The Record Keeper (Murphy Shepherd, #3)

by Charles Martin

This is ancient earth populated by old trees, some six feet in diameter, whose moss-draped limbs swoop down to kiss the ground only to rise again.

Bones smiled like a man who’d just returned home to the smell of fried chicken and hugged his mother.

Local knowledge is advised.” Local knowledge refers to what the locals know by use. By being on the water. And few, if any, have ever read a chart.

Tomorrow we . . .” A chuckle. “Blend in.” “Blend in” was code for reconnaissance, but I asked anyway. “What for?” He smiled. “Local knowledge.”

But as the weeks rolled by, I sensed there was something in me that was hesitant to climb back in the saddle. My problem wasn’t so much my body as my heart, and I’m not talking about the muscle in the center of my chest. I’m talking about the place in me that holds my love—and just as important, my hope.

Their intentions were beautiful. I’m not knocking the questions. And yet they produced consequences I never expected. This constant focus on me had an effect on me; it gave me time to think about me and what I needed, and did I really want to go through all of this again? That was a question I’m not sure I’d ever asked myself.

When I could muster the courage to pick up a pen, I found my hope bucket empty and the page wordless.

I, as much as anyone, knew that hope is what feeds us. It’s the currency of mankind. The fuel of the soul. Without it, we wither and die.

Despite over two decades of spending myself to rescue the lost, I’d made no dent in the cancer. Evil was no less evil. Some might find my longing to make a real difference idealistic. I don’t. I don’t do what I do for kicks and giggles. It’s not a game. It’s trench warfare.

what I remembered most was the pain; the images I saw when I closed my eyes were those of terror and horror and heartbreak and pain.

I come here for something else. Something you can’t touch. It’s the universal sound of freedom. Laughter. On most days it echoes from one end of town to the other.

When each of us arrived at Freetown, our hearts and souls were held together by twine and tape and glue. Little more than a patchwork of pieces. Like a sweater with one loose thread, a simple pull threatened to unravel the whole. Each of us walked in with a singular need: to be known. I used to think the need ended there. Repair the tear and fix the person. Wrong. What I saw happening across the streets of Freetown, from fashion to dance to photography, convinced me there is one need deeper. To be accepted in the knowing. Maybe that’s rescue.

When racing fuel was used, the horsepower rose to a total of 3,100, pushing the boat to 140 mph. A waterborne rocket.

Admittedly, I was not firing on all cylinders, and the mental fog created by convalescent months on my back had not cleared.

My problem was simple: if I did what was needed to get myself back in shape, I was that much closer to leaving again. Healthy would equal absent. Which brought its own set of problems. Absent brought with it the possibility of being shot again. A vicious cycle.

But if I remained in my current condition as a limping, beat-up once-was, slightly disconnected from relational engagement, I could extend my stay here and delay the inevitable. Because while my current state frustrated her, my absence would hurt her. Me becoming me came at a price. And while I could and would pay it, Summer would pay the higher price. Which hurt me more than being shot.

Writing had always been my release. The thing I did to probe my own wound. Dig around. Unearth the shrapnel. Cleanse my soul.

Maybe this was why Bones never married. My thoughts, along with the empty page, suggested my problem was bigger than I would admit.

His back was a road map of rescue.

Bones navigated with an uncanny knowledge, putting the large vessel in skinny waters I’d not thought possible. He was threading the needle between oyster bed and sandbar and doing so at a fast rate of speed. When he did throttle down and brought us off plane, I found myself looking at a protective high bluff canopied in ancient live oaks, all draped in Spanish moss.

Bones cut the engine, and we tied up at what was once a dock. He looked over his shoulder. “Feel like walking?” Some hurricane had long ago separated dock from land, so we hopped down onto the beach. Bones led, leaving an imprint in the soft sand much like the one he’d left in most everyone who’d ever met him. Something that lingered.

I followed. Something I’d been doing for close to t...

We turned a corner around a row of trees and the remains of a building came into view. Surrounded by hedges, pierced by trees, choked with vines, and with a tower that had caved in on itself, the small formerly white structure suggested it had once been a church. All the windows were gone, most of the roof had rotted, and the porch had become disconnected from the building, causing those who would enter to jump across a three-foot chasm.

Like the roof, the floor had rotted and taken many of the pews down with it. Three remained. The others sat at odd angles, having disappeared through the floorboards like sinking ships in a sea of ice.

“Memory is tough to recall when doing so brings pain.

moved us from the safety of the only warm bosom we’d ever known to the cold, frigid, and very infertile womb of an upstate New York convent.

Upon his death, his wife returned home to New York, but the trail grows cold at an asylum. I’d like to think she was heartbroken. Evidently we were taken from her when she could no longer care for us.”

Once outside, we walked into a larger canopy of even older oaks whose limbs arched up, turned horizontal like a roller coaster, then swooped down to kiss the earth, only to rise up again.

“The convent was the first place I ever knew, or experienced, favoritism.

He had then, and has now, a presence that draws people. A magnetism.

Somewhere near the age of six they moved us to an orphanage. Run by priests. And while the nuns favored Frank, the priests favored me—but for different reasons. It was the first time I remember knowing cold. And pain.”

you don’t know something is wrong, and don’t know what to call it, and if it’s all you’ve ever known, then it’s difficult to know for certain that it shouldn’t be happening to you. I once explained abuse like growing up in a world without hot water. If cold was all you ever knew, then a cold shower was normal. All you ever took. You had no choice. That doesn’t mean you liked it, but you didn’t complain. You could imagine something else, but what good would it do?

“So a cold life with these men who called themselves servants of God was all we knew.

They made us serve as acolytes. White robes. Reverent faces. We’d sit up front, holding a cross or candle, staring out across the congregation, and over time, familiar faces began to register. As in, we recognized them. Which is the thing about physical abuse. It’s face-to-face. These were men of standing, successful, powerful, who bought what they wanted, when they wanted. Sitting properly next to their wives and kids. Completing the act. But our bodies told a different drama. Our bodies were keeping score.

“During Communion, the priest would offer the body—the wafer—to the penitent, along with a whisper detailing time and place.” Bones shook his head and stared at his right hand. “Took me a long time to understand how they offered the body of Christ with one hand and us with the other.” Another long pause. “Of the two of us, I was stronger. When I rebelled, they beat me until I couldn’t.”

We didn’t know who we were, and more importantly, we didn’t know whose we were—forever proving that identity precedes purpose. You can’t know who you are until you’ve settled whose you are.

Whoever flew us across the pond knew that if we had no record, then we didn’t exist. And if we didn’t exist, then they could do what they wanted to us because no one would care enough to come looking. Which allowed actions without consequences. Before you’re rescued, you first have to be lost, and to be lost you have to be someone. Otherwise, what’s lost?

Hitler did the same with the Jews. We had b...

“It wasn’t just twice as bad as what we’d known, it was exponentially worse.”

Somewhere in there I learned the intent of man’s heart was evil continually, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it did so masquerading as good. As servants of God.”

“At some point Frank smuggled in a flashlight and, oddly, a pew Bible. Strange when you think that what he smuggles now found its root in that dungeon we called Hell Squared.

“My only signal that it was daytime was when, by some merciful act of God, the sun would rise to about ten thirty and hit a window and reflect off the stained glass at the far end of the cavern. For almost an hour I could see the faint hint of crimson-tinted daylight. I would later learn that glass was part of an underground prayer sanctuary—once dug by persecuted Christians escaping the Moors.

Unless they woke me, I slept twenty hours a day. I’m told people on death row do the same.

From that moment, nobody wanted anything to do with me, which fed a rather heated discussion that I found comical. They had no problem imprisoning me under lock and key, then abusing me like chattel to their hearts’ content, often daily. But somewhere, some priest grew a soul and drew the line at murder. How sick is that? In the meantime I’m sitting there thinking, No, just shoot me, feed me to the fish, and be done with me. Death is better than this any day.”

I’d done a pretty good job of dissuading anyone from ever wanting to unlock that door again, so, unable to come to a consensus, everybody soon lost interest in me.

While I’d been below in darkness, Frank had taken a liking to things that lit up—like computers. And planes. I’ve never met anyone with a mind like Frank’s. He could watch something performed once and then replicate it. Perfectly. Even complicated things. “Frank has a photographic memory, which, among other things, allowed him to impersonate.

For a long time I thought this move was their form of an apology.” Bones shook his head. “I was wrong.”

Frank is Mensa smart. And if Mensa is the top two percent of all people, then Frank is in the top two percent of the top two percent.

“The story of my surgical skills had preceded us, so everybody left us alone. Including the brothers. Who only let us eat with plastic utensils. While I recovered and strengthened, which would take months, Frank was working them, and they never saw it coming. To his credit, neither did I.

“Frank fought sleep for fear of what might happen when he did, so he developed a taste for things that kept him awake. Drugs that sped up both his heart rate and his mind, and films that scared him or enticed him. Horror and adult. All three had the same effect. I, on the other hand, had been forced to make friends with the dark and could sleep through a hurricane.