Twisted Miracles (19 page)

She started out by talking about her depression—how she’d lost her job, gained weight, gotten into credit card debt. How she’d planned the jump, wanted to do it when there were people around. She talked about leaping over the edge, the instantaneous wave of regret, and how she’d felt God’s presence as the ground came up to meet her.

“I tell you,” she said, “I know some folks out there don’t believe in angels. But I felt the wings of an angel underneath me. I felt her lifting me up. And I knew then God had a plan for me. I knew I was meant to stay on this Earth, meant to spread his Word. He saved me even though I didn’t deserve saving.”

Everybody clapped, and Cindy smiled. I rolled my eyes.

“And that’s what he can do for each of you. Now, I’m not saying you should go and jump off a building—that’s a plumb bad idea.” Laughter. “And there’re plenty of folks tried that, and they haven’t been saved like I was. But I will say this. You gotta put your faith in the Lord. You gotta trust he’s gonna see you through. And he will. I’m telling you, he will.”

Cindy stepped back, as though she were finished, and everyone clapped and cheered. Then she offered to take questions.

I couldn’t resist.

I stepped into the aisle and waited while she answered questions like “Where do you go to church?” and “Do you think your story will help save atheists?” Then she got to me.

“Yes, you, the young lady in the white shirt?”

“Ms. Cepello,” I said, projecting my voice, shocked at how loud it sounded carrying over the crowd, “I wonder if you could tell us what your guardian angel looked like.”

Cindy paused for a moment, and I waited for her to lie. She didn’t.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see her. But I felt her presence—it was like she wasn’t just holding me up, she was in my head, too. Like she knew all my sins but wanted me to live anyway.” She stopped for a moment, and I knew what she was about to say because she was rehearsing it in her mind. Part of it was also, apparently, the title of one of her book chapters.

“People always ask me if she had wings or a halo,” Cindy said, “and I always tell them that’s not what matters. What matters is she had a heart.”

Everyone cheered. Cindy smiled right at me, and my face flushed with a mixture of emotions I couldn’t pin down. Even though I knew I was risking a mental overload, I opened my head up to sift through her memories.

I wanted her to be lying; I wanted her to be thinking about how much she was cashing in. That stuff was there, but I also found images of people coming up to her after her talks telling her she’d changed their lives. I could feel her elation, her joy in doing God’s work. I clenched my fists, hating her unembarrassed sincerity.

Cindy took a question from one of the perky-looking bible camp high-schoolers. I wanted to wait for her, to tell her she was a fraud, that God had nothing to do with saving her, that her “guardian angel” had spent five years wishing she could take back saving her life. Instead, I found myself walking out the side door to the parking lot.

Shane was waiting for me, leaning against his driver’s side door. I didn’t say anything; I just leaned next to him, our forearms touching. He laced his fingers through mine, and I didn’t try to stop him when he gently slipped into my thoughts and rode the memory of what I’d seen.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” I got into the car. People were starting to exit the assembly center, and I wanted to leave before they swarmed through the parking lot. I wasn’t sure I could bear hearing their thoughts. “She was a lot more sincere than I thought she’d be,” I said when Shane got into the driver’s seat.

He nodded. “It was real to her.”

“Yeah, well, it’d be easier if I could hate her.”

“Would it? Maybe you should let it be worth something.”

I looked at him sharply. “Andrew
died
because of me. Because of
her
. How is his life worth a couple of people feeling all warm and fuzzy after listening to her talk about something that didn’t even happen?” My voice had grown louder as I spoke, and I took a deep breath and recollected myself. “I can’t justify it.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying maybe it’s all right if some good comes from it.” He started the car. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

I blew out a deep breath. “I’m just so tired of being afraid of it. What if I lose control, just for a second, and somebody else dies?”

Shane ran a hand over my hair. “Cass, you know what you are now. You won’t lose control.”

“How can you be sure?” I was still looking down.

“I trust you.”

I barked out a laugh. “Yeah. I’m real trustworthy.”

He didn’t respond. His hand was resting on the back of my neck, warm and heavy. After a moment, he pulled out of the parking lot and drove us home.

When we got back to the B&B, everyone had gone to bed, but Lionel had left the back porch light on for us, as if we were kids coming back from a date. A cloud of insects fluttered around the globe, making flapping noises against the glass.

Mina’s bateau had been returned to the carport. She’d spent so much time in that boat, Janine had been able to locate it even though she hadn’t found Mina. Instead of following Shane into the house, I walked over to the carport and put my hands on the metal rim. Shane was halfway up the porch steps before he saw me.

“What is it?” When I didn’t answer, he came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Cass?”

“Remember how Janine found this?”

“Yeah, I was there.”

“No—I mean, she found this, instead of Mina.”

“Yeah...”

“Do you think it would work in reverse? Like if we had something of his, maybe Janine could find him?”

“If we had that, we wouldn’t need Janine. We don’t even know who he is.”

“No, but we know where he’s been.” I looked up at Shane and watched as he figured out what I meant.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll tell Lionel.”

* * *

An hour after breakfast the next morning, the three of us were on the riverbank where we’d found Mina. Shane had known the way without looking at a map, without even stopping to orient himself. I knew without asking that this wasn’t his first trip back. The collapsed shack was waterlogged after the rain we’d had, and when I kicked at the boards and shifted them, things scuttled away into the dark. I shuddered. Shane grabbed a stick and started marking off squares in the mud.

“Did the police find anything when they came through?” I asked.

Lionel shook his head. “Nothing. They spent a couple days out here, but I reckon they had some actual homicides to get to.”

“Maybe it’s for the best. If we can find something...”

“All right,” Shane said from a few yards away, standing up and throwing the stick aside. “Pick a spot.”

“Maybe we’ll luck out and find a button.”

“Maybe. I’ll start here.” He stood in the middle of a square, and Lionel and I claimed patches of our own.

If anything was left after all this time, it had long since sunk into the muck. The only way we’d find it, short of digging up the whole riverbank and sifting through it handful by handful, was to probe through the ground with our minds. I took a deep breath and reached into the earth at my feet.

It was an unpleasant sensation, like sticking your hand into one of those gelatin-based salads someone inevitably brings to the potluck. The ground was a bowl of sludge shot through with hard blobs—decaying parts of trees, the bones of animals. It was slow going, too—we had to feel our way bit by bit. The ground moved slightly under the pressure of our searching, almost as if it were breathing in little gasps.

We finished the set of squares nearest the shack and moved on to the next set, and then the next. After two hours, I was exhausted despite the buckets of coffee I’d had with breakfast, and I felt like I needed to wash the grime from my hands even though the only thing I’d touched was my temple to rub the tension away. We took half an hour to rest, perching in the boat and eating the sandwiches Bruce packed before we left. I drank a Coke for the caffeine even though I didn’t want it.

It was too cold out for reptiles to be sunning themselves, but a few egrets were standing in the shallows across the river from us, snapping intermittently at minnows. We’d already scared off most of the small rodents in the woods around us, but if I concentrated, I could feel them in the bushes not too far off. We finished eating and went back at it, but I knew I wasn’t the only one who was losing hope.

The sun was sinking, and I was almost ready to give up when my mental touch grazed against something too long and smooth to be natural. I held my breath and focused, broadening my awareness. The object was hard, and it had a finely grained texture, like wood. It could be a buried branch. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

I slid my mind down the length of the wood, feeling for the end, and then I hit a sharp, metal edge. A shovel.

“Hey!” I called. “I’ve got something!”

Lionel and Shane came running, but I held up my hands to keep them back.

“Hang on. I’m going to try and get it up.”

The mud was thick and heavy, and I’d have to shift a lot of it before I’d be able to raise the shovel. I closed my eyes and let my strength slip below the handle, trying to work it free. Then I felt, in the wet, sucking ground, the soggy shape of a shirt collar.
A
shirt collar?
Did the guy leave his clothes
,
too?
I followed the path of the fabric through the ground, wrapping my brain around the buttons, and then the thin chain of some sort of necklace tangled with the cloth. I traveled down the chain, feeling the strength of it. The pendant was two thin squares of metal. Dog tags. My eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
Why would he leave his dog tags?
Then I let my awareness widen—and felt the awful, yielding crush of decaying flesh.

I jerked back so fast I staggered. Shane lunged for me and caught me before I hit the ground.

“Oh, God.” Bile rose in my throat and I broke free and ran for the river, making it just in time to throw up my lunch into the water.

“Cass!” Shane was behind me in the next second, holding back my hair. “What is it?”

“Body,” I said. “There’s a body down there.”

I could feel his shock, but he didn’t show it. “Sit.” He pushed me down onto the rough metal side of the boat. “Are you okay?” When I nodded, his eyes went dark as he spoke to Lionel. They both focused on the ground where I’d been searching, even though Shane didn’t move his arm from around my shoulders. I looked away, but I couldn’t block out the wet sound of displaced mud hitting the ground.

So this was why Mina had been attacked—she’d run across someone burying a body. I remembered the blank, staring face of the man in her memory, the dog tags I’d noticed when I called up his image in San Francisco. It was clear now why no one had recognized him. He wasn’t a converter. He was a victim.

I held on to Shane’s arm as though it were the only strong branch in a flood. His eyes were black with concentration, but he still found a way to stroke the back of my neck with his thumb. I don’t know how long it took before Lionel’s footsteps on the leaves made me look up.

“We need to call the police,” he said.

Chapter Nineteen

Shane called in an anonymous tip from a pay phone on the lakefront. He’d broken off the end of the shovel handle to take to Janine, leaving the rest for the police to find. None of us had much hope it would help.

For dinner, Lionel made a big pot of chicken and dumplings. Comfort food. Shane and I sat at the kitchen table watching the news while he and Bruce worked. The body we’d found was the third story after a shooting downtown and an overturned lumber truck on I-10. Based on the dog tags, police had confirmed that the man was Jerry Campbell, a homeless veteran who’d been reported missing almost two months ago. They were asking for tips that might lead to a suspect, but not even the reporter seemed all that interested.

When dinner was ready, I couldn’t eat. Andrew’s face kept rising in my thoughts, and I remembered how I’d fled after realizing what I’d done. What if I’d killed him in some secluded place? Would I have gone this far to cover it up? I picked at my food for as long as I could, feeling the hairs on my neck prickle as Shane glanced at me and wondered if I was all right. Finally, I gave up pretending not to notice and left the table, going up to my bedroom.

I was up there awhile before I heard footsteps outside the door. There was a soft tap, but I didn’t answer, and a moment later Shane pushed the door open and came inside holding two steaming mugs. Coffee. He passed me one, and I wrapped my hands around the thick porcelain and sipped, feeling it warm me from the inside out.

“Thanks,” I said, my voice breaking. The coffee was too hot, but I gulped it anyway, the burn in my throat a needful penance. He’d added cream. I concentrated on the taste, mechanically drinking until my hands started shaking and Shane took the cup from me and, despite me trying to push him away, gathered me against his chest. I burst into tears.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

I clutched at the back of his shirt like I was drowning. He stayed steady, his hands on my back, letting me soak his shirt with tears until there was nothing left in me.

“Shane,” I said, wiping my eyes, wanting to thank him but not knowing how.

“Shh. It’s okay.”

He stroked my hair idly, almost like he wasn’t aware of it, and as I leaned against him I could hear his heartbeat and feel the movement of his ribcage as he breathed. He was so solid, so warm. Leaning against him like this was the safest feeling in the world, like none of my mistakes mattered. I put my hand against the flat muscles of his chest, watching it rise and fall and splaying my fingers out against him. He drew in a sharp breath, and his hand came up and covered mine.

“Cass...” His heartbeat sped up as he said my name, and I shifted, keeping my hand where it was and angling my face to meet his eyes. His pupils were dilated and his lips were parted. I remembered how they’d felt on my skin that night behind the garden shed—full and firm and hot.