The Weather couldn't have been more fitting.
Rose Dwyer felt as if every drop of rain falling from the pitch black sky was pelting her creaky and somewhat overweight 51 year old body as she sat in the driver's seat of her rental car, staring pensively out into the deluge as she waited in a motel parking lot, well over a hundred miles from home.
For a trip that long, Rose came armed with surprisingly little. Dressed in her Sunday best as she stewed in the seat of her parked car, all she'd brought with her was a photo album, her Bible, and a mouthwash bottle full of homemade whiskey she'd snuck from her Husband's private stash.
Rose had asked herself several times why she'd went through the trouble of dressing up in one of her few dress and blouse sets for the long drive instead of her normal down home attire of jeans and sneakers. The voices in her head kept telling Rose what she was attempting amounted to a calling, a mission she'd been sent on by her Lord and Savior to bring one of his lost flock home.
For whatever reason Rose had also applied a healthy bit of make-up, mascara and lipstick, to the point it almost looked as if she was headed to Easter Services at the small church her Husband had been the pastor at the past 17 years instead of a non-descript interstate motel on the other side of the state.
"I'm gonna melt as soon as I step out into this stuff," Rose said to herself as the insides of the car windows began to fog from the radiating warmth of her body.
For all the primping and preparing she'd done however, Rose wanted nothing more than to sit there for another hour or so and the person she was there to meet never to materialize from the torrential downpour.
Rubbing her fingertips over the soft leather casing of the photo album she kept so many of her memories in, Rose flipped back and forth through the pictures under the dimness of the overhead lights in the parking lot. Looking occassionally over to the Bible sitting in the passenger seat beside her, Rose knew she should probably be reading through it instead, but somehow she wasn't sure she wanted to hear God's answers to the questions she'd been forced to ask herself over the past week.
So in that netherworld between trying to make some sense of why she'd driven halfway across the state, and working up the courage to confront the demons that drove her there, Rose unscrewed the cap from the Listerine bottle and took another swig of her Husband's moonshine.
"RRRRRGGGG... AAHHHHH," Rose cringed each time the bitter fire water washed down her throat, but the calming wave that followed was enough to keep her content as she sat in the car watching the watch on her wrist creep towards 10pm.
Pulling the scrapbook towards her chest, Rose nestled it between her ample bosom and the steering wheel and intently studied several of the photos. Childless due to a medical issue in her 20's, with her Husband's status of being the long time religious figurehead of several small towns in the mountains of West Virginia, many of the troubled and forsaken children in the area had at one time or another found a warm bed, a hot meal and a caring shoulder at the Dwyer household.
Rose found herself focusing on one certain boy in the pictures. Even though some of the photos were as many as 5 or 6 years old, Rose could close her eyes and remember the exact moment each of the pictures were snapped as if it happened that morning. It was just part of the nurturing nature of her DNA to remember the people who came into her life and the joy, and sadly sometimes also the sorrow, they brought.
Repeatedly rubbing the plastic sheeting covering the photos with her thumb, tears began to well in Rose's eyes as the rain continued to batter everything around her. She'd almost put herself into a state of hypnosis losing herself in the scrapbook when the faint sound of splashing footsteps in the parking lot snapped her back to reality.
Craning her neck towards the right, Rose could see a shadowy figure through the raindrops streaming down the windshield. Holding her breath as a sudden chill encased her spine, she watched as the man made a soaking wet beeline for the steps leading up to the second deck of the motel. Even though the man's head was down and covered with the hood of a sweatshirt, Rose could tell from his angular frame, and the definitive gait of his movements, who it was.
When he finally topped the steps and turned towards the numbered doors of the rooms, Rose could feel the grip she had on the scrapbook in her lap tighten. Her heart quickly sunk when she watched him slide his keycard into the same room he'd told her to meet him at the previous night. Rose knew right then, any hope that all this had been a mistake or simply all a bad dream wasn't to be.
Seeing the drenched man disappear briskly inside the room before slamming the door behind him, Rose muttered a psalm to herself as she laid the photo album back down in the passenger seat, knowing her moment of reckoning was now at hand.
_______________________________
For Rose, it had all started out innocently enough five days earlier. She'd been over at the house of one of the members of her Husband's congregation, basically house-sitting while the man was away on a business trip. Rose had gone over to Sam Puttman's place each day that week to feed the fish, check his mail and make sure everything was in order. With the increased opiate and meth abuse in the area, incidents of home invasion and burglary had skyrocketed, especially in a small town like Coburn where all the residents pretty much knew the comings and goings of everyone around them.
On her third day over to the Puttnam house, an idea sparked in Rose's head that she would quickly grow to regret.
The treasurer at her church, and an admitted creature of habit, Rose was begrudgingly allowing herself to be dragged into the digital age. Having walked past Sam's small home office each time she'd gone over to the house to tend to things, Rose glanced at his computer and remembered him telling her a few Sundays back about a neat spreadsheet program he had on his system that might help her with the bookwork for the church.
Knowing she had all afternoon free that day, Rose eventually worked up the courage to take a seat at Sam's desk chair before cozying up to the blank monitor.
"This feels weird... maybe you shouldn't," a sheepish voice in Rose's head warned, never one to feel comfortable touching someone else's property without explicit permission.
"Well he does trust you enough to look after his whole house while he's gone," another more forceful voice overrode the first, and within a few seconds she was cautiously reaching out to click the power button on.
Biting her lower lip, Rose felt her skin crawl as the machine instantly began to fire up.
"Good," she sighed with relief when the screen lit up and she saw the icon for the program Sam Puttnam had mentioned.
Pressing the mouse, Rose surfed though the spreadsheet setup for a couple of minutes, familiarizing herself with it, then made plans to bring her folder with the church's paperwork over to the house the next day and see if she could plug in some numbers.
"I'll definitely have to thank Sam for suggesting this," Rose said to herself before preparing to shut the computer down and go on about her business.