Stranger In The Night - Catherine Palmer Mills & Boon Steeple Hill

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the plight of a Third World nation. She and her college teammates went to help rebuild a primary school that had been hit too many times by mortar fire. They put up a few walls and hurried home.

      But that trip, more than a year before, had changed Liz’s life. The moment she graduated from college, she took a job with Refugee Hope, a resettlement agency in St. Louis. Her goal: to learn Swahili, enter a training program and move to Africa to work for the United Nations in refugee camps.

      On this stifling night, unable to sleep after long hours toting supplies to incoming families from Burma and Bosnia, Liz couldn’t sleep. Not unusual. Most days she was so exhausted she could hardly stand up. But after arriving home to her studio apartment, eating a quick bite of dinner and checking her schedule for the next day, she felt her second wind kick in. Wide-awake and unable to turn off her brain by 2:00 a.m., she made a cup of decaf tea and settled on her sofa with the scrapbook.

      Liz turned the page and studied the faces gazing back at her, impassive and worn. She had briefly considered decorating the page in the colors of the Congo flag and placing stickers of wild animals here and there. But why distract from the beauty of the Congolese people with their buttery chocolate skin and deep eyes?

      Yet what suffering the people had endured. Until that trip, Liz had never heard of such horrors. She understood now that Rwanda’s civil war had sent nearly a million refugees pouring over the border into Congolese camps. When those refugees began to build power to retake their homeland, they enlisted the help of men in Congo’s government. That brought resistance.

      War began in Congo in the fall of 1996, complete with genocide, looting and genital mutilation. In some areas, soldiers raped more than half the women. Almost fifty thousand children were kidnapped and forced into combat, slave labor, sexual servitude.

      Not long after a cease-fire was signed in 1999, insurgent groups led a second uprising. Yet another peace treaty was signed in 2003. By the time Liz arrived in Kinshasa, more than four million people had died. Some were killed in the conflict, but most perished from disease and starvation.

      Three million were homeless. Houses, hospitals and schools lay in rubble. Fields and food supplies were burned. People hovered on the brink of starvation.

      Under the umbrella organization of Refugee Hope, Liz cared for many of those woeful survivors who arrived in St. Louis. She wasn’t doing much to help, though. Her job was mostly desk work. Filing government forms.

      She wondered if anyone could prevent genocide. Probably not.

      Four sets of dark eyes stared back at Joshua. He had seen this before—a man, a woman, two children, a plea for help written on earnest faces. Their innocence could belie a body strapped with explosives. In battle, Joshua had learned not to trust any expression of virtue. But this wasn’t warfare—not the combat kind, anyway.

      With a tired smile, Sam stepped into the open doorway of Haven. “Hey, there,” he greeted them. “What can we do for you tonight?”

      The man gave an awkward little bow. Skin of polished ebony glowed in the streetlight. His gray shirt was too big, made of cotton, short-sleeved and wrinkled. Khaki trousers sagged at the ankles. Shoes, cracked patent leather with frayed laces, had parted at the seams to reveal threadbare socks.

      “Good evening, sir,” he said, clutching a battered suitcase. A faint British accent, Joshua noticed. “I am Stephen Rudi. If you please, may I present my wife, Mary. And here is my daughter, Charity, and my son, Virtue. We come from Paganda.”

      “What are you folks doing on the street at this time of night?” Sam asked. “This is a dangerous area.”

      “Yeah, and it’s after two in the morning.” Terell was peering at his Rolex, evidently a vestige of his once-lucrative basketball career. “Mr. Rudi, your children ought to be in bed.”

      “Indeed, sir. But we have had a most unfortunate day. Please, may I explain? You see, we had recently arrived in Atlanta when we received a letter from my wife’s brother. This man is our only family member to escape the recent unrest in Paganda. He invited us to join him here, where we could live with him and find better jobs. We traveled to St. Louis by bus, arriving this morning. But we searched all day, and we could not find him.”

      “Aha.” Terell stifled a yawn. “So, you’re from where? South Africa?”

      “Paganda, sir. It is in East Africa, near Lake Victoria.”

      Joshua could see that neither Sam nor Terell recognized the country. He didn’t recall much about it himself. Former British colony. Few natural resources. Tribal conflict—humanity’s constantly failing effort to eradicate enemies. Sunnis and Shiites. Kurds and Iraqis. Hindus and Muslims. Nazis and Jews. Spaniards and Aztecs. Settlers and Natives. Boers and British.

      Extermination never worked, but people forgot that. Again and again they attempted the wholesale slaughter of their foes. Genocide wouldn’t end until trumpets rang out in the eastern sky to announce the end of time.

      “You still got that letter?” Terell asked, focusing on the man’s wife. “Uh…what was the name?”

      “Mary.” Stephen Rudi spoke for her. He fished in his pocket and then unfolded a tattered sheet of notebook paper. Holding it out to Terell, he tapped a place near the end of the page. “This is the address, sir, but my wife’s brother is not to be found. Our search revealed nothing, not even the correct street.”

      While Terell and Sam studied the letter, Joshua appraised the Pagandan woman who stood beside her husband. Tiny and thin-boned, she wore large round spectacles that all but masked the distinguishing features of her face. She kept her eyes downcast and her fingers woven together, as if determined to draw no attention to herself. Joshua had seen this attempt at self-preservation in Afghani women and children. An effort to hide in plain sight.

      A scarf, elaborately knotted, covered her head. Her dress, threadbare pink gingham with eyelet lace at the neck, was mostly covered by a length of ethnic-patterned fabric. She had wrapped it in a sort of African sarong. The woman had the look of a frightened bird.

      Turning his assessment to the two children, Joshua saw exhaustion weighing on them. They gazed up at their father in a mixture of respect and concern. Charity’s hair was braided in messy cornrows. Her bright almond eyes glowed with intelligence. She had white teeth, a pug nose, round cheeks. She would do well in school, Joshua thought.

      The boy was a mirror image of his older sister—minus the cornrows and several teeth. How did so many five-year-olds manage to lose their two front teeth not long before Christmas? he wondered. The old song “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” wouldn’t be meaningful without a few toothless kids belting it out.

      “I don’t think that street exists,” Terell commented. He passed the letter to Sam. “You ever heard of this place?”

      Joshua eyed the document as his friend read it. Pulled from a college-ruled notebook, the page had been handled so much it was about to fall apart. Messy pencil marks were smudged, hard to read. A grease spot had blurred the signature. In the upper-right corner, a water ring muddied the blue lines. The letter was written in an African language, but the address at the end was clear enough.

      Sam returned the precious page to its owner. “You sure this is in St. Louis, Mr. Rudi?”

      “Indeed, sir.” Stephen glanced at his wife, suddenly hesitant. He spoke to her in their mother tongue for a moment. Head low, she uttered a couple of barely distinguishable words in response.

      Stephen nodded. “If you please, sir. My wife is quite certain her brother lives in St. Louis.”

      Terell and Sam eyed each other for a moment. Finally Sam spoke up. “I’m sorry, but Haven is not a homeless shelter. Our mission statement prohibits taking in strangers. We have a rule.”

      Joshua couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He nudged his friend’s elbow. “Sam, can I talk to you for a second?” They stepped back into the building. “Since when did you abide by rules?”

      “If

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