The Prophet

by Michael Koryta

  “Anything I need to understand about what I’m signing here that I don’t already?”

  “It’s straightforward. Financial guarantee that he makes his scheduled appearances. As far as the court is concerned, you’re now responsible for him. Your brother’s keeper.”

  He signed the last three pages faster, an illegible scrawl.

  By the time Chelsea got Adam released, darkness had settled and the streetlights were on and a chill wind whistled through town. He was wearing only the T-shirt he’d had on that afternoon, when the sun was high and the fall air was warm. Chelsea had brought his jacket, handed it to him without a word. He pulled it on and started to zip it up but she slipped her arms inside the jacket and wrapped them around him and held him, put her head on his chest. For a moment he stood there awkwardly, wanting to step away from her touch, wanting to show that he did not need it, that he could bear this alone just fine, but the warmth of her and the smell of her hair got to him and he returned the embrace and lowered his face until his cheek rested against hers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have gone there with you. I shouldn’t have let you go alone, not when I knew they were at the house.”

  He tried to tell her not to worry about it, but words weren’t coming easily, and so he just stood there and breathed in the smell of her and did not speak. They swayed a little, and for a moment they could have been dancing together, cheek to cheek and happy and in love, somewhere far from here. It would have to be somewhere far from here. Then a door banged open behind them and he knew it was one of the cops and so he released her and began to walk.

  “They set it awfully high,” he said. “I figured they would go fifty, not one hundred.”

  “I know.”

  “How’d you cover it?”

  “Your house. I can’t sign over mine. I pay for it, but it’s still—”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  “Your brother came down. He called me; I didn’t have to call him.”

  Somehow this surprised Adam. They reached her battered car, an old Corvette that had so much rear-wheel-drive torque that it was absolutely impossible to drive in northeastern Ohio winters, a decision that said—Chelsea!— in flashing neon lights. It had been July when she bought it, and in July it worked great, so why worry about winter?

  “I’m going to need to talk to him,” Adam said as she gunned the big motor to life.

  “He didn’t put up any of the cash. Just signed what he needed to for the house.”

  “I’m not worried about that. It’s about the reason all of this shit came down today. Whoever killed Rachel Bond doesn’t have interest in her father. He has interest in Kent.”

  She turned to him. “In Kent?”

  “The guy is contacting Kent for a reason.” In the side view mirror Adam could see a cop standing outside the jail, watching, and he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You want to go home?”

  “Eventually. First I want to see my brother.”

  There were countless reasons that Kent loved his wife and that he’d been attracted to her from the start, but central among them was strength. The calm kind of strength, the most rare and most difficult to obtain. She’d fostered it in her career, of course, but it had been there for as long as Kent had known her. She was unflappable.

  That night he came up the stairs and found her standing on the threshold of Lisa’s room, her hand tight on the doorframe and her head bowed. He knew the nature of the prayer, saw it in every tense muscle. She was praying against fear.

  “They’ll find him, Beth,” he said.

  She kept her head down for a moment, then lifted it and stepped away, leaving the door cracked open even though their daughter was adamant about sleeping with the door closed.

  “I know they will,” she said. She had moved to Andrew’s door, and Kent joined her there, watched his sleeping son. A nightlight kept a dim glow, shadows around it. Earlier that fall, Kent had been talking on the phone while Andrew played in the driveway with a basketball that was far too big for him. It was getting on toward evening, and when Kent turned to the window he saw his son on the pavement with pools of blood spreading away from his head.

  He dropped the phone in mid-sentence, and the plastic case cracked when it hit the tile floor. Was out the door with a scream in his throat when Andrew sat up and smiled at him.

  It had been shadows, nothing more. The way he was lying there in the fading light, they’d looked like blood all around him. Kent carried Andrew in, picked up the phone, and apologized, tried to joke it off. “You’ve seen the kid’s balance—it was a reasonable concern.” Then he excused himself, went into the garage, and sat on the workbench stool until his hands stopped shaking.

  Not my children, he’d thought that night, a desperate plea, not mine, not mine, not mine. Tragedy will make its daily appearance, I know that, but please, God, not at my door. Not again.

  “What are you thinking?” Beth said.

  That Sipes could have started with us, he thought. That instead of Rachel, it might have been Lisa.

  “Maybe we should leave,” he said.

  “What?”

  “For a while. Until they sort it out. Give the police time to find him.”

  “You want us to hide somewhere? Take the kids out of school? You quit coaching?” She shook her head. “If the police thought that was necessary, you’d know it.”

  It was what he needed to hear her say, it was the return to the calm strength he needed, the kind she’d provided to him so many times over so many years. And yet, somehow, it didn’t steady him the way it usually did. She hadn’t met Clayton Sipes. She hadn’t seen his eyes.

  Beth was saying, “We don’t even know for sure that it’s him,” when there was a hammering on the front door. Three rapid reports—thud, thud, thud.

  For a moment they both looked at each other uneasily, and then a voice called, “It’s just me, Franchise,” as if Adam could see through the walls of the house and knew exactly how they were reacting, knew that they were scared.

  “Adam,” Kent whispered, and when he turned to go to the door, Beth reached out and caught his arm. He looked back at her and said, “It will be fine,” though he wasn’t sure how he knew that. The last time Adam had come to their home it had not been fine.

  He went downstairs and opened the door. Adam stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, and beyond him there was an old Corvette. Kent could make out Chelsea sitting behind the wheel. The engine was still running. Evidently they did not intend it to be a long stop.

  “Hey,” Kent said. “I’m sorry. It unfolded fast, but I should have called you.”

  Adam lifted his hands, palms out, a placating gesture. “Not a problem. Not a problem. It was a rough situation all the way around.”

  There was something false in it. He was too conciliatory. Allowing access to Marie’s room was a cardinal sin, Kent knew that.

  “You doing okay?” Adam asked.

  “Yeah.” Kent hesitated, then said, “You? How serious are those charges?”

  “Ah, we’ll figure it out, right? I mean, I’m clean, so they’ll plea bargain.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help…”

  It sounded pathetically formal, stilted. Adam gave a wan smile, glanced back at Chelsea in the car, and then returned his focus to Kent, and the smile was gone.

  “Who left the letter?”

  Kent was silent. His only operating instructions from the FBI were not to disclose his suspicions about the identity of Rachel Bond’s killer.

  Adam leaned his head to the side. “Kent?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” Adam said, and there was bite to his tone that made Beth come down the steps. He looked over Kent’s shoulder and saw her and there was a pause as they studied each other, Kent trapped in the middle of the gaze.

  “Relax,” Kent said, and he wasn’t sure which one of them he meant to direct it to.


  “Salter told me the guy who left you the letter was one of your buddies from the prison,” Adam said. “Someone who was in my home. Tell me who he is, Kent.”

  Kent said, “I haven’t even talked to Salter.”

  “No. You talked to the FBI.”

  He knew that much, then. What detail they had provided to him Kent couldn’t guess beyond the obvious fact that they had not inquired about Clayton Sipes directly. Kent took a deep breath and said, “Adam, I’m sorry. For all of it. But you need to go home, keep your head down, and stay out of trouble. There’s nothing in this for you but—”

  “He killed her, you son of a bitch,” Adam said, the words rising in volume but not in speed, no rush to temper, just a steady climb toward the summit of rage. “At least I’ll admit that I sent her to him, but you brought him here. How are you going to handle that? Are you going to pray with him again, Kent? He put a bag over that girl’s head and watched her drown inside it, do you understand that? Do you have…”

  He had just taken his hands from his pockets and coiled them into fists when he came to a stammering stop. Whatever words—or punches—had been about to come were lost as fast as embers beneath rain. Kent saw the change and turned his head to follow his stare.

  Lisa was awake. Standing at the top of the stairs in her pajamas, eyes bleary but concerned, staring down at them. Watching her uncle.

  Kent said, “Beth,” but Beth was already moving, taking their daughter and shuffling her toward the bedroom, whispering that everything was fine. By the time Kent looked back to Adam, his brother was stepping away.

  “You need to think about them,” Adam said, gesturing at Kent’s wife and daughter. “I know what you believe, Kent, I know how you are, I know who you’ll trust. Salter, the FBI. And I know that you look at me and you see… shit, I don’t even know what you see. But I can tell you that it’s wrong. What I’m thinking about is exactly what you should be thinking about. I’m going to have to answer for what I’ve done. You will, too.”

  There was no heat to his words. His eyes were still on the spot where Lisa had just been standing, and he looked as troubled as Kent ever remembered seeing him, as unsteady.

  “We’re both going to have to answer for it,” he said, and then he turned and walked off the porch and back to the Corvette.

  27

  ONE OF KENT’S STRUGGLES, and they were many, was with his language. Locker room talk was a product of testosterone, nerves, and macho competition. Always had been, always would be. Kent, who had been raised in locker rooms, and whose father had been one of the most impressively profane individuals he’d ever known—The secret, boys, is in the verbs. Everyone uses the adjectives, but you’ve got to pick unique verbs— wanted to run a clean locker room. That started by keeping his own tongue in check, which was a far more difficult ordeal than anyone probably would have guessed. He’d been nurtured on profanity; it came as a reflex.

  That morning he got as far as “worthless cock—” and was about to employ the unique verb when he saw his son’s head snap up. Kent bit down the rest of the sentence, and that was too bad in a way because it was one that would have impressed the heck out of his coaches, who didn’t think he had it in him. Neither, though, did his son, and he wanted to preserve that for as long as possible.

  “Daddy?”

  “Sorry, buddy. I’m good. We’re all good.”

  But his hands were fists at his sides down below the kitchen island, where Andrew couldn’t see them, and when he brought in a breath it was through his teeth.

  The arrest had made the front page of the paper. Kent shouldn’t have been surprised—there weren’t many big stories in Chambers right now. There was his undefeated high school football team, and there was Rachel Bond. Of course her case would stay on the front page.

  He hadn’t counted on the photograph, though.

  In the photograph, Adam was in handcuffs, head down, a cop on either side, and just in front of him another officer stood beside a cruiser with a bloody towel held to his face.

  LOCAL BAIL BONDSMAN ARRESTED AFTER SEARCH IN BOND HOMICIDE CASE

  Adam Austin, 40, of Chambers, was arrested on preliminary charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting law enforcement, and battery after police attempted to serve a search warrant at the local bail bondsman’s house as part of the investigation into the murder of 17-year-old Rachel Bond. Police said that Adam Austin, brother of Chambers High School football coach Kent Austin, has not been named as a suspect in the homicide, but that his professional interaction with the girl provoked “avenues of interest,” according to Lt. Stan Salter of the Chambers Police Department.

  Salter deemed the incident an “unfortunate situation” and declined further comment, saying the pending criminal charges against Austin are a separate matter from the Bond homicide case. Salter also said he could not provide details as to what led police to seek a search warrant for Austin’s home and office, and was unable to confirm whether any articles of evidentiary value were confiscated during the search.

  “This is part of a process,” Salter said. “It is one of many searches conducted in that process. We will release more information when it is suitable to do so.”

  The rest of the article included a short biography of Adam, and that of course carried a mention of Marie. No accusations were made, careful journalistic distance was upheld, and yet in the gaps between what police confirmed and what they did not, dark suspicions would flourish. Why would the police have sought a warrant? Why would anyone possibly try to prevent the search if there was nothing to hide? Why would any man of pure heart do anything but assist? That photograph—Adam in cuffs, a bleeding officer at his side—would tell people more than the text. Or so they would think.

  It’s not about Rachel Bond, Kent wanted to tell them all. You’ve got to understand that it is about my sister, and when it comes to my sister, Adam is not quite right. You cannot expect the same reactions from Adam if it involves my sister. You’d understand a little better if you realized that all they needed to do was stay out of her room.

  While his children shouted at each other upstairs—Andrew had apparently walked into the bathroom while Lisa was “working on my hair!”—Beth emerged around the corner, stepping into the kitchen, and headed for the coffee. She stopped when she saw his face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He slid the paper across the countertop, and she did what everyone in Chambers would do: looked at the photograph first.

  “Kent… this is going to be really bad for him, isn’t it? This is going to be really bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think he’ll be ready to see it? Handle it?”

  “I don’t know what Adam’s ready for,” Kent said. “I really do not know.”

  There was always a newspaper on the counter in the morning; Chelsea brought it in before she fed the snakes, and Chelsea was always up ahead of Adam. It was usually turned to the police beat column, jail bookings being of paramount importance to them. Today there was no paper in sight. Adam poured his coffee and walked to the sink, where she stood washing dishes, wearing one of his sweatshirts and a pair of loose cotton pants. Soft music played from the little iPod dock on the counter. A dark, brooding rock tune by Brian Fallon. I kept my secrets far from your condition. And in the explosions, they both were just powders…

  He leaned down, kissed the back of her neck, and said, “You can let me see it.”

  She rinsed a glass, dried it, and her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath.

  “It’s not good.”

  “You can let me see it.”

  She went into the garage to get the paper then, which had already been tossed into the recycling bin, leaving him alone with the soft sad song. Did you say your lovers were liars? All my lovers were liars too.

  When she brought the paper back inside, she dropped it on the table without a word. Adam studied the picture and, in a perverse twist of the mind, found himself thinking, I look big, and
I look mean, with a touch of pride. Old habits, maybe. Memories of the days when his picture was in the paper often, and the bigger and meaner he looked, the better. That was an acceptable version of the traits; this was not. He pushed the paper aside.

  “Thought you wanted to read it,” Chelsea said.

  “I said I wanted to see it is all,” Adam said, and felt like a child. He had thought he wanted to read it. The headline and photo were enough, though. Seeing the spread scared him, but not for any of the reasons people might expect—public perception or jail time. The thing that scared him was that Rodney Bova was unlikely to miss this, and if Rodney Bova understood, then Adam’s best hope for success was dead.

  He said, “I should talk to Rachel’s mother. I’ll need to clear some things up.”

  “Or let it go.” Chelsea had her back to him, standing in the living room, and when he looked at her, he saw that she’d taken one of the snakes out of its tub. The python coiled around her arm, then slid up her shoulder, its wedge-shaped head bobbing, gliding past the row of silver loops that lined her right ear. She knew that he hated the snakes, never wanted to touch them, and he couldn’t help but feel that she’d removed it to keep him at a distance.

  “No,” he said. “No, I cannot do that.”

  She didn’t answer. The snake’s tongue flickered, its eyes on him, its thick body slinking past her neck now as it slithered from one shoulder to the other. Why does she have to come with the snakes? he wondered, and then he looked down at the photograph of himself and thought she was probably asking herself something similar.

  “I can’t, Chelsea.”

  “You could,” she said. “But you don’t.” She put the snake back into its plastic tub and slid it into place against the shelves. “I’ve got to see Travis today.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “Why?”

  “Is that a new question or a repeat?”

  “Both.”

  She turned and faced him then, folding her arms under her breasts. “He knows by now, Adam. I need to address that in person.”