“I have my nine and an extra clip,” Frank said. He took the gun out of his waistband and laid it on the arm of the chair. “I’ll be fine.”
“I will, too,” Mike said.
“Okay.” Reverend Powell looked at his guests. “The beds are ready, there’s fresh towels in the linen closet and you can have the hallway bathroom. Mike, get me up at four.”
“You got it,” Mike said.
With a curt nod, Reverend Powell retreated down the hallway to the master bedroom.
“Well, I’m turning in, too,” Mike said. “Will you be alright, Frank?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He turned and headed toward one of the bedrooms.
Vince turned to Frank and shrugged. “I don’t feel tired yet.”
“You’re welcome to hang out with me.”
Vince thought about it for a moment. What he really wanted to do was call Tracy, but he knew Mike would probably be able to hear him in the next room. He knew there was no way he would be able to get out of Frank’s sight long enough to steal downstairs and use his cell phone. He sat down on the sofa reluctantly, facing his old childhood friend in the darkened living room.
They remained seated in the darkness for a minute. The outside shadows were long and dark and the only sounds were those of the crickets chirping in a rhythmic susurration. The toilet in the bathroom upstairs flushed and then the door opened to the sound of padding footsteps making their way to one of the bedrooms. There was the sound of a door closing and then silence.
Except for the crickets.
Vince looked out the window. The curtains were drawn, but there was a thin line between them that he could see out of. What he saw wasn’t much; he tried to see into the darkness, but he knew there wasn’t much beyond the front porch except the long driveway that led to the lonely two lane country road and beyond that a vast corn field.
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like this,” Frank said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Frank replied. Vince’s vision had adjusted to the darkness in the living room, and he could make out Frank seated comfortably on the chair. The handgun was on the arm of the chair, Frank’s hand inches from it. Frank was looking out the window, too. He turned to Vince. “I’ve always lived in cities. Never lived in a place like this before. I’ve always dreamed of escaping from the noise and the shit and just…hiding out here.”
“It’s definitely a great place to get away from the city,” Vince said.
“Yeah.” Frank’s voice had taken on a reflective tone. “Maybe…when this is all over I can…come out to a place like this. Just pack up Brandy and the kids and bring them out to a place somewhere far away from all the shit big cities breed. Violence, despair, poverty, pollution. You know…?”
“With the work you do, you could make a nice living quite easily out here,” Vince said.
“Yeah.” Frank nodded. He turned to Vince. “What was it like for you growing up out here?”
Vince thought about it. When he’d first come to Lititz last week he’d been instantly transported back through time to when he was young and innocent, ready to face the world. He remembered driving by his old friend John’s house, seeing the family car that he remembered from those long ago days and resisting the urge to get out and walk up to the front porch and knock on the door. He remembered hating Lititz when he first moved out here. He’d been plucked out of his junior year in high school in Toronto without warning and whisked almost five hundred miles away, to a place in the middle of nowhere. He’d missed his friends in Canada terribly, but adjusted to life in the country fairly quickly. He told Frank this in quiet tones as the two men sat in the darkness, Frank’s fingers caressing the handgun. He told Frank how he kept expecting to run into people he’d gone to high school with and how that hadn’t happened yet. “Do you want it to happen?” Frank asked, interrupting Vince’s monologue.
“I don’t know,” Vince said. “I guess part of me does because…it would bring me back to those days to when…I was innocent, I guess.”
“You think that coming in contact with some element of your past will bring the innocence back,” Frank said.
Vince nodded. “Yeah. But I know that most of the friends I made here left for college when I did. I kept in contact with some of them, but I haven’t heard from a lot of them in years. They probably don’t live here anymore.”
“You’ve talked to me about your mother and her friend Lillian before,” Frank said. “Do you remember anything that stands out from the time you were living here?”
Vince thought about this. There really wasn’t anything that stuck out as particularly strange or odd. There was nothing in mom’s behavior or what she said that would have suggested to Vince even then that she’d lived the life of a deranged cultist in the late sixties. “No. I can see why mom became such a Christian fanatic, though. The things she was into in California were—”
“Pretty evil?” Frank chuckled. He leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, even though I don’t believe in all this heaven and hell bullshit, I still don’t see the attraction of worshipping a deity that represents evil.”
They talked some more, mostly trading stories of what they remembered from those times. “All I can really remember is when you used to come over,” Vince said, sitting back on the sofa. “And some of the others came by with their kids as well. I don’t really remember many of them.”
“You remembered Nellie.”
“Yeah, I remember her.” The image that came to Vince of Nellie was one of a little blond haired girl around his own age with fair skin, always happy and laughing, always willing to play whatever it was the boys had in mind. “She seemed…I don’t know…she seemed kinda normal.”
“What do you remember about her parents?” Frank asked.
Vince thought hard to remember. “Her dad wasn’t around much. I…I want to say that he was a truck driver because I remember her talking about that.”
“That’s what he told Nellie and her mother,” Frank said. “Nellie was one of the lucky ones. She wasn’t subjected to the group in any way. Her mother wasn’t a member, but her father was. He was a contract killer. The truck driver ruse was just a cover. He’d leave for the road in truck driver garb, and he’d call in to home on the CB frequencies truckers used to checkin. He was set-up so that by outward appearances he was a truck driver. He was incorporated as a carrier and everything. He even worked with a dispatching service to field messages.”
“Shit,” Vince whispered. He’d never known, had never suspected. “Did my mom know?”
“I suppose she did,” Frank said. “Mine sure as fuck did. Their job was to keep the wool pooled over Lucy’s eyes. Lucy was Nellie’s mom. Remember her?”
Vince’s memory of Lucy was even more vague. He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
Frank was pensive from his spot on the sofa. “Lucy eventually filed for divorce from her husband. Even Mike and I could never get his real name. He went under a lot of aliases.”
“You’ve…done some checking on Nellie? What…what ever happened to her?”
“She’s married with four kids,” Frank said. “Her husband’s a mechanic. She goes to church every Sunday with her husband and kids. Her husband is part owner of the garage he works out of and she manages the business end from home. By outward appearances, she appears to have a good life.”
“Appears to have a good life?”
Frank was silent for a moment. “You’ve got to understand, Vince. These people are really good at blending in. They’re like fucking chameleons. That’s why we didn’t want you blabbing everything to your girlfriend, Tracy. She appears normal too. So do the rest of your friends. Brian Dennison and his wife, the people you hang out with at the office. Your late wife. The truth of the matter is, they’re really good at concealing their true selves.”
“Now you’re just being paranoid.”
“We’ve identified some of th
em,” Frank continued. “By outward appearances, the ones we’ve identified seem on the up-and-up too. Community service leaders, doctors, lawyers, respected business people. We were able to ID them as cult members due to some stealth investigation into their background and matching their known associates. I also did some light surveillance on a few. We did the same thing with your friends, as well as people Mike and I know. They all checked out. But then, we did the same kind of investigation on acquaintances and friends of the folks that know us…that know you…and do you know what we found?”
Vince shook his head.
“We went back two and three degrees of separation on all known acquaintances and friends of everybody involved. On the surface, they checked out fine. But we found an anomaly in one. He almost passed with flying colors, but there was something about his background that seemed a bit off, so he merited further scrutiny. And…well, to tell you the truth, it’s still inconclusive as to this guy being a member of the cult. It could go either way. And his outward veneer is rock solid, just like everybody else.” Frank paused. “That’s what I mean by when I say we can’t be too sure about anybody. Dig?”
Vince didn’t know what else to say. Frank was silent as they sat, looking toward the window out at the little sliver of darkness between the curtains. Finally, Vince said, “What do you think will happen?”
“With us?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. But I know what I want to do.”
“What’s that?”
Frank turned to Vince, fixing him with a piercing gaze. “I want to kill my mother and I want to kill my step-father. And then I want to kill Samuel Garrison. I want to blow all those motherfuckers to hell.”
Vince shuddered. Frank’s tone of voice suggested he meant everything he said.
Vince wound up staying up until one a.m. with Frank, mostly talking, their voices lowered so they wouldn’t wake up the rest of the house. Vince tried to keep the conversation away from the topic of why they were here, instead focusing on what he’d been up to the last twenty years, trying to coax Frank to tell him more of the same and letting the conversation run from there. Because they’d led such rich, varied lives, they talked about a wide range of subjects: music, politics, literature, economics, travel. Vince could have stayed up all night talking to Frank. When Frank rose from his chair and went to the kitchen and began preparing a pot of coffee, Vince glanced at his watch. “My God, it’s almost one!”
“Yeah,” Frank said, looking through the cupboards for coffee filters. “Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?”
And with that, Vince decided to call it a night and headed for his bedroom.
Chapter Fourteen
REVEREND POWELL WOKE Vince up at eight a.m. “Rise and shine,” he said, opening the door and poking his head in. “Frank’s making breakfast. Come out and join us. We got a lot to talk about.”
Vince groaned and rolled over. He rubbed his eyes and glanced out the window. He could tell by the sunlight streaming through the curtains that it was going to be a warm day.
He shuffled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans, and padded to the bathroom. He splashed water on his face, finger-combed his hair, and reached for the toiletry bag he’d left on the counter last night before turning in. He brushed his teeth hurriedly, wondering what happened in the last seven hours or so that he’d been asleep.
When he emerged from the bathroom the scent of sizzling bacon and freshly brewed coffee greeted him. Frank was standing at the stove, cracking eggs into a skillet. “How do you like your eggs, Vince?”
Vince rubbed his eyes again. Frank was standing in front of the stove wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else. In addition to his heavily tattooed arms, his chest and back were tattooed as well. So was his right thigh; some kind of design snaked down below the hem of his shorts, stopping just shy of his knee.
“Well?” Frank was waiting for an answer.
“Over-easy, I guess.” He entered the kitchen, honing in on the coffee. “You can cook, too?”
Frank snorted. “What, you don’t think that I can cook? Shit!” Frank cracked two more eggs into the skillet and turned to another skillet, turning the bacon over with a pair of tongs. “I’ve been on my own since I was twelve years old, dude. I can probably cook Emeril or Wolfgang Puck out of the kitchen.”
“I can vouch for that,” Mike Peterson said. He was seated at the dining room table, a newspaper spread out before him. He was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He took a sip of coffee. “The man can make a mean casserole.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” Frank said. He put two slices of bread in the toaster. He turned to Vince, looking more awake than Vince felt even though he’d gotten less sleep. “That’s the trouble with people like you, Vince. You take one look at me and figure because of the long hair and all the tattoos that the only thing I can fix is my motorcycle. I’ve never owned a motorcycle. What they don’t know is that I can cook any damn thing I want to, can brew a great pot of coffee, and can write most best-selling authors under the table even though I’m not being paid to do it.” He grinned. “I’m also the best husband and father in the world!”
“Of course you are,” Reverend Powell said, returning to the kitchen from the master bedroom. He’d changed into fresh clothing—clean blue jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. Reverend Powell looked to be in a better mood this morning, too. He poured himself a cup of coffee. “Frank, what you’re preparing smells wonderful. Vince! Have some coffee and join us at the table. We have a lot to talk about.”
Vince sat down at the table with his coffee and took a glance through the Sports page of the Lancaster Intelligencer. Frank puttered in the kitchen, tending to the eggs and bacon, serving them up as they were finished. By the time he seated himself at the table Vince was already halfway through his breakfast, which also consisted of a glass of orange juice. “This is great,” Vince nodded, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Thanks, Frank.”
“Don’t mention it,” Frank said, digging in.
“I’ve already told this to Frank and Mike,” Reverend Powell said, pausing from his breakfast. “I spoke to Tom Hoffman this morning. He wants to meet them.”
Vince glanced at Mike as he chewed on a piece of bacon. Mike nodded. “I think it’s a good idea.”
“Tom Hoffman is a brother in the Lord,” Reverend Powell said, returning to his breakfast. “And he’s a solid law enforcement man. He also has first-hand knowledge of the crime scene at Maggie’s home, so he’s seen what we’re up against. I didn’t tell him everything we discussed last night, but…he seems to have a feeling for what’s going on.”
Vince looked at Mike. “Are we going to tell him?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know. I want to meet him first.” He looked at Frank. “Right?”
Frank nodded as he dipped his toast in egg yolk. “Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. But I still say we play our cards close and don’t reveal too much. I want to check the guy out.”
Mike turned to Reverend Powell. “Do you have a personal computer?”
“Yes. In my office.”
“Mind if I use it?” Frank asked.
“No, I don’t see why not. Can I ask why?”
“Just some things I want to do,” Frank replied, taking a bite of egg-yolk dipped toast.
“You want to check out Tom Hoffman, is that right?” Reverend Powell sounded both surprised and slightly angry at the idea.
“Hank,” Mike said in a soothing tone. “We have to make sure—”
“Make sure of what? I can assure you that Tom Hoffman is a man of good standing. Why, he’s a deacon at First Presbyterian Church here in Lititz!”
“I understand that and I apologize,” Mike said. “But we have to check. Please respect our cautionary approach to this, Hank, but—”
“No, you’re right,” Hank Powell said, holding up his hand. He attacked his breakfast, spooning eggs and bacon into his mouth. “You guys have
been in this battle longer than I have. You know what we’re up against. I won’t say anything.”
They were silent for a minute. Vince could tell that Hank Powell was irritated at the thought of Tom Hoffman being checked out. Vince would have felt the same way last week, but now he felt glad they were taking such extreme measures. They had to.
Mike broke the brief silence as he finished his breakfast. He took a sip of coffee. “Okay, here’s the plan. We meet briefly with Tom Hoffman. Where did you say we were to meet him, Reverend?”
“The Family Cupboard Restaurant and Buffet on Newport Road at ten-thirty,” Hank said, still eating his breakfast. “He has an early shift today. Ten-thirty is his break-time. I told him we’d meet him there for coffee.”
“Fine,” Mike said. “That gives us enough time to grab quick showers and head over. When we get there, Vince will have to ask about the investigation. I’ll be acting as his lawyer and Frank will act as a body guard.”
Frank snorted. “Falling back on that cliché again, I see.”
Mike ignored Frank’s wisecrack. “Naturally, you’re interested as a friend of the family. If Tom Hoffman refers us to the state police or a homicide detective, we go from there. If he has information he’s willing to share, we listen and take notes. If he tries to solicit information from us, we don’t tell him anything we discussed last night.”
“What do we tell him?” Vince asked.
“We tell him we have reason to believe that the people responsible for your mother’s death may be trying to kill you, too,” Mike said. “We don’t want him to find out on his own. He can learn this easily himself. And if he finds out we’ve been withholding information, he may not cooperate.”
“You’re damned right he won’t want to cooperate,” Reverend Powell muttered. He’d put away his breakfast in less than two minutes. He scooped up the rest of the egg yolk with the last remaining piece of toast and finished it off.
“Tom Hoffman needs to know Vince may be in danger because it might help him give us more information,” Mike continued. He took a sip of coffee. “If it does, and if it feels right, we can talk later about sharing more information with him. We can discuss that after our meeting with him at the Family Cupboard. Then we’ll come back here, Frank will do some checking on the computer, Vince will call the Irvine P.D., then we’ll take a look at the report on Tom that comes up and decide whether or not we want to meet with him again.”
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