by G. M. Ford
“Where’s her family from?” I asked.
“South America,” she said. “They’re missionaries somewhere out in the jungle. Said it took them nearly a week to get here.” She looked up at me. “Like Blaine . . . she was their only child.”
The front door slammed. A man’s voice rose in the hall. She set the wedding album back onto the table and heaved a sigh. “Phillip,” was all she said.
The dining-room door slammed open against the wall. He was tall and extremely thin, narrow lips, razor blade cheekbones, with a great shock of white hair bobbing around on his narrow head like a balloon. He pointed at me with a long bony finger. “Who are you?” he demanded.
I told him.
“You have no business here,” he said.
“I’m looking for Theresa Calder.”
My words stopped him in his tracks. He seemed to want to misunderstand.
“She sent you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I’m looking for her.”
“Why? Why would you be looking for that . . . that . . .”
I didn’t have an answer to the question, so I kept my mouth shut.
He angled in my direction. “That woman ruined my son’s life,” he rasped, his voice beginning to rise. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t in some way responsible for . . . for what happened. Her and that so-called church of hers . . . that . . . He was obsessed with finding her. It ruined his life. Killed my boy.”
He began jabbing his long finger into my chest.
“Without so much as a by-your-leave. Goddamnit! Gone,” he shouted. “Cleaned out their accounts. Never even . . .”
He opened his mouth to continue his tirade, but nothing came out. I watched his eyes change from anger to confusion and then to fear. He brought a hand up to his sternum and clutched his own shirt, twisted it hard, and then looked down uncomprehendingly at what he was doing to himself. “Oh . . . oh . . .” He spit the syllables out like fish bones, and then his knees buckled and he dropped toward the floor.
I managed to get my good hand under his shoulder to brake the fall. As I gently laid him on his side, his whole body began to tremble violently. I watched as his eyes rolled back in his head, and his feet began to drum on the floor.
“Call 911,” I said to his wife.
She just stood there, both hands clamped over her mouth, staring down at her husband in horror.
“Call 911,” I yelled.
“Phillip,” was all she said.
He began to vomit. I eased his head away from the widening puddle of puke on the floor and tried to quiet his spasms. When he finally stopped retching, I used two fingers to clear his mouth. His breath was coming in short, rattling gasps now. If anything, he was shaking more violently than he had been before. I cradled him in my arms, trying to keep his spasms from shaking him to pieces. My hand felt like somebody was jumping up and down on it. It was all I could do not to moan.
She was on the phone now, giving the dispatcher the address.
Took the aid car eight long minutes to arrive. By that time, his breath had gotten shorter, his spasms more uncontrolled. I rolled aside and let the medics do their thing.
I found a bathroom down the hall, splashed some cold water on my face, and washed the puke from my hands. By the time I got back, the docs had Phillip started on a couple of IVs, had wrapped him up like a mummy, and were wheeling him out the door at a fast trot.
Carlotta appeared in the doorway. “I’m going to drive Mees Peterson to the hospital,” she announced. Took my addled brain a few seconds to realize that was my invitation to leave. I was bleary eyed, mouth-breathing, and numb all over as I started for the door.
Comes a time when a person needs to do a little soul-searching. No matter how I spun what had happened today, it still turned out that I should never have bothered those people. Not at a time like this. Probably not at all. Wasn’t like I had a dog in the fight. None of these people meant anything to me, but, for selfish reasons, I decided to stick my face into their lives anyway, and why . . . because after forty-some years, I still couldn’t put my finger on where I stood with my father, or because somebody told me to butt out, and I have this asinine aversion to being told what to do by authority figures.
The freeway was a parking lot, so I veered across five lanes and got off at the Seneca exit. City streets weren’t moving either, but at least there was something to look at while I sat there breathing carbon monoxide fumes.
My nerves were shot. Seemed like it took two hours to get home from downtown. By the time I got down to Elliott, I was leaning on the horn and barking at other drivers, working my way up to a full-scale road rage hissy fit, so I calmed myself down and made an effort to find something positive in my surroundings.
The best I could manage was to notice that spring was late this year. It smelled like spring, but felt like winter. Here and there, in spots that got just a bit more sun than others, daffodils and primroses were beginning to show their colorful faces.
I didn’t have a plan for when I got home. Didn’t want one. I felt like crawling into bed, pulling the covers over my head, and not coming out for a week. At least, that way, I couldn’t do any more damage to myself or others.
I didn’t check the mail on the way in. I turned the phone off and dumped it on the kitchen counter. Anything anybody wanted was just going to have to wait. I grabbed a Stella Artois from the fridge and sat in front of the TV without turning it on.
I ran out of beer before I ran out of self-pity, so I started in on a big bottle of Stolichnaya I’d had in the freezer since the late eighties. An hour later, I remembered why it was that people drank. How the jagged edges of things got smoother. How “for sures” got to be “maybes,” and “I’s” got to be “theys.”
I’d just about drowned my sense of shame when the self-defeating side of me decided he just had to know how Phillip Peterson was doing. I stumbled around a bit, remembered I’d left my phone in the kitchen, and lurched in to get it.
Took me about ten minutes to find out that, although Newcastle had its own medical clinic, anyone requiring serious attention was going to end up at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland.
I asked for him by name. The switchboard connected me. It rang four times before somebody picked it up. “Meester Peterson’s room,” she said.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Excuse?”
“The guy from the house today.” I heard Carlotta catch her breath and swallow. “How’s he doing?” I asked.
“He die at four thirty,” she said, and broke the connection.
I stood there for a long while, staring at the wall, phone dangling in my hand, until eventually I forgot I was supposed to be holding it, and it slipped from my fingers.
When I bent over to pick it up, I checked to see if it was broken. It wasn’t. That’s when I noticed all the calls and e-mails I’d been ignoring all afternoon. I pushed the button and dropped it into my pocket.
The calls would have to wait. I was in no shape to be chitchatting with anybody.
On my way back into the den, I sat down at my desk, hit the space bar on my iMac, and waited for the box to come alive. I sighed, and started to change my mind, to reach around the back and turn the damn thing off. That’s when I noticed the e-mail from Carl.
I grabbed the mouse and double-clicked it. All caps across the top.
HEY ASSHOLE. YOU OUGHTA TRY ANSWERING YOUR FUCKING PHONE ONCE IN A WHILE. HERE’S THE REST OF YOUR INFO.
Two attachments down at the bottom. The attachment on the right was a list of the properties that had turned out to belong to Aaron Townsend rather than to the Mount Zion church. The attachment on the left sent me looking for another drink.
“The bitch chewed him up and spit him out,” he said. “Poor bastard never had a chance.”
His name was James Dunn. Five ten, ginger-colored hair, and a bit of a Philadelphia accent. He was the sales manager for Victory Motors, an outfit that specialized in restored American
muscle cars. Years before, back in the period before Charles Stone had slipped into oblivion, they’d worked together at Lee Johnson Chevrolet in Kirkland. How Carl had found him was a mystery to me, but he had. And here I was. Telling myself I owed it to the recently departed Phillip Peterson to find out whatever I could about Theresa Calder.
We were wedged into his phone booth–sized office out next to the body shop, watching three guys pull the body off a purple ’66 Dodge Charger.
“You knew her well?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Company picnics. The Christmas party. That sort of thing.”
He thought about it for a second. “It wasn’t like she wasn’t comfortable around any of Chuck’s old friends. You know—one of those women who marry a guy and want his life to start all over with her. Like nothing ever happened in his life before she came on the scene. You know what I mean? One of those honeys.”
I said I did.
“You know those commercials where they say ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’? Well this one followed old Chuck all the way home.”
“That where he met her? Vegas?”
He nodded. “Chuck won a weekend for two in Vegas in a sales contest. Asked me if I wanted to go along.” He threw a hand into the air. “I mean . . . why the hell not, you know? A free weekend in Vegas, who’s gonna turn that shit down?” He leaned forward in his chair. “Second night we’re there . . . we’re in the Bellagio . . . I look up from the table and he’s gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that,” he said. “Thin fucking air. Poof.”
He seemed to be rolling so I kept my mouth shut.
“Don’t show up till noon the next day. Comes stumbling into the room, looking like he just won the lottery, and tells me that he’s found the love of his life and is getting married.” He shook his head. “I tried to tell him, man. You know: pussy’s a renewable resource . . . don’t be gettin’ crazy here . . . there’s probably forty more of ’em downstairs right now. But he didn’t want to hear about it. Nope, man . . . this was the one. Said he’d already called home, got a few extra days off and was staying for a while.” He shrugged. “That was it, man. He took a shower, changed his clothes, packed his shit, and left. Didn’t show up back home at the store for a week.”
“What then?”
“Then Chucky’s a new man. No more goin’ out for a few pops after work. Don’t play on the softball team no more. Don’t do a damn thing other than stay home and kiss her ass, which was just how she wanted it.”
“When did you finally meet her?”
“First Christmas party.”
“What did you think?”
He shrugged. “Not the best-looking broad I ever seen—kinda horsey lookin’, if you ask me—but I mean, like, seriously put together.” He chuckled. “I joked with Chuck, told him if he wasn’t careful he was gonna end up with stretch marks on his lips.”
He laughed again. “He didn’t think it was funny though. Got all kind of pissed off.”
“So what happened?”
He thought about it. “Hard to tell,” he said finally. “I think she was some kind of Jesus freak. Got him involved in that kind of Holy Roller shit.” He waved the idea off disgustedly. “And then what? Maybe two years in, Chuck starts coming unglued. Starts missing shifts. Showing up smelling like a distillery. Wearing the same suit for a week. That kind of shit. I mean, management was good about it, put up with a lot of shit for a long time, but you know, it just got to be too much, so they hadda let him go.”
“And that was it?”
He shook his head. “Naw. So after they gave him his notice, couple weeks after that, I stopped by his place on my way to work one morning.” He held up a cautionary hand. “You wouldn’t friggin’ believe it,” he said. “He was being evicted, right then and there. Couple sheriff’s deputies was frog-walkin’ him out the door right as I pulled up. Place looked like that TV show Hoarders. I mean, like, there was shit everywhere.”
“Where was she?”
“Long gone,” he said. “Walked out a couple months before. Took everything that wasn’t nailed down and left him for some stockbroker or something.”
I was betting the so-called stockbroker was none other than Blaine Peterson.
“And that was the last you saw of him?”
He sat back in his chair. “Not quite,” he said. “Somethin’ like . . . maybe six months after that, I’m comin’ out of the Lake City Fred Meyer and this bum asks me for spare change. I’m fumblin’ around in my pockets trying to come up with a little something and I realize it’s fucking Charlie. Crusty, dirty long hair, black dirt under his fingernails. I mean, man . . . it was terrible, so I said, ‘Charlie, it’s me, James.’ Like, what can I . . . And he just turned and walked away from me, yellin’ and screamin’ about the Lord and Jesus and all that kinda shit. How he’d been cast out of the fold and stuff like that.” He anticipated my next question. “Those were his exact words. Swear. Said he’d been cast from the fold into the pit.” He went somewhere back in his mind and relived the moment. “Never seen him again,” he said, finally. “Always felt a little guilty . . . you know, ’cause we was together in Vegas when he met that honey. Like maybe I should have stopped him or something.”
“He made his own choices,” I said, with a lot more conviction than I felt.
Seemed like no matter which way I turned, all roads led to Mount Zion Ministries and their wonder boy Aaron Townsend. That poor homeless bastard they called the Preacher left all his worldly goods with that kid, told him he was going in search of the prophet of the Lord, and never came back. Theresa Calder got Blaine Peterson mixed up in what his late father had called “that so-called church of hers,” and he ended up composting in the trunk of a rental car. Seemed like having a few words with Aaron Townsend would be the next logical step, but, as is often the case, doing the logical thing was more easily said than done.
While the papers reported that Townsend was showing up at various churches to preach, exactly where he was staying was still an unknown. “In seclusion” seemed to be the agreed-upon phrase to describe his present domestic arrangements.
I figured he couldn’t be making all these public appearances and staying out on the peninsula at the Rectory. It was just too big a pain in the ass getting back and forth on the ferry, so it had to be someplace here on the mainland. Common sense said he probably wasn’t camping out in an abandoned church, which left those two other disputed properties Carl had identified as the most likely starting points.
One of them had a Shoreline address. The other was way out in unincorporated King County someplace, on a road I’d never heard of. In keeping with the story of my life, I thought about it for about three seconds and then opted for easy over hard.
Took me twenty minutes to drive to the address in Shoreline. Turned out to be an older neighborhood. The fresh, green tips of leaves were beginning to show on the branches, and the air smelled of turned earth. 14512 was the last of the old-time farms that used to dot this part of the county, the vast majority of which had long since been subdivided and cul-de-sac-ed out of existence.
The property sat way up above the road, with a rough stone wall holding the slope in place and a long-abandoned garage dug directly into the side of the hill.
I’d like to tell you how I parked down on the road and walked up in an attempt to be stealthy. I’d like to tell you that, but truth be told, that all-too-familiar white Range Rover was parked in the driveway, making rock star parking highly inadvisable.
The rutted track was just steep enough to remind me how many parts of my body still hurt. I was grunting and groaning along when the sound of raised voices brought me to a halt.
“I’m not telling you again,” somebody shouted.
A woman’s shrill voice rose above the trees, “Go on—get out of here!”
The Range Rover was between me and the voices. On my right an ancient orchard stood black and crook-knuckled against a slate-gray sky. On the left, a thick cop
se of tangled fir trees and brush, probably left in place by the original homesteaders to protect the house from the winter wind.
I ducked low and slid along the side of the car, then peeled off and slithered into the trees. Took all I had to force myself through the jungle of brambles and branches. Ten feet in, I had to get down on my knees and crawl.
About the time I ducked under a low-hanging branch, the tree voiced its displeasure by dumping about half a pound of dried fir needles down my neck.
As I scuttled forward, the voices began to rise. The air was suddenly filled with adrenaline and acrimony. I rested on my elbows and wondered how it was I’d somehow morphed into an engine of conflict. Seemed like no matter where I went something bad was just about to happen. Like, all of a sudden, I’d become the Typhoid Mary of hard feelings or something.
I got down on my belly and crawled the last ten feet. By the time my head popped out the far side, the situation was really beginning to unravel. First thing my eyes were drawn to was Brother Biggs, standing directly behind the Range Rover, his arms folded across his thick chest, flashing a grin bigger than the grille of a ’57 Chevy, despite the half a mile of surgical tape holding his nose to his face.
Up on the front porch, a young couple stood shoulder to shoulder. Tall blonds, both of them, early thirties, trying to present a united front, but looking scared as hell.
“Gonna tell ya one more time,” Biggs said. “We are the owner’s duly authorized agents. We have given you the required seventy-two hours’ notice to vacate the premises.” He unfolded his arms and waved a handful of legal papers at them. “Now get your personal things together and get on up the road.”
They held their ground. “Pastor Highsmith told us—” the young man began.
Brother Biggs heaved a sigh. “Pastor Highsmith can flat-out kiss my ass,” he said.
“We’re not leaving,” the woman blurted.
