Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Whether I do or not doesn’t really matter. But maybe she’s telling the truth. At least as far as she knows it. Maybe Dean never meant to kill me that night. Maybe, if it was him, he was only trying to scare me off the case. Trying to get rid of me but not in a permanent way.
I watch as she fiddles with her coffee cup, turning it this way and that, before she says, “Everybody thinks I’m crazy.
They’ve always said I just want attention and I know they’ll say it again now, but, Miss Gore, I know I feel crazy sometimes but I’m not.
I know I’m not. I know what I saw. Everyone around here says they believe in God—in prayer and faith and angels—but I know that stuff is real. I’ve seen it.”
“You mean Ezra?”
“Before Brother Ezra. From the time I was a kid, I’ve had visions. Angels, usually. Most times, it’s when I’m falling asleep. I’ll hear someone say my name and I’ll wake up and can’t move and there they’ll be.”
“Angels?”
She nods.
“What do they look like?” I ask.
“Not like they do in movies,” she says with a laugh. “They’re like … shiny. So shiny it always hurts my eyes, but I always look anyway. They have voices like thunder and they’re naked, but their bodies don’t have—Well, you know. They’re like Barbies.”
“Okay. So, usually, you see angels. Is it always when you fall asleep?”
“No,” she says. “No, sometimes it’s when I’m waking up. That’s how it was with Brother Ezra.”
I take a drink of my coffee and wait, hoping she’ll elaborate on her own.
What she’s describing sounds exactly like sleep paralysis and hypnagogia, a more common phenomenon than most people think and not far off from what Katie probably experienced.
Still, even if it was a vision manifested by her subconscious, Crystal knew Dean and she knew Ezra.
So maybe her intuition was trying to tell her something. Maybe it’ll even be useful.
“You knew Brother Ezra,” I push, trying to get her started.
She nods and says, “Yes, I knew him because Dean worked for him. And I’d see Brother Ezra around Dean’s sometimes. Or at the Dairy. He never made me feel stupid or crazy. He always listened to me going on about angels and auras and all the stuff. The stuff nobody ever listens to me about.”
“He was kind to you,” I say.
“Yes,” she says with a soft smile. “And he was good to Dean. Dean grew up really rough. He started using when he was just a kid. And I mean a kid. He was only twelve. And it wasn’t just pot either.
Everybody smokes pot. Dean was using pills.
But then—after the last time Dean was in jail—Brother Ezra got ahold of him and helped straighten him out.
After that, Dean worked for him whenever Brother Ezra needed help with the tent revival stuff.
Dean was happy to do it. He said helping Ezra got him back on the right path. ”
“Crystal,” I ask. “I know you said Dean was clean, but is there any chance he was maybe moving drugs for someone else? Maybe with Brother Ezra?”
Her eyes widen in a mix of surprise and alarm.
“What?” she asks. “No way! No, Dean was—”
She looks down at her hands, searching, and then in a very small voice asks, “I thought … Was Dean dealing again? He promised…”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It looks like there was definitely something going on, at least with Dean and Ezra’s tent revival circuit, if not Ezra himself.”
She shakes her head but less, this time, in disbelief than in shock and disappointment. “I thought … I thought Dean was done with all that. He promised me…”
“Did you ever hear the name Joel Shepherd?” I ask. “Or Billy Shepherd?”
“I mean, I know the names. Everyone here knows about the King of Weed but…” Pausing mid-sentence, Crystal lets out a long, tired sigh, her cheeks paling.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
Looking down into her soup, she presses her lips together but then says, “My cousin called me the other night. Said he saw Dean driving out toward Willow’s Bend.”
“Willow’s Bend,” I say. “Where Joel Shepherd lives.”
“My cousin asked what the hell Dean would be doing all the way out there and I told him he must’ve been going out to fix someone’s vehicle. He did that sometimes. Made house calls like that. He was real good.”
Tears well up in her eyes again and she presses her fingertips on her eyelids as if that can stop the flow.
“When was this?” I ask.
“I was in the grocery store when he called,” she says, her fingers still mashed into her eyes. “So, it must’ve been Thursday. I always do the shopping on Thursdays.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, as she sniffles and the tears slip past her fingers.
“I wonder if that’s why Brother Ezra came to me,” she says, wiping her nose. “Maybe he wanted to be sure I was there tomorrow. In case he has a message from Dean.”
“Hmmm,” I say, thinking that doesn’t sound any more bonkers than any other reason Ezra might miraculously appear on a mountaintop.
“Everyone always knew how powerful his faith was,” Crystal says. “But I could see it because … I can see auras. Most people have a sort of dim glow, but Brother Ezra’s was more like the angels in my visions.”
“Shiny?” I ask.
Her mouth forms a small, careful smile and she says, “Almost. His was shiny the way light on the water is shiny. The way it’s so bright you can’t hardly look. But you want to. Even though it hurts, you still want to.”
I watch as a subtle blush creeps up her neck and onto her ears.
“Did you have feelings for him?” I ask.
The blush deepens, but she shakes her head.
“I’d never have admitted it before he died, but I always sort of … Well, he was so good-looking and so kind. But, no, nothing ever happened.”
I give her a searching look, but she blinks at me, and then laughs as she says, “I’d never cheat on Dean. Not after everything we’d been through together.”
But the way her blush spreads onto her temples, the way she looks away from me, I feel like there’s more to it.
“Ezra never … he never tried anything with you?”
She shakes her head, quickly, side to side.
I open my mouth to ask another question, press harder, but instead she just starts talking at a fast clip as if she’s been holding it all in and needs to let it out.
“When I saw him today, well, it just overwhelmed me, I guess. I got home from my shift at the Dairy and I was dead tired. With Dean’s death and—I just haven’t been sleeping well. I took some melatonin and turned on my wave sounds and closed all the curtains and went to bed.”
“But you didn’t stay asleep?”