Even In Darkness--An American Murder Mystery Thriller (2 page)

Mahan.
Jimmy
Mahan. I know this name.

We were in school together. He was two years behind me, working on a religion degree.

I bring the picture close and squint. I recognize the name but not the man. If I know him, if he is the Jimmy Mahan I used to know, he is changed or I've forgotten his face. He has a girth on him and though it is hard to tell from the picture, he looks like one of those red-faced men who sweat. And indeed in the next picture he has taken out a handkerchief to mop his face. Different suit. This one grey. The first navy blue.

He is playing golf in the next shot. I don't recognize the golf course but the terrain reminds me of South Carolina, maybe Georgia. Pine trees, needles in sandy soil. His shirt is Kelly green, short-sleeved, and he wears white shorts, which seems less than wise. His pompadour is higher here, and he does not seem to be sweating. Early spring, sunny and cool.

The next shot disturbs me. Mahan is asleep in a brown recliner, mouth open. There is the arm of a matching recliner and an elbow in the corner. A woman? His wife? The shot seems intrusive. I wonder who took it and how. Why.

The next picture up sends rivulets of shock tingling down my spine. I hear a voice, my voice.
Oh God. Oh shit.
My heart is pounding. I sit down on the floor.

I am suddenly remembering something about Jimmy Mahan. How they used to call him ‘the mouth that roared'. He was skinny then, a medium sort of height, as I remember. Quick-moving, loud-talking, a laugh that used to echo in the hallways. People would roll their eyes and say his name. Fondly. Or with irritation. Usually with irritation.

I cannot find the skinny guy with the big laugh in this picture. But the man with the pompadour and the tear-stained face looks oddly brave, braver than I would be with my head jerked back, my neck exposed and a gun jammed hard to my throat.

I am propelling myself backward, scooting on the floor until my back is against the wall. I draw my knees up and look at the next picture.

Mahan's throat has been ripped open, a piece of something like pink pipe cleaner sticking up, and if I had not seen the gun in the other picture I would have thought that Jimmy Mahan had been attacked by some animal, a lion or a wolf, something that had ripped his throat out in a death-lust frenzy.

This one has a label. THE REVEREND JIMMY MAHAN, AFTER DEATH. There is writing on the back of the picture, in green ink, bold, like a Sharpie.

I am experiencing a strange double vision. Part of me seems to be viewing myself, huddled against the wall, staring at these pictures. The other is studying this final shot – Jimmy Mahan's face splashed with Jimmy Mahan's blood. There is nothing left of his chin. His hair, parted on the left, has flopped over one eye. One dead eye. And I remember this – that Jimmy Mahan was vain about his hair. I remember how he used to wear it long, and toss his head back, thin white wormlike fingers pushing the hair from his eyes whenever he answered a question in class, or made a point in discussion.

There are more pictures. There are two more sets.

I realize that Leo is quiet now. I should go and get him, bring him into the house. I should call the police. Although if the police are coming, maybe I should leave Leo out. He will jump on them and bark and he is scary-looking, despite his teddy bear heart, but he's been out too long as it is, he's probably thirsty.

He barks again, as if he knows I am thinking about him. I can't go now, not until he is quiet, but I can't leave him barking, he is no doubt disturbing the neighbors. I can lock him in the bathroom while the police are here. It will only be a problem if one of the police officers needs to use the bathroom, but that would be unprofessional, wouldn't it? Maybe I should vacuum the living room before they come, because Leo sheds, he sheds a lot.

I scream. A long scream that hurts. Why did these pictures come to me? Who sent them? Who put
my
address in the top left corner, and my address in the center, as if I'd sent this packet to myself? I scream again, but I don't feel better.

Who?

Why?

And why me? Me? Me? What did
I
do?

Is this some sort of a confession? The televangelism used to pull in the nuts, but those days are over, nobody remembers. I don't know anybody who would do something like this.

Except, wait. Maybe I do.

L
eo knows I am unhappy. A dog always knows.

I wonder absently why I live in this house. I don't
like
this house, I never liked this house. My husband, fourteen years dead – he's the one who picked this house out, this is the house that
he
wanted, and more house than we could afford in those days. In any days, really. I've been house poor most of my life. Why do I still live here after all these years?

There are two more sets of pictures. It surprises me that I have not at least given them a quick glimpse. I have as much human curiosity as anyone else. Maybe more.

But what I want to do is throw them all away. Burn them. I don't want their presence in my space, and even as I have this thought I feel a sense of guilt, as if I am betraying Jimmy. These glimpses I have of his final moments make me feel defiled. Death is intimate and I do not want to witness this private montage of the end of his life.

I stumble back into my shoes and trudge down the carpeted hallway through the kitchen and to the back door and in my head I list everything I hate about this house. The layout, for example, is too much like a rat warren. I want openness and tall ceilings. And I don't like carpet, I like wood floors. Old ones, not too shiny, covered in the patina of scuff and scratches, worn with life but ready for more. I like old houses and tall ceilings, homes designed when architects still held sway, instead of the way they are built now – contractors piecing them together like a toddler with a small selection of blocks. Random thoughts to fill my head, a way to push back the images of pictures I never wanted to see.

I stare out the window of the kitchen door and for once I catch Leo unaware. He is snuffling through the monkey grass that rings the white birch tree, and I see from the way he jerks his head up and backward that he has rooted up yet another garter snake. They love the long grass but they do not love Leo. He noses them up for the evident pleasure of watching them glide swiftly out of reach, a puzzled but satisfied light in his teddy bear eyes. I have never seen Leo harm any living being, with the exception of flies, which he can snap right out of the air, but to the cats, dogs, snakes and neighbors that are the focus of his affectionate enthusiasm, he is an object of terror. Lean and athletic as he is, a still-growing adolescent of fourteen months, he weighs eighty-three pounds and stands twenty-seven inches high at the shoulder. He is thirty-eight inches long, not counting the fifteen inches of tail that will take out any low-lying coffee cups. His coloring is unusual – black and tan feathered with silver, without the standard black saddle markings common to most German shepherds.

Leo's feet are monstrous and he has yet to grow into them. I think, with pride and uneasiness, that he will not reach full size for yet another year. His ears are long, upright and pointed, and his face is solid black, and when I take him for walks, people cross to the other side of the street.

I am sitting on the couch again, and Leo, who has raced through the living room three times, slopped water out of his bowl on to his ‘shirtfront' of fur and into a line of puddles on the kitchen floor, has suddenly caught my mood. He trots close, winds his way around the chair and coffee table, which he has knocked two feet off kilter, and sits on the rug that is now wrinkled and curled sideways. He lays his head sideways in my lap. My off-white cargo pants soak up the water that dribbles off his muzzle and I feel the thunder of his heartbeat against my leg. He offers me consolation by bringing me his third favorite toy, the beloved ‘chip monkey' – now headless – and it sits on my knee, the fur sticky with dog spit. I pull Leo's ears and scratch behind them, feeling the hardened lump of fur where a neighboring cat has swiped at him, drawing a copious amount of blood.

I left the pictures on the coffee table. I reach for the second set. One hand on Leo's head. One hand on the pictures. I think of the dreams these photographs will bring me.

Now Gloria I do recognize, with a dread that makes me feel weirdly hollow through the knees, and it is good that I am sitting down. In the first shot she is standing on the steps of her church in the traditional black robes trimmed in purple, a good Presbyterian assistant pastor. I used to envy her having a church of her own. I could not get one, so I went into televangelism, and by the time I was offered my choice of positions, I didn't want them anymore. In an echo from the past, I hear the familiar introduction,
Joy Miller, a preacher without a pulpit
, the way pulpit would become
pull-pit
in a drawn out southern drawl.

Gloria's hair is mostly grey now, and it is cut short. Like me, Gloria Schmid got a degree in religion. Unlike me, she began with the intention of ‘keeping her place' in the church – an obedient female, she would focus on counseling, though if ever a woman was born to preach, it was Gloria.

Hanging out with me, in the days we were students together, was politically incorrect in a big way and she took flak for it. I have been both credited and vilified for convincing Gloria to preach. In those days, a woman in the religion business didn't take the pulpit, she captured it, like changing lanes on the 405 in Los Angeles.

Like all of us, she's changed dramatically since school. For Gloria, there is weight, grey hair and more than the hint of a double chin. That air of disapproval I remember about her still emanates from the muddy green of her eyes or maybe I am imagining it. She certainly disapproved of me – disapproved, competed, judged, took me on as a project, tried to save me, reported on me to our professors and, years later when my cable show became a hit, followed in my footsteps.

There is a student hierarchy, in seminaries. We are categorized, and there is a pecking order. I have heard that when Billy Graham was in seminary it was thought he would not amount to much.

The most admired student among my own classmates was good old Elwood Shipley, who professed to having been a heroin addict who slept under the I-65 northbound bypass until he awoke one day with a religious tract in hand that turned his life, as he used to say,
right side in
. The peckerwood accent, the Howdy Doody freckles and Opie of Mayberry sprouts of reddish brown hair gave him a
so uncool he was cool
credibility and he spent his off-study time saving endangered souls at the top of his lungs.

The professors loved him. Even when he was exposed as the son of well-to-do physicians, a boy who'd gotten a brand new Corvette at the age of sixteen, and a boy who had never been addicted to anything except being the center of attention, they still loved him. He just confessed his sin of lying and begged them to join hands with him as he knelt in front of the whole student body to beg for God's forgiveness and direction.

I cannot see in the picture of Gloria Schmid if she still wears the tiny pearl earrings she wore every day in school. She always wore pantyhose to class, skirts and uncomfortable-looking polyester blouses, and flat, square-toed shoes that just looked odd on her long chunky legs.

There were times we banded together, as only women can when drowning in a sea of men. And others when we were at each other's throats, as only women can be when drowning in a sea of men.

I was ‘the albino', Gloria was ‘the frump'. Most female students had a derogatory nickname, supplied by a small cadre of small-minded male students we ourselves nicknamed ‘the frat pack'.

It is true that my skin is very pale, almost bluish. I think if I were ever foolish enough to try a tanning bed, they would have to give my money back. I am slim and tall and got my first bra more from desperation than need; I wear a minimum of makeup and have always dressed plainly. If I have a style, you'd call it stark. My face is sharp and angular, my nose broad. I am intellectually adventurous, if physically frail. In high school, my looks never earned me a place on the cheerleading squad, but I was the hands down choice to play Joan of Arc in the senior play.

It was unfair as well as unkind to label Gloria a frump. She was merely conservative and formal. Where I am androgynous, she is Rubenesque. In a physical sense, as a woman, Gloria would be a sonnet. I would be a haiku.

Leo whimpers softly, head burrowing deeper into my lap. ‘Be easy,' I say. Not sure which of us I am trying to reassure.

She has children. Gloria. I lost track of her, but I know that she married. In the next picture, she's hugging a boy of about sixteen. He is reluctant enough that he is clearly hers. She got married way after I did, waited sensibly to establish her career before she had kids. The boy looks like her, minus the air of disapproval. He has evidently just lost a soccer game, from the looks of his mud-streaked uniform and the glum aura of his teammates. No doubt a public hug from Mom made it better.

He is caught exchanging looks with his father, who stands behind Gloria, a tall, broad bear of a man with a pewter grey crew cut, and something of a military bearing. I wonder about this boy, bracketed between a minister mother and military father.

And then it hits me that the minister mother may be dead now and I move through the next two pictures.

Just like the sequence with Jimmy Mahan, these pictures follow a pattern. Subject at work. Subject at play. Subject with family. Subject moments before death.

Oh, Gloria. All of those times I hated you, I admit it; I see your eyes now and am filled with such compassion that it feels like love. How stupid we were, way back when. What a waste it was, all that anger and angst. I would not wish this on you in a million years. I would take it off your shoulders if I could. If I could have been there to hold your hand, Gloria, just to hold your hand, let you feel the warmth of another human being, to give you something – some connection when you were so afraid. I see such fear in your eyes, I would do that for you Gloria, I would.