The guy moves around a lot, I thought. Illinois to Tennessee to California to Vegas. His itinerant lifestyle aroused a bit of curiosity, so I ran his name through Google and a few other search engines. There wasn’t much there apart from a few old ads for The Meadows. Most of the ads encouraged people to visit the worship center and “discover” themselves. They would be amazed, the ads said, about how they would “feel” afterwards.
I was no theologian, but for me, church was about worshiping the being who created me. Whoever or whatever had created the universe was so infinitely greater than the little worm I was that I felt like the least I could do was give Her an hour a week to acknowledge that fact. That’s why I liked old-school pews, the less comfortable the better, and kneelers, which were becoming an endangered species. I wanted the Creator to know that I wasn’t above experiencing searing lower back pain from the wooden pews, which undoubtedly were designed by some medieval sadist, and neither did I mind getting shin splints from the understuffed kneelers jamming into my knees. As far as I was concerned, if you needed to see a chiropractor after attending mass, you were in the right place. The point is, it wasn’t supposed to be about me. In fact, it was the one hour a week I wasn’t a self-centered little you know what. And if that happened to make me feel a little bit better, then so be it. But that was a side effect, not the purpose of going to church in the first place.
I decided I probably wouldn’t be raising these theological issues in my tête-à -tête with the reverend. For present purposes, if he wanted me to “discover” myself, then I would play along and keep my mouth shut, even if keeping my yap closed wasn’t among my greatest talents. I was there to learn about him and his relationship with Laura Hartmann, not to debate angels on the head of a pin.
I arrived early for our three o’clock appointment. I had dressed in a conservative blue-and-white outfit befitting the occasion of a private meeting with a minister, something I had never experienced. When I walked through the church office door, the secretary I’d spoken to on the phone stood and beamed at me for a split second, but then her expression soured almost imperceptibly. She maintained the smile, but it was now a forced effort rather than the genuine one she’d initially greeted me with. There was something about me she didn’t like.
I forced my own smile and sat down in an overstuffed leather armchair which squarely faced the secretary’s desk, creating an awkward expectation that whoever was seated in the chair would have to talk to the secretary. Luckily, Corinne had the good sense to busy herself with whatever papers she had on her desk. She wasn’t selling it, though. She began frowning at a few of the papers for effect, looking oh so busy, and then she typed feverishly on the computer (still frowning) as though Western civilization itself teetered on the balance of whatever meaningless email she was sending. I kept staring at her, enjoying the show and wondering what she had been doing before I arrived. Playing solitaire? Texting her husband?
The I’m Really Important and Busy show ended when Rev. Owen buzzed her and told her he was ready for me. He was really busy and important, I gathered, too, since he couldn’t even be bothered to stand up and open his own door to let me in. It was a leap, perhaps, but I was sensing a pattern of self-importance permeating throughout the little office.
“How do you take your coffee?” he asked.
“Blacker the better,” I said.
He smiled and fetched me a cup, which he served on fancy china.
“Call me Owen,” he said, ushering me onto a white leather couch where he joined me, crossing his legs.
I smiled back at him. Again, I thought, with the self-importance. The “call me Owen” thing wasn’t real. It felt like a fake kind of modesty or folksiness that was belied by his shimmering cuff links and two-thousand-dollar suit. I called him Owen anyway. The coffee was excellent.
He asked me to tell him about myself, so I did, in a roundabout sort of way. He kept waiting for me to mention the part about how I’d been a stripper over the last decade, but I left that out of it. When I’d finished my little monologue, he remained silent, as though contemplating what I’d said.
The silence continued, at first awkward and then unbearable. It was a way of getting me to blurt something out, I figured. Anything to end the yawning chasm of awkwardness. I knew it was an old police trick cops employed to loosen the tongues of helpless perps, and it wasn’t going to work on me. I occupied my mind by imagining what Corinne was doing outside the office. Was she eavesdropping, or had she gone back to doing her nails?
Finally, he broke the silence, and I thought I detected a pained smile creep into his expression, even if only for a second.
He cleared his throat. “Raven, er, is there anything else about you we should know? Like, for example, how do you make a living? I see from your finger you’re not married, right?”
Here it comes, I thought. I was in a bind, though. I didn’t especially want to talk about being a stripper, but I really didn’t want to talk about being a private detective. That might have gotten his radar up, raising suspicions even though I was there at his request and even though he had no idea I was working a case that might have involved him.
I decided to come at him with both barrels. “You see these?” I asked, grabbing my breasts.
His eyebrows shot up.
“That’s how I make a living. So you can see why I didn’t mention it. It’s a little embarrassing.”
Owen nodded solemnly and recrossed his legs in the opposite direction. I was ninety percent sure that he already knew I was a stripper. After all, they’d found my unlisted phone number somehow, so it wouldn’t have been too difficult, especially since I looked like a stripper. At least, on a good day.
“I see,” he said, fumbling for words. I began to suspect I had truly taken him off guard. “Is that something you’re comfortable with?”
“It pays the bills,” I said nonchalantly. “And then some.” I wasn’t about to mention the fact that I had gotten my PI license as a way to get out of that business entirely.
He smiled faintly, and I could sense he was struggling to come up with an angle of approach. “Well,” he began, “I’m not going to be judgmental. I don’t think taking your clothes off for money is why God put you on this earth, but I also know that the records we have, including the Bible itself, suggest that many of Jesus’s friends and early disciples came from the ranks of society we might look down our noses at.”
“Tax collectors, prostitutes, that kind of thing?” I asked.
He nodded. “Exactly. But, Raven, we can do better, right? God himself wants you to flourish, to find yourself.”
I shrugged, not giving anything away, slightly annoyed by the exhortation to find myself again. Even if I had been unmoved, a spark had been lit inside Owen. His eyes became more distantâhis voice jumped half an octave. It was higher pitched but more powerful, driven by an inner spirit that had taken over the reverend’s personality entirely. He began by quoting scripture, the Old Testament, and then started off on a mini homily, a personal sermon tailored just to me. Most of it was recycled material, I’m sure, but he had a way of bringing it home so that, if I hadn’t known any better, I would think he had just crafted a ten-minute monologue complete with apt Biblical quotes on the spur of the moment. It was impressive stuff, I had to admit.
He continued on, sometimes appearing distant, other times looking me deeply in the eyes, holding me with a gaze so powerful I was afraid to look away. At those moments in particular, when our eyes were locked, I began feeling a kind of otherworldly, ethereal buzz that was somewhere between a caffeine high and a drunken stupor. It was a sense of utter, naked, jaw-dropped-on-the-floor curiosity about what the minister would say next about my life and my relationship with God and the universe, and at those moments, which could have been seconds or minutes or hours, nothing else mattered, nothing else could have swayed me, could have distracted me from the message that I was special, that I had meaning.
When he was d
one, we were both panting heavily. I was still clouded in a kind of haze, mesmerized by his performance. Impure thoughts began coursing through me. My body began craving his, I think as a means of keeping him with me for as long as possible so that I might experience that sensation again, that sense of belonging as a part of a grander plan. And partly, it was out of an insane creeping sense of jealousy, the notion that others would be able to share Owen’s vision, that he would talk to other women in the same way. I needed to prevent that, it seemed to me at the time, and so if we got physical, I could keep him with me longer, past our allotted time. I fought a powerful urge to begin flirting with him, to give him the green light to do whatever he wanted to me because whatever he wanted was what I wanted too. He was watching me carefully, I recall, but the rest of it is fuzzy.
And that’s when a danger bell began chiming deep in my subconscious. It was the warning signal that had saved me before, more times than I cared to admit. It gripped me, barely, but enough to prevent me from undressing, from giving in to the bizarre sensations that coursed through me. I remember standing up, an act that took more than one try, and stumbling out the door.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A loud knocking sound kept penetrating my left eardrum. In my woozy dream, it was a jackhammer, a giant one, and I was astride it, for some reason believing that beneath the earth’s crust lies an undiscovered river of champagne. It was just me, alone, in the desert, for some reason garbed in a baby-blue dress, confident I was about to uncover the mother lode of wine rivers, a million-gallon gusher that I could sell and drink to my heart’s content. But the knocking kept coming, more insistently, and then hands were on me.
“She’s breathing,” I heard, rattling me out of the dream.
My eyes opened, one slit at a time.
“You okay?” a voice asked.
I wasn’t okay. I felt hungover, like I’d drunk a river of champagne. And yet I knew that couldn’t be true. It was light out, and my car’s clock said it was just after five.
“Uh, I think I’ll be okay. Just not getting enough sleep at night, I guess,” I said, lamely.
The couple looked at each other skeptically. In all likelihood, they thought I was a drugged-out hooker or something. Except that I was in the driver’s seat of a brand new Porsche. I looked around and didn’t recognize my surroundings. It was a residential neighborhood, and I had parked the car (it was still running, I just noticed) next to, and partly on top of, the curb in front of a gray ranch house. I had no earthly reason for being there, which no doubt fueled the skepticism of the middle-aged couple who’d found me.
“Seriously, thanks for waking me up. I do this sometimes,” I lied. “I was having a migraine, so I pulled over, and then it got the better of me.” My voice was sounding a little less spaced-out.
“Oh, I used to get those,” the woman said knowingly. “Awful things. You okay to drive home? I can call an ambulance if you want.”
“No, no,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “I’m not too far. I’ll be fine. It’s gone now.”
Their facial expressions told me they weren’t quite convinced, but at the same time, neither did they want to get too involved in the health issues of a dingbat who was a complete stranger. They were more than willing to take my word for it, so I waived at them and pulled out, having no idea in the world where I was.
A block away, I pulled over, fired up the GPS, and realized I was less than a quarter mile from the church. And that’s when it all came back to me, at least in bits and pieces. The reverend. His personalized sermon. The way I felt during it and after, an almost chemical kind of high. The coffee he’d given me. That must have been it. I remember vague snippets about how God had a plan for meâthat was the main themeâbut few other details. My last memory was of Owen staring at me, almost studying me, which I now realized was his attempt to see if I was going to pass out or not. I had been poisoned before and survived, so a half cup of tainted coffee wasn’t going to put me under. But it did, I realized. It made me pass out on the road where I easily could have been killed. It was only through some miracle that I’d maintained enough sense to pull over before I clunked out.
A million thoughts raced through me. Why did he do it? Was it just for sex? That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, although neither did half the things men did. It seemed awfully risky to drug an almost complete stranger because he’d have to expect I’d run straight to the cops. Unless. Unless the drug was supposed to make me forget everything. I wondered if that was the plan all along. I’d drink the whole cup of coffee and pass out in his office, oblivious to time and everything else, and then, once he’d had his way with me, he’d wake me up and explain that he’d hypnotized me and that everything was all right. Given his hypnotic sermons and the overwhelming charisma that made me, and presumably most other women, want to like him, I bet he got away with it. Maybe all the time.
My brain strained to remember any more details. Had he touched me, or did I get out of there in time? And what was Corinne doing, just outside his office? Maybe that was why she had to force a smile when I arrivedâshe knew what the Rev was going to do to me. It gave me the chills. I had to get past all that, though. I knew that if I wanted to bust the guy, I’d have to have my blood tested. I wasn’t sure where the nearest hospital was, but my phone told me it was two miles to the northeast.
The two intake women in the ER looked at me a little funny when I told them what I wanted.
“Are you okay?” they asked in unison.
“Yes. I think so. I think I got away before anything happened.”
They looked at each other. “So this isn’t an emergency, it sounds like.”
“But, I mean, if I’m going to file a police report, it would probably be good to have, you know, evidence.” I tried not to sound as snippy as I felt.
One of the women rose reluctantly and went into the back where she flagged down a white-haired man with a large paunch protruding from his gray lab coat.
He nodded at the woman solemnly, checked his watch, and then told her something that seemed to satisfy her.
She returned, a petulant look on her face.
“What we’ll do is this. We’ll call the police on your behalf, and in the meantime, we’ll run a blood test. OK?”
I shrugged. “Fine with me.”
She wasn’t done with me. “Most people call the police first, you know. So you’re just a little out of order.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been drugged.”
Her eyebrow shot up, but that was it. She had to admit that I had a point. “Follow me,” she said curtly.
She led me into a small closet-sized room that wasn’t really a room but just an area enclosed by two large blue curtains, part of a small tent city of identical quarters used for intake screenings and the kinds of tests that nurses could perform before you saw the doctor. She told me to wait and that someone would be by shortly.
Three minutes later, a rotund black man arrived garbed in salmon scrubs that matched the color of his gums when he smiled at me.
“Says here you think you were drugged,” he said non-judgmentally. His name tag said his name was Winston.
I nodded. “Basically, I was with this guy, and then everything got really woozy, you know, and I got up and drove away, but I passed out and woke up by the side of the road.”
He nodded, his round face a model of concern. He asked for my arm and then placed a cuff on and squeezed the little ball to make the cuff tighten. He looked off into space as he calculated my pressure through his stethoscope.
“And now the pulse,” he said softly, taking my wrist. Fifteen seconds passed as I tried to lower my pulse by imagining that Winston was just about to give my arm a massage, the opening round of a two-hour full-body package at my spa.
He took his fingers off my wrist and punched something into the little computer.
“Your pulse is fine,” he said. “Which is unusual.”
I frowned, uncomprehendi
ng.
He leaned back in his chair. “Most people in your situation would be over a hundred just with the adrenaline flowing. You’re at sixty-three which means you’re still partly sedated, I think.”
Then he wheeled around and rolled his chair over to a small white cabinet which held the mother lode of medical supplies and fished out a syringe. He rolled back to me, unwrapped the needle, labeled it on the side, and then showed it to me to make sure my name and date of birth were right. I nodded solemnly, and then he dipped a cotton swab in alcohol, cleaned a spot on my left arm, and smiled at me.
I’m good with needles, which has always surprised me, given my other phobias and neuroses. For some reason, I didn’t mind a bit when someone plunged one into my veins. It was all over in ten seconds, but Winston didn’t seem impressed at my virtuoso performance. No cringing, no wincing, no tears. I supposed most grown-ups handled it just the same.
“How long before the results come in?” I asked.
Winston smiled. “You know how that goes. Could be this afternoon still, or could be a day or two. It depends on a lot of things.”
I nodded along as though I understood how things were, even though I was wondering what could be more important than a woman alleging she had been drugged.
“You’re done,” he said. “They told me they were calling in the police department, so you probably want to wait for them in the lobby.”
I nodded and stood up. I was still hoping for a sticker, or some candy, or something. I left disappointed.
Double Down (Raven McShane Mysteries Book 4) Page 10