Lovesick (24 page)

3

What was next? She had to plan carefully. Without a plan the only other option seemed uncontrollable, unending screaming. She had killed Shep Waters, shot him, left him lying on the floor of the Ramada Inn in a pool of his own blood. People would not understand that she was acting as God's instrument. They would hold her responsible. In a movie this is where she would start to run, take it on the lam. She imagined herself like Janet Leigh in
Psycho,
after she had taken the $40,000, tainted in her black slip, a shady lady. Wary. Watchful.

So she began to drive and drive and drive. On the way out of Greensboro, she stopped at a bank and withdrew most of the cash from her savings account. She told them her husband had suffered a stroke (she even had Carson's ring to show them as evidence). She told them he did not believe in using credit cards. That much was true. Carson had ingrained in her the merits of cash-only transactions, which is how she had paid the Ramada Inn. No credit card to trace her. Just her last name and an initial on the registration slip. Her address was a rural box number. And as usual, she had not remembered her license plate number so she had left that space blank. She wondered briefly if it all had not been a foreshadowing.
God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.
They let her withdraw the money with no questions. The teller had even patted her on the arm and said she would pray for her.

As she drove, she imagined herself poised high above the car watching as it zigzagged a cobweb of highways and back roads. When she stopped to sleep, she ignored the major chain motor inns along the highway and stayed only in the second best motels—lost, lonely places on the outskirts of town. In those places they did not request ID, and cash in advance was always appreciated by the weary desk clerk who she was sure pocketed the money and tore up the registration. Even so, she was careful not to give herself away and concocted exotic aliases for herself, names like Marion or Delores or Yvonne. None seemed to suit her fancy, though. Each day she felt Sandra fade away just a tiny bit more.

Time moved like sunlight through water. She was aware of it only when she would catch the glimpse of a clock tower on a bank or when the news would announce three o'clock or six o'clock. Music distracted her and she would turn the radio on only for brief intervals when she thought about it, wondering if there was some news of Shep. It was on the third or fourth day when she finally heard the report that a popular television evangelist had been found shot to death in a motel room. They gave no details. They did not mention her name.

That night, when she had stopped driving, she listened to the TV news at 6:00 and at 10:00 and again at 11:00. Each time the report was roughly the same. A bleached-out video showed the Ramada Inn now festooned with yellow police tape across the parking lot, then an interview with the manager, pictures of Shep preaching, a wedding photo of him with the wife. Police were not sure why he was at the motel. He had left Brother Toby that morning and said nothing about going there. Brother Toby thought Shep had headed back straightaway to his wife in Sumter. No, he did not think sex or drugs were involved. Shep Waters was a good man, he loved the Lord. He loved his wife. Whoever had done this was a crazy person. Maybe a Satanist trying to stop the work of God that could never be stopped.
Hallelujah!

She thought about Shep as he lay on the floor of the motel room, how he must have looked when they found him, his handsome face now pulp. She took out the note she had written to him, the note he had brought with him to the motel. Speckles of dark red flecked the pink paper like dried, crumbled rose petals. Clasping it like a sacred relic, she held it to her nose where she could still smell his aftershave impregnating the paper that she had scented with her own fragrance. The two smells intertwined—Old Spice meets L'Air du Temps.

That night she dreamed of Shep again. In the dream, he was hosting a show on the Home Shopping Network wearing a tight, shiny snakeskin suit; but when she looked a second time as he stepped through the TV screen, she couldn't tell if it was truly a suit or simply his flesh. She only managed to view him with a quick backward glance, over her shoulder as she ran away from him. Then in front of her loomed a mountain, tall and craggy, dense with vegetation. She was trying to climb it wearing only her undergarments and high heels, and she could hear the stones chip beneath her shoes with loud cracks like limbs of trees breaking off. She would slip and scrape her skin against the boulders as she tried to scurry up over them, inching her way toward the top. When she looked down to check her wounds she was amazed to see she wasn't bleeding. Instead, the rocks had merely loosened large translucent pieces of her flesh that lay scattered behind her like tissue paper.

What was at the top of the mountain she did not know. But she was desperate to get there, to reach it. She was acutely aware that the snake could hide in the small spaces between the rocks, ready to spring out at her at any time. And she knew she was making too much noise. It would only alert him to her—and there was no place to hide a weapon, dressed as she was. She felt absolutely vulnerable. She knew if she encountered the snake she would have to wrestle it, hold it in her hands and strangle it. Or it would kill her. Then as she pulled herself up over the top of one of the rocks, she saw it tangled and knotted with dozens, hundreds of other snakes, a kingdom of vipers. His kingdom. The snakes twisted and writhed, interlocked in a slow, solemn dance. She knew that they were mating, except as they copulated, the smaller snakes somehow merged, melded with the king. She watched helplessly as one by one they disappeared, as he grew larger and more hideous. Finally, when all the other snakes had been consumed, he rose up from the rock, towering over her, and struck.

When she woke, the room was deep with shadows. Sandra ripped open drawers, dumped her suitcase into the middle of the room, searching desperately for the snake, to make sure it wasn't there. When she could not find it, she read in her Bible, she prostrated herself on the carpet in prayer, she pulled at her hair in hope for relief. But there was none. What was the dream trying to tell her? She was afraid to go back to sleep—afraid that the snake might return. She kept a vigilant watch all night.

Then in the morning, before she left to begin driving, she saw another TV news report about Shep. They showed everything she had already seen, but this time they highlighted parts of the state with stars showing where Shep had been born, where he had been killed. They interviewed a male cousin who looked remotely like Shep and who still lived there in Shep's home town, Pison River Gap. High in the mountains where Shep had learned to love the Lord. Where Shep had told of old Brother Hiram who kept the snakes and brought them to church. Looking at the TV screen as the name blazed yellow on the emerald green map, Sandra knew that God was calling her there—to Pison River Gap.

 

It was early when she arrived. The morning sun had just cleared the crest of the highest ridge when she passed the Pison River Gap Chamber of Commerce welcome sign. A black wreath hung from the top of the sign.

Pison River Gap reminded Sandra of her own hometown, and the similarity saddened her. In her mind it seemed every town on her journey had become a composite, each main street virtually interchangeable with the next—a homogenized blend. Wal-Mart, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hardee's hamburgers, one, two, or three banks depending on the size and wealth of the population, the same rule governing both the number and denomination of churches. Though she had been driving for what felt like forever, where she had arrived seemed almost exactly like where she had left.

She stopped at the Huddle House for breakfast. She was too early for the regular coffee crowd, and the few construction workers who allowed themselves the luxury of a full breakfast instead of a drive-through sausage biscuit were just clearing out. She had the place almost to herself. Sandra chose a booth in the rear and rummaged for a paper to see if there was any more news. The local paper, a weekly, had run a special edition that was little more than a memorial to Shep.
The Asheville Citizen Times,
however, featured the story on the bottom half of the front page. The details were still vague, but the investigators said they were following a strong lead. They were not revealing anything till they could be more definite, but they felt they would certainly solve the case and bring the murderer to justice. Sandra's stomach tightened at the word.
Murderer.
Did that mean they thought it was a man? Wouldn't they have said
murderess
if they were looking for a woman? Or was murderer just generic enough to make her relax until the net had dropped over her and she was caught in its snare.

“It breaks my heart.” Sandra looked up to the waitress, Darlene: small framed, pink polyester, tight gray perm. Run-of-the-mill hash house. Sandra took her to be well past fifty. She wondered what sad story had brought this woman to this point in her life. She was too old to be slinging pancakes and eggs, how her feet must ache at the end of each day while her derelict husband drank up all the tips at home sitting on his redneck ass.

“Yes, it's tragic. I'll have the Number Three, eggs over hard, bacon crisp, white toast, and coffee.” She did not want to engage this Darlene in conversation.

“He was from here, you know.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

“He used to come in here when he was a boy. He worked at Dobson's Tire till he got the call to preach.” Sandra pictured Shep, sweaty in his coveralls, hands grimy, making an old engine purr. “I never was one for the religion myself. At least that type—you know, the Pentecostal. Church is fine for Sunday, but everything in moderation is my motto. What brings you to Pison River Gap?”

“I'm just passing through.”

Darlene's expression darkened quickly like a cloud crossing by the sun. “Pardon me for being rude, ma'am, but not many people just pass through Pison River Gap. You're usually either coming or leaving. You're not a reporter, are you?” she asked. “There's been people snooping around trying to get dirt on Shep—since they found him in a motel and him with a pregnant wife and everything. But I know he was a good boy—a good man.”

“I'm not a reporter,” Sandra replied. “I did know him, though. We had planned to work together—Shep had persuaded me to join his ministry full-time, before this happened.”

“Then why ain't you at the funeral? That's going to be tomorrow—down in Sumter. Half the town left here yesterday to get there.” “Yesterday” came out like “Yas-tiddy.” Darlene was mountain born and bred.

Sandra cut her off quickly. “Jesus said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.' My work is here.”

“And what work is that?” Darlene made no attempt to move. Sandra knew country folk well enough to understand what this meant. Darlene didn't trust her—she wanted an explanation. Sandra tried to think quickly, confabulate a story. She did not want to call undue attention to herself.

“The saddest thing that could come from this is that Shep's ministry would not continue, don't you agree?”

Darlene did not answer.

“I worked with Shep handling the finances for the ministry. As you can well imagine, there was quite a lot of money. It was a huge responsibility. Shep relied on me tremendously. Now, that money must be used in a good way.”

“Why not just give it to his wife and baby? That would make sense to me.”

“There is plenty of insurance for that, I can assure you. Shep provided well for his family, but we aren't allowed to give it to her anyway. The government is very strict—money collected for religious purposes can only be used for those purposes.” She saw by Darlene's expression that she had made an inroad, so she added, “That is covered under article twelve, section nineteen of the federal tax code.”

“Damn government.”

“Render unto Caesar,” said Sandra. “It is my job to make sure the money is distributed as Shep would have wanted.”

“You going to give it to a church, then?”

“In a way. We will set up a fund for families who need help here in Shep's hometown. He would have wanted that. We will call it the Shep Waters Memorial Fund. One of the churches will distribute it.”

“I hope you ain't planning to give it to the Methodists. They will just use it for a beautification project or something.” Sandra knew the idea of free money had hooked Darlene. “Who did you say could get hold of this fund? My daughter and her kids need help something terrible. Her littlest one, Edgar, has a short leg, so there is always money going for special shoes. . . .”

Sandra interrupted before she got the whole sorry tale. “We will make an announcement in the paper,” she said. “And I am sure your daughter would be just the kind of person we would want to help.”

“My husband has been out of work with a displaced hip. . . .”

“It will be in the paper.” Sandra smiled. “But for the moment, Darlene. I hope you don't mind if I call you by name. For the moment, we need to keep this pretty quiet. I don't want to call any attention to myself while I am here. I just want to get the ball rolling.”

“Sure, I understand.”

“But if you write down your last name and your daughter's name, I will pass them along so they get special attention.”

“Thank you, Mrs. . . .”

“Just call me Lucille. My last name is a tongue-twister, so everyone just calls me Lucille.” She liked the way it sounded. It fit. Then she added, “By the way, I need to get directions to Mt. Pisgah Holiness Tabernacle. That is where Shep said he attended church.”

“It's about twenty miles up the old Rosman highway. It's a ways off the main road. I can draw you a map if you want.”