by Lowe, Sheila
She moved around him, directly into his path. His eyes were squeezed shut, his respirations shallow.
Please don’t let him lose his lunch, too.
“He’s gone,” he said, almost to himself. “There’s no turning back for him now.”
“What do you mean, he’s gone?”
“He’s lost to us. Proof of evildoing? How could he—”
“What proof is he talking about? What evildoing do you think he means?”
“He’s lost his mind.” James inhaled a deep breath, gave a long, sad sigh. “It’s more than my life is worth to go on trying to shield him. I can’t help him anymore.”
Chapter 19
Claudia held her breath, hardly daring to hope that he might be ready to give her the information that she and Kelly had come to the Ark to find: Rodney Powers’s whereabouts.
James started talking.“The girl you mentioned from last night—what did she look like? I just need to be sure. . . .”
“Black hair, purple streak; a little on the chunky side. . . .”
“She’s my niece, Tabitha. Rod and his daughter are staying at her place. When Rod called me for help, Tabby was the only one I could think of to turn to.” He met Claudia’s eyes, then quickly looked away as if ashamed. “We don’t associate with anyone else outside of TBL. Tabby was excommunicated a couple of years ago when she turned nineteen; she’d started causing disruptions among the other young people, creating dissension. She always was a rebellious, disobedient girl; refused to do what her parents told her. My sister and her husband tried and tried to counsel her; brought her before the governing board time and again. Finally, the judicial commission stepped in and had no choice but to expel her from the Ark. It was obvious she’d become a danger to the congregation.” James scrubbed his hands over his face and sighed again. “Neither Rod nor I should be having anything to do with her at all. We could be expelled ourselves, but I—”
Something he had said earlier suddenly boomeranged and struck Claudia with enough force to take her breath away. “Wait a minute, James, hold on. A few minutes ago, I thought you said that Rodney doesn’t want to hand over his child to Jephthah’s Daughters. Did I hear that correctly?”
He nodded miserably.
“But . . . aren’t you helping him hide her until the ceremony on her third birthday?”
James gave her a strange look. “Well, I helped him with Tabby, but . . .”
“James, where can I get some of Erin’s handwriting?” The words had come out of her mouth before she had consciously formed the question, but her instincts told her she was on the right track.
“Her handwriting?”
Of course, he had no idea why Harold Stedman had brought Claudia to the Ark, or why that would have anything to do with her question. “I don’t care what it is,” she said urgently. “It can be anything she’s written. Can you put your hands on anything?”
“She gave me a letter she wrote before they left for the mountains,” James said. “She asked me to read it to all the members after they’d left. I still have it.”
“I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“That’s something I can’t explain right now. Please just take my word for it. It’s really important.”
He was watching her with a mixture of curiosity, anxiety, and more than a little suspicion. Claudia met his eyes and put all the sincerity into her voice that she could muster. “You’ve got to trust me, James.”
She could see him wavering, but in the end he agreed. “All right, I’ll get it to you.”
“I need Tabby’s address, too.”
“I can’t do that, but I’ll contact her and ask her to have Rod call you.”
They left the clearing separately. Claudia waited ten minutes before she followed James’ trail out of the woods. She checked in at the infirmary and was told that Kelly was still sleeping. “How much longer do you think it’ll be before she’s able to leave here?” she asked Martha Elkins.
Elkins shrugged, gave her the offhand almost-sneer. “Couldn’t tell you.”
“What’s with your attitude, Martha? What is it you have against me?”
Elkins didn’t pretend not to understand, and her answer spewed venom. “You outsiders are all alike. You come here looking for something to use against us. You’ll leave the Ark and do whatever damage you can when you get away from here. Meanwhile, we just want to live our lives in peace and prepare for the end-of-time days, but instead, we’re forced to waste our energy fighting people like you.”
Claudia felt as if she’d been bitch-slapped. She was tempted to strike back at the other woman, but she bit her tongue. “I don’t know why you would think that, Mrs. Elkins. We’re here because Harold Stedman asked us to come. Neither Kelly nor I have any desire to hurt you or anyone else at the Ark.”
Martha made a little puffing noise with her lips that said she didn’t believe a word of it. She turned away with a jerk of her shoulder and picked up a file from the basket on her desk. Giving up, Claudia said she would return in another hour.
Her next stop was Ararat. She would pick up Kelly’s luggage and take it to the car. The closer they were to being ready to go when Kelly awoke, the better. And if it happened that Kelly was not ready the next time Claudia showed up at the infirmary, she would take stronger measures—though she hadn’t figured out yet what those might be.
Magdalena had finished her work, and the room Kelly had stayed in was as clean and empty as a hotel room waiting for a new guest. Claudia managed to get the laptop bag and bulky suitcase down to the lobby and outside, bumping it awkwardly along the long dirt path to the parking lot. After heaving them into the trunk of the Jag next to her own bag, she returned to Rodney Powers’s office and booted up the laptop and portable printer.
Preparing her final report for Harold Stedman, she peppered it with disclaimers and strongly urged the use of additional tools to make a determination about integrity. She carefully avoided negative comments about the veracity of any of the writers. If one of these writers was the FBI operative, and if the FBI operation was as close to completion as Jovanic had suggested, it probably wouldn’t make any difference what she said, but she wasn’t about to make any statements that might come back to haunt her.
Forty minutes later she was printing out the report on her portable printer. She slipped it into the envelope with the handwriting samples and packed up her equipment once again. She had everything ready to load into the Jag and was preparing to go to the parking lot when Rita popped her head around the office door.
“Sister Rose, could I see you for a moment?”
The tension in her face made Claudia immediately rise from the desk and follow her into the hallway. Rita pressed something into her hand, a small envelope. “I’ve brought you this from James,” she said in a whisper. “It’s Erin’s letter, like you asked for.” Without saying anything further, she turned and hurried away.
Claudia went directly upstairs and shut herself in the second-floor bathroom, hoping there was no surveillance on her in there. She leaned against the sink and removed the card from its envelope, suddenly reluctant to look at the handwriting, not wanting confirmation of what she had come to suspect.
The note was hand printed and as she had expected, it matched the one Erin had showed them earlier in the week—the one she claimed to have been written by her husband. It was a letter to the congregation, thanking them for everything they had done for the Powers family. It was signed “with agapé love from Rod and Erin.”
But what did it actually prove? Maybe Rodney had written both notes. Claudia reminded herself that even though they didn’t match the handwriting she had found in his files, without someone to authenticate those samples as Rodney’s own writing, authorship would remain inconclusive. All she knew now was that they were written by different hands.
The spiritual leader of the Temple of Brighter Light was leaning back in his chair, his stockinged feet resting on the desk. Hands cla
sped behind his head, Harold Stedman gazed at the ceiling, speaking in a low voice, words that Claudia could not hear. When he failed to respond to her knock on the open door, she wondered whether perhaps he was praying. Hesitating to interrupt, she cleared her throat. When there was still no response she called his name.
Slowly, his gaze lowered and he turned, staring as if he did not recognize her. Then his focus seemed to sharpen. He sat up straight and removed his feet from the desk. “Good afternoon, Sister Rose. Come in, please. Have a seat.” He indicated one of the chairs in front of his desk and rose. “Excuse my casualness. I was thinking about something. ‘Lost in thought,’ as they say.”
Claudia apologized for intruding and handed him the envelope. “My report is in here with the final set of handwriting samples that I’m returning to you. Kelly and I will be leaving as soon as she’s awake.”
“Are you sure Sister Brennan is going to be ready for travel? She didn’t look at all well at lunch. I think you might want to reconsider leaving today. Why don’t you stay on for another night and go in the morning, when it’s cooler and more pleasant for such a long drive? You’re quite welcome to stay here.”
She read nothing but concern in his face, and Claudia had to remind herself that Kelly had been surreptitiously drugged and hypnotized, undoubtedly on the orders of this man. It made her want to call him on it, but not wanting to arouse his suspicions she did her best to keep her tone normal. “Thank you, but we need to go. As I mentioned at lunch, I’m needed at home, and Kelly has to get ready for a trial.”
And for some reason I don’t know, the FBI is about to come down on you.
Stedman slipped the envelope she had given him into the top drawer of the desk. “As you wish. I’d like to—” The phone on his desk rang, interrupting him.
It was the only phone Claudia had seen at the Ark since the first day when she’d had to beg to use the one locked in Rita’s desk. Stedman excused himself and answered the call. After listening for a few seconds he put the caller on hold and asked Claudia to wait. He crossed the room in a few strides and opened a door in the far wall, giving her a glimpse of what appeared to be antique bedroom furniture before closing it behind him. So his office and living quarters were combined.
While she waited for him to return, she absorbed the Victorian craftsmanship, which was more noticeable here than in the other rooms she’d seen. It was evident in the golden oak corbels that supported the ceiling beams; in the overstuffed easy chair that had been placed before the ornate cast iron fireplace whose andirons stood empty and unused in the unbearable summer heat.
She wandered over to the window and discovered that the angle from the second floor allowed her to view a large area of the vast Ark grounds. She could see the women working in the garden and a small group of children walking together on the path. No wonder Stedman had known she’d been out there the night before. Standing at the window, even in the darkness he could have easily seen her as she left the path by the vegetable garden and entered the back door below. So much for her attempt at stealth.
The realization made her jittery with anxiety, unsure of what Stedman knew or what he thought he knew. She wished he would end his phone call so she could get the hell away from the Ark and all that it represented. To distract herself she began browsing the bookshelves that lined the office from floor to ceiling; enough books to fill a small library.
If he had read a small fraction of these volumes, Stedman must be in love with scholarship. A wide range of Bible translations filled several of the shelves. Eastern religions were heavily represented, and several were tomes from obscure denominations Claudia had never heard of. There were books on psychology, philosophy, theosophy; books about symbolism, paganism, witch-craft ; even a copy of the Satanic Bible. Whatever she felt about Harold Stedman personally, his reading materials were eclectic, to say the least.
She peered through the glass front of a barrister’s bookcase, curious to see what types of volumes Stedman found worthy of keeping under lock and key. Cracked leather bindings and ornate leather tooling told her that the books on these shelves were undeniably antiquarian. The titles were printed in gilt along the spines: Nostradamus Quatrains, The Book of Concealed Mystery, The Key of Solomon, The Holy Writ Explained, The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
“Are you interested in ancient texts, Sister Rose?”
Claudia swung around. Fascinated by the variety of topics, she had not heard Stedman come back into the room. “Yes, of course; my field is written communication. It doesn’t matter what language or form it takes, nor how old the text, the principles for analysis are the same.”
He came over and stood beside her at the bookcase. “Do you mean to say you can analyze the inscriptions of a monk who lived hundreds of years ago? Or a scribe who lived long before Christ? You would be able to determine something about their personality?”
That strange heat she had felt emanating from him the night before was there again. She edged away, putting a few inches between them. “Oh, yes. The hieroglyphics in Egyptian tombs, for example—it’s possible to tell where one scribe leaves off and another begins; each scribe’s pictogram displays characteristics, just as writings in the romance languages do. There’s no reason why an Egyptian’s work shouldn’t tell something about his character, too.”
Stedman’s eyes were alight with interest. “I find that utterly fascinating. Let me show you something interesting.” He took a key ring from his pocket as he spoke and began sorting through the many keys until he found the one he wanted. “I think you’ll like this.”
He lowered himself to his haunches and unlocked a drawer at the bottom of the bookcase. Taking out a piece of old-looking ivory-colored satin brocade cloth bound by a length of ribbon, he held the bundle as gently as a baby. “This is a handwritten translation from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. It’s quite old.”
Claudia stopped listening to him. This piece of immortality—history made alive through the handwriting on the page—drew her in completely. The faded, spidery notes transliterated the original text interlinearly. It brought to mind the image of an elderly translator bent over a desk, carefully deciphering and decoding each word of an ancient papyrus. She read the words to herself:
“ ‘I germinate like the plants. Physical body changes into a sahu—spiritual body . . . the soul liveth, thy body germinateth by the command of Ra himself without diminution, and without defect, like unto Ra forever and ever.’ ”
Stedman’s voice came through to her. “. . . tremendous wisdom.”
Claudia nodded, pretending to have heard what he had said. She hoped it wasn’t anything that required a response.
“The Egyptians believed in a resurrection to another kind of life,” Stedman added.
Claudia wondered whether he was drawing a parallel to the beliefs of the Temple of Brighter Light. “They believed in drinking the blood of their enemies, too,” she said. “I think you’d better have a document specialist look at this and tell you how to preserve it. You wouldn’t want to lose this. I can give you a recommendation to someone.”
“Thank you, I’d appreciate it.” Stedman lovingly re-wrapped the papers in their cloth cover and tied the ribbon in a neat bow. “The written word has always mesmerized me,” he said. “I’ll admit my own handwriting isn’t the most beautiful—it’s a little bizarre, in fact—yes, I realize that. But I do love the feel of a good pen in my hand, drawing it across the page, watching the flow of ink it leaves behind. To me, it’s like sharing a truly intimate piece of oneself with the reader.”
Claudia could see why people followed him. There was something about him—charisma, she supposed. His air of quiet authority made you want to believe him. She nodded understanding. “At least one graphological author has compared the ductus—that’s the flow of ink from the pen—to the movement of blood in the body. The ink might be smooth or sluggish, or it might become clogged up in some areas the way blood does as it moves through the veins. The duc
tus symbolizes the life force, the psychic energy that drives the writer.”
Stedman was gazing at her with something like wonder. “I believe you understand that, to me, being able to actually touch these old writings is as intimate as dipping my fingers into the lifeblood of the person whose pen scratched out the words.”
Claudia looked back at him, uncomfortable with the allusion, not finding an appropriate response. He didn’t seem to notice her silence as he replaced the translated text in the drawer and locked it. “There’s something else I think might interest you,” he said. “It’s a document that I’ve never shown anyone.”
“What is it?”
“A sacred text. I think you would appreciate it for what it is, not just for what it says. It’s kept in another area of the Ark, a place where the brothers and sisters can’t access.”
His offer to let her view a special document was intriguing; especially when he seemed so excited about showing it to her. But the urgency to leave the Ark and allow the FBI to get their operation on track made her think twice. Claudia opened her mouth to decline, but Stedman held up a finger for her to wait. He picked up his phone and punched in a number.
“Good afternoon, Sister Elkins. How is our patient Sister Brennan doing?” He listened for a few moments, then said, “I understand. Thank you, Sister. Her friend will be over a little later to pick her up.” He rang off and said to Claudia, “She’s still trying to wake up, and Sister Elkins is about to help her take a shower, so it all works out well. By the time we return, Sister Brennan will be all ready to go.”
Chapter 20
Harold Stedman led her outside, taking the worn path toward the dining hall. The vegetable garden had emptied at this hottest part of the day. He touched her arm, guiding her to turn right. They were approaching the building that Esther had identified as the bookbindery. With a jolt of surprise, Claudia realized that he was taking her close to the spot where she had hidden the night before and witnessed the appearance of the five hooded figures.