“When was the last time you talked to her?”
The kid thought about that. “Forevs ago. May, I think, when the air conditioner crapped out.”
So at least I could cross one thing off my list.
I went to the second property, which looked a little bit neglected—the grass was long but also matted and brown. The windows didn’t have curtains, and the view from the front porch showed an empty space with glossy wooden floors.
There was a notice stuck to the front door, a bright orange rectangle from Toledo Edison that advised YOUR ELECTRIC SERVICE IS SCHEDULED TO BE DISCONNECTED ON OCTOBER 10, which had come and gone.
I went around to the back of the house, past a tangled mess of bushes and three empty trash cans. The long driveway terminated in a carport, under which a white Chevy Lumina was parked. I glanced in: a mess of clothes and shoes and fast-food wrappers and soda bottles, most notably from a Marco’s sub and a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew.
* * *
I watched the house for two hours before anything good happened.
At least I made good use of my time—I found home addresses for Constance Archer-Nash and Barry Newsome, since I had yet to connect with either of them, and I did some digging re: the Keystone Fellowship.
It was a modern-looking church with a logo in a handwritten script at the top of its website to show how hip it was. The site also featured a lot of photos of smiling white twentysomethings in matching neon shirts, doing various good works in the community such as descending en masse upon a food bank and posing for pictures with dented cans of stewed tomatoes.
The website was an elaborate network of overlapping groups: home churches, lifegroups, worship streams. In the News section I found a picture of the dirt mound where Keir Metcalf had met with Scooter, the guy in the red pickup, on my first night in Toledo. Breaking ground on our new multimillion-dollar Fellowship campus!
“Damn,” I said to myself.
I found Joel Creedle’s face on the Elders page. The photo showed him with the twins, Preston and Porter, and a tall but dainty-looking woman in a white dress.
Aiden and his sister were not present.
The text accompanying the picture read: I am a husband and father of two kids, serving as lead pastor of Keystone Christian Fellowship, which is a house church planting ministry. My wife is Nadine, and my kids are Preston and Porter. We’re all involved in this wonderful Christian community, growing together as God uses us to bless others. Nadine serves in our Women’s Ministry and is a horticulture expert at Bloom. Preston and Porter (the twins, as we call them) seek to lead their own home churches someday.
I’ve been a member of the Fellowship since I was in college. I had recently come to faith in Christ and left the party lifestyle to follow Him. I have served in this group from the days it was a small Bible study and watched it grow into a church of almost 2,000 people, made up of nearly 300 house churches across Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Unlike a lot of home church networks, we have an eldership and weekly worship meetings too.
I clicked on the Beliefs tab and felt my eyes narrow. Despite the modern look of things, this church was evangelical in nature:
We believe that the Bible is the Word of God, without error, and is the final authority on faith and life.
We believe that marriage is a purposeful union between one man and one woman that exists for God’s glory as a picture of the covenant between Christ and His bride, the Church. God has commanded that no sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman.
I was naturally suspicious of organized religion. But did any of this have anything to do with Rebecca Newsome’s death?
Finally, the white Lumina backed out of the driveway.
Aiden was at the wheel, still wearing the black hoodie. I followed at a safe distance and we headed out of the neighborhood and to the west. As we drove, I realized that I had been this way before, just last night; he eventually pulled to a stop half a block away from Joel Creedle’s house.
He got out and stood on the street, hands balled into fists.
I watched as he took a few steps toward the house, turned around, muttered something, got back in the car, got out again, lather, rinse, repeat. He seemed to be trying to talk himself into something, or out of it.
I wanted to see what would happen between the two of them. Hopefully it would be a conversation that I could overhear and not, for example, a murder. But in the end Joel Creedle came out of the big house and got into a blue Audi and drove away.
Aiden gave his stepdad a head start, then followed.
I did the same.
* * *
The three of us got on the outerbelt and then picked up 75 going north. Aiden wasn’t a bad tail; he was maybe one car length closer than I would have been, but the Audi seemed oblivious. That told me that perhaps Joel Creedle hadn’t seen the car before—maybe it was a recent acquisition—or that he was very much expecting his stepson to be safely away at boarding school in Michigan.
As we continued to head north, I started to wonder if that’s where we were going. But as the sun began to set through my driver’s-side window, we went into the Detroit metropolitan area, past the warehouses of Delray and the eternal construction of the interstate on the Michigan line.
But after going through the space-age tunnel that ran below the convention center, the train led by Joel Creedle hooked left on Washington Avenue and away from the river. It was getting harder to follow now—the early start to rush-hour traffic in downtown Detroit clogged the streets. I hung back and got caught at a red light at Fort Street while Joel Creedle and Aiden turned left. “Dammit,” I muttered. I turned off the radio—why did that always seem to help a person concentrate in traffic?—and squinted in the sun and up the block as Aiden’s distinctive taillights, oblong and slitted like the eyes of a snake, turned right at the next intersection and disappeared.
When my light turned green, I made the turn as well and slowly approached the intersection where Aiden had turned. I no longer saw his taillights. But I was on the same block as the St. Clair Club.
* * *
The Audi was nowhere to be found—maybe Creedle had opted for the valet service—but as I passed Lafayette, I saw Aiden’s taillights, illegally parked in a bus lane.
I drove up another block, pulled a tight U-turn as quickly as I could, and headed back toward the St. Clair Club. I found a parking spot on the opposite side of the street from Aiden so that both he and the club were to my left.
Checking the binoculars again, I saw Aiden digging around in his backseat for something. Then he got out of the car and, shrugging into a white button-down shirt, ran toward the St. Clair Club, stopped just short of it, and seemingly disappeared in the time it took for a bus to drive past the building.
As I got closer, I saw a narrow alley cutting to the back of the red brick building. A service entrance? Two men were standing next to a doorway, smoking, and they watched me warily.
“Hi,” I said, “did you just see a kid in a white shirt come through here?”
One of the smokers stared at me with cold eyes. He had longish fingernails, either a guitar player or a pervert. He didn’t say anything.
Did Aiden work here? It seemed unlikely, but I tried, “Is there an employee here named Aiden? Sixteen, blond hair?”
“We got cheese that’s sixteen years old, maybe,” the other guy said. He had a thick beard and eyebrows like caterpillars. “But no employees.”
“So no one came through this way.”
I could tell that neither of them could care less. “The main entrance is back that way,” the pervert said.
“Right, thanks.”
Aiden was a sixteen-year-old kid, so maybe the service entrance was his only way into an establishment such as this. But I was an adult lady, which meant I could go through the front.
CHAPTER 14
I hurried back to the vehicle and found the pair of black corduroys I had thought to put in my compute
r bag yesterday.
I looked around; cars idled at the traffic signal in front of me, but no one appeared to be paying any attention. Detroit had no doubt seen stranger things than a woman changing her pants in the wayback of a Range Rover, so I took off my boots and got to it.
The suited doorman greeted me with madam once again. The lipsticked hostess from last night—or another just like her—nodded at me. “Good afternoon, madam, do you have a reservation?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, we don’t have any available tables.”
I smiled right back at this infuriating person. There was always some reason that I could not gain access to the St. Clair Club. “Could I have a seat at the bar, then?”
“Of course.”
Finally, I was allowed to enter the inner sanctum. The restaurant was roughly the size of an airplane hangar and just about as noisy as one too. Every linen-clothed table and stately dining chair was full. My hostess friend carried a menu that resembled a leather-bound photo album, but I didn’t need to look at it to know that this was the type of place that served six cuts of steak and one salmon entrée and the rest of the menu was a wine list. There appeared to be plenty of wine being consumed at the tables that we passed on the way to the bar, which ran along the right wall of the restaurant and sported a gold-veined mirror behind the tin-soldier formation of liquor bottles.
The hostess placed the menu down at a seat on the end, smiled again—or still?—and said, “Enjoy your meal.”
I looked at the room’s reflection in the mirror. The servers all wore white button-down shirts and black pants. Some of them looked like they had worked here for decades. The lighting was low, and the tables offered flickering candles in translucent blue orbs, so everything was soft-focus and vaguely dreamy. The patrons were mostly men, mostly in their middle fifties and wearing sports coats. Some of them had second wives with them. Some were possibly on to their thirds. But I didn’t see Joel Creedle among them, and I didn’t see Aiden, either.
I flagged down a bartender, who turned out to be the caterpillar-eyebrows guy from the alley, and ordered a whiskey and Coke—I needed to keep my wits about me.
“We meet again,” the bartender said. “I see you found the front after all.”
“I did, thanks. What even is this place?”
This question confounded him. “It’s … the St. Clair Club.”
“Yes, I know, but what exactly is that?”
He was clearly offended that I didn’t know what the St. Clair Club was. “Detroit’s first, and oldest, social club,” he advised. “Founded in 1896, and we’ve hosted the likes of Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, Empress Zita of Austria, Edward G. Robinson, and, once, Madonna.”
“Wow.”
“It was built in the Romanesque Revival style, and beautifully restored just last year.”
I sipped my drink and went back to studying the mirror.
“So you’re new here, then.”
“You could say that.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a dental hygienist. Do you know all the members?”
“I don’t know about all.”
“Most?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know a man named Creedle?”
He squinted. “Creedle? No.”
I showed him a photo of Rebecca. “You ever see her in here?”
“You ask a lot of questions for a dental hygienist.” But he looked at the image and shook his head. “Sorry.”
I finally spotted Aiden on the other side of the room. He was lurking near a ficus, conspicuously idle. He appeared to be scanning the room too, and without success.
Aiden went through the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. I left a twenty on the bar and went back out into the lobby, down the steps, and around the corner into the alley. The guy with the long nails was still back there, smoking another cigarette and scrolling through his phone.
He looked at me like I had two heads. “What are you doing?”
I said, “Ten bucks if I can go in this way.”
He shrugged and held out a hand, and he stepped away from the door when I slapped my ten-dollar bill into it.
Compared to the size of the dining room, the kitchen was tiny. The air was hot and heavy with grease and the smell of meat in various states of doneness. A small hallway ran behind the kitchen wall, with two offices and two unisex restrooms on the other side. There was a small porthole-like window in the center of the wall that looked into the cooking area, presumably so that a boss person could keep an eye on the staff while in the office. The glass was greasy, but I could still see through it. Amid the bustling activity, shouted orders, and flaming grills, I saw no sign of Aiden.
At the end of the hallway, I could go to the right—into the literal fire—or to the left, which offered an elevator and an order-entry terminal that had a bouncing blue diamond as its screensaver and a long strand of receipt paper dangling from the machine like an untied shoelace. I lifted it up and tried to read it, but the printer was nearly out of toner and had rendered a day’s worth of orders as faint grey lines.
I turned my attention to the elevator. The row of indicator lights above the sliding doors showed that the car was currently on the seventh floor. I checked the tiny kitchen again but still didn’t see Aiden. So if he wasn’t in the kitchen, and he didn’t leave through the service entrance, maybe he went up to one of the guest rooms?
The elevator had buttons for floors three, four, five, and six. Two apparently didn’t exist, and seven’s button was a long white oval that said PENTHOUSE. I pushed it, then hit the one that made the doors close before anybody saw me.
This particular elevator was out of sync with the feel of the St. Clair Club—rickety, slow, and drably industrial. When it opened on the seventh floor, I found myself in a utility room with housekeeping carts and a dumbwaiter stuffed with rolls of toilet paper. I stepped out of the elevator and listened, but the small room was quiet except for the rattling of a vent in the ceiling.
Next I opened the door a crack and listened again—nothing.
I opened the door further and stuck my head out. The hallway was carpeted in thick blue with taupe-colored walls and dark wood wainscoting. Framed photos and newspaper articles hung in ornate frames. There were two doors, marked PH1 and PH2, and the guest elevator at the end of the empty hallway.
I stepped out of the utility room and crept over to PH1. I could hear low voices murmuring inside, unintelligible. PH2 was quiet.
The area in front of the elevators was also empty.
I glanced at the framed newspaper articles on the walls. HISTORIC DOWNTOWN CLUB GETS A NEW LEASE ON LIFE, a headline said. Thanks to investments from regional titans like Ford, Marathon Oil, and General Dynamics, the long-defunct St. Clair Club is getting a top-to-bottom renovation.…
A fascinating trip down memory lane that didn’t tell me anything about what Joel Creedle and Aiden were doing in this place.
I tried to go back into the utility room, but the door had locked behind me.
“Fuck.” I yanked on the lever, frustrated, then mad at myself for forgetting to be stealthily silent.
I crossed the hallway to the door to PH1 and listened.
The murmuring voices had stopped.
The strip of light in the crack between the bottom of the door and the plush carpet suddenly went dim as someone stepped in front of it. I dropped to a crouch and crab-walked away from the door and hopefully out of the peephole’s fish-eye view.
A voice said something—the doors here must have been soundproofed, because I still couldn’t tell what it was. The shadow lifted from the light at the foot of the door.
I stayed where I was, clocking the locations of the security cameras in the hallway. If the staff of the club was watching them, I’d look pretty suspicious. Maybe it would be more natural to loiter in the hallway standing up? I was still debating this point three minutes later, my quads burning, when the door to PH1 opened and
Joel Creedle strode out.
It was my good luck that he didn’t glance toward the end of the hallway where I was lurking awkwardly. Instead, he just headed toward the elevators at the opposite end, pushed the button, and got in.
Whoever had been in there with him stayed in the room.
I unfolded myself and slunk over to the windows. The drapes were blue, and I was wearing black and purple. But maybe there was a way to blend in. Then I felt the floor vibrate faintly as the service elevator came back up to the seventh floor and the utility room’s door opened.
A man stepped out, black suit, black shirt, earpiece. He looked right at me.
“I think the Wi-Fi is down,” I said, ineffectually waving my phone at the window. “And I can’t get a signal.”
“Ma’am, can you come with me, please?”
No more polite madam for me. My luck had run out.
“I’m—”
He shook his head, cutting me off. His neck was thicker than his jaw, so the effect was owl-like. “This floor is reserved for members and their guests, and we both know you’re neither. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’re leaving.”
There wasn’t really much I could say to that. But I wanted to see who would come out of the penthouse suite, so I tried to stall. “Okay, you’re right. Busted. But it’s harmless, I swear.”
I thought he would ask me what was harmless, but he just stared at me.
“I’m playing a game with some friends, a scavenger hunt—”
From the other end of the hall, the elevator dinged.
I turned to look just in time to see a man disappearing into it.
How had he gotten out of the room without me seeing him?
It dawned on me: “These rooms are connected, aren’t they?”
The security guard didn’t acknowledge that. “You’re trespassing. What happens next is up to you.”
I put my phone away. The St. Clair Club wouldn’t be approving my application to join anytime soon.
The lobby was still empty. Across from the check-in desk was the row of private phone booths, outfitted with a VoIP handset and a LAN hookup. I glanced in each one as the security guard led me toward the door, but they were all empty. I saw no signs of Joel, or Aiden, or the mystery man, and when I got back to Lafayette Street, I saw that Aiden’s car was gone.
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