by Jen Blood
There is silence as Zion puzzles this out before he finally speaks. “My soul is what matters. My soul is safe.”
Rebecca sees the smile of admiration on the Reverend’s lips before he can hide it. He nods approvingly. “Yes. Your soul is indeed safe.”
The tears have dried on Will’s cheeks now. His eyes are hard, staring straight ahead, no longer paying heed to the faces fixed upon him.
“But what of this soul?” Isaac continues. Zion moves to return to his seat, but Isaac stops him with a hand on his shoulder. “This soul, my friends—do you not smell the decay that comes from this boy?”
Isaac takes Zion aside, whispering to him. Zion shakes his head—slowly at first, then with more vehemence. Pleading. The congregation looks on, silent, the air filled with the low tremor of blood. Rebecca remembers the Romans in Isaac’s paintings, and feels that she now understands their fire-filled eyes.
“Zion.” Isaac’s voice is firm, uncompromising, as he leads her son to the kneeling boy. “For the good of another’s soul, for the sake of this child’s redemption, I command it.”
Isaac presents Zion with a whip, long and black as a serpent, the end trailing to the floor.
The first blow Zion delivers is weak; there is a small slap as leather connects with flesh, and Will rocks slightly in his place before a sneer touches his lips.
“Again!” Isaac shouts.
The congregation is on their feet. Zion is weeping, the tears clean and bright, when he strikes the second time. Harder now. Will falls slightly to the left, his smile faltering before he rights himself.
“Do you fear the path of your soul, William?” Isaac’s voice tears through the chapel; Rebecca trembles at the sound.
The boy does not reply. Isaac says nothing, looking to Zion. Zion’s jaw tightens. He closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, his tears have dried. When he strikes this time, it is with all the strength in his small body. The whip cracks across pale, lean shoulder blades. Will falls. His fists clench, and he starts to rise. Isaac keeps him down with a hand on his shoulder, until the boy obediently kneels once more.
“Do you feel the rage, son? The hate? Do you feel Satan undermining Christ’s love, twisting your soul to tar?”
There is a madness in Will’s eyes, a hatred so pure its only equal could be love. Rebecca stands by and waits, whispering her son’s name, understanding now that Zion is the only one who can save this lost boy. She doesn’t flinch, and neither does Zion, when he delivers the next blow.
Chapter Nineteen
“You can do a reverse address search, right?”
I’d wiped my eyes half a dozen times, but I couldn’t get the tears to stop. I was shaking, seated on Hammond’s couch with his cats eyeing me warily. Juarez looked pretty wary himself.
“You’re sure it was your father?”
“I haven’t heard his voice in twenty years and I have every reason to believe he’s dead, so… No, Jack, I’m not sure it was him. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d still like to follow up.”
He didn’t ask any other questions. I listened as he made the request to an anonymous voice on the other end of the line, and we waited in silence until he motioned for the notepad and paper. He wrote down an address and a name, thanked the person on the other end of the line, and hung up.
“It’s registered to a Jane Bellows,” he said. “1162 Highgate Lane. Olympia, Washington.”
“Jane Bellows.”
“Does the name mean anything to you?”
I shook my head. When I finally had my wits about me enough to move again, I gathered the scrapbooks and the notepad and headed for the door. Juarez cleared his throat, blocking my path with clear intent.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m taking these. I need to know what Hammond knows—he’s too far ahead in this, and I’m completely fucking lost.”
“Erin, I work for the government—I took an oath to uphold the law. I can’t just stand by while you steal someone’s stuff.”
“Seriously?” The look on his face made it clear that, yes, he was indeed serious. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Imagine if this was you, okay? This is you, and you finally have a lead on your family and that whole thirteen-year blank slate you’ve been lugging around. It’s all locked away in these two volumes. You’re telling me you wouldn’t take them?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m beginning to understand why Diggs is always saying you’re a pain in the ass.”
“I’m just focused. Dedicated.”
“Or obsessive and completely lacking in conscience.” He smiled when he said it, but he still didn’t move out of my way. “I’m going back to the car. Leave things as you found them when we came in. If you don’t, of course,” he looked at me significantly, “I will have no way of knowing that.”
He squeezed my shoulder on the way out. I waited until he was out of sight, then tossed the two scrapbooks and the notepad with the Washington phone number into my bag. I turned off the lights, slid the door shut, and went to the car. I’d made no attempt to hide my presence from Hammond, and didn’t plan to. He would know exactly who had taken his research, which meant he would have no alternative but to return my calls.
And, finally, tell me what the hell was going on.
Hammond’s truck was in the parking lot at the town landing when we got there, his boat nowhere to be seen. I tried to keep an eye out on our way to Payson Isle, but between approaching nightfall and the low-lying fog, we might as well have been looking for a ghost ship. When we reached Payson Isle, though, it was clear that he—or someone—had been there. I’d expected the trail to my father’s cabin to be nearly impenetrable; instead, freshly broken branches and clear footprints marked the way.
“I don’t suppose you were an Indian guide in a former life?” I asked Juarez.
“Do you need me to send up a smoke signal?”
I shook my head and knelt at one of the most sharply defined prints. “That’s a big shoe, wouldn’t you say?”
He set his own beside it, clad in a very-slightly-scuffed LL Bean boot. Juarez’s were maybe half a size larger.
“It’s not so big.”
“Show off.” I waited for him to make the tired joke about men with big shoes. To his credit, he did not.
“They’re big enough to be Noel Hammond’s though, right?”
“You think he was out here?”
“I’d bet money on it.”
There were seven cabins in the little Payson village on the other side of the island. All of them were obscured by years of overgrowth, and all of them were smaller than I remembered.
“You’ve been here before? Since the fire, I mean.” Juarez asked.
“A couple of times—I borrowed my mother’s boat and came out.”
We were a few feet from my father’s cabin. Night had fallen, the sound of the ocean like some haunting lullaby in the distance.
“So you saw him then?” Juarez asked.
“Yeah.” I took another step toward the cabin. “He just didn’t see me.”
It had been a gray night the first time I saw my father at the cabin—not quite raining, but damp enough that it might as well have been. When I reached the cabin, my father was outside. His hair was long, his beard had grown out, and he wore jeans that hung low on his bony hips. No shirt. He knelt beside a wood fire in front of the cabin, focused on the blaze. He could have been there an hour, or he could have been there the whole two years since I’d seen him last.
I’d stood there watching from the woods, shivering, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I left my father kneeling by the fire, staring into the flames. Even at fourteen, I’d known there was no way to get back the man I remembered—the one who told me stories and tucked me in at night, kept me safe and loved and protected for nine perfect years. He might as well have died in the fire with the rest of the Paysons. That night, not for the first time, I wished neither of us had survived.
<
br /> Juarez and I faced each other on the path. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, waiting for me to tell my story.
It wasn’t a story I cared to tell, though.
“You never came back here after he died?”
I shook my head wordlessly.
“And now you don’t want to go in.” His hand was still on my face. It was warm and I was cold, and his eyes had a strength to them that I hadn’t noticed before.
“I do.” I shrugged and blew out a lungful of air. “And I don’t. It doesn’t matter, though. If this is where the story leads, this is where I go.”
I headed for my father’s front door.
I don’t know what I expected from the cabin, but it definitely wasn’t what I found when we crossed the threshold.
“Wow,” Juarez said. He stood behind me, flashlight in hand.
I shined my own light over the opposite side of the room. I’d prepared myself for more of what I’d seen at the boarding house: mildew and mold, vermin and debris. We found anything but. The cabin was small, but immaculate—the windows clean, the twin bed made up neatly with what appeared to be fresh linens. A sturdy-looking homemade bookshelf stood beside the bed, a very thin layer of dust on the top.
I’d always known my father to be a fastidious housekeeper, but I somehow doubted that quality would extend twelve years beyond the grave. I thought again of the voice I’d heard on the phone earlier that day. That number might belong to someone in Washington, but that didn’t necessarily mean Dad hadn’t been back here. Had he been living here the entire time that I thought he was dead?
As I approached the bookshelf, Juarez ran his light up another wall, the beam a pale yellow wash over words grown barely legible with time.
“Do you remember that being there?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I never came inside. It could have been.”
I set my flashlight aside. Juarez kept his light trained on the wall as I knelt at the base. With a gloved hand, I polished the rough boards until I could read what my father had written.
Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? 6/4/94
Another verse was scrawled beside it, dated three years earlier. I turned my attention to the floor. More words were written beneath me. Jack lit a lantern by the bedside and set it in the center of the tiny cabin. A soft glow, more shadow than light, slowly brought the details into focus.
Floor to ceiling, beneath Spartan furniture and faded curtains, I found Bible verse after Bible verse. The dates were in red marker faded to a pale pink, the verses in black, with the most prominent passages written on the floor in large block letters. On hands and knees, I used my shirtsleeves to clean the floorboards.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? 8/22/2000.
It was the most recent date I could find. Two weeks after that, my mother told the world that she’d found his body hanging in the greenhouse… It seemed beyond unbelievable to think she could have been lying about that all these years.
I sat on the floor. Juarez took a seat on the edge of the bed. I was cold and tired, and I couldn’t shake those words: Why hast thou forsaken me? Was that how he’d felt? Abandoned by his God, doomed to live the rest of his years alone? Or had something changed that day?
I turned my attention back to the titles lined up neatly on the bookshelf: Robinson Crusoe; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Last of the Mohicans. They were old and a little dusty, but still in remarkably good condition—and they sure as hell had been handled less than twelve years ago. There was one title that I didn’t find there, though. I searched all three shelves, then stood and checked the nightstand on the other side of the bed. There was a circle free of dust where the lantern Juarez was using had been, and a small, plastic travel alarm clock stopped at 11:20.
“His Bible isn’t here,” I said.
“Could he have taken it with him, before he…?”
He left the question uncompleted, though I knew what he was asking. “Kat never mentioned finding anything with the body. I think she would have told me. It was a nice Bible—illustrated. Antique.”
My heart was beating faster, a clear blue certainty settling in place of the loss I’d lived with for years.
“He’s still alive,” I said.
I waited for Juarez to argue. He didn’t. “Who was the one who discovered his body?”
“My mother. She told me she came out to check on him—she’d been doing it for years. She’d bring supplies, medicine, whatever he needed.”
“And you didn’t see him at the burial?”
“She had him cremated before I could see the body. She said he’d been…” I swallowed. “She told me it had been a couple of weeks before she found him. With the high temps that summer, the body was pretty far gone.”
“So, it may have been difficult to positively identify the body she found,” he said.
“No. She would have known if it wasn’t him.”
“Why would she lie?”
I didn’t know. But I was damned well going to find out—just as soon as I figured out what Noel Hammond knew that I didn’t.
I left the cabin with Juarez on my heels. There was no moon, no stars, the night fully fallen and a darkness so complete that I felt newly blind, opening my eyes as wide as possible in a vain quest for light. I pulled out my cell phone. We were almost back to the dock before I got a signal.
My call to Hammond went straight to voicemail, yet again. I’d been angry before, but that began to ebb as worry took its place. I called Diggs instead.
“Everything okay?” he asked immediately.
“Have you seen Hammond anywhere?”
“Nope. Has he given you the slip again?”
“Yeah. Listen, can you find out whether his boat’s back at the landing yet, and give me a call back?”
“Done. Give me a couple minutes.”
Juarez had been silent since we’d left the cabin, guiding the way with his flashlight while he kept his thoughts to himself. After I hung up, he cleared his throat awkwardly.
“This woman—Rebecca Westlake, the one with the rosary. You think she had something to do with all this?”
With all the discoveries surrounding my father, I’d almost forgotten about Rebecca. I glanced behind me to get a glimpse of Juarez’s face. Something about his voice bothered me. He was trying to be casual, I knew, but underneath it was a near-desperation that I recognized—I’d heard it in my own voice more than once over the past few months, as I probed deeper into the Payson mystery.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know anything about her—I’d never even heard of her until today.” I turned around to look at him fully. “She was Matt’s friend, though. Have you heard of her? Has he ever mentioned the name?”
He hesitated. “He’s talked about a Becca before. Becca and Joe.”
“For someone who’s just a third party in all this, here to look after a man who isn’t even a blood relative, you’ve taken a lot of interest in this story.”
“I’m a cop; it’s a mystery. And a damned good one. And I’ll admit that the fact that it has something to do with why Matt—a man who was there for me more than anyone else in my life—is circling the drain right now, has a lot to do with it.”
He took a step closer, his hand falling once more to my face. His knuckles brushed lightly across my bruised cheek.
“I’d like you to get the answers you’re looking for, too,” he said.
“Why?”
This time, I could see his eyes as they shifted from mine. “I don’t know. I just… It seems like you deserve them. And maybe I know what it’s like, not really understanding what you came from. Trying to sort through everyone else’s stories to find the truth.”
His hand slid to the back of my neck. I held onto the lapels of his jacket, our eyes locked now. He moved closer.
And my cell phone rang.
Neither of us moved.
“That’ll be Diggs,” I said.
“Good timing.”
I managed a nervous laugh. “Probably so, actually.” I stepped away and caught my breath as I pulled the phone from my pocket.
“His boat’s back, but he’s not answering his phone,” Diggs said when I answered.
“Not even for you?”
“I know, right?” Diggs asked. “I can understand him not wanting to talk to you, but who the hell avoids my calls?”
“You don’t happen to know whether—”
“Truck’s in the driveway, kitchen light is on.”
A boulder settled at the bottom of my stomach. “Did someone knock on the door?”
“No, I just had a neighbor do a drive-by. Why?” His voice got serious. “You think something’s wrong?”
I started down the old steps to the dock with the phone still at my ear. “Get your friend from the sheriff’s department on the phone. I’ll meet you at Hammond’s as soon as we hit the mainland.”
We’d only been on the water a few minutes, trying to navigate through the fog over rough seas, when my cell rang again. I let Juarez take the helm. Diggs’ number was on the caller ID. Everything slowed. When I picked up, it took a few seconds of silence before he said anything.
“Diggs?” I finally prompted.
“You were right,” he said. I felt shock settle in deep, mingling with cold sea spray and heavy fog and the ocean beneath. Diggs’ voice sounded strange. People were shouting in the distance.
“Where are you?”
“I’m here—at Noel’s house. About thirty seconds after I hung up with you, a call came into the fire station.”
“You think he’s inside?” I could barely hear him between the noise on my end and the chaos on his.
“They don’t know yet. But I think so. Don’t you? He would’ve gotten in touch with someone by now otherwise.”
“Will you still be there when I get to the mainland?”
“Yeah. Fire crews are still getting here—it’s a hell of a blaze. I’ll be here a while.”