Annalise recited the words in her head. She actually didn’t mean them. If Jesus came now, it might have a good effect on a few, but biblically speaking, it meant an apocalypse for the multitude. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Annalise shot back a quick OK to Brent in text form. What more could she say? She leaned forward and reached for her second coffee of the day, perched on the desktop calendar on her desk. Her office was her sanctuary, her respite, her place to collect wayward thoughts and put them in some semblance of order. It was her—
“Q?”
Her coffee sloshed through the sip hole of its lid as Annalise jumped. She snapped her head up, sucking a puddle of coffee from her hand that was dripping down to her wrist.
Annalise’s eyes met Garrett’s. So much for her private sanctuary. “Yes?” She tipped her head and waited.
Garrett’s arms were crossed, his forearms heavily corded from hours of climbing. She could see chalk dust embedded in the corners of his fingernails. The desk stood between them. A cornfield, no, an ocean would have been preferable.
“I thought you deserved to know why I came back.”
So much for her ocean.
“I do know.”
Garrett’s brow raised in question. His strong jawline curved toward a chin with a crease down its middle. He hadn’t shaved in maybe two days. Chestnut brown hair was floppy on top with sides haphazardly trimmed. The guy was sloppy, but he sure smelled good. Nutmeg, or apple pie, or something.
“You came back to help Nicole ramp up the tourism economy in Gossamer Grove. Make yourself a happy little place for all your climbing buddies to hang. Literally.” Annalise crossed her own arms, but her right hand gripped her coffee as if it were a lifeline.
Garrett shook his head. “Nope. Nic doesn’t need my help. And professionals wouldn’t come here to climb.” He didn’t say it arrogantly, just as fact. Apparently, the resort wouldn’t be professional climbing caliber.
Annalise took the moment to sip her coffee. “Okay, then why?”
Garrett shifted his weight and jammed his hands into the pockets of his shorts. She couldn’t help but notice his calves. Built. The guy was built. Better than her senior year of high school. This must be what over ten years on the professional climbing circuit did to a man. Rock solid—no pun intended.
“Larson contacted me for my expertise in helping design and run his wilderness center. He wants to put in a climbing gym and a zip line. Maybe lead bouldering tours—there are great boulders in the woods near the park. I’m not getting any younger.”
“Thirty-one is old?” Annalise raised an eyebrow.
Garrett shrugged. “In competition? It’s getting there. I’m competing against nineteen-year-old brutes. Their climbing skills are sick. I need a plan for the rest of my life.”
“No more sleeping in decked-out vans and climbing cliffs in Switzerland?” Annalise took another sip of her coffee.
“You followed my career?” Garrett asked.
Annalise choked. Darn it. “No. Yes. I mean, it’s hard not to when you’re practically the town’s pride and joy. Garrett Greenwood, continuing the great line of Gossamer Grove Greenwoods. Medaling in competitions and exploring Europe and Asia. You’re hard to ignore.”
“I’m hard to ignore?”
Annalise closed her eyes and forced herself to take a deep, controlled breath. When she opened her eyes, Garrett’s expression was searching.
“I don’t want trouble, Q. Neither does Nic. We just want to go about life fair and square, okay? The wilderness center will be good for the town, for the people who visit for our outdoor elements here in Gossamer Grove. It’ll get people into physical stuff and away from technology.”
It dawned on Annalise. Very clearly. The decision for the property and the wilderness center had already been made, just not formalized. There would be no land for a shelter, no acknowledgment of the great need shared by those who’d been ostracized by the community.
“I understand.” Her voice came out in a whisper, squeezed by the tension of tears.
“Listen—”
“No. I’d rather not.” She made pretense of organizing paper clips in the tray on her desk. She needed him to go away, before tears slipped out and shamed her. Before Garrett discovered how wounded she still was, and how the past was anything but resolved.
“Q . . .”
She sniffed and pushed the paper clips into a pile. “The great Greenwoods. Always looking out for Gossamer Grove.” She bit her lip as it quivered, glancing up at him. “And ignoring the little people.”
Annalise Quintessa Forsythe may sound lofty, but her parents had failed miserably. Owning a reputable law firm still hadn’t been enough to compete with the Greenwoods’ hierarchy of banking, industrial factory, and four generations of mayors.
She reached for her planner and a pen, under pretense of returning to work. “Goodbye, Garrett.”
There was no resolution in ignoring him as he left her office, silent and without apology.
Chapter 8
Can I get into the trailer?” Annalise knew Brent would tell her no, but she had to ask anyway. “Well?” she pressed him.
“No.” Brent crossed the linoleum kitchen floor, his plaid flannel pajama pants matching his ruffled hair.
Annalise swung her attention to Christen, who sat on a stool at the breakfast bar.
“Why can’t she?” Christen challenged her man.
Brent leaned against the counter. “You two are like bulldogs. Let up, okay? I don’t have the authority to let you into Eugene Hayes’s private property, and we don’t know COD yet.”
“You said he died of a heart attack,” Annalise argued.
Brent shrugged. “Sure, that’s what the ME thinks. But until we have it official, we don’t know.”
“Oh gawsh, you don’t think he was murdered, do you?” Christen squirmed on her stool, peeling her breakfast orange.
Christen’s question may have been flippant and offhanded, but Annalise chilled at the idea. She sank onto the stool next to Christen.
Brent cleared his throat and gave them both a stern eye. “Listen, you two. I can’t discuss the case details with you outside of what I’ve already questioned you on. I’m not even the lead investigator. And I absolutely cannot grant you clearance to snoop around the old man’s trailer—not that you’d want to. It stinks like nothing else.”
“I want to,” Annalise said. “I want to see if I can figure out why he was photograph-stalking me. Doesn’t that unnerve you? It’s not normal. Brent, how did Tyler find out my pictures were plastered all over Eugene’s place? This morning’s paper was practically an exposé. And that random obituary paper-clipped to my senior picture?” She emphasized the last two words in hopes Brent would get her insinuation. Christen didn’t know the repercussions of Annalise’s eighteenth year, and Annalise preferred it that way. But Brent did. And the picture paper-clipped to the obituary of some dead Greenwood ancestor could not be coincidental. The old man had linked her to the Greenwoods, though why a dead one was important, she had no clue.
Brent looked away. Good. He’d gotten her point. She couldn’t afford to have the newspaper digging into the significance of that.
“Well?” Christen broke the awkward silence. “How did the paper find out?”
Brent swung his attention to his wife. “I don’t know. Someone probably unintentionally leaked it. Gossamer Grove is a small town. It happens.”
“Sue for libel.” Christen snapped her fingers.
Annalise rolled her eyes and sighed. “That’ll make it all better.”
“Well?” Christen shrugged. “Tyler needs to know he tiptoes on the edge of slander.”
“So does the National Enquirer and they’ve never been stopped,” Brent muttered.
“They’re still in print?” Christen’s tone was incredulous.
“I think so.” Brent popped an orange slice into his mouth.
“Oh. Well, I read People, so . . .” Chri
sten left her sentence hanging.
“Point made. That type of journalism isn’t going away.” Annalise leaned forward, trying to soften the panic in her voice. Her old friend met her gaze, and she knew Brent recognized the anxiety that rested there. “I can’t have my name smeared through the mud—not before I put up a fighting chance against Doug Larson for the town property.” Not that it would make a difference now. “This is important to me. For people like Eugene Hayes who need recognition in this overly proud community. We have a homelessness issue, and it’s growing.”
Christen shifted in her seat to address Annalise. The citrus scent of her orange drifted into Annalise’s nose and refreshed her senses, if not her nerves. “Why does it really matter, Annalise? People know your intentions are good. It’s not like you’re hiding anything, right?”
Annalise looked down at her fingernails.
Brent choked on the glass of water he’d just swallowed. He set his glass on the counter. Diversion. Christen swung her attention back to him.
“If I were you, Annalise,” Brent said, controlling the conversation, “I’d look into who Harrison Greenwood was. The man mentioned in the obituary. That’s what the newspaper would do first. See if there’s any tie to you, or why Eugene Hayes would’ve had reason to try to link you to that man specifically.”
“Linked to an old obituary?” Christen shivered and plopped an orange section into her mouth. Chewing, she continued, “That’s super freaky. I mean, ghost freaky.”
“There’s no Greenwood ghost haunting me,” Annalise mumbled, then bit her tongue. Well, it depended on if one meant actual spirits. The image of the man outside her bedroom window washed over her. She met Brent’s eyes. Fine. Slipping off the stool, Annalise nodded.
“Okay. That makes sense.” She accepted the clue Brent was subtly handing her. If Eugene Hayes was fascinated by her—which the pictures of her more than implied—then he had to have somehow connected her to a yellowed old obituary and a tent revival.
Annalise could read the message in Brent’s eyes. Find the answer before the paper does.
“That’s all I can do for you.” Brent’s statement chilled Annalise.
All he could do? The newspaper edging its way into her past, random old artifacts that appeared to mean nothing, and Garrett Greenwood returning to town? She needed something—a miracle. Her regimented world was collapsing by the second, and her only option was to research what Harrison Greenwood, the man who died in 1907, had to do with her? More than likely, he had more to do with Garrett, and that made it all so much worse.
Chapter 9
Libby
A low fog settled over the grassy lawn by Gossamer Pond, with the moon a half slit in the sky. Within a few days it would be a moonless sky, like the pall the funeral earlier that day had left over the town. The evening breeze sent a chill through Libby as she paused. The outline of a large tented structure rose alongside the pond, its frame imposing and new. Dusk outlined the rectangular tent, its canvas a dark gray with the front doors pulled wide and fastened back to invite souls inside. Ropes stretched from the corners and midpoints of the structure to wrap around metal posts hammered into the ground. It was almost like a circus tent, only this wasn’t the Big Top, and the entertainment was a different kind of show. It was spiritual.
Residents of Gossamer Grove lined up their various forms of transportation in the field just west of the tent. Motorcars, wagons, carriages, and some lone horses. Men, women, and children alike all gravitated toward the tent’s entrance. Libby knew they were a mixture of curiosity, faith, and trepidation. Tent revivals had been sweeping the nation the last few years and had finally made their way to Gossamer Grove in the form of Jedidiah and Jacobus Corbin. Since the mid-nineteenth century, people such as D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday had been shaking up people’s eternal security. Some, like Moody, seemed well received, with church revival spreading rampantly. Others, like Sunday, were stirring controversy with unscripted tirades from a mouth straight from the baseball field instead of the seminary.
Mitch had told her one paper he’d read said Sunday was so “raw” that they refused to print his words. He used language unfit for feminine dispositions, and even some men were so stricken by his preaching, they were taken from the tent on stretchers, having swooned like a female whose corset was tied too tight.
Libby narrowed her eyes, attempting to catch a glimpse of the Reverends Corbin through the bright lantern-lit inside of the meeting place. Supposedly, the twin brothers had traveled with Sunday for a while and now had struck out to evangelize on their own. Hopefully, tonight’s female attendees had loosened their corsets—assuming the Corbin brothers had picked up on Sunday’s bad habits.
The smell of kerosene from the lamps was pungent as she neared the meeting place. Libby searched for Mitch, but there were so many in attendance, she couldn’t find him. The message he’d left with Paul to have her join him at the tent revival meeting left her scrambling to help finish proofs on the articles going to press that night. She gave Paul a timid reminder to be prepared for Mitch to come busting through the doors at midnight with a special report on the revival. Paul’s sneer told Libby all she needed to know about how he felt about that.
Libby caught a glimpse of Old Man Whistler, the town drunk. She was taken aback that he would even be here, and yet it stood to reason, she supposed. The Corbin brothers were a curiosity.
Whistler brushed alongside her, his shaking elbow knocking into her arm as his knuckles gripped the bulbous end of his cane.
“Come to get yerself saved?” he cackled, and Libby tried to hide her repulsion toward the old man and his musty breath.
“I already am, thank you.” She moved a step away.
Old Man Whistler chuckled. “I’ve a feeling we all will be after tonight. Unless we want to hang along with Deacon Greenwood. Even the good can’t hide their sin forever, you know.”
The elderly man gave her a sideways glance before leaving her behind. Libby swallowed hard. Hide their sin? She watched him wobble toward the tent’s doorway. Old Man Whistler probably should not be underestimated. He was a wanderer, and wanderers saw things—knew things. His remark struck close to the obituary’s heart. The insinuation of hidden sins. But, Deacon Greenwood’s slate was so clean, even Mitch had never been able to find a speck of dust on it.
Libby startled as a grating shriek erupted from inside the tent. Gracious, there was an organ! The music began to play, and the shivering tones and airy puffs from the pump organ blasted from the door. Row upon row of attendees lined two sides of the tent with an aisle down the middle covered in sawdust. Libby should have come earlier to find Mitch. There was no way she would now. She stretched up on her tiptoes, but the sea of bowler hats, feathers, bonnets, and bare heads made identifying anyone nearly impossible. The sun had almost completely gone down, and even now, little children were being shushed as ushers made their way up the aisle indicating they were not to disturb with whining and crying.
Libby moved to the other side of the tent, hoping she could edge her way inside and find an unobtrusive spot to stand along the canvas wall. It was hot inside the tent, stuffy with the smells of perfume, sweat, and fresh sawdust. She fumbled with the neckline of her blouse, tempted to remove the cameo brooch and unbutton the lace at her throat.
The organ music whined to a halt.
Silence.
Someone coughed. A child whimpered and was quickly shushed.
Libby strained to see the front. A modest stage, a pulpit, and . . .
“Sin!” The deep voice branded the atmosphere with authority. “It will deceive you. It will drag you to the depths of hell with the claws of demons leading the way.”
Libby froze. The vivid picture the Corbin brother drew had the entire meeting place holding their collective breath. Trepidation spread uninvited through the shelter.
Jedidiah Corbin was a man of medium height, with lamb-chop whiskers along his cheeks and wavy brown hair parted down the middl
e. He couldn’t be much older than Libby. His early thirties perhaps. The flyer advertising tonight’s event identified this twin as the eldest. His brother, Jacobus, was very obviously missing from attendance.
He stalked across the platform. “The darkness that festers in our souls is like a poison that, but for the grace of God, cannot be squeezed from our hearts.”
Libby scanned the crowd around her, twisting the material of her dress in her hands. Running was implausible, but preferable to being here. There was no comfort—no conviction—in the words. Merely impending doom and destruction. Jedidiah Corbin might as well have combined his message with Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, and the congregation would have barely been able to tell the difference.
She jumped as Corbin’s foot stomped on the platform.
“But the grace of God is real!” Corbin’s gravelly voice rose with intensity, and he flung his arm forward as if throwing a baseball. “It is the damnable misrepresentation of theology that allows us to sin and wait until we lay on our deathbeds, gasping for our last breaths, to lay penitent before the Lord. That a whore can continue in her sin with a backward confession to cover the last evening’s errancy. That a drunkard may swallow his liquor along with a prayer. That a thief can pocket coins from the offering plate while admitting other sins to his priest. This hypocrisy is from the pit of the lake of fire and must cease before we hang ourselves from the rafters of a house built on lies!”
An audible gasp arose from the crowd. Whether from the language of curses and vulgar frankness mixed with grace or the reference to hanging, Libby wasn’t sure. Murmurs and heads turned toward each other. Libby’s throat closed with the claustrophobic reality that Reverend Jedidiah Corbin danced on the circumstances of Deacon Greenwood’s death.
“May we not die a sinful wretch unforgiven!”
No more. Please, no more.
Libby shoved through the people toward the tent opening. Her breaths came in short, suffocating gasps. The black sky outside, with only the tiny shaft of moon to light the banks of the pond, held little escape from this sense of being squeezed. She hurried to the pond’s bank, staring into glowing waters.
The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond Page 5