“I’ll check back later,” she said.
Aloa piloted the Honda motorcycle south through the fog to a spot where land met bay. She needed to clear her head of thoughts of ghosts and a man who’d willed himself dead, and nature was the perfect cleanser.
She parked the bike behind a row of old shipping containers that had been transformed into clandestine businesses—an auto detailer, a welding shop—and ducked through a chained gate toward an expanse of salt marsh unvisited by tourists and yuppies. The fog had lifted slightly and she sat on a graying log, tugging her watch cap more tightly over her ears and tucking her hands into the sleeves of her jacket.
The air was scented with salt and tidal mud. The soil was dark and dotted with clumps of tall grass. She spotted a great blue heron on the hunt and stilled. The bird moved through the shallows with the grace and patience of a tai chi master, stepping one slender leg forward, pausing midstride, and finally setting its foot back into the water. It waited long seconds before taking another slow-motion step. Then another.
Aloa knew she didn’t have the heron’s patience when it came to the hunt, but she had its persistence. She’d never had a problem spending hours, days, and weeks following the twisting trail to truth. Even when the path led her to a dead end, she simply turned around and tried another way. Dogged obsession was the only redeeming quality of needing to be in control. She thought about this case. Was she on the right path or had she wandered astray?
She watched the heron as the cold seeped through her jacket. She wound Erik’s yellow scarf more tightly around her neck and thought she wouldn’t leave until the bird either found its prey or flew away. Ten minutes later, the heron finally struck, its sharp bill thrusting lightning-fast into the water and coming up with a small silvery fish.
Aloa stood.
“There you go,” she said.
Aloa was chilled but clearheaded as she left the shoreline. She sent the faithful old Honda along side roads in an attempt to avoid as much traffic as she could. A short time later, she was at the old yellow storefront where Ruiz had supposedly attended his recovery meetings. The front windows of the shop were covered in butcher paper, but a small sign taped inside the window listed the schedule for meetings and the name of the program: HOPE RECOVERY SYSTEMS.
Could you conjure hope when none was there?
She tried the door. It opened to a fluorescent-lit space filled with two dozen folding chairs and a restroom, where a man in jeans and a plaid shirt was bent over a toilet with a plunger in his hands.
“Meeting doesn’t start for another thirty minutes,” he said, not looking up.
“Actually, I’m trying to find someone,” Aloa said. She waited for him to turn in her direction, then approached him with what she called her church-lady smile: warm with a touch of innocence. She held up her phone. “Would you happen to know this man?”
The man set down the plunger and studied the photo of Ruiz that Steve Porter had emailed. Aloa saw recognition in the man’s eyes along with something that told her that, like the manager of the halfway house, he wasn’t a member of Pablo Ruiz’s fan club.
“’Fraid I can’t help,” he said.
“You haven’t seen this guy?”
“Not saying one way or the other. Anyway, I’m not supposed to talk about what goes on here,” he said.
Aloa did a quick calculation. “You must like your job.”
The man looked at the overflowing toilet and clucked his tongue. “Thirteen bucks an hour for opening and closing, making coffee, security, plunging toilets, and cleaning up puke. They’ve got me working six a.m. to eight p.m., but then they tell me I got to take a four-hour break when there ain’t any meetings. There ain’t no way to get another job for four hours, so I’m stuck. Unless I want to work night shift at a bar, which has its own problems. I guess a guy with a felony record can’t be choosy, but this ain’t exactly my ideal career choice, if you get what I mean.”
“Thirteen bucks an hour, huh? That’s tough in this town.” Aloa gave him a sympathetic look and dug her wallet out of her pack. “How about sixty bucks and you tell me what you can? It’s all I’ve got.”
At this rate, her whole paycheck would be used up by bribes.
The man considered her for only a few seconds before he walked across the room and locked the front door.
The story he told made her path to the truth seem even more twisted.
Apparently, Ruiz had been banned from meetings about the same time Elvis had last seen him. According to the toilet-plunger guy, who would identify himself only as Ace, when Ruiz first showed up, he’d hardly said anything, but as the days passed, he became aggressive. After a while, he started talking about how he’d deserved to go to prison for the sin of promoting addiction because drug use was a defilement of the pure bodies given to us by the creator. Addicts, Ruiz said, should be locked up in work camps instead of being allowed to roam the streets, and dealers should be executed for how many lives they destroyed and how many people died of overdoses. Finally, he’d told a woman who’d confessed to a relapse after she’d been sexually assaulted by her boyfriend that she deserved to be raped.
“That’s when they tossed him out,” Ace said. “My guess is he was using again too. Heroin or oxy, probably.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“I heard a rumor,” he said.
Aloa waited.
“There’s some church out there, some church that pushes the same things your friend Ruiz was talking about. I overheard one of the clients telling our facilitator about it later. Church of the Sacrificial Lamb, I think it was called. He might have gone there. Guys like him find religion and think it’s going to save them, but it won’t, you know. It’s got to come from inside you. You have to be sick and tired of the life.”
Aloa knew the truth of that.
“Do you know where the church is?” she asked.
Ace shook his head. “The guy said it was near Irish Hill, but I’ve never heard of any place called that.”
Something tickled Aloa’s brain. She gave the man her last three twenties and went outside.
Daylight was fading by the time Aloa arrived at the remnants of the place once named Irish Hill. After meeting Ace, she’d stopped at a Starbucks and searched on her phone for a place with that name, and found a mention of the neighborhood on a history website. Sitting atop a high knoll near the water in the late 1800s, Irish Hill had once been filled with rough shanties and ramshackle boardinghouses packed with immigrants from the old country. The men worked in nearby foundries and mills, and when the whistle called an end to their labor, they’d climb the two hundred and fifty wooden steps to their homes to share stories and smokes and maybe a few drinks. Every Saturday, bare-knuckle fighters would square off in front of Mike Boyes’s saloon. Afterward, the crowd would celebrate by retiring inside the bar to plunk down their nickels for pints of steam beer.
According to the site, when World War I broke out, the homes were demolished and the hill was excavated to allow the expansion of the Bethlehem Steel factory, then leveled during the Second World War. Now it was just a small, sad hump of dirt sprouting clumps of pampas grass and fennel.
Aloa sat astride her rumbling bike, looked at the fenced-in mound, and sighed. She’d walked the area but hadn’t seen anything that even faintly resembled a church. She put the CB-350 in gear and began to cruise, winding her way through a maze of abandoned brick-and-metal factory buildings that hugged the waterfront nearby.
Jagged shards of broken glass edged window frames. Weeds sprouted through pavement. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Even without the fog, the place would have been spooky. Aloa thought about Davenport’s story of his wife’s ghost floating through the living room and again felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.
She rounded a corner and saw a man and woman leaning against a parked car. A light shined from a window above them. Did people actually live here? Another turn led her parallel to a long building
made out of rusting sheets of corrugated metal and surrounded by a dilapidated chain-link fence. Aloa stopped the bike, imagining the building’s walls echoing with the clatter of tools and machinery, the workers inside laboring long hours to build what they hoped would be a better life for themselves and their families. Now all that remained was ruin.
She told herself to stop making up stories about empty buildings, put the bike in gear, and began to pull away when her eyes caught movement. She turned the bike slightly and spotted a puppy with matted chocolate-brown fur hobbling across the road as fast as it could, one front paw held gingerly above the ground.
Aloa stopped the bike and considered for only a few moments before she shut down the engine and took off her helmet.
“Hey there, boy,” she called in her most trustworthy voice. “Let me see what’s wrong. Can you stop? Will you sit?”
The dog looked over its shoulder at her and, as if it understood, sat, its tail thumping the ground. Aloa guessed it was about a year old.
“That’s a good boy,” Aloa crooned, moving slowly in the dog’s direction. But when she came within a few feet of the pup, it gave a panicked bark and darted away, slipping through a hole in the fence.
“Dammit,” Aloa said.
She shrugged out of her daypack and scrambled through the fence. There was no way she was leaving an injured animal out there.
A spotlight on a corner of the old factory shined dimly through the fog and she saw the little dog hop-limping toward the abandoned building. She knelt and opened her pack. Chasing it would do no good.
“Hey, boy, I’ve got something for you, boy,” she called, digging into one of the pockets for the sample packet of almond butter a way-too-perky vendor had shoved into her hand when she’d stopped at the store to buy her dinner makings.
She tore open the packet with her teeth and smeared some of the goo on her finger. She whistled softly. “Here, boy. Come on, boy. I’ve got something for you.”
The pup stopped and sniffed the air.
“That’s right. Come and get it,” Aloa called.
She waited as the pup edged toward her in a crouch, then snatched it up when it got close. She held the little dog tight against her chest as it struggled, throwing its head and thrashing its paws.
“It’s OK. It’s OK,” Aloa murmured even as she wondered how much damage was being done to her leather jacket.
She held her cashew-buttered finger in front of the pup’s snout until hunger overcame fear and she felt its rough tongue against her skin. She waited for the pup to calm before lifting its paw to discover a piece of wire protruding from the dog’s foot.
“Ouch,” Aloa said in sympathy.
She squeezed the pup tight under her arm as the animal began to struggle again. Tucking her phone under her chin for better light, she began to ease out the offending wire from the pup’s paw, all the while murmuring about its bravery and good manners.
She had just pulled the piece of wire free when the animal’s good behavior failed him and he nipped her hand.
“Ow,” she said, falling backward as the pup sprinted away, disappearing around a corner of the building.
“You’re welcome,” she muttered, standing and brushing dirt from the seat of her jeans. She plucked her phone from the ground where it had fallen, examined the bite mark (it hadn’t broken the skin), and saw a trail of bright-red drops where the pup had fled. She sighed and followed the crimson trail around the corner until she came to a partially open door. What was that saying about no good deed going unpunished?
Her boot crunched on broken glass as she pushed into the abandoned building. The place was dark and cavernous, lit faintly through its high windows by the spotlight outside. Aloa flicked on her phone’s flashlight once again. The dusty concrete floor was littered with hulks of rusting machinery, fallen beams, and the empty shell of an ancient truck. She picked her way carefully around the debris, following the trail of blood droplets along a path that ran down the middle of the old factory and thinking once she got the dog’s wound cleaned properly she would see if she could find it a good home.
At the far side of the building, she came to a wall, bisected by a hallway lined with doors. She guessed this was where the factory’s offices had been located. The blood droplets were getting farther apart, which meant the bleeding was already slowing, but she could see another crimson spot ahead of her. She stepped into the hallway and opened her mouth to call for the pup when the words died on her lips.
Halfway down the hallway a sliver of light fell across the floor.
She stopped and heard a murmur of voices.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
A normal person would have turned around and come back to look for the dog the next day, but curiosity was both Aloa’s Achilles’ heel and the reason she had won so many awards as a journalist.
She switched off the flashlight app and crept forward. She passed one door, then two more until she was about five feet from the narrow beam of light.
“In the Lamb’s name,” said a man’s voice.
“In the Lamb’s name,” a chorus echoed.
From down the hall, the pup gave a sharp bark and whoever or whatever was behind the door fell silent.
Some friend you are, Aloa thought, mentally scolding the dog.
Footsteps approached and Aloa pressed her back against the wall. She was about 99.9 percent sure she was trespassing—but then, whoever was behind the door was too.
She held her breath as the footsteps stopped, then moved away, the scratchy notes of a violin rising and a dozen or so voices beginning to sing: “Our bodies, our temples. Our destroyer, our savior.”
Aloa edged closer to the door.
“Hoist your mighty sword. Seek those who sin,” the voices sang.
Aloa used her finger to push the door open a few centimeters and put her eye to the narrow crack. What she saw made her breath catch.
Inside the rectangular room, dozens of candles burned around an inverted wooden cross with a crude metal symbol—a triangle superimposed over a circle—nailed to it. About twenty people, led by what looked like a priest in a scarlet robe and hood, circled the cross. The worshippers sported an assortment of clothes in shades of red, and each wore a crimson hood over their head and carried a tall wooden staff.
“We follow your word,” they sang as they circled the cross. “We die so that we may live.”
Aloa watched, transfixed.
The violin’s tune grew more intense and the marchers’ voices rose. “Help us in our fight. Give us strength. Give us courage. Cleanse the world. Cleanse our hearts.”
The violin squealed its final notes.
“Justice for all,” the hooded marchers cried and banged their staffs against the concrete floor. The sound was like cannon fire.
Silence dropped.
Finally, the robed and hooded priest broke the quiet. “Remember those who have died in your name,” he called.
Aloa heard a mumble of words from the tiny congregation.
“Now go and live in purity,” the priest said.
“Live in purity,” the worshippers answered.
Aloa watched for only a second as the worshippers broke out of the circle.
Time to get out of there.
DAY 7
Aloa woke up at eight in a tangle of sheets and blankets. She’d gone to bed at 11:00 p.m., but images of hooded marchers and floating ghosts had haunted her thoughts, making sleep impossible. At 1:00 a.m., she’d debated going for a ride to calm her thoughts, but decided foggy and dark was a bad combination and got out her cello instead. She’d taken up the instrument in junior high, loving its tone, the way the notes vibrated from the instrument through her body. She’d been accepted to a prestigious summer music program, considered applying to Julliard and to the New England Conservatory of Music, but then her dad had died and her plans fell apart. Until the Honda arrived in her life, her cello had been the best antidote to the intermittent insomnia th
at plagued her. She turned on the space heater and played until her mind cleared.
Now, she climbed from her bed, donned sweatpants and her wool sweater, and made coffee. She swallowed a full mug in a few gulps, cut up an orange, and spread butter on a piece of toast.
She went to her front window. The fog still held the city in its hard gray embrace.
At her desk, the space heater blasting and another mug of coffee beside her, Aloa jotted notes from the strange ceremony she’d witnessed last night. Was that the church the Hope Recovery Systems worker had talked about? If so, could Pablo Ruiz have been one of the hooded worshippers?
She searched for information about the Church of the Sacrificial Lamb but was frustrated to find nothing. She drank a glass of water and turned to the envelope Kyle had given her. Davenport’s hatred for Burns Hamlin made the information suspect, but she also couldn’t ignore it.
She dialed the number for the former classmate Hamlin had been accused of stalking, a woman named Camille Walker, who lived in a suburb outside Boston.
According to Aloa’s research, Camille had two children and was now a psychologist working with battered women. She answered on the third ring.
Camille was guarded but honest as she answered Aloa’s questions. Even in only a few minutes of conversation, Aloa liked her.
“I met Burns in my Brit Lit class, British Literature, and he asked me out,” Camille said. “I liked him, thought he was cute. But after a couple of months he started to feel too needy, a little controlling. He’d be waiting outside my classes, showing up every morning with coffee, hanging around my dorm room, wanting to know where I was all the time. I told him it would be better if we were just friends. He cried.”
Maybe Hamlin’s arrogance was an act to cover up insecurity.
“After that, he started writing me poems and sending me flowers,” Camille said. “I’d see him sitting on a bench outside the library while I studied.”
“Stalking you?”
“Not exactly. Just always there. I told him to stop and the next day I found this beautiful silver bracelet in a box outside my room with a note begging me to take him back. I returned the bracelet and told him he needed to leave me alone, but I saw him outside the library again the next day. My roommate said I should report him so I went to the dean of student affairs. I told her Burns was following me around and I was afraid.”
The Thin Edge Page 9
