Hallowed (11 page)

Uncle Hank gave a homily on Fear.  I think he saw the way the tide was going with the announcement of a second body and figured that under the circumstances stepping out of the bounds of the weekly scripture readings could be forgiven.  I could tell the parishioners were active listeners in the way everything went dead silent.  Gone were the cell phones and crying babies.  It was as if even the children knew the time for crying was over.

“As Christians, we are promised eternal life through the cross and resurrection of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.  So, we have to ask ourselves: what do we fear?  Do we fear death?  Why do you fear something that offers eternal reward?  But perhaps you’re saying, Father Hank, this fear isn’t for me.  It’s for my son.  My daughter.  This is the answer I give you: why do you presume to know the will of God?”

An audible murmur passed through sections of the crowd, more dissenters than those in agreement.

That was when Uncle Hank hit his stride.  He could be a master orator when he wanted to and this was one of those occasions.  He commanded the aisle, seeming to direct his eyes to each and every individual of us in turn, speaking personally, intimately.  This had both a calming and a centering effect on the crowd and once again their murmurs were hushed and their ears opened.

“The path of the storm can lead some to destruction, others to revelation.  An act of God, you say?  So many atrocities are committed by men like you and me.  Free will, brothers and sisters.  Free will brings us closer to the Light.  Free will brings us closer to the Darkness.  We are the masters of our own fate.  We can choose to be victims of this Fear or masters over it.  The only difference is the strength of our faith.”

He stepped over to the first Station of the Cross, on the wall immediately to the left side of the altar.  It depicted the Sanhedrin condemning Jesus to death.  He stood there for a moment contemplating the image, then turned back to us.

“Let us not forget from whom Fear comes from and from whom Love originates.  Will you choose Fear of the unknown, fear of something that may or may not happen, or Love, which exists now and is present all around us?”

Turning, he glanced at the depiction of Christ on the cross over the altar.  “Luke tells us that Jesus’ final words on the cross were: ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’  This is the example He set for us and this is the model we follow as Christians.”

He let this sink in for a moment before continuing.  “Now let us pray for the conviction to trust in the will of a higher authority.  Please stand.”

After mass, everyone wanted a piece of my Uncle.  As I waited outside the front doors of the church as he greeted and shook the hands of the small crowd one by one, I examined the small silver crucifix I wore around my neck.  Though I had wore it every day since my uncle had given it to me on my first communion, I rarely stopped to think about what it meant outside of mere ornamentation.  A man, subjecting himself to such fear, humiliation, and torture for me?  The concept seemed a bit foreign in a world where a man no longer even held a door open for a woman because he was in too much of a hurry.

My thoughts were interrupted by Mom, stepping to my side.  She gave me a look as I dropped the crucifix back down into my shirt.

“I want to invite Uncle Hank to dinner,” I said.

Mom gave me a look of mixed emotions.  “Not tonight, Paul.  From the looks of it, he’s going to have a few dozen invitations.  Besides we can’t be stingy.  He belongs to the community.  They need his strength.  We’re lucky enough to have your father on a full-time basis.”

“Later this week then.”

“I’ll talk to your father about it.”

“Why?  He’s my uncle.”

Mom shot me a warning.  “Stop acting like a child.”

Glancing over the line waiting to see him, I sighed and started toward the parking lot.  Mom followed.  “Is there a reason why we don’t have Uncle Hank over more?”

“He’s a very busy man.”

“It’s because of Dad, isn’t it?” I said, giving voice to a long-held suspicion.

Mom didn’t immediately respond, which was answer enough.  “You father and his brother have a… complicated relationship.  You and I have never had a sibling, so it’s difficult for us to understand.  Mrs. Wicke is the closest I have to a sister and back in high school we had some pretty heated arguments.”

“That’s high school.  Dad’s a grown man.”

“Y’know, I think you should talk to your father about this instead of me.”  We reached the parking lot.  Mom gave me a big kiss and gestured to her car a couple of rows from mine.  “Now you’re going straight home, right?”

“I guess that all depends on what this punishment consists of.”

“You’re grounded.  Home and school for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” I exclaimed.  “Isn’t that’s a little..?”

Mom made an annoying humming in her throat, cutting me off.

“What about work?”

“Ok, home, school, and work.  I stand corrected.”

“What about Halloween?”

“What about it?”

“Am I grounded that Saturday too?”

“Well, I figured you’d help us with the party like you always do.”

“Claudia and I have plans already.”  The lie slipped out as easily as if it were already established truth.

The look on my mother’s face would have been no different had I just given her a premeditated shove.  “Oh… well.  I guess we’ll have to talk about that one.”

“What about the library? Can I at least go there to study?”

“Check with your father,” Mom replied tersely, starting away.

Of course, Dad was in the garage when I got home.

Standing in front of the open hood of the Ford, he seemed to be having a staring contest with the Ford this morning.  I couldn’t tell who was winning.

“Mom told me to ask you if I can I go to the library to study.”

“Fine.”

That seemed to go well, so I figured I’d push my luck.  “Can we invite Uncle Hank over for dinner this week?”

Dad turned to look at me.  “What?  Why?”

“Because I want to.”

Dad drew an oily rag from his pocket and used it to apparently spread even more oil on his hands than was there previously.  “Paul, your uncle’s got church business and all that.”  Then under his breath, “Counting up all that money.”

“Can I at least invite him?”

He waved the rag at me in dismissal and disappeared under the hood.  “Under the circumstances, this week is not a good time.”

“For him or you?”

Dad shot me a look from beneath the hood.  “Paul, the department has asked me to take a look at what they have so far on an informal basis.”

I rushed up to the hood, waiting patiently for more.  Claudia was going to flip.

He sighed and straightened up, giving his back a stretch.  “They figure a fresh pair of eyes might see something they haven’t.”

Around three o’clock, I found Claudia at the library computer, surfing the net for as many details on the two victims as was out there.  When I greeted Claudia with my father’s news, she spun around in her chair, her dark eyes as big as saucers.  “You’re shitting me!”

I shook my head.  “A friend of his called him late last night.  Woke him from a dead sleep.  That’s when they noticed I was gone.”

“Did he tell you anymore?  Is he going down there to work with them?”

“His condition for helping them was that all the material be brought out to him at home.”

Claudia nodded.  “They wanted him to go to them, but he refused.”

“Yeah, he told me he wants to avoid publicity.”

Claudia looked me in the eye.  “He’s protecting you and your mom.”

She was right.  Until that moment, I had never considered the interest an investigation like this might attract from the media, from sicko celebrity hunters.

We sat in the silence of the library, our respective wheels turning, generating questions and posing hypothetical answers to them.

“Did your Mom punish you?”

“Well, what do you think?  Can’t say, I didn’t see it coming.  I just figured that it’d be for the séance, not for hanging out with you,” she said with a scoff.  “Actually, you provided a perfect cover for me.”

Claudia turned back to the computer and I signed in to the terminal next to her.  “I should probably warn you, my mother doesn’t buy the cemetery story.  She thinks I lied about the movie so I could be with you.”

I stopped typing and stared at Claudia in wonder.  “Huh?”

“Yeah, she’s a little pissed at you, I think.”  There was a teasing smirk on her face, though there was no doubt in me that she was completely serious.

“What?  Your mother thinks that you and I..?”

Claudia gave me a searching look.  “Is that so hard to believe?”  When I didn’t respond right away, she went on.  “Honestly, what would you think if your daughter started spending all her free time with a guy?”  She turned and gave me her characteristic poker-face.

I spent the next few moments squirming in my seat.  Finally, I sighed and snapped back, “You told her the truth, though.”

“I tried.”

“And she doesn’t believe you?”

Claudia laughed at me.  There’s nothing like the amused laugh of a teenage girl to sober one to hidden realities.  “You’re kidding me!  After all the lies I’ve told her.  I’ve used up all my credit with her.”

Angry but keeping it under control for the moment, I responded, “Didn’t you even try to defend me?”

“What and tell her about the séance?”

“Oh, so you’re covering for your friends from Dallas, just not me?”

Claudia rolled her eyes.  “What should I have told her?  That I’ve been schooling you in the intricacies of serial killers?  That we’re investigating a chain of murders that only has one victim?”

“Actually two.”

“Well,
now
it’s two. It wasn’t last week.”

“Didn’t you tell her about the cemetery?”

“I did.  She thinks I’m hiding something.”

“Hello!  You
are
!”

The librarian gave me “the shush,” followed by “the look.”

“Look, I don’t like being accused of doing something I didn’t do.”  I couldn’t seem to adjust to this new position I had been placed in.  It felt foreign to me.  “Is she really mad or are you just exaggerating a little?”

“Look, she’s delusional.  Just blow it off.  I do.”

I sat there frowning at the computer screen in front of me.

“Stop pouting, Paul.  We’ve got work to do.”  She handed over several printed pages of information on the two victims, Grace Fischer and Sadie Nayar, gathered from various sources.  “Like much of the stuff on the internet, some is rumor, speculation, or just outright crap.  Some are unverified facts.  But here’s what I know for sure,” she began.  “Grace Fischer was eighteen.  Tall with short dark brown hair.  Sadie Nayar was sixteen.  Short in height with long blonde hair.  Grace was from Renton and found in Abner.  How far is Renton from Abner?”

I pulled up a mapping website and gauged that Renton was roughly twenty-five miles from Abner.

“Sadie was from San Marcos and her body was found in Pine Marsh.”

I typed in the towns.  “Thirty-six miles.”

Claudia glanced over at the maps I had pulled up on screen.

“All these towns are within thirty or forty miles of each other.”

“So we have a commonality of distance.  What about the girls?  Do you see any common denominator?”

“Teenagers,” I offered with a shrug.  “They seem pretty different.”

“In appearance.  We know nothing about their private lives.”

I studied the printouts that Claudia gave me.  “Oh, that’s weird.”

“What?”

“Twelve letters in each girl’s name.”

Claudia snatched the printouts out of my hand before I could get all the words out.

“Five in the first.  Seven in the second,” she finished for me.  “Probably a coincidence but it’s just the sort of thing the Feds would have spotted.”  She gave me a smirk and slugged me on the arm a little harder than she really needed to.  “Now, if the letters in their middle names matched as well that would be more than chance.”

“Nothing on the web?”

“No, y’see that’s my whole point.  People don’t know each other’s middle names.  If they do, that only means those individuals somehow hold a special place in their lives.  Intimate knowledge implies intimate relationships, right?”  Claudia had already begun adding another paragraph to the document she was working on.  “If this pans out, the killer had a more than casual relationship with the victims beforehand.  We have to know where the girls used to hang out.  If there is a commonality, we may be able to determine how the killer met the victims.  First, we have to find out what these girl’s middle names are.  What are the odds your dad would just give us this info?”  When she got no response, she glanced over at me.

My mind was elsewhere.  I was busy recalling the moment in the cemetery on Thursday.  She had asked: “What would make you say such a bizarre thing, Paul Andrew Graves?”  What was it that I had said?  Now I couldn’t recall.  Strange.

“Paul?”

Suddenly I saw the house in my head.  On the heels of that image, I could hear that tune again out of the blue.

“The house that you and your friends went to for the séance; could you find it again if you had to?”

Faced with such an unexpected question, Claudia stared at me in confusion, her mind sat in neutral.  “What?” Then almost as if she wasn’t sure she said it the first time, she repeated, “What?”

“The house?”

“What does this have to do with the investigation?”

“I don’t know.”

I turned back to the computer, realizing that I’d misspoken.  She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to hear what I had decided to tell her.  But she was awaiting a response nonetheless.

I turned back to her and moved in conspiratorially.  She gave me a distrustful look.  “Do I seem unbalanced to you?”

“What are you talking about, you freak?”

“Psychosis.  That’s when you hear voices and stuff, right?  Like Berkowitz thinking that a Labrador retriever is talking to him because he’s a high demon, or like Herbert Mullin believing that he has to kill to prevent an earthquake from destroying California.”

Claudia gave me a confused smirk.  “Does this have to do with your constant humming?”

“Yes,” I sighed, relieved to get at least that bit out.

“Do you think you’re going crazy?”

I struggled with the question a moment before answering: “Maybe.”

“If you think you’re going crazy, you’re not.”  Claudia slapped my knee and turned back to her document.  “You want to get a song out of your head, do what I do.  Hum it out loud.”

I hummed as much of it as I could remember out loud for her.

“Sounds familiar, but odds are if it’s a song you like, I’ve never heard it before.”  I narrowed my eyes at her and she showed me her teeth.  “So, why do you think this song has anything to do with the house we had the séance in?”

I shrugged.  The well of awkward sharing had dried up.

“If you want, I can ask the DFW guys if they know any history on the place.”

I sighed.  “Do you realize that it takes more syllables and time to say D-F-double U than it does to actually say what those letters stand for?”

She, of course, ignored me, handing me a freshly-printed document.  “Give this to your father.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a list of questions we need for our investigation.”

I looked down at a few of the questions.  “‘Were the bodies posed?’  ‘Was there sexual penetration?’ I’m not going to ask my father these questions!  Do you know the lecture I’d get?”

“Well, you’ve got to be just a little sneaky about it,” Claudia growled.  She snatched the page back from me and began packing up her stuff.  “I can see you might lack the finesse for this kind of job.  I guess I’ll have to do it myself.  When do you think you dad will know something?”

“I believe they’re supposed to bring him down some information tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll be over tomorrow night for dinner.”

“I thought you were punished?”

“Yeah well, I’ll handle that part.”