Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Two soda cans flip backward, toppling off the tree stump, and land in the grass behind. The third can stays where it is. Apparently, I’d missed it. I look down at my revolver, empty in my hand, still smoking.
Though it’s nearly August, I’m wearing earmuffs—a pair of fluffy winter ones my granny gave me the Christmas before—but they’re not much protection against the noise of the gunshots. My ears are ringing and it’s a moment before I realize my dad is talking to me.
“What?” I ask.
He’s standing beside me, reloading his own revolver.
“Do you think she’ll ever come back?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
My mom left almost two months ago. I’d expected the worst from him.
But instead, without her there, he’d been a different guy.
I’d seen no sign of the raging, roaring, bitter hostility I’d come to associate with my dad’s worst moods.
Instead, hanging out with him was like hanging out with another kid.
A giant twelve-year-old who fished and set off illegal fireworks and fired off guns in the field behind the house.
He spins the cylinder of his gun like a cowboy in a movie and then slams it home.
“Do you miss her?” I ask.
“Of course!” he says. “Of course. I’d give anything to have her back.”
It’s probably true, I realize. My dad loved my mom like kerosene loved a lit match.
I walk down to the tree stump, collect the shot cans, stand them up again, a line of aluminum soldiers.
“Don’t you miss her?” he hollers, from twenty paces back.
“Sure,” I answer. And it’s also true. I do miss her.
I miss her laughter and her singing and her storytelling and the soft touch of her hands while she braided my wild hair.
I miss the smell of her cooking and the scent of her shampoo and the way she always answered the phone: “Gore residence, this is Rochelle.”
But there’s also a lot I don’t miss. I don’t miss the fights, the screaming, the late-night trips to the ER. I don’t miss sweeping up broken glass the next morning while they stay in bed together, giggling under the covers, just winding up for another fight.
“What you want for dinner?” my dad shouts.
But my answer won’t matter. I know the cupboards are mostly empty.
Neither I nor my dad can cook. We’ve been living on junk food and microwave dinners for two months.
At first, I’d loved it. But a nonstop diet of frozen pizza, potato chips, and peanut butter straight out of the jar is only amazing for a couple of weeks.
Even when you’re ten. I’d started to crave real food.
My mom’s black-eyed peas, barbecue drumsticks, fried apples.
At first, I’d begged to go to my granny’s but—at least that summer—she’d been too set-upon by her own problems. Her health issues meant she was in and out of the hospital and now she had my great-uncle staying with her until she was in the clear.
There was no way she could take me under her wing. Not yet.
I find the last can and set it on the stump. When I look up, my dad is aiming down his barrel. Right at me. I freeze, my heart racing, my mind trying to catch up.
“Dad—” I start, but then he’s laughing. Throwing his head back like this is nothing more than a big joke.
“Annie-Girl,” he chuckles, gesturing with the gun. “Come on now, move out of the way.”
I run from the stump, off to the side at first, and then make a large arc before returning to stand beside him, my heart still thundering, a cold sweat freezing my clothes to my body.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The world goes dark. Silent.
And then I hear the singing. The voice like an angel. Clear and loud and beautiful.
It is powerful. Magical. Undeniable.
Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
Shall never lose its power,
Till all the ransomed ones of God
Be saved, to sin no more …
There is no obvious source of the voice. It’s a song without a singer. It’s as if the words, resonant as bells, are rising up from the earth itself. Tears come to my eyes, burning and unstoppable.
Be saved, to sin no more;
Till all the ransomed ones of God,
Be saved, to sin no more.
And then I see him standing before me. At first, I think it’s my dad. Then I realize this man is too tall, too thin, too clean cut.
The man steps through a curtain of rain and now I can see his face. This is Ezra King. His mouth moves as if he’s speaking but no words come out. A rain of blood falls on us both, slides down our faces, mixes with tears.
Split splat. Split splat.
“Ezra?” I say.
He leans forward, grabs me by the shoulders, opens his mouth to scream. But instead of words, snakes slide out from within him, flooding from his mouth like a river. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They thud heavily against my skin, rattle and writhe when they hit the blood-soaked ground.
A huge disembodied hand appears above Ezra’s head, fingers outstretched, glowing with golden light. And then, the snakes—all around me—hiss, The king has been judged. His kingdom is no more.
I gasp, wake with a start, panting. I’m covered in sweat. I wrestle free of the covers, go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, and take a long drink of water. When I return, I look at the clock. It’s almost two AM.
My heart rate isn’t as frantic as it was moments before but, already, I know there’s no way I’m getting back to sleep now.
Instead, I cram my laptop back in my bag, pull a fresh set of nitrile gloves from my duffel, and grab the Bronco keys.
Fifteen minutes later, I’m rolling through Brimstone Hollow.
The sulfur smell fills my nose and burns my lungs. I ease off the gas as I near the twisted gap in the guardrail where Honey’d gone through.
I stop, staring at the black skid marks Honey’s wheels left behind. In the dark forest beyond, a pair of yellow eyes glimmers, the height of a man. They stare at me, unblinking.
Whooooo!
An owl, I realize.
Whoooo!
I let out a long breath and continue through and, eventually, out of Brimstone Hollow.
“It’s just the woods at night, you ding-dong,” I tell myself. But my voice is shaky.
A few more miles and I finally reach the gravel road that leads to Mount Zion Church of the Healing Redeemer.
No one around. I could turn back. Forget this harebrained plan.
But I carry on. The sooner I’ve done what I came here to do, the sooner I can go back to my mundane life of receipts and taxes and boring surveillance work in rented Hondas.
But is that what you really want? I ask myself.
And answer, No.
As I pull into the parking lot, I flick the headlights off and continue at a crawl, cutting the engine once I’m parked just behind the church. No one runs out to ask what I’m doing here. No lights come on inside the church or the parsonage. I wait a little longer. Nothing.
With a deep breath, I slide out of the Bronco. I look from the church toward the dark shape of the parsonage within the trees, debating the most likely place for Ezra to keep his ledger. Considering I’ve already made a cursory search of the parsonage, I decide to start with the church.
I open my bag and take out the gloves and lock-picking kit and look again at the dark back side of the church, the little door that likely leads to the office and bathrooms.
Follow the money, I repeat to myself. If I’m going to figure out whether Ezra was into something criminal, I’m going to have to find that ledger.
I snap on the gloves and climb the steps.
This lock, unlike the one in the parsonage, is not new.
Old and rattly, it snaps open in a matter of seconds.
Inside the church, I use my tactical flashlight to get my bearings.
There’s a single bathroom, a little kitchenette with a tiny table and two chairs, a utility closet, and a cramped, cluttered office. There’s also, of course, the sanctuary.
“Might as well start there,” I mutter as I step through the door from the kitchen area into the business end of the church, emerging in the corner behind the stage.
I check the pulpit first—basically just a large wooden lectern—and find only some old programs, a flocked-edge hymnal, and a spare Holy Bible.
I pad around the stage and the ornate altar attached to the front of it.
I run my hands over every surface but find no trap doors or cleverly concealed latches.
Both the stage and the altar look about a hundred years old and harken back to a time when things were made of the thickest, hardest wood possible.
I make a cursory search of the pews and nudge every baseboard and floorboard before heading back into the office and kitchen area.
I pull a stepladder from the utility closet and head into the bathroom.
I check the acoustic ceiling tiles. Then the toilet tanks.
Then the high storage cabinets. Nothing.
I move into the utility closet, checking behind bottles and rooting through big plastic bins that contain Christmas and Easter decorations, spare hymnals, and candles—but no ledgers.
In the kitchen, I open every cabinet and shuffle the cans of coffee and boxes of filters. I open any box big enough or heavy enough to be concealing a leather-bound ledger. I check inside and under every drawer and poke around in the fridge and freezer. Nothing.
“Well, it wasn’t gonna be easy, I guess,” I mutter, as I turn toward the office.
In the narrow hallway, I walk past a bulletin board full of old pictures and a few pinned-up programs and click my light off when I hear a loud noise. I pause, crouching down against the wall, and wait. But, after several heart-thumping seconds, I decide it’s nothing. Just a night animal.
I click my light on again and head into the office.
I’ve burgled more than a few places in my time, and if you don’t care about people knowing you were there, it’s not that hard.
Leaving no trace, however, is more difficult.
Requiring patience and careful, focused searching, it’s easy to get bogged down and run out of time.
I let out a soft groan as I shine my light around the office.
It looks like no one has ever thrown anything away in here.
The room is piled with boxes featuring hand-scrawled labels like Records 1980–1985, Misc Photos/Programs, Receipts, Donation Hats and Coats.
I squint at that last one and open it up.
It seems to be a collection box for the needy and contains, as advertised, only winter clothing.
The bookshelves are crammed with various versions of the Bible and other Christian literature and more old hymnals plus what look like newer Bible-college textbooks.
“Okay,” I breathe, and pop out the stepladder again.
I lift and slide every ceiling tile and find nothing but dust. I switch on the PC—which does not require a password—and find only a desktop organized into yearly files, which are then organized further into various types of records.
I find nothing exciting. I power it down, unscrew the PC’s case, and look inside. Nothing but dusty hard drives.
Making sure to leave everything as I found it, I search in the desk drawers and under them.
I check inside the boxes of printer paper and then move to the filing cabinet.
I take every book off the shelf and every photo album out of every box.
After a few hours, I sit down in the desk chair again and heave an exhausted sigh.
My back hurts from hunching over and I’ve had next to no sleep for two nights in a row.
With a groan, I push the chair back and get to my feet, start back down the hallway. The office is windowless, so I’m a little surprised when I look through the kitchen window and see the first pale hints of daylight. I’m so keyed up and overtired, I actually jump when my phone buzzes in my pocket.
“Leo,” I answer, whispering just in case. “Right on time.”
“You sound awake,” he says. “But like you haven’t been asleep.”
“Correct.”
He chuckles; I listen. I had a cup of hot chocolate once, in Switzerland. Rich, velvety, bittersweet, with an understated decadence, it seemed to warm me from the inside out. Leo’s voice is like that. I could drink it.
“You sound like you’re up to something sneaky,” he says.
“Burglarizing a church,” I whisper, looking around me in the fresh, pale-blue light of predawn.
“Of course,” he says. “What else would you be doing on a fine Tuesday morning?”
In a hushed voice, I tell him about finding Dean Griffon’s body, the truck in the video, and Nathaniel Nickels, whom no one seems to be able to locate now. Then, I tell him about Billy Shepherd, his missing finger, and his granduncle, the recently released Weed King.
“Shit,” he says. “Sounds like you got a tiger by the tail.”
“Or something,” I say.
Leo chuckles again. “Or something is right.”
I listen to the sounds in Leo’s background. A distant hum of traffic and, nearer by, birds, a bicycle bell. I remember he’d said he was going to Boston. Now he’s likely in a park somewhere. Probably just finished jogging. Not even out of breath.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I tell him. “So, I decided to do a little recreational B and E to pass the time till morning.”
“Nightmares?” he asks, softly.
“Yeah.”
I’m still paused in the hallway, backed away from where anyone looking through the kitchen window might be able to see me.
I lean against the wall and click my light on again, shine it on the bulletin board layered with old papers and photos.
I spot a younger Will, looking bright-eyed, wearing a vacation Bible school T-shirt.
There’s an article clipped from a newspaper in Georgia with Ezra standing out in the open air, holding his hand to a woman’s forehead.
TRAVELING PREACHER WORKS MIRACLES! HEALS THE SICK!
“This case—this girl and her dad—it was bound to scrounge up some shit,” Leo says.
“I know.”
My mouth pulls into a sad half smile. Neither of us has a relationship with our father. I haven’t talked to mine in a decade and Leo’s dad disappeared when he was twelve, never to be seen again.
I’m about to click the light back off when I stop and do an actual double take, shining the beam onto the paper in front of me.
“Shit,” I say. “So, I’ve been looking for a ledger all night long.”
“Did you find it?” Leo asks.
“No,” I say. “No, I didn’t find the ledger. But I found something just about as good.”
“What?”
“Proof that Ezra had criminal connections,” I say, nosing up to a big photo of Ezra with a group of men in orange jumpsuits. Faded slightly with age but still plenty visible, the photo is part of a printed-off church newsletter and features the headline brOTHER EZRA SAVES SOULS AT BIG SANDY.
Ezra stands with the other men on a basketball court, a grassy berm and high fence in the background.
Holding his Bible to his chest, he wears his all-black uniform and squints against the bright sun.
Standing right next to him, smiling at the camera, is Kentucky’s King of Weed himself, Joel Shepherd.