Hidden Sins

by Selena Montgomery

  Ethan debated how much to tell her, a woman he knew he couldn’t trust. Yet, there were two mysteries here, three if he counted his inscrutable Mara, and he planned on solving at least one of them. “The map isn’t there, but I think there may be clues hidden in other places. You might know where. As long as I help Chi, I’ve got complete access to the site.”

  “Convenient.”

  Ethan continued to tap softly and stare out the window. “Yes. The authorities have no record of many of the deaths, and they need to determine why these particular bodies were buried. The medical examiner believes all the deaths were from natural causes. My job is to determine who they were before they died. Chi Development is anxious to move on the project. Once we know who we’ve found.”

  Mara tensed but kept her tone level. There was no way he could know, she thought anxiously. After so many years, how could anyone know? But she had never been one to duck asking the question. “If you didn’t find a map at the site, what did you find?”

  “Just the fifty-six dead bodies so far.” He turned to her then, grinning broadly, like a little boy with a prized frog. “Wanna see?”

  Chapter 5

  The human body told a story long after the spirit had departed. Brittle bones whispered secrets, when the ear had been properly trained to hear the truth. His truth, Ethan thought as he and Mara descended to the bottom floor of the warehouse.

  In the cold, shadowed cavern of space, he’d set up shop with fifty-six bodies recovered from unmarked graves on the outskirts of Kiev. He explained his project to Mara. “Chi Development purchased all the land just south of town. Had clear title, until the crew started digging to lay foundation. Then they found this.” He pointed to the rows of human remains. “The property is adjacent to your father’s church.”

  Ethan guided her down to the last couple of steps. Mara hesitated. He didn’t press, and instead hit the landing and strode to the metal tables arrayed in precise rows. He gently motioned her forward, but she shook her head.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Mara, come on. They’re dead. They won’t bite. And I have something to show you.”

  “I can see from here,” she retorted, hanging back. Mara stared, transfixed by the gruesome sight and what she imagined he’d discovered. She shuddered and pushed away the threat of memory. He doesn’t know yet, she reminded herself. He’s guessing. With effort, she leveled her voice, erasing the currents of dread. “Can’t you simply tell me? Why the show and tell?”

  “Because we’re partners.”

  The simple declaration held her still. “Just like that?”

  “I don’t play games, Mara. A deal is a deal. I’ll show you what I’ve found, then you show me yours.” With practiced motions he snapped on latex gloves and covered himself in a white lab coat. He held a bundle out to her, slightly out of reach. “Will you put this on? In case you decide to join me?” The urge to push surged strong, but Ethan realized that few shared his passion for the past in skeletal form. If they were going to be partners, she would have to join him willingly. If she chose not to, he’d know up front where he stood. After a few seconds’ impasse, he set the coat and gloves on the table. He shook off the disappointment and, with a shrug, moved to the cadaver he’d been working on.

  “Like I said, the developer broke ground, only to find an unregistered cemetery. The bodies were in boxes, but none had been embalmed. They searched county records, but nothing turned up. More than fifty people had been buried without identification—men, women, and children.”

  Mara inched closer to the bottom step. His disappointment pricked at her conscience, drew her closer. She knew what lay beneath the sheet at his hand, why the bodies he’d found had been buried so ignominiously. They were as familiar to her as her own family. Members of the church that had controlled her life for eighteen years. A past she had actually believed was buried. Apprehension warred with pride, and she settled on the bottom step, not yet ready to move forward. “Isn’t it illegal to dig up corpses?”

  Ethan noted her movement. To distract, he launched into explanation. “Yes. Particularly if they are from a tribal burial ground or an historical site. Normally, the project would be terminated when the bodies were discovered, but this is Texas. Chi worked out an arrangement with the county. If the remains didn’t have historical significance, the company would pay for relocation to the Kiev cemetery. Since the graves were unmarked, the sheriff’s office asked for help in identification. That’s where I came in.”

  Mara swept a long look over him, from the white sheet to the smock. Partners, he’d said. For now. She took a short breath and it whispered out. “I need help putting this on.” Still unable to bend her left arm without pain, she settled for cocking a fist on her right hip. “You’ve got thirty seconds to explain why I’m down here, or I’m gone.”

  The tone of bravado was undone by the faint quiver Ethan could hear in her voice. Stifling a grin, he crossed to the staircase and helped her into the smock. He waited until she’d put the gloves on and then he returned to his patient.

  “Tattoos.” He pulled back a white sheet to reveal a body. “I think these marks may be our clues.” For the second time, he beckoned Mara forward, and she approached cautiously. Proud of her, he teased, “They’re dead, Mara. The dead can’t harm you.”

  “Of course they can.” Unable to suppress her shudder, she eased forward, careful to give the body wide berth. When she shivered, she blamed it on the cold of the warehouse and not the preternatural trepidation that settled on her like a shroud. She already knew what he wanted to show her, knew it the moment he explained where the bodies had come from. The Second Church of the Spirit.

  She glanced down at the uncovered body. “Show me.”

  “Look. Here,” Ethan instructed as he tilted the body forward. “This is what I was hired to study.”

  Because he focused on the dead man, he failed to notice Mara’s observation of him, the admiring look that stole into her widened eyes. He handled the remains delicately, she realized. Hands that could have coaxed music from a grand piano instead played along fragments of body, urging out tales about their time on earth. They arranged the cadaver to angle it into the light, and she braced herself.

  On the aged skin, a symbol stood out in stark, black contrast. Ethan focused on the strange shape of the Greek letter. “I’ve found Greek letters on all of the bodies,” he murmured.

  Mara stared at the ridge of flesh that had been burned and raised by scar tissue. Her father’s doing. “These are brands. You mentioned tattoos.”

  He glanced at her. The flat tone showed no surprise at the marks, only at the method. “Yes, these are from a branding iron. The burns run deep and left shadows on the bone of the decomposed. I’ve also found trace ink stains on the bones of others.”

  “On the bones?”

  Ethan nodded. “A scientist in London has a theory that the tattoo ink settles in the bone over time. You don’t get a perfect image, more like a hazy reflection. But it’s there.” His eyes locked with Mara’s. “On every body, I’ve found the same symbols. Greek letters. Branded. Except for two bodies. Those two have been tattooed with the letters.”

  Mara asked calmly, “What do you know about the marks?”

  “It’s peculiar. I haven’t come close to the entire alphabet. Some letters are repeated on several bodies, while others occur sporadically. I’ve found most of the lesser-used graphs on the corpses of children.” He draped the sheet over the deacon’s face. “The marks are similar to the tattoos, but not the same.”

  “Do you know what it means?” Mara asked, playing for time. Bailey’s journal recounted tattoos, but in garbled fashion. He’d even drawn crude pictures of his mark. In a moment, Ethan would ask a question she had been forbidden in childhood to answer. Prompting the confession, she asked, “Have you determined what the markings say?”

  “No.” Because he knew the answer, he softened his voice to ask the next question. “Do you? Know what the letters
mean?”

  There it was. The first part of the reason she’d run away twelve years ago. This time she’d answer. “They aren’t letters. It’s a code. A holy code.”

  Something in her brisk delivery caught him off guard. “A holy code? Your father?”

  Mara nodded, slipping away into a past she’d run miles to forget. “Christian numerology. My father was obsessed with it. When one of the church members died, he would mark the bodies with a holy number. So that God would know of their faithfulness on earth. Or their sin. As a child, I had to memorize the entire table.”

  Fascinated, Ethan gripped the edge of the gurney. “And Greek was one of the original languages of the Christian church. Your father spoke Greek?”

  “No. He didn’t know the language, but he understood the numbers.”

  “Numbers?” He pointed to the mark dubiously. Although he didn’t speak the language either, he, like most college attendees, was familiar with the Greek alphabet. “Looks like the letters iota and epsilon to me. This is a number?”

  Mara nodded absently. She couldn’t seem to look away from the images that haunted her. “In Greek, letters and numbers are the same. One through ten are the same as the first nine letters of the modern alphabet plus diagamma.” Anticipating his next question, she supplied, “Diagamma is an obsolete letter in the alphabet. But in numerics, it represents the number six. Twenty and higher are either combined like Roman numerals or they have their own letter. Like pi for eighty or rho for one hundred.”

  “I didn’t think about that.” Using his latex-covered index finger, he traced the on the man’s hip. He’d noted Mara’s reaction to the symbols; in particular, her absolute lack of reaction. His theory that the symbols on the dead bodies were connected to the church and to the gold and the artifacts shifted inexorably toward fact. Nonetheless, any good theory required confirmation. “Iota and delta. That would be…” He paused, running through the alphabet. “Fourteen, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Her response promised more, and Ethan waited. And waited. “Mara? What is the importance of fourteen? Why tattoo it onto a man after death?”

  “Not after. As he lay dying.” Death and memory crawled across her skin once more, and she realized her most efficient tack for this scene was honesty. “It was a tribute. Like other evangelicals, my father felt that the presence of numbers in the Scriptures held holy meaning. Because Greek is considered one of the pure languages of the Bible, along with Hebrew and Aramaic, he relied on Greek numerals to do his work.”

  “His work?”

  Mara’s eyes flashed with a smoldering resentment. “It certainly wasn’t divinely inspired, despite his lies to the flock.” Taking a deep breath, she continued harshly, “He subscribed to a philosophy that spoke of bodies arriving at the pearly gates unadorned and without clear direction for admittance to heaven. According to him, St. Peter would get confused, I guess.”

  “Are you serious?” Ethan took a step toward her, but she reared away. He didn’t try again. “Why did he do that?”

  The mirthless laugh echoed in the warehouse. Mara felt the cold condense inside her, the shame of family secrets that she’d prayed Ethan would never touch. “Dad was determined to be a good help on earth. So he marked the bodies either before or after death. The symbols marked their state before leaving this mortal plane.”

  “And fourteen means…”

  Like a teacher, she explained the twisted rubric. “In biblical numerics, fourteen is the mark of deliverance. Salvation. This must be Deacon Jessup. He lived a rather sinful life before joining my father in his spiritual totalitarianism. I thought of him as a cruel man with an empty soul. Dad found him to be the perfect attendant.”

  Driven to soothe, Ethan closed the distance between them again. “Did he hurt you?” He laid a gentle hand on her arm, waiting for the recoil.

  Mara shook her head once and wrapped her hand over his. “Not now. Don’t ask me now.”

  Seeing the woman who refused to back down from a fight beg for respite spun an impotent anger through his blood. Obadiah Reed had a lifetime of sin to answer for, but Ethan realized he would deal with that later. For now, perhaps, she needed to focus on the mystery.

  Slowly, he led her to a table where a pile of photographs were spread out across the granite surface. Each photo held an image of a Greek symbol emblazoned on a hip or back. “Can you translate these for me?”

  Mara set her shoulders and pushed off the lingering chill. “Of course. It’s in my blood.” She checked each picture, startled anew at her father’s handiwork. On the slight bones of a child’s body, she identified , the letter—and the number five. “Grace. This one means grace. Most of the children were converted young. When they died, he absolved them.” She explained the kappa of twenty, which signaled redemption, and the of the faithful witness. An automaton, she identified his entire catalogue, but at an image of F, the diagamma symbol, she stopped, aghast.

  Standing behind her, Ethan didn’t see the tears well. He reached past her to the photo. “I don’t recognize this number. Is it the one you mentioned?”

  “Uh, yes. Did you identify the body?” Her father saved this symbol for the wretched few who disobeyed.

  “The autopsy and records we found identified her as a Ms. Kate Super. Did you know her?”

  “She helped my mother escape.” She remembered the branding, the screams from the shed. “This symbolizes the manifestation of sin. The evils of Satan. He was condemning her to hell.”

  “My God.”

  Mara offered a brittle, humorless smile. “That’s the point, isn’t it?” For most of her life, she’d lived with the perversion of religion. A despot of a father who controlled the souls of men and women too weak to defy him. Not quite a cult leader, but perilously close. Families crowded onto a compound, following a spiritual leader who accepted their paychecks and penance with equal sanguinity. Her father didn’t demand that they believe in him, treat him as a messiah. Instead, he demanded obeisance to his twisted brand of Christianity, and heaven help those who rebelled.

  Ethan wanted to press, but he had one more revelation to share. “Can you look at something else?”

  “Why not?” Dutifully, she followed him to another room where refrigerated units hummed lightly. Ethan opened a compartment and pulled out a tray. He lifted the sheet to reveal a man’s arm.

  Mara jolted. “Is it a mummy?”

  “Not quite.” He pointed to the aged skin, which was yellowish-gray and waxy. “It’s a phenomenon called ‘adipocere.’” Ethan touched the preserved flesh. “Sometimes, when the dead are placed in wet areas immediately after death, a complex chemical reaction takes place that preserves the soft tissue. Adipocere is from Latin. It means fatty wax.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Most bodies are embalmed after a natural death. And state law requires proper burial. Even if the body isn’t embalmed, natural decomposition will erode the tissue and leave only a skeleton after time.” He uncovered the body, down to the man’s waist.

  Mara froze.

  Ethan looked up and caught her wide, fearful look. He deliberately continued to explain the science, giving her a moment to compose herself. “East Texas is humid almost year round. We get almost more than fifty-five inches of rainfall a year. With Kiev right on the Sabine River, the ground has a number of seeps and creeks. Whoever buried these bodies didn’t dig very deep. There was an underground spring nearby, and the seeps bled into the graves. It was enough.”

  Unable to look away from the man who’d once bounced her on his knee, Mara whispered, “Enough for what?”

  “Enough to preserve this on his corpse.” Ethan reached out his free hand and tilted her chin up. “What?”

  Mara jerked her face from his hand. “It’s Poncho.”

  “You recognize him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “He died when I was four or five.” Taking a shallow breath, she steeled herself to look at the body without interest. “Of thi
s disease?”

  “Adipocere isn’t a disease. It’s a chemical reaction.” He pushed the sheet lower. “And it preserved this on a body that died nearly thirty years ago. This tattoo is not like the others.”

  Like flame, suddenly the mark on her hip began to burn. Spinning away, Mara headed for the steps. “Sorry. Lesson’s over.” She tossed the words over her shoulder as she rushed up the stairs.

  In the loft, she stripped off the lab coat and the latex gloves, heart racing. Poncho’s tattoo. Bailey’s drawing. Her grandfather’s marks. It all came back to the Second Church of the Spirit. Which is where she was headed.

  Her first shoe was barely tied before Ethan burst through the door.

  “Running again?”

  Mara hunched over her sneaker and didn’t look up. Meeting his eyes might make her stay. But he had figured out too much, and that would make him a target if she did stay. Coating her words in disdain, she scoffed, “I’m done here. Dead bodies marred by a religious zealot’s decoder ring isn’t the clue to a fortune. I thought you had more.”

  The rebuff stung and Ethan raised his hand in defense. Then dropped it. Stupid fool, he chided himself angrily. He should have known better than to trust. But he’d been rocked by the sight of her with his books. Not only by the fact that she’d discovered his plans, but that when he entered the apartment, the sight of her in his clothes, on his bed, seemed perfectly natural. Perfectly right. “Don’t leave me, Mara. Not like this.”

  Summoning her best performance, she raised her head. “Like what, Ethan?” she scoffed lightly. “All you’ve got for me are corpses with my father’s version of pin the sin on the donkey. I assumed from your notes that you knew more. You don’t. So I’m gone.”

  Afraid he couldn’t stop her, terrified that he needed to, he held out the one set of photos he hadn’t shown her before. “Take a look at this, then. Before you run. Again.”