Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 09 (26 page)

“Seraphina was an angel,” Malachi was saying, his expression befitting a bereaved widower. “She was the light of my life, and I was proud to see her light shine on others as well. Her childhood was filled with hardship and misfortune. When I first met her, she was sitting alone in a bus station, with all her possessions in one small suitcase. But even though her clothes were dirty and her shoes were worn, I could see the purity in her heart. I sat beside her and pressed what money I had into her limp hand. She looked at me with a smile so radiant that it brought tears to my eyes. You remember what the apostle Paul wrote to the Hebrews, don’t you? ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ “

“Are there any leads on her murder?” asked one of the reporters.

“I am here to bring redemption to skeptics and disbelievers, and prosperity to struggling Christians. So urgent is my mission that I cannot allow worldly matters to distract me. I know that Seraphina would want me to continue despite my heartache.”

“So you don’t know anything,” the reporter said as he closed his notebook. His colleagues did the same, while the cameraman turned and panned the tent.

I ducked back inside and waited until they were gone. When I emerged, Malachi was still on the porch, watching them drive away and looking pleased with himself.

“That went well, didn’t it?” he said. “If we make the six o’clock news, we’ll have a full house again tonight.”

“If I don’t close you down, that is.”

“Oh, dear, Miss Hanks, do you remain perturbed? I instructed Chastity to answer all your questions in a forthright manner. She has nothing to hide. We’re here only to celebrate the glories of God by bringing wealth and happiness to the citizens of Stump County.” Grinning, he rubbed his hands together. “This very night more than a thousand of them will lift up their eyes and thank Jesus for healing healing the lame and making the blind to see.”

“Let’s talk about that,” I said. “These miracles of yours are beginning to border on quackery. Unless you’ve got a medical degree tucked away in your Bible, you’d better stick to selling seeds. I already told you about the woman who was convinced she could drive without her glasses and had an accident. You told a local girl that she no longer has diabetes. You’d better pray nothing bad happens to her, because if it does, I’m holding you responsible, Mr. Hope.”

“The responsibility lies with a higher power, and you may have a hard time convicting Jesus of a felony. Now I think I’d better prepare for the service. Will we have the honor of your company again tonight?”

“I’m not finished yet. There’s the small matter of the note you gave me yesterday. I guess someone must have performed a miracle on it, too. Jesus changed water into wine. Did he also change the wording on the note?”

I enjoyed watching his expression erode. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I gave you the note that was delivered to me. Have you bothered to test the typewriter in Norma Kay’s office to see if it was used?”

“It was typed on Norma Kay’s typewriter, but it’s not what she wrote. She overheard a conversation in the locker room during which Chastity asked one of the local girls about abortion possibilities. Norma Kay was real touchy about that, as you must have known from the letters she wrote about the unpleasantness in Topeka ten years ago. You remember, don’t you?”

“I receive thousands of letters, and I don’t read every one. I certainly don’t commit them to memory.”

“Let me refresh you,” I said obligingly. “While she was the coach there, one of her best players came to her and admitted she was pregnant. The girl went on to say if she couldn’t get an abortion, she’d be kicked out of school and packed away to an aunt in South Dakota. No more star center, no more conference championships. Norma Kay gave the girl the name of a backalley butcher, who botched the job. Poor, ambitious Norma Kay came close to being arrested but was allowed to resign and leave town. From what I could gather from her letters, you told her to abandon the Catholic church because she would never be forgiven, and instead she could become a part of your cable congregation.”

He crossed his arms and looked down at me. “Should I have told her to throw herself off a bridge? I welcome saints and sinners alike.”

I decided it would be inappropriate to punch out his lights (blessed is the cop that endureth temptation—or something like that). “Norma Kay wasn’t about to allow Chastity to get an abortion, legal or otherwise. The note she wrote demanded that you come to the gym to assure her that you would take steps to prevent it. You were too scared not to go, weren’t you?”

“Scared?” he said with a caustic laugh.

“Norma Kay must have threatened to take the story to the media. The newspapers might not have carried anything, but the tabloids would have loved it—and trust me on this, those guys are ruthless. They’d gladly take the latest talking-potato story off the cover in order to have a doctored photo of you and Seraphina on either side of a fifteen-year-old fallen angel: ‘Evangelist Dictates Abortion.’ That’d put a dent in the ol’ aluminum bucket, wouldn’t it?”

Malachi came down the steps and turned on all the charm he could (it wasn’t much). “Okay, Norma Kay and I discussed all this, and I swore Chastity would marry the culpable party and carry the baby to full term. After we prayed, she agreed not to tell anyone else. I had no reason to harm her. She was perfectly satisfied when I left.”

“What about the note?”

“When I went back to the gym, I found her as I described earlier. I assumed all the old memories had returned with such painful clarity that she committed suicide. There was no reason to drag Chastity into it, so before I called you, I typed the second note. But as God is my witness, I did not strangle Norma Kay—and I would never even think of hurting Seraphina. She was my wife, my partner, my comfort in times of adversity. She believed in my miracles.”

“Excuse me,” I inserted. “She was the one monitoring the microphones and selecting the patsies each night. Are you saying she actually believed the workman from the crew was truly blind, or that the woman she saw walk into the tent was in need of a wheelchair until you begged Jesus for a cure?”

“She always said, ‘What difference does it make if you’re a fake—and still get the job done?’ People feel better because they have something to cling to, if only the memory of a crowd screaming ecstatically as they walked across the stage. Jesus was there in their hearts. Some of them will experience some improvement because they believe they’re better. A touch of my hand, a burst of faith, a surge of adrenaline, something. I cure people, Miss Hanks, and I bring them into the spiritual fold. I know you think it’s callous of me not to cancel the revival, but you simply do not appreciate the enormity of my calling. I am God’s chosen instrument to bring enlightenment to a world riddled with wickedness. I am here to save humanity.”

I stepped back and eyed him with trepidation, not at all sure how sincere he was. Brother Verber was as transparent as a pane of glass, and Mrs. Jim Bob’s motives weren’t much more opaque. Hell, I wasn’t even sure how sincere Burt Lancaster had been. Malachi Hope, however, seemed to have no problem characterizing himself as a modern-day Messiah.

Did he also consider himself above the law?

—==(O)==—

“The lucky shot made the score twenty-two to fifteen,” Bur said as saliva bubbled out the corners of his mouth, mingling with the latest gulp of beer. “Amos wanted to run the two-one-two with the wing overload, but they came out of the quarter in a straight man-to-man. I yelled at the asshole playing point to run the one-three-one pass and cut, but the asshole thought he could take his man.”

“Did he?” murmured Ruby Bee. “How the hell could he! The point guard wasn’t more than five-ten, and the guy guarding him was six-five if he was an inch.”

“My goodness …”

Bur paused, stroking the shotgun as if it were a cat curled in his lap. Ruby Bee felt a flicker of optimism that he was going to doze off. Having owned a bar all these years, she knew about beer drinkers. Bur’d guzzled a half dozen, most likely on an empty stomach.

She was no longer interested in finding clues in dresser drawers and heartshaped boxes, or in duping Bur into spilling secrets about Norma Kay’s problems in Topeka. Getting out of there alive was all that mattered. She leaned forward, stealthily putting out her hand, and whispered, “Bur, are you awake?”

His head jerked upright. “The asshole fires a fifteen-footer, but the guy guarding him slaps the ball into the stands like he was swatting a fly.”

Ruby Bee put her hand back on the arm of the sofa. “Then what happened, Bur?” She could only hope that Estelle’s snores and her own question had prevented him from hearing the back door open.

—==(O)==—

“Where’s Kevin?” Jim Bob asked a checker. “I need him to mop up a mess in the second aisle. Some shithead knocked over a bottle of ammonia, and the stench is driving away customers.”

“He’s not here. While you were gone, Mrs. Jim Bob came in and told Kevin to come with her. He tried to argue with her, but she was”—the checker searched for a tactful word—“persistent.”

“Come with her where?”

“Gee, she didn’t say. Kevin was real unhappy, but he didn’t have any choice but to leave his mop and follow her out to her car. That was an hour ago.”

“I don’t pay you to stand around staring at your wristwatch,” Jim Bob said. “Go clean up the ammonia.” He went into his office, shut the door, and sat down to scratch his head and try to figure out if Mrs. Jim Bob was plum off her rocker or up to something illegal. Either one might result in her being locked up, which was okay with him as long as the lawyer’s bill wasn’t skyhigh. He damn well didn’t want to waste his windfall from the land sale on some legal leech.

Not when he could lie on a beach, a drink in his hand, while some sweet young thing rubbed suntan oil on his back. Later, they’d watch the sunset from the balcony of his suite, and after that …

Jim Bob forced himself out of the reverie. With his luck, Mrs. Jim Bob would come storming into the office and catch him with a bulge in his britches. He didn’t think he could blame it on the ammonia in the second aisle.

—==(O)==—

“That looks better,” the clerk lied, smiling at the fat lady preening in front of the mirror. “It’s not quite so snug around your hips. You know what would look real cute with that? A silk scarf, draped over your shoulder. Here, let me put it on for you, Wilma.”

“Thank you, dear. I was thinking those earrings would go with the ensemble.”

The clerk was thinking that the only thing that would save the ensemble was a paper bag with eyeholes, but she said, “Aren’t these perfect!” As she put them on the customer, she couldn’t help noticing the tufts of hair coming out of both ears and a few whiskers on the chin. As soon as she could, she took a break in the back room and made a few calls to see if she could find another job, preferably one in which she worked alone in a small, confined room. No windows, no doors—and no customers. Ever.

Estelle’s station wagon was still in Bur’s driveway as I drove back down to County 102. She and Ruby Bee were making one heck of an extended condolence call, I thought with a resigned sigh. Instead of heading toward town, I turned right, splashed over the low-water bridge, and parked near the logging road that led to where Seraphina’s Mercedes had been discovered.

I was not on a Sherlockian quest for clues. The car had been towed to Farberville to be examined for fingerprints, stray hairs, buttons, radioactive dust bunnies, blackmail notes, cryptic chemicals, and all those wonderfully exotic things that are found only in fiction. Seraphina’s body was at the state lab in Little Rock. The official autopsy would not turn up a South American tree frog poison or a needle mark hidden in her scalp. She’d been strangled. In her case, there’d been no crude attempt to fake a suicide.

I went to the edge of Boone Creek and began to pitch rocks into the water, causing blue jays in the trees to squawk and turtles on a sunlit log to plop into the water.

Cory Jenks’s story could be true: He’d gone to Emmet, returned home at 12:05 with a case of bootlegged beer, and stayed inside the remainder of the night. Unbeknownst to him, his truck had been possessed by Satan and taken itself for a drive. Minor problem. Malachi Hope’s story could be true: He’d gone to the gym and reasoned with Norma Kay, gone to the RV, and gone back to the gym at 1:30. His explanation of the faked note was somewhat credible.

Chastity’s story could be true: She’d gone to the Dairee DeeLishus and was there when Seraphina pulled up. They’d argued in the parking lot, argued in the road, and argued in the pasture before Chastity had gone inside the RV, leaving her sister in the Mercedes.

Joey’s story, although less complex, could be true: He’d been fired, taken a ride on his motorcycle, toured the county, and returned to the tent after he’d calmed down.

Thomas Fratelleon’s downright simplistic story could be true: He spoke to Malachi at 12:05 and then went to bed.

I tried to think if I was missing anyone. Bur Grapper was a suspect in a minimal way. He could have driven to the gym and waited until Malachi left, then killed Norma Kay in a jealous rage. Had Seraphina entered the gym at the worst possible moment? If Bur had strangled her, he’d have to have driven her car to the creek and walked all the way back to the high school to retrieve his truck. He’d barely have made it home by dawn.

A black snake slithered across the gravel bar in search of a toasty rock or a plump, reckless rodent. Finding neither, it disappeared into the weeds. I recognized it as a water moccasin, content to peacefully go about its business—but aggressive and dangerous when provoked. As a kid, I’d provoked plenty of them on a summer day, just to watch my friends scramble out of the water, shrieking shrieking and cussing. All it took was a long stick and a steady hand.

—==(O)==—

“The next year I lost that point guard,” Bur said, perilously near tears. He wiped his cheeks with a disgustingly crusty handkerchief, then tucked it underneath the cushion and took off like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. “Him and his uncle went deer hunting over by Pineville. The next thing I hear, the kid’s paralyzed on account of a goddamn bullet in his spine. He was the one I was telling you about who was shooting fifty-eight percent from the floor and eighty-seven percent from the line. What am I supposed to do? Amos thinks we can bring up this reedy kid off the sophomore bench, despite the fact the kid’s flunking everything, including study hall. His eligibility’s a joke. I know we’re gonna face Greenland the week after Thanksgiving. I ask you—what am I supposed to do?”