Sins of the Mother

by August Norman

  “The bombs. Her husband’s death left her with so much money, but she couldn’t use a penny without thinking about what each cent meant in the loss of human life.”

  He moved his hand up to my calf, still rubbing.

  His touch felt great, but I was confused. “What bombs? No one’s used a nuke since World War II, right?”

  He switched to the other calf. “That’s right.” Desmond looked up and met my eyes. “I have a gift, Maya. I can help people with their pain, and sometimes, I can even see what they see.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “I know,” he said, “but stay with me. Linda wasn’t only suffering from headaches—she was also having dreams, nightmares even, every night. So I joined with her in something I call the Knowing.”

  “The Knowing?”

  He lifted my feet out of the bowl and onto a dry towel. “Throughout my life, I’ve seen remarkable things through other people’s eyes. Wonderful, magical experiences, but also horrible, shameful things. Like your father.”

  My throat choked up. “My father?”

  “I see things,” he repeated. “My visions are a gift that I use to help people heal.”

  I stood up. “What did you see about my father?” Nobody knows about my father. I never told a soul.

  He rose as well but sat back in a chair. “In time. Now, you need to know what Linda saw every night. A city, full of life but not love, built on vanity and power, bursting at the seams, divided by lines of race and wealth.”

  “LA,” I said. “No shit, right?”

  “Right, but not just LA. She saw London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Tehran, Mecca. All of the people in the world, all caught up in their own moments and movements, all blaming someone else for their problems. Then, the bombs came. Worldwide devastation, nuclear fallout, bodies strewn across the planet. From her house in the hills, she watched the people of Earth melt away, leaving only her untouched.”

  “No wonder she had headaches,” I said, still not really sure why it had anything to do with me.

  “But here’s what she didn’t know.” Desmond folded his legs up and under each other on the chair. “Linda wasn’t having dreams. She was having visions.”

  “Visions? Like, of the future?”

  I expected Desmond to start laughing, like he’d been stringing me along the whole time, but he was serious.

  “From the Spirit. Or as you might refer to him, God.”

  “Okay. I’m not really a God type of girl.”

  “Hear me out. God was showing her the end of the world.”

  I looked around for my bag. I’d been in bad situations before, dudes in shit hotel rooms with knives, someone hiding in the backseat of my car. None of that scared me as much as when someone started talking about visions from God. “Uh-huh.”

  “But he was also showing her there was time to save people. The special people.”

  “Sure, good to know.”

  “It’s not just Linda. Daya also communicates with the Spirit.”

  I took a step away from the couch and his chair. “Cool family.”

  He wasn’t blocking me or anything, but for a second I thought about making a run for it.

  “She had a vision too. A vision of you.”

  “Bullshit.” I turned back to face him. Enough was enough. “Why the hell would Daya have a vision about me? She into group sex or something?”

  Desmond rose. “I understand, it’s a lot to take in.”

  “So is a gang bang.” I saw my bag by the door and went for it. “I don’t know what I thought this place was. I figured you were all getting high and fucking each other and maybe I’d get to join in. But visions from God? I’m good.”

  “I can show you,” he said, still behind me.

  I turned back. “Show me what? There’s no such thing as God.”

  “Ask Linda, or Daya, or any of those free souls dancing around the fire. I can show you.”

  He raised his hands. No prayer or anything, just open and up at eye level.

  I didn’t need some old man in the sky to tell me the meaning of life. Still, I set my bag down and walked back toward Desmond. Every asshole I’d ever met, from the guy with the knife to half of my producers, had backed down when I called them on their shit. I couldn’t wait to laugh in his face.

  “Fine. Show me your God.”

  I hadn’t even stopped moving when he reached out for my head, one palm at each temple. All of my anger dropped away, and a wall of heat surged through my body. My vision went dark, then light, then suddenly I was somewhere else. I saw flames spreading out over the cities of the world, heard millions of voices in pain. That hell was replaced by a green mountain, where me and thousands of people, arm in arm, circled around a white column of light, brighter than anything I’d ever imagined, reaching up into the sky. One by one, the people of the circle leapt into the light and were carried up into the air. When it came to be my turn, I didn’t hesitate. I stepped into the light and fell back so that I looked straight up into the beam to heaven. And there, at the top of the beam, a face waited. A face of kindness and wonder and wisdom and forgiveness. And it spoke—He spoke to me.

  “Welcome, my daughter, your voyage has begun.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  LAKSHMI FLAGGED DOWN the more-of-an-actor-than-a-waiter who’d provided the bare minimum of service to her and her date. Redheaded Evelyn from Milwaukee had been in the bathroom for five minutes at this point. Lakshmi was starting to think the girl had skipped out the back door, maybe because she’d considered the same move herself every minute for the last half hour.

  The waiter came her direction, then turned back to his station to retrieve her credit card receipt before finally making his way over.

  “I gotta go,” Lakshmi told the corn-fed next-Hemsworth-brother, grabbing her purse and getting up. “If a ginger who looks like she’s afraid of math, science, literature, politics, and history asks about me, tell her I had an emergency.”

  “Shit, I forgot.” The waiter reached for a notebook in his apron and read from the top page. “She told me to tell you, ‘She had a great time, but it’s a pass.’ ”

  “Bloody hell.” Lakshmi turned for the door, not sure which bothered her more: that the date she’d wanted to ditch had ditched her first, or that the waiter hadn’t been able to memorize the simple message.

  She still hadn’t figured out life in LA, or at least online dating apps, or maybe dating in general, or life in the slightest. Sex wasn’t a problem. Like with Pixie Cut, the girl she’d met on her night out with Caitlin. Lakshmi had learned enough about the city’s scene to find company when needed—just not any meaningful connection. Evelyn, the runaway redhead, had seemed great through the app’s algorithm, but sitting across from her, watching the girl eat sushi with a fork and talk about her search for a commercial talent agent, Lakshmi had been unable to find common ground. Now she was alone in East Hollywood on a Saturday night. Starting her walk back toward the Red Line train station, she had to remind herself that Evelyn’s not a girl; you’re the same age.

  Maybe that was the reason she hadn’t seriously connected with anyone. She’d felt so much older than everyone else ever since her first real love disappeared during sophomore year. Lakshmi had spent the rest of college looking for Angela, eventually getting Caitlin involved, only to discover that Angela had been held in an underground prison and tortured and …

  Something Caitlin had said last year interrupted her descent into the past.

  Not everything’s that asshole’s fault, kid. Keep moving and you’ll be fine. Make the world a better place somehow.

  Lakshmi shook the self-reflection away, double-checked the people around her at the intersection, then kept moving, crossing the street to the subway station. This time of night, the trains came every twenty minutes, and she’d missed the last one by five. She thought about finding Evelyn on social media and getting snarky, but she knew a more constructive way to kill time.
Friendship always made the world a better place.

  Caitlin answered the phone on the fourth ring.

  “You don’t sound intoxicated, and I don’t hear a man’s voice in the room,” Lakshmi said. “Is something wrong?”

  Caitlin’s laugh brightened her night. “I’m reading. What’s your excuse?”

  Lakshmi filled her in on the latest disappointment. “What about you? Want to talk about whatever’s happening?”

  “I’m not sure I know what’s happening,” Caitlin said, then launched into the story.

  By the time Lakshmi’s train arrived, she’d nearly forgotten her bitterness over her Evelyn encounter. The date’s letdown disappeared completely when Caitlin asked her to research the Daughters of God.

  “Pop back a tick. You want my help?”

  “I’m gonna try to figure out what Mama Maya was into up here,” Caitlin said, “but it all started down there in LA.”

  Lakshmi got on the train, almost bouncing with excitement. “I thought Mike usually did the research you didn’t have time for.”

  Caitlin and Mike Roman, a muscle-bound ex-Marine and ex-cop of few words, were close, and as far as Lakshmi knew, never in a romantic way.

  “Roman’s down in Mexico right now,” Caitlin said. “Plus, he’s more of a battering ram than a magnifying glass. I know you weren’t exactly alive at the time, but want to look into a cult that started in LA in the nineties for me? I’ll throw you some cash, maybe a little more than your transcription rate.”

  Lakshmi would have done it for free. “I’ll start tonight.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  CAITLIN SNAPPED AWAKE, unsure why her heart was racing like she’d just sprinted a hundred meters.

  Muted daylight streamed through the hotel room’s window shade and the side-table clock read 8:43, seventeen minutes before her alarm would chime.

  She reached for her phone but froze. Heavy pounding shook the door to her room. No one who worked in a hotel would knock that loud. Caitlin rolled out of bed in only a T-shirt and underwear, reaching for the pair of jeans she’d abandoned on the floor.

  “Hey, bitch.” The angry male voice on the other side of the door sounded familiar. “I know you’re in there.”

  Caitlin grabbed the hotel phone and called the front desk.

  “I need security,” she said, pulling on her pants. “Someone’s trying to break down my door.”

  “We don’t have security,” the clerk replied, possibly the same kid from the day before.

  “Then call the police.”

  Caitlin hung up and slid her shoes on, unlaced with no socks.

  Another barrage shook the door. “You think you can come to my county and jack me up?”

  Caitlin placed the voice.

  Johnny Larsen.

  She didn’t know how she’d pissed him off before nine on a Sunday but knew she didn’t want to open the door. Larsen seemed like the type to argue with a gun in his hand, plus he’d figured out which room was hers, meaning he’d either bribed someone for the info or had someone watching her hotel.

  “Sir,” the same voice from the phone said, now in the hallway, “is there a problem?”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  The pounding resumed.

  Caitlin didn’t travel with a curling iron, hair dryer, or anything heavy enough to weaponize. She inventoried the rest of the hotel room: a flimsy luggage rack, an ice bucket, and two eight-ounce plastic cups—one she’d used for water, the other still wrapped in cellophane.

  The hotel clerk chimed in again. “If you’re not a guest, I need you to leave the property.”

  Caitlin considered the window, but she knew no budget hotel would ever let a first-floor window open wide enough for someone to escape without paying.

  “Not until I talk to this bitch,” Larsen answered.

  Screw this.

  If Larsen had been waving a gun around, the clerk would have bugged out long ago. Caitlin went back toward the bathroom, where a solid-looking soap dish held an assortment of toiletries she’d ignored so far. She grabbed the dish, walked into her bathroom, pulled the shower curtain in front of her body, and threw the faux-sandstone block into the tub. Shards peppered the vinyl curtain when the dish broke, but one major chunk remained, a jagged three-inch triangle. She gripped the piece and went for the door.

  “Sir, I’ve called the police—”

  “That’s it, dickhead,” Larsen said, his voice moving away from the door and toward the clerk.

  Caitlin pulled the handle and stepped into the hall. Larsen was ten feet down the corridor. The desk clerk stood ten feet further holding a broomstick in front of him, like a knight with a broadsword.

  Caitlin raised the convincing end of the broken dish toward Larsen’s back. “Who are you calling dickhead, fuck-stick?”

  Larsen turned fast and wild, flaring his flannel jacket open. No gun shown on his belt, but the camouflage hilt of a hunting knife peeked out of a sheath.

  Caitlin took a step back, ready to run. No need. At least three voices spoke in the hall behind her, one of which had to be a kid. Plus, the clerk wasn’t going anywhere. Plenty of witnesses on hand.

  Larsen’s eyes went toward the new voices, then came back to Caitlin’s improvised weapon. “The hell you gonna do with that thing?”

  She squared off against him. “Whatever I have to. What’s with all the noise?”

  “The boys said I just missed some chick with a Jew name leaving the Lumberjack last night.” He opened the palm of his right hand. “Want to explain why I found this shit in my truck this morning?”

  He dropped a handful of something onto the hallway carpeting. From that distance, the ten or so little white bits looked like rocks.

  Caitlin didn’t have to move closer to know they weren’t rocks. They were teeth, and where would anyone get a handful of teeth?

  Larsen lowered his voice. “Think I’m going to jail for some dead Dog, bitch?”

  So that was it. The man with the arm covered in bandages, probably covering up defensive wounds, had woken to find a mouthful of missing teeth in the bed of his truck. She laughed. “You do know you’ve just admitted you’re holding the teeth of a homicide victim, right?”

  He clenched his jaw and took a step in her direction.

  “Come an inch closer,” she said, “and you’ll be the next body in the morgue.”

  Larsen’s shoulders rose with a deep breath. For a second, Caitlin thought he’d really chance an attack, witnesses or not.

  The clerk must have agreed. His broomstick snapped in half when it hit the back of Larsen’s head. The big man fell face first with the solid thud of a three-hundred-year-old redwood.

  CHAPTER

  20

  SHERIFF MARTIN ITCHED the side of his goatee with the back of his pen. “And how did you end up in the Lumberjack, again? Out of all of the places in the county?”

  “My feet,” Caitlin said, sitting back in the chair across from Martin’s desk for the second time in two days. “The place looked like a dive. I love dives. Plus they had a State of Jefferson flag behind the bar.”

  The local police had arrived minutes after Johnny was knocked down. Then Sheriff Martin and a pair of deputies had followed to place the concussed but still-living Johnny Larsen under arrest for the murder of UD-0004. On the ride from the hotel to the station, Caitlin had told Sheriff Martin how her impromptu research project had turned into a legitimate story, then put him in touch with Stan Lawton for corroboration. It wasn’t that Martin had interrogated her after the hotel surprise party, but as she’d given her account, his brow had furrowed deeper and deeper with each mention of her meetings with Johnny Larsen. At this point, she was worried his face might collapse.

  “They had cheeseburgers, booze, and Wi-Fi,” Caitlin stressed. “The whole thing was a coincidence.”

  “Right.” He dropped his pen and shook his head in disbelief. “Coincidence.”

  Caitlin raised his headshake an eye
roll. “Why were you there, Sheriff? Are you a Proud Son of Oregon?”

  He absently reached for the fallen pen. “Well, I did grow up here, and I do feel a fair amount of pride in my state—”

  “It’s no Jefferson,” Caitlin interrupted. “But are you a member of a white supremacist organization known as the Proud Sons of Oregon?”

  Martin let out a sigh. “I am not, and calling them an organization is one helluva stretch. It’s basically Johnny and two or three other assholes who wanted to get tattoos.”

  “But you happened to be in the same bar, maybe ten minutes before Larsen and his holes had their meeting.”

  “Just like you.”

  “Right,” Caitlin said, bringing him full circle. “A coincidence. So do the bits of teeth found in the back of Larsen’s truck match the empty mouth of the dead body?”

  Martin found his pen again and doodled a series of circles on the yellow pad in front of him. “We’ve already sent them off, but it’d be pretty wild if they didn’t. I think the best thing for everyone involved would be for you to head back to Los Angeles until we get our results.”

  “And when might that be?”

  “A school shooting outside of Portland just jumped to the front of the line. From what they’ve told me, it could be weeks.”

  On her first day in town, Caitlin had thought Martin’s goatee made him look like a wizened bear. Now her bear looked more like a pouting puppy.

  “Is that before or after your next election, Sheriff?”

  That put the man on his feet. “I’ve tried to take your grieving into consideration, Miss Bergman, but I’ve got work to do, and I no longer need your help.”

  Caitlin got up as well. “Hold on, Boz. I’m not trying to rock the boat.”

  “Coos Bay is a big town, but outside of it, this is a small county. I don’t have to like everyone in the area, but I do have to live with them. You, on the other hand—” He opened his office door. “You can go on home now. We’ve got everything covered.”

  “There he is,” a voice in the outer office said. “Don’t tell him a thing, Miss Bergman.”