Devil in the Deadline

by Walker, LynDee

  I pulled out a notebook and scribbled all that.

  “Why isn’t she here anymore?”

  Elise shrugged, hurt creeping into her voice. “She didn’t even tell me she was going. She was sick for a couple of weeks, didn’t get out of bed. When they moved her out of our room, I thought she was going to die. But she got better. Came back to the dorms for a day. Then she disappeared.” A tear slipped down her round cheek. “I would’ve gone with her if she’d just said where she was going.”

  Not the best idea ever.

  “How about you?” I asked, looking up. “Why are you here?”

  “A long story that amounts to a rough year.” She picked up a piece of straw and twirled it between her fingers. “My folks got divorced. My grandparents died. My choices were pretty much get Jesus or get meth.”

  Jesus worked for me. Normal Jesus, anyway. Golightly’s Jesus, I wasn’t sure about.

  She must’ve read it in my eyes. Her lips tipped up the barest inch. “I love the Lord. There are other people here who do, too. Pastor Brady. Mr. Mathers—you can hear it in every word they say. But I see things that don’t make sense. And asking questions isn’t popular. I don’t have anyone to talk to anymore.”

  I opened my mouth to reply and the sound of an approaching engine snapped it shut.

  “What’s that?” I breathed.

  “I don’t know, but you’d better hide,” she hissed, jumping to her feet and scooping up her bag. “Get under the workbench, and don’t make any noise.”

  I crawled to the table and folded myself into the tight space between the wall and a rolling tool chest.

  Elise stood, looked around, then sat again, dragging a thick Bible from her bag and opening it across her lap.

  The engine idled a few feet away, doors opening and closing and low voices floating through the thin walls of the shed. No words, just tones.

  Men. The roughest bass I’d ever heard, with an accent I couldn’t make out enough to place. The other lighter, higher-pitched.

  I held my breath, and it looked like Elise was doing the same. No idea how long we sat that way, her staring blankly at the Good Book and me praying silently that we weren’t about to get caught—more for her sake than mine.

  The car door finally opened and shut again, and the engine receded. I blew out a long breath.

  Raising my head, I met Elise’s blue eyes. “I guess He does answer prayers when they’re repeated urgently enough,” I said.

  She nodded. “They have maintenance trucks that go all over the property. Probably someone spraying Roundup. The Lord can cure us of everything but weeds, if you watch the gardeners.”

  I smiled. The more I talked to her, the more I liked her. “Elise, will you help me?”

  “Help you what?”

  “My gut says Jasmine’s ties to this place have something to do with her death. I need to know about her.” Picasso’s deadpan “they killed her” floated up. “And her family. Who’s who and how things work here.”

  She stared at the floor for a long minute. “What is it you want to know? You can’t put my name in the paper. They…wouldn’t be happy about that.”

  “No worries,” I said, pulling a notebook and pen from my bag. “Top secret source. For starters, what was Jasmine’s given name? The police want to contact her next of kin.”

  “Ruth,” Elise said softly. “Ruth Galloway.”

  I jotted it down, a sigh of relief escaping my chest. Nearly two weeks of searching, and there it was. “Do you know her parents’ names? Or where they live?”

  “Her mother’s name is Wanda. She was from a little town in South Carolina called Wallingford. In the mountains.”

  “Is that why she’d never been to a dentist?”

  Elise shook her head. “She used to complain about her back teeth hurting. She never ate anything sweet—that’s part of the reason she was so thin. But her folks have plenty of money. Her mom’s dad owned some kind of mine. Copper, I think. But they were really into Golightly’s schtick. Watched every sermon. Even traveled here a few times a year to come to service. Donated tons of money. But she didn’t go to the dentist or the doctor. Like, ever.”

  “Why couldn’t she go to the doctor?”

  “Doctors are for the weak of spirit.” Bitterness dripped from the words. “If you are faithful enough, the Lord will take your ailments from you.”

  “Because God didn’t give us doctors?” It popped out before I could stop it.

  “Exactly.” She grinned. “That’s exactly what I said the first time I heard that.”

  “Wow.”

  Elise touched the picture on my screen again. “I’m pretty sure she had endometriosis,” she said. “She said she’d had a bad attack right before she left. She was still bleeding pretty badly when she came back to our room.”

  I scribbled so fast my fingers ached from gripping the pen, not missing a word. I put a star by that because of what Aaron said about an abortion, a thousand questions firing in my brain. Was she “sick” because of an early pregnancy? And had someone here ended it? Because that seemed…hypocritical was too light a term.

  I looked up. “You said Jasmine had a boyfriend before she came here. Was she seeing someone here, too?” I asked.

  She sighed. “I don’t know.” Her mouth twisted to one side.

  “You don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?” I softened my voice. “It could be really important.”

  “She didn’t say. She was acting funny, and I asked her a few times what was up, but she wouldn’t tell me. Said she was protecting me. She spent a lot of time looking moody and scribbling in her journal.”

  Of course she did. Please God. One more favor today.

  “A journal? I don’t suppose she left it here?”

  She tipped her head to one side. “Maybe. There’s a box of her things under the floor in the closet. I kept thinking she’d come back for it, or she’d get in touch and I could return it.”

  “Any chance I could see it?”

  She glanced around, then checked her watch. “We have to hurry. And you have to be quiet.”

  The hallways were tastefully decorated, but not in the opulent overabundance of the main church building and offices. The dry air held the faintly floral antiseptic smell of college dorms and old folks’ homes everywhere. They must buy that cleaning solution in bulk from a secret supplier.

  “It felt wrong to look through her things,” Elise whispered as she climbed the stairs. “But I found stuff moved around every day for three weeks after she disappeared. Someone wanted this. Maybe it will help you.”

  In her room with the door closed, Elise moved a chair from one desk and hooked the ladder back of it under the doorknob. “We don’t have locks,” she said. “The Lord sees all, so the ministry does, too.”

  For real?

  “I’ve been here three times and I’m skeptical of their motives, too, Elise,” I said, shaking my head as I perched on the bare mattress on the far side of the room. “Your instincts are good.”

  “Sometimes I wish they weren’t,” she said. “I wanted to fit in. To lose myself and my worries in the glory of God. I guess part of me still does or I’d go somewhere else. I could get a job in any Starbucks in America, thanks to the reverend’s fondness for lattes.”

  “I hear they have great benefits.” I grinned.

  She turned for the closet, then paused with her back to me. “Do you really think it could have been someone from here? Who killed her?”

  “The more I learn, the more I think that’s likely.”

  She nodded, opening the door and dropping to her knees. I caught a glimpse of a cross on the back wall of the closet before she stood and turned back to me with a pink lockbox in her hands. She set it on the desk and took a step back.

  I crossed the room and knelt in front of the desk. The box wasn’t much bigger than your average Stephen King hardcover, a scratched-up pink metal rectangle with a dented corner and a bitsy silver lock on the front.


  “You don’t have the key, do you?” I raised an eyebrow at Elise.

  “I do not.”

  I waved one hand. “S’ok. I have a friend who’s pretty good with picking locks. How about a paperclip?”

  She rifled through the desk and came up with one. I poked one end of it at the lock.

  No dice. The lock was too small.

  “Do you have a smaller one?” I asked.

  She shook her head, and I racked my brain, lifting the box. It was heavy, but I couldn’t tell if that was the container itself or the contents.

  I asked for a staple. She didn’t have a stapler. “Ball point pen?”

  She handed me a retractable one and I took it apart and straightened the spring I pulled from the pen barrel. Folding it in half, I tried it in the end of the keyhole. It slid in. I jiggled it and it slid further. Blowing out a slow breath, I tried to leverage it to turn the lock.

  It broke.

  “Dammit!” I clapped a hand over my mouth, glancing toward the ceiling. “Sorry. Habit. That was loud, too.”

  Elise smiled. “I think if your worst sin is the occasional curse, you’re in decent shape. No matter what the secretarial staff has to say about your shoes.”

  Not sure swearing even made my top five worst sins, I focused on the box. For all I knew it held the key to the whole mess, and someone hunting it after the victim left the academy smacked of motive. Jasmine wasn’t coming back for it, so who’d get upset about it being broken?

  “Do you have a hammer? Or anything we could use as one?” I turned to Elise.

  “I don’t think so.” She bit her lip, looking around.

  I stood. A lamp on the night table with a heavy silver base caught my eye. “What about that?” I pointed.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Break the lock.”

  She grinned and pulled the lamp’s plug from the wall. “I knew I liked you.”

  It took three swings, only because I didn’t want to draw too much attention. I pulled back for number four, and Elise put a finger on the lid and opened the box.

  Papers. At least two journals, plus a stack of rubber-banded index cards.

  And photos.

  I caught my breath. “You said you’re doing work-study. Does everyone?”

  She nodded. “Idle hands are the devil’s playground, and all that,” she said.

  And free labor is better than paid. I didn’t say it out loud, but from the look she shot me, I might as well have.

  “What did Jasmine do?”

  “She worked in the executive offices.” Elise tried to cover a smirk. “All the talking they do about lust being the biggest obstacle to faith, but you should see who works up there.”

  Of course. I blew out a sigh and grabbed the photos.

  Jasmine smiled up at me. She posed with four other girls, arms slung around shoulders, in cap and gown. A magnolia arched over their heads, graceful blooms dotting the branches. I flipped it around. “High school graduation?”

  Elise shrugged and nodded. I laid it on the desk.

  Photos of Jasmine with several combinations of the girls from the other photo lay beneath it.

  “They were her friends. Her mom didn’t approve, and she was never allowed to talk to them after she came here.”

  “How old was she?” I asked, squinting at the tassel in the graduation picture. “Twenty-three? Twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-three when she left. So twenty-four,” Elise said.

  Same range as the dead girl in the car trunk. Hmm. I shoved that aside. This whole thing was too intricately webbed for Jasmine’s murder to be random, but I understood Landers’s mission. I just didn’t agree with his theory.

  “So her folks made her come here.” I put the photos down and turned. “But she was a grown woman. I was almost finished with college at twenty-one. How does that work? Why did she do it? I mean, leaving home, couldn’t she have gotten a job and an apartment? Or moved in with the boyfriend?”

  “She’d never really worked.” Elise shook her head. “She came from a lot of money. She didn’t even know how to make a bed when she came here. They threatened to cut her off. She used to tell me this was better than living on the street. Said she had nightmares about not having a place to sleep or food to eat. I guess when you think about it, that would be pretty motivating in her shoes.”

  Indeed. And it would take serious motivation to face that nightmare. I picked up one of the journals, but the dates in it were four years old. Maybe this was just a memory box.

  I flipped through the index cards. Schedules, names, abbreviations. I passed them to Elise. “Do you recognize any of this?”

  She shook her head.

  A second journal had entries from the year before she was sent to Way of Life. I turned pages slowly, skimming the months leading up to her arrival. She wrote pages about how much she loved her boyfriend—his name was Jared—and how they were going to be together forever. Pressed flowers slid down every other page as I turned it, and her descriptions of their dates got more graphic and heated as the summer went on.

  I kept scanning, the story sucking me in better than the last romance I’d read. Jared was a mechanic. A black mechanic, from the nasty names Jasmine said her father called him. The pages crinkled and blurred with tear stains. I kept turning.

  Three pages later, the detective Jasmine’s mother hired got photos of the young couple in compromising positions. Oh, boy.

  Four pages after that, she met Elise at Way of Life.

  The entries stopped after she started classes. I closed the book, drumming my fingers on the cover and glancing around.

  “I wonder if he knows,” I murmured, looking back at the empty box.

  “Who knows what?” Elise asked.

  “Jared. That was her boyfriend. He wasn’t exactly what her folks called marriage material, according to this, but she writes about him with such passion. She loved him. If he loved her, he should know what happened to her.”

  “She said at first he was waiting for her,” Elise said. “Then she stopped answering his letters.”

  “Letters?” My eyes flew back to the box.

  “She kept them in her night table.”

  I turned for the drawer, but Elise shook her head. “They disappeared after she left.”

  I furrowed my brow. “I thought you guys weren’t allowed contact with people outside the church.”

  “Letter privileges have to be earned,” she said. “But if you’re devout enough, you can be favored by the Lord with mail. They read it all, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “They had a code. So he would write things to her like about the beauty of the grass, and it was supposed to mean her eyes. Or something.”

  I nodded. “How does one earn letter privileges?”

  “Being faithful. Toeing the line. Getting praise from the ministers. You know—God telling them you could get letters.”

  “I’m not sure I see God concerning himself with my method of correspondence.”

  “Their God concerns himself with everything. Especially how much money you have. Some people who work here drive fifty miles each way in the most awful cars. No air conditioning, and it’s getting hot. No heat in the winter. They sincerely believe if they’re faithful enough and believe enough, God will bless them with a better car.”

  I scribbled that down, then reached into my pocket and tried to find the voice recorder on my BlackBerry from memory. Pretty sure I took a picture of the inside of my pants.

  “How does this pass for logic?” I blurted, biting down on the tip of my tongue as the words slid out anyway. “If they really believe God cares about such small details, then why wouldn’t a benevolent diety want people to be comfortable?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Elise said. “They don’t like when I ask questions. That’s how I got moved from the offices to the coffee bar.”

  “You used to work in the offices?” I asked.

 
; “Just as an assistant. Answering phones, filing papers.”

  Watching people?

  Thirty minutes of careful questions all but confirmed my suspicions about Wolterhall. He was from California. He liked women, but of course no one acknowledged that. The younger and prettier, the better, according to Elise. Yes, he was married. He handled all the ministry’s financial affairs. And they overlooked his extramarital ones in return. Holy cow.

  “How many women are we talking about?” I asked.

  “I was only there for about two months, but I saw seven,” Elise said.

  Seven. That was playing the field, all right. It was damned near a whole softball team.

  “And his wife?”

  “The wives don’t stay with the ministers the night before a service.” Her tone was beyond sincere and straight into matter of fact. Her face said she believed what she was saying, no matter how kooky I thought it sounded, so I held mine carefully neutral. No judgment. Only facts. “They have to be alone to receive God’s anointing. You can speak to them if they talk to you first, but not unless.”

  “But the women he was with?”

  “Needed saving. I asked about it, and Miss Jenny strongly suggested I never speak of it again. The next day I learned how to make the reverend’s favorite latte.”

  I nodded slowly. Needed saving from him, maybe. “Young women from the congregation?”

  “Newer ones. Never the same one twice. Usually the ones who came in wearing heels. I told you about the lustful thoughts and the shoes. My guess is Mrs. Wolterhall got them banned from the whole church. None of us were allowed to wear them already, but they started with the flip flop welcome and the insurance thing about a year ago.”

  “Does Wolterhall have an assistant?”

  “Matthew. He’s the only boy who works in the offices.”

  Damn. I paused. Jasmine was pregnant before she left.

  “And Jasmine? Who did she work with?”

  “Pastor Brady. He’s the reverend’s right hand.”

  Pastor Brady. Mister B? I’d have to check him out.