When She Flew by Jennie Shortridge

Author:Jennie Shortridge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18

Three years previously, Jess had responded to a call to assist other officers during an INS raid at Pacific Produce Wholesalers. Undocumented workers streamed from the building when they got wind of the raid, still wearing latex gloves and hairnets, a good many of them escaping into north Columbia’s industrial warehouse catacombs. Like most of the other officers, Jess didn’t try too hard to find them. The city—the entire state of Oregon—had a policy of looking the other way when it came to these workers. It was only the feds who wanted them rounded up and deported, and Oregonians didn’t much care for feds.

Jess knew that if not for a little good luck, her mother’s grandfather might not have made it here from Chihuahua, might not have found work at the lumber mill in Columbia and met her great-grandmother and started a family.

A small group of fleeing produce workers found their way that day to the City of Refuge Church, a nondenominational house of worship in Columbia’s oldest African-American community. The church welcomed all, delivered meals to AIDS patients, assisted the homeless and the poor. They granted the workers sanctuary and, over time, helped them immigrate legally. The feds backed off in disgust. The citizens of Columbia rejoiced, most of them anyway. Those who didn’t wrote their editorials and huffed and puffed for a while, then moved on to taxation issues the next election year.

That Ray and Lindy attended the City of Refuge Church made a strange kind of sense to Jess. They were refugees, more so now than they had been before the Columbia Police had found them. She stared resolutely into the dark as she drove.

At MLK, Jess turned north. After a few blocks, Lindy’s excitement became palpable in the car; she fairly glowed with it, wriggling and chattering in her seat.

A block away, Lindy exclaimed, “There it is, there it is!” She pointed out the tall spire, dark and stately against the city-light glow of sky. “Wait till you meet Reverend Rosetta!”

“Honey, it’s two something in the morning,” Jess said. “It’s probably all locked up for the night, and even if we can get in, the reverend will surely be home in bed.” She didn’t mention Ray. Even if he planned on meeting her eventually, Jess doubted he could have made it there yet. What would she do with the girl? “Just don’t—”

Get your hopes up, she was going to say, but clearly Lindy’s hopes were well beyond up. Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a good idea. If the doors were locked, what then?

At the church, Jess eased the car into the parking lot and came to a stop beneath a light pole, the safety of illumination not all that comforting in a neighborhood known for drug activity and drive-by shootings.

Before she’d even switched off the ignition, Lindy was out of the car with her backpack, sprinting across the lot.

Jess pushed her reluctant body out of the driver’s seat, clutching her sore shoulder. “Lindy,” she called,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.