Swift Justice

by DiSilverio, Laura

  Elizabeth Sprouse’s funeral was next on my agenda, but I needed to change first. The jeans and green hoodie I’d thrown on when Gigi called at three o’clock wouldn’t cut it for a funeral. There were few things I missed about the air force, but the uniform was one of them. You always knew exactly what to wear to any function. Scrambling over an obstacle course—battle dress uniform. Funeral—service dress. Formal party—mess dress. If you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, someone would tell you which uniform to wear. I wasted far too much time now that I was a civilian on deciding what to wear, and all I was aiming for most of the time was clean and appropriate. Decently attired in a black linen skirt that fell straight to my ankles and a matching short-sleeved jacket with white piping, I drove to the Church of Jesus Christ the Righteous on Earth, where Elizabeth’s stepfather would conduct her funeral service.

  My first glance at the church told me that whatever his gifts as a preacher, Zachary Sprouse didn’t have the fund-raising talents of some of his more famous evangelical brethren. When compared to the 7,500-seat New Life auditorium formerly filled by Ted Haggard (before he learned his lesson about trusting gay prostitutes), the corrugated metal warehouse looked modest indeed. I could hear my missionary parents telling me that the presence of God transformed even the humblest dwelling, but my one encounter with Pastor Zach left me doubtful that there was room for his ego and God in the same building.

  Inside, metal folding chairs were set up in two sections with an aisle running between them, culminating in a white casket, mercifully closed, that lay parallel to the altar. More than three-quarters of the roughly two hundred chairs were filled when I walked in, many by what looked to be students (wearing jeans) and faculty (wearing business casual) from Liberty High School. Women with long hair and body-obscuring clothes, and men with somber faces and beards, I decided were from the church’s congregation. Several of those women clustered around Patricia Sprouse, who had her face buried in a handkerchief. There was no sign of Zachary Sprouse. I spotted Jack Van Hoose on the left and made my way over when he waved. He wore a black polo shirt neatly belted into dark gray trousers and scooted over one chair so I could sit on the aisle.

  “Making any progress?” he asked when we’d exchanged greetings.

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” I said.

  “Was Linnea Fenn able to tell you anything?”

  “Able, possibly. Willing, not.” I scanned the crowd and realized Linnea wasn’t there. Odd.

  “She wouldn’t talk to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “How about if I set you up with her for Monday?”

  The bare fluorescent bulbs overhead gleamed off his bare scalp. “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  He shrugged muscular shoulders. “Maybe, if Linnea complains—but Linnea’s not much of one for running to authority figures with her problems. I’ll try to talk her into meeting with you, tell her you’re only trying to do right by Elizabeth’s baby by finding the father.”

  “Sounds good” was all I had time to say before music tinkled from an upright piano in front and a choir surged into an off-key rendition of “Morning Has Broken.” Pastor Zach emerged in a white robe with a hood draped down the back that looked disturbingly Ku Klux Klannish to me and stepped in front of the casket. His sermon rambled for close to an hour and included references to the adulterous Bathsheba, Tamar (who slept with her father-in-law), Jezebel (who was an evil whore eaten by dogs), and Lot’s daughters (who got him drunk and seduced him into incest). He recited the lines about the dragon and the drowning woman again and finished with his favorite phrase.

  “The wages of sin is death. And we are all sinners, brothers and sisters, all sinners who deserve to die!” He raised his hands straight overhead to the accompaniment of a few halfhearted “Amens.”

  I couldn’t imagine Elizabeth’s mother or friends found his words comforting in the least, and I could tell by the jumping muscle near his mouth it was all Jack could do to contain himself. I put a hand on his forearm, and he swiveled his eyes to me, muttering from the side of his mouth, “What’s he mean by dishing out a lecture on ‘Bad Girls of the Bible’? He better not be implying anything about Elizabeth. The man’s certifiable. I hope the police are looking hard at him.”

  On the words, I glanced back to see Montgomery staring at us, his gaze inscrutable. Without thinking, I sat straighter so I wasn’t so cozy with Jack Van Hoose. Stupid, I chastised myself. I faced forward for the rest of the service, immensely relieved when it was over and the casket had been carried out to the waiting hearse. The heat had become almost unbearable in the metal building, and smells of perspiration, deodorant, and cloying lilies from the altar coalesced into a smothering fug. As I stood and stretched, making way for people to exit the row, I noticed a woman in the back who didn’t seem to fit with either the Liberty High School crowd or the Church of Jesus Christ the Righteous on Earth believers. She had a model’s figure and height; her auburn hair was tucked under a cloche hat. Dressed in a black suit that whispered “designer” from every seam and button, she hurried toward the exit on three-inch pumps. The sun streaming through the door as she reached it revealed a slight sagging of the skin around her eyes and jaw that hinted at a woman in her forties, rather than the thirty-year-old she looked from behind.

  “Excuse me,” I said to Jack, instinct telling me to follow the woman. How had she known Elizabeth? Elbowing my way through the crowd of mourners scurrying out of the incinerator of a church, I squeezed through the door just in time to see her climb into a Lexus sedan.

  “Wait!” I trotted toward the car, waving, but she either didn’t see me or chose to pretend she didn’t. I scribbled down the license number before she made the turn onto Vollmer Road. My contact at the Department of Motor Vehicles could give me her name and address in exchange for the usual hundred dollars.

  Seeing Jack surrounded by a knot of students, and not wanting to spar with Montgomery again, I climbed into the Subaru and headed for home. From the way the mystery woman had driven off, I was sure she wasn’t going to the graveside service and I decided to skip it, too. My immediate future held a nap to make up for lost sleep, some hard work in the backyard, and a margarita-enhanced session with Father Dan to pick his brain about Pastor Zach’s theology and the likelihood a man obsessed with sinful women had harmed his stepdaughter.

  I found Father Dan at St. Paul’s, preparing for a wedding that evening. He wore tan slacks with his black shirt and white collar. Apparently the florist had just left; lilies and carnations decked the altar and draped from sconces, making the room smell eerily like Elizabeth’s funeral. I didn’t like the juxtaposition and lingered in the hall.

  Stooping to pick up a fallen sprig of baby’s breath, Dan caught sight of me and smiled. “Charlie. I never thought I’d see you in here,” he said, coming toward me.

  “I’m not in in,” I said from the doorway. “Besides, it doesn’t count, because there’s no service going on.” We had an ongoing discussion about my lack of church attendance with me saying I could talk to God just as well on a bike ride or a hike on Sunday morning and Dan trying to persuade me to give the service a try. No, thanks. Given my parents’ obsession with the whole Jesus thing, I’d had enough organized religion as a kid to last me until my dying breath. My gaze traveled to the huge plate glass windows that rose to a point behind the altar, framing a stunning view of Pikes Peak and the front range. I had to admit it was a beautiful venue for a wedding.

  “C’mon.” With his hand at my elbow, he guided me along the hall, down a flight of stairs, and out a set of glass doors leading to the church’s memorial garden and columbarium. “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  My feet scuffed at the pebbled path as we walked slowly between shrubs laden with yellow or white flowers and the hum of bees. “I’ve got a case I’m working on that might or might not have a religious element to it,” I said. I told him about Elizabeth being found dead and my search for Olivia’s father. “
My client, the baby’s biological grandmother, doesn’t want to keep her. And the adoptive grandparents . . . well, let’s just say that the new husband rules the roost, and I’m not too sure he didn’t do away with Elizabeth. So finding the baby’s father might give the baby her best chance at a normal life.” I summed up my interview with Zachary Sprouse and the content of his funeral sermon.

  Dan was silent when I finished, a gentle breeze ruffling his blond hair. His steps slowed, and he seemed to be studying a viceroy butterfly sipping nectar from a blossom.

  “Well, what do you think?” I prodded. “Is he a nutter? Could he have killed his stepdaughter?”

  “That’s a question for a psychologist, Charlie, not a priest.” He pulled me down on a conveniently placed bench and looked at me. Sun glinted off the hairs on his muscled forearm where it lay across the back of the bench. “You met him. What was your reaction to him? Is he capable of violence?”

  “Definitely.” I stopped to think. “He felt like a volcano, the kind that simmers for a few years, spitting up ash and yuck, and then blows its top, like Mount St. Helens. Not like you. You’d be controlled, premeditated.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were true, that I’d sensed something in Dan from the very first moment I met him, some relic of his life before priesthood, I imagined.

  “Like me?” His tone was light, but his eyes were suddenly watchful. “I thought we were talking about Sprouse?”

  “Forget it.” I swiped the words away with a flip of my hand, backing away from what I might find out about my neighbor if I pushed. Things were comfortable with Dan as they were: We shared beer and conversation, looked out for each other’s house if one of us was out of town, argued politics and religion in a way that threatened neither of us. My words endangered the status quo, inviting confidences I wasn’t ready to receive. Or, worse, maybe they’d prompt Dan to erect barriers I didn’t want to see between us. “You’re right. It was silly of me to think you could say anything useful about Sprouse without having met him.”

  “Those texts he used at the funeral certainly aren’t standard funeral material,” Dan said, his eyes still fixed on my face, but his shoulders relaxing infinitesimally. “I have to think he was saying something about his stepdaughter. I think he knew about the pregnancy, and condemned her for it.”

  “Could he have killed her?”

  “As punishment for her sins? Maybe. Which doesn’t preclude the possibility he was the baby’s father.”

  “Oh, Dan.” The thought saddened me. I let my head drop and watched a fuzzy caterpillar undulate along a stick. Reaching the end, he rippled off and disappeared into the grass edging the path.

  “If he is, he’s convinced himself she seduced him into sin, so she’s the one who deserved punishment, not him,” Dan added, his expression grim. “I’ve seen it more than once.”

  Me, too. “What about the dragon and the drowning woman stuff? Where does that fit in?”

  Dan shrugged. “It’s part of the apocalyptic vision. In the verse after the ones Sprouse quoted, the woman is saved and the dragon is enraged. He decides to go after her children.”

  “Baby Olivia?” I asked doubtfully. My mind whirred with the possibility that Sprouse, having killed Elizabeth, might want to harm Olivia to conceal all evidence of his sin . . . and crimes.

  “Don’t take it so literally. Biblical scholars generally take ‘her children’ to mean humankind. You can’t dismiss the possibility Sprouse was just raving.”

  As I chewed the inside of my cheek, thinking, he rose to his feet. “C’mon. I’ve got a wedding to prep for. Wouldn’t want to get the names wrong.”

  “Like that’s ever happened,” I said with a snort, accepting the hand he held out to pull me up. “I’m sure you’ve been counseling the young couple for months and have memorized the names of everyone in the wedding party, down to the flower girl. Don’t think you can fool me.”

  The wry half-grin crooked his lips. “Oh, I wouldn’t think that.” He squeezed my hand hard, then released it to return to the church. My fingers tingled as I cut through the garden and past the rectory to get to my house. The church is the first structure on Tudor Road, with the rectory two hundred yards behind it, where Tudor Road starts to curve, and my house set back from the road about a hundred yards past the rectory. The rectory is a larger house than mine, clearly meant to house a priest with a wife and two or three preacherkins. Thank God Dan was single. With no fence—just a strip of thin woods—between our properties, I didn’t need kids trampling my garden, playing hide-and-seek under my deck, or drowning in my hot tub.

  Before changing to work in the yard, I checked my cell phone messages one last time for the week. There was a call from Gigi to say she’d been released from the hospital and to thank me for taking care of Nolan. I deleted it, thinking I should give her a call to see how she was, but knowing I wouldn’t. The second caller surprised me: Patricia Sprouse.

  “Miss Swift, I need to talk to you. Could you please come to my house tomorrow afternoon? My husband meets with the church elders between two and four. Please.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and I got the sense of a woman under a lot of stress. No surprise, really, given that she’d just buried her daughter and lived with Pastor Zach. Interesting that she was letting me know her hubby wouldn’t be around. I deleted the message.

  8

  (Sunday)

  I spent Sunday morning hiking part of the Barr Trail up Pikes Peak before coming home, showering, and putting on clean jeans and an orange camp shirt to meet with Patricia Sprouse. The Subaru motored out to Black Forest as if it knew the way, and I pulled up outside the Sprouse home at two twenty. I’d wanted to give Pastor Zach plenty of time to get caught up in his meeting. The tan Chevy that had been under the carport before was missing, so I assumed he was out of the way. As I climbed out of the car, checking to make sure my recorder was in my purse, I spotted another car parked farther down the road in front of a blue-painted home with a horse weather vane on the chimney. I knew that car; in fact, I had its license plate number in my notebook, waiting for Monday to arrive so I could call my DMV contact and get the name of the Lexus’s owner. Maybe the car’s owner was a friend of the Sprouses after all, and she’d come to pay a condolence call.

  The sounds of an argument coming from the backyard as I headed for the front door put paid to that idea.

  “I don’t know!” Patricia Sprouse sounded close to tears.

  “I think you do know. You’re hiding her from me.” The other woman’s voice trembled with rage. “She’s mine! If I have to I’ll get my lawyers involved. Your husband’s church will never survive the scandal—”

  “Calm down, Jacquie,” a man’s voice said as I pushed through the back gate, scattering the six or seven hens pecking at corn nearby. They squawked and half-flew, half-scuttled closer to a weathered chicken coop that was once red but had faded to a rusty pink.

  “Hi, Patricia,” I said brightly, my eyes on the auburn-haired woman and her male companion. Her husband? She wore black slacks with a cream silk blouse and turquoise earrings, bracelet, and belt buckle. A large diamond sparkled on her hand as she hitched her purse higher on her shoulder. The man was equally well turned out, but in a less showy way, the subtle plaid pattern on his sport coat meeting flawlessly at the seams and his neat beard well barbered. He stood half a head taller than his wife and looked to be ten or fifteen years older, putting him in his midfifties, I’d guess. A large hand rested on his wife’s shoulder. Comfort or restraint?

  Completely ignoring me, he told Patricia, “Two days, Mrs. Sprouse. That’s all I’m prepared to wait. That baby is ours.” Without waiting to see Patricia’s reaction, he strode toward the gate, sizing me up with a glance as he exited.

  His wife paused to say, “Please,” with a pleading look at Patricia before following him. Fastidiously picking her way around the clots of chicken poop, she brushed past me without a word and stalked out the gate. I pushed it closed as a fat white
chicken tried to escape.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Patricia, who stood unmoving in the middle of the yard, a pail of chicken feed forgotten in her left hand. “Who was that?”

  My words broke Patricia’s trance, and she stared at me with troubled eyes. “The Falstows, Jacqueline and Stefan.”

  When she didn’t continue, I said, “I saw her at the funeral. Was she a friend of Elizabeth’s?”

  “Oh, no.” She hesitated, as if unsure how much to tell me. Then the words burst from her. “She says Elizabeth’s baby is hers! She says Elizabeth signed a contract with her and her husband to let them adopt the baby. They paid her. If we don’t give them the baby within two days, they’ll sue us.”

  Her words knocked me back a step. Pieces of the puzzle clicked into place in my mind, and I knew I’d found the source of the money Elizabeth planned to use to escape her home. I didn’t know how much a teen could make on such a deal—wasn’t selling babies illegal?—but I suspected there were some under-the-table ways to profit, like college athletes accepting cars and bogus jobs and such from team boosters. It might add up to a lot of money, at least by a teenager’s standards.

  A black chicken pecked at the feed pail, recalling Patricia to her task. She scooped up seed with one hand and scattered it across the yard, inciting a mad flutter of wings and some vicious pecking as the chickens converged on the food.

  “Are you going to give the baby to her?” I asked. “The DHS—”

  “I know you don’t work for the Department of Human Services,” she said, her voice stronger. Her faded blue eyes met mine as she upended the pail, dribbling the last seeds onto the ground. “Aurora Newcastle told me who you were.”

  So much for my cover. “Is she doing okay?”

  “She’s dying,” Patricia said flatly. “She was too ill to travel down for the funeral. I’m going to drive up to Denver this week, have lunch with her. I want to see her one more time before . . . I don’t care what Zachary says. She was—is—my best friend.” Her eyes stabbed defiantly at me, as if I were the husband who had detached her from the friendship.