Silent Pledge

Critical Praise for

HANNAH ALEXANDER’S

Novels

SILENT PLEDGE

“I found a gaggle of caring, interesting people who stole my heart with their struggles and made me cheer with their triumphs. Bravo!”

—Lisa Samson

SOLEMN OATH

“Solemn Oath absolutely hit the ball out of the park. Hannah Alexander is going to have a hard time writing fast enough to keep up with reader demand.”

—Debi Stack

SACRED TRUST

“Alexander is great at drawing the reader into her story line and keeping them hooked until the resolution of the plot.”

— Christian Retailing

A KILLING FROST

“Running dialogue and a few twists will keep romantic suspense fans coming back for more.”

—Publishers Weekly

DOUBLE BLIND

“Native American culture clashes with Christian principles in the freshly original plot.”

— Romantic Times BOOKreviews

GRAVE RISK

“The latest in Alexander’s Hideaway series is filled with mystery and intrigue. Readers familiar with the series will appreciate how the author keeps the characters fresh and appealing.”

— Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Silent Pledge

Hannah Alexander

MILLS & BOON

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In memory of our beloved cousin,

Mark Mercer Patterson,

December 24, 1954 to April 14, 2000.

Cheryl’s childhood playmate and defender.

May his courage and tender heart live on in the

character of Clarence Knight.

We wish to thank Joan Marlow Golan and her

excellent staff for giving us this opportunity to share

our books with a new reading audience.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

Questions for Discussion

Prologue

O dira Bagby sat on the edge of her great-granddaughter’s twin-size bed, soaking a thin washrag with water from an old mixing bowl. She squeezed out the excess and applied the rag to Crystal’s hot tummy. Odira winced every time seven-year-old Crystal coughed.

The hoarse crackle and wheeze sounded loud in their small three-room apartment, and the little girl bent double with the effort to breathe. Her pale, blue-veined face was flushed, and her mouth opened wide as she gasped for breath. The sound of her struggle was worse than a nightmare. Odira caught herself automatically trying to breathe harder and heavier, as if she could take in extra air for Crystal.

The room smelled like Vicks, even though Odira knew that rubbing the ointment on Crystal’s bony chest probably wouldn’t help. It’d never helped before, except to ease Odira’s arthritis for a while and make her feel as though she was at least doing something. Her hands always stayed sore and swollen from the thumping she did on Crystal’s back and chest. Crystal had cystic fibrosis.

“Gramma,” Crystal whispered, stiffening her neck to push the bare sound from her throat. She reached up and pressed her hand against her chest. “Hurts.”

“I know, little ’un.” Odira felt the tears in her eyes that Crystal never cried. “We’ll get help.” Heaving herself up, she lumbered the few feet across the room to her own bed.

She peered at the numbers on the secondhand alarm clock. It was almost midnight on a Saturday night. What was she supposed to do? Crystal’s mom had disappeared last year—and Odira didn’t know who the daddy was. The grandma, Odira’s sweet Millie, was dead. The grandpa “didn’t want nothin’ to do” with the whole mess. There was nobody else.

Bedsprings cried out in alarm as Odira sat down and picked up the receiver of her phone. She leaned forward and peered at the list of emergency numbers on the bedside stand. There was no E.R. in Knolls since the explosion last fall. Odira couldn’t afford a car on her social security, so she couldn’t drive Crystal to another E.R. She didn’t want to wait.

She did all she knew to do. She dialed the home number of Dr. Mercy Richmond.

Buck Oppenheimer woke to silent winter darkness in the bedroom he shared with his wife, Kendra. The room felt like the inside of the unheated toolshed out back, and for a moment he wondered if the pilot light in the central heating system had gone out again.

But as he listened to small sounds gradually creep to him through the house, he heard the furnace popping, and he felt warm air coming from the vent on his side of the bed.

So why was it so cold?

He listened for the soft sigh of his wife’s breathing but didn’t hear anything. He reached toward her and felt the emptiness of icy sheets.

“Kendra? Honey?”

He didn’t hear any sounds coming from the bathroom and no sound of drawers clattering or silverware clinking in the kitchen—sometimes when Kendra couldn’t sleep she’d go in and make some toast.

And sometimes when she couldn’t sleep…

Buck threw back his covers and scrambled out of bed, switching on the lamp. The bedroom door hung open, but there was no light coming from the rest of the house. He didn’t like the feel of this. He pulled on the jeans he’d worn home from the fire station a few hours ago. They smelled like smoke.

“Kendra?” he called again.

No answer.

She hadn’t said much when he came home two hours late from his shift tonight. There’d been a flue fire out in an old home north of town, and he couldn’t get away any sooner. Not that she got mad anymore when that happened, but ever since the arson and the hospital explosion last fall, Kendra was scared. Which was understandable—her fireman father had been killed a year and a half ago in the line of duty. Kendra said she knew that would happen to Buck someday, too.

He went into the kitchen. Kendra wasn’t there, but the door to the back porch stood wide open. Icy January wind blew in, nipping at the bare skin of his chest and shoulders. He stepped to the screen door and looked out, curling his toes up from the cold linoleum.

“Kendra?”

Quiet. Had she gone out again? He fought back the memory of two months ago when he woke up at 1:00 a.m. to find her coming through this very back door, a sweater slung over her arm, her makeup smeared, and the sound of a car motor heading off down the street. She’d acted high on something—not booze, but something. And, man, did they ever have it out that night!

Now he was hearing a car again…the sound of a motor, its chug-chug-chug reaching him through the dark. Music drifted faintly through the icy air. He felt the familiar pain rip through him.

Was she doing it again? After all he’d done for her, didn’t she even love him enough to be true?

He let out a deep breath and watched the white puff drift from his mouth. The air was as cold as he felt inside. How much was a man supposed to take?

Kendra’s mood swings were getting worse. If she wasn’t hiding out at home crying, she was laughing too loudly and flirting with all the guys down at the fire station, going to shows in Branson with her girlfriends, and buying things he couldn’t afford on his fireman’s salary, like lots of jewelry and expensive clothes. There was no middle ground.

He pushed the screen door open and stepped on the back porch, bracing himself in case she came walking in drunk, or maybe even with another guy.

He still heard the car motor idling, but the sound didn’t come from the road. And he recognized that idle. With a deepening frown, he looked toward the small garage where Kendra kept her five-year-old Ford Taurus. The music was clearer now. Clint Black. Kendra’s favorite. The doors were all shut.

But that was stupid. She knew better than to leave the motor running.

“No,” he whispered, then more loudly, “Kendra, no!” He reached inside and flipped on the porch light, then turned and raced down the wooden back steps and across the grass to the side entrance to the garage. Through the windowpane he could see the glow of the car’s interior light, but he couldn’t see around the shelving by the door to tell where she was.

He grasped the knob and tried to turn it, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Kendra!” He banged on the pane. “Open up! What’re you doing in there?”

No answer. And she had the only key to the garage—she’d lost the spare one last month.

Buck bent over and grabbed a broken piece of amethyst crystal about the size of his fist from Kendra’s rock garden. He swung the chunk of rock against one of the windowpanes and shattered the glass, avoiding the shards that flew in every direction.

He reached in and unlocked the door from the inside, then shoved his way into the garage. “Kendra!”

His worst nightmare came true as he caught sight of her golden-brown hair splayed across the backseat, the car door open, her pale skin illumined by the overhead light in the car. The heavy fumes tried to drive him backward.

Choking, eyes tearing, he rushed over and knelt beside her still body. He touched her face, her neck, felt for a pulse, and raised her eyelids to check her pupils. She groaned. She was still alive!

Gagging from the filthy air, Buck reached between the bucket seats in front and switched off the motor, then gathered his wife in his arms. He had to get her to help fast.

Delphi Bell peered out the small front window of the cluttered living room and saw her husband’s hunched, brooding form on the porch steps, silhouetted by the moon. All he had on was an old pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the right sleeve. Like a fifties greaser—dirty, stringy hair falling down over his forehead and into his eyes.

He might freeze to death. A girl could always hope….

She saw the glowing tip of a cigarette, then saw his shadow move as he turned and looked at the window. She knew he saw her, and she stepped backward fast.

He’d been like that all night, quiet and glaring. She got scared when he acted like this. Sometimes the air around him seemed dark, just like it got outside before a bad storm that tore trees up by their roots and blew the shutters off houses. And he didn’t even drink much anymore. He wasn’t drinking tonight, but that didn’t make much difference, not since he got out of the hospital. And that whole thing had been her fault. He kept reminding her of that.

She thought of the duffel bag under her side of the bed. Inside were a jacket and sweater, and she’d been saving her tips from her job.

A thump on the porch startled her just before the knob turned and the door swung around and crashed into the side of the coffee table. Delphi cried out and jumped backward.

Abner loomed in the threshold. “What’s the matter with you?”

She hunched forward with her arms over her chest, afraid to breathe. She shook her head.

He looked around the front room, and his face twisted in disgust as he stepped in and allowed the cold air from outside to swirl around him. “Why don’t you get busy, then? What a pigsty. Get me some food.” He kicked a pile of dirty clothes out into the center of the floor and got his foot tangled in one of Delphi’s two pairs of jeans. “What’s this stuff doing in here? Can’t you do anything right?” He grabbed up a handful of clothes and slung them across the room, then turned on her again, arms out to his sides like a fullback getting ready to block a move.

“I…I been working, Abner,” she sputtered, averting her gaze from those devil’s eyes she saw more and more often lately.

“So’ve I!” He swung around and slammed the door shut, looked over his shoulder at her and gave her an evil leer, then deliberately snapped the door lock.

Delphi’s thoughts scrambled. That was what he did the last time, just before she ran to her so-called friends from work and begged them to take her in. He’d smacked her a good one then, cut her lip and blackened her eye and nearly broke her arm before she could get away. And they’d turned her back over to him as if she were some annoying stray dog they didn’t want around.

“Come ’ere,” he muttered, pointing to a spot on the floor in front of him.

She took a step backward.

His expression didn’t change. “I said come ’ere.”

Delphi thought again about the duffel bag beneath her bed. She would take it after he went to bed—if he went to bed tonight; sometimes he didn’t when he got like this—and then she would head to another town and never come back.

“You been talkin’ to that Richmond doctor, haven’t you?” His voice deepened and his words slurred, though there was no smell of booze. “Dr. Mercy,” he mocked in a singsong voice. “She been telling you to leave me again?”

Delphi knew the surprise showed on her face before she could stop it. She’d run into Dr. Mercy at the store the other day, and they’d talked a few minutes.

Abner snorted, his lips pulled back in a snarl, and his yellow-brown eyes gleamed with a crazy light. “She don’t know nothin’! She know you’re the one who banged my head into the garage floor last fall?”

“Yes.” Delphi felt that rush of guilt she got every time he reminded her of what she’d done. He’d been drunk and yelling at her and hitting her. When he fell and passed out, she’d tried to make sure he’d passed out for good. She couldn’t help herself. But he was smart. Or at least tricky. Maybe he hadn’t really been passed out at first. Maybe he’d been testing…

Suddenly his eyes narrowed, and his whole body surged toward her like a black cloud. His right arm rose, and she ducked as his hand came down on her shoulder. She winced and cried out and tried to get away. He grabbed her by the back of her shirt and jerked her toward him. She wrenched away and tried to run, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her.

She fell face-first onto the wood floor. Pain hammered her right cheekbone and elbow as she closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth, waiting for a kick in the side or a smack in the head.

He grabbed a handful of her hair and jerked back. Hard.

She flinched, but by now she was used to pain. As he lifted her, she drew her feet under her and swung up and around with her left elbow and slammed him in the jaw.

He grunted and let her go.

She stumbled and nearly fell, but she caught herself and kicked him hard, low in the gut. Without waiting to see what he would do, she ducked past him and ran for the kitchen, holding her hand over her eye.

He screamed a curse and came for her. There was no time to grab a coat, let alone the duffel bag. She just ran out the back door and down the steps and kept on running. She didn’t care where to.

Chapter One

T he crunch of tires on gravel echoed across the unpaved parking lot as Dr. Mercy Richmond drove into the apartment complex where Odira Bagby lived with her great-granddaughter, Crystal Hollis. A bare lightbulb glowed over the small concrete front stoop at the door nearest the alley so she’d know which apartment was Odira’s.

Mercy pulled as close to the steps as she could and reached over to turn up the heat in her car. The curtain at the window beside Odira’s front door was open, revealing a front room with an old threadbare sofa and a straight-backed chair crammed into a ten-by-ten-foot space, along with an old TV resting on a nightstand. An off-white lace doily topped the TV. Mercy had never been here before, but she knew the sixty-six-year-old woman supported herself and seven-year-old Crystal on social security. She couldn’t get a place at Sunrise Villa, the retirement apartments, because the new management didn’t want children.

Before Mercy could shift the gear into Park, the front door opened and out lumbered Odira, all two hundred seventy pounds of her, with wraithlike Crystal beside her, bundled all the way to her nose in a thick quilt.

As Mercy stepped out of the car into the icy wind and hurried around to open the door for them, Crystal started coughing again—the same hoarse, dry sound Mercy had heard in the background when Odira called a few minutes ago. It was typical of a child sick with bronchitis, maybe even pneumonia, brought on by the specter of cystic fibrosis.

“Hope you didn’t have to leave your own little girl at home alone for this,” Odira said in her booming baritone voice that always seemed to shake the walls when she came to the clinic.

“No, I dropped Tedi off at my mom’s on the way here.” Mercy got Crystal and Odira settled in the car, slid into the driver’s seat and pulled onto the quiet street for the five-minute drive to her clinic.

At the first stop sign, she noticed Odira sniffing…great, heaving sniffles. Tears, which she obviously could not contain, paraded down her cheeks. Odira was known to talk more than she breathed, a counterpoint to Crystal’s silent watchfulness. But not tonight.

Mercy cast a second concerned glance at the woman, where the dash lights illumined her broad, heavy face and rusty-iron hair that looked as if it had been cut with a pair of dull scissors. Beside her, Crystal’s face was thin and pale, filled with a sad knowledge. She raised her hand to cover her mouth when she coughed, just as Odira had taught her to. Her stout, clubbed fingers demonstrated the effects of oxygen deprivation to her extremities throughout her battle with CF.

“Are you two warm enough?” Mercy asked.

“I’m plenty warm.” Odira looked down at Crystal and wrapped a thick arm around her. Worn patches at the sleeves of her thirty-year-old coat had been carefully mended. “You okay?”

Crystal nodded and ducked her head into her great-grandmother’s side.

“What’s Crystal’s temperature?” Mercy hadn’t bothered to inquire about that over the phone because she knew that if Odira was desperate enough to call for help, Crystal was sick.

“Hundred and two.” Odira’s voice sounded like a solid mass in the confined space. “Couldn’t get her temp down, and the coughing just kept getting worse. Think she might have pneumonia again.” She sniffed and wiped at her wet face with the back of her hand. “Sorry…just couldn’t figure out nothing else to do but call you.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Odira.” Mercy laid her heater-warmed hand on Crystal’s face. Yes, it was hot. Crystal’s underdeveloped body was always fighting some kind of an infection. She’d had bouts of both bronchitis and pneumonia since Odira took over her care last year. Who knew what nightmares the child had suffered before that? She talked more now than she had when she first came to Knolls after her mother disappeared. She was healthier, too. That didn’t surprise Mercy. Love and kindness had great power over illness, and nobody could envelop a little girl in love the way big, awkward Odira Bagby could.

Mercy shared the hope with Odira that they would see Crystal live to adulthood, maybe even into her forties, with the new treatments and increased knowledge about this debilitating genetic disease. And by the time Crystal reached her forties, maybe they would have a cure.

As Crystal’s coughing and wheezing increased, Mercy turned onto Maple, the street that fronted Knolls Community Hospital and her clinic. The hospital came into view, glowing a dark rose color in the security lights set strategically around the grounds. Mercy slowed to the required fifteen miles per hour as she passed the property, set in a scenic residential section of town, with plenty of open lawn and evergreens. Bare branches of oaks and maples jutted out from between humps of burlap-protected rose plants.

She looked up to see, without surprise, that the administrator’s office was illuminated on the second floor. Mrs. Pinkley had opted to move her operations into an unused storage area rather than take the time to repair her own suite, which had been damaged in the explosions when the E.R. was destroyed. The E.R. was Estelle Pinkley’s first priority. Knolls Community usually employed about two hundred fifty people, many of whom would be out of work until they had the west wing with an emergency department. Estelle’s sense of civic responsibility had impacted her career as prosecuting attorney for a great deal of her life. Why stop just because she’d changed careers? At seventy, she was a more powerful force than a whole roomful of attorneys.

Odira sniffed and wiped her face again. “Sure do miss Dr. Bower.” Her heavy voice had an unaccustomed catch of sadness. “Bet you do, too. Bet you get all kinds of calls like this since there ain’t an E.R.”

Mercy reached over and patted Odira’s fleshy shoulder. “You know I wanted to come.” But what the woman said was true. Mercy’s practice had been overwhelmed the past three months. She missed Lukas a lot, and not just for his professional ability.

Lukas Bower, the acting E.R. director, was working temporarily at a hospital on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, a three-hour drive from Knolls. Patients and hospital staff members continually asked Mercy when he’d be back. She wondered, too. Nobody missed him more than she did.

“Don’t seem right he should be out of work just because some monster wanted to set fire to the E.R.” Odira pulled Crystal closer. “Don’t seem right we should all be suffering like this.”

“I feel the same way.” Mercy looked down at Crystal. “How are you doing, sweetheart?”

“My chest hurts.”

Mercy bit her lip and prayed silently, the way Lukas had taught her to do. God, please help me with this one. She’s so young. Why is she suffering like this? The question came up often lately in Mercy’s mind, and after all the talking she and Lukas had done about the subject, she still hadn’t found a satisfactory answer. Every time she found herself questioning God about it, she felt afraid. Sometimes it seemed as if all those great, profound truths she and Lukas had discussed last summer and autumn had deserted her, and that her new belief in Christ was just a fairy tale.

She turned into the dark parking area of her clinic, less than a block from the hospital. “Let’s get inside and get a breathing treatment started.”

Clarence Knight just happened to be in Ivy Richmond’s kitchen, raiding her refrigerator and practically swallowing three frozen chocolate chip cookies whole, when the phone rang for the second time Saturday night.

He jerked backward and knocked his head on the overhead compartment where Ivy had been hiding the treats from him. He thumped his elbow on the door and spilled crumbs down the front of his size 6XL T-shirt in his rush to get to the phone before the ringing could wake Ivy. If she came in and found him eating, she would roast him whole over an open fire, all four hundred twenty pounds of him.