A Lie for a Lie (10 page)

Once we were past the gate and the initial crowd, I could see the big top glowing on a slight rise in the nearest field. In the fading sunlight it looked like a huge, perfect pearl, and from that same direction, I could hear the music of a brass band. Not circus tunes, exactly, but music that was upbeat and energetic and totally unfamiliar to me.

“Lucy? Junie?”

We turned as one body and stared in the direction of the woman’s voice. Before anyone said her name I recognized Sister Nora. She was dressed all in white—the preferred garb for prophets, I suppose—white jeans, white spangled tank top, white leather boots. Her blonde head was bare but she wore white riding gloves.

“I’m so glad you came,” she said, when she was close enough. “We have a new show. Tonight’s the premier performance.”

I had heard that SNITS did interesting if peculiar reenactments of Old Testament stories. Daniel in the lion’s den was an obvious choice, of course, performed by an excellent lion tamer and all the big cats. I’d heard a rumor that the new show was a retelling of Moses and the Israelites escaping from Egypt. I was hoping this wasn’t true. I didn’t want to see the ten plagues in living color under a circus tent.

“Miss Emma and I can hardly wait,” Junie said. She introduced her assistant, and Sister Nora greeted her warmly. Then she turned to Lucy and me. “You’re Aggie,” she said. “I remember you.”

“Aggie’s my daughter,” Junie said proudly.

“Aren’t you both lucky?” Sister Nora asked. “The gift of family.”

“We were going to stroll by the house,” Lucy said.

Nora checked her watch, which I was happy to see. She might get direct orders from above, but the small things, like telling time, were still up to her.

“Come see what we’ve done,” she said. “I have a few minutes before I make sure everything’s set, and I need to get something anyway.”

We made all the polite protests, but by the time we’d finished, we were at the house. Everyone else was meandering in the direction of the tent, and a line of three elephants passed us, along with a pair of camels and four men carrying a bamboo pallet on which a woman in a black wig was reclining. She was dressed in leopard skin and looked too much like Pharaoh’s daughter for my taste.

The house looked much better than the last time I’d seen it. All those strong men and women had apparently turned their hands to improvements. The roof no longer sagged; in fact the roof was brand-new, a soft red shingle that was just shades lighter than the freshly painted porch. The house was now a soft yellow, and new forest green shutters matched the door. Petunias and marigolds bloomed from big terra-cotta pots flanking it.

“The front’s our office. Yank and I live in the addition in the back. Come see what we’ve done.” She led us up to the porch and through the house. The front looked official, file cabinets and desks, computers and fancy calculators. But once she unlocked the door on the other side of the room, we were in an airy, open space with a small kitchen set off by an island from the rest of a pleasant room with windows looking out over the acreage. Vintage Nelson- Zimboni posters adorned three walls, sporting ringmasters, women pirouetting on tightropes and hanging from trapezes, and one with a buxom young blonde on a gorgeous white stallion. Unfortunately the fourth wall wasn’t nearly as friendly.

“Some collection,” I said, nodding to the rack of lethal-looking knives clinging to magnetic strips beside several powerful shotguns. The rack was as far from the kitchen as it could be and still hang in the room. Clearly these knives weren’t meant for mincing onions.

“Yank’s our knife thrower,” Nora said, as if she were explaining that Yank was a lawyer, Yank was a tree surgeon. “You won’t see him perform tonight, though. He has a cold, and his hands aren’t steady enough.”

I was glad to hear this, since a knife thrower with shaky hands sounded like plague number eleven to me and not one I wanted to witness.

“I hope Yank doesn’t practice at home,” I said.

“No chance. We just keep all the weapons here in the addition, pistols for the animal keepers and the rifles for tranquilizer darts. All valuables, too, important papers. We have good locks on these doors and a top-notch security system. Everything’s perfectly safe that way and we can keep track. We don’t want trouble.”

She and Lucy chatted a moment about everything that had been done on the house. Then Nora disappeared, returning with a small whip.

“Just for show,” she said. “I never whip my horses. But it makes a lovely cracking sound. Why don’t you follow and I’ll have you seated up front. We have a row reserved for the local clergy, but so far it’s been empty. I’m sure they’ll come, though. They’ll want to help.” She smiled a little. “Although I wish they would hurry. There’s so much to do and so little time.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Until you build your biosphere?” I asked.

“There has to be a place where some people survive, and of course our animal friends, as well. It’s not their fault we’ve disobeyed God’s commandments. Man has greatly reduced his own chance of survival, and the odds will get worse and worse unless drastic changes are made. I’ve been given the task to save what we can. Now. Before it’s too late.”

She said all this so calmly, so assuredly, that we might have been having a conversation about books we’d read and loved. But I followed the others to the big top with an uneasy feeling. If Sister Nora had her way, someday, right here, just miles from the parsonage, a biosphere would house a few selected human beings and a circus load of animals. I was sure there must have been a few revelations along the way about oxygen, about food and water enough to survive, oh, conservatively, a millennium? Before the atmosphere cleansed itself, the glaciers began to reform, and life on the surface of the earth was comfortably habitable again. If such a thing could occur—and I was no scientist, so how would I know?

Of course this was screwy. Of course Nora was hearing voices in her head propelled by a very legitimate fear that our earth was not going to survive the abuse we leveled at it. There is a name for people who hear voices in their heads, and it isn’t a pretty diagnosis. Yet here she was, warm and welcoming, the leader of a thriving circus, a performer of some renown, a manager with good sense and the ability to rally people—at least some people—to her cause. She’d even convinced a man with millions to join her and help support her vision.

I tried to put all this together and failed. The line between prophecy and psychosis? I had no idea. I was glad it wasn’t my job to make that call.

“So first the band plays, and while they do, two guys in the front start a fight. They’re pushing and shoving, and just when you think you’d better jump in and save somebody, one does a flip in midair, then a cartwheel, and pretty soon they’ve got a whole acrobatic act going, until they’re both so exhausted they help each other out of the ring. This voice comes over the loudspeaker and says, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ And that’s the warm-up.”

May Frankel, friend and member of Ed’s congregation, shook her head. “An interesting way to teach the Bible.”

“Right. You think, gosh, this is going to be some night. Then the band cranks up and the parade begins. Very old-timey circus, but traditional, no booming voices. Performing poodles, cantering horses, elephants dancing. But before that can bore you, the troupe begins the story of Moses leading his people from Egypt.”

I paused for a breath. Besides, it wasn’t possible to adequately explain my Saturday night adventure, not in so many words. If May wanted the full effect, she was going to have to go and see SNITS for herself.

“How did they do that?” May sounded sincerely interested, but then, she makes her living as a psychologist, and sounding interested pretty much comes with that territory.

“Well, for scenery they had teams stacked into human pyramids. I don’t know how they just stood there for so long. Then they had people scurrying along tightropes, others swinging frantically from platform to platform on trapezes. They were trying to evade the Egyptians, who were approaching on elephants and camels. Then Sister Nora came riding in on her gorgeous white stallion, and all the Hebrews followed her. They did something amazing with lights and sheets of shimmering plastic that looked like waves, and when the sea parted, the good guys had gotten away and the bad guys had drowned.”

“Ambitious. And creative. I don’t remember a white stallion in the book of Exodus.”

“Artistic license. They did the traditional stuff, too, sort of an abbreviated version of what you’d get at a regular circus. Then Nora did a speech about global warming. They dimmed all the lights, then brought up one huge spot, like the sun. And they’d created this tableau of a garden with performers dressed as trees and flowers, and as she spoke, they shriveled. Then the animals laid down, one by one, as if they were dying. An elephant, a horse, a bear, all the poodles. Even one of the big cats put his head in his trainer’s lap—which was the scariest moment of the night. Finally Nora explains that she’s here in our county because God told her to build a biosphere that will house as many species as she can find room for, and that this is how humanity and life as we know it will be saved from annihilation if things don’t improve. It’s the job of people in Emerald Springs to help make this happen.”

“Uh oh.” May has a cherubic face, which was now screwed into a grimace. “Let me guess. That part didn’t go over well.”

“Not so you’d notice. She cleared the place in record time.”

Tara Norton, one of the Price Girls, appeared at the head of our stairs and posed for a moment like a runway model. She was dressed in leopard-print pants and a gold T-shirt with her dark hair teased and curled into a wild tangle around her head.

“Scary Price,” I guessed, having boned up on my Spice Girls lore.

“I’m loud and boisterous, and I get into trouble.”

Nothing could actually be further from the truth. Tara’s a sweetheart. For a couple of years now, all the girls presently calling themselves the Price Girls have been part of a larger group named—unfortunately—the Green Meanies. I’ve never been fond of them banding together to promote envy among their peers, but the Meanies, despite their name, are for the most part nice kids who just like to spend time together. Some of them, like Carlene, otherwise known as Ginger Price, concentrate on being popular at school; some, like Tara and Maddie, May’s daughter, are brainiacs.

Maddie joined us now, in a sweet little babydoll dress, which because of her mother’s intervention, was longer than the girls wanted it to be. “Baby Price.” She did a cute little curtsy.

Like May, Maddie is petite, blonde, and delicate. She looked appropriately cherubic with her hair in long pig-tails. Deena came down right behind her in sweats, a spandex tank, and a headband, looking as if she were planning to run a marathon. I could tell from the expression on her face that she wanted to be anywhere else at the moment. Since “Sporty” has dark hair and I had refused to let her dye hers, she’d borrowed a dark wig from a friend which was fastened into a ponytail. I wondered if she was hoping nobody would recognize her. I hoped it didn’t fall off mid-song.

Deena is at an age when confiding in me feels traitorous, but she had gone so far as to admit—as Lucy said—that she’d been railroaded into this performance. Now the big moment had almost arrived, and she and her friends were going up in front of Grady Barber and the other judges. I hadn’t warned her that he might be less than charming. She’d found Internet accounts of other events like this one that he had judged. Humiliation seems to be the key to selling tickets.

Ed was next down the steps, followed closely by Teddy. Along with May the two of them were going to take the girls to the Emerald College auditorium, where they would wait their turn for this first round of the finals. I’d been there a good part of the day and had only just run home to shower and change before the evening began.

I definitely needed both. I’d spent a chunk of the afternoon crawling on the floor moving electric cords and wires right along with the stagehands every time Grady reconsidered where the judges’ table should sit. Next to checking each plate of food destined for his stomach, next to helping Fred rearrange the upcoming schedule so Grady would have time for an hour of yoga each afternoon, next to finding a store in Columbus with medium-density down pillows that could be delivered to the hotel by evening, getting my jeans dirty and blisters on my hands and knees was nothing. A mere inconvenience. Besides, when they threw me in jail for murder, I would have plenty of time to clean up and heal.

“You girls are all set?” Ed asked. The other Price Girls, Carlene and Shannon, were going to meet them at the auditorium.

“Yeah, whatever,” Deena said glumly.

“You have to be peppy. You have to have confidence,” Maddie told my daughter.

“I need a lobotomy, then.”

I wasn’t sure where Deena had learned about lobotomies, but I rested my hand on her shoulder. “Just do your best, girls, and let the rest sort itself out.”

Once they were all gone, I finished getting ready and left for the college myself. The campus is a nice asset for our small town, a center for culture as well as a place of higher learning. It’s also a parklike oasis where townspeople can go for a stroll or sit by the creek that meanders between Rice Hall and Marlborough Center. Most of the buildings are antique brick or stone, with the requisite tendrils of ivy climbing toward slate roofs. Trees shade the expansive open areas, and beds of flowers break up long stretches of lawn.

Unfortunately a month ago the creek dried up, and the flower beds looked like a who’s who of local weeds. I walked along the ditch where the creek had been toward Marlborough Center and took the route to a side door. The Marlborough Auditorium has fifteen hundred seats, and most had been sold for the final Idyll round. Buses chartered in nearby counties were set to bring in patients from nursing homes and retirement villages. Church groups, civic associations, choirs, bands, and drama clubs had bought large blocks of tickets. At twenty dollars a head, we would make back Grady’s fee in just one night.