This was one of those turning points, like when the Lord came aknocking, and you either opened the door or you didn’t. Where everything changed, either for better or worse. No going back to last week, when life was nearly normal and all Ronnie had to worry about was homework and Melanie Ward. This was for all the marbles.
Dad looked at Mom again, then at Tim, then at the shattered window. The sky had settled into that deep blue of early morning and even the crickets had quit their chirping. Somewhere in the hills, a hound dog bayed, a lost, lonely sound in the predawn stillness.
“I’ll stay,” Dad said, staring out the window at the black slopes of the mountains.
Ronnie admired the muscles in his dad’s jaws, the way Dad held his head up proudly, without a bit of back-down in him. Dad said that a man ought to draw his strength from the Lord, that nobody who trusted the Man Upstairs needed to be afraid of anything. And Dad made a pretty good case for it, too: why should you be afraid of dying if dying only brought you into the presence of everlasting glory?
When Ronnie thought of heaven, he always imagined that color illustration in Dad’s Bible, right before the New Testament. The picture showed Jesus at the top of a set of golden stairs that rose up into the clouds. Jesus had long hair and a brown beard and the saddest eyes Ronnie had ever seen. He had his arms out and his palms lifted in welcome, but there was nobody on the stairs. Heaven looked like a lonely place.
And besides, no matter how wonderful heaven was, new things were always scary. Like the first day of school, the time he’d given that poem to Melanie, the first time he’d been inside the red church, this business about Mom and Dad being mad at each other. So he’d rather stay right here in bed, with Dad sitting beside him and Mom and Tim under the same roof. He’d rather just go on living, thank you very much.
Even with a broken nose and a monster after him and schoolwork and Mom hanging out with that creepy preacher.
Even with all that.
He closed his eyes and waited for the sun to come up.
Archer crouched in the forest near the church. He had dragged the sheriff under the trees after sending Linda away. She wouldn’t understand why the sheriff should be suffered to live. She was a good disciple, and she would willingly sacrifice herself, but she wasn’t prepared for the truth. None of them were.
Archer surveyed the landscape, his great cat’s eyes piercing the darkness. God ruled the kingdom of heaven, but He had given Archer the kingdom of the Earth, along with dominion over all of its creatures. Archer’s brother Jesus had misused that power, had wandered among the humans and confused them with messages of love and hope. Before the rise of Christianity, heaven was attained only through pain, trials, and sacrifice. After Jesus’s blasphemy was erased from the earth, people would again turn to those true tests of faith.
Of all the ludicrous Christian beliefs, the most laughable was that being forgiven would earn the sinner a ticket to heaven. Yet it was so utterly human. Why bother living right and enduring the rigors of true faith when all you had to do was say, “Come into my heart” and Jesus would be right there tricking you with lies?
Archer would also grant forgiveness. But his would be delivered after the sinner got on bended knee and begged, begged, even as the dark claws of justice performed the cleansing. Deliverance must be paid in blood. Redemption must be earned the hard way.
And Father above would burn with jealousy as Archer succeeded where Jesus had failed.
Archer felt a brief twinge. Bullets passed through the manifested spirit that lurked at the Days’ house three miles away. Archer threw back his head and growled a laugh at the moon, then sent the manifestation back to its home in the belfry. Let it eat the shadows there until the next night’s work.
Dawn would be breaking soon. The forest was in the held breath between the changing of the guards, the nocturnal animals returning to their nests and burrows and the morning songbirds shaking sleep from their heads. What a beautiful world God had made. Except for the blight of human hearts, a blight born of God’s insecurity, the earth nearly approached heaven in its glory.
But Archer was here to erase that blight. All that sinned must be destroyed, so that a new, pure world could emerge. And all on Earth had sinned, even Jesus. Especially Jesus. All except the Second Son.
Archer licked his fur, patient in the knowledge that he had forever. In the meantime, he would continue the cleansing right here in the place of his mortal birth. Here where Wendell McFall’s soul had been trapped, where Archer himself had suffered the taunts and abuses of the unrighteous. Here where the sinless ones could come forth in an exodus of blasphemy and mockery.
Archer brought his teeth to the sheriff’s collar and gently closed his mouth around the cloth. The sheriff’s eyelids twitched as Archer’s warm breath tickled his neck, but he didn’t awaken. The smell of the man’s sin, and those of all the generations of Littlefields, crowded Archer’s sensitive nose.
Before Littlefield paid for his own sins, the sheriff first had to suffer for the sins of his ancestors. Archer dragged Littlefield across the churchyard, to a special place of punishment. Littlefield thought that the death of his younger brother had been enough to atone for Wendell McFall’s hanging. But he would soon learn that sacrifice was the currency of a jealous God, and of jealous sons as well.
There was joy in being a messiah.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Det. Sgt. Sheila Storie looked at the clock above her office door. It was one of those old round clocks of the kind that hung in elementary schools, with a black casing and plain, oversize numerals. The second hand didn’t sweep smoothly. It locked into place on each tiny mark, then twitched over to the next. She watched twenty-three of the spastic seconds pass before she took her eyes away.
She had spent the night in the office, napping a few hours in her chair. Now her back was stiff. She stood and stretched and made another pot of coffee, even though her stomach ached from the abusive night of caffeine and snack food from the machine in the hall. Just before the midnight shift change, Deputy Wellborn had called in to report that the hounds had found nothing.
Somehow, she wasn’t surprised by the negative report. Hounds might be okay for chasing down runaway convicts, but this was the twenty-first century. Sifting forensic evidence and poring through criminal databases were the ways to solve crimes, not sniffing around the woods. But she had to admit that a night spent at the desk with her reports had brought her no closer to solving the two murders.
Where was the motive?
That was one of the first lessons of homicide investigation: find the motive, and you find the murderer. But she had a near-penniless drunk mutilated in a churchyard and a farmer with his head caved in by a sledgehammer. As far as anyone could determine, robbery was not a motive in either crime. In fact, the only connection between the two victims was that both lived in the Whispering Pines area.
No, that wasn’t the only connection. There were more of what she called the BDC’s—big damned coincidences. And most of the coincidences seemed to center on the old church.
McFall’s buying of it. Frank’s spilling his guts about the childhood tragedy he’d endured there. Even the ghost stories seemed to be a red flag of some kind, though she would never in a million years admit that she gave them any credence at all.
Storie looked out the window. The sky was just turning pink behind Barkersville. The two blocks of Main Street were shadowed, the brick buildings cold and empty in the gasp of dawn. A few vehicles were on the road, most of them pickup trucks with tools in the back. People were heading to work, another week to get through before another payday, and then another two days to forget that they had to do it all over again on the following Monday.
The Chamber of Commerce mailed out glossy brochures that said, Up here, life moves at a different speed. The idea was to lure rich tourists with the promise of front-porch rockers and lazy river breezes. Of course, once they got here, they were bored out of their minds after two day
s and then dumped a few thousand dollars in the area craft shops and restaurants. Some different speed.
Then why are you here?
She chewed her pencil. Why the hell was she here? Running from the Metro force and big-city crime, she had wanted as rural a life as she could find. Maybe she thought this would be an easy place to cut her teeth, move up a little in rank, and then make a run for sheriff.
She’d always wanted a department of her own. Storie wanted it the way other people craved sex or fame or a family. Solving high-profile cases was just the means to that end. But she also had developed this very scary need to understand Frank Littlefield, to get beneath his professional veneer and his good-ol’-boy act and figure out just what in the hell he was about.
She didn’t know much about him. She didn’t know enough about the red church or Archer McFall, either. It was time to change that. She pulled her keys from her desk and poured herself a last cup of coffee.
She pressed a button on her two-way. “Unit Two will be in service.”
“Ten-four,” came the third-shift dispatcher’s voice.
She strapped on her shoulder holster before putting on her blazer. The .38 revolver was comforting against her rib cage. As she went outside, she was struck by the moist scent of life: lilies crawling out of their night pajamas, the wild cherry in front of the library snow white with blossoms, birds chattering from branches and utility poles. She took a deep breath and gazed over the mountains.
On those hills were houses, filled with people who were as deeply rooted as the old-growth hardwoods. Smoke curled from a couple of the chimneys, despite the warmth of the morning. These people were no different from the urbanites she had grown up with. They slept with dreams, and the dreams dissolved when they awoke. Time passed for them as rapidly as it passed for everyone.
Yep, some different speed, all right.
She got in her cruiser and headed for Whispering Pines, staying just under the limit all the way.
Frank.
Get up.
Frank didn’t want to get up. He was lying under some hay, and the sun was coming through the open loft door and warming his bones until they were like cooked noodles.
“Get up, Frankie.”
Frank opened his eyes. The world was yellow, all sunlight and straw dust. The straps of his overalls dug into his neck, making him itch. But that was only a minor problem. He could endure the itch, and he could ignore Samuel. Samuel was about as minor a problem as a little brother could be.
“Come on, let’s go fishing.”
“Go away,” Frank murmured. If Grandpa or Dad found him lazing off, they’d wear out his rear end with a hickory switch. He could hear Grandpa’s crotchety voice now: Corn to be hoed and hogs to be slopped and the goldurned dinner chicken’s still wearing its feathers. The chainsaw buzzed like a drunken bee where the two men were cutting firewood on one of the hillsides.
Something poked Frank in the side. He reluctantly rolled over and saw Samuel with a cane pole in his hands, feet bare and an Atlanta Braves cap perched on his head. A grin filled with crooked teeth threatened to split Samuel’s freckled face in half. “Come down to the river, Frankie.”
Frank sat up, dazzled by the sun. Outside, the fields were a brilliant shade of green. The mountains were sharply in focus, as if each individual tree and rock had been carefully etched onto a fine cotton paper. The sky was so vividly blue that he rubbed his eyes, because the air was like water, thick with currents and eddies and languorous coolness. He stood on wobbly scarecrow legs.
“Got your pole, too,” said Samuel. He held out another bamboo cane. A round red-and-white float and a small silver hook dangled from the monofilament line. Frank took the pole without a word, then followed Samuel across the hayloft. His feet felt as if they were wrapped in fat clouds and scarcely seemed to touch the ground. Then they were down the ladder and out of the barn and crossing a long meadow. The grass was alive, like the crisp hair of the earth.
The chainsaw stopped and its echo fell like smoke across the valley and dissolved. In the sudden silence, a bird cried from the trees near the river. Samuel led the way across the meadow, below the garden with its tomato vines and leafy cabbage heads and cornstalks tipped with golden buds. He felt as if he were attached to an invisible line, being reeled toward an unknown shore.
Samuel hummed a church hymn that was a little too somber for such a bright summer day. And Samuel should be skipping, laughing, beating at the thistles with his cane pole. He should be running ahead of Frank to find a hiding place under the cottonwoods. Instead his little brother walked solemnly, watching his toes.
The sky pressed down and Frank swam against it. They were at the river now, and its sparkling silvery eyes watched them.
“We’re going to catch the big one,” Samuel said, standing on a sandbar and freeing his line. He sneaked a look at Frank and put his hand to his mouth. Then he held out his palm to Frank, showing a writhing mass of thick, glistening nightcrawlers. Frank took one and speared it on his hook. Samuel took one for himself and returned the rest of the worms to his mouth. Frank’s stomach tightened in nausea.
The boys launched their baited hooks almost in unison. Dragonflies scooted along the riverbank, their green wings beating against the air. Water splashed over stones, snickering.
“It’s almost like Sunday,” Samuel said.
“Yeah. Here we are being lazy when there’s chores to be done. Dad will get ill as a hornet if he finds out we’re fishing.” Frank moved down the sandbar a little so the sun didn’t flash off the water into his eyes.
“Lazy Sunday. Makes you want to go to church, don’t it?”
“Church?”
Samuel smiled and his head lolled limply to one side. “Fun place to hang around, know what I mean?”
“We don’t have time for that,” Frank said, his hands sweating and his heart pounding.
“I got all the time in the world,” Samuel said, as a thick worm crawled from his mouth. The brown tip of it squirmed as if sniffing the air, then the worm inched down Samuel’s chin.
“I don’t go the church anymore,” Frank said. “Not since . . .”
“Since what, brother?”
Samuel’s float bobbed once, twice. Then he jerked his pole and it bowed nearly double. “Got one, got one.” He squealed in delight.
Frank dropped his own pole and lay on his belly so he could reach into the water and land the fish. In the calm water near the shore, he saw the reflection of the sky and the high white clouds. His own face was dark on the water, unwrinkled, unworried. Young.
“Pull him in,” Samuel said. Frank reached out and grabbed the taut line. As he tugged, the river erupted in a silver avalanche.
The Hung Preacher rose from the water.
The fishing line was a rope, the hook a noose that encircled the preacher’s neck. The pale figure clawed at the strands, and the skin was purple where the rope dug into flesh.
The Hung Preacher’s mouth parted in a suffocated scream, except—no, that wasn’t the river, that was the preacher—he was laughing, gurgling, a font of morbid merriment.
Frank’s own scream was a dull fist in his throat, a mossy stone, a cold fish. He tried to scramble up the bank, but a hand on his arm held him down.
“Time for a baptism, Frankie,” came Samuel’s voice, only it wasn’t the voice of a child. It was a low voice from beyond the grave, a putrid exhalation of hate, the words rustling and slithering like snakes through a catacomb.
Frank looked up at his dead brother, into the eyes that had once been mercifully sewn closed by the funeral director, eyes that now stared accusingly, filled with the hot hunger of vengeance delayed. Samuel’s crooked teeth were sharp, moldy, the spaces between them filled with quick darkness.
Samuel was knee-deep in the water now, his gaunt hand tight on Frank’s arm, drawing him across the mud and soggy roots into the lapping, laughing tongue of the river. The Hung Preacher tented his hands in a prayer, and his bowed head
was smiling, smiling.
Samuel tugged, and Frank was in the river, his dead little brother pushing down on the top of his head, submerging him, and the water tasted like death, the water was crypt air and flooded his lungs even while he struggled toward the surface that was so far away. He fought, even though he knew he deserved to die for what he had done to Samuel.
The hands tugged, pulled. He felt himself going under, deeper—
“Sheriff, wake up.”
Littlefield kicked and flailed, moaning.
“Get up, you’re having a bad dream.”
Littlefield tensed, his muscles spasming from the struggle. “Sh—Sheila?”
“Yeah, Sheriff. Are you okay?”
He opened his eyes. The morning sun was painful. He blinked up into Detective Storie’s face. She was so close that he could smell the coffee on her breath. Her hair fell softly about her cheekbones, but her mouth was lined with worry.
What a pleasant sight to wake up to.
Littlefield’s head felt as if Zeb Potter’s murderer had done another sledgehammer job. A sweetly foul aftertaste coated the inside of his mouth. He could smell his own body odor.
Storie helped him sit up. His uniform was moist with sweat and dew. Or maybe baptismal water . . .
“What happened?” Storie asked.
“I don’t know,” said the sheriff, shaking his head. “Last thing I remember . . .”
He looked across the churchyard. The Trooper was where he had parked it the night before, but that was his last memory. Had he been inside the church?
Gravestones surrounded him, the marble and granite bright in the sun. He knew this area of the cemetery. He had brought flowers here many times. He turned and glanced at the marker where his head had been resting.
A small lamb was engraved on the top of the tombstone. The etched symbols beneath the image pierced his heart, just as they had always done:
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