by Cal Moriarty
16
December 2nd 1982
He closed the door of the den, as quietly as he could, and turned the key slowly in the lock so it made only the tiniest murmur as it slid into place. Along the darkened corridor he could see the flickering lights of the television. He could hear the sounds of cops chasing bad guys. He knew that she would be sat in there, just like every Thursday night at this time.
He stood in the doorway now, watching her, the empty bassinet on the floor beside her, the baby suckling and Edie’s eyes closed, asleep. Edie’s favourite, that new cop show Hill Street Blues, played on regardless. He thought she must have a thing for Captain Frank, she wouldn’t even go to her sister’s if it was on. Sis was far too devoted a Follower to have a TV, especially one with cable. Clark had registered it under his Cliff Hartman alias. He didn’t put it past the Faith to have one of the Followers inside the local TV company running checks on anyone starting a new account, getting the heads up if any of the flock were straying from the righteous path. The Faith had spent years trying to prevent the cable companies from doing business in Canyon County and beyond, figuring people might replace worshipping in Mission to worshipping the box 24/7 from their armchairs and give up Mission altogether. The Faith certainly didn’t want their ten per cent of the flock’s income getting diverted en route to their coffers, and especially not by things they’d banned. To avoid snoopers Clark got the TV guide, and the cable bills, sent to the post office box in Arizona he’d set up in Hartman’s name with a driver’s license he’d spent an afternoon crafting up at the university, using their colour Xerox machine.
Edie insisted on Clark hiding their TV every time her sister was due to visit. The TV had been hefted in and out of the yard store and replaced with a large vase of dusty plastic flowers more times than he cared to remember. Clark watched as the actress playing the bad guy’s lawyer, cheekbones you could slice Parmesan on, pushed her glasses back onto her nose and gave the DA a verbal slap-down in front of a vexed-looking judge. As things escalated in court, Clark turned the sound down, so as not to wake Edie. When Captain Frank reappeared onscreen Clark turned the sound back up, then made his way slowly and quietly over to the small table underneath the window. He put the neatly wrapped package down and clicked on the table lamp. The light, the click of the switch or Captain Frank’s voice had woken Edie and she was pulling herself upright again now, balancing the baby on her lap as she wrestled her shirt closed with her other hand.
‘Clark, I didn’t hear you, how long have you been standing there?’
‘I just came in.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter of ten.’
‘Oh, I must have dropped off.’ She looked around him to the TV. ‘I’ve missed most of it. I could have slept for a week.’ She beckoned over to the table. ‘What’s that?’
She sounded groggy, that was good.
‘What?’ Clark said.
‘That package. On the table.’
‘Oh, this?’
He picked it up and gave it to her. This was it, the start of it.
He gestured for her to hand him the baby. Little Lorina, Lori for short. He had told Edie that he thought the name was pretty, delicate. He hadn’t told her that the little girl who had inspired his favourite story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, had a sister called Lorina, named after their mother. He couldn’t tell her that, because her very next question would be how he knew such an odd bit of trivia and he could never reveal that to her. Not ever. He could say that the Prophet’s work is in the minutiae, the painstaking minutiae of creation. She would like that, invoking the Prophet, but he feared using the word ‘creation’, feared it would draw her attention and show his hand.
Lori gurgled. He put her over his shoulder. He didn’t want her to gripe too much and ruin everything, so he bounced around a little on the spot, patting her on the back, to allow Edie to keep her eyes firmly on the book. Pretending to be engrossed in the TV, Clark watched out of the corner of his eye as Edie unwrapped the Bible from all the layers of protective wrapping he’d used, intent on adding a little suspense into the proceedings, and smiled to himself as she began to flick slowly through its pages.
‘Oh, Clark, it’s beautiful. How old is it?’
‘Three hundred and fifty years. Give or take. 1638 – it’s from England.’
‘England? I wonder how it got here.’
‘Maybe on the Mayflower. One sailed in ’39.’
‘Shame it can’t talk.’
Clark was glad it couldn’t.
‘I’m taking it to Rooks Books tomorrow. I should get a good price for it.’
‘Do you really have to sell it?’
‘Do you really want to eat this week?’
‘But haven’t you got something else, one of your coins?’ Edie said, silently reading all the pencilled names in the back page, names that he’d spent two weeks researching from microfiche archives at the smaller of the state’s two universities, over two hundred miles from home. They had copies of many of the original manuscripts and records held in the Faith’s Historical Records Office at their own university, less than three miles away from his house, but he couldn’t be seen there, or anywhere local, researching this. Not yet. Edie hadn’t liked him being away, but he told her it was one of his multi-state buying trips. She didn’t care for coins, so he knew she wouldn’t ask to see anything and, even if she did, he had a stash in the basement, so he could show her those.
‘I already told you. The recession’s really biting, the coin market’s not doing so good. I’m trying to diversify. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Remember?’ She’d liked the idea. She didn’t much understand why anyone would buy coins and old Faith bank notes as they weren’t much to look at. Couldn’t hang them on the walls or anything. Well, you could if you liked ugly things. Edie liked pretty things, pretty people, and she really liked babies.
‘Oh, Clark, look, how sad.’ She held out the Bible to him, pointing to the inside back page with her finger.
‘Edie, support it with both hands.’
‘Sorry.’ She righted the book. ‘You see here, this little one, Anna-Beth Bright, she died aged six. And this one. Little William Bright, “died this day April 15th 1832”. Just two months.’
‘They lost a lot of kids back then, Edie,’ he said.
‘It must have been awful.’ Edie looked closer now. ‘It makes me sad, I could just weep thinking about it.’
Please don’t. His mother had cried a lifetime of tears.
‘All these children and, oh, three wives. They’re all listed here. Marriage dates and all.’
‘And none of them died before the husband wed the others?’
‘No, doesn’t read like that.’ She looked again. ‘Not as far as I can see . . . 1826 was the first marriage, 1834 the second, and the third one just a year later. He was a bigamist. He could have divorced.’
‘Obviously didn’t want to.’
Clark thought back to his own mother and how it was rumoured her granddaddy in the tail end of the 1890s had denied the Faith’s rules and also taken several wives, all at the same time. It had made his mother an outcast, even though the granddaddy was long dead before she had even been born. Defying the Faith’s edicts was the very worst of sins. And its Followers would punish subsequent generations for it, for as long as your father’s sins lived in their memories.
‘Clark, did you see – one of them was thirteen, another fourteen?’
‘The kids?’
‘No, the wives. The second and third wives. That’s . . .’
‘Terrible?’
‘It just doesn’t seem right.’
‘The world was a different place back then.’
‘You’re right.’ She looked skyward. ‘Lord, forgive me, who are we to judge?’
‘Judge not, lest you be judged,’ said Clark.
‘Amen,’ said Edie. ‘Where did you say you got it, Clark?’
He hadn’t.
&n
bsp; ‘A collector.’ It was a lie. It couldn’t take her much longer to notice now, surely, and then she would remember everything that happened.
‘Robert Bright married Elizabeth, Rebecca and Ellen.’
She looked up at him. The penny was dropping. He smiled at her. ‘Robert Bright?’ She looked back down at the Bible. At the names. ‘Elizabeth Earnshaw . . . Rebecca Hardy . . . Ellen Mays. It can’t be?’
She looked up at Clark again.
‘Robert Bright, born Tallahassee, Florida, sometime between Christmas and New Year 1801. No records exist for the precise date.’
‘Robert Bright? 1801? Oh my goodness, Clark.’ She was trying to whisper on account of baby Lori but her voice rose anyhow. ‘Clark. This is his Bible?’
‘Not his, I don’t think. But the immediate family. One of the wives, I’d reckon. And it looks like two very different hands. Both kind of girlish. All the dates match up. As far as I could find, anyhow.’
‘Robert Bright? Our Prophet? Clark, when were you going to tell me?’
‘I didn’t want you to get your hopes up.’
Clark moved to swap the baby for the Bible, but Edie ignored him, started reading the page, pointing out the various passages where in the same pencil – and one of the same hands – Clark, fuelled by Kenny’s home-brewed beer and seized by Mesmer, had marked passages in the hand of Rebecca Hardy, second, polygamous wife of the Prophet Robert Bright. Rebecca had accompanied her husband on a calling to the Crystal Arch, where on a searing hot desert day she transcribed the lucid dreams and waking visions of her bigamous husband Robert Bright, twenty years her senior, a former snake oil salesman lately of Kansas City. Rebecca’s notations of his dreams and visions, in a language no one could decipher except her and her husband, became commonly known as the Testament of Faith and came to form the cornerstone of the Faith’s beliefs.
‘Could it be, really?’ Edie looked inside its cover pages, scoured the penciled writing for something that might disprove her theory. He could tell, she couldn’t see his hand in any of this. His creation. Gently, she closed the cover, her hands clasped together on it as if waiting for morning service to begin. ‘You can’t sell this, Clark. It would be wrong. You have to donate it to the Church.’ He could tell that she was disturbed to see in print the very thing the Faith had spent over 150 years trying to erase from the collective unconscious. Their founder had three wives. All at the same time. For Robert Bright’s lifetime and that of his son and successor Robert Jnr, every male member of the Faith had enjoyed the delights of at least several wives at once. Women, however, were allowed just one husband.
‘Edie, for all I know this might not even be anything to do with the Prophet. Perhaps some family members filled all this stuff in later. Y’know, like an In Memoriam.’
‘It looks pretty old.’
‘It is. Sure. It’s worth something, even on its own. Without the inscriptions, or any connection to the Prophet.’
‘But, if it is the Prophet . . . or his family . . . what will you do?’
‘I’ll ask the Rooks tomorrow. See what they say. They’ll know better than me.’
‘You can’t sell it, Clark.’
‘I’ll have to see what they say about it. It could be a fake.’
‘A fake?’
‘Sure. It could be.’
‘Why would anyone fake a Bible?’
‘I mean the writing. Not the actual Bible itself, that’s real enough.’
‘But why?’
Clark shrugged. ‘People fake stuff all the time, make it worth something.’
‘Shouldn’t you take it direct to the Faith? This should be in a museum, Clark. The Mission’s museum.’
He knew that she would tell the world. Tell her world. And when she told her sister, she would tell her world and so on and so forth until a ripple of news became a tsunami, one which would reach the Faith maybe before the Bible did. At least, that’s what he hoped. He wanted the buzz about it to precede him, to herald his arrival in their orbit.
He took it back off her now. Swapped the baby for it. He watched as, cradling Lori, Edie picked up the bassinet and headed towards the door and up the stairs.
Clark wrapped the book back up in its protective packaging, clicked off the table lamp and followed her.
17
‘That’s so kind of you, thank you,’ said Linda Lomax as Marty placed the cup down in front of her on the small white doily. ‘You’ve both been so kind, I feel as if I should tell you something I did. Something bad. Really bad. I haven’t been able to go to Mission since.’
Al shot Marty an expectant look.
‘How’s Arnold?’ said Linda.
Marty raised his eyebrows. ‘Ma’am, if you want to call a lawyer . . .’
Linda looked up at him, a Kleenex clamped tight in her fist. ‘Can’t afford one, is the truth.’
‘Still. Do you want to take a moment? We can step out.’
‘It’s OK.’ She picked up the hot tea and took a sip.
Al looked at Marty, one of the what-the-hell-are-you-doing looks he gave him on occasion, but mostly when Marty put the law and the doing-it-right side of his personality between them and closing a case. They hadn’t read her the Miranda, she didn’t even have the bracelets on, and she hadn’t been downtown, or booked in, let alone processed. Anything she said now wouldn’t even count, but it might help them close the case. Confessions were good that way.
But Marty knew from the way that she’d asked after the errant Arnold that Linda Lomax still loved the old fool. Took one to know one, he guessed. He also knew those shaky hands couldn’t set a tilt bomb into action without blowing her up in the process. Hers were not the hands of a bomb-maker. Bomb-makers need nerves of steel and hands to match. Generally, that ruled out ageing middle-class mothers with a dependency on housewife’s heroin. Besides, he’d checked the kitchen cabinets, one of the few storage places in the tiny apartment, and there was no sign of bomb components. No pipes, no blast caps, no nails, no fuses, no stray wires, no mercury, no sulphur and no batches of fireworks that could be gutted for their explosives. But never say never. She could have trained with Baader-Meinhof for all he knew, and he quickly suppressed a smile.
She blew her nose, sighed as if the weight of the world was lifting from her shoulders. Al shifted forward in his seat, pencil poised over his notebook.
‘Arnold had a safe, in the house. In his office. Nothing fancy, no electronic codes, tumbler codes, nothing like that. Just a good ol’-fashioned lock with a key. Two keys, to be accurate. It was under his desk, must have weighed a ton. One of my friends, her brother-in-law owns a locksmith company.’
‘A locksmith company?’
Al looked a bit confused, his head was all set for the full I-did-it confession. Marty knew it wasn’t coming.
‘Again, Linda. If you would like a lawyer, we don’t want you to incriminate yourself.’
‘I don’t care any more. Look where I am. Prison might be nicer.’
Marty doubted it. At least this place had a pizza joint underneath.
‘There I might have some friends. All my so-called friends are now friends with Arnold and her. Business. Money. That was a mistake, wasn’t it, seeing as how he doesn’t have any business left.’
‘And no money, by all accounts,’ said Marty.
She smiled at him, turned to Al. ‘A locksmith. You can write that down. But I won’t say who or where. He told me what to do.’ She looked up at Marty, she was looking for release, for absolution. He could see it. He could trade absolution for information.
‘Did it involve a plasticine cast?’ Marty asked.
She smiled proudly and her eyes lit up for a moment. ‘Yes, yes, it did. It was the day Arnold told me about Bobbi Edwards, as she was then. Told me that they’d been screwing – and that he wanted a divorce, and I was gonna be thrown out like trash. I knew I had to get into that safe, had to find out what he’d got. I knew he’d lie, hide stuff. He rarely let the keys out of his
sight. But sometimes out on the lawn he would practice his golf swing, dress in that full ridiculous golfer’s outfit and leave the keys on a hook in the kitchen, as they got in the way of his swing. He’d be only about ten yards away from the kitchen door. So, I called my friend, got the locksmith’s number and he told me what to get.’
‘Plasticine?’ said Al.
‘Plasticine. There’s a kids’ toy store just ten minutes’ drive from the house, so without even telling Arnold I was going out, in case he changed the locks, I jumped in the car and went and got some. He was still out on the lawn hitting balls when I got back and so I took a small Tupperware dish, put the plasticine in it and pressed down one safe key, grabbed another Tupperware dish and got the second one done. I thought I made sure there was no plasticine left on either of the keys, but I might have been wrong.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because the next morning after the locksmith had made me the keys – perfectly, they fit right into the locks – when I opened the safe there was absolutely nothing in it.’
‘Nothing?’ Now it was Marty’s turn to look disappointed.
‘The SOB had cleaned the safe out. Completely. All I could think of was that he had found a bit of the plasticine on his keys, suspected something and taken everything to the office with him that morning.’
‘Did he mention anything about it to you?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe he’d already cleaned it out, before he told you about the divorce. Taken out anything incriminating.’
‘Like my life-insurance policy, perhaps?’
‘Looks like Mr Lomax might have had a lot of things to hide, he’d be crazy not to be cautious.’
‘So, after, when they were married – I was still watching them, stupid I know. My son called me from Palm Springs and told me her and Arnold were going to change the house locks. He’s still in touch with Arnold, but not that often: we have a little grandchild, Arnold Jnr, he’s two next month. I just call him Junior.’ She looked over to a small shelf which was rammed with baby pictures.
