Girl, Sought (Ella Dark #24)

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Joseph Carpenter had many titles. Reverend. Your Grace. Property mogul. But the one that always made him smile - though pride was technically a sin - was Richest Man in Chesapeake .

Not that he advertised it. To his flock, he was just Father Joe, the kindly priest who gave short sermons and remembered everyone's name. The congregation never questioned why their humble servant of God drove a Mercedes S-Class, or how he afforded the three-story Victorian with a manicured lawn and copper gutters. Faith had a funny way of making people overlook the obvious.

The morning mass had gone well. Twenty-three attendees, not bad for a Tuesday. But now he was done for another six hours, where he'd come back and do it all again. Twenty years in the priesthood, and it never got any harder. If you could work a crowd, you had it made.

Joseph crossed the street from St. Michael's to his Victorian mansion and admired the topiary. The gardener had trimmed the topiary into perfect crosses, because subtlety died somewhere around the time Jesus got his own theme parks. December wind rattled dead leaves across the wraparound porch where the original builder's wife had supposedly hanged herself in 1892. Joseph had considered exorcising the property when he bought it, but ultimately decided a good ghost story added character.

The path home was short but sweet - just enough distance to shed his pastoral persona and remember who he really was.

Amazing how far he'd come from that cramped office in '82, when he'd bet everything on America's newfound love affair with recreational vehicles. While other investors chased semiconductor pipe dreams, Joseph had seen the future in Winnebagos. He’d bought controlling interest in a failing motor home company for sixteen cents on the dollar. Everyone said he was crazy. RVs were dinosaurs, they said. Gas prices would kill the industry. Nobody wanted to vacation in a rolling tin can.

But motor homes meant freedom, and freedom sold better than sex. His initial investment of $10,000 had mushroomed into millions as Baby Boomers discovered the joy of retirement on wheels. By '86, Joseph had an empire built on wheels. By '88, he owned the largest motorhome retailer on the eastern seaboard.

Joseph unlocked his front door as he remembered those heady days. The factories in Michigan and Texas. The dealerships that spread across the Sun Belt.

The real genius had been investing all that cash in commercial real estate when the market bottomed out in the early nineties. Now, half of Chesapeake's strip malls paid rent to companies that all led back to Joseph Carpenter. Three Marriott hotels, six apartment complexes in the historic district, that new medical center on Watson Boulevard that charged $30 just to park - all his. The Harbor View Shopping Center alone netted him six figures a month. The dollars piled up faster than he could count them.

But somewhere between the seventh and eighth figure in his net worth, Joseph had discovered that money couldn't fill the God-shaped hole in his soul.

He stepped into the hall and remembered the day everything changed. He’d been clearing out a defaulted storage unit - lot 23B, renter deceased, next of kin unknown. Just another tax write-off until Joseph had unwrapped those newspapers and found salvation sealed in bronze and silver.

Pre-Reformation craftsmanship, the appraiser had said. A reliquary, French, 14th century, its provenance documentation claiming it contained a splinter of the True Cross.

At first, he was about to throw it in the dumpster with the rest of the trash, but the piece spoke to him. Not in words – he wasn't that kind of crazy, not yet – but in the way it filled a void he hadn't known existed. Like finding a missing puzzle piece you didn't realize you were missing. The peace that passeth understanding, as the Good Book said.

Joseph would catch himself staring at the cross, feeling a peace he couldn't explain. He started reading about its history, its providence. Found himself hungry for more pieces like it. The collecting began slowly. A reliquary here, a medieval manuscript there. Each new acquisition scratched an itch he hadn't known he had.

His first major purchase had been a thirteenth-century prayer book. Then came the icon of Saint Nicholas, rescued from a monastery in Greece just before the communists burned it down. A chapel bell from Santiago de Compostela. The more he learned, the more he needed to own. The hobby transformed into obsession, then transcended into something approaching real faith. Now his collection rivaled the Vatican's private holdings – religious artifacts spanning two millennia of belief, doubt, and the thin line between miracles and madness.

And the crown jewel of Joseph’s collection had cost him almost two million dollars. A 15th-century crucifix containing what three separate carbon-dating labs had confirmed was human bone from 1st-century Jerusalem. The British Museum had offered eight figures. The Vatican had sent emissaries. Joseph had told them all the same thing – some things weren't for sale at any price.

Sometimes at night, he'd go down there just to look at them. To feel that otherworldly energy radiating from behind bulletproof glass. Those precious things had saved his soul, given him purpose beyond just accumulating wealth. They'd led him to take his vows, to serve God in ways his younger self could never have imagined.

In his foyer, a sudden heat engulfed him. The place was at least ten degrees warmer than it should be. Like lingering body warmth. His security system showed all clear – and it was state of the art, because faith in God didn't preclude faith in motion sensors and redundant alarm systems. He'd learned that lesson after the attempted theft in '19, when some methhead tried to access his vault. Poor bastard had triggered the nerve gas system. The police report listed it as natural causes because sometimes God worked in mysterious ways through private security contractors.

Then a thump from below. The basement.

The collection room.

Joseph ignored it. Probably his imagination. He'd never sired children, despite plenty of offers from some less-than-desirable gold diggers around here, so he'd always considered his collection his only baby. And like with children, that note of parental anxiety often conjured up the worst-case scenarios in his head, including phantom bumps.

But reality and paranoia were two different beasts, and Joseph didn’t have time to dwell on anything that wasn’t real. He had five hours to kill before he needed to head back to the church, and if he was lucky, he could fit dinner and a nap in that time.

So Joseph made his way to the kitchen with a prawn sandwich in mind.

He was just over the threshold when he heard the noise again.

Louder this time. A scrape of something against concrete.

‘Just the pipes,’ he said to his reflection in the kitchen window. But the words were empty, like prayers muttered by a man who'd stopped believing but couldn’t stop going through the motions.

Thump. Scrape. Thump.

‘What in God’s name?’

Probably rats again, Joseph reassured himself. Even the finest Victorian homes suffered occasional vermin, especially in the colder months. The exterminator had laid down enough poison last month to qualify as a war crime, but some of God's creatures proved more resilient than others.

He had to put his mind at ease.

Joseph marched back through the living room and grabbed the broom he kept by the cellar door. There was no need to call pest control when a good sweeping usually did the trick.

The broom felt ridiculous in his hands. It was a peasant's weapon in a house full of saints' bones and holy wood. But something instinct told Joseph not to go down into the basement unarmed.

The basement keypad glowed blue. Joseph punched in the code - his mother's birth year followed by his first RV dealership's zip code. A combination of the sacred and profane, just like everything else in his life. The lock chirped acceptance, and Joseph took the first step down.

It was a little suffocating down here. You couldn’t air out a basement, not without additional doors or windows. But with these kinds of relics, Joseph kept this place airtight. The only way in was through the security door.

Thirteen steps down. One for each apostle, counting Matthias after Judas took early retirement. Joseph had always appreciated that symmetry, even had the stairs restored to maintain that exact count. His heart seemed to be stuck in his throat. He swore off the pills years ago, but what he wouldn’t give for a Valium to take the edge off right now. He wished he still had the nerve gas system in place, but he’d been forced to take it out after the accident a few years ago. It was his little quid pro quo with the cops to keep him out of jail.

Get it together, man. It’s just a couple of rats.

Truthfully, Joseph hated the things. He didn’t dare to trap them and free them outside, and the thought of brooming them to death made his stomach twist. But still, death was easier, and Joseph always took the path of least resistance.

At the bottom of the stairs, Joseph's hand found the manual switch. Part of him wanted to retreat, to call the police or his security company, but pride - that deadliest of sins - kept his feet moving forward. This was his sanctuary, and he'd be damned if some creature was going to spike his anxiety.

Joseph breathed a sigh of relief when he saw everything still in its place. First the main aisle, then the side passages between display cases. Joseph's treasures emerged from shadow - the prayer book in its hermetically sealed case, the chapel bell suspended in its custom mount, the icon of Saint Nicholas watching with those roving eyes.

But something was wrong with the light. A shape interrupted its flow and forced a shadow where no shadow should be.

Joseph's reading chair. The leather wingback he'd imported from London.

The figure sat so still he almost missed it - just another shape in a room full of sacred geometry. But this was no mere artifact.

His first thought, absurd in its mundanity, was that someone had moved his reading chair. The leather wingback sat at the wrong angle, but that observation died as his eyes adjusted to what sat in it.

A man.

No - something more than a man.

Because the face wasn't a face at all. It was perfection rendered in whatever material could capture divinity - porcelain maybe, or some kind of resin. The eyes held infinite compassion. The lips curved in that serene smile known from a thousand paintings. A crown of thorns wrapped the brow.

Joseph was staring at the perfect visage of Jesus Christ.

‘Dear God,’ he whispered. The broom slipped from nerveless fingers. ‘Is this... Who are you?’

His mind fragmented. A divine visitation? A miracle? Had his collection of holy relics finally manifested something truly supernatural?

Cold sweat broke out across his forehead and trickled down his temples. His collar felt two sizes too small. Sweat stung his eyes, but he couldn't move to wipe it away. His muscles had locked up, frozen by some primitive part of his brain that recognized predator even when it wore a holy face.

And then the figure stood, and there was nothing divine in that movement. Nothing holy in how it flowed across the space between them. Those latex fingers reached for his throat with an intent that belonged in darker testaments than the ones Joseph preached from.

The world began to dim at the edges as his lungs fought for air. His collection - his precious pieces of the divine - blurred and doubled as darkness crept in. The mask caught the light as its wearer stood over him, and suddenly Joseph saw it for what it really was.

Not divine at all, but a mockery. A perversion of everything he'd spent his life collecting.

As consciousness fled, Joseph had time for one final thought: maybe this was God's judgment after all. For a man who'd spent his life collecting pieces of the divine, perhaps this was simply the collection coming full circle.