The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense
wire soldered at one end. Iris pondered it, then tried twisting the wire into various shapes across the top of the bracelet. None pleased her. Pulling a length of gold wire from a plastic drawer, she twisted it this way and that, twining it with the silver wire, encircling the smooth arc of metal. With a pfft of disgust, she returned the wire to its bin. Her original vision had been of intertwined lengths of gold and silver wire crisscrossing the copper, perhaps studded with a piece or two of polished agate, maybe tiger’s eye. Nothing faceted or sparkly. But it wasn’t coming together. Iris set the cuff down and her gaze slid to the computer on the other side of the room.
    She knew why she couldn’t concentrate, why she couldn’t hold a picture of the bracelet in her mind’s eye, see the way metal and stones needed to come together. Pastor Matt’s face kept getting in the way. Damn him for waking up. Pushing away from the worktop, Iris glided on the castored stool to the computer and powered it up. There couldn’t be any harm in reading a news story or two about Pastor Matt’s recovery. Maybe learning the details would let her push the whole damn thing from her mind, get on with her jewelry making and selling, with deciding where to go from Portland.
    The search terms “Brozek” and “coma” brought up hundreds of articles. After only a brief hesitation, Iris clicked on one at random. Pastor Matt’s face, unchanged from when she’d last seen him, filled the screen. He was smiling, the curve of his mouth pushing up the pads of flesh on his cheeks, squeezing crow’s feet around his blue eyes. His blond hair swept back from its part near his left temple, thick and straight, disciplined with mousse or hairspray. Her clenched teeth made Iris’s ears ache and she forced a yawn, assessing him from a distance of twenty-three years and two thousand miles. Unable to face his smile any longer, Iris scrolled down the page but didn’t find a recent photo.
    Keeping her eyes averted from the snapshot, she read the text. “Matthew Brozek, 72, awoke from a twenty-three-year coma yesterday morning, astonishing doctors and convincing family members that miracles happen. ‘It’s a miracle,’ Brozek’s daughter, Esther Brozek, 41, said with tears in her eyes. ‘Our prayers have been answered. I always knew Daddy would come back to us.’”
    Iris guessed Esther must never have married because she would certainly have taken her husband’s name if she had. Hunh . She’d been sure Esther would be married by twenty-one, maybe even to Noah, although their mother had been against his dating a girl who was older than him. Iris skimmed the medical gobbledy gook that followed, but the technical terms meant little. She’d already gotten the gist: Pastor Matt’s awakening after so long was a one in a bazillion, bona fide medical miracle. Yet another example of God’s—not that there was a God—warped sense of humor. Surely there was a saint, or at least a war widow and single mother of four, who deserved a healing miracle more than Matthew Brozek.
    Iris’s hand trembled on the mouse as she closed the web browser and her fingers stroked the obsidian pendant at her neck. I should visit Dad. The thought had recurred a dozen times over the years, but she’d always pushed it aside. She hadn’t undergone four years of therapy, working to come to terms with Pastor Matt’s abuse and her family’s reaction, making her way baby step by baby step toward healing and closure, only to jeopardize her progress by exposing herself to the forces that had ripped her life apart. She shoved herself away from the computer and back to the worktop where the cuff waited.
    Jewelry-making had given her a focus and maybe saved her life years ago. She felt half-silly thinking that, but it was true. As soon as she’d started training with the goldsmith Jane had introduced her to, she’d felt a sense of purpose that made her think she could be more
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