“Stay alert and together when you can,” I said. “Keep your eyes and ears open. Stay away from Adam, Connor, Alchemy 101, and the Cathedral by the Sea. Call me quickly if you see either of those men, or if something seems wrong. If anything is out of place.”
“It’s worse than we thought it was,” said Alanis.
“And we thought it was pretty bad,” said Carrie.
I waited with them in the Monarch Academy parking lot until Alanis’s father came to take them home.
Checked in with Burt again. Nothing unusual at Paradise Date Farm. Burt was worried that camera four had malfunctioned. “Hopefully it didn’t just drop off the wall and land in the barnyard,” he said.
Very hopefully, I said, and rang off.
* * *
—
I GOT SOME take-out from Thai Thai and took it to my office. Sat and ate while the air conditioner hummed, watching Main Street in the midday heat. Not much traffic. We don’t have much hustle-bustle in Fallbrook, except when school days start and end. Instead, we have classic cars, avocado orchards, and citrus groves. We have a terrific Christmas parade. And a nice 4-H show every year, if you want a lamb, a goat, a calf, or a pig. We have a handsome new library, a high school whose mascot is still a warrior in a feathered headdress, four bars, five tattoo parlors, just a few downtown traffic signals, one tennis club, thirty-eight churches, and a Christian Science Reading Room.
I thought back to a week ago, last Wednesday, when Penelope Rideout had walked into this office and begun her improbable tale. Enlisted me for her dangerous mission and sent me into the beating of my life. Puzzled, deceived, and angered me. Flirted and feinted and danced away. Into a private place of mine that had long been closed for repair. Years since anyone had come near it. But there she was.
I heard footsteps on the stairway, coming up. A figure arrived outside my door. A white shirt and a white hat, both pebbled by the glass.
He paused for just a moment, then stepped in and closed the door.
“Mr. Ford.”
“Pastor Atlas.”
“Your face looks better.”
“You came all the way here to tell me that?”
“I need to talk to you about Penelope Rideout.”
“That’s funny. As of Sunday, you’d never heard of her.”
“May I sit down?”
25
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ATLAS sat, crossed his legs, and set his hat over one knee. The hat was a white Parabuntal fedora, crisp and clean. He wore what looked like the same trim jeans, white shirt, and white athletic shoes he’d worn to preach on Sunday. Same shaggy blond hair, now dented and darkened above his ears by hat and heat. Same hopeful blue eyes.
He looked around the office, gazed out at Main Street, then turned his attention back to me.
“Penelope Rideout has been telling a story about herself and her sister, Daley, for almost fifteen years now. I was probably the first to hear it. In the story, Penelope, a trusting girl, falls for an itinerant evangelical preacher. Who befriends, drugs, and forces himself upon her, resulting in Daley. Is this approximately what she told you?”
“She said the preacher was you.”
Atlas stared at me for a long moment. The sunlight through the blinds hit the side of his face and brought a pale blue glow to one eye.
“Only part of her story is true. I was, in fact, an evangelical minister, traveling mostly by bus in the South, when I met Penelope Rideout. That was 1999. She was eight years old. After that, she came to hear me preach once, sometimes twice a year, until 2004. Then she didn’t come to any of my services again until late 2005. At which time she told me that she had had a daughter from our union nine months earlier. Allegedly this happened in my bus, involving the blood of Jesus laced with a date-rape drug, damning photographs, and a failed morning-after pill. I was thirty-five years old at that time. Married, a father of three. I had been preaching from my bus, and as a guest pastor, for seventeen very long years. And was on the verge of establishing my very own first church.”
A dark mood seemed to have come over him. He lifted the hat off his knee and leaned forward, out of the light.
“Go on,” I said.
“Mr. Ford, you couldn’t stop me now if you wanted. Penelope began accusing and harassing me not long after Daley was born. I don’t know if there’s a complete answer as to why. I saw that she was mentally ill. I read in the psychiatric literature that sibling rivalry can compound psychosis in the young, leading to more serious derangement. Later I learned that an additional sudden psychological trauma—such as the death of a parent, or both—will often incite a psychotic break. But as a man of God, not of medicine, I looked for answers in her soul. I saw a very bright, excitable, deeply unhappy girl. Filled with love. But with a blind, almost monstrous focus on herself. Creating a new self at the expense of her genuine self. And, of course, I looked into my own soul. Was I responsible? Had I somehow created this break with reality, or encouraged it to happen?”
The pastor regarded me. Challenging or observing? Waiting or preparing? He would have been impossible to read across a poker table.
“Did you?” I asked.
“After we first met, I saw Penelope Rideout once or twice a year, when I delivered a sermon at her church. And I also talked, prayed, discussed scripture, and sang with her and the rest of the Sunday-schoolers. I corresponded with many of the young people through brief notes, occasional postcards. I’ve always focused on the young. As the future of our planet, and the future of my ministry. When she first accused me of fathering Daley, I felt like I was being taken down by the devil’s own hound. A huge black thing, dragging me by the throat across cold ground toward the pit. Did I encourage Penelope’s break? No, Mr. Ford. I tormented myself for years with that question. And the answer is no. I do not see how that is possible.”
“Nothing she could have misinterpreted?”
“She misinterpreted everything.”
“No private tour of the Four Wheels for Jesus bus?”
Atlas sat back down, set the hat on his lap, and placed his hands over the ends of the chair arms.
“It’s very strange to feel filthy in my innocence. In denying my guilt. When you mention my bus in such a context, the bile rises in my throat and my stomach knots. When I hear the words Four Wheels for Jesus in this light, I feel that Jesus is being whipped and spit upon because of me. In some very strange way, Penelope has won. Like a suicide bomber. So, Mr. Ford—there were no private tours of my bus. I’ll tell you something that shouldn’t surprise you. In those early years, my wife and young children often toured with me. Driving those buses across the country, camping and setting up those tents and preaching and touching the poor and the humble, were among the happiest and most rewarding years of my life. Sleeping bags and microwave food. Hot dogs and burgers and donuts. We were poor as dirt, but we were carrying the Word. We lived the Word. Penelope Rideout’s lies—her vengeance—can’t take those years away from me.”
“Vengeance for what?” I asked.
“Refusing her attentions.”
“Have you threatened her?”
“My dear Lord, with what?”
“Why don’t you take a paternity test?”
“That was my wife’s first reaction, too, Mr. Ford. I’ve been demanding one for fourteen years now. Very privately, as you must understand. Penelope won’t allow it. She claims that it would shatter her sister. But she knows very well what it would prove. Or I should say, what it wouldn’t prove.”
“Why are you here?”
“I want you to find Daley. Bring me to her, or her to me—however you do this kind of thing. Then help me convince her to take a paternity test to prove medically that I’m not Daley’s father. This all has to happen in absolute privacy. I have a ministry, a reputation, and a family to protect. Absolutely no publicity of any kind. I will not en
ter the social arena of hate. A sealed secret. Daley, Penelope, and me. You will be the impartial enforcer and referee. You can oversee the test. If you would like, I will hire a nurse or doctor who can be trusted. You will make sure the blood is drawn properly and the test is done perfectly and without incident. It would take less than five minutes.”
I tried to think my way through his delicate proposition. It was perilous but possible. I thought it strange that he showed so little concern for a missing fourteen-year-old girl, beyond her ability to help him prove his case. “And?”
“And after that, maybe the three of us—Daley, you, and I—can convince Penelope to get the help she desperately needs. She has driven her own sister into the night. Look at the violence that has followed her. Think of what can happen to an undefended girl in an evil time. The police can’t find her. The agencies can’t find her. Even you are having your own troubles in that regard. Mr. Ford, you can see that Daley Rideout needs a capable guardian, and Penelope is not that.”
In Pastor Reggie Atlas, I was up against a real pro when it came to selling ideas you couldn’t prove. I considered his youthful-for-his-years face, his boyish hair, his eager blue eyes. Faithful eyes. Hopeful.
“I’ve been hired by Penelope to find Daley,” I said. “I can’t take money from two people for the same job.”
“Then terminate her contract and name your price,” said Atlas. “With a bigger budget you can hire some skilled confederates and find Daley faster. That would be a good thing for everyone. Daley would be protected, I would finally be exonerated, and Penelope could save her hard-earned dollars.”
“You are a convincing man, Pastor Atlas.”
“I’m a tired man, too, Mr. Ford.”
He stood somewhat stiffly, tapping his hat on his leg as he walked to the window. I wondered how many hours he’d spent performing. I wondered if preachers, like actors and undercover agents, occasionally got lost in their roles. He looked out at Fallbrook.
“Reminds me of small towns all over America,” he said. “They all look different, but there’s a sameness to them. The people tend to be good people. Things are slower. Down there I see a barbershop with an old-fashioned barber’s pole outside. I see a candy store. Down the street, a hardware store. Joe’s Hardware. What a great name for a hardware store. I like an America this size.”
“There was a sex-and-torture dungeon in a house just a few blocks from here,” I said. “Chains and mattresses. Wall fasteners and hand tools. A couple set it up. The cops shut it down when a young woman died there.”
He turned. “Why do you bring that up? What is the point you’re trying to make?”
“That faces can hide secrets. For a while.”
“But why focus on the evil?”
“I like dogs and children,” I said.
“Meaning what?”
“I appreciate innocence, too.”
Pastor Atlas gave me a look that said I should be dunked as a suspected witch. Or maybe just locked in stocks right down there on Main Street, where the dogs and children I like so much could torment me.
“I’m tired of trying to hold up the whole of grim humanity,” he said.
“Then drop us. We might not need you.”
“Jesus hears every word you say.”
“Oh, he’s heard worse from me.”
Atlas sighed, looked out the window again.
“Mr. Ford, I’m tired of defending myself, my family, and my ministry from a troubled woman and her dangerous delusions. I need your help to put this all to an end.”
“Why start now?”
He put on his hat and gave the brim a rural tilt, then sat back down and pulled his chair closer.
“Start? I’ve tried before. This isn’t the first time Daley has run away. She ran away from home in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno, too. And in Eugene, Prescott, and other cities and towns. Now Oceanside. Every time she escapes, Penelope comes after me again. I’m not hard to find. She hires a PI or a lawyer or worse. Suggests without evidence that I have kidnapped her sister. Or simply had her abducted. Or . . . sweet Lord, there’s no end to Satan’s imagination. To tales of me and my bus and the blood of Jesus mixed with drugs. As you know, firsthand. Did your version include the baptism from the silver bowl, or the robes sprinkled in holy water? One day, some well-meaning person will believe her, and my reputation will be functionally ruined. Thus I come to you.”
“When was the last time you saw Daley?”
“Late August. She brought a friend to the cathedral.”
“Just a few days ago, you didn’t remember seeing her.”
A brisk nod. “The mind investigates while the body sleeps.”
I was familiar with that phenomenon. “And before that?”
“Four years ago. When she was ten. It was the first time I’d actually laid eyes on her, outside of pictures sent to me by her sister. This was before I opened the cathedral. Penelope brought her to my event at a convocation in Las Vegas. They sat in the very back. I was terrified. It was the most difficult sermon I’ve ever given. I had no idea why Penelope was there. No idea what she might do.”
“What did she do?”
“Nothing, praise the Lord. They left before the service was over. I had trouble sleeping for weeks. So worried what Penelope might be planning. Inconsolable, even to my wife.”
“Did you communicate with Daley after that?”
Atlas held my stare for a long beat. Then smiled. “Yes. I answered an email. It arrived on my webpage not long after the Las Vegas show. She wanted to know if Jesus could love a girl who fell asleep almost every night before finishing the Lord’s Prayer.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Yes, I told her. Of course Jesus loves you. I think I suggested she say her prayer earlier. Such as after dinner, or maybe even first thing in the morning.”
“Did you ever tell her that you two were like ghosts flying through each other?”
Atlas frowned amiably, shaking his head with some good humor. “I’m sure I did not.”
“Did she write again?”
“Every few months.”
“And you wrote back?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I shrugged.
“Mr. Ford, will you find Daley and arrange the test? You are my best hope.”
I thought about my decision, but not for long. “I’ll let you know when I locate Daley Rideout. Until then, you can keep your money and I’ll stay in the service of Penelope under the conditions set forth.”
He stood. “Quixote had a wooden lance. All you have is a wooden head.”
“It’s good hard wood.”
“It looks a little beat-up right now. Car wreck?”
I could have said something about Reggie’s connection to SNR Security, but I didn’t. No good reason to reveal what I knew. No reason to train a searchlight on myself.
“Call me immediately when you find Daley,” said Atlas. “Better yet, bring her straight to me. That paternity test is the right thing to do, and you know it is. No matter who’s signing your checks.”
At the door, he turned. “Has Penelope mentioned her husband, Richard?”
“Yes, she has.”
“She made him up. He never existed.”
“I came to the same conclusion.”
A beat as he studied me. Spun his hat in his hands. Then a small smile. “Have you been spending some extra time with Penelope?”
“Only what’s required, Pastor. Why do you ask?”
“I’m concerned for your soul.”
“Save it for the choir.”
“I’m willing to pray with you right now. I could use some strength. So could you.”
“Not necessary, thanks.”
“It is so much more than necessary. But I respect your decision.”
That smile again, boyish and conspiratorial. “Penelope is beautiful, isn’t she? So bright and open. So sexual. Always has been. And, boy, she knows it. She offered all that charm of hers to me, more than once. Threw it right at me. She was fourteen and I was thirty-five. I won’t deny that I was tempted. I prayed like a condemned man. Prayed, and prayed again. Jesus stepped forth and offered his hand to me. Now you know how I answered Penelope, and you see where it got me. Paul said it best. He said, ‘Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness . . . On account of these the wrath of God is coming.’”
“I hope He takes His time.”
“I’ll say a prayer for you.”
I watched him leave and then walk up Main Street. Tipped his hat to a mom walking a baby in a stroller. Got into a sleek Mercedes Sprinter painted in high-gloss copper and black, with “Four Wheels for Jesus” airbrushed in racing-yellow script along its flank.
I sat back down just in time to watch my sleeping computer monitor wake up.
Burt Short’s bold italic Times New Roman 14 font hit the screen in a drop-down:
LIVE AND URGENT FROM PARADISE FARMS
BURT
26
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DUST rising in bright light and the strangeness of things happening without sound.
Clevenger’s motion-activated wasp-cam streamed beautiful video, startlingly clear. I recognized the bunkhouse with the modified freezers in the living room and the gloves and white hazmat suits hanging on the walls.
The front door had been propped open. Connor Donald and Eric Glassen crossed the porch and disappeared inside. A forklift pulled up to the front porch, Adam Revell in the cage, four wooden crates stacked two-on-two waiting on the forks. Flat-Top Woman with the gun on her hip stood talking to him, her mouth working silently.
I put Burt on speaker as I watched Clevenger’s wasp-cam feed.
“None of the usual activity earlier,” said Burt. “No SNR vehicles coming and going. No Paradise shipping trucks in and out. No kids to the barn with their laptops and backpacks. They cleared the decks for this, whatever it is.”
The Last Good Guy Page 15
