Malevolent

by Searls, David

  Vincent Applegate squatted awkwardly before her. Matthew and Roseann Porter hovered in the background along with Kent Lamplighter and most of the extended Scranton family and one or two others whose names or faces weren’t familiar to Patty.

  She looked away, studied the small crowd for Tim. It had been his idea to come here tonight, but after she’d murmured introductions to the few members of the congregation whose names had sprung to mind, he’d disappeared.

  He’d acted funny all evening. Uptight and nervous. Beyond an admiring comment for an old canary-yellow VW Beetle in the parking lot, he’d had little to say once they’d arrived. Tim had mentioned hearing about the Kendall suicide on Monday and had surprised her by wanting to attend the memorial. Had kept trying to tell her something about strange goings-on at the small church, but Patty hadn’t had much interest in whatever he’d been trying to say. Her only interest was in watching Tim make his way around the interior. Would he show any familiarity with it, or act like this was his first visit?

  It seemed to her like he knew his way around the place. And now he was gone.

  “It was his idea to leave the religion of his birth. He said that it had grown too massive and uncaring for him. Travis thought things were different here.” Gina Kendall took in her surroundings with a weak swipe of her hand. “He liked being a part of something smaller, more intimate and personal.”

  Her eyes were dry now and focusing above and beyond the little group huddled around her, as if she was taking her case to God Himself. “But it bothered him leaving the Church. Not at first, but in time. He tried to joke about it, about what eternity held in store for a lapsed Catholic.” She turned now and faced the young minister squatting next to her. “A man with this nervous uncertainty about the afterlife, he’d kill himself?”

  After a pause so long and intense that Patty didn’t want to draw attention to herself even by swallowing hard, Vincent said, “I understand how Travis might have felt. I was raised Catholic myself, so I understand the burden of guilt.”

  “Then you’re not concerned about the loss of your own soul, Reverend?”

  Patty turned with everyone else to the sound of the woman’s voice. She might not have been able to immediately place the attractive woman in the green suit, except for the fact that Tim was standing next to her. In that context, Patty immediately identified Detective Dillon. Interesting the way they’d just happened to run into each other here.

  Imagine that, Patty thought bitterly.

  Vincent smiled tentatively at the petite cop in a way that suggested the need for introductions, but before he could ask for one, another female voice broke in from another part of the church.

  “Vincent doesn’t have to worry about breaking Church doctrine. He’s pope of his own little church, so he gets to make the doctrine.”

  Heads turned, like spectators at a tennis match. Sandy Applegate stood by the swinging door to the tiny kitchen where women behind her were heating casseroles, but she looked like no minister’s wife Patty had ever seen. Her crisp ivory dress sleekly draped her tall, slender figure, a single strand of pearls to complement her long neck. She smiled faintly, but it was Patty’s impression that the smile never reached the woman’s eyes.

  Vincent gingerly rose from his squatting position in front of the young widow, grimacing as he flexed his stiffened legs. He shifted his gaze three times—to Gina Kendall, to Melinda Dillon and finally to his wife. “I believe,” he said quietly, “that if you treat others with kindness and dignity, your soul is in no jeopardy. Anyway, it should be of greater importance to seek heaven than to avoid hell.”

  Sandy nodded, her face still wearing that smile that seemed to have been planted there. “Well spoken. How about trust? Is that a grace in your church?”

  By now most of the congregation was watching with baffled interest.

  Vincent’s face pinked slightly, but didn’t otherwise lose its usual mask of bland concern. “As you can see,” he told the room, but kept his gaze leveled on his wife, “we’re all a little unnerved tonight. That’s not surprising. Let’s ask God to help us make sense of what happened.”

  Make no mistake about it, it was spooky down there. Pipes rattled, water flowed and things that Patty didn’t want to think about scurried in the dark. It was, after all, the cellar. But it also happened to be the only place in the whole building where restrooms could be found.

  “What?” Patty shut off the hard-splashing water tap and listened to the silence. Had someone said something? Maybe someone on the other side of the door she’d locked. Someone waiting to use the bathroom. “Hello?”

  There it was again. Voices, but…whispering. Sounded like it came from beyond the door, from in the walls, or maybe sounds drifting her way through the air ducts or following the water pipes from the main floor. Chatter from upstairs.

  “…have to kill her…next oppor…”

  “Sure, but…first have to…”

  “…only if…no way around…”

  Patty pressed the palm of her hand to her mouth to hold in the scream that had started to build. She braced one hand on the porcelain sink and stared at her reflection in the cracked mirror.

  Overhead, the hollow crunch of footfalls, the morose gathering still taking place above the pipes and ductwork and wiring harnesses that gave the old building life. Under the sound of water running through the ancient copper plumbing, Patty picked up the murmur of conversation. No whispering, just distant murmurs.

  And yet her hand still sealed her mouth shut. Her arms were goose-fleshed. She’d heard…nothing. Not two familiar voices lost in whispers.

  Certainly not.

  “… when the moment’s right we’ll…”

  She jumped back. Her head swiveled to take in everything—the old sink, the cracked mirror, the liquid-oozing soap dispenser, the multiple rolls of single-ply institutional toilet paper stacked on the pitted concrete floor. Not much else to see. She listened to small rodents scratch the walls and ceiling. Heard pipes bang and water rush through them from elsewhere. From the kitchen, where people were eating and talking and reminiscing and sometimes forgetting the sad occasion and laughing out loud.

  No one was whispering about her. Plotting against her.

  She removed her hand from her face and forced her legs to unlock so she could take a few hesitant steps to the doorway. It sounded like a gunshot in the silence as she unbolted the lock. The door whined melodramatically as she opened it a crack. She pressed her face against the edge of the door to see out, and then, remembering too many bad movies where sharp objects penetrated eyes in such narrow openings, she stepped back and swung the door all the way open.

  A cool, musty scent hung in the air like a decade’s worth of rain. From here, she could see the stairs she’d come down, four yellow lightbulbs hanging below tin pie plate shades above the stairwell. More voices from upstairs.

  The thing to do, she told herself, was to take to those stairs and run up them like her ass was on fire. And to stop visualizing those four bulbs flickering out, one by one as she moved past, like in some shoestring-budget horror film.

  “If we have to kill her…”

  She froze, one foot still reaching for that first step. The whisper, it came from everywhere and nowhere. Which of the familiar voices had uttered it? Had it been Tim or Melinda Dillon?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “I’ve tried talking with her, but she won’t answer the phone. Once I dropped by the house where she lives with her mother and sister. No one answered the door, even though I could see a figure moving around by a window. Not much I could do,” Vincent was saying, “so I left and wrote Germaine a long letter telling her I’d like to help.”

  If anyone bustling about the church vestibule and kitchen noticed Patty’s wide eyes or heard her panting like a long-distance runner as she pounced up the stairs, they said nothing.

  And now, now that she had found her way back up the stairs, without a single lightbulb inexplicably burnin
g out, her terror of just moments before seemed over the top, ridiculous. She felt like she was nine.

  “I know she’s hurting and I wish there was more I could do, but…” Vincent shrugged away the rest of it. His long, lean frame was draped against one wall just outside of the kitchen while he talked with Melinda Dillon. He sounded defensive and looked tense, his eyes in constant contact with the crowd. They barely lingered on Patty, though.

  The policewoman had distractedly glanced her way too, as Patty had stumbled up from the dungeon-like restrooms, but her expression betrayed nothing. The conversation up here sounded like it had been going on awhile, but how could that be if Patty had heard the detective whispering with Tim just minutes ago?

  Unless Vincent was in on it too.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said under her breath, mentally kicking herself for how far astray she was letting her thoughts take her.

  She scanned the vestibule in search of the boyfriend who was most certainly not plotting her demise. She made brief visual contact with the Tatums, the newest members of the congregation. Candy chatted easily with some of the women, but William looked stiff and uncomfortable next to her. Fearful, even? Or maybe Patty was reading her own emotions on his face.

  She finally found Tim, in conversation with Dick Biddle. No, it was more accurate to say that Dick Biddle was in conversation. Her boyfriend’s face wore the passive glaze of the sick old antelope being brought down by lions on the Discovery Channel. Lost hope, doomed despair. As with Melinda Dillon, it looked like he’d been held up for some time.

  Patty, feeling as hopeless as her boyfriend looked, got herself a paper cup of an overly sweetened and decidedly nonalcoholic fruit punch from the kitchen and held up a wall near its propped-open swinging door. From here she could eavesdrop once again on the dialogue between the cop and the minister.

  Detective Dillon was saying, “I found her to be about as uncooperative as you describe her. It’s going to be damn hard getting any closer to the truth if she keeps shutting us out like this.”

  From the doorway behind her, Patty could observe four or five women loading serving vessels, and sticking colored toothpicks into bits of ham and water chestnuts, and bringing the trays out. Faint laughter could be heard from clumps of conversation here and there. It felt like a party. Hell, it was a party. They’d call it a wake if they’d remembered to bring along the corpse and some booze.

  Patty joined the women in the kitchen. She took bowls of olives and celery and arranged them on a glass tray. She worked slowly while capturing snatches of conversation from just beyond the doorway.

  “So you suspected that I’d directed that poor Marberry woman to bring false charges against the video store owner so I could close it down?” Both tension and surprise registered in Vincent’s voice.

  “It’s something I had to consider,” Detective Dillon admitted. “The way she looked up to you, well, it wouldn’t be the first time a deluded religious fanatic was led astray by a strong leader.”

  “No, of course not. Jones. Koresh. The nut right near here in Kirtland who had his flock slaughter an entire family of unworthy followers,” Vincent said.

  “Switching channels,” the cop said, “what can you tell me about what happened to Travis Kendall?”

  Patty popped a celery stalk in her mouth and sucked it so it wouldn’t crunch through Vincent’s reply.

  “Switching channels, you call it. But I bet you’d be interested in finding a common thread between two violent events involving church members over a short time period. I’m going to turn the tables, Detective Dillon, and ask what you can tell me about his death.”

  “The medical examiner’s satisfied it’s a suicide by the angle of the weapon, gunshot residue on his palm and other factors. Besides, he left a note.”

  “I know.”

  After a long pause, the detective spoke so softly that Patty had to edge her way nearly out of the doorway to pick it up. She continued to make piles of celery stalks and carrot sticks on the glass tray, giving her hands something to do.

  “I assume you learned the contents of the note from his wife.” The minister must have nodded. “Then you know that he was depressed about getting laid off. This, despite the fact that he was still employed at the same place he’d worked for twenty-seven years.”

  “They’d had recent cutbacks,” said Vincent. “These are difficult times.”

  “And difficult times drive people to religion.”

  Vincent made a dry sound, a chuckle with little humor. “To take what you’re saying one step farther, Germaine Marberry has had a rough life. Never married, lives with a mentally challenged sister and an overbearing, puritanical mother.”

  “What I’m trying to do is—”

  “You’re trying to figure out why bad things keep happening to my people. Travis Kendall’s problems were definitely psychological in nature. He was maybe more concerned about his job than the situation warranted. Maybe he was in debt. Probably was in debt, if he and Gina were like most Americans. What he had in common with the similarly damaged Germaine Marberry was religion. The crutch of emotional weaklings—right?”

  “That’s not what I’m suggesting.”

  “It’s all right,” said Vincent, his tone loosening. “I didn’t mean to come down on you. Let’s switch channels again, as you’d say, and I’ll ask you point-blank if Germaine Marberry only imagined her attack.”

  Patty perked her ears, but caught no response. She was annoyed at the high-pitched chatter of the women in the tiny kitchen with her, but at least they’d made no attempt to include her.

  When the conversation outside the doorway resumed, it was Vincent again. “Don’t look so shocked. I have to admit to holding that suspicion for awhile now. No witnesses, no suspects, and I’d bet no forensic evidence. Now she’s got this fantasy going about my having spoken with her when I haven’t. Quite frankly, she’d be my first suspect if I learned that someone from my congregation had delusions of sexual violence.”

  “Honey, I don’t think you could dress up that vegetable tray any better than you’ve already done it,” chirped a voice from behind her. Sara Lamplighter, shattering Patty’s concentration like dropped crystal. The glass tray twitched, and black olives rolled to the floor, bouncing merrily at her feet.

  “Oops,” Sara said cheerfully. “Must have startl—are you all right, dear?”

  Patty nodded, not trusting her voice. She hadn’t known how tightly wound she’d become as she spied on the policewoman whom she’d not long ago suspected of conspiring to kill her. Conspiring with the man she planned to share her life with.

  “You poor girl, you’re so pale,” said the husky woman. “We all miss Travis, so don’t be ashamed of your feelings. That’s why we’re here tonight, to make some sense of it together. One big family is what we are. Now what did you say your name was, honey?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The gunmetal-gray binoculars held to his face turned the movements of the three people into a mimed performance which he followed like a silent ballet.

  First, the lanky man leaves the church with the tall woman with the sexy hips. When he notices the smaller woman about to step into a sweet midseventies muscle car parked at the curb, the lanky man calls out to her. He has words with her on the sidewalk in front of her car, while the woman with the sexy hips walks on, alone. He steps away from his conversation with the tiny woman with the car and calls out to the taller woman. She ignores him, keeps walking, her back stiff and stride hard.

  This woman, she earns the most attention of the man with the binoculars. He focuses in tightly on the long hair swinging behind her, her shapely ass and womanly hips, the confident way she attacks the pavement with sharp, determined footsteps. The way her legs gobble pavement, it’s obvious she’s angry. So is the lanky man, now. He shakes his head as the tall woman continues down the sidewalk without him. Then he watches the petite woman roar away in her muscle car.

  Now he’s got no one,
the lanky man. Others spill out of the church behind him, mostly in pairs, but he stands alone out there. He turns, and then turns again, as though he’ll find an answer in some direction of the compass.

  The binoculars have grown heavy on the bridge of the man’s nose, his upper cheeks clammy. And now he notices that the lanky man is staring at him.

  “Jesus!”

  Griffin jerked the field glasses away from his face. He blushed as he realized how exposed he’d been in his fluorescent-lit store with its wall of glass.

  Now, without any visual aid, he could see Tim crossing Broadview Road and striding through the sparsely occupied parking lot of AfterHours Video.

  “How’d it go?” Griffin asked cheerfully when the buzzer sounded and Tim walked in.

  “How’d what go?”

  “Nothing. Your evening. Your life. However you choose to answer the question.”

  “By the way,” said Tim, “I’ll bet the white oval indentations on your cheeks match the binoculars you left sitting on the counter. You’re not exactly invisible at night in this birdcage of a store.”

  Together, they stared at Griffin’s gunmetal-gray binoculars. They’d belonged to John Solloway. He’d also left behind a smoking pipe, and Griffin had never seen his old man use either item.

  Tim glanced at the black curtain.

  “No customers,” said Griffin.

  Tim stabbed a thumb at the door behind him. “Guess that gives you plenty of time to track the comings and goings of those church people.” Obviously not in a great mood.

  Griffin frowned. “You a cop, or just working for one?”

  “Actually, I’m just like you, Griffin–curious,” said Tim as he moved into the room, picked up a returned DVD from the counter and dropped it back down. “Curious to know what you find so interesting that you keep binoculars trained on the church.”

  Griffin looked out at the black world beyond his plate-glass window. Watched it throb with intermittent color as his sign swathed the parking lot pavement with jerky splashes of hot pink.