by G. M. Ford
I moved like the Mummy as I stiff-legged it from the car to the men’s room. Everything ached. I cradled my left hand with my right as I shuffled across the grass and up the sidewalk. Mercifully, the john was empty.
I spent the next twenty minutes and every single paper towel in the dispenser trying to clean myself up. I had a carbuncle the size of a golf ball on my forehead, and a split in my upper lip you could have stuffed a dime into. My sternum ached from the head-butt and my kidneys felt as if they had been pureed. Worst of all, my left hand was turning purple and throbbed with every beat of my heart.
Wasn’t till I crawled back into my car that I started wondering about the cops. Whether they were camped out somewhere along the highway, or waiting for me at the ferry terminal. Either way, I didn’t have a leg to stand on. The Rectory folks were local and I wasn’t. I’d clearly been trespassing on their property. I’d committed several counts of assault. If they’d called the cops, I was going to spend a night or two in jail. I winced as I dropped the car into gear and started rolling for the highway.
My flight mechanism was screaming at me to put the pedal to the metal. Took all my willpower to drive at a grandmotherly pace. Fifteen clammy minutes later, I rolled back through Port Gamble, turned east at the big intersection, and headed for the Kingston ferry terminal. Halfway back, I passed a Washington State trooper going in the opposite direction. My eyes kept flicking back and forth between the road and the rearview, expecting the light bar to fire up at any second. When the cruiser finally faded into the distance and disappeared from view, I exhaled for what seemed like the first time in a week.
I stayed in my car for the ferry ride back to Edmonds. Just sat there, leaning against the window, listening to the throb of the big diesels and watching the black water slide by. By the time we docked and the crewman motioned me forward, I was crimped around the steering wheel like Quasimodo. Bumping up and over the ferry ramp pulled an involuntary moan from somewhere deep inside me.
Edmonds to downtown Seattle was less than twenty miles, but it seemed to take an hour. By the time I got there, I’d abandoned any illusions I may have harbored regarding self-medication. Band-Aids and Mercurochrome weren’t going to get it done here, so I drove directly up to Harborview Hospital, parked the car a long block away, and wandered into the ER.
Harborview is the primary trauma center for the Pacific Northwest. If you’ve severed your aorta or extruded yourself through the windshield of a Karmann Ghia, Harborview is where they send you, so walk-ins with boo-boos can generally expect a pretty substantial wait time. Today was no exception.
By the time they’d gotten around to me, determined that although my hand wasn’t broken, it might as well be, then forced all the bones back where they belonged and fixed them in place with a deep-blue soft cast, darkness and a steady drizzle had claimed the remainder of the day.
I stayed in bed for three days. I guess you could say I was nursing my wounds, but, really, I spent most of the time going over the info I’d gotten from Carl and surfing the Internet, trying to catch up on the whys and wherefores of the Mount Zion church. And, believe me, there was a lot to catch up on.
Like most clusterfucks, Mount Zion had grown from humble roots. A young guy named Aaron Townsend started a Bible study group in Belltown on Tuesday nights. A group that, within a decade, had morphed into twenty-three branches in five states with thirteen thousand people showing up for Sunday services. Townsend appeared in Northwest Travel & Life magazine, preached at a Seahawks game, threw out the first pitch at a Mariners game, and founded a network of evangelical leaders who started hundreds of other churches.
Which was all the more amazing because Seattle is hardly a godly town. Yeah, we’ve got our share of coffee-social Lutherans and other true believers, but for most of the neck-bearded, tattooed hipsters traipsing around town in their jaunty hats and skinny jeans, Sunday services were far more likely to include chicken and waffles at their favorite brunch joint than those symbolic tapas offered at a standard house of worship.
But maybe that explains Mount Zion’s appeal. Just as Pacific Northwesterners prefer to make their own software, airplanes, music, organic food, and political movements, they also prefer to make their own religions. They’re freethinkers, anti-institution, and individualists, making them more inclined to participate in a Pilates class, hike a mountain, or even attend a Seahawks game to find spirituality rather than step inside a traditional church.
But, for reasons that may never be satisfactorily explained, Aaron Townsend’s blue-jeans, down-home style drew them like lemmings to those icy Arctic cliffs. Unfortunately, as is all too often the case in cults of personality, the rise of the church proved directly proportional to the rise of Aaron Townsend’s ego. By the time the first rumblings of discontent began, Townsend and his new wife, Alice, had written a nearly five-hundred-page tome humbly entitled Real Belief, a document which any number of conservative Christian scholars, not surprisingly, found sorely wanting in both piety and scholarship.
But, even with that, the dissension might well have ended there. It’s not like churches don’t have a long and bloody history of doctrinal disputes. But no. Emboldened by his meteoric rise, Townsend then began to hold forth on how marriages should be conducted. Early on my second day in bed, I downloaded a copy of Townsend’s best seller, The Christian Couple, and spent most of the day working my way through it.
In a nutshell, what it says is that it is God’s will that women are to be ruled over, controlled by, and dominated by men—particularly their husbands—in family, church, and civic life. Period, end o’ story. Sorta like a “Grab your ankles, Agnes, it’s the Lord’s will” kind of thing.
Realizing that an unusual degree of compliance was going to be called for, Mount Zion Ministries began to make it more difficult to become a member. Simply showing up at services wasn’t going to cover it. Becoming a full-fledged member—a process thunderously demanded, in Pastor Aaron Townsend’s sermons—required months of classes and a careful study of Real Belief. To seal the deal, the prospective member had to formally agree to submit to the “authority” of the Mount Zion leadership, which included Townsend’s macho interpretation of Christianity, one in which men are unquestioned heads of their households and “sissified church boys,” as he called them, could feel free to get lost. He railed against mainstream Christians who imagined what he called an “androgynous Christ.” Instead, he molded his doctrine on manliness, sexual purity, and submission to authority: wives to husbands, husbands to pastors, and everyone to God.
Needless to say, not everyone was enamored with this somewhat testicular approach to religion. Almost immediately, rifts began to appear in the social fabric. A full-scale them and us situation erupted. Those unwilling to submit to church demands were ostracized and shunned by members of the Mount Zion community.
Splinter groups soon formed. The chorus of protest rose to a roar. And, not surprisingly, the church began to dissolve beneath the deluge. Several church elders quit. A national “church planting” group called Reach 36, cofounded by Aaron Townsend, removed Townsend and Mount Zion Ministries from its membership rolls, while urging in a letter that Townsend “step away” from his ministry and “seek guidance.”
Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what he did. Calling it an extended spiritual reconsideration, Townsend stepped away from the church and went into self-imposed seclusion. Without its charismatic pastor, the church immediately went into a death spiral. Attendance and donations took a nosedive. All church memberships were suspended. Petitioners were encouraged to seek their spiritual guidance elsewhere. And the entity known as the Mount Zion Ministries was quietly disbanded.
That was the end of February. As far as I could see, Mount Zion Ministries didn’t make the news again until April 6 of that same year, when the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce ominously noted that there had been some serious holdup in the sale of Mount Zion’s assets. The following Monday, the Seattle Times broke the
story. Front page of the financial section.
Seems that several of the church’s presumed holdings—including the church building on West Woodland Way, the compound on the peninsula where I’d gotten my ass kicked, and two unspecified private homes—had been donated not to Mount Zion Ministries, as had always been presumed, but instead had been deeded directly to Aaron Townsend himself. The resale value of the properties in question was estimated to be between twenty-three and twenty-eight million dollars.
Same day the story hit the papers, Aaron Townsend returned from his soul-searching odyssey like Caesar returning from Gaul. He arrived back in town with a hotshot law firm, which immediately began passing out restraining orders like they were breath mints. Townsend preached that night up in Mill Creek, to an SRO crowd, and was welcomed home with a prolonged standing ovation.
Four days later, the SPD found the naked bodies of Blaine Peterson and Chuck Stone wedged into the trunk of a rental car, covered with my old man’s overcoat, which was, of course, the point where I’d stumbled into it.
As of yesterday, neither the elders of the church nor Aaron Townsend were making any public statements, although an anonymous elder was quoted as saying that Townsend was now claiming the property as his own. The unnamed elder wanted the public to know, however, that it wasn’t about the money.
Funny thing was, after the better part of a week’s work and after getting the shit kicked out of me, I hadn’t dug up a single thing that took us any closer to solving the murders. Sure, I’d found out that both guys were once married to a “now you see her, now you don’t” woman who’d called herself Theresa Calder, but what, if anything, that fact had to do with the price of eggs in Tibet was still anybody’s guess.
The gate buzzer sounded and then again. I checked the bedside clock. 6:37. That would be Bite Squad, the food delivery service, bringing my dinner.
I rolled over and put my feet on the floor. I stopped at the hall closet long enough to collect a jacket and a Glock 9mm before stepping out the door. The wind was swirling in the tops of the trees as I made my way down the driveway. My body felt like it’d been threshed and baled. I opened the gate just far enough to grab the food package.
When I looked up, I noticed the Seigals out on their front walk again. The rush of the wind in the trees prevented me from catching anything being said, but if body language was any indication, their relationship was rapidly moving from bad to worse. I didn’t like the look of it one bit. For a second I thought about wandering over, but just couldn’t muster the gumption, so I closed the gate and headed back for the house.
Like its English namesake, the area they now call Newcastle had once been a giant coal mine. As the years passed, and suburban creep began to overtake Seattle, somebody noticed that if you got high enough up on the slag heap, you had a rather grand view of the Seattle skyline and then, of course, the property race was on. These days, it was an über-snooty golf club community. One of those places where the stone-fronted five-bedroom houses all looked the same and everybody drove a high-end SUV. Crime was limited to an occasional drive-by snubbing.
The family had buried Blaine Peterson day before yesterday. His parents lived in Newcastle, so I’d spent a few minutes online with what passes for a phonebook these days, and, for a mere $9.95, come up with their address, which, when I checked out the handy Google map, turned out to be along the sixth hole of the Golf Club at Newcastle. The body of water guarding the front of the sixth green was named Peterson Pond. These were charter members.
I had mixed emotions about today’s agenda. First off, I felt shitty about showing up at the parents’ house so soon after they’d put their son in the ground. I’d been kicking myself about it all morning. It was one of those places where who you are comes into contact with who you’re afraid you might actually be. The story I was telling myself—and God knows I was good at doing that—said that the older and colder something like Blaine’s death got, the harder it became to come up with any meaningful information. That was the story, anyway.
Secondly, I was still nervous about running into the cops. I had no doubt they were humping hard on the case. By now, there were probably multiple law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation. People with four-car garages generally got law enforcement’s best efforts. The question was where they were working. What I knew for sure was that running into them was gonna ruin my day, but, as the now familiar story went, there was no way around that either. I didn’t have so much as a starting place when it came to Chuck Stone, not a thread to pull or a stone to turn over, so it was either work the Blaine Peterson angle or give it up altogether.
I pulled my car to the curb and got out. Long, thin clouds raced across the bright blue sky like the vapor trails of the gods. The air was cooler up here. I bunched my collar about my neck as I walked up the driveway.
A dark-haired woman with thick eyebrows and a pink maid’s uniform answered the door. She looked me over like I was the blue plate special.
“I’d like to see Mr. or Mrs. Peterson,” I said.
She leaned out through the doorway and peered around me on both sides.
“Are you police?” she asked in an accent I couldn’t quite pin down. Something Central European maybe.
I shook my head.
“Are they expecting you?” she asked.
I allowed that they weren’t. She said, “Wait,” and then double-bolted the door in my face. I could hear her heels clicking away.
A black Ford SUV rolled around the corner on my right, the clicking of its studded tires announcing its arrival. NEWCASTLE HEIGHTS SECURITY in gold letters emblazoned on the side. The sight of my car sitting in the street seemed to get their attention. The SUV slowed to a crawl. The side window slid down. I watched over my shoulder as they eased to a stop at the end of the driveway and the passenger door popped open. In the same second that a booted foot stepped out of the security car, the door behind me snapped open.
“Please come in,” the maid said, stepping aside.
I was still stretching my neck and checking out the surroundings when, without a word, she turned and started walking away from me.
I followed her down a wide hall. Her uniform hissed and rustled as we clicked along. She stopped at an arched entranceway on her left and gestured with her arm that I should enter.
I gave her a big smile on the way by. She ignored me and quickly closed the door.
The minute I walked into the room, I knew exactly what the woman was doing. She had her son’s whole life laid out before her in pictures. From cradle to grave, it was all there. Spread out over a dining-room table big enough to seat a football team. Glossies, albums, diplomas, yellowed newspaper articles under glass. All of it. She was circling the table, picking up one thing and then another, running her fingers over the surfaces of photographs and then setting them back on the table.
The room overflowed with cards and flowers, the air filled with the heady smell of dying vegetation. I stood still and watched as she moved slowly, lost in thought, along the far side of the table.
She was just a little thing. Five feet nothing in an expensive black two-piece suit and a pair of low heels. As I approached, she turned her tired eyes my way. She looked at me as if I might be the messenger she’d been waiting for. Someone from the Great Beyond who could finally straighten this nightmare out, once and for all. The anguish in her eyes made me wish like hell I could do it for her.
After a moment, she looked up. “Carlotta said . . .” she began, and then stopped, as if suddenly she wasn’t certain what Carlotta had said.
“Sorry about your loss,” was all I could think to say.
She reached out and picked up an eight-by-ten color photograph, studied it for a moment, and then turned it my way. One of those baseball team pictures with the boys in the front kneeling down holding baseball bats. Little guys in front, bigger guys in back. The Phillies. Somewhere in my attic, I had a very similar photo, only my team was the Astros. Things were sim
pler then. You either won or you lost. Nothing was ambivalent. Quite frankly, I liked it better that way.
I walked around the table and stood by her side. She pointed at the back row, second boy from the left. “That’s Blaine,” she said with a hitch in her voice. “He played third base.”
“I played catcher,” I said.
She looked me up and down. “You look like a catcher,” she said.
I nodded in agreement.
She took a step sideways. Opened a white leather photo album. Blaine, ten years older, accepting a diploma. “Harvard,” she said. “He was third in his class.”
I stayed by her side as she moved on. Blaine wearing mouse ears way back when they went to Disneyland. Blaine and what I figured to be his father standing next to a huge marlin hanging by its tail, grinning like madmen beneath the bright Mexican sky. Skiing pictures. “Breckenridge,” she offered with a wan smile.
Five minutes later, we’d crabbed our way to the head of the table, when she suddenly stopped and looked up at me as if she’d only just noticed I was there. “Did you say . . .” she began. Then answered her own question. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
Figuring this for my chance, I said, “I’m looking for Theresa Calder.”
She took in a short, shallow breath and looked down at the floor. “It broke his heart,” she whispered. “I mean . . . just like that . . . completely out of the blue . . .” She threw a small, angry hand through the air. “Not even the courtesy . . . the common decency . . .” she sputtered and stopped.
For the first time since I’d been there, she moved quickly. Brushing a chair aside with her hip as she whirled around to the other side of the table and grabbed a thick photo album. OUR WEDDING was embossed on the cover.
By the time I reached her side, she’d cracked the album open and was frowning down at one of her son’s wedding pictures. I peered over her shoulder. Blaine gleefully wedged between his parents. Theresa between what I imagined to be hers. Everybody spic-and-span and smiling for the camera. Just one big happy family.