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

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  The people next to her on either side reached out and joined hands with Sara. And she knew that their hearts too had joined with the courageous young woman on her knees next to the fallen form of her father. Sara prayed, first silently, then whispering, then speaking out loud, and then beginning to cry and plead louder through her tears and the constriction of her throat, her mouth impinged by the severe emotions gripping her. A hundred people prayed aloud, some in English, some in unknown languages. The sound began to rush and roar like a mighty wind. And in the middle of that storm, one girl remained calm, in the eye of the storm and in the eye of God.

  Then Beau Dupere did the most surprising thing of his entire surprising life. He sat up. He propped himself on both hands stretched out behind him, like he had just been resting there and was now fully recovered. Dozens of people screamed on all sides, the senior pastor of the church shouted an alarming “Halleluiah,” before collapsing backward, as if he had been shot. Several others fainted or fell to the carpet under the power of that miraculous restoration.

  Maggie collapsed onto her father, wrapping her arms around him and knocking him back to the floor. Even in the pandemonium stirred by his rising, Sara could hear the hearty laugh of Beau Dupere, the controversial healer, the billionaire, the friend to sinners . . . and now, the man raised from the dead.

  In Search of an Explanation

  Dixon and Brett heard the radio report of Beau Dupere’s death as soon as they pulled onto the freeway toward Parkerville. They both remained silent. Even Brett was sober and contemplative. They exchanged a few trivial words about traffic and a place to eat, but they both needed time to process what they had just experienced.

  It was an athletic stretch for Dixon to venture into that meeting under the guise of gathering firsthand information and even an experience of Beau Dupere. Way beyond that, however, he had just been present in a building, in a meeting, where a man was murdered. That was an ungainly load for which to find a resting place in his mind and in his soul.

  Then there were those fringe elements in his mind, vying for a hearing in the center of his thoughts. On one side, a voice nudged at his conscience. Hadn’t he encouraged people to hate Beau Dupere? Didn’t he sow seeds that, in the right soil, would grow up into lethal plants?

  On the opposite side, a small voice made satisfied sounds, relieved noises, and even slightly triumphant intimations. This would bring his daughter back to him. This would free his congregation from the temptation to follow that charlatan. This was good news.

  But Dixon didn’t allow either of those minority voices to take up the pulpit on the stage of his heart. They would stay in the shadows, in the overflow room, spreading doubts, distributing accusations, but only covertly.

  Though he hadn’t voiced his doubts the way Sara had, Brett wondered whether Beau Dupere was really so bad, so dangerous, as his father believed. Sure, he had been instrumental in Sara leaving home, but that wasn’t really anything Beau had done intentionally. That just fit with the things that teenagers did to their parents. Brett was still reserving his vote on this subject, whether someone like Beau Dupere could heal people and whether that healing expressed the will of God when it happened.

  Brett felt the weight of the experience of being in the meeting where Beau Dupere was killed. Of all the meetings the famous healer had held, in all the cities he had visited, on all the nights that he did his thing, Brett had been there on that last night.

  Back at the church, Anna rose from her place of purgation, down between the seats, when she heard that mighty wind rushing through the auditorium and swirling up to the front, where Beau had fallen. She leveraged herself to a standing position, with both hands and shaky legs, just as Beau sat up. Anna was one of those people that screamed. She narrowly avoided fainting again. Darkness had seeped into view all around her field of vision, like one of those old sepia movies with a fuzzy black frame around it; but the darkness had retreated in time to leave her standing, hearing the echo of her own scream. Then she laughed. She laughed for the same reason she screamed. Hysteria bubbled her brain, and relief relaxed her lungs and loosed her limbs. She laughed away the grief, and inhaled new hope more deeply than she had ever inhaled anything.

  Then the news reporter in her awakened. What a story! What would she say? How could she tell this so that people wouldn’t just dismiss it as religious nonsense? She grabbed her bag and climbed over bodies, scooting between people coming and going in the aisles and on the stairs. She was going to get to the heart of this story. And who cares what they will say about it, when she has researched and written all the facts? She shuffled down the aisle as fast as her feet, and the staggering people rising or falling around her, would allow.

  With the whole death and resurrection scenario came a feeling like a flight in a small airplane that has lost its engine and begins diving toward certain death, only to be pulled up just before the ground can smack it, when the engine suddenly, and inexplicably, revives.

  When Beau sat up, Sara jumped up and down. That’s what cheerleaders do. Maleka and Jessica jumped with her, and they hugged each other and they cried on each other, and they made inarticulate sounds that made each other laugh. “Now, that’s a healing service!” Maleka said, bursting into gales of unfiltered laughter.

  Dixon Claiborne finished his ride back from the meeting around ten p.m. He and Brett had switched the radio a couple of times, away from the news, before finally turning it off. They both favored silence over more of the droning voices of people who were not there and did not see it themselves, did not see anything themselves.

  Kristen was sitting up in the living room, the only other person in the world who knew of their secret mission, which is not to imply that she approved of that mission, beyond the slim hope it dangled regarding reuniting their family one way or another. Now, Kristen waited with the TV off, after seeing all the coverage of whatever it was that actually happened at the Beau Dupere meeting. After major news agencies retracted the death of Beau Dupere, deciding instead that he was simply severely, and then slightly wounded, video taken at the meeting hit one of the more sensationalistic cable news programs. The “slightly” wounded Beau Dupere took three large caliber shots to the chest, his body concussing with each bullet’s “slightly” wounding him. And what of the blood soaked shirt when he stood up finally at the end? What of that huge pool darkening the carpet? He was no longer as severely wounded as one would expect a man shot at point blank range. He seemed perfectly fit, though his shirt was clearly ruined.

  A quartet of pundits on that channel commented on the story, bantering and debating until they concluded, in unity, that Beau Dupere had perpetrated a hoax, staging his own death and resurrection in order to convince his cultic followers that he was The Messiah come back to earth. When Kristen shut off the TV, no one yet had the footage of this latter declaration.

  “Did you hear the news?” Kristen said, standing up to confront, more than greet, her two men.

  “About Beau Dupere getting shot? We were there, we didn’t have to hear the news,” Brett said, youthful drama elevating his voice past the line where enthusiasm retains respect.

  Dixon nodded knowingly, the veteran of a murder, the traumatized witness.

  “You didn’t hear that he’s alive and well, then?” Kristen said, delivering her punchline with a stolid monotone.

  “Alive and well?” Dixon said, trying to figure out where the humor was in such a joke.

  “Resurrected, his followers are saying.” Kristen raised her eyebrows and nodded sharply, her head providing the one last tap required to drive in that nail.

  “Wait,” Brett said, “you’re saying he’s not dead? You saw him not dead?”

  “Alive.” Kristen provided the adjective her son couldn’t speak.

  “No,” Dixon said, his voice haunted with creeping disbelief.

  Kristen nodded, this time repeatedly, as if to say it over and over --“It is true, it is true, he is alive, he is alive.”


  Though he had been driving for the past two hours, Dixon dropped into his big easy chair, in deference to his knees deciding that standing wasn’t to be taken for granted.

  “Some of the media, of course, are saying it’s all a hoax, that he faked it to get attention, or to make himself look like Jesus.”

  “The media?” Dixon said. Hadn’t he hoped to get the media turned against Beau Dupere? And now, he felt a protest rising in defense of Beau Dupere. Of course, the secular media wouldn’t believe someone was raised from the dead. If they believed that was possible, they would have to believe in Jesus.

  That rally proved short-lived, however. Dixon started then to absorb the opportunity the media was providing. Able now to look past the assassination, he remembered how uncomfortable the meeting had made him, like a teetotaler at a wine tasting. That discomfort turned now to anger. Of course, it had all been fake. Of course, this was a ploy to elevate the cult leader even higher. Dixon could see that. He could see the advantage of accepting that explanation.

  “He won’t get away with it,” Dixon said, finally, rising from his chair, his bigger mission restored, and with new momentum. He looked at his wife and then his son and declared again. “This will be the end of him.”

  Seeing What You Want to See

  Anna arrived at her office the next morning, notes in hand and speech prepared. Her editor would have to prove his commitment to true journalism, to man up and stand against the rising tide of disbelief.

  “Disbelief? What do I know about believing?” she said to herself, providing her own editing, as usual.

  Anna dropped her bag at her desk and pulled out her phone, pinning it against her steno pad on which she had scrawled shaky notes, in the adrenalin soaked air of the meeting the night before. Beau had laughed at her and her note pad when she arrived at the front of the auditorium. He was shaking hands with everyone, no one interested in hugging his blood-soaked shirt and jacket.

  “You’re here and on the story,” Beau said, when Anna eased to a stop next to the surging, ebbing and flowing mass of arms and smiles around him.

  She smiled back at him with closed lips and nocturnal animal eyes, not sure she believed she was actually there. “This is a pretty good story,” she said, her voice diluted in the laughter and tears around them.

  Anna began to ask people who had seen Beau shot, who had checked him when he was on the ground, what they had seen, what they believed happened. She collected seven accounts of the blood spattering from the bullet wounds, including one bullet that went straight through and embedded in the edge of the stage, twenty yards away. During her interviews, the police arrived, and then the FBI, who had been following a group opposed to Beau that they thought might resort to violence.

  Special Agent Martin Parks focused on finding the shooter, leaning hard away from the question of how the victim could be standing, smiling and laughing, among the other witnesses. Anna marveled at the serious federal agent’s tunnel focus on the only clear part of his job that remained.

  Oakland Police took some statements but yielded to the half dozen FBI agents and investigators, who collected the bullet from the stage and took the necessary photos. One technician stood looking at Beau for a while, perhaps wondering what had happened to the other two bullets. Anna couldn’t help laughing at that unprecedented investigative problem. The bespectacled crime scene tech just turned away, finally, swearing or praying in Spanish. Anna couldn’t tell for sure which. The local cops interviewed several people, but avoided Beau, as if he might not actually be there. They certainly dared not be caught talking to a ghost.

  Equally amusing to Anna were the emergency medical technicians who insisted on examining Beau. He wouldn’t stop patting backs and shaking hands, tears in his eyes and in the eyes beaming at him from all sides. But he did let one stout thirty-something EMT take his blood pressure inside his jacket. Beau didn’t want to show off his blood stains, so insisted on keeping his expensive blazer in place. He also kept his shirt buttoned, still feeling like he was in public, and definitely not feeling a need for medical attention.

  The paramedic just shook his head and said, “I don’t know what to put on my report. There’s usually more to show for it when there’s such a big blood stain. He looked at the carpet in the taped off space in front of the stage and shrugged.

  Like a party of partially drunk friends and neighbors, the group at the front of the auditorium milled and mixed, leaving only the bloody stain on the floor for the crime scene investigators. Beau had buttoned his suit coat to cover much of the stain on his shirt and the lining of his expensive jacket, but Anna could tell he was uncomfortable and wanted to get back to his hotel to change.

  At the end of the first row, Maggie sat by herself. Anna spotted her from the middle of the remnant of people who couldn’t pull themselves away from the scene of the miracle.

  Maggie looked less than miraculous. She seemed to be still recovering from her shock, her hair pushed back behind her ears, small looping locks stuck to her forehead where she had been sweating not too long before. Her pale yellow blouse bore the print of her father’s blood from when she hugged his resurrected body.

  Anna sat down next to her.

  For a moment, both of them were silent. Then Anna said, “You know I want to tell the whole world what you did here tonight.”

  Turning briskly toward her, Maggie acted a bit like she had just woken from a vigorous dream. “You’re gonna write about Dad being killed and then coming back to life?”

  “Everyone else is saying you brought him back to life.”

  Maggie sighed. “He said he wanted to be brought back when someone finally got a clear shot at him. And it happened, just like he knew it would.” The thin wires that had been propping up her appearance of unflappable composure snapped at that last phrase, and Maggie aimed her head at Anna’s shoulder when the tears burst out of her. She sobbed into Anna’s peach colored linen jacket, leaving a dark stain next to the lapel. Anna wrapped her left arm around Maggie’s shoulders and held onto her notebook with the other, trying to keep it out of the weeping girl’s hair.

  Beau saw his daughter’s breakdown and wriggled free of his well-wishers to kneel in front of Maggie. She switched her head from Anna’s to Beau’s shoulder.

  “You won’t ever have to do that again,” he said, his muscular arms wrapped around her. “Let’s get outta here, huh kiddo?”

  Maggie nodded and sniffled harshly, causing a laugh of embarrassment and relief, as she stood up. Anna laughed with her. But she was thinking of one question for Maggie.

  “Who did you call on the phone? People said you called someone.”

  “Mom,” Maggie said, her tight smile quivering at the thought.

  “I called Justine as soon as I got to my feet,” Beau said. “I knew Maggie had called her and I wanted her to know I was alright.”

  Anna wanted to ask one last thing of Beau, as well. “While you were on the floor, and . . . you . . . were . . .” She didn’t want to say “dead.” But she still had her question. “What did you see?”

  Beau put an arm around Maggie’s shoulder as they started up the aisle. “Anna, that’s one thing I’m not gonna tell ya. In fact, I don’t think I can tell anyone for a while.” He smiled as he said this, but a rock-hard resolve lay behind that cheerful veneer.

  Now Anna wanted to know what he saw more than she wanted anything. Her inquisitive nature crossed paths with that hunger for contact with the mystery that sustained and animated Beau and his family. She even started to think that the driving desire she felt to know everything about Beau and Justine, might be leading her to know the one that they knew, the one that could raise the dead.

  Lagging behind, after Beau and Maggie left, Anna noticed a young woman getting off the floor, makeup streaked from tears, her pony tail yielding a couple of odd lumps on the back and side. Anna felt like she had seen this girl before, but couldn’t remember where.

  Sara Claiborne smiled at th
e young reporter who stared at her just a bit too long to ignore, but she wasn’t focused on who was staring at her, or why she might have attracted attention. Actually, she wasn’t focused on anything. When Anna wandered toward her, she decided to talk to her just because her mind felt inverted and she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “You were talking to Beau. You know him?” Sara said to Anna.

  Anna nodded, bypassing the sorts of answers she gave the reporters after Dianna’s incident. “Yes, I’ve been reporting on him for the last few weeks, since a meeting up in Parkerville, where some pastors denounced him.”

  Sara’s mind coalesced a bit at the mention of that meeting. Without wondering what it would mean to admit it, she said, “I was there. My dad was the one who called that meeting.”

  Hesitating for a second, checking her internal recording to see if Sara had said what she thought, Anna lowered her head, cocked it a bit to the side and said, “You . . . you’re Dixon Claiborne’s daughter?”

  Sara was surprised that this reporter knew her father. “Yes. You know him too?”