“Thanks, boss!” Jim smiled as he shook Ted’s hand.
“You’re welcome. Oh, give a call to Howie McLaughlin at our sister paper in Chicago, the Daily Examiner. He can probably set you up with a freelance photographer who lives somewhere in the area to get some photos of the family. While you’re halfway across the country, we might as well get some good art to go with your story.”
—
After the tension-filled meeting, Jim and Melissa bought some snacks from the vending machine and took a break in the lunchroom.
“Thanks for offering to pay for the extra room.” Jim saw the sincerity in Melissa’s eyes. “That really meant a lot to me.”
“Shucks ma’am, wern’t nothing.” Jim’s familiar John Wayne impersonation had resurfaced.
“Knock it off.” She jabbed his arm. “I’m serious. I really appreciated that.”
“You’re welcome. Besides, I knew Ted wasn’t going to make me pay for the extra room. He would probably be afraid I’d go work for the L.A. Times and write about what cheapskates Courier management is.”
“Very funny. Hey, maybe you can catch your Trojans beating up on the Irish this year.”
“I wish! The Trojans dominated against Virginia and Ohio State, but the Notre Dame game isn’t until November. I figure since we won’t have anything better to do, we might as well find out more about the mysterious Shepherd Jeremiah.” Jim smiled as he finished his Cheez-Its.
—
12:22 p.m. Thursday, September 25
Jim yawned as the cross winds buffeting the 200-plus-passenger jet woke him up from his nap. He looked out the window and watched the plane descend through the sun-buttered, mashed potato clouds covering The Windy City.
“This is your captain speaking. We have begun our descent into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. We expect a little turbulence as we land, but it’s shouldn’t be too bad. The weather on the ground at O’Hare is partly cloudy and 53 degrees. We should be landing about 12:45 p.m. local time.”
Jim turned to Melissa, who was so engrossed in Davis Bunn’s latest thriller she ignored the bumpy flight. “Cold and rainy, huh?”
“Yep.”
“It was 95 and sunny in Emerald Valley yesterday. You know, some say California, loosely translated, means ‘hot as an oven’.”
“Sounds about right.” She placed her index finger in the book that was half finished. “Ever been to Chicago?”
“Yeah, Christmas nine years ago. My girlfriend, Tina, and I came to Chicago and stayed at her parents’ house for the holidays.
Jim saw Melissa’s left eyebrow rise and he felt the need to explain the situation. “We had separate bedrooms and all. Her parents were very old fashioned and she didn’t want them to know we were living together.”
“You lived together?”
Even though her question was not laced with the judgment he had felt from other Christians who had learned this information, he still felt uncomfortable.
“For about two years.”
“What happened?” He appreciated the concern in her voice.
“I met her in my interpersonal communications class at USC when we were paired up for a group project. She was an officer in the Public Relations Student Society of America and I was News Editor for the Daily Trojan. We used to swap stories about the people we met in our extracurricular jobs.
“We had been dating for about a year when we decided to move in together just after graduation. Tina went to work in the public relations office at Universal and I began my master’s degree in journalism. She stuck with me through the program and we might even be together today if she hadn’t gotten the job offer in New York. It was a great opportunity, but she would have to move. I had always wanted to work for the Courier ever since I delivered the paper as a kid. I wasn’t going to New York for anyone, not even for my girlfriend.
“One day we had it out. She told me she the job was too good to pass up. I told her if it was that good then maybe she should go by herself.”
Jim noticed the grimace that passed across Melissa’s face.
“Yeah, I was a big, fat jerk. I know that now. But at the time I thought she was being selfish and she cared more about some job than she did about us. Tina really surprised me when she took me up on my offer. She was packed and gone within a week.”
“Wow, I’m so sorry. What ever happened to her?”
“She did pretty well for herself. I followed her career for a couple of years, but after a while Uncle Phil told me I needed to let go of Tina and the idyllic way I remember the relationship to be. He said I needed to see the flaws in the relationship, take ownership of the mistakes I had made and not make the same mistakes the next time around.”
“Sounds like a pretty smart guy.”
“That he is.”
“Have you dated since then?”
“Not anyone seriously. Work at the Courier keeps me pretty busy.”
“You really loved her, didn’t you?”
The plane shuddered as the wheels connected with the tarmac. Jim was thankful for the disruption as it gave him time to suppress his emotions before replying. “That was a long time ago.”
18
While Jim and Melissa had hoped to fly into South Bend Michiana Regional Airport, Keating was only willing to approve the cost of the flight to Chicago and for the hotel rooms. Since they were going to have to rent a car anyway, Jim and Melissa split the cost of the rental and gas and made the 120-mile drive from the airport to downtown Mishawaka in northern Indiana. As they travelled away from Chicago and its suburbs, Jim and Melissa soaked in the scenery that blended residential and commercial in Illinois, featured a strong industrial feel in Gary, Indiana, with its foul air, belching smokestacks and abandoned steel plants and melded into groves of trees and soybean and corn fields along the I-90 freeway. They exited the freeway to reach the city of La Porte, where they met up with Darrell Schmidt, a 25-year-old photographer for the Herald Argus who had gotten his start as a stringer for the Chicago Examiner.
“Thanks for helping us out with this.” Melissa shook Darrell’s hand.
“Not a problem. All I had today was a press conference at city hall this morning and an afternoon event I was able to get switched with another photographer.”
As he loaded his equipment into the back seat of the black Toyota Avalon they had rented at O’Hare, Schmidt gave advice on directions to the college. “It’s three-thirty now and you need to be there by five-thirty, right?”
Jim nodded. “We have an appointment at Hartley’s office on campus. The Google map we printed out recommend we stay on I-90 until we get to the 31.”
“That’s probably the best route. While US 20 is a bit shorter, Highway 80-90 is the most direct route.”
“Sounds good to me.” Jim buckled his seatbelt as they headed out of the newspaper’s parking lot. Jim and Melissa both enjoyed the scenic views of fields of dead cornstalks waiting to be cut as they made the journey between the northern Indiana cities.
“I was doing some research online and read this region is called Michiana,” Melissa said. “Do you know where the name came from?”
“My grandparents once told me the name was picked as part of a contest in the 1930s to help boost business in the area. Now pretty much everybody around here uses the term.”
“How long have you lived in Indiana?”
“My great, great grandparents bought a farm in Rolling Prairie, which is right outside of La Porte.”
Melissa shook her head and smiled. “Your family has been farming for five generations and you’re a newspaper photographer. There must be a good story behind that.”
“When I was in high school, the last thing I wanted to do was work the farm. Besides my older brother, Herman, was set to take over the family business. I spent more time taking pictures of the barn than feeding the animals inside. I worked my tail off and got a scholarship to go to Notre Dame and study photography.”
“You went to Notre Dame?” Jim�
��s raised voice indicated curiosity.
“Oh, this can’t go anywhere good. Maybe you should let me out here,” Melissa said in mock horror. “Jim’s a USC grad, so you might want to watch yourself.”
Schmidt smiled. “I’ll be OK. We are the Fighting Irish after all.” He continued the story. “I was a studio art major until my junior year when I heard about freelancing jobs in the Chicago area. A buddy and I spent the morning driving up to the city and the afternoon tracking down leads. I finally was able to convince Donald Murphy at the Examiner to give me a part-time job. Between that and some work I did for photo studios in town, I was able to scrape by.”
“What made you come back home?”
“My dad was paralyzed in a car accident and Mom and Herman needed some help around the farm. I decided living off macaroni and cheese and splitting a two-bedroom place with three roommates was overrated when family needed my help back home. I moved out of my place three weeks later.”
“Did you ever finish your degree?”
“I keep thinking about it, but something always seems to comes up. And with Herman and Mom working the farm by themselves, I find myself over at the house more often than not. There’s no time, or money, to go back.” Schmidt shrugged. “Sometimes dreams just fall apart. It’s nobody’s fault, but it just happens that way.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” Jim said under his breath as they crossed over the St. Joseph River. They continued east on Jefferson Boulevard and weaved through town until they arrived at the college campus.
—
5:17 p.m. Thursday
As they parked in one of the visitor spots near the Logan Street entrance, Jim surveyed the woodsy feel of the campus. Exiting the car, Jim buttoned up his trench coat to protect against the chill blowing across the campus. Being used to weather in at least the 80s on a late September afternoon, Jim was unaccustomed to the chilly 51-degree air that greeted him. This is what Aunt Patty would call “brisk”. Looking around, he noticed green grass still covered the campus. While most of the foliage retained its color, a few of the older oak trees that encircled the brick and stone campus were ablaze with the gold and red hues that accompanied the arrival of fall. Jim thought the campus pond with a water fountain in the middle was probably designed for how it would look on college brochures.
They walked across the lush campus until they found the second-floor office of “Edward Hartley, D.Min.” Knocking on the door, they were greeted by a man in his mid-40s with a little less hair and few wrinkles around the eyes, but who otherwise strongly resembled Jeremiah Harmon. Yet the similarities ended when he began to speak.
“Good evening. I’m Ed Hartley. Come on in.”
While some might have mistaken the enthusiastic greeting as being identical to his younger brother’s, Jim noticed the genuine warmth and sincerity behind Ed’s words. They were ushered into his office, which featured two cushioned blue chairs for visitors and two walls lined with books organized by subject and author. Hartley’s diplomas from Wheaton College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School hung in simple black frames and bordered the room’s window, which offered a scenic view of the campus. The wall straight across from his desk featured photos of the professor and his students.
Melissa introduced Schmidt, who scanned the room for the best angle for some pictures.
“Dr. Hartley, it’s nice to meet you. I’ll be just a few minutes and then you can get to your interview with Melissa and Jim. Why don’t you stand next to the bookcase case here and hold up the picture of you and your brother.” Schmidt continued to work with Hartley, taking pictures and then checking the camera’s display screen, he found a few shots he liked.
“OK, there we go.” Schmidt turned to Jim. “You guys will be about an hour, right?”
Jim looked at the professor to make sure. “That’ll work for me,” Hartley said.
“OK,” Schmidt said to the reporters. “I’ll walk around the campus and see what I can see. Call me on my cell when you’re done.”
The reporters and Hartley situated themselves as they began the interview.
“OK, I would like to say a couple of things before we get started,” Hartley said as he sat behind his desk and took a calming breath. “First, talking about Gerald in the newspaper was not how I wanted to deal with this situation, but I don’t feel I have any other choice. He refuses to take my calls any more. My parents deny there is anything wrong. I know he hasn’t been convicted of any crimes in California yet, but, if I read your stories correctly, it’s probably only a matter of time before charges are filed against him. I can only pray that something he reads in your paper will help him come to his senses. Heaven knows nothing else has.” He paused before continuing. “Second, I know my brother is going by ‘Jeremiah’ now, but I’ll always know him as Gerald.”
Both reporters nodded their head and, with that, Jim began the interview. “Since you mentioned his name, when did your brother start going by the name Jeremiah?”
“After Gerald got out of prison, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, for a few months, just long enough to change his name. He bragged about this in a phone conversation to me a few months ago.”
“When was the last time you spoke to…Gerald?” Jim had a hard time saying Jeremiah’s real name.
“We last spoke about a week after the first article came out in your paper. He sent a copy of the story to our parents. I called him and asked what he was doing. He said he was trying to tell people about God, just like I do at my church every Sunday.”
“We read at the Bethel website that you’re a college pastor at your church,” Jim said. “Is your church anything like New Creation Fellowship?”
Hartley’s intense stare suggested he was irritated at the question’s underlying assumption. “While Gerald may call himself a pastor or ‘shepherd’, let me assure you, he is running a con game, not a church. A church is supposed to be about helping people enter into a relationship with a loving God who wants to forgive their sins and help them live an abundant life. That’s what I do with the college students I work with each week.
“What Gerald says may sound like Christianity, but if you listen to what he is actually saying, he is perverting the Word of God for his own emotional and financial benefit. As much as I hate to say this, and I don’t say it lightly, I have studied religion for the last 20 years and I can say with some level of expertise that my brother is leading a cult, not pastoring a church in any traditional sense of the concept.”
Jim scribbled furiously. “Are you saying he is like Jim Jones or David Koresh?”
Hartley gestured “stop” with his right hand. “I didn’t say that. Those leaders displayed a messianic personality and reckless disregard for the lives of those around them. Those attributes have not shown up in Gerald yet.”
“Yet?” Jim’s voice raised an octave.
“Who knows what tomorrow brings. I pray every day that I’m wrong, but I can tell you Gerald is headed down a very dangerous path. When I spoke to him last, I tried to tell him he shouldn’t be playing with people’s lives. I said ‘These are people off the street or just out of prison. Who knows what they might do to you if they find out this is all just a con game’. He just ignored me like he always does. I said I would pray for him. He laughed and said ‘Good luck with that’ and hung up. That was at the beginning of June.”
They then shifted the interview to concentrate on Jeremiah’s early life with his brother. Jim and Melissa had agreed beforehand her softer approach would work best with the professor.
“What was Gerald like as a kid?”
Hartley raised both hands and his eyebrows as he sighed. “While I love my brother, growing up with him was difficult to say the least. To understand my brother, you have to understand our family history. You see, I was born in 1964 and my sister, Ellen was born in 1967. When my sister was 3, doctors discovered she had leukemia. We couldn’t afford chemotherapy, so my parents and I had to watch Ellen slowly waste away right in front
of us. She passed away in February of 1971, a month after her fourth birthday.
“By the end of the year, my mother was pregnant again. She told me at the time that though we were all sad, a new baby brother or sister would make us happy again. Gerald was born on June 17, 1972.”
Jim interrupted the narrative. “So he really was the ‘Golden Boy’ they said he was in the Boston papers.”
“He was indeed. The problem was he used it to his advantage. When he was a kid, he was always playing pranks on people and then getting them to believe someone else was to blame. Whether it was digging up flowers in the neighbor’s yard or stealing a candy bar from the grocery store, he always made sure whoever was next to him took the fall.
“When he got into high school, the tricks turned into full-fledged con games. He cheated on tests and plagiarized papers and, even when he got caught, he used his smile and charm to deflect the blame. You know the saying ‘cheaters never prosper’? That never seemed to prove true with Gerald.”
“Sounds like you were a bit jealous,” Melissa observed.
Hartley chuckled. “For a while I was, but I worked through issues when I was in seminary. But when I heard what he was doing in Boston, my jealously turned into righteous anger. His ‘investment firm’ just sounded like a scam designed to swindle people out of their life savings so he could get rich quick. I told him he needed to stop what he was doing before someone’s life was ruined. I even talked a to a friend of mine who is a police officer in South Bend, but he told me it would be hard to get an investigation started unless one of his clients reported the scheme. I didn’t know what to do after that.”
“What happened when you found out about the accident that killed Jessica Gratton?”
“I was unbelievably angry that Gerald’s actions led to the death of somebody’s little girl, but my parents were more concerned about him not getting convicted. They flew up for the trial. I offered to come to support Mom and Dad, but Gerald didn’t want me there. I think he thought I would somehow mess up his plan to get away with it just like he always had. My parents were there every day sitting right behind him the whole time. When they announced the plea bargain, my mother broke down and cried.” Hartley sighed as he continued.
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