Her head pounded as if she’d enjoyed a night of revelry and alcohol-infused merriment, but the extremely hung-over feeling, and the matching sour stomach, had had no happy origins.
The long night had been brutal. She flip-flopped between crying about Cam and crying for her mom. When sleep had failed her, she finally got out of bed around five that morning.
Coffee had always provided comfort and smelled so good to her, but that morning she couldn’t even lift the mug to her lips. It seemed as if her hands had become a dead weight. Like a deserted road that no one ever uses to get to their destination, the connection between her brain and whatever motor neurons were supposed to reach the muscle fibers of her hand were now broken down and forsaken. She was spent and completely destroyed.
That Cam would not only pretend to care about her being victimized and injured, but would take part in the plot, hurt her beyond description.
Val had come back to town to take care of the business of death. She had simply needed to get everything done and then head back home to grieve in peace. But people who had their own horrible agenda and possessed no empathy for a dead mother and her daughter had blown that plan to shit.
Val had snuck little Edgar away from the church and through the woods to a small house that was tidy and well kept. Thankfully, the woman who answered was kind and accepting. She’d called the police and offered Val and the boy water while they waited. They sat on a settee that looked like it came from a farm, and the rest of the room was comfortably decorated with things you’d expect a grandmotherly type to have. A white hutch housed her display of china, and a dark-brown throw rug complemented the delicate beige lace curtains that hung in the windows.
Edgar clung to Val and didn’t say much except to repeat that he lived at 44 Crest Drive. Val kept a firm, protective arm around him to let him know that no more bad things would happen to him that night.
Val told the woman a little about why they’d fled the church but kept it rather vague for the sake of the boy. She wasn’t sure how much he understood of what had really happened and didn’t want to make his nightmare worse.
By the look of shock on the woman’s face, she seemed to have no idea what had been going on at The Seeds of Light church. And whether she was prejudiced by the mention of bad things or just motivated to add to the talk, she seemed to know a lot about the church and wasn’t a fan at all. She said it seemed like a strange place, with over-zealous parishioners. She expressed a disdain for the music that drifted through the trees and bothered her peaceful Sundays and evenings and didn’t trust any church that wasn’t “Catholic, Jewish, or any of the other main ones.”
When a police officer arrived, he put them in a squad car and offered to take her to the hospital to get her knee looked at. She declined, so he drove them to the station. In all the years Val had previously lived in Hemlock, she’d never seen the inside of the building. It was very normal looking and what she would expect for a small-town combination city hall and police headquarters. The lobby walls were paneled, and the floor had worn linoleum tiles that were checkered with chocolate-brown and beige. The wood desk matched the paneling, and it all reminded Val of her high school’s main office.
They were led back to an interview room. Edgar looked afraid so Val made small talk with him until an officer came back in, telling them they’d located Edgar’s parents. He said he wanted to get Val’s statement while they waited for Edgar’s parents to arrive.
Val thought the boy had been through enough. She asked to be taken to a different room to make her statement, but Edgar tugged on her hand. He chirped out a “no,” reminding her of a helpless little bird. He looked so small, sitting on the metal interrogation chair, that Val relented.
She told the officer what she’d seen at the church. She told them she’d suspected something was about to happen and that she’d gone there, detailing what she saw and how she made a commotion to stop them from molesting Edgar.
“How did you come to suspect something?” the officer asked.
Val pulled the note out of her pocket. “My mother left this before she died. I figured out what the numbers meant.” She decoded it for him.
“And how did your mother know to write this down?”
Val shrugged. “I don’t know. She was a member of the church and must have found out about it.”
“I’m going to need a copy of that note.”
“Did they arrest them all?” Val said, nervous that Mack might have taken off and was running free.
“The call we responded to was for a fight in the church parking lot.”
“And?”
“We arrested two people.”
“Who? Which ones?”
“Mack and Cam.”
“But they’re all involved in this.” She pointed to Edgar. “All of them.”
“If that’s true, we’ll round up the rest of them. But we have to conduct an investigation first to see what evidence there is.”
*
Val looked down at the coffee mug in her hand, and memories of her mom, always up before she arose, as well as the aroma of freshly brewing java, came back easily. As a child, sometimes she could filter out her mother’s boyfriends as well as the instances when Val was more in the way than not. During those times, she’d fantasized about a world where it was just she and her mom, eating breakfast and planning the day together, with no one waking up later, barking for food, and then slapping her mom on the ass when he sauntered into the kitchen.
Now her mother’s house felt so much emptier than it ever had.
She spent the morning contacting real-estate agents who might be able to take over the listing. Most seemed more interested in why she was dumping Nedra Tobias than asking about Val’s particular needs. She imagined the local realty world would explode when the reigning real-estate agent’s true identity was revealed. They would run out of their open houses and raise their for-sale signs in celebration of the fall of the wicked queen. If Nedra had dominated the town’s housing sales like she intimated, the realtor serfs would rejoice around the village well and individually plan the siege of her castle.
Val hadn’t felt good about any of the agents, so she gave up on Hemlock and made some calls to realtors in the towns to the south. She finally found one who asked the right questions and didn’t care about the queen and her queendom. Val made an appointment to meet with her the next day.
Val had spent the last hour or so on the phone and not thinking about Cam. But the respite brought her only slight relief because, as soon as finished her last call, her stomach went stale and she was back in the sadness she’d woken up with.
She walked slowly back into the kitchen. Her ribs were finally feeling better, but the gash she’d received at the church burned hot in her joint. She’d fashioned a butterfly bandage to close the skin, and it was holding pretty well, but the sum of the cuts and bruises on every rib, her knees, and her forehead hurt only a fraction as much as the pain she felt at Cam’s betrayal.
Val leaned over the sink and grabbed a sponge to clean the coffee pot.
Cam was the pariah of Hemlock. Shouldn’t that have been a clue?
Mr. Harlin liked Cam, though. He was her chief supporter. But he only knew her from her candy deliveries. What did he know about who she really was? He didn’t venture out much, and what could he really learn about her if he saw her in only one particular context?
She scrubbed the inside of the glass pot, talking out loud to no one. “You had this all thought out, didn’t you, Cam? The whole ‘let me help you figure out the clues’ routine deserves a standing ovation. The way you figured out what the catapult thing was…genius, Cam. And I have to hand it to Donna for trying to convince me I should stay away from you. I have to admit the pitiful fact that your reverse-psychology shit really worked on me, didn’t it?
“And Cam, your whole performance was truly award winning. Tell me, how did you keep such a straight face when I told you about getting beaten up? How easy was i
t to tell me you liked me, huh?”
She pushed the sponge harder and harder into the coffee pot as she counted off the things Cam had said to her.
“Why don’t you come by and I’ll make you some special chocolate turtles?” Val said, plunging the sponge into the pot. “Oh, and ‘I’m glad you’re glad that I’m gay.’ Christ on a crutch.”
The pot was taking a beating. “‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’” Val remembered Cam’s bogus concern, and added, “‘after being almost gassed to death?’”
But Cam had truly taken her well-acted role too far when they’d made love in Mr. Harlin’s car. When she thought about how vulnerable Cam had made her feel, she thrust her hand back in the pot, punching it so hard it shattered. Pieces of glass exploded in the sink, and she jerked her hand away as she dropped the handle onto the shards.
She rested her elbows on the edge of the sink, her hands dropping in, and began to cry. The ache of betrayal was so intense her chest stung as if a thousand livid bees had attacked her. The debris in the sink became blurry, and she surrendered again to the deluge of tears that needed to come.
“God damn her.” She was now blubbering. “Damn you and fuck you, Cam.”
She cried out, letting her wails release the total and utter indignities she’d been subjected to. Her nose ran and she didn’t care. She wanted to purge every feeling from her body until she had nothing left to cry over. She needed to exorcise the stench of Cam’s duplicity and purge herself of the memories that had once felt so damn good.
“Get out,” she whimpered, repeating and repeating the command until her sobs slowed and her crying stopped.
When the kitchen became quiet again, Val blinked the last of the tears from her eyes.
“Shit,” she said, noticing a fairly significant amount of blood in the sink, pooled around the glass, with streaks that had escaped down the drain. She turned her hand over and saw that two of her knuckles had been sliced. “Shit God damn motherFUCKER,” she yelled, and ripped a few sheets of paper towel off the roll on the counter. She turned to lean her butt against the sink and pressed the towel to her hand.
Her cell phone rang, so she walked over to the dining-room table where she’d left it. Gripping her right hand with paper towels, she leaned over to see the screen. It was from a local number she didn’t recognize. She poked the screen to answer and set it to speakerphone.
“Hello?”
A bland-sounding recording spoke. “An inmate is calling collect from the Hemlock City Jail. To accept, please press ‘one’ on your phone.”
Val froze as a sudden tornado of emotions spun inside her. Anger, betrayal, disappointment, and even desire whirled around like chairs and cars and house parts slamming into her in an Oklahoma storm.
Was she ready to confront her? What would Cam say? Would Val’s mouth even work, or would her throat seize up and strangle any words that she tried to use to describe what was spiraling around deeper inside her?
The message repeated.
She wanted to cry, but she didn’t have any tears left to purge. She reached down and pushed the “end call” button.
Chapter Nineteen
Val finished bandaging her knuckles, though it took forever to get them to stop bleeding. She found some gauze and folded it up in small squares, then taped them onto her knuckles with a few Band-Aids to absorb as much blood as she could.
It was hard for her to bend her fingers, but what the hell did she care?
All she had to do was meet with the new realtor and arrange to have her mother’s things liquidated. In between calls to realtors, she’d found a Portland company that would come out and hold an estate sale for her. They’d take a percentage and send her a check for the rest. That way, she could leave town right away and be done with Hemlock and everyone in it.
She walked into the living room and sat on the couch. Looking around the room, she mentally inventoried what she wanted to take before her mother’s things were dispersed to Lord knows who to be reused or resold or eventually go in the trash.
So, that was about it. Remove any valuables, sell the house, sell the car, and never return to Hemlock.
Oh, and more than likely be available sometime in the future to testify or whatever she’d have to do when a trial was set for the porn-ring group. That meant a return trip.
She imagined it might be a long time before she got her mother’s car back since it was still at Mack’s. With him in jail, she was sure the business was closed or at least not running the way it had.
Maybe she’d have to arrange for a tow truck to pick it up and haul it to some other garage. Or maybe she should just leave it where it sat.
Perhaps she’d tow it to a vacant parking lot and put a sign on it that read For Sale: Deer Accident—Deeply Discounted. Better yet, it should read For Sale: Victim of a Porno Ring, Smashed Up as Bad as My Heart Was.
She could arrange for the car to be picked up without her even setting foot in that horrible place. The thought that the camera was probably still mounted above the toilet disgusted her. That he was targeting children, tempting them to drink all the lemonade they wanted and then recording them…
Val shook her head as if she’d just swallowed a putrid piece of meat.
But would the police find the camera? Surely neither Nedra nor anyone else in that group would reveal its existence. If they did know, they’d definitely get a search warrant and discover the tapes in Mack’s office, then tie them to the horrible things going on at the church.
When she’d spoken to the police, she hadn’t said anything about Cam and her being in the garage. She had left out important details and would probably be charged with withholding evidence, because they had broken in, for God sakes.
She paused at the realization that she’d committed a crime. Of course, she knew she had all along, but now that the others were in jail and Val wanted to spit on all of their graves, she needed to admit that she wasn’t without reproach herself.
She kicked at the leg of the coffee table.
“Cam’s probably already told the police I broke into Mack’s twice,” she said, reasoning aloud because she hoped it would help straighten out this new wrinkle a little. “But something was way off, and I wanted to see what they were doing to my car. And yes, I could have waited until the garage opened to go, but something told me I couldn’t trust anything that was going on.”
She looked up, as if a detective were standing in front of her. “Sure. Yeah, I broke in. But I’m not a frickin’ pervert. I had no idea what they were doing. I just knew that Mack had something to do with the attempts on my life.”
She kicked the leg of the coffee table again. “So I get charged with it, so what.”
But as soon as she said that, her heart jumped. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck!”
Blood was seeping through the bandages around her knuckles. She made a fist, which hurt like hell, but she didn’t give a shit.
Out the dining-room window, the pine trees looked so stoic and serene. She wished she were a child again, standing in the front yard, inhaling the comforting pine scent. As long as that woodsy fragrance surrounded her she would be fine.
But she wasn’t.
A car turned off Coast Highway and she recognized it right away. Mr. Harlin’s Gran Torino pulled up to Val’s house and parked.
Mr. Harlin took his time exiting the car, holding on to the doorframe and then the roof of the car while he closed the door, his movements very deliberate and careful, as if he were anticipating an earthquake. He carried a paper bag as he walked slowly up the walkway, and Val got up from her chair. Her knee was swollen and hurt like a mother, so she walked slowly, opening the door for him as he reached the bottom step.
“Mr. Harlin,” she said.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but could you spare a few minutes?”
Val stood aside to let him in. “Of course.”
She directed him to the table and went to fetch him a cup of tea since she’d just
broken her coffee pot. When she returned, one of the VHS tapes, the metal plate, and the spring from Mack’s garage lay on the table in front of him.
“Thank you,” he said, and took the mug from her. “Cam told me if anything happened to her to take this to the police. The plate and spring, I mean. And the tape,” he said. “There’s only the one there, because I destroyed the other. It had you on it. I watched them until I found you. No one will ever know of its existence.
“That tape there, though,” he pointed to it, “will make you want to throw up, but by God, it’s evidence to take that sinner down.” He nodded toward the table but Val was already staring at the pieces, the first stirrings of anger roiling around in her gut.
“Why are you telling me this?” Val said.
“I think you should do it. Take these things to the police.”
“Why me?”
“Because while you’re there, Cam will want to see you.”
“Why would I do that?”
He looked at her and blinked rapidly in what looked like surprise.
“Mr. Harlin, Cam was in on the whole thing from the beginning—the gas incident here at the house, the beating I got from Mack’s men. Cam pretended not to know anything about all that, but she did know.”
Mr. Harlin tilted his head and gave her the strangest stare. “Cam,” he said slowly. “She got beaten up pretty badly at the church last night. I know the janitor at the jail, and he told me. They’re going to charge her in the child-pornography ring.”
Val was emphatic yet trying not to raise her voice. “I saw her talking to Donna, Mr. Harlin. Cam was with the whole group, and she and Donna were whispering something. If she wasn’t in on it, would she be having a special, private moment with a woman who abuses children for money?” Val knew her fingers were tapping the tabletop a little too forcefully, but staying angry made her feel much less vulnerable. “She duped me into trusting her so they could get the evidence my mother had against them.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
A snicker escaped Val’s mouth. “None of this has made any sense, Mr. Harlin. But I saw what I saw.”
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