“Well,” she huffed, “I happen to be passionate about the rights of inmates and prisoners, and I’m sick of the people who exploit them because they are powerless to defend themselves.”
“It sounds like a good crusade, but if it blinds you to the truth, then it’s evil. Like all inquisitions, crusades, and witch hunts, passion must be tempered with wisdom and an open mind. If you are convinced of something before you investigate it, you will only prove what you already believed.”
“Fair enough. I am in search of the truth, and you are innocent until proven guilty.”
“Or in this case, just plain innocent,” I said.
“I sincerely hope so, of course. The church sure doesn’t need another scandal these days-crooked televangelists, pedophile priests.” She paused for a minute and shook her head slowly. “Well, I really do need to ask you some questions.”
I nodded.
“Where were you last Tuesday night? By the way, do you mind if I tape this?” she asked, pulling out a microcassette recorder.
“No, I don’t mind. And I was in the hospital, I am told. I was unconscious.”
“Oh no, I meant the Tuesday night before that. If you will lead me through all the events of that night.”
“I was at an AA meeting in a Sunday School room of the First Methodist Church of Panama City, Florida, from six until eight. I then went to Applebee’s on Twenty-third Street with two of the members of that group. I then drove home, arriving about twelve forty-five. I read a little and then went to bed … alone.”
“Can someone corroborate your story?” she asked.
“AA is anonymous. It would be their choice, but I’ll ask.”
“It’s not that important. The crime was said to have occurred later anyway, but if they’re willing, it wouldn’t hurt. Did you speak to anyone after you got home that night who could confirm your whereabouts?”
“No.”
“Do you know Molly Thomas?”
“Yes.”
“How well do you know her?”
“I’ve probably spent a sum total of three or four hours with her. Most of that time has been in the visiting park of the institution. I’ve counseled her and her husband during some of their visits together, at their request, of course. They, like most inmate couples, were having some marital problems and wanted my help.”
“Were you able to help them?”
“Apparently not. I thought so at first, but then lately something has happened to Anthony, her husband. He is on a serious downward spiral.”
“Have you ever met with Molly Thomas by herself at or away from the institution?”
“Yes, I have. Last Friday. I mean a week ago last Friday-she called and asked to see me, saying it was an emergency and she was scared to come to the institution. So we met in the pastor’s office of the Methodist church in Pottersville.”
“What was the nature of that meeting?”
“She described what took place the Tuesday night before when she was raped at the institution and asked for my help.”
“Who did she say raped her?”
“Her husband.”
“He’s an inmate. How could he have even seen her?”
“Captain Skipper arranged it, according to her, but interrupted them in the middle and then stalked her that night and tried to break into her home.”
“Why didn’t you come forward with this information?”
“I’ve been in a coma, but my friends turned it in after he assaulted me.”
“Was there anyone present at your meeting with Molly Thomas that Friday?”
“Yes, one of my few rules is that I will not counsel a woman alone. The pastor of that church, the Reverend Dick Clydesdale, was in the next office monitoring the session, and I told Molly that he was.”
“Would you be willing to submit blood and semen samples? If you’re telling the truth, it will clear this up quickly.”
“From what I’ve seen so far, telling the truth does no good and nothing can clear this up quickly. I’m being drawn and quartered in the press. Can you clear that up?”
“If you will submit those samples and they test negative, I will guarantee you front-page coverage of that fact and a chance to tell your story. What do you say?”
“I say, pardon me if I’ve become cynical, but I don’t believe you. However, I will submit the samples, because I am telling the truth.”
“I sincerely hope so. It would be a refreshing change.”
Chapter 38
After reading all the accounts of my alleged misconduct in the papers and talking with Rachel Mills, I was exhausted. I took a nap, but not before praying for my total recovery and for me not to have AIDS.
Please, God, anything but that. I couldn’t handle it; you know that. I’m not nearly strong enough for that.
It was at that moment that a voice inside my head said that God would never put more on us than we can bear.
That’s not what I want to hear right now. I want to hear that there is power in the blood. Power to cleanse me. Power to heal me. Power to kill HIV if it’s in my blood. I want to hear, by his stripes we are healed.
And then I fell asleep and had more bloody nightmares.
I awoke to the sound of the phone ringing. Since it was probably a reporter, I decided to let the machine catch it. I nearly broke my neck and reopened all of my wounds trying to get to the phone when I heard Sandy Strickland’s voice.
“Wait, I’m here,” I said, snatching up the receiver.
“I don’t blame you for monitoring your calls today. You’re really in a bad way, aren’t you?”
“Pretty bad.”
“I’ve heard some very disturbing reports about some things you’ve been doing-crimes, I mean, and against women. I was shocked. I was also confused. I thought you were different.”
“Me, too. They’re not true,” I said, but it didn’t sound very convincing.
“Well, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there’s a lot of damn smoke around here.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. All I ask is that you withhold judgment until all this is cleared up. It won’t be long. Are you back at the prison?” I asked.
“Not officially, and I’m glad. It’s a zoo out here. You’ve made it difficult for all of us.”
Her words and anger stung like slaps.
“Sandy, please listen to me. I didn’t do those things-any of them.”
“You’re lying, you son of a bitch. I hate men like you. I’m glad you have HIV.”
“What?” I whispered as the breath suddenly rushed out of me.
“That’s right,” she said and began to laugh. “What does the Bible say? You reap what you sow.”
“I can’t. I-”
“You do. And it’s called poetic justice,” she said.
And then there was a click. And in a few seconds, a dial tone.
I sat there with the phone still at my ear. I couldn’t move. I was seized by fear. It wasn’t shock. I wasn’t in shock, because she gave me the news I had expected. I knew that I had HIV the moment I had discovered the cut on my leg.
“Well, that’s that,” I said as I hung up the phone.
I now knew that I was going to die-sooner rather than later. Death had come into the room with me and said, “You’re mine.” And he was right. I was his, but not by the cursed blood in my veins, but by a bullet in my head that would let all that bad blood drain out. Or, maybe, the killer would do me the service of cutting me open.
That was it. That killer had done this to me. I was another of his victims. He had killed me, too, probably didn’t even know it. I made a vow, then and there, to find him and make sure he knew that I was one of his victims-find him, so we could die together. I was dying, but before I did, I was going to find the man responsible and woe be to that man.
I was climbing on a pale horse to go and track him down, and the name of that horse was death, and hell followed after him. In that moment, I pushed the knowledge of the disease
so far down inside me that it became nearly unconscious. I was going to die, but there was no reason to let that rob me of the little life I had left.
And then I broke. I cried for hours. I also searched my house for liquor, but found none. I buried my face into my pillow, baptized by my tears, and fell asleep and dreamed of death. I did, however, wake up. I woke up a new man-a man on a mission.
Chapter 39
There are a few places in Florida that have within them all that Florida has to offer-fields, forests, rivers, lakes, and beaches. Potter County is just such a place. You can stand in the middle of the huge trees of the Apalachicola National Forest and feel as landlocked as if you were in Montana, but a twenty-minute drive brings you to the Gulf of Mexico. Pottersville is home to farmers and fishermen, and I love its duality. Of all of Pottersville’s natural resources, one of the most beautiful and most powerful is the Apalachicola River.
On Sunday afternoon, in record-setting heat, I was lying under a tall bald cypress tree near the bank of the river, my head on Laura’s lap. Her lap was not as comfortable as the soft stack of pillows in the hospital and in my trailer; there were, however, other consolations.
The base of the bald cypress swelled to four times the circumference of the rest of the trunk, and there were cypress knees shooting up all around it. The grayish brown, spiraling base of the tree was normally covered in water, but the summer was dry and the river low.
Dammit, why do I have to die now? Why? How cruel to do this to me now.
She sat there gazing down at me, as if I were the man of her dreams, rubbing her fingers through my hair-the only part of my body that didn’t hurt. Occasionally, she would run her fingers delicately along the edge of my cheek, tracing the beard line. Although she barely touched it, it still hurt. It was, however, worth it.
“I was so scared in the hospital,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I thought I might lose you, and I had just found you. I prayed like I never have before. I remembered some of the things you said at that funeral … Anyway, I want you to hang around a while and teach me more, okay?”
“I plan to.”
“You know how you said that stuff about grace, about things being a grace, like dancing with me that night or a good night’s sleep?”
I nodded. Where the hell is my grace?
“You’re a grace for me,” Tears formed in her eyes. She smiled.
“There’s nothing I want more.”
A small breeze rippled the top of the muddy, coffee-colored water, and the moss hanging from the cypress limbs above us swayed slightly. Upstream, a fish jumped and made a loud splash.
We were silent, both fully in the moment. A single small tear fell from her left eye into my right.
“Tears form in my heart, but they fall from Laura’s eyes,” I said.
“That’s beautiful,” she said, and then more tears came.
“It’s from one of Dan Fogelberg’s songs-‘Anastasia’s Eyes’.”
It was a very romantic moment, considering that I looked like a raccoon that had barely survived being hit by a car … and was going to die anyway.
The branches of the bald cypress were too high and too small to provide any real shade, but a large live oak about ten feet away shaded the entire area of the bank and part of the muddy river. The water looked like just-stirred coffee as it swirled around the cypress trunks and the edge of the bank. The lapping of the water on the trunk of the trees reminded me of the bow of a boat breaking waves in the Gulf.
“I was a pretty successful pastor in Atlanta,” I said. “When I finished seminary, I served for a short time as an associate of one of the larger churches in the area, and then two years later I was the senior pastor of the second largest Methodist church in Atlanta. I drank like a fish when I was in high school, college, and shortly after that when I was working with the Stone Mountain Police Department, but I stopped when I received my calling. I didn’t seek help or look at why I drank so much. I just stopped.”
“And, stopping like that is always temporary,” she said.
“Yes, it is, especially because I had an extremely horrific case with a very traumatic ending just before I quit the department. I didn’t drink while I was the associate and for two years after I became a senior pastor. I threw myself into my vocation.”
“You exchanged one addiction for another,” she said.
“Yep, I was a classic workaholic. Now, this whole time I’d been living as a dry drunk, and that was okay with Susan, because that’s what she was used to. We had a nice, comfortable, unhealthy relationship. We didn’t see each other that much, and we lived in a glass house, so when we
did, we were usually doing our best to win an Oscar.”
“All the world’s a stage,” she said.
“Uh huh,” I said. “Finally, with all the pressure of being a pastor of a large church, never having gotten over my last case, and no personal life whatsoever, I began to drink again. Small amounts at first, but then I tried to swim in the bottle, and that’s when I drowned.”
“How did Susan respond?”
“Like an old pro at enabling. She was the best. The silence, the secrets, the excuses, and the justification.”
“Sounds like a perfect setup. What happened?”
“Remember that grace we spoke of earlier-she stepped in. I saw that I needed help, and I went looking for it. I started AA, I read the books, I got a sponsor, and I made one fatal mistake-I became honest about my addiction. Susan couldn’t handle it. It’s funny, but it wasn’t my addiction that split us up, but my recovery. And the church, the last thing they wanted was an honest recovering alcoholic for a pastor. I was too real, too much of a reminder of their own needs.”
She nodded encouragingly.
“Things got worse from there. I was faithful during all of this time. To be rigid enough to be a dry drunk meant that it was not a problem to be rigid enough to not be human. However, Susan and I had never been all that human with each other either, if you know what I mean. We were probably down to once a week, sometimes less. So, when the charges came that I was having an affair with one of the wives of a board member, she believed it. She was always so insecure anyway; that was all she needed.”
In the distance, the hollow tapping of a woodpecker started. It echoed off the trees and surface of the water, sounding like a family of woodpeckers at work.
“Why do you think the woman accused you of adultery?” Laura’s eyes were filled with compassion and understanding. Her mouth stayed slightly parted when she wasn’t talking-desirous, it seemed, to drink in my pain.
“She didn’t. Her husband did. She had come to see me because they were both alcoholics. She wanted help. He didn’t. He fixed her. Not too long after that, she committed suicide, and the papers had a field day. It all hurt like hell, but the worst thing was the way the church turned me out to the wolves.”
“Probably a lot of wolves within your fold.”
“Yes, there were. And every one of them had on sheep’s clothing. I didn’t see it coming, and I didn’t know what hit me.”
“So, you moved to this luxurious home,” she said, looking back at my trailer, “in sunny Pottersville, Florida.”
“Right here,” I said. “All of this came on the heels of a disastrous case I worked on with the SMPD. I quit. I ran away. I wanted to die. But, I didn’t drink, and, somehow, I didn’t lose my faith, in myself or in God. So, I’ve been demoted to a convict preacher.”
“You don’t see it as a demotion,” she said. “I can tell.”
“Well, maybe not. But, it was certainly a demotion as far as everyone else was concerned.”
“I think it’s a grace. The inmates at Potter CI have a priest who knows what it’s like to fall from grace.”
“You’re beginning to see grace everywhere, aren’t you?”
“Obi-wan trained me well,” she said and started to laugh.
“There’s just one thing. Grace was the only thing that I didn’t
fall from. I actually fell into grace’s gentle embrace.”
“You’re right. But I was using it as an expression, not literally.”
We strolled back to the trailer in no particular hurry. We laced our fingers together and held hands, weary of traveling alone. When we walked into the trailer, the phone was ringing, and I knew it was bad news.
It was.
It was Merrill. Anthony Thomas had been murdered in the infirmary the night before-stabbed and raped with a surgical scalpel, which the murderer had left in the body.
Chapter 40
“You look awful,” Molly Thomas said when she was seated in the only chair in my living room. She was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans, a white oxford button-down shirt, and white leather Keds. The large shirt, probably one of Tony’s, was not tucked in, and the tails were wrinkled. Clasped in her right had was a small wad of tissues that were wrinkled, too.
When she’d knocked on the door, Laura had greeted her like any Southern lady would, not realizing that she was the woman who had accused me of raping her in the chapel of PCI. I agreed with her, I did look awful, but she looked worse. She looked like the grieving widow she was. Her eyes were deep and hollow with big black bags underneath. Her auburn hair was thin and wispy, part of it standing up, but she didn’t care. She had aged ten years in the ten days since I had last seen her.
“Molly, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be here,” I said, sounding too harsh even under the circumstances. “I’m very sorry about Anthony, but I’m not the one to help you right now.”
“I’ve got to talk to you,” she said. Her voice was flat and as expressiveless as her face was expressionless. “I know what I’ve put you through, but I’m going to make it right. I’m so sorry.” She began to cry. Women seemed to be doing a lot of that around me lately. “I just didn’t know what else to do.”
Laura stood over near the door, giving Molly room but keeping watch over me. I hoped for Molly’s sake that she didn’t try anything crazy or make any sudden movements. I could picture Laura pouncing on her and, quite frankly, kicking her ass.
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