by Nene Adams
“Knish,” Veronica said stiffly. “Actually, I’ve got to catch up on my paperwork. Thank you kindly for the invitation, though. I’m sure I’ll see you around, Mac.” She left, holding her spine so rigid, Mackenzie’s back ached in sympathy.
Well, wasn’t that the most polite rejection she’d ever been given? Mackenzie sat back in the chair, wondering about Veronica and why she had the niggling suspicion that she’d put her foot in her mouth at some point during their conversation.
She replayed the events of the morning and decided to focus on work at the moment. Speculating on her friend’s mood swings wouldn’t pay the bills—nor would her own bad temper, another inheritance from her late great-grandfather—and she couldn’t think of an immediate solution anyway. Her decision made, she picked up her keys and wallet from the hall table on her way out the door.
She walked downstairs and went to the building next door where she tore the crime scene tape off her office door and let herself inside. Her nose wrinkled at the mess the construction workers had left. Not just the workers, she realized, glancing at the floor and the dirty footprints of sheriff’s deputies who hadn’t bothered wiping their shoes on the mat.
If she had her carpets shampooed and presented a bill to Sheriff Newberry, would he pay it? She thought not, so she settled for grumbling under her breath. Come election time, she knew who wasn’t getting her vote.
At least her private office remained relatively undisturbed if she didn’t count the gaping hole in the wall. She sat at her desk, powered up the computer and checked her email.
A client had contacted her about locating a 1931 Bugatti Royale for sale. She recognized the man’s name, a multibillionaire oil sheik from Abu Dhabi. He’d given her work in the past and now sent her a definite challenge.
A few minutes of research on the Internet revealed that only six cars, one of each model, had ever been produced by Bugatti. She frowned. The Limousine Park-Ward, Coupé Napoleon, Berline de Voyage and Cabriolet Weinburger were in museums. The fifth car, the Coupé de Ville Binder, was owned by Volkswagen AG. The sixth car on the list would be her best bet. Ownership of the Kellner was speculative, but not impossible to track down.
Her reply to the email stated the conclusion she’d drawn, along with a statement of her fee if successful. Typing the string of numbers transformed her frown into a smile. In 1987, the last time the Kellner had sold at auction, it brought eight point seven million dollars. Given the vehicle’s rarity, the value had to have appreciated since then. Her commission of one percent of the sale price would put a pretty penny in her bank account, provided she could locate the owner and persuade him to sell.
She sent her reply and scrolled through the rest of her inbox, finding junk, junk, more junk, and a joker asking to hire her to find the heart he’d left in San Francisco. Typical. After clearing out her inbox, she pulled up a file containing her ongoing cases.
The rest of the morning was spent making long distance phone calls and hunting clues about the ’31 Bugatti Kellner and doing Internet searches on behalf of current clients who hired her to locate objects, usually rare or unusual collectibles, on their behalf.
Most of the items were fairly prosaic: a vintage toy tractor, a certain model of Coke vending machine for a collector in Atlanta, boxing gloves signed by little known champion boxer, Greg Page. Not worth huge amounts of money, but every bit helped pay the rent.
“Yes, I know Martin,” she said into the phone at one o’clock, speaking to the owner of a sports memorabilia shop in Las Vegas, “I know Page died in ’oh-nine, but his signature isn’t worth nearly as much as Ali’s. I’ll be damned if I let my client pay more than a couple of hundred bucks for the gloves and that’s a gift. Uh-huh, you get back to me. Bye.”
She hung up, satisfied with the deal. Martin would sell. She’d never known him to turn down a fair offer, though of course he’d try to bump up the price if she let him.
Rising from her chair, she put both hands on the small of her back and stretched out the kinks. She’d had a productive day so far. Now she had to shift her focus to Kelly Collier’s problem with the Pentecostal preacher, Reverend Wyland.
The drive to Sweetwater Hill cleared her head, the fresh air and sunshine chasing the last of the stuffiness away. She turned off the main route to follow a gravel access road up the hill, driving slowly around the potholes. The recent rainstorms hadn’t been kind, and the road’s surface was still muddy and very bumpy in patches.
She pulled her car over when she reached the Covenant Rock Church of God with Signs Following. As Kelly had told her, the structure was hardly more than a wooden shack. Looking at the sagging roof, she wondered how the church remained standing.
A half-dozen older model cars, mostly Fords and Chevys, lined both sides of the road—members of Wyland’s flock, no doubt, gathering for one of their thrice weekly meetings to take up poisonous serpents and test their faith in God. Mackenzie thought the practice was tempting fate in the most flamboyant way possible.
She got out of her Datsun and took a moment to glance around.
The sun-blasted grass around the church had been recently cut to the tree line. Beyond the cleared area grew a thick tangle of crab apples and wild North Star cherry trees, and beyond them rose taller pines and clusters of hornbeams. In the distance, she glimpsed the blue-gray peak of Laxahatchee Mountain brushing the clouds, with the lower Big Brother and Little Sister Ridges spreading out on either side.
An odd sound intruded on her reverie, a kind of buzzing that didn’t come from a bumblebee. Mackenzie glanced down and froze, her mind going blank with horror.
Coiled close to her shoe, a huge diamondback rattlesnake opened its jaws wide to show wickedly curved fangs, and its tail rattled a second warning.
Chapter Ten
Mackenzie dared not move. Through an effort of will that tightened her muscles until her body ached under the strain, she denied the instinct to leap away.
Eastern diamondback rattlers were aggressive, dangerously unpredictable and quick to strike, with some of the biggest fangs and venom sacks of any poisonous snake. This particular specimen looked about seven feet long. Unless she suddenly developed instant levitation or teleportation, she wouldn’t be able to get out of its strike zone fast enough to avoid being bitten. If she remained calm, the snake might retreat.
The door of the church opened. A teenage girl came outside. She wore an ankle-length white cotton dress and her long blond hair hung loose to her waist.
“Stay back!” Mackenzie croaked.
As if resenting her warning, the rattlesnake’s flat, triangular head, as big as a man’s fist, darted at her calf, a lightning feint that nearly caused her to scream. The snake’s nose struck her, but the fangs didn’t penetrate her skin. While she tried to remember how to breathe, the snake coiled itself into a compact, hostile ball, its tail rattling continuously.
“Jesus will be there with you if you call on Him,” the girl said, her bare feet skimming the grass as she drew closer. “Remember God is good. Have faith in the Lord. ‘Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions,’” she quoted from the Gospel of Luke. “‘And over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.’”
Before Mackenzie could to do more than make an aborted negative gesture, the girl bent and picked up the snake, grunting as she lifted the long, heavy length into her arms.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Mackenzie said, afraid to move lest she trigger the snake to strike the girl, who swayed and crooned a melody, her crystal pale eyes focused on a spot far away. From within the church came the faint strains of music.
The rattlesnake stretched out its length to lay its huge head on the girl’s shoulder beside her ear. Its thin, black tongue flickered out. Mackenzie fought not to scream. A snakebite on or near the artery in the girl’s throat, and she’d be dead in minutes.
A man exited the church, a lean figure dressed in a dusty black suit. She recognized Reve
rend Wyland by his mane of white hair. He approached them with quiet confidence, his gaze moving from the girl to Mackenzie and back again.
“Does the Spirit stir you, Alafair?” he asked the girl.
“Yes, sir,” she replied in a dreamy voice, beginning to rock on her heels. The snake remained quiescent.
“Go inside, child,” he said in his rich baritone. “Go inside and bring the Spirit of the Lord to your brothers and sisters in Christ.”
The church door remained open. A dozen voices lifted in a hymn, “I’m Going Home to Be with Jesus,” accompanied by a piano and a guitar. Carrying the rattlesnake across her shoulders like a living boa, Alafair drifted across the grass and disappeared inside.
As soon as she was free to do so, Mackenzie confronted Wyland. Her heart still pounded, but this time in fear for the teenage girl. Her errand for Kelly Collier flew out of her head. “How dare you encourage that child to handle dangerous snakes! I have a good mind to report you to the police,” she said to him indignantly. “If she’s bitten—”
“Alafair is not only a child of God, she’s my daughter in the flesh,” he said mildly. “I have the greatest care for her since her mother’s passing.”
Mackenzie was surprised Wyland had a daughter that young. She’d thought he was about her mother’s age, but as Meemaw Cross used to say, Ain’t no bull so old he can’t catch a cow and make a calf. Of course, modern medicine hadn’t invented Viagra in those days.
“She slept with snakes in her cradle,” he went on. “Handling serpents is evidence of her salvation, her moral purity and her obedience and trust in the Lord’s will. Besides, no harm will come while the Lord’s Spirit dwells within her.”
From inside the church, a man’s deep voice shouted, “Bless Your holy name, Jesus!” followed by a chorus of thanks, praise and amens.
Mackenzie wanted to call Wyland on his bullshit, but his hooded gray eyes, set deep in nests of wrinkles, were lit with the fire of true belief. Arguing with him would be futile. She grudgingly settled for saying, “Your daughter’s too young to handle rattlesnakes. It’s not against the law. You and your adult congregation are free to practice your religion as you see fit, but I’m fairly certain Sheriff Newberry takes a dim view of child endangerment.”
He nodded. “You must act as God wills.”
“Unless you want Family Services out here—”
“I will speak to Alafair.”
Mackenzie paused, aware of the church service continuing while the pastor patiently waited on her with his hands clasped in front of him, his head cocked to one side. She had made her point. Time to move on. “I was asked to talk to you by Kelly Collier.”
Wyland assumed a disapproving expression. “I am familiar with Miss Collier,” he said. “Miss Collier and Mr. Dearborn know one another, may God forgive them.”
“What do you have against Mr. Dearborn and Kelly? Why do you want him to resign from his church?” Mackenzie asked, genuinely puzzled.
All of the religious institutions in and around Antioch, including the Catholic church in Trinity, got along fine. Even the Wiccan coven had become a little more accepted in recent years, or at least not denounced so often or so thunderously from the various pulpits.
The Holiness Pentecostals were a small sect of a small sect within a Christian sect—in fact, members of the Church of God with Signs Following preferred to think of themselves as nondenominational, believing splitting Christianity into denominations was not commanded by God, but invented by man and therefore demonic—but she’d never heard of a feud between Wyland’s people and Dearborn’s Methodists.
Wyland laid a hand over his heart. “Jesus saves and the Lord forgives the sinner, though he be dyed in the deepest black to the depths of his soul,” he intoned.
Growing frustrated by the lack of answers, Mackenzie asked him bluntly, “What did you see that day in Stubbs Park, Reverend? What were Kelly and Mr. Dearborn doing that’s made you take against them so?”
“Only God can pronounce judgment on them as deserves it,” he said piously.
“Well, it seems to me like you’re doing your damnedest to judge them yourself, sir, considering you’ve made threats against Mr. Dearborn,” Mackenzie countered.
“That man doesn’t deserve to shepherd good Christian people,” Wyland said, an edge creeping into his voice. “He should step down.”
“That’s not your call.” Mackenzie took a breath, letting her irritation at his vagueness recede. “I’m asking you politely to leave Kelly and Mr. Dearborn alone.”
A loud voice issued from the open door of the church, a woman crying gibberish at the top of her lungs. Speaking in tongues, Mackenzie thought.
“The Holy Spirit begins to move,” Wyland said, “therefore I must be brief. Tell Mr. Dearborn that I will take no action against him now, for what’s to come is God’s will and lies between him and the Lord. You may say I will pray for him to gain wisdom and the moral strength to do what’s right. I will pray for the girl also.”
Although Mackenzie had the promise she’d hoped for, she remained unsatisfied. “What did you see in the park, Reverend?”
Wyland turned and began walking to the church, pausing halfway to stop and speak over his shoulder. “Sin,” he said and continued on his way without uttering another word. He went inside the church and closed the door behind him.
“Damn it,” Mackenzie muttered. Try as she might, she could make no sense of Wyland’s animosity toward Dearborn.
She decided the matter required further investigation, if only to satisfy her curiosity. Perhaps Dearborn had done or said something to Wyland that Kelly knew nothing about. She’d go and talk to him today before she went home for dinner.
Or maybe Kelly was suffering from pre-wedding jitters and seeing man-eating tigers instead of kittens, she thought. Either way, she’d find out the truth.
Chapter Eleven
Returning to her car, Mackenzie drove back to Antioch. On the way, her cell phone rang. Although she shouldn’t be talking on the phone while driving, she checked caller ID and answered the call. “Hey Mama.”
“Hey, baby,” said Sarah Grace. “Are you out and about?” In her Charleston accent, the word sounded almost like “aboot.”
“I’m in the car.”
“That’s all right, I just wanted to tell you I was thinking about Ann Coffin and that boyfriend of hers this morning—”
“Mama, his name’s Billy Wakefield.”
“Gracious, Kenzie, how’d you find that out?”
Mackenzie smirked, though she knew her mother couldn’t see her. “I have my ways. Do you know his people? Do they live around here? Is Billy Wakefield still alive?”
“Well, if he passed, he didn’t do it in Antioch,” Sarah Grace said with the surety of someone who’d lived in a small town for the majority of her life. “You used to find Wakefields yonder to Little Sister Ridge in an itty-bitty place called Emorysville.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Oh, after the lumber boom petered out, Emorysville dried up like a squashed frog on a hot rock.”
“And the Wakefields used to live there.”
“Yes baby, but when the mill closed, a lot of folks left town. And of course, there was the murder. Really took off the shine. The town went downhill lickety-split after that.”
Mackenzie pulled off the road, put on the car’s emergency blinkers and focused her attention on the phone call that had suddenly become interesting. “What murder?”
“It was in the paper, I recall. Terrible tragedy. The whole Wakefield family was killed by a hobo. Or a crazy person, maybe. I don’t remember.” Sarah Grace fell silent, and then suddenly exclaimed, “Oh! I forgot to tell you. I remembered Billy Wakefield had a tattoo.”
With difficulty, Mackenzie shifted mental gears, putting the matter of the murder aside for the moment. “Okay.”
“On the back of his wrist.”
“Okay.”
“Mackenzie Lorelei Cross, are
you listening to me?”
Mackenzie sighed as quietly as possible. Her mother had wandered off topic, not unusual for a woman her age. The recollection about Billy’s tattoo had no relevance to a murder in Emorysville as far as she could tell. “Yes Mama. Billy Wakefield had a tattoo.”
“You young people today…” Sarah Grace released her own sigh in a gust of breath. “Folks were different back then. Tattoos were just for sailors, or men who’d been to jail, or delinquents and no-goodniks. Really, the way you children run around these days covered head to toe in tattoos, looking like a bunch of savages—”
“Mama please,” Mackenzie broke in. “Apart from the fact he had a tattoo at all, what was so special about Billy Wakefield’s ink?”
Sarah Grace sniffed. “A cartoon girl’s head. She wore a sailor’s hat. Not what you’d call pretty or even well done. Just crude black lines. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Thank you, Mama. Now, you were telling me about a murder in Emorysville.”
“I don’t remember much. It was summer around nineteen seventy-five, I guess, hotter than a two dollar pistol and my feet were swole up something terrible. Your daddy went into town to buy a quart of peppermint ice cream from the Thirty-Two Flavors store and got a flat tire on his way home. By the time he fixed it, the ice cream had melted all down the seat and ruined his best Sunday shoes.” Sarah Grace chuckled. “Goodness, he cussed a blue streak!”
“Mama, the murder,” Mackenzie groaned. “Tell me about the murder.”
“Oops! I have got to go. My program starts in five minutes. Goodbye, baby.”
“Mama don’t—” The call disconnected.
She cursed the producer of the soap opera that had become her mother’s obsession. Calling back wasn’t an option. Sarah Grace hated interruptions and usually unplugged her phone when Passion’s Pastimes came on.
Nothing to do but drop in at the Antioch Bee, she decided, starting the car. The murders in Emorysville might not have anything to do with Annabel Coffin, but maybe she’d find out information that would lead to something more relevant, like what had happened to Billy Wakefield in the years after Annabel’s murder.
