Everyone Was Left Behind

by Steve Armstrong

  “Good morning, ma’am; have you seen this man?” Seitzer asked, displaying a photo of Ray Browning in one hand and his badge in another.

  This librarian was different from the one he had already questioned about Browning. She was older and had gray, wispy hair. She put on her glasses and leaned toward the photo. “Not today. He usually comes in on the weekend and spends awhile at the computers, though.”

  “Any idea what he looks at?”

  “Oh, I don’t really pay attention to what patrons do on the computer. I prefer to give them privacy,” she assured Seitzer.

  “Well, if you see him, please give me a call.” He handed her a card; after she took it from him, the two detectives made their way to the back of the computer section, where Charity and a boy were seated at a large, wooden table.

  “Good morning, Ms. Wilcox,” Seitzer said. She nodded vaguely in reply. “And who is this?” the detective asked, fixing his gaze on the boy sitting next to her.

  “This is Kevin. He helps organize the church’s social media pages,” Charity said, her tone dismissive.

  The boy forced a smile at Seitzer.

  “Okay, let’s see it,” the detective said, motioning to Kevin’s laptop.

  The boy swiveled the laptop around so the detectives could look. Seitzer sat down opposite the teens and read the threat, which Charity had already spelled out over the phone. He could have asked all the questions and gained all the information that he needed during that call or through his own investigation of the web page; however, he hoped another face to face interaction with Charity might compel her to reveal whatever secrets she still harbored.

  “Have you seen any similar comments on your church’s social media pages in the past?” Seitzer asked. The boy appeared as if the detective was his father and had caught him making out with Charity. For her part, she seemed to regard the boy with a mixture of boredom and annoyance.

  “It’s alright Kevin, you’re not in trouble,” Harrison assured him.

  “Not like this. There have been a lot of other nasty messages, but not ones that seemed like a threat,” he finally said.

  “Did you show this to anyone else?” Seitzer asked.

  “Just my mom and dad, but they didn’t take it seriously.”

  “Have your mom and dad seen it?” Seitzer asked Charity.

  She shook her head. “They wouldn’t take it seriously, either.”

  “Do you take it seriously?” The answer to Seitzer’s question was already written on Charity’s eyes, but he asked anyway.

  “It’s scary.” Even as she spoke the words, Seitzer could see her holding back, trying to conceal her emotions.

  “Maybe you should tell your parents and make sure they know how it makes you feel,” Seitzer said.

  “They would just tell me not to be scared, that God is in control.”

  Seitzer emitted a low sound that measured somewhere between a snort and a chuckle. “That idea never made me feel any better, either,” he said. “We’ll look into it, okay?”

  Charity’s eyes had gradually grown wider as they spoke, broadcasting the young girl’s fear more clearly. “Are you going to be at the church Sunday? I’m scared something is going to happen.”

  “We’ll be there,” Harrison said without consulting his partner.

  “While we’re here, have either of you heard from Jason Watkins? You both played in the church band with him, right?” Seitzer asked.

  “No, not since last Sunday. I don’t think anyone has,” Kevin replied in an uncharacteristic display of boldness.

  Seitzer detected subtle hints of pain in Charity Price’s facial reaction to Kevin’s statement. “What about you, Ms. Price?”

  She shook her head.

  “Kevin, would you excuse us for a moment? I’d like to ask Ms. Price a few questions.”

  Kevin froze, perhaps waiting for Charity to insist that he stay. When she made no such request, he nodded, picked up his laptop and fled to the other side of the library. Charity stared at the ground while he departed.

  With Kevin out of the way, Seitzer commenced with the questioning. “When you were over at Elizabeth Wilcox’s house helping with the kids, did Jason Watkins ever visit her?”

  Charity did not raise her head and allowed the detective’s question to hang in the air.

  “Ms. Price?”

  “No. I never saw them together,” she said.

  “Even at church?”

  “No. Nothing beyond the usual ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’”

  “You can tell me if you did see them together—I already know about the messages,” Seitzer said, in a soft but firm voice.

  “I never saw them together,” she said, more forcefully this time.

  “Okay. I’m sure you wouldn’t lie to me. But if you remember something about them, please let me know,” Seitzer said.

  She nodded. “Can I go now?”

  “Of course. Thanks for letting us know about the threat. And if you or Kevin see anything else online, let us know.”

  Charity stood up and moved briskly toward the door. When she sped past Kevin without stopping, the boy leaped up and followed her out the door.

  “You still think she knows something about Elizabeth Wilcox and Jason Watkins?” Harrison said after the teens had left.

  Seitzer sighed. “Whenever I ask Charity Price about Jason Watkins or Elizabeth Wilcox, she has the worst body language. I can’t believe she’s told me everything she knows about them.”

  “What about the death threat? Do we take that seriously?”

  “At this point, I think we have no choice. Call Justin; see if he can track down the IP address from where that comment came from, because according to the timestamp on the comment, it was made when the library was closed.”

  “If it’s local, it has to be from Ray Browning, right?” Harrison asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be. Could have been someone who we haven’t even thought about yet. But if it was Browning, where else around town could he have logged on to make that comment?”

  “If he has a burner phone, he could have made it from anywhere. Assuming he doesn’t, could’ve been in Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s—there are probably others. But he would need a laptop or a tablet to go online in those places.”

  “Okay. So let’s check them out, see if anyone has seen Browning today.”

  “And what about tomorrow’s service?” Harrison asked. “What are we going to do about that?”

  “I’ll talk to the Chief and see how he wants to play it. At the very least, you and I will be there.”

  Seitzer’s phone vibrated. He didn’t recognize the number on caller ID. “Hello, Detective Seitzer.”

  “Detective, it’s Theresa Watkins. Jason was just here,” a frantic voice said.

  “Are you still at your sister’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you speak to him or let him in?”

  “No, I was too scared. It was just my sister and her kids—her husband was gone.”

  “Okay. Is he still there?”

  “No, he left a few minutes ago.”

  “Did you call 911?”

  “Yes, but they haven’t gotten here yet.”

  “Okay. You guys hang tight. I’m going to call the local PD and tell them to watch out for Jason.”

  “Detective, there’s something else you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He called my sister’s while he was waiting outside. I didn’t answer, but he left a message. He said he made a terrible mistake and that he was going back to make it right.”

  “Do you know what he meant by that?”

  “No. I don’t know what he’s planning to do.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the call, Theresa. Call me if you see him again.”

  Seitzer ended the conversation and turned to Harrison. “Find out how many different routes Watkins could use to get from his wife’s sister’s house to Woodside.”

  H
arrison took out his phone and plotted the addresses into Google maps. “You think he’s coming back here?” the younger detective asked while the app calculated the various routes Watkins could take.

  “He told his wife he wanted to make things right. I don’t know exactly what he means, but I figure it involves coming back to Woodside. If he killed Wilcox, maybe he’s coming to turn himself in. Or maybe he’s coming to tell Elizabeth Wilcox that what they did is wrong and he’s staying with his wife.”

  “He could be coming to confess to the church what he did. Churches like Holy Spirit Tabernacle emphasize that kind of public confession,” Harrison pointed out. He handed his phone to Seitzer. “There are at least three different ways he could go with two main entry points into town, assuming he doesn’t take back roads.”

  “That’s too many roads for us to patrol under the circumstances,” Seitzer said. “But we can have a few officers watch his house and keep a few on the lookout for Browning.”

  Seitzer and Harrison left the library and crisscrossed the town, showing Browning’s photo to anyone who occupied a public place with Wi-Fi access. Despite the exponential increase in manpower, neither Browning nor Watkins surfaced. As the day pushed forward into evening, the police presence diminished. The only new piece of information that trickled in came from Justin, who reported that the IP address originated from the Woodside Library.

  “How does that work?” Harrison asked as the detectives sat in their car, prepared for another all-night stakeout of Elizabeth Wilcox’s house. “Does that mean Browning snuck into the library without tripping the alarm?”

  “Must be the demon,” Seitzer said. “Demons are known for their ability to break into places without setting off alarms.”

  “You can joke all you want, but this guy Browning—if he is the one who made the threat—has shown an impressive ability to avoid us so far.”

  Seitzer didn’t bother to respond to Harrison’s comment. He was too tired for another theological and metaphysical scuffle with his partner. Besides, Harrison was right—Browning had proved difficult to find, even if breaking into a library wasn’t the world’s greatest heist.

  Despite the anticlimactic end to the day, Seitzer felt like something had to give. Watkins and Browning couldn’t evade capture forever. Sooner or later, Seitzer would have an opportunity to interrogate the two men and determine what exactly had happened in Graham Wilcox’s study a week ago. He was sure that one of them knew how Wilcox’s life ended.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  When Charity emerged from her bedroom late Saturday night, she expected her house to be completely dark. Instead, a light from her deceased sister’s room disrupted the anticipated blackness. She peered into the room and found her mom sitting on the floor at the foot of Faith’s bed.

  “Mom, what are you doing in here?”

  “Just sitting, dear. Would you care to join me?” Glenda Price patted the adjacent patch of lavender carpet, the same rug Faith had picked out so many years ago. Charity accepted her mother’s invitation and sat down next to her.

  “I thought you didn’t like coming in here,” Charity said, making her customary initial perusal of the room’s artifacts.

  “I don’t come here much,” Glenda said, her gaze falling on the pictures on the bulletin board. “There are a lot of times that I want to, but then other times I’m afraid of what I’ll find inside. Sometimes I think we should just move as far away as we can from here. But then I’m afraid of losing the connection to this place because it feels like the last physical connection I have to Faith.”

  There was a distance in Glenda Price’s expression that suggested she only partially inhabited that space with Charity—large fragments of her soul roamed elsewhere, probably in the past.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “Yeah, I am okay. Somehow, despite everything else I feel, I am okay.”

  Charity’s mother ran her hand over the purple carpet.

  “I miss her so much, Charity. Not one day goes by that I don’t feel her loss. I think that’s one of the main reasons I got so carried away by Pastor Graham’s prediction. I just wanted to see Faith again.”

  Charity watched her mom, waiting for the next revelation. None of what she said was earth shattering news, but since her mom told them so little, even the obvious things now felt climatic and surprising.

  “About what Hope said earlier—that she still believes in Jesus—was she being honest?” Glenda asked, folding her hands together.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Glenda shook her head, though the gesture didn’t seem to mean she doubted Charity’s assessment. “I was so wrong. But I shouldn’t be surprised. I used to think Hope was rebellious, but that was just because she wasn’t like Faith. Faith would always try to please us, so she felt safer somehow. But not Hope—she had this unique passion and fire. Hope was always strong. I knew that whatever she gave her life to, she would do it with all of her being and she would do it on her own terms. That’s why she scared me so much.”

  “What am I, Mom?” Charity asked. She wasn’t the passionate Christian Faith was, but she wasn’t the free-spirit Hope was, either.

  Glenda gazed into her daughter’s eyes. “You, dear? You’re a healer. You see the pain of everyone and you just want to fix it. You want to make everyone better. You’re my compassionate, kind, and merciful daughter, Charity. And it must have hurt you so much since Faith died to see so much pain in your family and to feel like you couldn’t fix it.”

  “I didn’t know you were in pain, Mom. I thought you must be, but you seemed so strong. It made me feel like I was doing something wrong.”

  “No, dear. You weren’t doing anything wrong. I was hurting. So was your father. We still are.”

  “Then why didn’t you ever talk about it with us?”

  Glenda chuckled lightly. “I guess we were trying to be strong for you guys. We wanted you to believe that Jesus could take away all of your pain. I never knew that by doing that, we were making it harder for you and Hope.”

  Charity placed her head on her mom’s shoulder, causing Glenda to wrap her arm around her daughter.

  “Jesus has seen me through this, Charity. I don’t want you to think that I’ve been putting on a show the entire time. I should’ve given you a window into my soul, I see that now. But without Jesus, there’s no way I could’ve endured losing Faith.”

  “Why’d He do it, Mom? Why’d He let Faith die?” The young girl’s voice trembled as she asked the question. This was the question Charity feared most of all because she wondered if it had an answer.

  “I don’t know, Charity. Oh, the conversations I’ve had with God on that one. He’s never given me an answer, though. But I trust Him. Do you trust Him?”

  Charity would never have answered her mom’s question in the past because it would have felt like a trap. But given her mom’s newfound ability to wear her heart on her sleeve, Charity dared to answer that night.

  “I don’t know, Mom. I don’t know if I can trust Him like you do.”

  Glenda Price smiled. “Don’t worry, Charity. It’s not something you can just do—it’s something you have to learn, and that will take time. You’re a work in progress, dear, we all are.”

  “Do you think Dad will do what Hope wanted him to at the service tomorrow?” Charity asked.

  “He might. I know your father feels Faith’s loss as deeply as the rest of us. It’s a terrible thing to bury your child. But it might be even worse to lose a child because you drove her away. It might not seem like it, but I know Hope leaving the other day made an impression on your dad.”

  “Someone threatened our church,” Charity said, a comment that seemed to come out of the blue, yet in her mind was intimately connected to everything else they had discussed.

  Glenda turned toward her daughter. “Who did?”

  “Someone on the internet. They said that God would judge us because the truth wasn’t in us.”

  Charity’s mom f
urrowed her brow, but disappointed Charity with the response the young girl expected. “I’m sure it’s nothing, dear. Just someone who’s angry and wanted to make other people afraid.”

  “Will we be safe tomorrow, Mom? What if someone really wants to hurt us, like they did to Pastor Graham?”

  “I believe we’re always safe, Charity, even if we’re in danger. God will lead us through whatever happens tomorrow.” Glenda stopped to gauge her daughter’s reaction and when she did, saw the fear in her daughter’s eyes. “But if you’re scared, you can stay home. I won’t make you go.”

  As she sat next to her mom, Charity felt her confidence grow. Maybe her mom’s faith was passing onto her through osmosis. Whatever the case, after another few quiet moments in Faith’s room, Charity announced, “I want to go tomorrow.”

  Glenda smiled again. “That’s how faith begins—one uncertain step into the unknown. Then we wait for Jesus to find us.”

  Charity and her mom remained in the room until the young girl started to doze off. The last thing she remembered was her mom gently leading her into her own bedroom and tucking her in.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  For Seitzer and Harrison, who were parked out in front of Holy Spirit Tabernacle, Sunday began with another cup of coffee from Elizabeth Wilcox. After Seitzer downed his cup, he hit the ground running. The detective had the bomb sniffing dog team assembled and ready to go even as the Prices showed up to open the church.

  “Is this really necessary?” Gary Price asked when the police forbade his family from entering the church until the building was cleared.

  “At the very least, it’s prudent,” Seitzer replied as he paced the perimeter. Truth be known, he had the same internal debate when the chief ordered the bomb team on the scene. Perhaps it was overkill, but there was no reason to take a chance. “You should take this threat seriously.”