Divinity (6 page)

When William Congrave coined the phrase about Hell’s fury and a woman scorned, he certainly had not witnessed Gabriel’s wrath
, Michael thought.

VI

J
ULIA’S
tires chirped as she refocused on the road, cutting her steering wheel sharply to the right to get back into her lane. Her cell phone was ringing, causing her to regain her focus, and she narrowly avoided swerving into oncoming traffic. She laughed nervously and said to the sky, “I guess it’s not always you guys who keep me from dying.”

A chill ran through her as she heard her own words, and the meaning of them seeped into her marrow. She glanced at the phone, knowing it would be Alex wondering why she had bailed. She pressed the button on the steering wheel to engage the voice command function on her cell phone. “Answer.”

Her cell phone connected and Alex’s voice boomed through the speaker, making her jump in her seat. She reached forward and lowered the volume a bit.

“Is everything all right, Julia? You really have me worried tonight. You were so distracted when you got here already, but when Mother asked you about your birth parents, you turned white as a ghost! I actually thought you were going to be ill!”

“I’m fine, honestly. I wasn’t feeling well and when she mentioned them I started to think about my childhood on the ranch and it put me off.” The part about thinking about her childhood was the truth, at least. “I didn’t want to upset anyone, so I excused myself. It’s just a bit of an upset stomach, really. No need to worry. I’ll make it up to you next time, okay?”

“I asked her not to interrogate you about your family again, Julia. I really am sorry; I didn’t think it still bothered you so much to talk about them.” Alex sighed heavily, a loud, crackling sound through her speaker.

Her car ran so quietly that even when someone on the phone was whispering, it sounded like they were right in her ear. She leaned forward and turned the volume down again. “Normally it doesn’t. Please don’t make a big deal out of this. I really am fine.”

“Sweetheart, I’m just worried about you. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.” He lowered his voice. “I almost choked on my supper when you said you had to pick Mitsy up.”

A small amount of Julia’s tension lifted with a laugh. “I’m sorry, Alex. I promise I’m not out robbing doggy graveyards. I just need to go home and lie down for a while. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

“All right. Drive carefully. I love you.” He hung up the phone, and the car was once again filled with eerie silence. She rolled the window down a touch, so she could hear some outside noise. She was not in the mood for music, but she didn’t want creepy silence, either.

Dogs
, she thought,
what was it he said about the dog?

Julia thought back to the story her adoptive mother had told her about her first pet. It was always told the same way, starting out with the acknowledgement that Julia’s birth mother was crazy. Julia had heard the story more times than she could count.

When Julia was three months old, her birth mother had been locked away in an asylum. Julia was to be cared for by a large, state-run orphanage. When Bill Samson heard where his sister’s baby girl had been placed, he and his wife Natalie made the long drive out to see her. From the moment they saw Julia in her little crib, they knew they had to have her. For the Samsons, the timing couldn’t have been better. They had a boy—a
real
son—and wanted a baby sister for him but were no longer able to conceive. They knew very well a pretty little baby in perfect health wasn’t going to last long in the orphanage.

Bill and Natalie Samson were quite wealthy and lived on a cattle ranch south of Dallas. They did not want the court battle that would have been necessary to have the adoption go through the process properly. They found a judge who wasn’t averse to lining his pockets to push things through faster. Ten thousand dollars and less than a week later, the Samsons drove down the long, dusty road to their ranch with their new baby girl in her new mother’s lap. After spending the entire day and most of the evening retrieving the baby, nobody had the energy for conversation.

Bill slammed on the brakes of his Cadillac and cursed, then guided the car over to the side of the road, threw it into park, and jumped out of the car.

“Bill, what happened?” Natalie exclaimed, clutching the baby to her chest.

Bill ignored his wife and ran around to the front of the long sedan, where the puppy he had almost run over lay whimpering. It was shaking, eyes rolling wildly, and it was holding one furry little paw in the air. The pup let Bill take her paw in hand, and her tail started to thump into the dirt of the road, causing small plumes of dust to rise. It was of no particular breed that he could be sure of; it had the general body and facial shape of a small German shepherd, but with longer, shaggy brown hair.

Bill chuckled softly, picking the puppy up and looking it over more carefully. It was only a few months old.

Natalie could now see the dog for the first time in the light of the headlights. She gasped. “Is it hurt? Did you run it over? It looks so scared and hungry!”

Bill came back around to the driver’s side, opened the back door, and gently put the dog inside. “It’s a she, Nat, and I think she just twisted her paw trying to get out of the way. Nothing seems really hurt. She does seem to be lost, though, so I think we should take her home and see if we can’t figure out where she belongs.”

While the Samsons were talking, the puppy and the baby stared at each other. The baby reached one hand toward the puppy, who returned the interest with a bob of her head and a wagging of her tail. When Natalie noticed the interaction, she looked at Bill and said, “I think maybe we just got ourselves two babies!”

“You may be right about that,” he said, laughing. He shifted the car into gear and continued on the way home. “What are we going to call her?”

“Let’s wait and see if we can find her owners first.”

The Samson family made their way home, where Julia’s new older brother, Jamie, waited with a babysitter. Jamie was two years older than she, and fascinated by both her and the puppy.

The Samsons were not able to find the puppy’s owner, so she became part of the family. She stayed close to the children at all times, and was very quiet and well behaved. Nine months had passed and they still hadn’t thought of a suitable name for her, and referred to her simply as “the puppy.”

One particular visitor at the door changed all that.

It was a warm day in mid-October when the puppy barked for the first time since they had found her. Natalie had the doors and windows open, airing the place out. When the puppy sounded off, Natalie jumped to her feet and rushed to the window.

In the distance, she could see two dark sedans speeding toward the main house, their tires kicking up long trails of dust that seemed to hang in the air. The puppy’s bark took on a note of urgency. Natalie didn’t recognize the vehicles at all, and she scrambled to lock the front door and windows, then hurried to the back.

Just as she threw the last bolt lock, securing the back door, there was a sharp rap on the front door. The puppy’s hackles stood up on the back of her neck and she growled deeply. If Natalie hadn’t been standing right there, she would have thought it was a wolf growling. She opened her mouth to ask who was at the door, and the dog barked so loudly it drowned her out.

“Natalie? Open the door, Natalie, it’s me, Lori.” The muffled voice of Natalie’s mother-in-law came through the door, barely audible over the barking. “Open the door, sweetheart. I just came to see the baby.” Something about the tone of Lori’s words made Natalie’s skin crawl. If she had had hackles, they would be rising, too.

The dog barked even louder. From where Natalie stood, she could see Lori through a crack in the curtains, standing on the front porch, making every effort to sound casual and friendly, but looking very impatient, and even angry. There were two hulking men just behind her on each side, muscles bulging out of their tight, black T-shirts. They looked like they were trying to stay out of sight of the peephole.

Natalie had no idea why Lori would show up unannounced, nor why she would feel the need to bring bodyguards, and by the look of them all, she wasn’t about to ask. Her mind raced. She quickly convinced herself that they were there to take Julia back to her birth mother. No way was Natalie about to let that happen.

“It’s not a good time, Lori. I’m sorry; you’ll have to come back when Bill is home.” Natalie had to shout to be heard over the dog. With a bark like that, it no longer seemed proper to call her a puppy. It almost seemed as though she had saved up all of her barks just for that day.

It occurred to Natalie that there might have been more men, so she ran to the back of the house to peek out the curtains. As she thought, there were an additional two large, muscular men, one trying to pick the lock on the door, the other trying to pry open the windows.

The dog looked up at Natalie, then back to Julia’s room in between barks. It had the strangest look in its eyes. They seemed almost human, trying to give her a message. Natalie followed the dog’s gaze and gasped as she saw the shadow of a man outside the window behind Julia’s crib. Running in, she swept Julia out of her crib, clutching her tightly. Natalie’s heart was pounding so loudly it was almost deafening.

Despite all the commotion, Julia didn’t make a sound. She looked at her puppy and smiled as though she thought it was all a great game. The enormous figure on the other side of the pane leaned over to pick something up, even as Lori’s frustration started to come through in her voice.

“Now listen to me, Natalie. You open up this door right now. I’m just here to see my granddaughter. Let me in and you won’t get hurt. Let. Me. IN!” Lori rattled the door handle as she yelled.

“Get out of here, Lori!” Natalie shouted. “You’re all crazy! I’ll call the police!”

As the shadowy shape on the other side of the nursery window pulled back its arm, ready to hurl the large rock he had picked up, the dog uttered one last loud bark—a triumphant-sounding bark. Natalie could hear the sounds of feet on the walkway, headed away from the house. She heard the car doors open and then slam shut. Then she heard them start up and drive off quickly. She risked peeking out the window and watched, trembling, as the cars created the same billowy clouds of dust trailing along behind them.

Her ranch hand had pulled up in his old pickup truck and the thugs had left immediately.

The now-quiet puppy sat down and waggled its tail happily, as though nothing unusual had just happened. Natalie looked at her incredulously. She knew that, if the dog hadn’t barked like that, she wouldn’t have gotten the windows and doors locked. She shuddered to think of what would have happened next.

“Well.” She sat, leaning over to pat the puppy with trembling hands. “I know what to call you now.”

Julia supposed Natalie had repeated the story so Julia would be grateful for the life Bill and Natalie had given her, saving her from the crazy part of the family, so she had never thought much about it. Natalie had had many ways to make Julia feel disinterested about her birth family, and because of all these stories she had never asked who her real father was. She wondered if Natalie had known the truth.

The family had moved within days in an effort to stay out of the reach of Lori and her goons. Nobody knew why she had shown up that day, why she had tried to abduct Julia or what she had planned with her thugs.

It seemed bitterly ironic that Natalie had fought to keep Julia safe then, when only a few short years later she was willing to turn her back on Julia and cast her out in order to “protect” her son. Julia shook her head, refocusing on the puppy’s story.

As Julia remembered how and why her adoptive mother had decided to name the dog “Gabriel,” goose bumps covered every inch of her skin, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, as if the act would make her wake up from the memories, and kept driving.

“Gabriel,” she murmured, realizing that the more pieces of this puzzle fell together, the more outrageous it seemed. She recalled Natalie telling her why she had chosen that name that night. It seemed the dog reminded her of the Archangel Gabriel blowing his trumpet at the gates of Heaven with all the barking that day—the messenger of Heaven.