by Nene Adams
Deciding to play along and encourage him to think God had spared her, Mackenzie nodded, unsure if he registered the motion.
“And that thief J.D. Bledsoe, calling himself Dearborn, came trying to buy my land, trying to destroy my church—!” His fists clenched, the sole outward sign of his anger. His expression remained placid. “Threatening me and my ministry. Bledsoe was no man of God. He worshipped Mammon. He was steeped in vice. But the blackest sinner may have a change of heart. I gave him a chance to prove his faith.”
Abruptly, Mackenzie heard Veronica’s voice in her head telling her about the cause of Jacob Dearborn’s death: a poison like cyanide or strychnine. From her position, she had a good view of the table along the left wall with its stacks of hymnals, screen-topped wooden boxes where rattlesnakes rested and jars of colorless strychnine. She cursed herself for not thinking about a possible source for Dearborn’s poisoning sooner.
Why was Wyland telling her what he’d done? Why confess to murder? The answer made her stomach twist tight around a knot of ice. Sickness rose in her throat to choke her.
He had nothing to lose. She wasn’t a witness. She was his next victim.
Wyland appeared oblivious to her struggles. “Divine providence…I had only to offer Bledsoe the poison. He drank, believing the strychnine was water and my faith was as much of a sham as his own. And so perishes the false prophet. Thank you, Jesus!”
The sound of a car engine filtered through the church walls. Although Mackenzie knew logically that the driver couldn’t hear her, she sucked in air through her nose and began to make loud, inarticulate grunts behind the duct tape sealing her mouth.
Listening hard above her galloping pulse, it seemed to her that the car had turned off the road and parked on the grass outside the church. She redoubled her effort to break free, drawing back her legs to kick out at Wyland and thump her heels on the floor though fresh pain shot through her bad leg.
When Wyland’s admonitions failed to silence her, he stalked off the dais toward the table. Hearing another car, Mackenzie continued grunting, kicking and pulling at the tape binding her wrists together. She felt certain most of the Reverend’s genuinely Christian congregation wouldn’t approve of kidnapping and he was no Jim Jones.
He returned with a long, sinuous form dangling from his hand. He draped the snake over her neck. She stiffened in sudden terror at a familiar rattling buzz.
“I find you troublesome, Ms. Cross,” he said, “and I’ve prayed for an answer. Did God spare you before, when you came to my church, or was it the Devil’s luck? I was shown the way to test you as I tested Bledsoe.” He reached down a long fingered hand to stroke the rattlesnake’s head where it rested against her flat chest. Instantly, the buzz intensified. “Let this be a test of your faith. Armor yourself with salvation, put your trust in God and you’ll not be harmed. Let your faith falter and you’ll die. Whatsoever He wills, so it shall be.”
Sweating, Mackenzie rolled her eyes, trying to glimpse the snake. The vibrating tail tickled the side of her arm. She dared not move, not so much as a hair. She sat perfectly still, every inch of her skin crawling, while she heard more cars arriving and people entering the church chatting softly among themselves. Wyland left the dais to greet them.
He must have called for a special meeting. Nobody here would think twice about attending church when the Spirit moves their pastor.
A shimmer caught her eye, a silver-gray manifestation to one side of the dais. No, Annabel, not now! Mackenzie desperately thought.
The apparition appeared, looking more solid than she’d seen at any time before. Annabel’s black gaze was filled with blistering hate. Her form glowed brighter. The gray bled out of the ghost until she shone like molten silver in a forge. Mackenzie had to avert her gaze. Always in the past, Annabel had been cold, but now she burned.
Billy, Annabel whispered in a voice like dust.
After a short while, the congregation took their seats. Wyland mounted the dais. He launched immediately into his sermon. The subject was lost on Mackenzie, but she was keenly aware that his jerky movements and pacing, and the occasional slaps of his Bible against the top of his pulpit, kept the diamondback around her neck in a state of restlessness. Its blunt, wedge-shaped head quested over her chest to her shoulder, but for some reason, the snake didn’t seem inclined to bite. Perhaps it didn’t feel threatened enough.
She started to flinch when the snake’s tongue flicked softly against the skin of her neck, but caught herself. Fear wrung a stifled whimper from her throat.
Annabel waited in perfect silence, her dark gaze fixed on Wyland, who became increasingly agitated as he preached. In the corners of the room, shadows stirred.
Mackenzie heard someone in the congregation fall to the floor, babbling nonsense while others praised Jesus. She also heard rhythmic scuffling footsteps—no doubt women coming forward to perform a rocking step-dance in front of the pulpit. A guitar played. A few voices began to sing a hymn, “I’m Gonna Let It Shine.”
“A joy unspeakable it is, to be obedient to God’s will!” Wyland cried, his hair further disordered and falling over his brow. A patch of sweat darkened his shirtfront.
“Tell us!” bellowed a man in response.
“There’s no power but God,” Wyland thundered. “Every soul here is subject to God’s power. Resistance is damnation. I tell you, I feel the power today! Let it come!”
“Bring it!”
“In this moment, in this hour, I feel His power! Can you feel it, brothers and sisters?”
“Amen!”
“I do not fear death—no, sir, I’m ready to go. We all need to be ready to go. I tell you, you can’t be ready for Jesus and hang on to the world. Trust in Him and you will go to a better place.” Wyland pulled off his jacket, tossed it on the piano and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He extended his arms outward, out of Mackenzie’s line of sight.
When he drew his arms back, he held several fat rattlesnakes coiling and squirming in his grasp. “No matter what comes,” he shouted, raising his arms high, “I’ll glorify God!”
Mackenzie saw the crude sailor girl tattoo on his wrist—on Billy Wakefield’s wrist, she realized—at the same time Annabel Coffin darted forward, no longer human-shaped, but a blue-white blaze of fury, hotter than a sun, more brilliant than a flash of lightning.
The rattlesnakes held by Wyland began to bite him in a frenzy, striking his hands, his forearms, his face, his neck. The snake around her neck slithered off to join the rest in their crazed attack. He screamed and tried to drop the snakes, but they clung to him, strike after strike, while he turned pale and staggered.
The sudden disappearance of the bright light left spots dancing in Mackenzie’s vision. She glanced around, finding no trace of Annabel.
Wyland collapsed, his tongue protruding blue and swollen between his lips.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“What happened?” Veronica asked much later.
Mackenzie glanced around her apartment, glad to be home and safe. “The rattlesnakes just went crazy, Ronnie,” she replied, settling more comfortably on the sofa. “They kept biting the reverend even after he was dead. They ignored everybody else, including the Animal Control officers who rounded them up.”
Veronica kept touching her as if unable to believe she was actually there. “Detective Maynard and I found Billy Wakefield’s picture in the frame on the charm bracelet, just like you said. Wakefield and Wyland were the same person. Dearborn must’ve recognized him.”
“So did Annabel. I should have known. Wilson Wyland. ‘Will’s son,’” Mackenzie explained. “William Wakefield Sr.’s criminally inclined boy, Billy. I guess Billy didn’t just vanish in ’85, but changed his name and went to Bible school. Had a daughter of his own. By the way, what will happen to Alafair?”
“From what Detective Maynard told me, relatives on her mother’s side offered to take her in,” Veronica said. “They’re Holiness Pentecostals, too.”
“Poo
r girl. At least she’ll find comfort in her religion. Hey, let me do this one thing before I forget.” Mackenzie took her cell phone from the coffee table and made a quick call.
When she finished, she answered the unspoken question in Veronica’s eyes. “Sam the baker,” she explained, waving the phone for emphasis. “I had an idea in the patrol car on the way home. I wanted to know if Sam recalled what company did the renovations on my office building next door back in ’57. Turns out it was Young Construction Company.”
“Didn’t Billy’s father work for Young?”
“He sure did. Billy could have gotten access to the worksite.”
“If Billy killed Annabel in the shack in the woods, why not leave her body out there?”
Mackenzie shrugged. “Somebody was making moonshine at the site. If a ’shiner was brewing out there at the time, Billy couldn’t risk Annabel’s body being found. Hiding her behind the drywall of a building under construction probably seemed like a good bet to give himself a head start out of Antioch.”
“His luck held a lot longer than that.” Veronica shifted a little, drawing her legs under her. “But eventually, his bad deeds caught up with him.”
“I’d say so.”
“I’m unclear on why he’d kill Annabel, though. Didn’t he love her?”
“Perhaps he did, but Annabel got pregnant. Billy had promised her they’d run away to New York City together. Whether he meant it at the time, I don’t know, but when she told him she was expecting, he persuaded or forced her to go to Isaac Rush for an abortion. After the procedure, she started to hemorrhage. She called Billy and arranged to meet him in the shack in the woods. Maybe Billy panicked when he saw all the blood. Maybe he never loved her as much and she became a complication he didn’t need. Either way, he hit her on the head with a pipe or something else heavy enough to do the job.”
“As a theory, it hangs together, but there’s no evidence.”
“Ronnie, we’ll never know the whole truth. That died with him.”
“Dearborn’s murder?”
“Wyland said he arranged a test of Dearborn’s faith by giving him strychnine to drink,” Mackenzie said, moving to a more comfortable position that also brought her closer to Veronica. Their shoulders touched. She leaned her head over, letting out a little sigh when Veronica hooked an arm around her. “Dearborn thought the stuff was water, not poison.”
“Strychnine is colorless, odorless, tasteless. Not hard to imagine Dearborn might think Wyland was just trying to frighten him with a bluff.”
Mackenzie nodded. “Wyland told me Dearborn threatened him over that land on Sweetwater Hill,” she went on. “Dearborn needed the land to avoid financial ruin. However, Dearborn had a false identity and a criminal past, too. If he exposed Wyland as Billy Wakefield, he exposed himself, so he didn’t dare go to the police or try to discredit Wyland. But if Wyland told him he’d sell the parcels in exchange for Dearborn proving his faith by drinking what he thought was fake poison, he’d do it in a hot second.”
“Why did Wakefield/Wyland go after you?” Veronica’s expression remained pleasant, but her hand tightened on Mackenzie’s thigh.
Mackenzie found the possessive gesture endearing. She considered the question. “I don’t know for sure,” she finally replied. “Remember, I told you I thought I’d seen him when I was bitten by the rattlesnake.”
Veronica looked stricken. “Oh, Mac, I’m sorry, I thought you were hallucinating—”
“Hey, it’s okay.” Mackenzie put her hand over Veronica’s. “I thought the same thing. Anyway, he told me that since Dearborn failed his divinely inspired test by dying of strychnine poisoning, he decided to find out if I was really a righteous person or not by using another test, this time trial by rattler. He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense at that point. I got the feeling he wasn’t shamming about his conversion, though. He really was a devout man of God. So devout, he saw signs everywhere.”
“The man wasn’t in his right mind,” Veronica declared flatly. “What about his followers? The ones who kidnapped you and put that bump on your head?”
Mackenzie had given up trying to figure out the identities of the “Chippendale woman” and her accomplices. “No idea. He called them ‘colleagues,’ whatever that means.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Well, Wyland’s gone. I suppose the church will disband now.”
“Or get a new preacher.”
“Don’t say it. I’ve had enough of rattlesnakes to last me a lifetime.”
Veronica turned her head to bring their lips together. “You stay off Sweetwater Hill, Mac. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to be lost.” Mackenzie kissed Veronica. The angle was wrong, her lips were sore from the duct tape gag and she suspected her breath could’ve peeled wallpaper, but Veronica didn’t seem to mind.
Suddenly realizing she had forgotten something important, Mackenzie tore her mouth away and gasped. “Oh, my God!”
Veronica sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong?”
“Mama! I was supposed to pick her up at the hospital in Trinity. She’s going to have a cow, Ronnie. A herd of cows,” Mackenzie went on, imagining the horrors an angry Sarah Grace would inflict on her. “A herd of mad, bloodthirsty, vindictive cows with—”
“It’s okay,” Veronica interrupted, visibly relaxing. “Your mother called me when you didn’t answer your phone. I was worried, Mac. I dispatched a patrol car to pick her up in Trinity and started calling around town looking for you. I was about to put a trace your cell phone’s GPS when someone at the church called nine-one-one to report Wyland’s death.”
“And you guessed I was involved? I don’t know whether to be insulted or not,” Mackenzie teased.
Veronica smiled. “What happened to Annabel Coffin?”
“She disappeared. One second she was there, going for the old man like she meant to tear him apart, the snakes went wild and the next minute…poof. She was gone.”
Although Mackenzie appreciated Annabel’s absence, a small part of her also missed the spirit despite her anger and her destructive habits. She picked up a glass of peach iced tea, raising it in a salute. “To Annabel Coffin: may she rest in peace.”
“World without end, amen,” Veronica said, raising her own glass.
Holding her breath, Mackenzie waited for a flash of silver-gray to appear in the corner of her eye to contradict her, but none did. The apartment remained quiet and undisturbed.
Veronica joked, “Alone at last,” but Mackenzie didn’t feel like laughing.
“Yes,” she replied, wondering if Annabel had really found peace.
Who knew why the dead returned as shades to haunt the living, or why some murders cried out to be revenged and other old grudges moldered in the grave?
Annabel had chosen her, tormented her, saved her, and she still didn’t understand why. She blew out a breath. Perhaps one day she’d understand, but not today.
She and Veronica sat in silence for a long moment, just looking at each other. Finally, Veronica leaned over, offering her mouth for another kiss.
Mackenzie obliged.
Bella Books, Inc.
Women. Books. Even Better Together.
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Phone: 800-729-4992
www.bellabooks.com
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thrity-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five