Ritual Sins (14 page)

She sat upright suddenly, shoving the pillows away from her. Her mind was playing tricks on her, making things seem even more terrifying than they were.

There was a thick file on her desk, full of clippings and photocopies of articles on Luke Bardell and the Foundation of Being. She knew everything the public knew, which wasn’t much beyond PR-spun stories, and now she knew far too much about his private persona. She picked up the file, wanting nothing more than to burn it, burn him, out of her life, out of her consciousness. She dumped it in the wastebasket, only to have a piece of paper flutter onto the floor, facedown.

She stared at it. She could tell by the paper that it was something she’d printed out from the Internet. There was no way it could lead her in any useful direction. She should just ignore it, not even look at it, dump it in the trash with the other stuff and carry it straight out to the incinerator. She needed to make a symbolic gesture, to admit not defeat, but her willingness to let go. If she wanted to survive.

But the piece of paper lay on her smoke-gray
carpet, and she knew its contents would determine the path her life would take.

“Ridiculous,” she said out loud, her voice sounding strange and distorted in the empty apartment. “You’ve been with those new age flakes for too long. Pick the damned piece of paper up and throw it out.”

She picked the paper up, turned it over, and read it, knowing she was sealing her doom.

It was a simple chronology of Luke Bardell’s known life. Born December 8, 1960, in Coffin’s Grove, Alabama. Mother died when he was eight, father committed suicide when he was sixteen. Moved to Chicago in 1976, convicted of manslaughter in 1980, served four years in Joliet Prison.

Coffin’s Grove. The name stuck in her head like a message. A message she was at a loss to understand.

Just simple facts. With so many questions behind them. How had his mother died? What had made his father commit suicide eight years later? Had Luke been the one to find him?

Rachel had been relentless in her quest for information. She’d read the court transcripts of his trial, every single piece of public record. But she’d never thought about his past. Or anything about a little town in Alabama named Coffin’s Grove. Not until an act of clumsiness brought it back.

She pulled the file out of the wastebasket and
dumped it on her desk. She shoved her hair out of her face—it was getting too long, she needed it trimmed, but she didn’t have time to bother with such mundane irritations. She had to find out everything she could about Coffin’s Grove, if she was going to do battle with the devil himself.

It was hot, miserably steaming hot when Rachel stepped off the airplane in Mobile one week later. She was used to the humidity of a New York summer, but it was nothing compared to the liquid air that surrounded her, filling her lungs and clamping a tight fist around her heart.

It took too damned long to get the anonymous white rental car, too long to orient herself. She hadn’t been able to touch the airline food, and the various greasy restaurants at the airport hadn’t looked any more promising.

She was losing weight, something she couldn’t afford to do. She didn’t want to be rail-thin—too many men found skinniness attractive. She was feeling light-headed, from the heat, from lack of food, from tension, but she didn’t want to stop long enough to do anything about it.

She wanted to make Coffin’s Grove by nightfall.

The road atlas offered only minimal help as she sped along the heat-baked highways, the narrow, secondary roads, back into the overgrown forests that looked like they belonged in swamp country.
The air conditioner was blasting cold air against her face, and she switched on the radio, hoping for distraction.

“The devil came down to Georgia,” sang a rough voice, and Rachel almost drove off the road in her haste to turn the damned thing off. She was spooked enough as it was.

She was in Alabama, not Georgia, she reminded herself. And Luke Bardell wasn’t the devil, even if he seemed almost otherworldly in his power. Besides, he didn’t go down to Georgia, he came up from Alabama.

She shook her head with self-disgust. The last week had taken her obsession and deepened it, until she wasn’t sensible. She wasn’t eating, or sleeping, driven with her need to destroy the man who had taken everything from her.

For some reason she no longer thought about the money he’d conned out of her mother. She didn’t even think about Stella, lost to her decades ago. Never hers to begin with.

Luke Bardell had possessed her mind. If she could destroy him, expose him as the charlatan and manipulative con man that he was, then she could finally find peace.

Couldn’t she?

The roads turned to gravel, the trees loomed higher and darker overhead, and she couldn’t rid herself of the notion that she was traveling to
some dark, disenchanted place, like a twisted Brigadoon. A town of Spanish moss and rotting houses, wasted lives and poverty.

The reality of it was enough to force a bitter laugh from her. The sign was freshly painted, with neat black lettering.
COFFIN’S GROVE, FOUNDED
1822.
POPULATION
730.
HOME OF LUKE BARDELL
. She couldn’t believe it. He hardly seemed to qualify as a hometown hero.

The town was picture perfect. Neat white houses, neat trimmed lawns. Pretty little gardens, white picket fences, everything polite and prosperous. There were no blowsy roses or luscious peonies, only small, tightly budded flowers in pale, subdued colors. Life here was restrained and well bred, Rachel thought, pulling the car up in front of the Village Cafe.

It was no illusion that she was being watched. Coffin’s Grove wasn’t a mecca for visitors, and the customers in the tiny little coffee shop stared at her as if she were a Martian who’d just landed.

She ordered coffee and toast. She needed the caffeine, and she thought toast would be one thing she could manage to keep down. The middle-aged waitress who’d taken her order wasn’t the one who brought her food. Rachel watched with interest as an older man intercepted her, taking the tray and heading for her table.

“Mind if I join you?” he said pleasantly enough.

Rachel studied him. He was in his sixties, a friendly, slightly pompous-looking man who was, she decided, absolutely harmless. If she had to make a guess, she’d peg him as some sort of town official. The mayor, perhaps, or the chief of police.

“All right,” she said, managing to sound gracious.

“You’re not from around here,” he said, lowering his impressive bulk into the protesting chair across from her. “I know, because I’ve lived here all my life, and my daddy and my granddaddy before me, all the way back to the War of Insurrection. My name’s Leroy Peltner, and I’m the mayor of Coffin’s Grove.”

“Do you personally welcome all your visitors, Mr. Peltner?” Rachel murmured, sipping at her coffee. It was weak and oily, a nasty combination, but she drank it anyway, eyeing the plate of butter-drenched white bread with distaste.

“Call me Leroy. I’d tell you my daddy was Mr. Peltner, but no one called him that either. We’re a neighborly town, Miss …” He waited for her to supply her name.

“Rachel Connery,” she said dutifully.

He blinked. The reaction was so slight she might have been imagining it. After all, there was no reason for her name to mean anything to this pompous old man.

“We’re a neighborly town, Rachel,” he said again. “We like to welcome everyone who comes by. Besides, we’re not exactly a tourist center. Our only claim to fame is long gone.”

That easy, she thought. Or was it too easy?

“What’s your claim to fame?” She couldn’t bring herself to call him Leroy.

“Didn’t you see our sign? Luke Bardell comes from these parts.”

“Who’s Luke Bardell?” She was a good liar, but she didn’t think she fooled him. He’d reacted to her name, though why he should have was beyond her.

“Heck, I thought everyone knew who Luke Bardell was. Don’t you ever read
People
magazine?”

“Not if I can help it,” she muttered.

“He’s founded some newfangled kind of religion, kind of like Scientology without the movie stars. Has some fancy place out in the Southwest, but he was born right here in Coffin’s Grove, and his momma and grandma before him.”

“What about his father?”

Leroy Peltner hadn’t been elected mayor on the basis of his poker face or his diplomatic abilities. He was two seconds too late in hiding his reaction.

“Well, him too,” he said, taking out a handkerchief and mopping his brow. The cafe was air-conditioned to the point of chilliness, but Leroy Peltner was sweating up a storm. “Course, what with the tragedy we don’t like to talk about Jackson
Bardell. Hell, it’s water over the dam, excuse my French, and we like to concentrate on happier things around here.”

“Tragedy?”

He ignored her question. “What brings you to Coffin’s Grove, Miss Connery? Or is it Mrs.?”

“It’s Ms.,” she said, knowing it was what he expected from a nosy Yankee bitch.

“And you know perfectly well who Luke Bardell is, don’t you, honey?” He leaned across the table, too close, and put his hand on hers.

She snatched it away so quickly she knocked over a glass of water. “What makes you think that?”

“Because no one ever comes to this godforsaken burg unless they’re curious. So let’s just cut the horseshit, lady. What exactly are you, a reporter or a cop?”

She watched the water pool on the gold-flecked Formica and start a path toward the edge of the table. “Why should I be either one?”

“Don’t toy with me, honey. If you want my help, if you want to know about Luke Bardell, you just come right out and ask. We don’t have any secrets around here.” He looked over his shoulder at the group of people huddled by the counter, and raised his voice. “Do we, boys?”

“No, sirree.” “Nope.” “Not a one.” They were like a Greek chorus.

Rachel plastered a smile on her face. She could manage a certain amount of charm if the situation called for it. Leroy Peltner knew her name, but he didn’t know why she was here, of that she was reasonably certain.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m writing a book about the Foundation of Being.”

“No shit?” Leroy’s Southern gentleman politeness had vanished. “You gonna try to dig up some dirt on old Luke?”

“Is there any to dig up?”

He eyed her speculatively. “There’s always dirt, sugar. What’s it worth to you?”

“That depends on the quality of your dirt.”

Leroy leaned across the table, his voice low and insinuating. “Honey, I got the finest dirt around.”

“Leroy!” The voice was sharp and clear, and poor Leroy jumped a mile, sweat beading up on his wrinkled red forehead.

“Sheriff Coltrane,” he said, his nervous stammer almost indiscernible. “I was just welcoming this young lady to our fair town. She’s writing a book on our Luke.”

Sheriff Coltrane wasn’t much of an improvement over Leroy Peltner. He had to be somewhere in his mid-fifties, a weathered face hidden by dark glasses and the hat he had pulled low, and his bulky compact body looked to be made
of pure, ornery muscle. Something told Rachel he wasn’t going to be as easy to play as Leroy.

“You go back to work, Leroy. Eva Lou has some papers you need to sign.”

“Hell, Coltrane, I don’t need …” His whine tapered off as the sheriff turned his sunglassed eyes to him. “Pleasure meetin’ you, Ms. Connery. I hope we get a chance to talk real soon.”

Leroy practically scurried from the cafe, and the other patrons were now studiously ignoring the newcomer. Apparently Sheriff Coltrane put the fear of God into just about everyone.

“Don’t count on it,” he said.

Rachel blinked. “Don’t count on what?”

“On seeing Leroy anytime in the near future. The old fool shoots off his mouth—it makes him feel important, but you can’t believe a word he says. Just last month he was doing his damnedest to get some TV crew down here looking for the Goatsucker. Two years ago it was flying saucers. Leroy’s got a hell of an imagination and a need to be the center of attention.”

“Then why is he the mayor?”

Sheriff Coltrane’s smile was tight and cold. “No one else would take the job. And we’re loyal around here. ’Cept for Leroy when he gets carried away by a pretty face. No one’s got anything to tell you about Luke Bardell that you don’t already know. If I were you I’d get back in that
rental car and head on out of town before it gets dark.”

“It’s still summer, Sheriff. It doesn’t get dark all that early.”

“No one’s gonna help you,” he said again.

“Are you trying to interfere with the freedom of the press, Sheriff?”

“Don’t give me that ACLU crap. And you aren’t the press. You’re just some woman who claims to be a writer. You got any credentials on you?”

“No.”

His smile was downright nasty. “Now I don’t know what you’ve heard about small Southern towns and their sheriffs, but we follow the letter of the law. I can suggest you leave town, but I’m not about to make you go. I’m just warning you that you’re wasting your time.”

“It’s my time to waste.”

“So it is. But the nearest motel is twenty-seven miles away in Gaithersburg, and these roads are mighty dark at night.”

“I saw a sign for a bed and breakfast when I drove in.”

He had tobacco-stained teeth that showed when he grinned. “That’s run by Esther Blessing, and I don’t think she’s gonna take you in.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s Jackson Bardell’s mama. And she’s never forgiven Luke.”

“Forgiven him for what?”

“Who knows? This is a small town, Miss Connery. I expect she’s already heard that you’re here, and why. If you walk up her front steps you might get a blast of buckshot.”

“Cut it out, Sheriff!” The weary-looking waitress seemed to be the only person in the cafe brave enough to stand up to him. “Esther’s more interested in money than revenge, and besides, there’s nothing she’d like better than to fill this young lady’s head with lies about Luke.”

“Who says they’d be lies?” someone piped up.

“You shut up, Horace Wildeen, or I’ll shut you up,” Sheriff Coltrane said without looking back at him. He continued to stare at Rachel through those mirrored sunglasses, and she was just as glad she couldn’t see his eyes. She knew just what they’d look like—cold and flat like a reptile’s. “It’s up to you, miss,” he said. “I’m not about to mess with your civil rights.” He said the phrase as if it was an obscenity. “It’ll be your funeral.”