If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  She felt confident going into the next interview that Beau had been a billionaire at one point in his life. Measuring the value of his investments and holdings at several points in time, in fact, she believed she could document at least a billion dollars in holdings as early as 2009. Before that, she doubted he had yet won the title “billionaire,” but couldn’t prove anything precisely.

  Much of what she found came from adding pieces of circumstantial evidence, coincidences of timing. For instance, the rumor that Beau Dupere was the anonymous winner of a 2006 lottery jackpot led Anna to a big investment he made a month after that $140 million payout. Though he had already made nearly as much from “intuitive investment practices,” which his former boss described, that lottery payout would have catapulted him a long way toward his first billion. This is true because he partnered in a new Web venture with some of that money, which multiplied more than twelve times in value over the next two years. But he didn’t put all of his new money into that investment, because he also funded an expedition that recovered the largest treasure of sunken gold in the Western hemisphere. Though the “intuitive investments” prompted three investigations for insider trading, no one could think of any way to charge him for being so lucky as to win a major national lottery and also recover a billion dollars of sunken treasure in consecutive years. In fact, Anna suspected that none of it was luck. She linked his investing “intuition,” his pick of the winning lottery numbers, and his discovery of a fleet of sunken galleons, to his ability to “know things,” as he put it.

  As far as Anna could tell, no journalists had yet exercised the audacity, or gullibility, to ask Beau if he became a billionaire by listening to God whisper in his ear. She would be the first.

  She didn’t know if he would feel comfortable telling her about his finances, but then she couldn’t imagine Beau being really uncomfortable about anything. Anna didn’t think he would try to hide his finances any more than he hid his children with multiple women. The exception, however, might be questions about where the money had gone.

  Anna didn’t know how much the Dupere family’s financial holdings were currently worth, but she suspected that they were no longer billionaires. She had discovered evidence of charitable contributions totaling well more than a billion dollars. The balance sheet, as imprecise as it had to be, just didn’t allow that kind of output without diminishing the status of “Billionaire Beau Dupere.” “Multi-millionaire Beau Dupere,” however, lacked the poetic ring, so she suspected people would be slow to adjust his title, even if she could prove he had lost it.

  Of course, Anna wasn’t interested in belittling Beau or his family. They had done nothing to raise such spite in her. She had, in fact, built her nascent career with insightful, but restrained, articles about the rich and famous. Access through the next set of eight-foot-tall mahogany doors depended on that reputation of restraint.

  Others knew no such restraint. Hackers had infiltrated the Web site for Jack Williams’s church and posted inflammatory photos and graffiti, aimed at “The Antichrist,” or “The Devil,” as the attackers had branded Beau Dupere. They supplemented these flames with, apparently altered, photos of Beau at a satanic ritual, or in sexually explicit poses with multiple women. No restraint there. At the same time that Beau’s home church had to hire security consultants to protect their Web site, down in Malibu, the police had parked a car next to the driveway of the Dupere home, according to the latest news. They claimed they were responding to “credible death threats.”

  These vicious assaults stirred sympathy for Beau Dupere, Hollywood luminaries speaking out on his behalf and calling for moderation from those with a different opinion of the friend to the stars. Anna nodded knowingly, when she read these reports. She understood how Beau’s sincerity, and quietly commanding presence, had won him a place among the super-rich and the super-famous.

  When one o’clock arrived, Anna had dressed and packed her over-sized purse for another visit, wearing modest shorts and flip-flops. She was prepared this time.

  What Are They Laughing About?

  The night before Anna’s interview, Beau had been away from home for a healing meeting, though not very far away. Sara and Kim, along with Jenny and Candy, attended that meeting. They made the two-hour drive to the state capitol, arriving at the church about a half-hour late.

  The four girls had based their attire for the evening on Internet videos they had seen of these healing meetings. They simply dressed for a casual evening in Sacramento, in late May, none of the shiny shoes and stiff dresses they had worn to Sunday school as little girls. Because they had seen people passing out on the floor at Beau Dupere’s meetings, they wore shorts instead of skirts. Because they were going to see a holy man at a religious service, they each independently checked that they weren’t showing too much cleavage.

  The host church for the healing meeting met in a building formerly used by an organic grocery store and still had the long row of windows on the front of the building, though the store sign had been neatly replaced and there were no food adds in those windows.

  Once inside, all the girls except Kim stopped in the lobby. The wall of sound emanating from the sanctuary doors and the speaker system in the high ceiling above their heads dunned the uninitiated. To Candy, it sounded like a rock concert she would attend for the music and dancing. To Sara, it sounded like no church she had ever entered. To Jenny, it reminded her of the night her mother was healed. To Kim, it sounded like the sort of electric atmosphere she had long prayed would seep over into her Assemblies of God church. Kim waved the others forward, looking back at them with the smile of the knowing veteran. Clearly she was enjoying the stupefied faces of the newbies.

  “C’mon, we haven’t missed all the music,” Kim said, leading the way.

  Candy started dancing, swinging her hips and churning her arms as she fell in behind Kim. With a glance over her shoulder, Kim laughed and joined in. Jenny and Sara just looked at each other and followed, like little girls going to their first haircut.

  A tall man with grey hair and glasses stood by the sanctuary door nearest them. He swayed with the music and sang under his breath right up to when the group of four bunched in front of him. The girls paused there as they would before wading into the ocean late at night. The man grinned at the new arrivals and made a dramatic sweeping motion with his right arm. “The meeting awaits you,” he said with a chuckle that they couldn’t hear over the guitars, drums and voices.

  The equivalent of a ten-person rock band stood on stage under purplish lights, young men and women on instruments, half-singing, half-shouting into microphones. But their voices didn’t overpower the singing and shouting of the congregation. If the crowd needed to be whipped up in order to get the healing flowing for Beau Dupere, the band was doing that job well.

  When Sara began to acclimate to the temperature of this unfamiliar water, she felt disappointment pop up, as she realized that the size of this crowd meant that she would only see Beau Dupere from a distance. Two large projection screens above the right and left sides of the stage would offer a bigger video image, but it wouldn’t be the same as standing next to the healer, or the healed, in one of those unbelievable scenes on the Internet.

  By the time the four of them had located a place where they could sit together, much closer to the back than the front, the music had become more spontaneous and contemplative. As soon as they reached those four seats, Jenny began to cry, struggling to manage her sobs and internally baffled by the source of those tears. Was it the memory of her mother’s healing? She didn’t think so. Sara noted Jenny’s reaction, and she thought she knew the source of those tears. To her, the air in the room felt charged with the same energy she had felt in sparks and splashes throughout her life. Here, that same emotional and spiritual energy seemed to flow over her in swimming pool quantities. She didn’t yet let it penetrate her heart as Jenny had. Nor did Sara let the weighty power charm her like it had Kim—her eyes closed as she danced an u
ninhibited slow dance with an invisible partner. Sara watched in fascination. She had never thought to hope for this much palpable divine presence, but she was beginning to wonder why not.

  Candy, Jenny’s best friend, avoided looking at Jenny sobbing next to her. She tried to join in the dance that had drawn Kim, but she wasn’t feeling it, whatever it was. She looked over at Sara, who appeared to be capturing the sights and sounds for later playback. From Sara’s example, Candy took permission to just stand and watch.

  As the quiet music faded, Sara noticed laughter toward the front of the room. It didn’t seem to fit into the massaging mood of the music. The people on the stage, however, appeared to ignore the interruption, standing still or swaying slightly with hands raised or with a steady stroke of guitar strings. Then the video image on both screens switched to a hand-held camera in the crowd.

  For just a second, this recalled to Sara the clipped up images she had seen at her father’s meeting, images of Beau Dupere pushing people, appearing to ignore others and babbling incomprehensibly all the time. There, on the screen, stood Beau, leading a small entourage of people down into the congregation. He had just briefly touched a woman who had been one of the strange laughers. She fell to the floor as if shot in the head. Someone tried to break her fall, but otherwise no one seemed concerned. Now Beau slowed down so that a tech with a microphone caught up to him, but he pointed to the young man next to him and turned his own face away from the mic.

  As Beau stepped between two oblivious worshippers he seemed to be speaking rapidly, and Sara thought she might be hearing him over one of the microphones. But the barely post-adolescent voice of a young man close beside Beau came over the sound system much more clearly.

  “He’s praising God about his love for you and his forgiveness. He’s saying something about you being set free from all guilt and shame, especially about this accident. It wasn’t your fault. He is praying freedom for you to let go, forgive, release yourself as God has released you, forgive the rider of that motorcycle and forgive the driver of the truck, the big green pickup truck with the name of a landscaping company on the driver’s door. And now he is just praising God for your healing, delivered here by God’s angels.”

  With this odd narrative came the image of a young woman on the big screen letting crutches fall to the floor and throwing her hands in the air. She nodded her head vigorously, as if confirming what the young man reported about her accident. Suddenly Sara realized that the young man was translating or interpreting the incomprehensible words Beau was saying.

  “Tongues!” she said. She had never heard it so clearly, and had certainly never seen anyone translating it. Kim looked at Sara and laughed. She reached over and gently pushed Sara, standing next to her. Though it surprised Kim as much as Sara, that push resulted in two things. First, Sara started to shake uncontrollably, causing her to stumble and even to fall into the aisle on her knees. Second, she started laughing like a lunatic, as she thought about it later, a squeaky high-pitched cackling that she had never heard from herself, or anyone else she knew, for that matter.

  Kim put both hands over her mouth and started laughing uncontrollably as well. Sara fell to all fours and then rolled to her back. She looked up at Kim for just a second and seemed to catch an increased dose of laughter, a convulsion that originated just below her belly button and wrapped itself around her stomach and up to her throat. The effect of this outburst was like an internal message, a very vigorous massage, that didn’t hurt at all.

  This is why Sara didn’t get to see much of Beau Dupere that night. When she opened her eyes she mostly saw the lights on the ceiling. She did see him once, later in the meeting. Beau towered over her, where she lay sprawled on the carpet. Leaning down, he said, “Now you have tasted The Truth and no one can ever take it away from you.” Then he was gone.

  Behind him, Beau left Sara with a heart open like a blossomed poppy, feeling rain and sunshine that she never knew existed. Brief moments of self-consciousness about the spectacle she had become, collapsed repeatedly before surges of emotion that came like the power of a fast sports car expertly shifted into higher and higher gears. Though she hurtled past that embarrassment, she still noticed it each time her awareness included a noise from someone around her. She wasn’t the only one laying in the aisle.

  About half an hour after Beau spoke to her, Sara’s mind settled on the memory of a painting that used to hang in her aunt’s house, a painting of a young woman standing on the beach with her shoes in her hands, turned away from the viewer, toward the ocean. She hadn’t thought of that image for years. As a little girl, however, Sara had worried about the young woman, a faun-like teenager, whose story seemed incomplete. Sometimes Sara thought that the girl on the beach was there by herself. Sometimes she worried that she was about to run into the foamy waves and perhaps drown, maybe intentionally. She dreamed about that unnamed girl some nights. And she was that girl some nights.

  As unexpected as this memory was, the way it served to scoop up her unpolished soul surprised Sara even more. She knew in an instant that some part of her still believed she was like that lonely girl, if not that she was the girl herself. And then she knew that she was not alone on that beach. She knew that the picture was the view of a lover who cared for the girl as much as the little nine-year-old Sara had cared. And the one watching was not prepared to idly stand planted on the wet sand while his beloved ran to her death in the sea. As soon as Sara knew these things, she heard someone call. That voice turned the girl around, and when she turned, the girl was Sara and she was crying. But her tears of despair turned to tears of relief and gladness when she saw who was there watching her, as if he were the one painting the picture.

  Warm and strong arms wrapped around Sara and she leaned into the solid fortress of the love that both supported her and prevented her from rushing to her own destruction. Laying on the floor, Sara even opened her eyes briefly to make sure that no one in that room had actually touched her. She was alone, untouched, but only on the outside, only in that old hard reality that had once trapped her soul. Inside, on the beach, the warm breeze flirting with her hair, she was settled into ultimate safety and yet weightless. She could not drown. She would only float. She was always safe.

  Meeting this part of herself and seeing the rescue of that girl left Sara sobbing there on the carpet for a half hour more.

  Interview with the Devil

  Anna stood in the three-story-high entryway to the Dupere home. Upstairs she could hear a woman reading a children’s book, though all she could hear distinctly was the tone of the story and the occasional interruption by a child asking a question. In the distant background, she heard the shush and rest of the surf from behind the house, a windy day on the ocean elevating the volume of the waves. But, even with these noises around the house, Anna could hear the cadence of the protestors on the road in front of the driveway.

  When she had slowed down fifty yards from the house to show her press credentials to a Los Angeles County Sherriff’s deputy, she could see a neighbor across from the Duperes spraying a hose at the sign-waving protestors in front of her house. The police had tried to keep the protestors off the Dupere property, threatening arrest if anyone violated that line in the sand. But they had been less strict at keeping the growing crowd off the lawn on the opposite side of the road. The annoyed neighbor, whose cactus and palms had been trampled and scarred by clumsy men and women, finally decided to try dousing anyone venturing onto her property. The stiff breeze off the Pacific made being wet a bit uncomfortable for some, but for others the water was a welcome relief from the persistent sun. The cardboard signs, however, universally suffered from the confrontational stream of water.

  As Anna slowly drove toward the driveway, a deputy jogging beside her car as an escort, she could see Malibu police conferring about what to do regarding the neighbor. Anna saw one officer turn his back to the commotion so he could release a laugh at the whining protestors. In the face of all that, Anna
was glad to be a junior reporter for a small regional weekly, instead of a cop.

  Turning into the drive, Anna spotted the usual security guards, augmented by two others. Though they carried no weapons that Anna could see, their sheer size intimidated her, and likely would intimidate any rogue protestor as well. One of the guards stepped out of the shade of an awning and waved her forward, recognizing her as she expected. Behind her, she thought she heard a wave of taunts that might have been aimed at her, given the repeated use of terms describing women of ill repute, to speak politely. Did they mistake her for one of Beau’s women? That idea warmed her. And, in that glow, she completely missed the sting of her reputation being impugned by a damp protestor clutching a soggy sign.

  Now in the entryway, Rhonda emerged from the hall to Anna’s right, part of the house she hadn’t seen yet. Looking more carefully assembled than when Anna saw her last, Rhonda’s hair bounced and shone as if it had been recently washed, and her clothes fit her more closely. Her face bore the rosy glow of someone who had absorbed just a little too much sun, and her light gray eyes seemed illuminated from within.

  “Hello, Anna. Good to see you again,” Rhonda said, with a welcoming smile that seemed to Anna to have migrated there from someone else’s face.

  “Hello, Rhonda. It’s good to see you too.”

  Rhonda sobered. “You don’t think Beau is the Devil, do you?”

  “The Devil?” Anna said. “Did you hear the protestor shouting out front?”

  Rhonda nodded. “I went with Beau and Maggie yesterday to a meeting in Sacramento. I saw the mob from the car.”

  “Were you afraid?” Anna said, not really sensing any emotion from Rhonda.

  Shrugging slightly, Rhonda shook her head, glancing toward the street. “Not afraid, but sad. They’re wasting a lot of time and energy on nothing,” she said, tipping her head toward the faint shouts.