by Pamela Hart
Because of the horseshoe shape of the seating, I had a great view of Carter’s group. I was more interested in Patience than the others. She sang and clapped and listened with the others, but when Winchester talked about prosperity and abundance, there was a slight frown on her face, an expression, not exactly of doubt, but of reserve. As though she’d like to be convinced, but wasn’t.
She looked up as if she felt my eyes on her and smiled involuntarily as she saw me. My heart lifted and I smiled back. Patience blinked and looked away, but shot a couple of glances at me as the sermon went on. I tried to look respectful but I suspected that she saw through me, because when I sneaked a peek there was a tiny quirk to her mouth.
After the service I slipped out quickly and made my way to the end of the enormous parking lot where I had stashed my car for a smooth getaway. If I lingered, I’d have to talk to the Carters and Stephenson, and if they asked me what I’d thought of the service I’d have told them, and then they’d never have spoken to me again.
But as I was unlocking my car, Patience ran up, panting. ‘What did you think?’
Maybe I could have schmoozed Stephenson if I’d really tried, but I couldn’t lie to Patience.
‘I saw your face during the prosperity sermon,’ I said. ‘And I have just one thing to say to you: Matthew 19:24.’ The Bible verse about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Her face turned to stone. None of us like having our worst fears laid bare.
‘You said you believed in God,’ she whispered.
‘I do. But Amos Winchester isn’t God.’
She turned and ran. Poor Patience. Being a teenager is hard enough without having to cope with dodgy theology. I remembered how intense I’d been about religion at her age—full of desire to be good, full of anger about the hypocrisy of adults. Not my parents. My parents are many, many things, but hypocrites they’re not. That’s why I can deal with their sometimes difficult attitudes. They live by them, and try their very best to help everyone they meet. But Patience … poor Patience.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sunday afternoon was Annie’s daughter Ruby’s eighth birthday party. Jim, Annie’s husband, is a ranger at Lane Cove National Park, so that’s where the birthday party was. He’s Indigenous—a Dharug man of the Eora nation—and runs courses in bush tucker and Indigenous Art at the park. I was born on Dharug land, in Parramatta hospital, and so was Jim, only two days earlier, which forms a weird kind of bond between us. Also, his twin sister Elsie and I had been friends since kinder—that’s how he’d met Annie.
‘Hey, cuz.’ He greeted me with a hug.
‘Hey.’ I hugged him back. Jim was the hottest guy I’d ever met. Like one of those firefighters they get to do the calendars. But he was so lovely that, after a while, the hotness wore off and all you could feel for him was a vast affection. Besides, he was a double brother to me, via both Elsie and Annie.
‘Hi, Aunty Poppy!’ Ruby and Miles and Peter, Annie and Jim’s kids, ran up and hugged me. I gave Ruby her present—a stuffed purple dragon.
‘Oh, she’s so cool!’ She sat on the ground to investigate it straight away.
Miles started to tell me about the party. ‘Fairy bread! Party pies! Games!’
Peter is only four, and resents the fact that Miles is my godson, so he attached himself to my leg and started talking about dinosaurs. ‘I like T-Rex best!’ he announced.
‘Everyone likes T-Rex best!’ Miles said, scornful as only a big brother can be.
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I like parasaurolophus best.’ True. The boys were silenced for a fabulous moment by my unexpected knowledge of dinosaurs (very experienced aunty, here) and their mother swooped in, dragged Ruby off the ground and sent them all off to greet the arriving guests.
‘I need someone to set out the food,’ she told me. Properly marshalled, I went to get the sausage rolls from the cook.
The party was at the café in the national park—a beautiful setting overlooking the Lane Cove River, surrounded by the tallest of gum trees. Only one drawback: the local birds are convinced that any food on any table is theirs. And when a raven or kookaburra decides it wants your fairy bread, it gets it.
So all the eating was done inside the café, but after the song was sung and the cake cut, the kids piled outside and were set to classic party games by Alex and his partner Rick, with help from me and Annie. Three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races, bobbing for apples … Very appropriate for a historian’s child. And fun.
Afterwards, Annie, Alex, Rick and I collapsed on chairs and had a cold drink while the small people ran around screaming, working off the sugar hit. Jim supervised down by the river to make sure no one drowned.
Alex and Rick are a study in contrasts. Alex is six foot three, with thick bright red hair and green eyes, and looks like an extra in Outlander—those Scottish highlander genes are strong. Rick is tall, too, but slender and dark, with big brown eyes and light brown skin; he says he has Persian and Italian ancestry as well as Anglo, but both so far back that it unfortunately doesn’t count in terms of dual citizenship. They draped over each other in comfortable affection.
‘Tell us a story, Poppy,’ Rick said, as he always did when things were happening in my life.
I complied with a commentary on Radiant Joy Church. I had them in stitches parodying Winchester’s sermon, trying to wash the bad taste he’d left in my mouth away with laughter. It didn’t work. I felt off-kilter, out of sorts.
‘He’s the gay one, right?’ Rick said.
Astonished, I sat up and stared at him. ‘Amos Winchester? Surely not.’
‘We did a thing with them when their choir wanted to sing the Messiah last Easter.’ Rick plays timpani for the Sydney Symphony. ‘The symphony lent them a few people. I swear he was giving me the once-over.’
‘Rick’s gaydar is the best in the business,’ Alex said, ruffling Rick’s hair. ‘And you know what those right-wing preachers are like. Always being caught with rent boys in seedy motels.’
Annie pursed her lips. ‘Maybe he killed Julieanne. Her gaydar was pretty good too.’
But I just couldn’t believe that. Winchester and rent boys? No, and no, and no. Not because he couldn’t be gay. But because Amos Winchester was very, very smart, and very, very much in control. If he was having sex with a man, it would be with a man who had just as much to lose as he did. And, frankly, I suspected he was sincere in his beliefs. If he was gay, he was probably celibate.
But would he, or someone else in the church, kill to prevent an accusation? He didn’t have a convenient wife to contradict it. Come to think of it, he’d never been married, which was odd for a man in his position.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Whoever killed Julieanne really hated her, and Winchester wouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of hating her.’
What a horrible sentence. A horrible thought. It made me feel unclean.
‘What I don’t understand,’ Annie said, ‘is why Julieanne was trying for preselection with Australian Family.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine a party she’d fit into less. Why not as an independent? Why not as a Green—they have a good chance, too, and she’d be right up their alley. She’s done good work in rehabilitating dig sites back to native habitats.’
None of us could answer that, but it did make me think. Julieanne had approached Carter at his electoral office, but I didn’t know when—was that part of a long-term plan? No one could have predicted that a sitting MP would have a heart-attack hump and create an opportunity via a by-election. Maybe she’d identified that Australian Family was missing members in her demographic? Or had it been pure short-term opportunism? None of it made sense.
After the birthday party was cleared up, I decided to go to six o’clock Mass and let the comfort of ritual, the ordered, calm process of the Eucharist, ease my mind. No one asked me for enthusiasm at St Brendan’s, but I was expected to be reverent and that,
I realised, was what I had missed most at Radiant Joy.
And when I went home and let myself in and my mother said, ‘Have you been to church?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I went to six o’clock’, as I might have done at Patience’s age, I felt clean, and restored to some kind of balance.
My father said, ‘Your dinner’s in the oven’, so I sat down and ate lamb chops and mashed potato and then I went to bed and slept better than my sister’s baby.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Monday
The next morning, we started at nine at the museum and worked solidly through the schedule. I needed Tol for the interviews. Now that Julieanne was dead, he was the only archaeologist we had on film at the house dig. So at morning tea, after we’d shot all the pieces in the vault, I left Terry and Dave setting up the lights in Gerry’s office and went in search of him.
Tol’s office was one of those small, untidy spaces given to temporary staff—corners full of odd equipment there was nowhere else to put, old posters from long-past exhibitions fraying on the wall, dents in the filing cabinet drawers from frequent moving. Overlaid on the slightly grimy standard museum effects was essence of Tol: a trowel tossed onto a side table; his leather jacket hanging on his chair; a clutch of pottery sherds in the middle of the desk; three takeaway coffee cups in the bin; a fez perched on top of the hatstand. But no Tol. Then a step behind me and the slight scent of something male.
I turned, my heart beating as though I’d been caught in a burglary. ‘Hi,’ I said, trying for insouciance, ‘ready for your interview?’
He smiled at me, but his brows twitched together at the last word. ‘Interview?’
‘Didn’t Annie tell you? For the program we were shooting at the house.’
He didn’t look pleased. ‘I don’t like doing interviews,’ he said. It was a flat tone of voice with very little room for manoeuvre.
I wasn’t going to beg him. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can hold a séance and interview Julieanne.’
He flinched and I immediately felt guilty. She had been his girlfriend, after all.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But—’
He sighed, a tad melodramatically, I thought. ‘All right. Let’s get it over with.’
He was grouchy all through the preparation, through the lighting set-up, the sound test, signing the release for Mirha the PA, acting like we were going to torture him. Then, as I sat down opposite him and gave Terry the sign to start filming, he smiled into my eyes and proceeded to give an impersonation of the loveliest, most charming, most interesting archaeologist in the world.
I wanted to slap him. Then he made me laugh with an outrageous joke about skeletons—the kind of joke that six-year-olds would love—and I wanted to kiss him. I flushed and frowned, but even Terry and Dave were grinning.
‘What do you like best about archaeology?’ I asked. The last question on my list.
Tol paused. All his other answers had been glib, rolling off his tongue with practised ease. This one he really thought about. I was expecting something profound, something philosophical, something inspiring.
‘Walls,’ he said. ‘I really like finding walls.’ He smiled at me with genuine warmth, offering me this insight into his soul, and God help me, I couldn’t help but smile back.
‘That’s it,’ I said.
Terry snapped the lights off with the usual effect of turning off the sun. We sat blinking for a moment while our eyes adjusted.
‘Walls?’ I asked.
Tol shrugged. ‘That’s why I don’t much like colonial archaeology. Hardly any walls worth finding.’
But in Jordan there were lots of lovely old walls buried deep, just waiting to be uncovered.
‘Some good news,’ Tol offered. ‘We can get back into the house tomorrow. And I went out to Sydney Uni the other day and recruited a bone expert who can identify the bones definitively for us. If they are fat-tailed sheep, we’ll know tomorrow.’
‘A bone expert?’
He shrugged. ‘A mate of mine. It’ll save you a lot of time.’
He was nice. Considerate. Funny. But there were no interesting walls in Sydney.
Terry and Dave left to set up in Annie’s office. Mirha followed them. Tol stood and I lingered, both of us unsure what to say.
‘Uh—see you tomorrow, I guess,’ he said at last.
‘Sure. Yeah. Tomorrow.’ I sounded like a zombie in a bad horror flick. Then he smiled at me again, but I thought, Walls, walls, and kept a proper demeanour.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said with much more assurance. ‘We’ll be there at eight-thirty.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll be there at nine. After I’ve had my coffee.’
In the doorway, Mirha cleared her throat and showed me the shooting schedule for the afternoon. ‘Terry says how about lunch after we set up, and then knock this over fast?’
‘Good idea,’ I said. Would Tol ask me to lunch?
‘I’ve got a meeting with Annie,’ he said, half-apologetically. ‘See you tomorrow.’
I knew about that meeting. Annie had emailed me—she wanted Tol to take over from Julieanne, at least temporarily. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to agree or not. If he was going back to Jordan eventually, better for my peace of mind if he went soon.
I rang Stuart as soon as Tol was out of the room and arranged to meet him at the Newtown cinema after work for an arty French film he’d been wanting to see. And then, while Terry was filming the bits and pieces of finds, I sat down and googled Amos Winchester again. This time I went through the information I found with an investigative eye. Could he be gay?
He’d always been single.
He’d never been involved in any scandal involving a woman.
And, most shocking of all, he’d never been quoted, so far as I could find, saying that homosexuality was evil. He’d said a lot about marriage being between one man and one woman. Oh, yes. Quite a lot. But it was always couched as ‘the foundation of society’, ‘the real kind of family’ and so on. At no time did he ever say that gay people would burn in hell.
He said that about paedophiles. He said it about adulterers. He even said it about apostates. But not gay or lesbian people. Which was almost unbelievable.
His co-preachers, including Matthew Carter, had put themselves on the record as saying that only heterosexual sex was blessed by God. But not Winchester.
I read interview after interview. I watched several sermons from the church’s website. Any time he was asked about LGBTQ+ matters, he turned the answer into a statement about family values. It looked as though he was answering, but he wasn’t. Not once.
I was filled with a fresh and poignant admiration for him, as well as a deep and sickening disapproval. He’d clearly pulled off one of the great sleights of hand. His congregation believed, implicitly, that he would condemn homosexuality. Of course he would. They probably all believed that he had. But he hadn’t. Never. Instead, he’d left the LGBTQ+ members of his community to hang in the wind, the target of everyone else in the church.
It was brilliantly done. It was disgusting. To collaborate with the bigots who would be happy to tar and feather gay people … There was a degree of self-hatred there that was both awful and pathetic.
I had to ask him.
Face to face.
The movie didn’t start until seven-thirty. I checked that the film crew didn’t need me, and then I ran out to my car and rang the Radiant Joy offices and made a quick appointment with Winchester.
‘He’ll be at the church,’ the receptionist told me. ‘Supervising the installation of new lighting.’
The church parking lot was quiet, except for some tradies’ utes and a couple of vans parked with reckless disregard across the disabled parking bays.
I went into the church and found my way to the—I realised I was thinking about it as the ‘arena’. It didn’t feel like a church to me, especially empty of everyone but Winchester, a couple of flunkies, and the men putting up the new lights.
He saw me come in
and smiled benignly at me, motioning me to a seat in the front row and joining me there.
‘Miss McGowan.’
I really wanted to say, ‘It’s Ms McGowan,’ but I didn’t. No need to antagonise him just yet. We sat. He was still smiling benignly. Could he possibly think I had come to him for spiritual guidance? Well, why not? I’d come to service, hadn’t I? I’d told them my family supported their values. I could work with that.
‘Pastor, service was very interesting.’
He nodded, still smiling.
‘But I did want to ask you a couple of questions.’ I took a deep breath. ‘What is your position on homosexuality?’
He launched into the spiel I’d already heard or read several times about the man–woman family. I let him talk himself out.
‘But that doesn’t say anything about homosexuality, pastor. Just about what a family should be.’
His eyes sharpened, and his hands, loosely held in his lap, tightened. ‘It’s not my job to condemn people, Poppy.’ Oh, smooth as honey.
‘But you’ve condemned paedophiles. And adulterers. You’ve said they’re going to Hell. What about gay people? Are they going to Hell?’
‘That’s up to the Lord.’
‘But what do you think? Do you think that being gay is a sin?’
He looked over his shoulder at the lighting men, and pretended to see one waving at him. ‘Oh, I think I’d better just go—’
‘My friend Rick says you’re gay,’ I said baldly. ‘He’s met you. He’s very gay, and his gaydar is excellent.’