Chapter 11
1
Holly is in and out of sleep, and what she gets isn’t particularly restful. Their Holiday Inn is in the Coral Ridge Mall, which is fairly quiet after ten PM, the only party at the far end and by midnight it was winding down, but the motel is between I-80 and the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, and the long-haul trucks—eastbound, westbound—drone 24/7. That sound usually soothes her, but not tonight. She’d specified three rooms, Kate’s on one side of her and Corrie on the other. She keeps waiting for the sound of a door breaking in or one of their anti-rape alarms blasting off. She knows she’ll be having thin sleep for the next week. Longer, if she continues with the tour. Catching the woman who threw the bleach and delivered the anthrax would help, but even then…
Holly keeps thinking of the booing section last night, those men and women wearing blue shirts saying LIFE AT CONCEPTION. How righteously angry they looked. These are the people who protest at abortion clinics. Sometimes they throw bags of animal blood at the women and girls who come to have the procedure. And in several cases they have attacked doctors and nurses. At least one doctor Holly knows of, David Gunn, was shot and killed. She finally drifts off into a deeper sleep and dreams of her mother.
The idea that you can protect those women is ridiculous , Charlotte Gibney says in this dream. You couldn’t even remember your library book when you got off the bus .
While she’s brushing her teeth at quarter past six, her phone rings. It’s Jerome, asking if he can treat John Ackerly to breakfast on the company dime. “I want to ask him something about that AA guy. The one he found dead? I tried to call you yesterday, but your phone was off.”
Holly sighs. “This job doesn’t allow for outside distractions. What do you want to ask him? Keeping in mind it’s police business, not ours.”
“It’s about the appointment book. Never mind, I’ll go ahead and pay for breakfast. We’re talking twenty bucks, thirty tops.”
With the success of your book, you could certainly afford it , Holly thinks. “No, put it on the Finders Keepers card. Just tell me if there’s anything to tell.”
“I will. It’s probably nothing.”
“Then why did you call? Not just to ask if the company would buy breakfast for a possible source. I don’t believe that for a second.”
“I’ll tell you if anything comes of it. Even if it doesn’t. How’s it going out there in flyover country?”
She thinks about pushing Jerome for what’s on his mind—he’d tell her, she thinks it’s why he called—then decides not to. “It’s all A-OK so far, but I’m a little on edge. The woman stalking Kate means business.” She fills Jerome in, finishing with the forced door and the bloody mess poured over Kate’s luggage.
“Has she thought about packing it in?”
“She won’t. She’s… dedicated.”
“Do you mean stubborn?” Jerome suggests.
A moment of silence from Iowa City. Then Holly says, “Both.”
“I’m a little surprised her publisher didn’t pull the plug. Those people tend to be timid.” He’s thinking of the run-up to the publication of his own book, and how the editor brought a sensitivity reader onboard to go over his manuscript. She suggested a few minor changes. Which Jerome made, guessing there would have been more if he were white.
“The publisher’s not in charge,” Holly says. “Kate’s doing this tour on her own. It’s politics more than publicity for her new book. She does have an assistant that’s coordinating with bookstores along the way. Her name is Corrie Anderson. I like her. She’s very capable. Which is good because Kate can be demanding.”
“The assistant’s the one who got the bleach shower? And the card with the anthrax in it?”
“Yes.”
“But she’s also continuing?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”
“Yes.”
“Sorry you took the job?”
“It’s stressful, but I look at it as a growth opportunity.”
“Take care of them, Hollyberry. And yourself.”
“That’s the plan. And don’t call me that.”
“Just kind of slipped out.” She hears a grin in his voice.
“I call poop on that. Talk to John by all means and give him my best.”
“I will.”
“Now go on and tell me what’s on your mind. I know you want to.”
He thinks about it, then says, “Later, Gator.” And ends the call.
Holly gets dressed, folds her pajamas neatly into her suitcase, and goes to the door to look at a whole lot of Iowa. It’s at times like this, early in the morning on a beautiful spring day, that she really wants a cigarette.
Her phone rings. It’s Corrie, asking her if she’s ready to go to Davenport.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Holly says.
2
Chris wakes from a terrible nightmare. In it he’s back in the third row of the Macbride. The woman onstage—magnetic, beautiful, and dangerous—is asking all the men in the audience to put their hands up. Pretend I’m the teacher you crushed on in the sixth grade , she tells them, and for Chris that was Miss Yarborough. He was homeschooled, of course; all the kids from Real Christ Holy were homeschooled (the public schools being tools of the deep state), but Miss Yarborough came to give lessons in math and geography. Golden hair, blue eyes, long smooth legs.
In the dream, McKay tells those men who’ve had an abortion to keep their hands up. There’s laughter at this absurd idea and all the men put their hands down. All but Chris. His hand won’t come down. It’s frozen, sticking straight up. Straight up and thousands of people are looking at him. Someone shouts, Where’s your sister? Someone else murmurs, Our secret. He knows that voice. He turns, hand still upraised and frozen, and sees Mama as she was near the end, so pale and thin. She shouts for everyone in the Macbride to hear: You are you and she is she!
That’s when he pulls himself out of the dream and finds himself sprawled on the filthy squashed-flat rug of his motel room. The sheet and the threadbare blanket are tangled around him, and he can barely unfist his fingers enough to let them go.
You are you and she is she .
He gets up, staggers into the bathroom, and splashes cold water on his face. He thinks that makes it better, fixes it, but then his stomach clenches and he doesn’t even have time to make a half-turn to the toilet, just vomits last night’s Taco Bell steak quesadilla into the basin.
Our secret .
For awhile it was.
He stands where he is, sure he’s going to retch a second time, but his diaphragm loosens. He runs water into the basin, then mops up the chunky residue with a washcloth, which he throws into the tub— splat .
At times like this, in the aftermath of his frequent nightmares, he’s both . He thinks of the hand hanging down from the upper bunk and he’s both. Never died, never died usually works, but after the nightmares, in the socket of the night, such words have no power. At times like this he can’t deny the fact that Christine will forever be seven, hair growing brittle in her narrow underground home, and the best he can do is to inhabit his sister’s ghost.
He can hear Daddy talking to Mama. I forbid it. Would you be Eve? Would you listen to the serpent instead of your husband and eat from the Tree of Knowledge?
That day his mother was where she almost never went, in Daddy’s barn. Where he invented the things that had made them… well, not rich, not when they gave most of the money from Daddy’s patents to the church, but well-to-do. Never brag , their mother had told the twins. All we have comes from God. Your father is just a conduit. That means he just passes it along .
Chris was at the side of the barn, standing in knee-high weeds, grasshoppers leaping around his shins, listening through a crack between two boards. A crack Chrissy had found.
Mama rarely spoke back to Daddy, but that day, after the funeral hack had come and gone, she did. You’re hiding out here, Harold. Can you call yourself a scientist and not want to know what killed your daughter?
I’m not a scientist. I deny science. I’m an inventor ! They will cut her up, you stupid woman!
Chris had never heard his father call his mother stupid. Had never even heard him raise his voice to her.
I DON’T CARE!
Screaming! His mother, screaming!
I DON’T CARE! I HAVE TO KNOW!
She got her way. Contrary to the church’s teachings, there was an autopsy on Christine Evangeline Stewart. And it turned out to be something called Brugada Syndrome. His seven-year-old sister had died of a heart attack.
You had to know , Daddy told her later. You had to know, didn’t you? And now you know the boy could have it as well, because it’s hereditary. There’s your knowledge, woman. Your useless and pointless knowledge .
That time they were in the house, but Chris had become quite the accomplished eavesdropper. He didn’t understand hereditary , so he looked it up in the big Webster’s in the lesson room. He understood that what had killed Chrissy could kill him, as well. Of course it could, it made perfect sense, weren’t they twins? Chrissy with her father’s dark hair, Chris with his mother’s blond hair, faces not identical but similar enough so that anyone who saw them knew they were brother and sister. They loved Mama, they loved Daddy, they loved Pastor Jim and Deacon Andy, they loved God and Jesus. But most of all they loved each other and lived in the secret world of Two.
Brugada Syndrome.
Hereditary .
But if Chrissy were alive, if there had been no hand dangling down from the upper bunk in a beam of dusty morning sunlight, then he could stop worrying that some night his own heart might stop. If Chrissy were still alive, his mother’s pain would be gone. His pain would be gone as well. The emptiness. The darkness where a monster lurked with its claws outstretched, a monster named brUGADA. Waiting to pounce.
His father was consoled by the church. It was Chris who consoled his mother. There was no horror the first time he went to Mama wearing one of Chrissy’s dresses. No disgust. She simply opened her arms to him.
“I’ll be your little girl,” he said against her bosom. “I’ll be your little boy, too. I can be both.”
“Our secret,” she said, stroking his hair, as fine as Chrissy’s had been. “Our secret.”
They kept her alive. When Daddy found out and called him a transvestite, Chris had no idea what that meant until he once again went to the Webster’s. Then he had to laugh. He was no such thing, because he was Chrissy. Not all the time, but when he was, she was.
They had been close; they were close again.
“Leave him alone, Harold.” Not screaming that time, just firm. It was a week after Daddy found out. Harold had taken counseling with the church elders. “All of you, leave him alone. And leave her alone.”
“Woman,” Harold Stewart said, “you’re crazy.”
“He loves her,” she said (Chris once more listening at the crack in the wall of the Invention Barn). “And I love them both. I’ve given you everything, Harold. I gave up my life for your life and your church. You will not take my daughter away from me, nor his sister from Christopher.”
“ He’s crazy!”
“No more crazy than you are, using the tools of science and calling it the will of God.”
“Do you dispute my understanding?” A warning rumble in his voice, like far-off thunder.
“No, Harold. I never have. I’m only saying that, like him, you have two ways of thinking. No… two ways of being . Chris is the same.” A pause. “And she is.”
“Will you at least agree to counseling?”
“Yes. If it stays in the church.”
So Chris and Chrissy started going to Andy Fallowes. Andy hadn’t laughed. He tried to understand. The twins would always love him for that.
Does God make mistakes? Deacon Andy asked.
No, course not .
And do you still have male urges, Christopher? Eyes averted, Deacon Andy pointed vaguely in the direction of Chris’s crotch.
Thinking of Deanna Lane, his spelling and math partner—he said he did, at least when he was Chris. And with Deanna, and later with Miss Yarborough, he was always Chris; he was only Chrissy with his mother, because the one time his father had seen him in a dress and in the wig his mother had bought for him… that one time was enough.
Our secret, our secret .
“When you are Christine, it comforts your mother, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And it comforts you .”
“Yes.”
“You’re not afraid you’ll die like she did.”
“No, because she’s alive.”
“When you’re Christine—”
“Chrissy.”
“When you’re Chrissy, you are Chrissy.”
“Yes.”
“When you’re Chris, you are Chris.”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe in God, Chris?”
“Yes.”
“Have you taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. You may continue to be Christine— Chrissy —but only with your mother. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” And oh, the relief.
Later, much later, he would come to understand the concept. Which did not, in the view of Real Christ Holy, exist. Nor in his own view. To Chris (and to Chrissy), they were perfectly sane. There was, however, possession , which could be demonic but also benign. Although Fallowes never said so, Chris came to believe that Deacon Andy had decided Chris might have been possessed by the spirit of his dead sister. How old was he then? Nine? Ten?
It was five or six years later when Deacon Andy—after consulting with the church elders, Pastor Jim, and his father—began talking to Chris about Katherine “Kate” McKay.
Never did Fallowes mention to any of them that he was discussing the baby-killing woman with Chris’s sister as well as Chris himself.
3
Chris leaves the bathroom and regards the two suitcases at the foot of the bed, one pink and one blue. He opens the pink one. On top are two wigs, one black and one blond (the red one was discarded in Reno). She dresses in skinny jeans and a boatneck shirt. She puts on the blond wig. Today it will be Chrissy who travels to McKay’s next stop.
Chris is a doer tortured by jumbled thoughts and nightmares. Chrissy is a thinker who has more clarity. She is perfectly aware that Andy Fallowes, possibly along with Pastor Jim, see this divided person as a God-given tool to put an end to the Murder Queen. Both personae, Chris and Chrissy, will claim they acted on their own, that the church had nothing to do with it. They will, in the vulgar but applicable phrase, dummy up.
Fallowes and Pastor Jim see Kate McKay as a terrible influence working against God’s law, not only when it comes to abortion but about the acceptance of homosexuality and her insistence on limiting the Second Amendment ( strangling the Second Amendment). Most of all, they worry about McKay’s influence on various state legislatures. McKay understands that all real change is local, and that makes her a poison seeping into the body politic.
Unlike Chris, Chrissy knows how Fallowes sees them: as pawns.
Does it matter? No. What matters is that the McKay woman wants to arrogate the power of God to earthly creatures who have no understanding of God’s plan.
4
Jerome Robinson and John Ackerly have scrambled eggs and about a gallon of coffee at a café down the street from Happy, which John will open at eight AM, ready to serve early birds wanting that all-important wake-up shot of vodka and orange.
“So what’s up, buttercup?” John asks. “Not that I don’t appreciate a free meal.”
“Probably nothing.” It’s what he told Holly, but it gnaws at him. “Did you get the picture I sent you?”
“Yup.” John shovels in scrambled eggs. “Close-up of the May page of the Rev’s appointment book. You find the guy yet? Briggs? Because I’ve checked with a lot of Program people, and no one’s heard of anyone calling themselves that.”
“It’s a police case. I’m just an interested bystander.”
John points at him. “Caught the detecting bug from Holly, didn’t you? It’s more contagious than Covid.”
Jerome doesn’t deny it, although in his mind it’s more like poison oak—a persistent itch. “Look at it again. You can see it better on my iPad than you can on your phone.” He shows him the photo of the calendar square.
John takes a good close look, even spreading the image with his fingers to make it bigger. “Okay. Briggs, seven PM, May twentieth. What about it?”
“I don’t fucking know ,” Jerome says, “and it’s driving me crazy. Briggs in capital letters.”
“The Rev put all the names of all the people he was counseling in capital letters.” John taps CATHY 2-T, then KENNY D. “So what? His cursive handwriting is probably shit. I know mine is. Half the time even I can’t make out what I wrote.”
“Makes perfect sense, but still.” Jerome takes his iPad back and frowns at the photo of the calendar page. “When I was a kid, I saw this optical illusion in a comic book. At first glance you only saw a bunch of black blobs, but if you looked at it long enough, you saw the face of Abe Lincoln. Blobs at one second, a face at the next. To me, this is like that. There’s something weird about it, but I don’t know what the fuck it is.”
“Then it’s nothing,” John says. “You want to break the case yourself, that’s all.”
“Bullshit,” Jerome says, but thinks John might be right. Or partly right.
John checks his watch. “Got to get going. The regulars will be lining up.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Jerome asks Holly’s question: “Who wants a screwdriver at eight AM?”
And John gives him the same answer: “You’d be surprised. So are we on for Friday night?”
“Guns and Hoses? Sure. You can be my date, or I can be yours. Only if it’s a blow-out, I’m leaving.”
“We can take off any time after the first inning,” John says. “I just have to be there for Sista Bessie singing the National Anthem. That’s a gotta-see.”