The Miracle Stealer (4 page)

T
he morning after I had my run-in with the Scarecrow and Volpe up at St. Jude's, my mother drove Daniel over to the Abernathys' with a bowl of potato casserole to welcome the family home. When I told her my plans to head in to the
Gazetteer
, she said she could drop me off, even though it was out of her way. I told her I'd be fine on my own and walked into town alone. In the office, I locked the door behind me and kept the blinds down. Gayle typically didn't show up till around lunchtime, so I knew I'd have the only computer to myself for a few hours while I worked on a special project.

The Scarecrow's talk of healers and charlatans inspired me, and online I tracked down a half dozen “miracle workers” who'd been exposed as fakes. There was a woman from Kansas with bleeding palms, an Iowa farmer struck six times by lightning, a preacher who claimed his kiss could heal. That last guy gets the gold medal for being both a fraud and, quite clearly, a class AAA pervert. I cranked out a rough draft of an article summarizing their experiences, focusing on how each one was eventually exposed as a quack. The stigmata woman was charging a hundred dollars per “consultation” until somebody caught her taking a razor to her hands, and it turns out that preacher had seven wives in as many states. I wanted to show the
Gazetteer
readers the facts behind the hysteria that surrounds a supposed miracle worker.

Of course, everybody in town knew I had some experience as a debunker of miraculous acts. My infamous senior-year journalism project at Paradise High School was an exposé of the plagues that supposedly convinced the pharaoh to let Moses and the Israelites leave Egypt. The frogs, the locusts, the water turned to blood. But I located all kinds of scientific studies that suggested that these were in fact naturally occurring phenomena, many linked directly to the eruption of the Santorini Volcano in the Aegean Sea. Once its ash infected the Nile, the water changed color and the fish died from lack of oxygen. Their rotting corpses drove the frogs up onto land and brought the horde of flies, which carried disease that killed the youngest children, since their immune systems were the least developed. It was a chain reaction of crazy coincidences. Taken as a whole, it seemed like divine intervention. This was exactly what had happened when Daniel got pulled out of the well, but now that chain reaction was starting again, and I had to stop it before it got out of hand.

Why, I kept wondering, did all these people believe in the first place—in Daniel's power or Irene McGinley's curse or a Kansas woman with bleeding palms? It was one thing in the time of Moses, sure, but these days, with cell phones and satellite dishes, I couldn't understand why the world clung to such superstitious crap.

I was just printing up a revision of my article when Gayle came in through the back door of the
Gazetteer
office holding two bags from Victorio's.

“Got you the special,” she said, depositing one white bag on the desk next to me. “Meatball sandwich and a bag of chips.” This struck me as odd, since I usually didn't come in on Saturdays, and I expected Gayle to be surprised I was there. But she just shuffled to the big table by the front window and opened the shades. “You going vampire on me or something?” she asked. She got started on her own lunch, a salad piled high with tomatoes. Gayle's weight was something she'd been struggling with since I met her. She'd tried pills, patches, hypnosis, even adopted a stray dog to get her to walk every morning, but she couldn't lose a pound. Every day I worked at the
Gazetteer
, she bought me lunch. She never once asked me what I wanted, and over time I realized she was buying me the food she really felt like eating.

I unraveled the aluminum foil and took a few bites from my sandwich, trying to work up the courage to show Gayle my article. The first sentence read, “Human history has been a forward progression from ignorance to illumination.” Ever since I had done a high school internship with Gayle, she and I got along pretty well, but she wasn't one for favors when it came to using the paper for personal reasons.

She took a swig of her flavored bottled water. “Saw Jeff Cedars driving with his mom up by the Carlsons' this morning.”

I didn't make any response. Of course with all that was going on, I'd thought about Jeff plenty, but he had his life and I had mine.

“Wasn't he taking summer session?”

I shrugged, kept my eyes on the computer screen. “Maybe it's over.”

“So you haven't talked to him?”

“No, Gayle. I haven't.” Now I tried to give her the hard look that meant
drop the subject
.

Even though Jeff's a couple years older than me, we hung out all through middle school, just friends who liked to hike the trails deep into the woods or paddle around the lake on the metal canoes his dad rented out, before he upgraded to Jet Skis during the big boom. In high school, when Jeff started wrestling and I started track, we ran together every day before class. I found myself passing the day by marking when I'd see him again. Over time, our feelings grew beyond a simple word like
friendship
, though we never talked about dating or used goofy terms like
girlfriend
or
boyfriend
. Halfway through my freshman year, we started holding hands on those mountain walks, and our morning jogs were sometimes interrupted.

Those days, Jeff would be the first person I talked to about any problems. But after Daniel's rescue, we'd drifted apart. In all the excitement, with Daniel in the hospital, with all those folks with the cameras in our driveway, it wasn't hard to find excuses for not getting together. When he was leaving for college and came to say good-bye, we hugged but didn't kiss. Not even on the cheek. His first year at Penn State, he sent me a couple letters about his classes and life in the dorms, and we ran into each other at a New Year's party. That summer, he might wave if he drove by our dock on a Jet Ski, and I might wave back. After his sophomore year, he stayed at Penn State for the summer, so I was surprised to hear he was coming back home this June. I wondered now if he'd heard about the Abernathy baby. I wondered if he thought about Daniel or about me.

Gayle pushed her salad around with the plastic fork. “I'll bet you some sorority gal has got ahold of him.”

Clearly my eye contact wasn't backing her off the topic. “Free country,” I said. I turned back to my article. A moment later, something whacked into the side of my head. The plastic lid of Gayle's salad container wobbled like a Frisbee on the ground next to me.

“Hey,” she said. “Truce. I didn't mean any harm by my poking. I just always figured you two might have some kind of reunion. You were sweet together.”

“Well,” I said. “The past is the past.”

Gayle nodded her head to show she agreed, then changed subjects. “How's the meatball?”

“Not enough sauce,” I told her.

She started talking about some of the work we had to get done, mostly layout on ads, a couple obits, and polishing silly articles like “Ten New Uses for Your Old Socks.” Truth be told, Gayle didn't need me all that much. Once my internship was officially over, I just kept hanging around. I'd deferred my track scholarship to Lock Haven for a year so I could stick close and keep an eye on Daniel, and I had no luck finding other work in a dying town like Paradise. Every now and then Gayle would give me an envelope with a few twenties in it. I guess she realized I wasn't listening to her agenda for the afternoon, because finally she just said, “Hey, where's your head?”

I shifted in the chair, put down my sandwich, and said, “How many years of law school did you finish?”

“Two years of pre-law,” she said. “How come?”

“What do you know about restraining orders?”

She pulled her chair over to mine and set her salad on her lap. “You better tell me what this is about.”

I gave Gayle the short version of my encounter with the Scarecrow, and from the look on her face, I could tell she believed me more than my mother did. Not that that was hard. She lifted her chin and rubbed at her jowly neck. “I can't see how a judge could issue a restraining order against a stranger. You don't even know this guy's name. On top of all that, the last place you saw him was forty-five miles away.”

What she said made sense, but it was good just to have someone else share my concern. “He talked about the UCP like he's been there,” I said. “I've got to do something.”

“Maybe go talk to Bundower,” she offered. “Be on the safe side.”

I'd thought about the Chief myself but figured that he, like my mother, would just blow me off. “The problem is bigger than just this one guy,” I said. I picked up the article I'd spent all morning on and handed it to her.

Gayle wiped a napkin across her mouth. “What you got?”

I watched her eyes scan back and forth across the lines, narrow and tight as if she was thinking hard. Before she got through the opening paragraphs, though, her head was already shaking side to side. “This won't do you a damn bit of good.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're trying to reason folks out of a position that's got nothing to do with reason. These things are matters of faith. People believe with their hearts, Anderson, not their heads. All this story will do is make you seem pissy. Nobody'll change their mind.”

I knew instantly that what she was saying was right, but I didn't want to admit it. “Print it and let's find out.”

She handed the story back to me. “Nah. Can't do that. Won't do it. Besides the fact that it's a dumbass idea you're too thick-headed to see, the whole town knows you work here, and publishing this would make us seem biased. Journalists are supposed to stay objective.”

“Don't lecture me, Gayle. This ain't the
New York Times
.”

She put the story down and aimed that white fork up at me, stared at me along it like a rifle. “No, it's the
Five Mountains Gazetteer
, and it's my paper. When you're the publisher and editor, you can decide what goes into it.”

I looked away from her, out the window at Roosevelt Road. A school bus painted white rumbled by, with a blue cross and words I couldn't read scrawled along the side like graffiti. A bus like that had no place in our town, none that would make me happy at least. I scratched at my forehead.

Gayle said, “Listen, since you're already all riled up, may as well tell you that we'll be running a story on the baby.”

“The baby,” I repeated. “Miracle?”

“It's news, Anderson. And that's our business, remember? Even with Paradise Days just around the corner, all anybody's talking about is that baby girl and Daniel. You should hear what they're saying over at Vic's. Cooper Reynolds swears his migraines are gone. Scotty Mitchell's stutter has cleared up. And Sally Guth is late.”

“Late for what?”

“Her period. She and Jim have been trying for two years to conceive.”

I could feel my jaw sticking out. “And somehow Daniel is responsible for this? How? You know it's all just coincidence. C'mon, Gayle, you can't believe any of this miracle bullshit.”

“What I believe doesn't matter. But a lot of the people who buy papers see these things as signs and wonders. I have an obligation.”

“Guess I just didn't realize how many of your subscribers were royal nutjobs.”

She spiked her fork into the salad and huffed. “Don't be like this. You know how things are. Besides, Sylvia's got some cute shots of that baby, and I already talked to your mom.”

Now those two bags from Victorio's made sense. She'd been to the Abernathys' and found out I was coming here. I said, “So you already interviewed my mother for that story?”

Defiant, Gayle nodded her head. “We talked.”

“And you're going to run one of Volpe's pictures of Daniel and that baby?”

“It's a human interest story. I'm in the business of selling papers.”

“Unbelievable. This'll only make everything worse. You don't even care about my side of the story.”

“I know your side of it, Anderson. Everybody south of Scranton knows your side of it. Don't you get it? Nobody wants to hear it. These people want to believe.”

“Volpe and the crazies do,” I said. Before I really knew what I was doing, I was walking toward the front door. When I snapped it open, the little bell chimed stupidly on top.

Gayle shoved her chair back and followed me out onto the sidewalk. “Come back in here and finish your lunch. We got work to do.”

I looked up and down the street, wondering about the crazy beat-up bus, but it was gone. “No,” I told Gayle. “I think maybe I'll take a few sick days. I need time to sort this thing out.”

People across the road were looking now, and those walking past ducked their heads like they weren't listening. I knew word would spread quickly that Anderson Grant had had another one of her hysterical fits, but I didn't care.

Gayle stepped over close to me, took my arm in her hand, and said quietly, “You're always jumping into things without thinking them through. Be careful, Andi. I don't want you getting hurt.”

Looking back, Gayle was damn near a prophet, but I didn't heed her warning. Instead I started the long walk home, knowing that I'd probably just lost a valuable ally. If I was going to save Daniel, I couldn't do it alone.

 

Hiding behind a thick pine tree, resting my face into the hard bark, I watched Jeff Cedars for almost half an hour. He was cleaning off his father's Jet Skis one by one, sitting on each seat as the tiny crafts bobbed on the surface of the lake, scrubbing their colorful bodies with a soapy yellow sponge that he dunked now and then into a blue bucket above him on the dock. The Jet Skis were dirty from just sitting around in storage, but with Paradise Days nearing, Mr. Cedars needed them to be ready for rental. I decided that this must have been what brought Jeff home from college—his parents' call to come help.