Chapter Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
“ANNIE-GIRL…”
The name my father called me—but it’s Ezra King speaking, his voice as deep and resonant as a tiger’s growl. The sound vibrates through my motionless body, rattles my bones, thrums in my ears. There’s a smell like fresh-dug earth in the room, loamy and wet.
I try to move but I can’t. Try to force my mouth open to speak but I’m frozen in place.
I can do nothing but watch and listen.
He says, “I heard you’ve been looking for me, Annie-Girl. So why don’t you come and see me? You know where I’ll be.”
Then there’s the sound.
Kssssshhhhhhhhhh …
The rattle.
He holds his hand out to me, glowing, his fingertip writing a message in the air. Blood-red and iridescent like oil on pavement. I try to read the message but can’t. The wavy shimmer-slick words slip away from me before I can grasp them.
KSSSHHHHHH …
The rattle again. Louder now.
I feel the cool, scaly weight of the snake on my chest. The tongue brushing my ear.
The king has been judged, the snake whispers. His kingdom is no more.
I blink and then—all at once—it’s all gone. Ezra King. The message. The snake. I realize that I can move. I sit up from where I’ve been slumped and inhale a deep breath. I hold it in my lungs until they burn and then, finally, exhale.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe. And then I repeat the name: “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
Like a chant. A mantra. A prayer.
My breath eventually steadies. My heart goes back to its rhythm. I rub my hands over my face, pull the covers back, slide out of bed.
I don’t need to look at the clock to know it’s only about an hour till sunrise. I can feel it. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and double-check my gun. I pull the Bronco away from the motel and into the bruised violet haze of the predawn.
When I get to the church, I let out a small gasp. There are more than a hundred cars there.
“This is crazy,” I whisper to myself.
Already, there are dozens of people with flashlights and LED lanterns milling around in the grass outside the church and up the hill around the graveyard.
I get out and watch Will as he locks the church doors and then jogs up to the front of the crowd, where he begins to lead the procession up the hill.
Without a word, I take up the rear of the procession, wordlessly following the serpentine mass of the congregation.
The gravel road peters out into an even older path as we climb higher onto Galilee Hill.
I walk in the back of the line, under the dense mountain canopy, my own flashlight in hand to pick out the path at my feet. Soon, I feel a presence next to me and I’m surprised to find Zelda there, wearing an old T-shirt and camo pants, her flame-colored curls pulled on top of her head.
“Morning,” she says. Then she pauses and fiddles with the processor on the side of her head and says, “Sorry. Morning. Okay.”
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I say.
She smiles. “I’ll always turn up for a show.”
“You think he’ll appear?” I ask. “Like Jesus?”
“Hell no,” she says. “But it’ll be interesting to see what everyone does when he doesn’t show up.”
Ahead, another round of “Amazing Grace” has started. It drifts back to us like a slow-moving river, haunting in the half-light.
“You don’t believe Crystal saw him?”
“I believe she believes it,” Zelda says. “But that’s not the same thing as it really happening.”
“I tried to tell her it might be hypnagogia,” I say.
“What—Hold on. What are you saying?” Zelda says, pulling me to a stop.
I realize that, in the dark, walking side by side, she can’t pick up any extra cues from me, and the word hypnagogia has thrown her for a loop.
I maneuver both of us into a patch of light where she can see my lips moving and say, “Crystal’s visions?
I think she has some kind of sleep disorder.
Like post-sleep hallucinations. It’s called hypnagogia. ”
“Oh,” Zelda says with a smirk. “I’m sure she didn’t like that. She’s pretty convinced she has magic angel fairy powers. But I bet you’re right. I think if she had a vision about Ezra, it had more to do with her subconscious making her feel guilty about her little crush.”
“She told me about that,” I say. “But she said neither she nor Ezra ever acted on it. Do you think she was lying?”
Zelda purses her lips to the side, considering, before she says, “She’s been dating Dean off and on for years. Since they were kids. But Frankie told me she saw Crystal and Ezra out in the parking lot together.”
“When?”
“Last week?” Zelda says. “I think it was after Ezra’s Wednesday night service. We usually get a big church crowd midweek and I’m pretty sure it was that night.”
“What were they doing?” I ask. Then, when Zelda gives me a pitying look, I realize what she’s talking about.
“You mean they were—”
Zelda shrugs. “Frankie said he was holding her close, rubbing her back. She said it looked sexual.”
“Wait, why didn’t you tell me before?”
Zelda scratches at her nose and then shakes her head and says, “I didn’t see it for myself.
Frankie’s the worst gossip in town and you can’t believe half of what she says.
For all everyone gives Crystal hell about making shit up for attention, Frankie’s way worse.
She’s just not as obvious so she never gets caught. ”
“Do you think she made it up about Crystal and Ezra?”
Though, thinking about the way Crystal had dodged my questions about Ezra hitting on her, I sort of doubt it. Zelda squints past me, up the hill, toward the disappearing crowd.
“I don’t know,” she finally says. “I wouldn’t put it past her, I guess.”
“But why?” I say. “Just to stir the pot? Why do that to the woman she works with?”
With a sniff, Zelda says, “Frankie hates how Crystal’s always getting out of work, always getting bigger tips despite folks saying she’s crazy, always breaking up and getting back together with Dean.
And Frankie is—or was—in love with Dean.
Don’t ask me why. But she was always angling to get with him.
Breaking Crystal and Dean up would’ve been the first step. ”
“Wait, did Crystal and Dean break up again recently?”
“Wednesday,” Zelda says. “The night Frankie saw them. I assumed she’d told him.”
“This past Wednesday?” I ask, just to be sure.
“Yeah. He came in to see Crystal while she was on shift and then, next thing I know, they’re out in the parking lot having a screaming fight. Then he left and she spent the whole rest of the night crying.”
I put the events in order in my head. Frankie supposedly sees Crystal and Ezra in the parking lot. Dean comes in later that night and they break up. And the very next day Crystal gets a report of Dean driving out toward Joel Shepherd’s house.
Zelda turns back toward the crowd and resumes walking. I fall in step beside her as the strains of “Amazing Grace” die away and are replaced by another, all too familiar, refrain.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains …
I picture the clothesline again.
Ezra King and Joel Shepherd at either end.
And next to Ezra, Dean Griffon—Ezra’s helper—who thought Ezra was messing around with his girlfriend. And if Dean wanted to get back at Ezra, what would he do?
He couldn’t risk striking out at Ezra, his boss and mentor, a man who held so much power, so much sway in the community.
Dean would never win, not by himself. He’d have to go higher than Ezra.
If he really wanted to bring Ezra down, he’d have to go to the only person in town with that kind of clout.
A person with a ruthless leg breaker on his payroll.
Kentucky’s King of Weed: Joel Shepherd.
And what information could Dean have taken to Joel? What would’ve been enough to get him involved?
The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day …
I imagine Ezra and Joel at opposite ends of the line. Taut and tight.
Between them: Dean Griffon, the driver. Nathaniel Nickels, the enforcer. Billy Shepherd, the local dealer, Joel’s middleman.
I think about how Joel Shepherd had only ever been known for growing weed. A farmer above all else. A man who merely traded one drug for another when the tobacco subsidies went away. So how did heroin and fentanyl wind up in Ezra’s RV?
I draw a mental line from Ezra to Billy Shepherd.
“A sideline,” I say.
“Huh?” Zelda says.
I shake my head and she keeps walking.
Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
Shall never lose its power …
Ezra and Billy could’ve been running a sideline in hard drugs, using the circuit they’d already established through Ezra’s traveling ministry, and keeping that money for themselves. Never telling old man Shepherd. So, what if Dean Griffon spilled the beans?
Maybe Shepherd sent Nathaniel Nickels out the next day, Friday, to deal with both his grandnephew, Billy, and Ezra King.
Maybe Nathaniel Nickels never meant to kill either of them.
Maybe the money or the drugs were hidden and Billy refused to tell where they were and Nickels got too rough.
Decided to torture Billy for the hiding place.
Cut Billy’s finger off in the process. Beat him too hard, thought he was dead, and ended up burning down the house to cover his tracks.
Then, maybe he went over to the parsonage with his baseball bat and kicked the door in, never expecting to see Ezra King sitting at the table milking a snake.
But of course once the two men started scuffling, the snake would’ve been agitated.
Riled up enough to strike. And maybe once Ezra was bit and clearly dying Nickels realized there was nothing he could do.
Maybe he figured, with the snakebites, Ezra’s death would just look like an accident. All he had to do was fix the door.
E’er since by faith I saw the stream
Thy flowing wounds supply …
Nickels could’ve given some acquaintance fifty bucks to run in to Walmart and grab the hardware and paint for him.
Then returned to the parsonage, fixed the door, and wiped the place almost clean of prints.
But then … if he’d covered his tracks in both Ezra and Billy Shepherd’s place, why not just go back home?
Scarlett, Nickels’s wife, said she hadn’t seen him since Friday and—pissed off as she was—I’m inclined to believe her.
So maybe Nickels split. Took whatever money and drugs he could get out of Ezra King and left town. But that doesn’t explain the missing ledger. Or the note written in Ezra’s hand, detailing how he wanted to be buried. And it doesn’t explain the empty grave.
When this poor lisping, stammering tongue
Lies silent in the grave,
Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
I’ll sing Thy power to save …
“Oh,” I say, stopping in my tracks.
Zelda stops too, turning to face me in the weak light. Deep in my reverie, I’d almost forgotten she was there.
“You okay?” she says. “What’s wrong?”
“I have to go back,” I mutter. “I forgot something. You go ahead. I’ll see you up there.”
She squints at me briefly but then nods and turns back to follow the crowd.
“Shit,” I growl. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
I start back down the hill as I reimagine the scene on Friday night: Ezra sitting at the table, milking the snakes.
The door bursting open, Nathaniel Nickels wielding a baseball bat.
The whooshing swing of the bat into the table, shattering the glass beakers already full of deadly venom.
The scuffle where Ezra—not the benign man of faith he seemed—manages to get the upper hand, pushing Nickels’s face into the table, the little shards of broken glass, the puddled venom.
I’ll sing Thy power to save,
I’ll sing Thy power to save …
The thing is, if Ezra King had been an innocent man, he’d have stayed there.
He’d have called the police. Reported the attack.
But he wasn’t innocent. He would’ve guessed, just as I did, that Nickels had been sent by Joel Shepherd—which meant that, best-case scenario, if all this went to court, his involvement in the Shepherd drug operation would come out.
It would’ve been all over for him. Which meant he had to run.
And what better time to run than when no one realizes you’re missing?
When everyone believes you’re dead?
Nathaniel might have been blond and a bit more muscular, but with a similar height and frame, dressed in Ezra’s clothes, with a face full of snake venom so he was swollen beyond recognition …
I break into a dead run.
It was never Ezra’s body lying in the chair, in the coffin, in the ground.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains …
My feet thump on the trail as I tear back down the hill. I almost topple, skittering across the gravel as I turn, then continue at a near-galloping pace.
If Ezra really did show up at Crystal’s—if he really did tell her that everyone should go to the mountaintop—then that’s definitely where he’s not going to be. No, Ezra must have wanted everyone out of the church.
And there can only be one reason for that: so he can go in without being seen.
I reach the church, sprint up the back stairs, and yank at the door. It’s locked.
I run around to the front, find the doors already open. My heart thumps in my ears. The sun is dawning, streaming through the east-facing windows, illuminating the sanctuary in pure, pale, golden light.
At the front of the sanctuary, kneeling prostrated against the altar, arms outstretched, is a man in an all-black suit of clothes.
“Mr. King?” I say. My voice echoes in the small sanctuary.
I start toward him, drawing my gun as I go. My footsteps are the only sound in the church.
“Mr. King, my name is Annie Gore. I’m a private investigator. I need to ask you some questions. I was hired by your daughter, Katie.”
I come close and he still doesn’t move. I reach out, touch his shoulder.
“Ezra—”
My movement tips his head to the side, revealing a little pool of blood under his temple.
“Shit!” I gasp, stepping back. And then I reach forward and check his neck for a pulse, even as I’m pulling out my phone. Chief Dishman answers on the third ring.
“Annie?” he says, his voice raspy with sleep.
“Where are you?” I ask. “Listen, I realized that—”
“Where the hell do you think I am?” he grumbles, talking over me. “In bed, trying to get some damn sleep. Why are you calling me at this hour barking orders? Annie, if—”
“It’s Ezra,” I say. “He’s dead.”
“What do you mean? Of course he’s dead.”
“No…” I say. “Listen, just get down to the church.”