All the Blue-Eyed Angels

by Jen Blood

  “By sleeping with preachers?”

  “People have believed less credible destinies. Rebecca told me once that she believed God spoke to her, mid…” his pale cheeks flushed to a deep pink that climbed all the way to his receding hairline.

  “So, Rebecca Ashmont believed she was God’s concubine. That’s your story?”

  “That was her story, though not so crudely put,” he said. He got up and made for the door one more time. “That’s honestly all I can tell you. You should go.”

  I didn’t need to dig any deeper—I knew exactly what the Reverend’s spin on the affair would be. It was the story of Eden all over again: an innocent man does his best to lead a godly life only to be led astray by Eve, buck naked with a snake ‘round her neck and an evil apple in hand, just begging to be tossed from the garden. I managed to get in one last question before he pushed me out the door.

  “So, Rebecca’s son—Zion. Where did he fit into this whole delusion of hers?”

  I heard footsteps upstairs. Reverend Diggins looked like he was about to be caught in the act instead of just talking about it. His fingers tightened around the doorknob, his lips pressed into a pale, straight line.

  “I told you, I only saw them together when he was small. But the way she raised him was not…” he hesitated so long that I thought he might not finish. Someone stopped at the top of the stairs, calling the Reverend’s name.

  “Reverend Diggins?” I prompted.

  He paused to call up the stairs. “One moment please, Alan. I’ll meet you out front.” He returned his attention to me as the man’s footsteps receded.

  “Rebecca was not a traditional mother, clearly. Zion was the center of everything. He was a serious baby who grew into a serious toddler, and I expect ultimately became a very serious adolescent. I never knew him as he grew older, but the stories that I heard were that he was somewhat…”

  I realized I was holding my breath. “Somewhat…?”

  “Unbalanced,” he completed. “There was a rumor that Isaac was grooming him for his position at the head of the church. It is my understanding from accounts I’d heard at the time that Zion took this training very seriously.”

  “But he was only a kid—he would have been twelve, thirteen years old when Rebecca took him to Payson Isle.”

  “With Rebecca and Joe Ashmont as parents, I expect twelve years is quite enough time to develop some…eccentricities.”

  Or go bat-shit crazy, in other words. I considered this for a moment, still trying to reconcile the image of the black-eyed little boy on his mother’s lap in the photo with the man I now believed he had become. Then, something else made me forget that thought altogether.

  “Wait—accounts from whom? They’d only been there a month, and everybody out there died. Who talked to you about Zion?”

  He hesitated a split second too long, and I knew. I didn’t have a chance to ask anything else as he herded me into the hallway. Just before he closed the door on me, he whispered the words I’d already anticipated.

  “Your father was concerned. He came to me for counsel regarding the relationship between Isaac, Rebecca, and the boy, a few days before the fire. That’s why we were going in—that’s why he wanted them off the island. Not just because of Rebecca’s delusions, but because of her son’s.”

  August 17, 1990

  Rebecca sits on a ledge on the north shore of the island, waiting for Isaac. Below, the ocean is a clean, sharp blue, etched with the white lines of a strong surf on a windy day. The ledge provides a perfect vantage, the granite cut as though God himself designed the site for this purpose. Rebecca thinks of the occasional stone masonry Joe used to do in the summers when they were still at the orphanage. She used to imagine Christ wielding a hammer in much the same way, for some reason. Joe would return at the end of the day, covered in fine white dust; she could taste stone in his beard and on his eyelashes.

  A voice pulls her from her reverie. It is not the one she expected.

  “Beautiful view.”

  She glances over her shoulder as Adam approaches. “It is.”

  It is late afternoon, the sun still high in the sky. Rebecca usually meets Isaac in the dark of night or first light of morning, but he suggested an earlier meeting this time. It made her uneasy the way he avoided her gaze when he made the request; Adam’s presence does nothing to ease her mind.

  He sits beside her without waiting for an invitation. When she looks at him, his eyes are as blue as the ocean below. She thinks for a moment that the name he chose for his new life is apt—he has assumed the innocence, the fresh-boned purity, of someone just stepping into the world. Now that she knows the extent of his deceit, she finds herself unexpectedly impressed with the performance.

  “Do you spend much time here?”

  She nods, knowing he will continue regardless of whether or not he receives encouragement from her. First man or no, he is still essentially a man.

  “Isaac sent me to tell you he can’t meet you this evening.”

  This time, she does turn. There is always something veiled about Adam, a sense that he is hiding some inner darkness behind those eyes of brilliant blue. For an instant when their eyes meet this time, however, the veil falls. She understands suddenly what he sees when he looks at her: A weed. Something unwelcome, something dangerous—a plague to be plucked from their midst before it contaminates the carefully tended garden that is the Payson Church.

  She picks up a handful of granite pebbles from the ground beside her and holds them so tightly in her clenched fist that the stones dig into her skin. She attempts a smile.

  “Did he say why he can’t meet me?”

  Adam shakes his head. Doubt darkens his face for an instant before it is gone. “He’s busy, I think. Preparing his sermon.”

  “And you’re his messenger.”

  He nods. The weight of the words she knows he is struggling with are heavy in the air. Finally, she prompts him.

  “Was there something else?”

  With long, graceful fingers, he reaches for one of the sharper stones on their shared ledge and flicks it in a clean arc through the air. If they were closer to sea level, the stone would have caught the water just right—it might have skipped five, six, seven times before it sank. This high up, it just sails out in a straight line before beginning its descent.

  “I just wanted you to know that I understand,” Adam says.

  She turns to look at him in question.

  “I know what it is to want something for your child. I know how becoming a parent changes you—how the world takes on new meaning.” He falters when she does not respond. “What I mean to say is, I know how easy it can be to lose yourself—to lose sight of God’s plan for you—when you have a child.”

  “Zion is God’s plan for me,” she returns simply. It’s absurd that she is having this conversation with a man who has allowed his only child to be taken from him, raised by a godless woman on the mainland.

  “You’ve done a good job with him—no one’s saying Zion isn’t an exceptional boy. I’m just saying, maybe the time has come to start considering your own spiritual well-being.”

  A fishing boat appears from behind the cove, followed by a dozen or more gulls that dive relentlessly at the deck. She knows immediately that it is not Joe’s boat—he kills a fresh gull every morning and nails it to a post at the hull. No gulls follow Joe.

  “I’m saved,” she finally says.

  “The way you conduct yourself with Isaac suggests that you are not.” He hesitates a moment when she doesn’t respond. “I’m not here to judge your conduct with Isaac. I’m more concerned about his behavior with Zion.”

  For the first time, she is surprised by his words. “My son has been chosen.”

  “He’s a very bright boy. Gifted. But I’m concerned that Isaac has become somewhat fixated, on him.”

  It is only then that she realizes the extent of his envy. Until Zion’s arrival, Adam was the sole focus of Isaac’s guiding han
d, the adored apprentice at the feet of the master. Others attended prayer meetings and Bible study, learned the ways of the Lord, but Adam was the favorite son.

  Everything has changed since their arrival.

  The silence between them grows sharper. She can feel him struggling with the final words to drive his argument home. He reaches out to her—touches her leg, just slightly, with the palm of his hand. Rebecca flinches, and he looks as guilty as if he’d struck her.

  “I think it would be best if you took Zion from this place. Put an end to your relationship with Isaac, take your son, and make a new life for yourselves. Isaac can’t do it—you two have some kind of power over him, some sway that he can’t seem to fight. But he has built something here, something valuable. All of that has been jeopardized since you and Zion arrived.”

  Rebecca weighs her response carefully, considering the information Matt passed on to her just yesterday. She hadn’t planned on saying something so soon; now, backed into a corner by Adam’s design, Rebecca realizes she has no choice. She will not go quietly.

  “You say you are concerned with putting the church in jeopardy. If that’s true, how can you justify living here when your presence is a much clearer danger to the sanctity of this island?”

  Several long seconds pass. Seagulls scream and waves crash, but Adam is frozen.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he says, finally. The words are so weak they make her smile.

  “I think you do. I understand the need to separate one’s self from the past; to reinvent yourself when it’s clear the path you have chosen is not the one God intended. But it seems Isaac and his followers are far better equipped to handle the challenges of one battered woman and her gifted child, than the fury that could reign down upon us all should you be discovered here.”

  He has gone unnaturally pale, staring at her as though she’s already uttered the threat.

  “No one knows,” he said. “That part of my life is behind me. The people who died, those who survived…It’s all behind me.”

  “Yet you sent your only child away to protect her—isn’t that true? To ensure that even if you—if we—are found, Erin will be safe. It’s a mistake, Adam, to believe I wouldn’t go to equally drastic measures to ensure that my son’s new life is not threatened.”

  Before he can respond, a branch breaks behind them. She and Adam turn, and Rebecca is not surprised to find Zion standing at the path. He walks to them with the certainty of a man rather than a child, and comes to stand beside his mother. Still seated, her head reaches just above his hip. His hands fall to her hair, and she nearly closes her eyes at the comfort of her son’s touch.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” he says.

  It is a lie, but one she can forgive.

  “I was here. We’re finished now.” She looks at Adam, daring him to challenge her. Zion offers her his hand. Rebecca doesn’t hesitate to let him take her full weight when pulling her up, confident he can handle the burden. Adam remains seated. As mother and child prepare to leave, he finally speaks.

  “I wish you would think about what I said.”

  Adam is on the ledge, Rebecca to his right. She doesn’t think about where Zion is until the boy has switched places with her, putting himself between her and Isaac’s minion. He moves so quickly that he knocks against the older man, his dark eyes hard. Adam grabs hold of a piece of scrub brush to keep from falling off the ledge and onto the jagged rocks below.

  More gulls screech somewhere offshore. Adam gets to his feet, and the two chosen ones—the elder now cast aside, the younger just coming into his own—stand facing one another. Zion looks at Adam tranquilly, his grip tightening on Rebecca’s hand.

  “You should be more careful,” the boy says.

  His voice is cool; Rebecca feels a combination of awe and undeniable fear at his confidence. Adam merely nods, but she sees that he is also afraid—of both of them, now. He takes another step away from the edge as mother and son return to their path, hand in hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  After my conversation with the Reverend, I went straight to the paper to catch Diggs up on everything I’d learned. It was only seven-thirty in the morning, but gray skies and lack of sleep had my internal clock running backward. It could have been noon, it could have been midnight. Hell, it could have been Cleveland for all I knew.

  The rain had been heavy enough overnight to cause flash flooding along the coast. Before I could stop him, Einstein swam a couple of laps in a marathon-sized puddle outside the Trib. I did my best to dry him off with a discarded towel in my backseat, and we went inside.

  The newsroom was empty when I got there—a sure sign that things had run late the night before. The TV was tuned to the weather channel, and the usual BBC news had been swapped out in favor of the weather radio. Both reports promised winds gusting to thirty knots and seas up to five feet. Not a good day to be on the water.

  I was just about to knock on Diggs’ door when Juarez called. I thought of the discoveries I’d made since our early-morning rendezvous—the angel in with his things, the photos I’d seen. Reverend Diggins’ words about Rebecca’s son rattled around in my head: Unbalanced. Delusional. The image of Juarez’s body flashed through my mind, the taste of his skin. The hammer of my heart when he’d pinned me to the mattress, his dark eyes hard as coal.

  I felt no fear with Juarez—but then, I’d never been afraid of Isaac Payson, either. What if that wasn’t because Juarez and Payson posed no threat, but simply because I had a spectacularly crappy psychopath-radar? I thought again of Zion Ashmont: an unstable boy who vanished in a fiery blaze of glory, the sole survivor of a congregation he was being groomed to lead.

  Who would that boy become, twenty years later?

  I answered my phone just before it went to voicemail.

  “Any luck?” My voice sounded tight. Jack had been dead on when he’d read me last night; I wondered what he heard now. I turned from Diggs’ door and headed for my office.

  “None so far.” There was a motor running in the background; he had to raise his voice to be heard. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “No—I had some work to do, decided to get an early start. What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to find out if you ever got in touch with Sheriff Finnegan?”

  Shit. In between rummaging through Juarez’s stuff and interrogating the local clergy, I’d totally forgotten I was supposed to be helping save Matt Perkins.

  “I didn’t, actually—I thought it would be better to wait ‘til morning, since you didn’t know exactly where he was.” A lie, but at least it was a logical one. “Do you want me to call now?”

  “No,” he answered, too fast. “I’m still looking—I’ll just call him myself once I get a better sense of things.”

  The call faded in and out, static heavy on the line. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Sorry, the connection’s bad—I’m in the car. I’ll call back later if I get a few minutes. I just wanted to know if you’d talked to Finnegan. And to let you know I’m sorry—you know, about the interruption last night.”

  There was no way in hell the motor in the background was a car engine. “Don’t worry about it, I understand. Are you in a car or a boat? It sounds like you’re on the water.”

  There was a pause. If my people-reading skills had failed me before, they were working overtime now.

  “You’re right, sorry—I’m on a boat now. Headed for the car. I’m a little tired, my head’s not quite working right. I just took a quick ride around the harbor to see if I could catch up with Joe. I thought he might know where Matt is.”

  I started to press for more details, but Juarez cut me off.

  “I should go, Erin. But stay off the water today, okay? Don’t go near the island. Just promise me you’ll stay away until the storm clears—at least for the next day or so.”

  “Jack, what the hell’s going on?”

  The pause that followed lasted so long I thought we’
d been disconnected. When Juarez continued, there was no mistaking the exhaustion in his voice. And something else—something close enough to despair to chill me to the bone. “Just promise me, all right? It’s bad out here today.”

  We lost our connection before I could think of a response.

  I sat there with the phone still in my hand, going over his words. Don’t go near the island. Had he been out there? And if so, what had he found? He was obviously warning me about more than just the weather.

  Diggs knocked on my door before I could develop any half-baked theories. He wore a long-sleeved t-shirt with Curtis Mayfield on the front and the words “Got Soul?” across the bottom. There was a coffee stain on his chest and black ink on the left leg of his blue jeans.

  “I thought I heard you in here.” He came in and sat down without waiting for an invitation. “Sorry we missed each other last night. Did you make any progress on the case?”

  I felt a twinge of guilt. “Not really—though I’d love to run a couple of things by you when you have a second.”

  “Any word from Juarez since yesterday?”

  It was clear from his tone that he already knew the answer to that. “What time did you come home?” I asked, horrified.

  “Around two,” he admitted. “I figured when Einstein was alone by the fire and your room was empty…” he attempted a laugh, though something in his eyes told me he hadn’t been so amused by the situation last night. “I didn’t want to interrupt—I figured I’d just come back here and sleep on the couch.”

  “It’s your house, Diggs—that’s ridiculous. You could have stayed.”

  He frowned. “No. I really don’t think I could have.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We stood there for a second or two, silent, and then an instant later it was like a mask had fallen. He shrugged, working hard to appear callous. I wasn’t fooled.

  “I had work, it was just as well. No big deal, Sol. And I still have work, actually—I’m gonna head back to the house and grab a shower and some breakfast, and then I’ve got a full day here. I just wanted you to know I’ll probably be here around the clock for another couple of days with the storm. I’ll be keeping a low profile for a while.”