laughing, they were both sopping wet.

“Tell me two things,” she said, finally. “Tell me how I could have raised a little boy without guns, without toys that look like guns, and without allowing television shows or video games with guns, and you can still manage to make a gun out of a garden hose.”

“You can make a pretend gun out of anything, Mom,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s a guy thing.”

“I guess so.”

“What’s the second thing you want me to tell you?”

She sat up. “How we’re going to get home on that motorcycle soaking wet. We’ll freeze to death.”

“Nah. It’s 80 degrees. Almost summer. Hey, you know what, Mom? This summer, Nathan’s dad said he’d buy us the lumber and stuff, and we can build a fort between our houses. Won’t that be cool?”

“It sure will. Can I help?”

“No way,” he said, aggravated. “Girls don’t know anything about building stuff.”

“Sure we do,” Carny said. “When I was growing up, we used to have to tear down the whole carnival everywhere we went, then put it back up when we got where we were going. I know a few things about construction. Come on,” she said, tickling him. “Let your old mom help!”

He squirmed and held back. “Sure, if I want my fort to look like a carnival booth. I don’t think so.”

“How’d you get to be such a male chauvinist at seven?”

“What’s a male chauvinist?” he giggled, defending himself from her tickles.

“A guy who thinks building a fort is a guy thing. And I suppose if I don’t get to help build it, I won’t get to play in it, either, huh?”

Jason held her hands to stop the tickling and tried to catch his breath. “It’s a boy’s fort, Mom. No girls allowed.”

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m suing.”

“Mom!” he said. “You’d bump your head on the ceiling, anyway. It’s for kids.”

“Keep going. I’ve got two counts of discrimination so far. Gender and height. I can take you for everything you’re worth. I’ll probably even get the fort. I’ll paint it pink and turn it into a doll house.”

He giggled frantically. “Mom! That would be gross! Besides, you can’t sue us for something that isn’t even built!”

“Oh, yeah.” She got up and wrung out the front of her shirt. “And if I die of pneumonia, I probably can’t sue, either. This was all a clever ploy to intimidate me out of taking you to court, wasn’t it?”

He laughed and popped his wet shirt away from his skin, then let it stick back. “Hey, Mom. Are we going to the dance Friday night?”

“Why? You got a date?”

“I sorta told Amber I’d meet her there. I might dance with her this time.”

Carny made a face. “But she’s a girl!”

“Girls are okay once in a while,” he said, skipping behind her in the puddles as she turned off the hoses. “I mean, you can’t have ‘em coming in your forts and stuff, but they’re okay to dance with. Are you going with Mr. Joey?”

Still chuckling, she shook her head. “Nope.”

“He said you were. He told me you’re his girlfriend.”

“Joey’s got a lot to learn. I never told him I’d go with him to the dance.”

“Then who are you going with? Mr. Paul? Mr. Sam?”

“None of the above. I thought I’d just go as your date.”

His face sobered. “Okay. I think that would be okay. Amber probably wouldn’t mind if it was just you.”

As he skipped into the hangar, Carny knew she couldn’t do better than Jason as her date. He, after all, was the man of her dreams.