Walls

By Kelly Anne Setzer

Anne-Marie Eldridge couldn’t wait to leave her small Georgia town to travel the world, taking pictures of walls as she went. The ruins of the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, pyramid walls in Egypt---they were all a part of her collection. At her last stop, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, she is kidnapped, tortured, raped, and held hostage for months, yet never loses her faith and trust in God.
Gage Steele realized his dream of becoming a world famous rock star, but after personal tragedy, he returns to his island home in South Carolina to raise his two children and pursue a new career in Christian radio.
Upon her return to Georgia, Anne-Marie sees Gage at her parents’ home and is instantly intrigued. The boy next door was nothing like the goofy guy she remembered from High School. She’s amazed at his exceptional parenting skills and his desire to know his Savior better. But will she be able to let the long-haired, former rock and roll star into her heart?
Will circumstances and personal hardships bring these two together, or tear them apart?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kelly Anne Setzer
• Release date: Apr 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311055071

Kelly Anne Setzer

Kelly Anne Setzer lives just south of Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and little girl. She loves to travel in her spare time and enjoys spending time outdoors with her family.

Book preview

WALLS

By

Kelly Anne Setzer

Copyright 2015 by Kelly Anne Setzer

All rights reserved

Cover art and design by Betibup33 Design

([e-mail])

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this story are either fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

DEDICATION

For my daughter, Grace

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Epilogue

About the Author

More by Kelly Anne Setzer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For my husband, Michael. Your love and support means the world to me.  You've made all of my dreams come true.

To my best friend and No. 1 fan, Angela Hedtke. Thanks for being there for me and for encouraging me to write just one more page.

To my mentor, Stoney M. Setzer. You're one of my favorite authors, and I'm proud to call you family.

CHAPTER ONE

Sometimes things happen for a reason. That’s what she was just saying a few weeks before, when Jamie got the dreaded break-up text from his long-time girlfriend. You just have to thank the good Lord that He’s moving in your life and that He knows what’s best for you. Jamie could see her now, sitting on the old rock wall outside of the city, cleaning her camera lens and squinting in the sun. Besides, she was too tall for you anyway. Her smile was so infectious.

Anne-Marie was an extraordinary female, and if she had been a little older, he might have made a move to date her. He was only thirteen years her senior, but there was just something there that prevented him from pursuing the matter. Maybe it was the fact that she was so beautiful and young and full of life. Maybe he just felt older than his forty years.

Funny how she could make a person feel young again with her Don’t let a moment or a memory pass you by spirit and just go with it attitude. He’d never met anyone like her. She could have stayed home, finished college, found a good suit to marry and put out a whole mess of beautiful children. Instead, she left home at twenty-one to pursue a career as a photojournalist; throwing caution to the wind and heading to parts unknown. Parts like this.

This God-awful place, full of chaos, hatred and beauty. Israel. God’s promised land she’d called it with a smile on her face. She’d said many times how this place felt more like home to her than any other place she’d ever been. Jesus walked here, she’d say. Or, Just look at the history. Think of the stories this place could tell.

I’m the story-teller here, he’d said.

She just laughed and said, Well get to it, Shakespeare. She’d taken thousands of photographs of things most people would find boring or un-photographable. Simple things like a five-foot stretch of crumbling wall with an old black dog lying against it.

Even to his trained eye, that was not picture worthy. It was just a wall and a tired old dog that had probably never had a bath a day in his life. Yet, she’d stopped and just stared at the dog like he was a long lost friend, backed up a few feet, trained her camera on him and snapped a single photo. After the photo was printed and hanging up in her hotel room, he’d been impressed with the simple beauty of the photo.

What amazed him most was the expression on the dog’s face. Had she seen that before she took the photo? The dog looked so at peace with the world. He was skinny, dirty and probably didn’t know where his next meal would come from, yet he seemed as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

One day at a time. That’s what she’d named the photo.

He was waking up with that photo in his face every morning since the day after Anne-Marie had been assaulted. All of her personal belongings had been moved to his hotel room down the hall since Anne-Marie had only paid for her room through the end of the week. Plus, he didn’t want to take a chance on having her thousands of dollars of camera equipment getting stolen in this heathen place.

Looking at her now, laying in this hospital bed, she looked so ethereal with her light brown locks resting so perfectly on her pillow. Picture perfect, if she wouldn’t kill him for capturing her in such a vulnerable state. Besides, she would never see herself as ethereal or pretty in any way. How she didn’t see her own beauty was beyond him. That was the first thing most people noticed about her.

She wasn’t super model beautiful or anything, just beautiful in the plain sense of the word. Like a rainbow in a cloudy sky, he thought. She would laugh at that comparison. She was always laughing at his choice of words or metaphors. She had once told him that he should be on Broadway doing Shakespeare. The funny thing was, she’d nailed it right on the head. He had envisioned himself doing that years before. He’d even written a play once, but never showed it to anyone.

Writing documentaries was safe, easy. Facts were facts. Period. This many years ago, This happened and caused This and That, which in turn led to….and so on and so forth. Yep. He could most certainly write that. It was safe and most importantly, it paid the bills.

Safe. Why did he always play it safe? Why couldn’t he take a cue from Anne-Marie and just play it un-safe every now and then, he wondered.

A soft sigh from Anne-Marie lying in her hospital bed dragged him out of his thoughts. She was here because she did not play it safe enough. The poor girl. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. No woman did. Rape was just about the most disgusting thing one person could do to another, he thought. It made his blood boil to think about those men taking advantage of his Anne-Marie. His Anne. Yeah, right.

Anne-Marie belonged to no man. Before the rape she had only been in two relationships. Both were when she was still living in Georgia. Jared had been the high school jock type. She was his trophy girlfriend.

Their relationship lasted all of junior and senior year and one week of summer. Anne-Marie had been devastated when he dumped her to focus on his college aspirations. Stewart was the college boyfriend, and the one that almost killed them both when he flipped his sports car after a few too many drinks. Anne-Marie still had the scar on her back from that near death experience. Stewart’s parents forced him to move back home after the accident. He didn’t even say goodbye to Anne-Marie; just called her when he got back to South Carolina and told her they were over.

After that, she spent another semester in college and dropped out. She felt like she’d learned enough about art; time to make some of her own. So, she withdrew some of her inheritance money and took off to Rome first, then Cairo, China, Berlin, London, and finally to Jerusalem. She lived off of her grandmother’s inheritance and money she made from her freelance photography.

Recently, she’d been receiving a lot of notoriety for her work. Her resume now included having photos published in Time magazine and National Geographic. She also had a huge portfolio of photos that she paid to have published just for her. That book was one of her most prized possessions. She called it Walls.

Some copies had sold on the Internet, but not enough to pay the bills, as one would say. A couple of her photos had been sold to printing companies for reproduction, making Anne-Marie’s bank account a little stouter.

She had the strangest fascination with walls. She’d photographed more walls than anyone he’d ever met in his life. It started with the rock wall around her mother’s garden. Some of her early photos were of the wild flowers and ivy growing next to and on the little wall. Then, as the landscape went uphill towards the back of the house she had grown up in, the wall got taller; so tall that in a self-portrait Anne-Marie did of herself in middle school, the wall was almost over her head.

She looked so unsure of herself in that picture, leaning against that wall. Her long brown hair pulled around to one side and tied with a simple white ribbon. She was obviously testing the waters, so to speak, to see if she was worthy of photographing.

The book then shows all of the pyramids and walls she photographed in Egypt, with the sun shining bright against the golden walls. Again, there’s one photo of Anne, squatting in front of a wall; her delicate hand on a small statue of a lion. She is more sun-tanned in this picture, and her hair is sun-kissed as well. This was Jamie’s favorite picture of her, not because she almost had a smile on her face, but because she looked like a tourist on vacation. She had a content look on her face. Here she was, twenty-two years old and didn’t have a care in the world.

After Egypt, it was off to the Great Wall of China where most of the photos were taken from great distances and included a lot of beautiful landscapes. Again though, there was the one lone picture of Anne-Marie, leaning against the wall with one knee on the wall and her hands behind her back. This picture had been taken from at least twenty-five feet away. Beautiful picture, but he always preferred close-ups of her. It was a shame to hide a face like hers.

Berlin was next. Anne-Marie only stayed in Berlin for two weeks but managed to capture more pictures there than anywhere else. The strange thing was, most of her Berlin pictures were not of the remnants of the wall but of the little German children. The children who lived, played and passed by the gravesite of the wall daily and didn’t even care why it had been placed there to begin with.

It was there that she discovered a love of kids. She took pictures of them playing kick-ball by the wall, sitting on the rubble, climbing the wall; every possible scenario with children and that dang wall was covered.

Her one photo of herself in Berlin was dark and oppressing though. It showed her squatting by a small mound of teddy bears and flowers; obviously it was a memorial to a child who had passed. In the picture, Anne-Marie was holding a small, sad-looking rag doll that had seen better days. The doll looked homemade; maybe fifteen years old, with a blue and gray striped dress and yellow yarn hair.

The London photos were more the most colorful photos due to the fact that most of those walls were in English gardens and were covered in all sorts of beautiful ivy and climbing flowers of various colors and varieties. He figured this was probably the look Anne’s mom was going for in her little back yard flower garden. Anne-Marie’s self-portrait in London was prim and proper. She was sitting on a short, ivy covered wall with a smart suit on and her legs crossed. Her hands were resting on her thigh. She looked very regal and almost like royalty with her brown chignon atop her head.

Jamie almost didn’t let himself think about Jerusalem. In fact, he quickly re-directed his thoughts. He was ready to get the hell out of Israel. He was pretty sure he had enough information for his story anyway, and why did every piece he wrote have to be the best work anyway? Besides, he’d barely left her hospital room and it wasn’t like he was making money just sitting around.

And then there was Anne-Marie, bruised, broken and beaten. In a medically induced coma so that her broken neck and cracked skull could heal. The bruises were not visible anymore, but he was beginning to wonder if she’d ever look the same. The stitches in her brow were out now, but there was still a red scar there. The busted lip was healed and her ear lobe had been sewn back on. That still looked rough and would most definitely scar. Plastic surgeons just aren’t on call everywhere in the world.

Odd to think that Anne would finally look the way she’d always felt like she looked. Imperfect.

CHAPTER TWO

Laughter. Who was laughing? Oh, she thought. Him again. The leader of this mangy pack of dogs that had been torturing her for weeks? Months? Who knew anymore?

At one point Anne-Marie was sure she was dead. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but if she was dead, where was God? Why wasn’t she in heaven? Surely heaven didn’t smell like sweat and urine. Then there was that metallic smell of blood.

The pain in her head brought her back to reality in no time though. No, she wasn’t dead. Not yet anyway.

#

Wake up! Lady, wake up! The voice was one she’d heard countless times, one of her captors.

She slowly opened the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut and saw his face again. The lesser of the evils she’d been held captive by for so long. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and his hollowed cheeks and bruises told her that he was nowhere near the top of the totem pole in the group.

Still, he’d been the first one to force himself on her; he’d done so multiple times since then. He was by no means the most violent of the captors though, and he’d never taunted her or beaten her. If there was a lesser of the evils, then he was it.

He saw her one eye opened slightly and hoped she was aware enough to hear him and understand. Lady, you go tomorrow. You understand me, lady?

Anne-Marie wanted to go back to sleep, but this boy would not stop talking to her. She closed her eye, hoping he would go away and let her fade away again.

The fingers digging into her shoulder a moment later got her attention. Oww.

You listen. Eat now. Go tomorrow to safe place. Eat. He shoved some bread and a piece of dried meat into her hands. Eat.

She tried to lick her lips but there was no moisture to wet them with. She heard the boy say something, but the words were foreign to her. He ran off and returned a minute later with a water bottle.

She felt him lift her head and the pain of it almost caused her to pass out again, but once the water touched her lips she lapped at it like a dog. It felt so good in her mouth that she wanted to hold it in there and swish it around, but she wasn’t sure how long he was going to let her drink, so she did her best to get as much down as she could before he stopped pouring.

After the boy pulled the can back and laid her head down, she looked at him again and mouthed the words thank you to him.

He looked down at her desperately and then around at his surroundings again. No time. Tomorrow you go. Must eat. He placed his hand over one of hers. She’d forgotten that she was holding the hard bread and meat. Eat. He nodded at her.

She blinked her good eye at him two times to let him know she understood, and watched as he closed the lid of her box and re-secured the lock, leaving her in almost complete darkness.

Anne-Marie felt a tear leave the good eye and for the first time in weeks she prayed for something other than a merciful death. She prayed that the boy had not been a dream. She prayed that whatever he was planning for tomorrow would be successful and that she might actually get to go home.

#

Many hours had passed before she got all of the food down. Her stomach was digesting angrily, but she was thankful that she was feeling something other than the pain in her head and neck. She knew she’d gotten some sleep in between the eating, but the wooden box she was in was not going to give any clues as to how long it had been since the boy’s visit.

She’d been reciting Bible verses in her head for hours and despite her many prayers, she was still nervous. Did she dare hope for escape? If the boy did come back, could he carry her out of there? She was sure she would not be able to walk and the boy didn’t look strong enough to even carry her to the door. Maybe he was stronger than he looked though.

The last time Abhaj had pulled her from the box and forced himself on her, she’d been unable to even get on her feet at all, and she’d long ago been too weak to put up any sort of resistance against him or the others.

Just as the doubt was overtaking her again, she heard the creaking of the old door to her right, and a bit of light pierced through one of her air holes. She held her breath. What a cruel joke it would be if the boy had been playing a joke on her and the footsteps she heard outside of her box belonged to Abhaj. "Please, please, please. Lord, help me. Father God, please help me."

The metal clanked and she knew the lock was being opened. The lid didn’t open, but she heard muffled voices and feet scraping gently over the wooden floor. Her heart was racing. "He brought help!"

She felt the bottom of the box lift up a couple of inches and then gently laid back down. She heard more muffled talking and then she felt the whole box being lifted up and carried. Someone closed the door softly and she felt the box tilt downward under her head as they descended some stairs. Another door opened and she heard some more muffled voices and as the box was not so gently dropped onto a metal surface, she heard an engine cranking.

The box was being bounced around wildly, but she tried not to worry about being tossed around or falling off what was surely a truck bed. There were no more voices, but she did not feel alone. She didn’t know how she knew he was with her, but the assurance was there all the same. He would see her through this, one way or another. The boy would see her to safety.

#

Doctor Taimoor Ahsan was exhausted as he pulled into his driveway. The twelve-hour shifts were not as easy when you had to do them for six days straight. He pulled the car up as close as he could get to the garage door and got out of the car to open it.

He saw the box before he’d even opened the door half way. He paused and looked around him before he finished opening the door. Leaving his car running, he surveyed the wooden box and thought about calling for the police to come investigate before opening it. He couldn’t think of any reason for someone to place a bomb in his garage, and surely if there was someone angry enough to bomb him, they’d put it in a smaller box.

Upon further inspection, he noticed several pea-sized holes in either end, but looking in, he couldn’t see anything but blackness. Finally, returning back to the front side of the box, he lifted the rusty metal latch and raised the wooden lid up about an inch. The thing didn’t explode, which he appreciated. Unfortunately, it didn’t give him anymore clue as to what was inside either.

Leaning down, he peeked in and