Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  I tried to get up, but couldn’t. I just laid there, watching as the second man joined the first and disappeared into the trees on the other side. A minute later, I heard a boat motor crank, grow louder as it passed by close to us, and then fade into the distance.

  “Are you all right?” Kathryn asked.

  I nodded slowly, but even that hurt.

  “You recognize either of them?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “What could be in Tammy’s diary to make them do that?”

  “Good question. Wish I’d’ve finished it.”

  “Sorry I freaked out,” she said.

  “You did fine.”

  “Remind me to tell you sometime why I did.”

  “Not now?” I asked, sitting up.

  “Not now,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  We stood, still staring toward the unseen waterway where they had escaped.

  “I can’t believe they have the diary,” she said. “You think they’re the ones who ransacked your room?”

  I shook my head. “My guess is they were his or her backup. When the ransacking didn’t work, he or she called them in, but that could have revealed far more to us than the diary will to them.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Two ways. First, who here would even know how to hire guys like that? But more importantly, the way they did it. Coming in by boat, attacking us, and escaping by boat down the waterway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” I said, “the killer could have done it the exact same way.”

  27

  “So you think maybe the killer came and left by boat?” Steve asked.

  “I think it’s a possibility. We need to check with the landings to see if anyone remembers someone launching late last night.”

  Steve nodded. “We also need to check with the houses and camps along the waterway. Boat may not have been launched because it was already in the water.”

  I nodded. “It could’ve been stolen or borrowed or the killer could be the owner.”

  Kathryn, Steve, and I were standing at the far edge of the clearing looking down into the Intracoastal in the last light of the day. The waterway resembled a small river, only too straight, too square, too symmetrical for the meanderings of Mother Earth.

  “You realize if you had turned the diary over to me like you should have, we’d still have it,” he said.

  “Yeah, but then we wouldn’t have this clue.”

  “This clue? I’d much rather––”

  “I’m kidding. Sorry I didn’t turn it over to you sooner.”

  “It was left for him,” Kathryn said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “it’s evidence.”

  “He’s right,” I told her. “I should have.”

  In the darkening day, the water in the Intracoastal looked black, its surface flat as slate.

  “What were you thinking?” he asked.

  “That I’d read it first.”

  “Well, what’d it say?”

  “I had just started it.”

  He shook his head. “I could arrest you for obstruction.”

  I nodded.

  “Were you ever going to give it to me?”

  “The moment I finished it,” I said.

  “I thought you were out of it after last night?”

  “I did say that, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t count. I didn’t believe you.”

  “Steve, he saved my life,” Kathryn said.

  “You gonna arrest me?” I asked.

  “Our search of the abbey didn’t turn up anything and I should have the prelim in the morning.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you’re gonna work this thing, you might as well work it with me.”

  “Do I get a badge and a gun?”

  “No,” he said. “You get bossed around and the privilege of making me look good.”

  “In other words,” I said, “my dream job.”

  28

  “There’s a beautiful woman at the abbey looking for you,” Sister Chris said as Kathryn and I emerged from the path near the cabins.

  Long after Steve had left, we had lingered in the woods together.

  “Of course there is,” Kathryn said. “Happens everywhere he goes.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, it’s a real problem. Actually came here to hide from them.”

  “Will you just toss me aside now,” Kathryn said, “after all we’ve shared?”

  “What all have y’all shared?” Chris asked.

  “Depends on who it is,” I said.

  “Who is it?” Kathryn asked Chris.

  “I think she said her name was Anna.”

  “Uh oh,” Kathryn said.

  “What ‘uh oh’?” Chris asked.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  Chris’s eyes widened at my tone. “In the chapel.”

  “It’s a sign,” Kathryn said.

  As I began to walk away, she started singing, “He’s going to the chapel and he’s gonna get married.”

  Turning, but continuing to walk, I said, “You’re not a nice person.”

  “You have no idea,” she said. “But you’re gonna find out.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said, adding to Chris, “Pray for her, would you?”

  Growing up, Anna had been my older sister Nancy’s best friend. In high school, when our attraction began to blossom, the two years that separated us seemed insurmountable. After graduation when Nancy fled our family, Anna left for college. Four years passed before I saw her again and, by that time, she was married.

  Several years later, following the breakup of my life and the first breakup of my marriage, I came home, began rebuilding, and not coincidentally became the chaplain at the same prison where Anna was a classification officer. Since then we had been a big part of each other’s lives, until I had told her that if I were going to make my marriage work a second time, I would need to see less of her.

  My marriage had not worked the second time despite my best efforts, and I was now without Susan or Anna.

  The last time I had seen Anna, she told me she was leaving the institution for a job in Central Office. Only a few months had passed, but it seemed a lot longer.

  The chapel was dim and cold, the creaks of the pews and beams above them the only sounds. I looked around to make sure we were alone, and though I saw no one, I got the feeling we weren’t. Was this place and all the talk of the supernatural making me more sensitive to an unseen realm, or just more imaginative? And then it occurred to me that the two could be far closer than most people think. Maybe it’s primarily through creativity and the use of the imagination that we access the spiritual.

  Anna was on the far end of the back pew to my right, kneeling in prayer, backlit by the votive candles behind her. She looked like a dark-haired angel, and I was sure I had seen something like this before in my dreams.

  Seeming to sense my presence, she turned her head and looked up at me, her humble posture and tentative expression childlike in its beauty, and it broke my heart.

  When she smiled, I walked along the pew toward her. Standing, she took a few steps toward me, and hesitantly we embraced.

  She felt familiar in the best possible way and I held the embrace longer than I should have, but she didn’t pull away until I did.

  “It’s good to see you,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Without responding, she eased down onto the pew and I sat beside her.

  “I really am,” I said.

  She shrugged. “You had to try to save your marriage. Besides, maybe it is best we don’t see each other.”

  As if continuing where we had left off, I could tell we were both still vulnerable, raw from emotional exposure and the pain we had inflicted upon one another.

  “I was dead wrong,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “And yet here you are,” I said, “and you’re back at PCI where you kn
ow we’ll see each other every day.”

  “It doesn’t take a lot of insight to see that my words and actions don’t match,” she said. “Doesn’t mean they always won’t.”

  I looked up at the large wood-carved crucifix hanging above the altar and wondered why life had to hurt so much. Art, religion, and philosophy had tried to explain suffering for as long as they had existed, nearly as long as there had been suffering, but ultimately every explanation fell short. The best they could do was offer companionship, the consolation, such as it was, that none of us were alone in our suffering. To me, that’s what the mystery of Christ’s crucifixion did most profoundly—vividly conveyed God’s intimate understanding of our pain and his mysterious presence within it.

  “I can’t help the way I feel about you,” she said, “that unquantifiable thing we share.”

  “Any more than I can you.”

  “But...”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure what I was going to say.”

  I didn’t know what to say either, and we both fell silent a moment.

  “Merrill said to tell you to get your narrow white ass out of the woods and back to the prison.”

  “You think my ass is narrow?” I asked.

  She smiled.

  “I love you, Anna,” I said. “I love to make you smile. I love being with you—even if it hurts.”

  “It’s just not fair to Chris,” she said. “My heart is so unfaithful.”

  Just hearing her husband’s name on her tongue made me feel guilty and ashamed, yet, in a warped way, it also felt like she was betraying me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m asking you to do something I wasn’t willing to do. It’s unfair of me and...”

  “And?” she asked.

  “And I’m not about to stop doing it,” I said. “I can’t help but feel like I have the prior claim—that I’m the one being cheated on.”

  “I’m not cheating on you, John,” she said, her tone taking on an edge. “I’m not cheating on anyone. You left me, remember? You got out of Pottersville the moment you could. You didn’t ask me to go with you to Atlanta. You didn’t even say good-bye.”

  Just that quickly she had changed, and there was nothing I could say or do now to change her back. I had seen her like this many times before. Her strong will and mental discipline made her as stubborn as anyone I had ever met.

  “I thought I was coming right back. I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve heard,” she said. “You know what, I’m not gonna feel bad for you or guilty anymore. You left me—twice.” She shook her head. “That’s all I have to do—just think about that. That gives me enough anger to see more clearly.”

  She stood up abruptly. “I’ve got to go,” she said. She grabbed a file folder from the pew beside her and handed it to me. “I shouldn’t’ve come. I could’ve just told you this on the phone.”

  “It wouldn’t’ve hurt as much on the phone.”

  She shook her head and frowned at me. “I’m talking about this,” she said, nodding toward the folder. “It’s copies of Keith Richie’s file. After you read it, you’ll probably want to move him to the top of your suspect list.”

  29

  The pounding I did on Kathryn’s door matched the heavy thump of my heart.

  “I knew you’d be back,” she said with a self-satisfied smile. “They always come back.”

  I pushed her in, closed the door behind me, and began to kiss her, spinning her around and pressing her against the door. She kissed me back, though not as passionately as I was kissing her.

  “Anna get you going?” she asked, her words gasps.

  “Yes,” I said breathlessly. “That okay?”

  “Depends,” she said.

  “She made me angry and aroused.”

  We kissed some more, our hands beginning to explore each other’s bodies.

  “On what?” I asked.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Depends on what?”

  “If you’re with me right now or pretending I’m her,” she said.

  I stopped. “I’m with you. I’m not pretending anything, but this isn’t right.”

  “Feels right,” she said. “God, I can’t believe I just said that.”

  I took a step back. “I really am sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I find you very attractive and I guess I was just out of control enough to do something about it.”

  “Hey,” she said, pulling me toward her. “I like it. I don’t mind if you’re in love with her as long as I’m the one you’re making love to. Did I really just say that making love part out loud? I’m really not very good at this.”

  She then kissed me hard on the mouth and I kissed back. We did that for a while, both of us feeling the other’s bodies through our clothes, until finally we began to take them off.

  After a few minutes of awkward but fun fumbling, our clothes were in a pile by the door and we were walking toward her bed.

  Her body was full, round, and soft, and I liked the way it moved when she walked. Her small white belly sloped outward as if showing the first signs of motherhood, and I rubbed it gently.

  The cabin was cold and before I even touched her large white breasts, her nipples were erect. On the bed, she cupped my head with her hand and pulled me to them, but before I lost all control, I stopped.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” I asked.

  She looked down at her nakedness. “Don’t get much more sure than this.”

  “I feel like I’m cheating,” I said.

  “You can only cheat on a married woman if you’re the one who’s married to her,” she said with a wry smile. “Now, shut up. Get out of your head. And fuck me.”

  I did, and then a little later I did again.

  Easing out of the bed where Kathryn was still sleeping, I dressed and carried the stack of exorcism books over in front of the fireplace. I had only taken Tammy’s journal when Kathryn and I had walked down to the clearing, leaving the other books on the swing. With all that had happened—the journal being stolen, the whack on the back of the head, and seeing Anna—I had forgotten about them. Fortunately, Kathryn had not. She had retrieved them while I was meeting with Anna. After adding a log to the fire, I opened the next book, Exorcism Nation by Howard Reese, and began to read.

  Exorcism Nation is an exploration of popular culture’s influence on exorcism in America. More social study than theological treatise, the book takes a journalistic approach to the proliferation of exorcisms in contemporary American culture.

  According to Reese, exorcism is more readily available today in the United States than at any other time in history. And though Jesus regularly performed exorcisms and the Roman Catholic Church has always conceded the possibility of demonic possession, it’s clear that the practice of exorcism in contemporary American culture has been more deeply influenced by the entertainment industry than anything else. During the mid-seventies, after decades of neglect and near invisibility, exorcism suddenly became all the rage. This not coincidentally followed the release of the novel and film The Exorcist.

  While conducting research for his book, Reese witnessed over sixty exorcisms, yet was still unable to say for sure if he believed in demonic possession, though he was quick to add that several people he met during the process claimed to have experienced significant improvement in their personal lives as a result of undergoing an exorcism. After reading Reese’s accounts, I realized that what he had witnessed were not Catholic exorcisms but Pentecostal deliverances, which are different enough to be noteworthy. Not only is there a difference in theology—Catholicism has developed its over two thousand years, Pentecostalism just over one hundred—but whereas the Catholic Church is extremely slow to even entertain the possibility that an individual might be possessed, and this only after the person has undergone extensive psychiatric evaluation, the Pentecostal faith is quick to pronounce someone possessed and as a general rule d
oesn’t trust psychiatry or psychology.

  Refuting the claim that exorcisms and deliverances are harmless rituals performed by superstitious simpletons, Reese chronicles some of the fatalities that have resulted from them. In 1995, a group of overzealous Pentecostal ministers from a sect in the San Francisco Bay Area pummeled a woman to death while trying to drive out her demons. In 1997, a Korean Christian woman was stomped to death by a deacon and two missionaries operating out of a church in Glendale, California. The three men had gotten carried away trying to expel a demon they believed was lodged in the woman’s chest. A five-year-old Bronx girl died after her mother and grandmother forced her to drink a lethal cocktail containing ammonia, vinegar, and olive oil and then bound and gagged her with duct tape. The two women claimed that they were merely trying to poison a demon that had inhabited the little girl several days earlier.

  In 1998, Charity Miranda, a seventeen-year-old cheerleader, spent her final hours undergoing an exorcism at the hands of her mother, Vivian, and her sister, Serena, as her other sister, Elizabeth looked on, at their home in Sayville, Long Island. After Vivian put her mouth to Charity’s and told her to blow the demon into her and she would try to kill it, she concluded that it didn’t work, that it wasn’t Charity at all but the demon who had taken over, and tried to destroy the demon by smothering the teenager with pillows and a plastic bag.

  Reese concludes that the prevalence of exorcism in modern America is the result of many forces, including traditional religious symbolism, current notions of psycho-spiritual healing, and perhaps especially pop culture iconography.

  I thought back to the other exorcism book I had read earlier in the afternoon. It was as different from this one as two books on the same subject could be, yet I found them both persuasive. After reading them, I knew a lot more about the modern phenomenon of exorcism in contemporary culture, but the increased information had done nothing to change the mixture of faith and skepticism that seemed my norm these days, nor demystify the events of last night. Perhaps nothing would, but I wasn’t about to give up.