The Emily Taylor Mystery Bundle

by Catherine Astolfo

  The reverend moved, rolling to a sit-up position. He rubbed his legs as though the blood had stopped flowing and he could not revive any feeling. He remained on the steps. His back was very straight, as he attempted to assert some authority despite the undignified pose.

  "Aaron," he said, very loudly and brusquely.

  The boy turned, looking confused and slightly dizzy. His eyes were still glazed over, but there was a flicker of recognition.

  Consumed by a mania impossible to completely penetrate, he quickly lost interest as his father continued talking.

  "Boy, this is not what is meant. People will not die by our hand, but by their very own. I have been watching them, following them and it is working. We will either turn them to the true path, or they will wither without…"

  "Shut up!" the boy demanded. "You are as weak as Pastor Rob was. You think that Marot had been going to follow? Do you think he was going to follow?"

  He shoved the rifle into the chest of the man in the pew, who stopped struggling. Misery and despair overtook him. He barely flinched when the gun's muzzle prodded him.

  The reverend was painfully aware that the boy had gone over the edge into madness. Carl Sanderson wondered when it happened. When had the Anointed One turned from the light into the darkness? They had so many plans for him. Sanderson was not willing to give up.

  "Boy, you are breaking God's Commands. Honour your father, honour your mother. Do not kill. Let God take care of the final atonement, son. We are the messengers. We are the harbingers of what is to come if they do not adhere to the commands. We punish, but we do not kill. That is for the Lord Himself to decide."

  There was a sound at the back of the church. The big doors screeched as they were slowly pushed open and then clanged shut once more. A man and a woman entered. The man was dressed all in black, long white hair looking stark above the collar.

  Isaac Rondeau's eyes were flat as he stared at Carl, his face twisted with hatred. Silent, he carried a rifle as though it were a child.

  The woman's normally detached visage was alight and engaged. Her eyes fastened on the boy.

  "Don't listen to him, son," she said.

  Her voice was different. She was strong and fierce. A loud, confident tone replaced her customarily quiet reservation.

  "You are God's Avenger, not just His Messenger. You do as you have been instructed. Do not listen to him."

  Carl Sanderson's eyes bulged out of his head. His face purpled with rage, embarrassment and fear. His wife had a completely different countenance. She was as enigmatic as her son.

  "My father taught me to repent," Dorothy Sanderson said, her voice ringing out as though chanting the chorus of a hymn.

  She held up her scarred hands toward the roof, toward the heavens.

  "I have learned to be stronger than my father. The pupil surpasses the teacher! I am so disappointed in you, my husband, as I was in Him. You were both weakened by the world and you stumbled over the boulders that the Devil put in your way. Carl, I thought you would avenge my father's protégé, but you did not. Husband, did you believe that those who sinned against my father's disciple were to be punished by the Lord alone? No. He demands that we become His Right Hand."

  She did not address her rant directly to her husband. As if she were talking to a group of uninformed followers, her tone was haughty and condescending. She laughed, a sound similar to Aaron's hyena-like guffaw.

  "We have just begun the purge. The time has come for vengeance. We have turned our faces from the wicked and they will be slain before their enemies and their loved ones alike. There is no more time for mercy."

  She turned toward the man trussed up in ropes and tape. She pointed a bony finger in his direction. Her face showed no anger, only joy and fulfillment.

  "Shoot him," she said.

  Sandford Haineau cringed in his seat, eyes wild with pleading. He murmured and whined, a pitiful guttural noise more animal than human.

  The sound of the rifle was deafening. The man became a mass of blood and tissue. His body slumped down from the pew, wedged between the floor and the seat.

  But it was not Izzy Rondeau who pulled the trigger and caused the devastation to another human being. It was the reverend's own son.

  Carl Sanderson put his head in his hands and wept. His wife's voice pounded into his skull.

  "Three are now done. Three more are to be eliminated. And then, there is the spawn of Molech and all that have assisted in their reunion. Once they are handled, the evil will be dispelled and the True Church shall be powerful once more."

  Chapter 54: Jacob

  Jacob waited in his office for Ron Murphy and Alain Reneaux to arrive. Doc had called earlier that morning to let them know he'd heard from his colleague, the forensic anthropologist in Ottawa. He was able to meet with them that afternoon, if they wished. Both Jacob and Alain had jumped at the chance.

  When he completed some of the work that had piled up regarding the gold mine and lingering issues about the subdivision, Jacob went back to all of the information he had gathered on the Church of Leviticus.

  Among the papers about the formation of the church in Canada, he found petitions to the government and Canada Revenue to declare Leviticus a charitable foundation and ultimately, a recognized church. Rather than the submissions themselves, it was the list of supplicants and their signatures that really interested Jacob. He saved the enlightening information for his meeting.

  The two men arrived at the same time. Doc was visibly excited by the faxed information that the anthropologist sent him.

  "Look at this, Alain," he said. "Deanna, she's Doctor Young, very well respected throughout Canada, so she knows how to investigate even the most mysterious of cases. It seems she was just too interested to let these little bones lie in a box somewhere. So on her own time, she did some forensic testing, just in case it ever came up for trial."

  Jacob smiled at Doc's rambling speech. His excitement was catching. He was concerned, however, that Alain might be overwhelmed by all of this.

  "What she found is intriguing. Plus it corroborates Alain's hypnosis memory as well. What the divers retrieved four years ago were fragments of the bodies of four children. Three of them are of Native descent and have been in that well for about one hundred years. They were nicely encased in the broken bits of clay from the original well, now caches of mud really, at the bottom of the pond. The other fragments are from a small child who died no more than thirty years ago. Between twenty-five and thirty is what she writes here, to be exact."

  Doc stopped, slightly out of breath.

  "That baby…" Alain reflected slowly, tracing the dream in his mind. "The little one that I see at the edge of the well and then in the hypnosis, when I see her dumped into the pond. That is Faith."

  "Doctor Young says it's not possible to get any DNA from the bones, because they were in the water all this time, so we'll probably never know for certain. However, she estimates that the child was just an infant. So the bones cannot belong to Dorothée. In my opinion, it's too much of a coincidence that you dreamt of this exact incident and now the bones match the time and age of the baby, though. They must belong to Faith."

  "I agree with you, Doc," Jacob said. "It's probably as close as we'll ever come to identifying that little girl. And from what I've read of this history," he gestured toward the piles of paper on his desk, "I really think that baby died and then was buried in the pond."

  "Her birth was registered with the town, but there was no public christening, which is odd in light of the religion they practiced. Plus, though neighbours reported seeing another child, an infant in or around the house, they did admit that, before the fire, they hadn't seen the baby for a few months. I don't think this child lived to more than a couple of months."

  "That would fit with Doctor Young's findings," Ron added.

  Alain said thoughtfully, "May is going to be interested in this too, I can tell you. There is a Native legend about Bahswaway that tells of children
playing around the well and then being led by a spirit down into the hole, where they were forever whisked away. The gods put water around it to form a scummy pond, so no one would ever drink from it again. Everyone thought it was just a story until those divers went in."

  The three men were silent for a moment.

  Alain spoke up again. "I have found my baby sister and I have found my older brother and they are both gone. I think I am glad that my parents are deceased. They were either very cruel or very misguided people, I believe. But I am going to find Dorothée. I pray that I have found her already."

  He paused and the room was deathly quiet. The men waited, not pushing him to confide.

  "I cannot say just yet. I must wait until we have done more research."

  Jacob filled in quickly. "I do have some further news," he said.

  He explained about the proposals to the government to officially recognize the Church of Leviticus. "The signatories to the petitions were the same."

  "First, there is Reverend A.J. Martin. I did some background research on him and found his whole life history laid out on the Internet, largely because the modern Leviticus followers seem to love blogging. Abraham John Martin attained an elevated level of fame due to the fact that he was the pastor of the Church of Leviticus in Williamsburg, the first of its kind in Canada."

  "He had three daughters, Dorothy, Carolyn and Diane. All three girls got married to Leviticans and they and their husbands adhered closely to the church precepts. Two of the couples moved away to start churches of their own in other parts of Canada."

  "In his later years, the Reverend Martin recruited two assistants, Robert Janot and Philippe Rondeau. Janot's signature is the second one on all the petitions. Rondeau's, the third. When A.J. Martin died, Rondeau took over the church. Rondeau still runs the church with his son Isaac. Perhaps in retaliation, Robert Janot started up his own branch of the church in Brinston. Many of the parishioners followed him."

  "The various blogs present two distinct viewpoints, one moderate and one a literal, stricter view of the teachings from Leviticus. Interestingly, Pastor Rob's side was initially more liberal. When Janot was accused of fraud, Rondeau Junior was actually very supportive, providing all the paperwork that ultimately cleared him."

  "I found one Internet blog that related the story of how Pastor Rob recruited the husband of the youngest Martin girl to be his assistant. It certainly looks like this daughter broke away from her father and went off with his protégé. Either that or she had no choice but to follow her husband in doing so. She was the youngest of the Martins and her husband was a lot older than she, closer to Robert Janot's age than to hers."

  "That was the other signature on the petitions: Carl Sanderson. And his wife is Dorothy, née Martin."

  Alain caught it right away. "Aren't those the parents that May and Emily are so concerned about?"

  Jacob nodded, satisfied that he now had someone else to discuss these odd connections with.

  Doc Murphy was astonished.

  "So let me get this straight," the physician said. "This Abraham Martin fellow was the pastor of the first church. Then Alain's birth father, Robert Janot, starts up a branch in Brinston. His assistant, Carl Sanderson, who is also Martin's son-in-law, brings the church to Burchill."

  "Not officially to Burchill, May told me," Alain informed them. "Mr. Sanderson told Emily or someone that his church is in Norvale. We're not sure if anyone from Burchill is actually a Levitican, but of course you never know."

  "That's for sure," Doc Murphy muttered.

  "Everything is connected," Jacob said wonderingly. "Your birth father must have been Carl Sanderson's mentor. Carl Sanderson is now in Burchill, so it's not a stretch to think that your sister is too."

  "I wonder what's going on in that household to make Emily and May worry so much about the children," Doc mused. "They are not the kind to fret over nothing."

  "Well, when I read these accounts, Doc, I was blown away by the fervour of some of these followers," Jacob said. "They pretty much twist the biblical references to suit their own purposes. They read everything as literal and they obey it without question and without any kind of context. For instance, they still carry out the rituals of the blood. They sacrifice a lamb, cut off the fat and offer it up, sprinkling blood over the congregation…"

  "Stop," Alain said suddenly, holding up his hand. "That's just what the preacher in my dreams, presumably my own father, made us do on a regular basis."

  "It seems disgusting to us," Jacob said. "Do you think he really believed that these rituals were good for you? I mean, you were just little kids."

  Alain thought about Jacob's words for a moment.

  "You know, I haven't really given much thought to what he was like or what he believed. I think I am still in shock. When I first got the memories, all that consumed me was this horrible rage. I wanted to hurt something or someone. Now I am calm, but I still feel anger. I am thinking of him as abusive, someone who yelled at us all the time, who never gave us any affection."

  "Yet I have this faint memory that things were different when I was younger, that we actually had a happy, if unconventional, family. I still can hardly remember my mother. She is like a ghost in the background. So I haven't gone beyond that. Not past these surface remembrances into anything deeper. I am consumed with finding Dorothée."

  "That's understandable," Doc assured him. "You've had so many shocks to deal with. It will literally take years to sort it all out."

  "Do you think we should let Emily know what we found out about the Sandersons?" Jacob asked.

  "Yes, I think she will want that information," Alain said.

  "I have to go and pick up Adrienne in a little while," Jacob said. "I'll go a little early and see if I can have a word with Emily."

  It didn't turn out that way.

  Jacob walked to the school. It was another mild day, without any wind, and the sun was unencumbered by clouds. Yet the air was still thick and dusty. The trees were just beginning to show tiny thumb-size buds, shy after a cold dry winter and an oddly barren start to the spring.

  When Jacob rounded the corner of Read Street, he saw an Ontario Provincial Police car outside the school. He assumed it was either Edgar or Frances, as they too were frequent visitors to Emily and May's office. He had no premonition of what had occurred.

  When he entered the school, a flushed, wide-eyed vice principal and a closed principal's door greeted him.

  "Hi, Lynda," he said, at once alert and sensitive to the vibrations in the office. "Where's May?"

  She looked up at him and her normally calm face was alive with tension. "She's gone home just now."

  "What's happened?" he asked, filled with concern, seeing the conflict on the woman's face.

  Lynda quietly told him about the Sandersons and the terrible revelations by Cate. Knowing the connections between Alain's past and the Church of Leviticus, Jacob could not help but be not only shocked but also intrigued.

  "Renae and Edgar are in the office with Emily," Lynda told him. "They just arrived a few minutes ago. I think they would love to hear a legal point of view about what they need to do next."

  "I'm not terribly up on the law regarding the CAS, but if they want me to listen in with the legal ear, I'd be happy to," Jacob replied.

  Lynda opened the office door, slipped inside and conferred for a few seconds.

  Almost immediately, Emily eagerly beckoned him to come in. Lynda discreetly shut the door behind her.

  Edgar Brennan and Renae Ogemah were seated, looking serious and energized at the same time, their faces a study of questions, frustrated action and worry.

  When Jacob perched on the side of her desk, the principal told him what had occurred with both Aaron and Catherine Sanderson. First they talked about the situation with Cate and how they might deal with it.

  "I'm suggesting that I send Cate home with my usual foster parent, Mary Jo Samuels," Renae said. "From what Cate has told us, I believe she is in suff
icient danger to warrant removing her from the home. Next, I'd like to visit with the Sandersons, including Aaron, to tell them of the allegations. I have no doubt that they'll deny everything, but I will be taking Aaron with me to another foster home if I possibly can. We may have to go to court to come up with a permanent resolution. Either Cate or Aaron will be removed from that home, one way or another."

  Renae's voice was flat but determined, as though already arguing her points with a judge.

  "I haven't dealt with the Child and Family Services Act very often and certainly not recently," Jacob repeated what he had told Lynda. "But I would agree that you have sufficient cause to remove her for now. And I do think a judge will be sympathetic to a child of her age, especially if we have a report from a hospital. The main thing is her immediate safety."

  Renae nodded. "Thanks, Jacob, it's great to have that confirmation. Edgar and I have proposed that we go straight to the Sandersons' place or the church and confront them."

  "I don't know if you'll have any success with removing Aaron," Jacob had to say. "After all, it's an allegation right now, from only one source. But if Cate has been abused, the abuser mostly likely was someone in that house."

  "Well, at the very least, we can encourage the Sandersons to keep Aaron at the church or with one of their friends. In the meantime, I'll call Mary Jo and then I'll bring Cate there."

  "I can do that," Emily piped up. "She's already so upset. Perhaps it would be good if I went with her and got her settled."

  Renae went out of the main office to make the call in private and Emily left to speak with Cate. While they were gone, Jacob rapidly made connections.

  "Ed, I think we have a complicated case here that goes back to Alain's family," he said.

  Edgar was alert, quiet, but listening carefully.

  "First, there was the original Church of Leviticus in Williamsburg, begun by the Reverend Martin." He used his fingers to keep everything straight.