The visitor looked over his shoulder, smiled, and kept rowing closer, not saying a word.
The fisherman had an eerie feeling about this encounter. If the visitor wasn’t going to speak, then he would. “Jim?”
Jim looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Owen.” With a few last oar strokes, he brought the little dinghy alongside. Owen used a short piece of tether to join the two boats together. “Ah, thank you much.”
“To what do I owe this visit?” asked Owen Bennett. “I hope it isn’t business. I’m out of the office right now.”
“Oh, I figured this would be a great place to have a chat, just you and me.” Jim looked back toward the resort. Some families were picnicking near the lakeshore. “But I’d talk quietly, Owen. The sound is really carrying today.”
Owen lowered his voice and asked, “So state your business. I’m very busy doing nothing today and I’d like to get back to it.”
Jim heaved a deep sigh, rested his forearms on his knees, and just looked at Owen for a moment. “I’ll come right to it, but even that’ll take a while. I suppose you’ve been keeping up on that case out of Bacon’s Corner?”
Owen stared at him blankly, then shook his head.
“Never heard of the place?”
“No, afraid not.”
“Well . . . I never heard of it either. Never cared to, except that the ACFA started a lawsuit there, and I know they were coming your way with it. They were going after a Christian school again, and thought they had all their ducks in a row, including you.”
“Well, if it’s a pending case, obviously I can’t discuss it . . .”
Jim held up his hand. “Oh no, no . . . don’t worry about that. We don’t need to discuss the case, no sir. We can talk about other things.”
“All right.”
Jim looked across the lake, gathering his thoughts. “We can talk about a few personal items, I suppose . . . like a particular secret society, the Royal and Sacred Order of the Nation?”
Owen smiled. “Well now, if I talked about that, it wouldn’t stay a secret, would it?”
Jim nodded. “So I’ve gathered. You know, I’m amazed at how many supposed friends of mine know everything else but what I want to find out about that bunch.”
“It’s just a lodge, Jim. It’s nothing to worry about.”
Jim wasn’t that willing to brush the matter off. “Ehhhh . . . you have to understand, a man in my position gets a little spooked when men in your position start protecting each other and keeping little secrets among yourselves. Well, I said little secrets, but I don’t know what size they are, do I?”
Owen remained tight-lipped. This was Jim’s meeting; let him carry the conversation.
Jim did. “I hear that Carl Santinelli’s a member, and that would concern me, as much as his name gets around Washington. To think the two of you are bosom buddies in the same secret society curls my hair just a little.”
Owen got a little tense, and his voice had an edge. “That raises an obvious question for me, though I doubt I’ll get an answer: How did you find out?”
“I’ve been reading some mail, Owen. A lot of mail.” Jim looked directly at him. “Letters written by Sally Beth Roe.”
Paydirt. Jim could see a definite reaction all over Owen’s face. Owen lowered his head and muttered, “Oh, boy.”
“Aw, we’ve all got a few skeletons in the closet, Owen. You know that about me, and I know that about you.”
Owen couldn’t contain his curiosity. “What . . . Did she write to you?”
“Oh, no. She wrote to the headmaster of that Christian school—I guess to give him some inside information and help him out.”
“Well . . . I hope you can recognize truth from vindictive lies.”
“Mmmm . . . one of the first things she wrote was that she wasn’t dead, and I was impressed by her truthfulness.”
“Jim, I think you’re talking in riddles!”
“Well, okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one: Sally Roe wrote a whole stack of letters to the headmaster of that school, I guess to help him out. The only problem was, he never got the letters because somebody tampered with United States mail and snatched them all. Turned out it was the local postmaster, also the plaintiff in the suit, but she agreed to cooperate and told us where she sent them all. You’ll never guess where: the Summit Institute! Some FBI agents went there and found every one of them in the possession of—are you ready for this?—Carl Santinelli, Mr. ACFA himself. He’s in real hot water right now.”
“That has nothing to do with me.”
Jim was a little shocked. “What happened to the old team spirit, Owen? I thought you guys were lodge brothers.”
“That means nothing.”
“All right, all right, we’ll try not to place guilt by association.”
“I would greatly appreciate that.”
“But just for my own information, don’t all you Nation guys have some kind of membership ring, some funny gold ring with an ugly face on it, and your secret code name on the inside?”
“I don’t have any such ring.”
“Well, I know you don’t have yours. Sally Roe has it. Well, she did have it. Now we have it.”
Owen just stared.
“Yeah, it’s yours, all right. We checked your secret lodge name against the Nation’s official membership rosters. ‘Gawaine,’ wasn’t it?”
Owen’s face was like cold stone. “What game are you playing here?”
“The game we all play, Owen. Sally says she learned it from you. That’s why she saved your ring all these years. It’s a nice ace for her to play, and it makes her story credible, especially since she happened upon another ring, this one belonging to some kid brother of yours in the Nation, James Bardine, a hotshot punk lawyer with Santinelli’s firm. Bardine’s ring turned up on the finger of a Satanist.” Jim added with an appropriate, sinister touch, “A woman who was hired to kill Sally Roe.” He quickly added, “The assassin blew it. She got killed herself, and now we have that ring too.
“So that sort of ties all four of you together in this thing: you, Carl Santinelli, James Bardine, and that Satanist lady—ah, make that woman, or something derogatory if you like.”
Jim removed his straw hat and wiped his brow. “Owen, I’m ready to lay odds you already know the rest, the whole lawsuit over that little girl having some kind of psychotic, personality blowout of some kind, and the ACFA blaming the Christian school just to get the government through their door, and . . . Well, it was quite a plan, yes sir.” Jim looked directly at Owen for his next comment. “A plan worth killing Sally Roe to protect—a plan worth covering up the fact that someone tried to kill Sally Roe to protect. A plan worth tampering with the mails and hunting down Sally Roe to protect.”
Owen occupied himself with his rod and reel, and didn’t look up. “Jim, I believe I’m growing tired of your company.”
“That was your baby, wasn’t it?”
Owen froze for a moment. If Jim was attempting to shock him, the attempt succeeded. He reached down and began to untie the tether between the two boats. “I think you’d better leave.”
Jim placed his hand on Owen’s to stop him. “You were on the advisory board at the Omega Center, and you got her that position at the Center after she graduated from Bentmore. You spent a lot of time with her, didn’t you, every time you flew out for meetings with Steele and the others?
“Until she had that baby instead of aborting it. Now there was a wrench thrown into your career! She could have sued you for child support, laid the whole thing open in public, right? What better way to solve that problem than to remove the only tangible link between the two of you—and destroy the woman in the process?”
Owen straightened up defiantly. “Do you actually intend to argue that I’m to blame for Sally Roe’s incredible delusions?”
“You believe in that spirit stuff, don’t you?”
“That’s my personal business.”
“And at the time, she beli
eved in it—with a lot of help from you and that Omega bunch.”
“That establishes nothing.”
“Who says the newspapers and networks ever have to establish something as juicy as this? They’ll print it now and prove it later. You’ve slipped them some goodies yourself from time to time, you know that.”
“And we could slip them some more—you should know that!”
Jim nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. We could make life pretty difficult for each other, no question.” Then he chuckled. “But I sure enjoy the picture I get in my mind of you hearing a case brought by some of your lodge brothers in the ACFA, knowing they tried to protect their case by killing a woman you once had an affair with. Top that, Owen!”
Owen Bennett looked across the lake and thought for a moment. “So what do you want?”
Jim smiled. “Have I done it, Owen? Do I really have a lever on you?”
Owen snapped, “What do you want?”
“The sound carries, remember.” Jim stopped to think for a moment. “Owen, I think I’ve been a pretty good attorney general, and I think I could do an even better job if certain parties would take all their weight and push it around elsewhere. I want this leash off my neck.”
Owen looked grim. “I didn’t put it there.”
“But you have pull with the people who did. You’re one of their star players.”
“I can’t cross them, Jim. You know that.”
Jim shrugged. “Well, you could always step down, I suppose.”
“I can’t do that either.”
Jim was resolute. “I’m giving you a choice, Owen.”
TOM HARRIS GRABBED the Hampton County Star from his front porch and stepped inside to the smell of hot biscuits, eggs, hash browns, bacon, the works.
“What’s new?” asked Marshall.
“Oh, quite a bit,” said Tom, perusing the front page.
It was Friday morning, it had been a week like no other week, and the core group, the central players, were gathered in Tom’s house for a big breakfast, just to be together: Ben and Bev Cole, Mark and Cathy Howard, Marshall and Kate Hogan, and Tom. Just Tom. If social worker Irene Bledsoe had heard of all the shake-up, she wasn’t saying, and so far she wasn’t returning Tom’s calls.
Ben asked, “Any speeches from the ACFA boys about the court’s decision?”
“Kind of a moot point now anyway,” said Mark. “The lawsuit’s been dropped. It’s all over.”
“Too bad,” Tom quipped. “I was scheduled to give a deposition next week. Now I’ll miss out on the wonderful experience.”
“But it ain’t over, not yet,” said Bev. “I mean, we’re talking ’bout a big investigation here. We’re talking ’bout some arrests!”
Marshall smiled a weak smile and shook his head. “Probably not.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Sometimes I wonder . . .”
Mark asked, “Well, the authorities are going to look into this?”
“My FBI friend John Harrigan doesn’t think so. There are cases and there are cases. Some you go after, some you don’t. A thing like this is . . . well, such a big can of worms; there’s so much of it going on in so many places, and you can’t arrest everybody.”
“Hey, listen to this,” said Tom. “Here’s a quote from Gordon Jefferson. There’s even a picture of him here, standing outside the courtroom . . .”
“Wait,” said Ben. “I want to sit down.”
Tom read the quote from the ACFA lawyer. “‘We sincerely regret this monumental breach of justice and of the rights of children everywhere. The clock of progress has been set back severely by this ruling. Had the court ruled in favor of the child, this lawsuit could have continued, and we could have fought against the scourge of religious bigotry and intolerance against our children. Mrs. Brandon wishes me to share her deep regrets and her thanks with all her supporters everywhere, and to express her heartfelt dream that the fight for our children will continue. For now, she has asked, and we have agreed, to drop the suit, pick up the pieces, and go on with our lives as best we can.’”
Kate was appalled. “What a pile of lies!”
“But what great PR!” said Marshall. “Official ACFA policy: No matter what happens, come out the hero!”
“Let me see that,” came a voice from the kitchen. Tom handed the paper to Lucy Brandon herself as she came into the room. She perused the story and just shook her head. “I dropped that suit on Tuesday, before that hearing!” She passed the paper on to Ben and said angrily, “But they’ll never tell, will they?”
Tom remarked, “Wayne Corrigan and I were wondering why Ames and Jefferson gave us such dirty looks. They knew the suit was dropped!”
“But they still wanted that ruling,” said Marshall. “Every little step helps.”
“Well to be honest,” said Mark, “I think they did just fine. The judges handed down some pretty strict guidelines.”
Ben searched through the paper glumly. “Nothing more about Joey and Carol Parnell.”
Bev put her hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Ben, you just got your job back. Don’t go chasing another phony suicide. Leave that for the Claytonville cops.”
But Ben was obviously frustrated. “I’m having a hard time being patient with all the inaction I’m seeing!”
“I should have warned you about this part,” said Marshall. “It’s tough to get action out of the authorities when the case is so vague and untraceable . . . and when the authorities are part of the problem.”
Ben passed the paper to Marshall, still fuming. “Well, this is one authority who’s going to earn his pay. There has to be a way to stop them!”
Marshall skimmed the first few pages and then smiled. “I think we did.”
“No, we didn’t! There’s been no investigation, no arrests, not even truthful reporting in the papers about what really happened. We all know the kinds of things these people are getting away with!”
“Oh . . . we hurt them, Ben. We hurt them. We won this round.” Marshall passed the paper to Kate. “And . . . well, I think we stand a good chance of recovering our POW’s too.”
“Josiah and Ruth?” asked Tom.
Marshall nodded. “Stomp a mole in your yard, you’ve killed your neighbor’s mole too. We’ll see.”
“What about our MIA?” asked Kate.
“Sally . . .” said Marshall. The thought was painful.
“What did Harrigan say?”
Marshall hesitated a little on that one. “That’s a tough situation. Khull and his people were apparently in the middle of some Satanic ritual in Goring’s basement when the feds got there. They had to have had a victim, but there was no sign of Sally, and Khull isn’t talking. The only thing they found was Sally’s letters. She could have escaped, or maybe the Satanists—Khull and his bunch—killed her and disposed of the body before the feds got there. We just don’t know.”
Tom grew very somber. “We owe her everything. She’s just got to be alive somewhere.”
“We’re gonna be prayin’ for that gal, that’s for sure,” said Bev.
“And I want to meet her,” said Tom. “After reading all her letters, I feel like I know her. No. I do know her.”
“An incredible woman,” said Kate.
“That she was,” said Marshall.
JUST OUTSIDE CLAYTONVILLE, a housepainter pulled his battered, laddered van to the side of the highway and let off a hitchhiker. “Sure I can’t drive you further? You’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Thank you, no,” said Sally Roe.
She remained there on the highway shoulder, a very tired, dirty, bedraggled vagabond in jeans, soiled blue jacket, and checkered scarf, watching the old van pull away, its rocker arms clacking, its exhaust pipe blowing smoke, its springs sagging under all the ladders and paint cans.
She felt just like that van. Her face was etched with the miles, her soul was weary from the pain, her body was bruised and dented from the abuse. But . . . she was still rolling, still chuggi
ng along, and at least now she had a good reason.
She crossed the highway as soon as she got the chance and ducked into the woods, following an old, rutted, surveying road she’d visited in the darkness of night . . . When was that? It seemed like years ago. She almost wondered if it was the same road, it looked so different in the daylight—inviting, peaceful, canopied in the fresh, new-growth green of spring, and not at all the horrifying, demon-infested hell it was the last time she was here.
She walked for some distance, following the meandering, rising, and dipping road through thick forest, tangled brush, and low-hanging limbs. She didn’t remember it being this far. Perhaps she’d missed a turn somewhere. Maybe she’d hidden that truck a little too well.
Oh! There, through the limbs and leaves, she caught a familiar blue tint. Well! Still there!
MOTA AND SIGNA stood next to the old Chevy pickup, hands on swords, eyes alert, waiting for her arrival. Their warriors had closely guarded that machine since Sally left it there. The kids on dirt bikes, the hikers, the equestrians, and any would-be vandals had all passed it by, so it remained untouched, slightly overgrown with brush, but ready to roll.
SALLY PUSHED THROUGH the new growth, pulling the keys from her jacket pocket. The door opened with its familiar groan; the smell of the cab was the same; she still remembered to avoid that small rip in the seat lest it grow longer. Her heart danced a little. This old truck was a blessing because it was familiar, it was hers, it was a piece of home.
It moaned a bit, hesitated, cranked over a few times, and then, with Sally’s well-practiced pumping of the gas pedal—something that had to be done just right—it lurched to life!
Mota and Signa gave her a push, and with little difficulty she got the truck turned around. The two warriors hopped into the back, and they were all on their way back to Bacon’s Corner.
CHAPTER 46
“I WOULD LIKE to know the real reason why I’m being fired,” Irene Bledsoe demanded.
Piercing the Darkness Page 55