Magdalene (60 page)

“He...thinks God abandoned him in his most
desperate hour.”

Kenard laughed bitterly, his scarred lip
curling, making him look absolutely satanic. “Yeah. I know
exactly
how that feels.” Then he rose and headed toward the
door. Stopped there. Looked down at the carpet. “I will say this,”
he finally said. “I like going to church now, with Giselle and my
only living child. He’s my fifth. I don’t know if you knew
that.”

And again, my gut clenched with the thought
of losing my children, and I nodded. I reached behind me and found
the tissue box.

“Anyway,” he continued, “Giselle, Dunc, and
I, we’re a family, sitting there in the pew in a familiar place,
and it feels...right. Like I finally have what I wanted all along,
like God’s okay with who I am and always was. Like what happened to
me and my family was to correct a bad decision I made when I was
too confused to know better, to release my kids from a life of
misery and give me the woman I longed for all the years I spent
married to a monster.

“It’s taken years to get here. I look at
Giselle and wonder what
good
I did to deserve her, and for
whatever reason—conditioning or wishful thinking or truth—sometimes
I’m tempted to think maybe it’s because I was faithful all those
years. But even if that’s not true, I still had to go through what
I did to be worthy of a woman like Giselle, that strength and
confidence. A refiner’s fire.” He paused. “I have third- and
fourth-degree burns over forty percent of my body, and I’ll tell
you something. If I had to walk through that fire again to have
her, I would.”

I gulped.

“G’night, Cassie.”

“Night,” I whispered, but he was gone.

* * * * *

The First Day of the
Week

April 24, 2011

Mitch was gone when I awakened Sunday
morning. Eight-thirty, and Mitch’s side of the bed was cold. I got
up and wrapped myself in a thick robe to go find him.

“Yo, Cass,” Sebastian called when I walked
into the kitchen to find him, Eilis, Knox, and Nigel at the table
eating, playing poker, but no Mitch. “Where’s Sleeping Beauty?”

“Gone,” I murmured, confused. I turned,
looked back into the foyer, from where I’d come. Started back out
and stopped at the library doors. Opened them. Nothing but the
Monopoly game we’d left last night, awaiting our return. No
Mitch.

“Mitch!” I shouted up the stairs, my hands
cupped around my mouth.

“His car’s gone,” Trevor called across the
house, from the area of the garage door.

“Well, he has to come back,” Sebastian said.
“He lives here.”

“House phone rang early this morning,” Nigel
said through a yawn. “Don’t know if that means anything.”

With that, they all went back to what they’d
been doing, but I was too worried about Mitch to care. Where could
he have gone? It wasn’t like him to leave me no note, no voice
mail, no indication.

And he was in a dangerous frame of mind.

I picked up the phone and hit the caller ID,
and my heart caught in my throat.

Oh,
no
.

Not with the way he’d cracked on Friday.

I bolted up the stairs and threw on clothes
that didn’t match. I ran back down the stairs and through the
kitchen, out the garage door, ignoring everyone. I got in my car
and zipped down the driveway, then out onto the highway. It took me
half the time to get to church that it usually did.

There.

Mitch’s Bugatti, in its usual spot.

I parked— Far away because the parking lot
was, as usual, bursting.

But I sprinted into the building and shocked
the hell out of all the people I knew who were all dressed in
Sunday best and present as if the world hadn’t blown up.

They probably didn’t know anyway.

I shot down the hallway, dodging a dozen
people, to the stake president’s office and blew in there, too.

“Where is he?” I demanded of the first man
who happened across my path.

“Uh, Sister Hollander...”

“Where is he?” I shouted, then saw Sally
Bevan step out of President Petersen’s office, her nose and eyes
red, her furious husband shoving her in front of him, his hand
wrapped tight around her arm.

“
Why?!
” I cried at her, reduced to
begging.

“Because she can’t be happy with what she’s
got,” Dan snarled at her. She hiccuped and wiped her nose on the
back of her arm.

She wouldn’t look at me.

“He’s gone.” I looked up when I heard
Petersen’s low voice, whose expression I couldn’t decipher.

“You ignorant bastard,” I whispered, staring
at him.

He looked down and scuffed his toe on the
carpet. “We all make mistakes, Cassie,” he muttered. “He’s—was—my
friend. I’m not proud of it.”

But I didn’t stay to listen to his
platitudes about whatever mistakes Mitch had supposedly made, up to
and including—
especially
—marrying me. I burst out a door
opposite the one I’d entered and saw Mitch, dressed in jeans and a
rugby shirt, walking to his car.

No.

Swaggering.

One hand in his pocket and the other shaking
his car keys out.

“Mitch!”

He stopped and turned. Stared at me.

“Cassandra, what—?”

But I threw myself in his arms before he
could finish, and I held on for dear life because who knew his
state of mind at the moment, a chip on his shoulder, driving his
death trap.

That thing had to go.

I rained kisses all over his face because he
was there, awake, not roaring, not collapsing, not—

“Cassandra,” he sighed, wrapped his arms
around me and let me kiss him.

“What are you doing here?” I murmured
between kisses. “Why did you come here?”

With a sigh, he disentangled me and put me
on my feet only so far as to catch my hand and pull me into his
body. His arm draped over my shoulders, he held me close as we
strolled toward his car. “I woke up about three, four this morning
and felt like...everything was going to be all right. I didn’t know
what day it was, but you were there sleeping and the house was
quiet. I went downstairs and saw the rental cars outside, so I knew
I had family around me. Looked in the library. Window’s boarded up,
rug’s gone, glass is all cleaned out of the bookcases, poker’s back
where it belongs, and the books aren’t burnt.” His mouth twitched.
“I don’t know, I wandered around for a little bit, got some
noodles. Like nothing had happened, nothing had changed. Like
I
hadn’t changed. Like I hadn’t...torn my library apart or,
uh—” He sucked in a deep breath. “What I said, what I did to you—”
Released it in a whoosh.

I looked up at him, saw his chagrin, the
flush on his face. He could barely look at me. “Don’t you dare
apologize to me for that, Mitch Hollander. I
loved
it.”

“But—”

“Don’t. Just promise me more of it.”

He sighed and snuggled me closer as we
walked. We got to his car and he leaned back against the door and
framed me with his legs and arms to look at me.

“Anyway, I felt just fine. Went back to bed
and dozed for a while. Phone rings, it’s Petersen, says he wants to
come over and talk.”

“And you said?”

“I told him he wasn’t welcome in my home,
that I didn’t want it defiled by whatever evil he’d let deceive
him.”

“Oh,
snap
.”

He chuckled. “He said he wanted to talk to
me and could I meet him somewhere and, well, this was as good a
place as any, I guess.”

“Okay, so?”

He pursed his lips.

Took another deep breath.

“I’ve been fully reinstated.”

My mouth dropped open. “Just like that?”

“Yeah, surprised me, too. What
should
have happened was, if we ever could’ve proven Greg set me up, then
I would request another bishop’s court to revisit the new
information. Obviously, that would’ve taken time.”

“But...?”

“Friday— The General Authorities who came
out for the proceedings— I thought they were there to grill me,
catch me out in a lie—they’re litigators, after all—and validate
the decision ecclesiastically and legally. So did everybody else.
We went through the whole thing again, but they never spoke. Just
watched. The decision was made. I was out.”

“Okay...?”

“Apparently, after I left, they asked
everyone else to stay. Asked Greg a few questions and kept asking
him questions. It pretty much turned into a cross-examination.”

“My God. They knew.”

“Had him pegged right off the bat, the same
way you did. You know he doesn’t bother to hide anything when he’s
confronted with someone who understands what he is, so when he
figured out he couldn’t win, he crowed about what gullible fools
they all were, then left. The General Authorities nullified the
decision and told Petersen to start excommunication procedures on
Greg and mend fences with me as soon as possible. Then they hopped
the next flight back to Salt Lake.”

“That happened Friday?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s taken Petersen this long to tell
you?”

“He had to work up the nerve.
He’s...ashamed. Humiliated. Grieving a long friendship.”

“And so this all happened before Sally
confessed to her false confession?”

He looked at me sharply. “Sally? What—”

“Uh...” I pointed helplessly toward the
building. “She— When I went in Petersen’s office, she was in the
process of being dragged out by her husband.”

“Well, no,” he said, obviously confused. “If
she didn’t recant until this morning, she wasn’t part of the
equation.”

“And the woman you didn’t know?”

He snorted. “A call girl.”

Of course. “Have you heard anything about
Inez?”

His lip curled. “I don’t want to talk about
Inez until I’ve cooled off.”

Oh. Huh. Maybe this wasn’t the best time to
break the news. Maybe he just didn’t need to know for a while.
Never
would be good, too. I switched gears.

“You’ll be glad to know that while you were
sleeping, we figured out how to prove Greg’s a thief.”

“Really?” he asked, a pleased grin growing
on his face. God, I loved that grin.

“Yes. Now, it’ll take a while to get him
behind bars, but you know,
I
am not a court of law and there
is no due process with me.”

He smirked. “I really don’t condone
revenge.”

“But when I do it, it turns you on.”

“Yes. It’s a character flaw. I’ll have to
repent.”

“Okay, so
the Lord
came through for
you.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Are you still bishop?”

Mitch chuckled. “In name only. You know,
there are easier ways to get released from the bishopric, but at
this point, I’ll take what I can get. Let’s go to the
Caribbean.”

* * * * *

Ascension

August 2011

The tropical sun felt good on my skin, lying
here on the beach of a private island near Antigua.

“I like these,” Mitch muttered as he flicked
the rubies that dangled from my nipples.

“Really,” I mumbled, loath to speak. “Your
depraved friend Giselle suggested them.”

“Oh.”

“Why so disappointed?”

“Not disappointed. Surprised. That it wasn’t
your idea.”

I opened one eye and looked at him, sunning
next to me, his eyes closed. I wondered if I had ever seen a finer
specimen of male.

He wore plain navy trunks, as I wouldn’t
allow him to risk damaging such an important part of his body by
getting it sunburned, depriving me while it healed. I didn’t expose
the most fun part of my body to the sun, either. I wore a red
bikini bottom.

He liked me in red.

“When I was in the business, the only
genital jewelry I could find was of the piercing kind, and you may
have noticed that isn’t on the list of perversions I like.”

“You expect me to know what’s missing?”

“Good point. I’ll write those down, too, and
see if any of that appeals to you. You like your cock rings well
enough.”

“Beats Viagra.”

“Don’t play the age card. You love it.”

He grinned.

We settled back into the day, our only
purpose to relax together in relative silence: no family, no
friends, no bosses, no jobs, no ward members, no church
responsibilities.

Two lovers on a solitary romantic
getaway.

Neither of us had had a vacation in more
than twenty years—or at least not that we remembered.

Me with Gordon, Rivington, the girls—always
frantically trying to keep my life together, then setting out on my
course of revenge after the courts emancipated me from my
marriage.

Mitch with college and a family and church
responsibilities, then Mina’s declining health, three growing
children, the bishopric, frantically trying to hold the entire
manufacturing sector together by absorbing Jep Industries.

There would have been no point to vacations.
Neither of us knew how to relax enough to have left our worries
behind and would’ve brought them with us wherever we went.

It had taken a while to wrap our lives up
enough to get out from under that problem. Today, on the first day
of our open-ended vacation, all we wanted to do was get used to
being
on
vacation.

The warmth, the glare of the white sand and
brilliant blue water-and-sky, the sounds of the sea and the
rustling palm fronds lulled me back into a doze. I sensed Mitch
adjusting the umbrella to cast us in shade.

Smart man.

“How are you doing?” I murmured later from
my half doze, then reached for his hand, big and callused and oh so
talented.

“Couldn’t be better,” he returned as
sleepily as I felt.

He knew what I’d asked.

Louise had let the fact of Inez’s suicide
slip accidentally (on purpose), and had prodded me until I’d
recited the note to him, too.