“Does what a lot?” I asked.
“Prays. Lights candles.”
He looked in the direction of the mumbling.
I didn’t know what to say. Seeing him—the dark circles under his eyes, the frailness of his frame—and wondering what unfathomable things he’s been going through, scared and alone in a place like this, made a hollow pit form in my stomach. I stared at him for a moment. He blinked long eyelashes, then turned away. I tried to push myself up to standing. My left shoulder screamed at me, but I didn’t think it was broken because I could move it. I fought the dizziness, reaching out to grab the side of the cage to steady myself. How had he managed, trapped in this fetid cage? I guessed he’d had no choice.
“Willing to face it again. My well . . . not dry. . . . Capable of appeasing you . . . not turning away. . . . Not being too stubborn to appease you. . . . Dear Lord . . . I am not afraid to climb the mountain again . . .”
“How long will he do this?” I whispered.
“A long time,” Jeremy said. “But sometimes he leaves and is gone for a while too.”
“Just him? Is he alone?” I looked around for my pack, but didn’t see it.
“I haven’t seen anyone else. He took your pack and your phone from your pocket before he dragged you in here.”
“Has he told you his name?”
Jeremy put his finger to his lips to stop me from talking.
“Gretchen.” A man spoke behind me. I turned, knowing I recognized it. “It’s Wendy’s father. I know this must be a shock to you, but then again, no one really understands the depths of me, of what I’d do to save my family. But, Gretchen”—he shook his head sadly—“why have you come here? You shouldn’t be here.”
“Mr. Combs.” I was speechless at first, and a little confused, still wondering if I was in a dream. I shook my head, which hurt. I tightened my fingers around the sharp metal loops of the cage. He looked so normal, so much like the person I’d see with Wendy at work. I was tempted to say, Mr. Combs, you’re here, get us out, get someone to help us, but the realization was all too clear: he had taken Jeremy. He had put me in this cage. “Mr. Combs,” I said again. “Why are you here?”
“I’m here to work. Someone has to do God’s work.”
“What work?”
“You’ll see.” He walked over to a rickety wooden table across from the cage. Six candles lined the top, five of them burned to the wick. The only one not burned all the way down was larger and a different color, burgundy, and its flame burned steadily. “As soon as this goes all the way down, it will be time. But now you’ve put me in a bind, Gretchen. I don’t want to hurt you, but God must be telling me something. Why did God bring you to me? Are you the lamb? I must pray,” he said, looking confused. “I must pray to understand this new development.”
“What? Mr. Combs. You’re not making any sense. Where’s Wendy?”
“Wendy is safe, and she’ll be even safer when this is all done. And Kyle too, poor disturbed Kyle. Don’t you understand, Gretchen?”
“Understand what?”
“If God doesn’t understand my devotion, things will just keep getting worse. Kyle will keep acting out. Balances need to be restored. I have to remain strong, resolute.”
“No, no, I don’t understand.” I shook my head. “Resolute about what? Why do you have this boy?” I pleaded. “His parents are worried sick. You know this. Surely you’ve seen the news. They’re searching everywhere, even your church.”
His eyes looked distant, truly calm and crazed at the same time. I continued to rattle off reasons for why this boy should not be here, but suddenly it occurred to me that my rant was lost on him, that it was as if I were speaking another language. There was something menacing underneath his calmness that made me shudder. This was not a dream. It was not a joke, and I’d never experienced anything like it. I wanted to laugh it away. For the first time since I was fifteen, I wanted to be in a dream, to sleepwalk away from the situation. How had I not noticed this delusion in Wendy’s father before? How could Wendy not know this about him? Or did she?
I looked at Jeremy, who sat still as a toad, as if at this point he was accustomed to the bizarreness as well as the setting, and that sickened me.
“What are the candles for?” I asked, trying to steady my voice. He turned toward us, and the dazed, cold look on his face chilled me to the bone. Panic jolted through me.
“To help find the answers. God has brought you to me for a reason, don’t you see that? Just as He has the boy. Gretchen, look at you. At your fair skin, at your stunning blue eyes—could it finally be true? Has God finally sent me a lamb?
I stared at him, my mouth hanging open, my throat dry.
“I need to pray,” he said. “Yes, I need to understand. Now, please, be quiet. Ours is a just God, Gretchen. He has asked me to do this, but in the end, it will all be all right, for all of us. When the candle burns out, it will be time.”
“Time for what, Mr. Combs?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Time for me to figure out if you are an angel’s gift—if finally, the lamb has been provided to spare Isaac, or if . . .” His words faded and he looked down.
“Or what, Mr. Combs?”
“Or if you’ve been sent by Satan. If Satan sent you, the hand of the devil is at work to interfere with God’s plans, and we can’t have that.”
“But you can’t just figure that out. Mr. Combs, how are you going to figure that out?”
He didn’t answer, just held up his hand, bowed his head, and walked away.
A terrible dread coursed through me. I turned to the boy. “Jeremy, do you know what he’s talking about?”
Jeremy stared down the hall for minute, but didn’t answer. I could tell he was thinking about whether he should or not.
“Jeremy,” I whispered, moving closer to him. “Please tell me what he’s talking about.”
Finally his gaze met mine and he spoke softly, “I’m not really sure. He says weird things and prays a lot. Talks about a guy named Isaac, about how his father, Abraham, took him to the mountain because that’s what God wanted. I think it’s something from the Bible, but he talks about it like it’s not very long ago.” Jeremy’s eyes looked scared, but resigned.
I went all the way over to him, my head still spinning and every muscle in my body aching. I knelt before him. “Has he hurt you?”
Jeremy shook his head. He had a nasty bruise above his right elbow. When he saw me look at it, he wrapped his other arm around himself and covered it with his hand and stared at the dirty floor. I could already feel the burden of shame and confusion running through him—the deep sorrow now darkly buried within him forever. I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t want to scare him.
“No?”
He shook his head again.
“He picked me up near our campground. He was wearing a uniform, like a ranger. He asked me my name and where my parents were, and when I told him that they were out hiking around the lake, he said that they were in trouble because of the fires, and that he was supposed to bring me to them at the evacuation camp.”
I nodded, taking it in. So that was it? That’s all it took—a man in a ranger uniform and a thirteen-year-old kid who still trusted the world around him.
“But, he didn’t take me to them,” he whispered. “He took me to some church—his church, I think. It was nice and he gave me lemonade. He made me sit and watch him perform some sermon, said he needed to practice before he spoke before the congregation, and that he’d take me to my parents right afterward. He lit candles there too. It seemed weird, and I got a little scared by then, but I wasn’t really sure what to think. I knew something wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what to do. Then he said we needed to go, that he was taking me to my parents, but he didn’t. He brought me here and that’s whe
re I’ve been ever since.”
I stared at Jeremy. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to ask anything accusatory, like Did you try and leave the church? Or, What did you think when you got to this abandoned place? Did you try and run?
Jeremy looked down at the floor again. He had a small piece of burnt wood or charcoal in his hand and was scraping on the cement as if he was drawing a picture. I realized that was the scratching noise I’d heard.
“What happened then?” I asked.
Jeremy didn’t reply. He continued to look at the floor, at the charcoal marks he smeared across it. He didn’t even seem to hear me—as if he’d gone into a type of protective trance. I wondered if he’d been doing that the whole time he’d been in here, passing the time, turning off his thoughts, going numb.
I decided not to push it. I watched his long dark eyelashes as he concentrated on the movement of his hand. I stood up and looked through the chain-link cage toward the next line of machinery. Combs was in between two of them, praying again. His voice, steady and trancelike, drifted toward us and almost sounded comforting. A frail light fanned across the rafters from some of the high, narrow windows on the other side of the plant. The candle continued to burn, and I could smell the wax, but I could also smell the fires from the canyon. I turned back to Jeremy, but he didn’t look up. He just kept scraping his piece of charcoal on the ground, his mind hopefully someplace far away.
26
* * *
Monty
KEN AND I drove straight to headquarters against the line of cars snaking slowly through the canyon. When we were back within cell-phone range, Ken called Ali, but she didn’t answer, so he left her a message and contacted Herman instead. I then called Joe, who said the wind had gotten stronger and that IC ordered an evacuation of the entire canyon. He said the winds had reached thirty to forty miles per hour and had fanned the flames from both fire complexes in several directions, but mostly down Bad Rock Canyon and the North Fork.
We avoided going down the North Fork Road and cut across the park on Camas Road to reach West Glacier, which was also being evacuated, including headquarters. We found out that Ali had ordered Tara Reed to handle the transfer of the staff and the incident room materials to the county sheriff’s headquarters in Kalispell. We also discovered that another thousand firefighters were being brought in to do damage control. Apparently Wilcox, the ops manager for the fire crews, said he’d never seen a fire burn this hot and fast before. I pictured all the desiccated trees and their needles and the dried chaparral from the drought feeding a raging dragon. I thought of the gravesite, and how we’d not even been able to get back to it to examine it. At this point, I was certain it was scorched, the earth charred and barren.
I contacted Ali again. She said Ray and Paxton were wrapping up at the church as quickly as possible. She had given the task of interviewing neighbors and church members to several other officers when Ken and I left for the North Fork, and now Ali said that the fire evacuation was interfering with the interviewing, since most people on the list were gathering pets, livestock and whatever belongings they could and heading out.
Ken and I left West Glacier and went to the church. We found Ray and Paxton loading up the back of their van. It was going on five p.m. and dark, thick smoke gripped the eastern horizon. A brazen red sun glowed in the sky and ashes fluttered around us as we stepped out of the car. Dry, hot air hit my face and settled in my throat.
I asked Ray and Paxton how it went, and they said they wouldn’t know exactly what they’d discovered until they returned to the lab, but they’d picked up as much trace and collected as many prints as possible. They’d checked for blood and grabbed a half-empty water bottle left at the back of the church on a table, in case the DNA from the saliva showed anything of interest. “But it could belong to anybody,” Ray explained. “It’s open to the community, so DNA, prints, trace, I’m not sure how much it’s going to tell us. What I am glad about is that we didn’t find any blood.”
I thanked him and Paxton for the information, then asked, “Agents Paige and Marcus inside?”
“I think so, just grabbing some last-minute things from the pastor’s office.”
I turned to go, then thought of Gretchen. “Have you heard from Gretchen?”
“Yeah, she left me a message a couple hours ago. Said she was looking into something at the county landfill and might stop by to check on how things were progressing up here, but she never did.” Ray shrugged. “I’ll call her on the way back to the lab.”
“Maybe she’s finally taking some time to herself,” I said.
“Unlikely, but maybe.” Ray swung the back door of the white van shut. “I’ll let you know what we find.”
• • •
Ali and Herman were standing by the table that held the visitor log, right inside the front door to the church. “Are we interrupting something?” I said.
“No, no,” Ali said. “Harris, Greeley, come in. Welcome to the show. Please tell me something has broken on your end with Minsky.”
“No, nothing. We did find him, though. He was with a petite woman. She looked Asian.”
“Asian?” she asked.
“Yeah, we figure she accounts for the extra set of prints we found up at Chiles’s place. They don’t belong to the boy.”
“You’re positive?”
“We checked out Minsky’s entire site. No sign of a boy. Unless they’ve got him hidden somewhere entirely different.”
“Damn.” Ali sighed. “And you couldn’t bring them in for questioning because they ran?”
Ken had already briefed Herman on our way out of the woods, so Ali knew a few of the details.
“That’s right.”
“And it wasn’t worth the chase?”
“I really don’t think they have Jeremy. There’s no evidence other than that he’s a distant relative and he’s been here for some free food.” I looked around the church again. I could hear the wind whistling against the cross, but otherwise it was quiet, peaceful. I remembered the plaque Combs had in his office. “You grab much from Combs’s office?”
“Some records to find out who else has worked here, what other connections there might be, that kind of thing. I’ve got one of the tech guys searching his computer now in case there’s anything of note. But the guy has an alibi, so we’re not expecting much.”
“That plaque,” I said. “The one that said something about the mountain of the Lord. . . . Either of you know the Bible well?”
“I think that comes from the Old Testament,” Herman said. “Yeah, that’s right”—he held his palm over his broad chest—“lots of Sunday school for this kid.”
“It said it was Genesis. Does the quote mean anything to you?”
“Not without knowing specifically which part of Genesis it comes from. I could look it up, though. Why?”
“No, don’t bother, it’s not important. It’s just something that’s been stuck in my head since Ali and I were in his office. I’d never seen that quote before.”
“Well, we’ve pretty much wrapped up here,” Ali said, motioning to the church. “Evacuees are being sent just west of Columbia Falls, to that large field near where the old drive-in used to be, and the high school. We plan to continue interviewing anyone from this community at those two places. At least most of the residents will be rounded up into one spot. We could use the extra help, and we should get out of here.” She lifted her head to the sound of the wind moaning against the cross and the eaves.
“We’ll be there,” I said, and Ken seconded me. I turned to head for the door and, beside the exit, noticed a corkboard with various pictures of church members and announcements tacked on it. “Anything interesting here?”
“No, we looked. Just announcements, some pictures of church members. We’ve gotten their names from Combs already.”
I stared at the board.
The soup kitchen schedule hung in the center. An announcement for a Christian rock concert that had already passed in late July was still tacked in the top right corner. A charity notice for donations to a family who’d lost their home in an electric fire dangled on one edge. Some pictures of smiling community members in action outside the church were scattered across the board. I studied them, but didn’t recognize anyone. In the bottom left corner, there was a picture of three men, a woman, and a child, and I recognized the woman—Wendy. She wore a wide smile and draped an arm over a young boy—maybe six or seven—and I recognized him as Kyle. To Wendy’s right stood a man about her age whom I didn’t recognize, and to his side stood another man who looked more familiar. He had a full head of reddish hair, so I didn’t immediately realize that it was Wendy’s father, Combs, just younger, but something about the image grabbed me. Another ghost of a memory danced in the corner of my mind. Behind me, Ali, Herman, and Ken were discussing the evacuation and who would take which evacuee camp for questioning, but I tuned them out. No, it wasn’t just that he resembled the older Mr. Combs. I’d seen that very face before. I stood listening to the wind until suddenly it dawned on me.
When we met with Combs earlier in the morning, I had just assumed that I recognized him from seeing him at the county building with Wendy, but that wasn’t it. Come to think of it, I’d never seen Combs before at all, only in a photo—the one taken on Richard Tuckman’s patio in the old man’s room. It was just like this one, when Combs was younger and sported more hair and fewer wrinkles. “Hey, guys?” I waved the others over.
All three shuffled over to me. I pointed to the picture and told them what I’d realized.
Ali looked at me. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
The Weight of Night Page 34