City of Heretics

by Heath Lowrance

  He frowned. “Don’t mock, boy. That innocuous mission statement makes my bullshit detector go off like crazy.” He scratched his bare chest, and his skin was so dry it left white marks. “We’re lucky, I guess, that they only have ten churches, spread out all over the country. Closest one to us is over near Chattanooga, little town called Longbaugh. You heard of it?”

  “Longbaugh? No. Why are we lucky?”

  He said, “That book I wrote, it’s called The Rise and Fall of the American Evangelical Movement. Put it out a couple years after my blockbuster novel, All the Flesh, and just like everything else I’ve ever written it sank like a stone. New York Times called it the most ponderous, hysterical diatribe against religion they’d ever seen. I don’t know, maybe it was a diatribe, I couldn’t say. But everything I said in that book, every little thing, was completely true. I did my goddamn research.” His eyes went vacant, and for a moment he looked every inch the sad, washed-up writer he had mentioned. “I did my goddamn research,” he said again.

  Crowe gave him a minute, not saying anything, and eventually he shook his head hard and said, “What I did, see, was I speculated about the Society being linked to this old church that most theological historians say went under back during the Great Depression. The Church of Christ, Holy Fisher. Holy Fisher sort of splintered off from the evangelical mainstream in the early part of the century. They had more of a… what do you call it… hands-on approach. An aggressive pursuit of what they called Divine Retribution.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they believed it was their duty, as Christians, to seek out and punish sinners. Harshly. If you read the Old Testament… have you read it?”

  Crowe shook his head.

  “Ah. Well, you don’t know what you’re missing. That’s some good reading. Anyway, in the Old Testament, it’s pretty clear that God isn’t all about Love and Peace and all that horseshit. That’s happy-crappy New Testament stuff. In the Old Testament, He’s all about punishment, see, and extremely harsh justice.” He leaned forward, propping his skinny arms on the table, and his voice started to become more animated. “It’s like this. You know the Muslims. I mean the Muslim extremists, right, not your average everyday Muslim. The hard-asses, that’s who I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah,” Crowe said.

  “Well, here’s the thing. Those Muslims, if you really want to get technical about it, are the ones who are actually doing exactly what it tells them to do in the Koran. They’re the ones who are actually taking their faith seriously, and I do mean seriously. The Koran tells ‘em to kill some heathens, and so… that’s what they do. The Church of Christ, Holy Fisher, was pretty much the same thing. They felt like all the other worshippers of God were half-assing it, or sort of picking and choosing whatever made them feel all warm and fuzzy about their faith. Holy Fisher, they thought, was the only church actually going out and doing the dirty work of Christianity.”

  Crowe said, “What sort of dirty work are you talking about?”

  He grinned, showing a worn-out old picket fence of teeth. “Well, that’s hard to say. There was a lot of speculation, you know. But no one had anything solid on them. I mean, you can’t go around openly killing folks and expect to stay in business in any legit form. People talked, though. The church fathers of a lot of other Protestant communities along the east coast condemned them as heretical. Said that Holy Fisher was driven by hatred of sinners rather than love of God.”

  “The Society of Christ the Fisher. This is the same church?”

  “No,” Hampton said. “Did I say that? I don’t think those words crossed my lips. I would never say that. I’m just saying… well, the name is similar, yes? And the secrecy. But the Society has only been around for, what? Twenty years? Thereabouts? And the Church of Christ, Holy Fisher tanked a long time ago.”

  “How long ago are we talking?”

  “Back in the thirties, during the Depression. They really only lasted about ten years or so, but in that time they managed to establish churches in a lot of rural communities along the east coast and into the areas west of the Appalachians. Messages of hate, though, are like sudden fires. They can rage out of control for a while, can burn the fuck out of you, but sooner or later they die out. The message that Holy Fisher was sending didn’t catch on in any way that mattered. Hellfire and brimstone in the afterlife is one thing, right, but church-goers didn’t want to think that it was their goddamn responsibility to mete out divine retribution to sinners in this life.”

  Crowe could’ve argued the point about hateful messages burning out eventually, but he didn’t.

  Hampton said, “Newspapers uniformly condemned them as dangerous and hateful. A bully in the pulpit urging people to commit monstrous crimes against humanity.” He closed his eyes, and quoted: “The Church of Christ, Holy Fisher, is fit only for simpletons and dangerous psychotics. Quite frankly, they are a church of evil-minded heretics.” He opened his eyes. “That’s from an editorial in 1925. The fire was already starting to sputter by then.”

  Crowe swished his coffee around in his cup and said, “Hampton. If the Church of Christ, Holy Fisher, has nothing to do the Society of Christ the Fisher, why are you telling me about them?”

  He shrugged. “You’re going to have to work out some of this shit on your own, boy. What I’m telling you is, if the Society is the same thing as the old church, then, well. I don’t know anything about that, do I? If they’re just a bunch of yahoos who adopted the name, I don’t know about that either. If they have something to do with killing people whom they judge as sinners beyond redemption, well… Let’s say someone actually does know the answer to that question. Would that person be wise to go around blabbing about it?”

  Crowe said, “Church groups don’t go around killing people, Hampton.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you. Hey, you showed up at my door. You wanted to know what I know. And now you do.”

  Crowe stood up. “You don’t know anything.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “You’re a paranoid basket case.”

  “Sorry to waste your time.”

  Crowe clenched his fists. Waste his time… that was exactly what Hampton had done. Crowe came two hundred miles to talk to some raving boozehound with too much free time on his hands and too little grasp on reality.

  He gritted his teeth and said, “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I’ll see myself out.”

  “Right,” he said. And then, as Crowe started to turn away, “Listen, son. The Society, more than likely, is just a savvy Christian charity group, with enough pull to make an old washed-up writer’s life miserable. They probably don’t have any skeletons in the closet. They probably don’t have anything to hide at all. There is nothing, nothing at all, to connect them solidly to the old church.”

  Crowe looked at him, watched as his face went dark and his eyes vacant again.

  Looking at the table, he said, “But I did my goddamn research. I did. They had no right to fuck me. They didn’t have any right.”

  The Wellings had a home in Bartlett. Crowe drove all day to get there, and didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did it. Non-stop from south of Oxford, and he didn’t pause for one second to reflect on what he hoped to accomplish.

  Bartlett is east and a little north of Memphis, pretty solidly middle-to-upper-middle class, unlike neighboring Germantown, where most of the real money is.

  Finding the place was easy, thanks to the internet connection on his brand new cell phone. Turning into a regular computer whiz, which was funny, because before prison he’d never touched a computer in his life.

  Cole had said the Wellings didn’t spend much time at their Bartlett home these days, not since Patricia had been killed; most of the time, they were at some other house or cottage or something in the eastern part of Tennessee—Longbaugh, he assumed, where the Society of Christ the Fisher had a church.

  That was a good thing. It gave Crowe carte blanche to indulge
in some prime B&E.

  It was very near full-on dark by the time he got there, shortly after seven-thirty. He was still annoyed about the trip to Hampton’s house, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe it wasn’t quite the waste of time it seemed like.

  The cold had eased up a little. Not that it had given way to spring or anything, but at least he didn’t feel like the wind was going to freeze his face off. He parked the Jag on the next block and walked over to the Welling house.

  The neighborhood was quiet and pleasant, if not sort of bland. The developers had made a point of making sure neighboring houses didn’t look exactly alike; there were a variety of houses on the block, ranches and bungalows, Tudors and Cape Cods.

  The Wellings place was a Tudor, with pale green vinyl siding and a nice brick front. A light was on in the front window, blurry through some flimsy drapes, but the rest of the place was dark. No cars in the driveway and no signs of life.

  A security light, then, probably on a timer. Crowe wondered about their security system.

  He glanced quickly up and down the block, saw not a soul, although it was possible someone was watching from one of the many windows up and down the street. It was a chance he’d have to take. He crossed the Wellings lawn, crunchy with clinging ice under his shoes, and went around to the backyard.

  There was a small brick patio, and some battered plastic patio furniture. Some of it had been blown over by the heavy winds a couple days before. That was good. It meant that the place was almost definitely vacant. If the Wellings had been home, someone would have righted the furniture by now. He pulled the electronic lock pick out of his inside coat pocket and went to work on the back door.

  An electronic lock pick is a beautiful thing. It looks something like a thick, unwieldy pen. You insert the tip of it into just about any lock, press a button, and it agitates the pins several times a second and pops it open in a heartbeat. Perfectly legal, too, unless you happen to have a record, in which case the pick doubles as a ‘go immediately to jail’ card.

  He popped the lock, stepped into the dark kitchen, and gently shut the door behind him. No alarms went off, but he waited for a long minute anyway without moving and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. The house was silent and empty.

  The kitchen was very modern, all gleaming silver and spotless white Formica. The pots and pans hung above the stove in a handy space-saving rig. He ran a finger along the countertop. No dust. They probably had a cleaning lady in once a week or so to fend off the unwanted advances of nature. It was a little chilly, which meant they’d probably turned the thermostat down to the low 60’s while they were gone. Very conscientious about energy conservation, the Wellings.

  He relaxed a little bit and moved swiftly through the kitchen and directly into the living room. This was where the lamp was on, casting an easy light over the comfortable-looking leather sofa and easy chair, enormous wide-screen TV, coffee table and end tables in elegant blond wood. A bible rested on the coffee table. It was the only book in the room.

  Down the hall. The bathroom was to the left. He went in and opened the medicine cabinet, found it empty except for a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. Past the bathroom was a bedroom, and then another bedroom. He went in each one, opened the closets to find them both empty. Good. Just further verification that the Wellings were gone for a while.

  At the far end of the house he found the study. He knew it was the study because there was a computer in it, and five or six books.

  A colorful life-like painting took up most of the wall, depicting Jesus kneeling amongst a group of modern children, smiling benevolently and resting a hand on one child’s shoulder. The children in the painting looked like they were very interested in what he was saying, except one kid in the foreground; he was looking over his shoulder, as if there was a basketball game going on over there and he really wanted to be a part of it.

  A fireproof safe sat directly under the painting. He turned on the little desk lamp next to the computer, went to the safe, found it unlocked. He found tax returns, insurance records, yellowed personal correspondence, bills, the usual. Nothing about the Society.

  There had to be something, though. If Fletcher Welling was the ‘alderman’, as Cole put it, there had to be some sign of it in his home.

  Crowe sat down in front of the computer and began riffling through the desk. There were five drawers; one long and narrow, and two on each side that were deeper. In the bottom left one he found a stack of pamphlets for the Society. He grabbed one, shoved it in his coat pocket to look at later, and closed up the drawer.

  He was about to open the next drawer, when the sound of wood creaking somewhere in the house stopped him cold.

  Outside, a car with a bad muffler drove by, echoing up and down the street, and he didn’t move.

  He strained to hear. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought maybe he heard the creaking sound again, under the rumble.

  Swiveling quietly in the desk chair, he faced the open door. His hand went to his overcoat pocket for the gun—the gun he realized then that he’d left in the car. Nice going, Crowe. He really was out of practice.

  He waited and watched the hallway for shadows. Because of the lamp in the living room, if someone was in the house they couldn’t come through the hall without Crowe having at least a few seconds warning. He wished he was standing, but moving from the chair would’ve required more noise than he wanted to make just then.

  A tiny digital clock next to the computer said 7:41. It ticked away the seconds, and he listened, and heard nothing. 7:42, and still nothing. No sound, no shadows, nothing.

  But he still sat motionless, until the clock said 7:49.

  He allowed himself to breath. Okay, so he heard a creaking noise. It was winter, after all, the heat was turned down, and the house was making the usual house noises. He stood up and swiftly crossed to the door and glanced down the hall. The place was empty.

  He went back to the desk and resumed foraging through the drawers.

  In the top one on the right, he found some official church documents, ledger books and receipts and what-not, and directly underneath those he came across a pile of newsletters that all said The Society of Christ the Fisher Events and Functions! along the heading. They were all different, and dating back about four years. Probably being saved to go into a scrap book or something.

  He leafed through them briefly, stopped about halfway through when the words Patricia Welling, daughter of Fletcher and Joan Welling caught his eye.

  It was the caption under a cheerful group photo, taken at what looked like a church picnic. A bright summer day behind them, balloons, streamers, a green park with trees, and children running around. The subjects of the photo were a girl with a distantly bemused smile—Patricia—and four or five other girls. Two adults lingered at the periphery of the shot, but the girls were clearly the subjects. He glanced at the date on the header. June, 2006, it said. That was about two months before Patricia ran away.

  She wasn’t like the other girls in the picture, that much was clear. They all looked younger than her somehow, even though they were all about thirteen years old. They all had open faces, hearts that shone through in the moment the photographer snapped the button and said cheese. But not Patricia. Her arms were folded across her narrow chest. Her smile was a temporary fixture. Her eyes were guarded and wary. Crowe could almost read her mind; sure, good times. What are they worth?

  But he could’ve been reading things into the picture, knowing what he knew about her, knowing about her murder only months later. What kid is that self-consciously cynical? No, it takes a grown man to be that immature.

  He was about to put the newsletter in his pocket with the pamphlet, when one of the other faces in the photo caught his eye. He stared at it, the information seeming to take longer than it should have to process. One of the adults, off on the far margins of the photo, smiling beatifically, as if it had every right in the world to be there. It was a face he knew, a face he reco
gnized.

  Jezzie Vitower.

  He whispered to himself, “Sonofabitch,” and then the floorboards creaked in the living room.

  He dropped the newsletter and stood up and faced the door, heart kicking. It wasn’t his imagination, and it wasn’t the house settling. It was a footstep, moving stealthily through the living room.

  He cast his eyes around for a suitable weapon, spotted a letter opener half-under the computer monitor. That would do. He’d never killed someone with a letter opener before, but he imagined it would do the trick.

  He grabbed it and waited, waited for another sound, waited for shadows to spill across the hallway.

  And kept waiting. He risked a glance away, at the digital clock. It ticked over to 7:54.

  When it hit 7:56 and he didn’t hear anything else, he started second-guessing himself, wondering if he really had heard someone moving in the living room. That was never good. Before prison, he’d been exceptionally good at his job because he always trusted his gut. But long years away had eroded his instincts, or at least his confidence in them.

  But no. He had heard something, He was sure of it, the sort of sound that only a living thing can make. It wasn’t just a creak. It was a stealthy creak.

  Unless the intruder was a complete idiot, he’d have to know Crowe would see his shadow in the hall if he tried approaching the study. He’d be lying in wait , then, somewhere in the living room or the kitchen, or possibly the bathroom—he could make the bathroom, probably, without Crowe seeing his shadow.

  7:59, the digital clock said. So okay. He was waiting. Crowe wouldn’t keep him.

  He flipped the desk lamp off, counted five, and moved into the hallway. He was very conscious of the bandage over his left eye just then. It severely limited his sight range. If someone came at him from the immediate left, he’d be blind-sided.

  With that in mind, he led with his right, holding the letter opener low and ready to thrust upward. He could see part of the living room from where he was—an end table and the stuffed arm of the sofa.