Chapter 2 American Crow #7
My younger sister, Nell, pounded in from the back porch, lugging a carryall bag and kicking the snow off her boots.
She’d been at home all day yesterday but evidently hadn’t unloaded her laundry.
The old house she shared with other grad students had a murder basement where the washing machines were.
It scared her, so Nell still brought her laundry home every few weeks to my parents’, whose washer was the size of the Apollo 13 spacecraft despite the fact that they were empty nesters who only ever had two kids.
I took Nell’s bag so she could shrug out of her coat before laying my warm cheek against her icy one.
I said, “When did it start snowing?”
Nell stared at me. “Midnight? There’s a foot of new snow, Reenie.”
I looked and yes, there was indeed a foot of new snow, more coming down hard. Had I had an actual nightmare, so real that
I seemed to be awake? Did I imagine that big bird, its feathers patent leather shiny in the morning sunlight?
“‘Quoth the raven, nevermore!’”
“I swear to you, I looked out the window upstairs and the sky was blue.”
“It’s a big house,” Nell said. “Different climate zone?”
My mom piled my plate and Nell’s with scrambled eggs. Her secret ingredient for this was a spoonful of mayonnaise and a dollop
of cream cheese, which sounds disgusting but is very good. It was the one dish my mother could prepare without everyone quietly
wishing we had a dog. Miranda set out stacks of ice-cold toast with the butter neat and hard as a coat button on top of each
slice. Her culinary abilities would have been a smash hit in Scotland. We often told each other that Dad’s coffee and Mom’s
cuisine could be weaponized by the Department of Defense.
“What are you here for?” Nell asked, as if she didn’t know.
“The toast,” I replied.
“Do you think you’re exploiting Felicity and taking advantage of your friendship?”
“Hey, Nell Diablo, what do you really think? Don’t hold back!”
“Anything for a juicy story.”
“I wish there was no story to tell. Some things are important because they’re interesting, not interesting because they’re important. They make us think about our own character. Ask Mom.”
“You can’t compare what you do with what Mom did.”
“I’m not.”
“So it’s not because it’s sensational, writing about a killer whore who used to be your . . .”
My mom said, “You might want to confront the apparent contradictions as part of what you write. You don’t want to be accused
of sensationalism. Nell has a point.”
“What is her point? She’s being a . . . a goody-goody, and since when? Just because she can read enough Latin to read an old
gravestone? To prove that your law-school dollars are being spent?” My parents were paying for law school; I’d refused to
let them pay for my grad school. They further assumed that I earned a couple of g’s a year, when what I really made at Fuchsia would have been a respectable salary in West Shreveport, Louisiana, but kept me awake nights in Chicago.
Nell said softly, “Reenie, I know you care.”
“Of course I care. I care about Felicity. I care about the people who died. Not as much, but I care. Plus, who are you going
to be when you grow up, Atticus Finch? Really? After a couple of years, you’ll be defending corporations for dumping stuff
into rivers that causes fish to have three heads and glow in the dark!”
Nell said, “And make in an hour what you make in a week!”
“It’s true, it’s true. Virtue is so underpaid.” I made a prayerful gesture with a strip of bacon still in one hand.
“I’m all about quid pro quo,” Nell said. “That’s Latin, Reenie. Mom and Dad, ad hoc ergo propter hoc, huh? I learned a little
Latin so I’m very, very smart.”
“A scholar right here at your kitchen table. A future chief justice.” I pointed at her with the bacon strip.
“She speaks nothing but the veritas,” said my sister. “About my virtus.” We both started to laugh. Then Nell added, “It just sounds so awful and hard. What you have to do for this.”
My mom said, “Don’t you think some of these people might be not just shady but really dangerous?”
Nell said, “It’s not as if she’s going to do what you did at the nursing home, Miranda. She won’t have to fake being a hooker.”
“I might,” I added, just to see my mother recoil.
Nell said, “Straight up, just imagine how you’d feel if you were Ruth Wild.”
“That’s why I’m here. I thought I would try to talk to Ruth.”
“Yikes, Reeno, I don’t envy you,” Nell said, all banter aside.
“Probably not on Sunday,” my mom said. “I think they’re in church all morning.”
“But not all day,” I said. It was after two in the afternoon by then.
“I’m sure they get to talk on Sundays if not plow the fields or sew on buttons,” my father said. He was confusing charismatic
Christians (which Ruth was, as her husband was the founder of the megachurch Starbright Ministry not far from our house).
“Would you come with me? I’m still the kid she knew from high school, at least to her. I’ve never had to question someone
who’s a friend about something so awful.”
My father said, “I’m sure it’s fine, Irene. I’m sure it’s not violating some holy order.” My dad was an atheist evangelist,
if there could even be such a thing. All religion was a scam. He disliked Felicity’s stepfather, Roman, on principle. Rev.
Wild, a fundamentalist preacher, was the founder of the Starbright Ministry, which started as a country church and grew into
an empire on the dime of the faithful. It now boasted its own school, ice rink, gyms, swimming pools, a missionary training
center, even a TV studio.
“Ruth couldn’t have known what Felicity was getting up to,” my mom said.
“But yes, back in the day, I used to hate facing people I was scared of but not as much as the ones I was sorry for. Sure, I’ll go with you.
I could use the exercise.” She walked and ran on a treadmill for two miles five days a week.
Her fitness was a witness to me. “You brought boots, right?” I had not, of course.
But Miranda produced some that “still had a lot of life left in them.”
Nell said, “I only go out in snow if there’s a ski lodge involved.”
So Miranda and I stomped our way through the new powder—for Nell was correct, there was a ton of snow, and what dreamworld
had I witnessed from my window?—until we got to the campus of Starbright Ministry.
The place was usually a hive. On Sundays, there were at least three off-duty police directing traffic. And even on days when
there weren’t any church services, there were always classes and study groups and athletic events for the students of the
Starbright Academy.
There wasn’t a single car in the parking lot.
We kicked a path through the snow down to the lakefront chapel where summer revivals were conducted in a lighted white tent
that extended from the open doors. There was not a soul, pardon me, in sight.
“Let’s go over to the rectory,” Miranda said, and we did, the heavy fall of snow under the evergreens on the way to Ruth’s
house needing some real thigh burn to push through.
My mom was curious. She had never seen it up close. Even I had only been inside the rectory once, a memorable unplanned visit.
The house was a gorgeous big pile of a Georgian made from lemony brick with dark blue shutters and trim tall casement windows
side by side on both levels and a curved pillared porch roofed by a walk-out balcony above. I could hear my dad grumbling.
The walk had not been shoveled. There was no car in the driveway, no snow disturbed by the attached garage. I took pictures with my phone, of the front of the house and a shot down a short rise to the massive, also deserted, tabernacle.
“Come on,” I urged my mother. “Let’s knock.” We used the door knocker, in the shape of a fish. We rang the doorbell. If this
had been a ghost story, or a different kind of crime story, the sound would have echoed within, and we would have caught a
glimpse of a wraith through the windows flanking the front door.
Instead, no response. No movement. But then, I recalled, it always looked that way: pristine, like a movie set for the home
of a good pastor reaping the rewards of the prosperity gospel he preached—for the faithful, rewards on earth, rewards in heaven.
It was so different from the slightly shabby house the Wilds lived in when they were our neighbors on Pine Street. Felicity
and I sometimes did our homework at her kitchen table, Felicity helping me with chemistry over her mom’s teasing objections.
Four or five times a month, we had a sleepover, but now that I really thought of it, I was never invited to sleep over at
Felicity’s. In fact, I’d only once seen her room, nudging the door open when I went to use the upstairs bathroom. What I glimpsed
didn’t look as though it belonged to an ordinary girl. There were no posters or piles of clothes or pyramids of cosmetic bottles.
Everything was white. On the walls were a few line drawings of birds. The one I remember was of the horrifying cruel face
of a shoebill stork, a bird, Felicity later told me, that grows as tall as a small adult human being, that eats baby crocodiles,
and is so ferocious that, as a nestling, it kills its siblings to achieve dominance.
“Maybe we should call the police?” Miranda asked me now.
“Wait.” I scrambled up on the railing and peered over the café curtains through the clean upper panes of a window.
Sun abruptly broke through then, sending a shaft of light into an empty living room.
The single piece of furniture was an old ladder-back chair stacked with what looked like a month’s worth of mail.
I jumped down. “There’s no one in there,” I told Miranda, and then asked her, “Do you know anybody who goes to church here?”
“To say hi to in the grocery store maybe but I wouldn’t have their numbers.”
Just then, as if in answer to a . . . whatever, a man and woman in a Jeep with a snowplow scraped into the driveway. We waved.