by Paul Heald
He did not understand why life had to be so complicated. Sondra thought he lacked ambition just because he wanted to stay in Clarkeston. She could not understand that interesting news happened everywhere, even in small-town Georgia. And Clarkeston really wasn’t even that small. In a town of sixty thousand people, there was plenty of crime and corruption, heroes and half-wits, to dig your teeth into. If he kept honing his craft, he stood just as good a chance of winning a major journalism prize as some reporter for The New York Times, and without having to live in New York City. He was privileged to work amid the oak-canopied splendor of Clarkeston College and along the broad avenues of the historic downtown, and even when he ventured out into the squalid trailer parks off the bypass, he could always retreat back to his quiet street with the thoughtful neighbors who would collect his newspaper without being asked when he went out of town for a couple of days. If he had ever taken her up to the North Carolina mountains to see his childhood home, Sondra might have understood his contentment with Clarkeston better, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
But for once, he was grateful for her absence, at least for the afternoon. He planned to dive deeply into Father Ernest Rodgers’s papers, and he was happy not to suffer snide comments about chasing phantoms in the dead priest’s junk boxes.
He propped open the side door of the house, carried the cargo directly from his station wagon into the study, and then made a cup of tea. Rain was pouring down, but the double-paned glass and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the library kept him snug and warm. Several months earlier, he had bought a worn leather chair and matching stool at a garage sale and squeezed them in between his computer desk and the picture window looking out into the backyard. The little nook had become his favorite reading spot, even after Sondra had “accidently” spilled nail-polish remover on the garish orange recliner in an attempt to get it out of her house.
Deciding to tackle the pile of sermons last, he sifted through conference programs and miscellaneous communications from the diocese of Atlanta, which provided insight into Episcopal church politics but little hint of Rodgers’s impassioned defense of Jacob Granville. Toward the bottom of the box, he ran across a clipping describing the Clarkeston police’s discovery of the bloody apartment of Diana Cavendish. To his surprise, he noticed that the story, slipped inside a brochure for a spiritual retreat, came from a small north Georgia newspaper rather than the Clarkeston Chronicle. The retreat had taken place at a conference center in the Appalachian foothills, so it appeared that Rodgers had been out of town at the time of the murder.
He read the clipping, but it contained no unfamiliar information. In fact, most of the language had been lifted straight from the first story he himself had filed with the AP wire service. Nonetheless, he laid it on his desk before he returned the rest of the papers to the cardboard container. When he put the box back on the floor and moved the next one to his desktop, he took a long sip from his mug of tea and contemplated the enjoyment he took from digging into other people’s stuff. He suspected that no momentous discovery would be found in Rodgers’s old papers, but there was something thrilling about drilling down into the most mundane details of someone else’s life. The microscope focused on the most insignificant detritus sometimes revealed more than the most powerful telescope pointed out into space.
At a minimum, the reporter learned a good bit about the job of being an Episcopal priest. James’s parents had taken him as a child to the whitewashed Primitive Baptist church down the dirt road from their house. The pastor had a small Christmas-tree farm close by and had no formal training for what was clearly a one-man, part-time operation. For Pastor Silas, saving souls meant a lot of yelling, and James started to find excuses to miss Sunday services once he was in high school. The hierarchy and formal structure of the Episcopal Church was far removed from his childhood experience. Nonetheless, Rodgers had one thing in common with Pastor Silas: his willingness to startle folks from the pulpit, such as his notorious excommunication of a parishioner for muttering a racial slur during Communion or his famous sermon on the persecution of Jacob Granville.
It was the Granville sermon that James especially wanted to find, but as he sifted through the typed sheets of marked-up text, he realized that the homilies were ordered by their place in the church calendar, and not in chronological order from year to year. He was not sure whether the sermon had been preached during Lent or Holy Week or Pentecost, so he went through the pages one at a time, constantly distracted by the content of Rodgers’s talks as well as by the violent scribbles in the margin where he argued with himself or suggested impromptu points of departure from the written version of his message.
Before the reporter knew it, night had fallen and a deep rumble in his stomach reminded him that he had not eaten all day. A cursory glance in the refrigerator confirmed his suspicion that all possible leftovers had been consumed or gone bad. Too impatient to cook, he ordered a pizza from his favorite (and Sondra’s least favorite) carryout joint and went back into his study to enjoy the sermons the old-fashioned way: beer in hand, feet propped up, pizza on belly.
Three hours later, an empty cardboard box lay on the floor next to a stack of discarded papers, and four brown bottles were creating an overflow problem in James’s small wastebasket. He was nearing the bottom of the first box of sermons, with another box still unopened and destined for the next day’s sleuthing.
After he pulled out the last four or five texts, he finally saw a reference to Jacob Granville, not by name, but in connection with “the mysterious disappearance of a young student here in Clarkeston.” Rodgers had waited to lash out at the public’s assumption that Jacob Granville had murdered Diana Cavendish until the Bible lectionary gave Psalm 35 as an optional reading. Verse 20 was his starting point: “They do not speak peaceably, but devise false accusations against those who live quietly in the land.” Without ever mentioning Granville or Cavendish by name, he launched a rhetorical offensive against local gossip and declared his firm belief that the longtime member of his flock was innocent of any wrongdoing. He offered no alternative explanations for what the police had found in Cavendish’s apartment, beyond hinting that a limited amount of blood had been found on the scene, not nearly enough to prove anyone had died there. The primary focus was his close relationship with the accused, and he made several references to long-suffering biblical characters to build his case.
The sermon was both wildly over the top and rather subtly done. Such personal subject matter was probably inappropriate for a mainstream church, but Rodgers had been very clever in how he made his point, by referring to events and characters from scripture. Unfortunately, the margins of the text were mostly devoid of notes, perhaps because it had been more carefully crafted than his normal sermon. The text conveyed a great deal about the attitude and personality of its writer, but little about its subject. The only hint of a clue was found on the final page, where the priest quoted from the first book of Peter: “Don’t repay evil for evil. Don’t retaliate with insults when people insult you. Instead, pay them back with a blessing. That is what God has called you to do, and he will bless you for it.” Next to the quote, he had written in small letters, “Miriam.”
James paused for a moment and then reread the final paragraph of the sermon, which concluded with a list of occasions when God had withheld judgment on his chosen people. He revisited the comment in the margin. Miriam was the name of Rodgers’s daughter, but she was also the sister of Moses, a biblical prophetess in her own right. When Moses delegated important responsibilities to various elders during the long march through Sinai, she was snubbed by her brother and began a whispering campaign against him. To teach her a lesson, God turned her into a leper, then changed her punishment to one week’s exile outside of the camp after Moses intervened on her behalf and she repented of her envy and slander. Was the marginal note a reminder to ask his daughter a question about Granville? Or was it a suggestion to add an impromptu reference to the biblical stor
y of Miriam during the spoken sermon? Or perhaps Miriam was just shorthand for some unidentified Clarkestonian who had gossiped and slandered Jacob Granville.
The reporter put the sermon on top of the newspaper clipping about the murder and quickly flipped through the remaining papers. He found nothing of interest, and when the Pica typeface on the yellowing sheets of paper started to swim before his eyes, he pushed himself up from the worn armchair and went off to bed.
He had a series of interviews to conduct with candidates for the local school board election the following morning, but he would have time in the late afternoon to go through the last box before he took them all back to Thorsten Carter. After he crawled into bed, he called Sondra’s cell phone, but it went immediately to voice mail and he turned off the light with a sigh, trying to think of an appropriate message he might text her. He considered firing off a biblical quote about dutiful wives, but there was no quicker way to infuriate a headstrong Baptist woman than to wield scripture, or worse yet, sarcasm, against her. He briefly considered paying a consoling visit to Mygirlfriendsbikini.com, but concluded sourly that the price of reconciling with his wife surely included foregoing the very sin that had led to the rift in the first place. Eventually, he drifted off to sleep, only to be awoken several hours later by the neighbor’s German shepherd barking like crazy next door.
He got up, walked to his back window, and noticed that his motion-detector lights were on. Raccoons and opossums often set off the lights, and so did the neighbor’s dog, for that matter. Once the dog stopped barking, he opened the window a crack and listened for noises coming from the backyard, but he heard nothing. After a trip to the bathroom, he lay down and turned off the cell phone he kept on the table beside his bed. One rude awakening per night was enough.
* * *
By the next morning, the rain had stopped and the air was warm but without the stickiness that came with precipitation later in summer. James decided to walk downtown to City Hall, where the school board candidates were filing their applications to be on the ballot. He had reserved a small conference room there, and six out of the eight hopefuls had agreed to be interviewed about their opinions on everything from the wisdom of having Coke machines in school cafeterias to the county’s decision to adopt an abstinence-based sex-education program. The interviews took all morning and by the end he despaired for the future of the county’s children. If he could get away with it, the headline in the paper would read, “Inarticulate Morons Advocate Lobotomizing Local Children.” At the end of the interview he summed up each candidate:
#1 Evolution and Dinosaur Bones = Conspiracy
#2 School Uniforms Will Solve All Problems
#3 Illegal Immigrants Are Bad
#4 Brain Dead
#5 Organic Lunch Food Will Solve All Problems
#6 Profoundly Brain Dead
He was so depressed that he treated himself to his favorite comfort food, even though the restaurant was five blocks away from the courthouse in the wrong direction from home. Williams Soul Food had occupied a bright yellow cinderblock building on the corner of Oak and Plaza for as long as he could remember. Once a month he chanced the massive amounts of cholesterol imbued in each mouthwatering piece of fried chicken, fried catfish, chicken-fried steak, Cajun fries, fried okra with bacon, or greens with pork belly. Even the drinks were bad for you: the sweet tea was the major cause of diabetes in the three-county area. Going to Williams was like going home, but minus the guilt and attitude.
As he contentedly popped a piece of Mama Williams’s (God rest her soul) perfectly crunchy chicken skin into his mouth, he nodded to the server for more tea and decided that he wanted whipped cream with his blackberry cobbler. He reveled in the clatter of cheap plastic plates on ancient Formica countertops and the constant buzz of the servers, who doled out a “sweetie” or “honey” with every refill of tea to the lawyers and laborers who sat shoulder to shoulder at the lunch counter. There was no more diverse place in Clarkeston, and the journalist had long ago concluded that if all banks, corporate boards, and legislatures looked like Williams Soul Food at lunch, the country would be a far better place.
Murphy’s editor did not want the story on the school board candidates until later in the week, so the reporter took his time with his cobbler and coffee and a day-old copy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He envisioned his name on the front-page byline of a story resolving the mysterious disappearance of Diana Cavendish, even better if he could reveal a cover-up that would take the story national. He folded the paper in half, stuck it under his left arm, and finished his coffee with new resolve. Once he finished working through Ernest Rodgers’s boxes, he would expand his search. Neither the victim’s parents nor Jacob Granville’s had been willing to talk to him five years earlier. Maybe they would be now.
The twenty-minute walk back home helped him shrug off the lethargic legacy of his lunch. The vivid colors of spring had faded, but the dense green of summer had not yet overwhelmed the town. Leaves on trees and bushes were nearly fully formed and played with the late-spring sunlight, twinkling a maze of cool mint and light velvet hues. Here and there, plots of red, yellow, and purple pansies signaled that Clarkeston would still enjoy a bit of time before July and August made comparisons with the Amazon jungle seem not only appropriate, but quite possibly favorable to Brazil.
As James ducked under the bushy crepe myrtle that hung over the corner of his driveway, he was trying to decide whether sparkling water or more coffee would be the best accompaniment to his final plunge into Ernest Rodgers’s papers, but all thoughts of beverages evaporated when he saw that the door from the garage into his house was ajar. He was sure that he had locked it firmly behind him earlier that morning. He had fumbled with his keys on the way out, dropping them to the garage floor and scraping his shoulder against the door frame when he reached clumsily down to pick them up. Sondra might have come by to pick up something during his absence, but writing about crime for a living had made him more cautious than the typical home owner. Before he went inside, he picked up a pitching wedge from his wife’s bag of golf clubs and pushed open the door with his foot. He yelled into the house, telling whoever was there that he was coming in and warning any burglars to run before the police arrived. He listened carefully for any noise and, hearing nothing, he stepped into the kitchen, eyes surveying the room for any sign of disturbance.
He went through the downstairs rooms one at a time, slowly peering around each corner, pitching wedge cocked over his shoulder, ready to chop down any hostile intruder. He was relieved to see the new flat-screen television was still in the living room. Some books had been flicked from their shelves and drawers had been opened, but his wife’s jewelry in the spare bedroom looked untouched. He was ready to conclude that Sondra must have come home in a pissy mood to pick up some clothes, when he arrived at the far end of the house and entered his study.
The room looked like a hurricane had struck. Every drawer had been ripped out of his desk and tossed on the floor. The file folders and papers inside them were all missing, leaving only a littered chaos of pencils, pens, scissors, rubber bands, paper clips, and a three-hole punch on the floor and chair. His new laptop had also been taken, and he groaned at the thought of having to migrate all of the files from his computer at work to its replacement. His voice-activated tape recorder was also gone, as were several notepads and a folder full of newspaper clippings that he had collected over the years.
Certain that the thief had left, he dropped the golf club, plopped down heavily in his armchair, and stared at the mess for several minutes, before pulling out his cell phone and calling the police. As he dialed, he scanned the room one more time and then swore aloud. Rodgers’s boxes were gone too. Everything that Thorsten Carter had given him was missing. After he finished talking to the dispatcher, he contemplated everything that had been taken and made another call, this one to Melanie Wilkerson in the US attorney’s office in Atlanta. The journalist did not believe in coincidences, a
nd he wondered why the thieves had targeted only items related to his job and left all personal valuables in their place. He could think of no story that he was working on, apart from the disappearance of Diana Cavendish, that might possibly interest someone daring enough to pillage his study in broad daylight. He had just reopened the case, and even if the break-in was unconnected, it provided an opportunity to prod the attorney into action.
XI.
BACKROADS
Melanie was sitting behind a worn wooden table in a federal courtroom when her phone began to vibrate quietly in the pocket of her jacket. Although the judge was notorious for scolding attorneys who dared check their messages in his presence, she slipped the device out carefully and held it under the table where he could not see. He was not paying attention to her anyway. She had accompanied one of her newest hires to make sure that the rookie knew how to properly conduct a plea hearing. A dozen defendants were making formal guilty pleas that afternoon and it was up to Amy to justify a proposed deal if the judge had any questions about the appropriateness of the agreement. Amy had done arraignments and some grand-jury work, but she had never worked the tail end of the process, and Melanie was there to make sure that she could jump through the relevant hoops and make the proper recitations to satisfy the procedural requirements of the court.
As the young woman explained to a dubious judge that a suspended sentence and diversion to an alcohol-treatment facility was an appropriate fate for a drunk driver caught on the local air force base, Melanie swiped her finger over the face of her phone and saw that James Murphy had called. A moment later a text came through asking for her to call as soon as possible. She tapped a perfectly manicured nail on the side of the phone and contemplated the three exclamation points that followed the request. The reporter had not struck her as the hysterical type.