Covenant by Dean Crawford Read Free Book Online Page A

countries sharing their unwanted opinions on whatever crisis they were heading to document. Rachel’s silence had been initially a great relief. Now, he suspected that there was something more to it, emphasized by the empty seat between them.
    “We’re descending,” he said in a vague attempt to provoke conversation.
    “So it would seem.”
    He tried again.
    “You ever been to the Middle East before?”
    “Only when family members go missing.”
    “Is that some kind of joke?” Ethan snapped.
    Rachel’s eyes swiveled to peer sideways at him. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood for talking right now.”
    “Is there some kind of problem here, with me?”
    “Should there be?”
    “You’ve barely spoken since we met, and if this trip is going to achieve anything at all, I need your help.” Ethan leaned across the empty seat between them. “If we can’t work together and start uncovering what happened to Lucy, you know what will happen?”
    “What will happen?”
    “Nothing at all.”
    Rachel stared ahead for a few moments before replying. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of running around a foreign country with someone I don’t know anything about and who clearly has problems of his own.”
    “You think I want to be cooped up on an airliner bound for the Middle East?” Ethan challenged. “I was perfectly happy where I was.”
    “Is that so?” Rachel said. “You see, that’s my point. Even Doug admitted to me that you’re troubled, and whether that’s because of whatever happened to you out here or not is irrelevant. If you’re unable to help yourself, then what use are you to me or to Lucy?”
    Ethan struggled to erect a harbor of dignity around his shame.
    “Do you think Doug would have asked me here if he thought that?”
    “By his own admission, there was nobody else he could ask.”
    Ethan gave up and stared out of the window. “Glad I could help.”
    For a long time Rachel sat staring into space, but eventually she glanced across at him.
    “Look, I appreciate you being here.”
    “Thanks,” Ethan said quietly. “As you’ve pointed out neither of us has much of a choice, so why don’t we just get on with it?”
    Rachel stared at him for a long moment with an unconvinced expression. “Fine.”
    “I need you to tell me everything you can about your daughter and what she was up to out here.”
    “Lucy was born in 1981, but her father Robert died when she was fourteen.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “So were we,” Rachel said, her voice softening. “He died before his time. I’ve questioned a thousand times what would make God take someone from us, but I’ve never found an answer.”
    “You’re Catholic,” Ethan guessed.
    “I’m a theologian. You?”
    Ethan held up his hands. “I’m on the fence, doesn’t interest me much.”
    Rachel looked away, but he saw a ghost of a smile touch her lips. “You’d have liked Robert then. He was a humanist.”
    Ethan blinked.
    “A humanist, a theologian, and a scientist? Family dinners must have literally been a riot.”
    Rachel smiled again and Ethan watched as her green eyes blossomed briefly with light, but the moment vanished as quickly as it had come and the smile melted away.
    “How on earth did you and Robert meet?”
    “He was a friend of a friend. We met at a barbeque, and he bet me ten bucks that I couldn’t convert him from his humanism over a dinner date.”
    “Nice move,” Ethan said.
    “It was.”
    Rachel’s features were no longer strained, and though she continued to stare straight ahead Ethan could see that her mind was wandering among the phantasms of the past. She barely noticed the mechanical grind of the aircraft’s undercarriage coming down somewhere beneath them. Ethan glanced briefly out of the window at the fields and palm groves sweeping past beneath the Boeing’s flexing wing tips.
    “How did Lucy end up in Israel?”
    “She had been doing field research in Kenya’s Great Rift