When He Found Me (Road to Refuge Book 1)
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Scripture
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Next in the Road to Refuge Series
Books By Victoria Bylin
A Word from Victoria . . .
About the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2019 Vicki Bylin Scheibel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. www.victoriabylin.com
Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org
Cover designed by Jenny Zemanek, Seedlings Design Studio
Print ISBN-13: 9781793192974
Printed in the United States of America
To my husband
A man who lives his faith in the spirit
of the Psalms
I also want to thank the women who made this book possible. Ladies, I can’t thank you enough for your input, encouragement, wisdom, and friendship.
Sara Mitchell
Play the Tape.
Charlene Patterson
Best editor on the planet. Working with you is pure joy.
Jenny Zemanek
Cutest cover design ever and perfect for the story!
Virginia Smith
A huge thank you for the beautiful design work!
Deborah Raad
Thank you for knowing where hyphens go!
Loose yourself from the chains around your neck
O captive daughter of Zion.
Isaiah 52:2 (NASB)
Chapter 1
Shane Riley yanked his wet Levis out of a grimy washing machine, one of twenty or so in a Laundromat straight out of 1992. Ten years had passed since he’d set foot in a place like this one, but he’d been ambushed by an August thunderstorm while changing a flat tire on a desolate stretch of I-80.
He should have been in Los Angeles, warming up at third base with the Los Angeles Cougars. Instead he was on his way to Refuge, Wyoming, to take a job he didn’t want, driving an SUV he didn’t like, and worrying about his sister. He also limped when he got tired, the result of the car accident that had cost him the chance of a lifetime.
Given a choice, he would have stayed in Los Angeles and haunted his local gym, but he needed a job. Why it had to be in Wyoming, he didn’t know.
Why, God? Mentally, Shane raised a clenched fist to the empty sky. Four months ago he’d been the frontrunner for Rookie of the Year honors—a man with a future and a hope just like the Bible promised. Now his future was uncertain and his hope hung by the fragile thread of his torn ACL.
As he reached back into the washing machine for his socks, the glass door to the Laundromat swung wide. A small boy burst through the door, followed by a woman in her twenties carrying a Spiderman backpack and a grocery bag dripping water. About five-foot-six and rail thin, she had the look of a distance runner—or someone who didn’t eat enough. Brunette hair framed her high cheekbones and pretty face, but what most caught his eye was the faded red T-shirt from Venice Beach, his old stomping ground. When his gaze reached her feet, he saw a pair of worn-out Nikes. Next to her, the boy was barefoot.
The kid didn’t mind at all, but Shane did. No child should have to go without decent shoes. He’d done it, and he knew how it felt.
The woman led the boy to a row of orange plastic chairs and plopped down the backpack. “Wait here while I get the dryer started.”
“But I’m hungry—”
“Shoes first,” she said. “Then we’ll eat.”
“But—”
“Cody, listen.” She dropped to a crouch, making eye contact as she smoothed his shaggy blond hair. “It’s going to take a while for your shoes to dry. You only have one pair, so you can’t go stomping in mud puddles.”
The boy frowned. “It was a really big puddle.”
“I know, but—”
“I had to jump over it.”
Instead of becoming exasperated, the woman laughed. “I guess you did.”
The plastic bag in hand, she headed for the wall of steel dryers just as Shane arrived at the same wall with his wet clothes. She glanced at him, but only long enough to take in his unshaven jaw and the scar above his left eye.
The line marked where he had cut his head in the car accident—a freak crash caused by a deer leaping in front of his new Mustang GT in Malibu Canyon. His other scars—the ones that changed his life—were on his left knee and hidden by gray sweats. Until a week ago he had used a cane.
No one dressed up to go to a coin laundry, and Shane looked particularly disreputable after driving ten hours straight on nothing but coffee and sunflower seeds. She wouldn’t notice his first-rate haircut or smell the aftershave that came in a logoed bottle. She’d see road trash—a fitting assumption considering the first fifteen years of his life—but the description no longer fit. Signing with the Cougars had drastically changed his income and overall quality of life.
The woman kept her back to him, a signal she wanted nothing to do with a stranger. Shane wished his sister had as much common sense, but when it came to men, Daisy had no good judgment at all.
He blamed himself for that weakness. After their mother’s sudden death, they had been placed together in a foster home run by a high school baseball coach and his wife. While Shane’s life morphed into a Disney movie, Daisy stumbled badly. Several months ago, she had disappeared completely, so Shane had hired private detective Troy Ramsey to search for her.
In their last meeting, Troy had been blunt. “Give it up, Shane. If she wants to see you, she’ll call.”
But that was the point. She didn’t want to see him. He wanted to see her . . . He needed to see her to apologize for abandoning her when she needed him, calling her terrible names, and for bullying her with his so-called faith.
Frowning, he dug in his pocket for quarters for the dryer. Each coin bought him ten minutes of hot air, a quirk of fate that reminded him of the post-career counseling from Cougar management. Steve Dawes, a retired catcher, had pushed him to apply for the teaching job in Wyoming. Steve thought the change in scenery would do Shane good, and with his BA in history and a minor in education, he could teach with a substitute permit while he tested the waters of a new career.
“What else are you going to do, Riley? Sit around and feel sorry for yourself?”
Self-pity wasn’t Shane�
��s style—not at all. In Los Angeles he went to the gym five days a week. He ran until his knee hurt, then did push-ups, chin-ups, stretches, and crunches until his muscles screamed. He’d do whatever it took to return to major league baseball. Until then, he needed a job or he’d race through his savings. When the principal of Refuge High School offered him a one-semester contract, he took it. In February he planned to try out again for the Cougars.
A handful of coins bounced on the floor and rolled in a dozen directions. He turned and saw the woman picking up pennies, nickels, and dimes. Instinctively he bent to help her. His knee protested and he grimaced.
When their eyes met, she recoiled from his scowl, her nose wrinkling as if he smelled bad. “Thank you. But I can manage.”
He plucked a nickel from the lint below the dryer and slid it in her direction.
“Really,” she insisted. “I don’t need your help.”
Pain shot from his knee to his spine. Holding in a moan, he answered with a grunt. The woman’s mouth tensed, but Shane kept sweeping coins across the floor. Lint made a cloud of scented dust, a mix of cotton and dryer sheets that took him back to the summers he’d traveled with his mother and sister to craft fairs all over the country. He knew his way around a Laundromat, and he didn’t see a single quarter among the runaway coins.
“Mommy? Can I eat now?” The boy’s voice traveled the length of the storefront. He sounded close to starvation.
“Not yet,” the woman answered. Settling on her knees, she peered beneath a washing machine, then reached under it. Whatever she saw, she needed it badly enough to paw through an inch of dirt.
Shane dug in his pocket for quarters. As he put them in the woman’s dryer, he saw the boy’s shoes, one sole-up and the other on its side. They were canvas sneakers, wet from being rinsed, and the cheapest shoes a mother could buy. Even so, they were worn to the point of sadness. The rubber soles didn’t have a speck of tread, and the canvas had faded from black to gray. Only the laces were in good shape. Stark white except for traces of mud, they were brand new. As a boy, Shane had owned shoes just like them.
Jaw tight, he closed the door and dropped a dollar’s worth of quarters into the slot. As he pushed the Start button, the woman jumped to her feet. “What are you doing?”
“Turning on the dryer.”
Her cheeks flamed pink. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?”
“They aren’t your shoes,” she said logically. “I can take care of myself.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t.” But he’d been thinking it. He didn’t doubt this woman loved her son, but she had bought shoelaces because she couldn’t afford new shoes. How much were kids’ sneakers at Walmart? He didn’t know, but they couldn’t be much.
The woman lifted her chin, a defiant pose, but she had lint on her knees and a handful of dusty nickels and dimes, signs of her poverty. Even more obvious, she was twig-thin. Her leanness, he decided, had nothing to do with running, at least not the kind people did for exercise. She was skinny, defensive, and chasing down pennies. The combination reminded him of Daisy and he wished again he’d been caring instead of critical.
Next to them, the shoes clunked in an uneven rhythm. As the woman turned to the dryer, so did Shane. In the porthole window he saw the reflection of her face, softer now and composed as she turned to him.
“That was rude of me.” Eyes wide, she offered him a handful of coins. “I owe you a dollar.”
He held up a hand to stop her. “No, you don’t.”
“But—”
“Help someone else with it.”
Suddenly solemn, she nodded. “I will.”
He had to stop looking at her face, not because she reminded him of Daisy but because she didn’t. Daisy’s eyes were blue like his, and he and his sister shared their mother’s dark blond hair. This woman’s hair was the color of a brown leather jacket, and her eyes, also brown, were large, round, and deer-like. When her gaze flicked to the whitish scar over his left eye, her countenance softened yet again, raising her lips into a tiny smile born of kindness, maybe empathy.
“Mooommmmy!” The boy charged up the aisle made by the washing machines. When he reached the woman, he shoved the backpack into her hands. “I’m really hungry. Can I have just the fries?”
She slung the bag over her shoulder and took the child’s hand. “How about eating the hamburger first?”
“Now?”
“Right now,” she said, smiling at the boy. Her eyes were still filled with love when she looked at Shane. “Thank you again for the quarters.”
“My pleasure.”
Her son tugged on her arm, half dragging her to the plastic chairs by the front door. With nothing to do but wait for his clothes to dry, Shane went to the opposite end of the row, sat, and checked his phone for messages. He didn’t expect to hear from either Daisy or Troy, but he checked dozens of times per day. There was nothing of interest, so he read sports scores.
The woman opened a McDonald’s bag. Shane smelled burgers and fries and thought of all the meals he’d eaten on the road with his mother and Daisy. The woman gave the boy the hamburger, admonished him to chew, and ate a french fry. The boy polished off the burger, the rest of the fries, and the carton of milk, slurping to get the last drop. The woman gathered the trash and tossed it, glanced at her watch, and sat back down.
She’d eaten a french fry. That was it. The shoes would need at least twenty more minutes.
“Let’s play the alphabet game,” she said to her son. “I see a . . .” She glanced around the room. “An appliance.”
“What’s that?” the boy asked.
“A big word for washers and dryers. It’s your turn.”
Shane didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but he couldn’t avoid hearing the woman’s playful way with her son. She laughed at his silly jokes, tickled him for the letter T, and praised him when he said Z stood for zipper.
“Let’s do it again,” the boy insisted.
“Okay, but no repeating.”
Silently, Shane played along, stealing glances at the woman and boy. The game was pleasantly amusing until they got to the letter G. The boy searched the Laundromat for inspiration, then reached inside the backpack and pulled out a baseball mitt.
“Glove!” he shouted.
Shane swallowed hard, his fingers flexing as he savored the memory of soft leather fit to his palm. In high school, baseball had been his escape, his hope for a scholarship and a better life for himself and Daisy. Before the accident, he had called himself blessed. Now he felt betrayed. Frowning, he refreshed the scores on his phone. The Cougars were ahead 3-2. They had a shot at winning their division.
The woman’s laugh rose above the clunk-clunk of the shoes in the dryer. “Good job, Cody.”
“I’m hungry again.”
“We have apples in the room. That’ll be dessert.”
A french fry. Worn-out shoes. Crawling after a quarter. Yet she had a smile in her voice. Shane liked her and wished they were in Los Angeles so he could ask her to dinner, someplace fun with large portions. But they weren’t in Los Angeles. They were in an empty corner of Wyoming, and tomorrow he’d leave early for Refuge. He’d never see her again, but he wanted to do something to help her.
One of the dryers buzzed and the drum stopped turning. As the shoes thumped to a stop, she retrieved them and came back to her son. Shane listened as she wiggled the shoes on to his feet, making yet another game of tying the laces.
As the boy headed for the door, the woman followed him but stopped short of leaving. Instead she smiled at Shane. “Thanks again for the quarters.”
“It was nothing.”
“It helped.” She looked at him a second longer than necessary, then herded the boy to an old brown Bonneville with oxidized paint, a dented fender, and tires that were unexpectedly new. He’d noticed the car at the motel by the interstate, the same place he’d taken a room for the night. He wouldn’t invite her to dinner—he was cer
tain she’d say no—but he could do something else for her. He could buy her son a pair of shoes.
Chapter 2
Melissa June Townsend, called MJ by her friends, finished supervising her son’s bath, then herded him to the double bed covered with a faded floral spread. Even with the air-conditioning on high, the motel room was stifling. MJ was damp with perspiration, exhausted, and thirsty for a Coke. Thanks to the kindness of a stranger—a man with startling blue eyes—she had a handful of coins in her pocket.
When Cody fell asleep, she’d make her “I’m safe” call to her friend Lyn, then step across the hall to the vending machines. First, though, she had to tuck him in.
“Okay, tiger.” She pulled back the covers with a flourish. “It’s bedtime for you. We have another long drive tomorrow.”
Cody tumbled into the bed as if he’d been tackled. Considering they’d spent two days on I-15 and I-80, the interstates from Los Angeles, she could forgive his rambunctiousness. She endured the same restless urges, and the feelings would only intensify as they approached Refuge. When she’d left home six years ago as a UCLA freshman, she had envisioned medical school. She’d also been ridiculously naïve and had paid a heavy price. She could still hear Nicole Tatum, the junior who’d been her friend and mentor, talking about relationships.
“You can’t be independent until you control your own body. Men don’t control it. Your mother doesn’t control it, and neither does God. You control it.”
MJ had taken control of her body the way Nicole advised, but the consequences were unexpected. Pregnancy had been the first shock, but the surprises didn’t end with her son. At her postpartum checkup, she’d been diagnosed with the earliest stage of cervical cancer, a condition caused by a sexually transmitted infection called human papillomavirus, or HPV. Five years ago she’d been treated successfully without a hysterectomy, but the virus lived in her system and periodically reared its ugly head.