Crown of Thorns (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  The elders who had rushed to take Junior away were the same elders who had been guarding Angel. From the beginning, she’d seemed too small to be much of a threat. Because of that, it had never occurred to them that she might have a weapon of any kind or that she’d attempt to use it.

  Angel, of course, had taken advantage of this. The stun gun was hidden beneath her loose shirt. And now, unguarded, she scuttled forward in the darkness, unseen to anybody.

  “The will of Juh-hee!-ze-huss! shall be done!” Shepherd Isaiah thundered. His voice rumbled through the darkness of the congregation, quelling the mutterings. He raised the Holy Rod of Chastisement as another lightning strike threw his entire arched figure into relief.

  “If I am wrong,” his voice echoed throughout the church before the ensuing thunder hit, “let God himself strike me down!”

  Another bolt of lightning.

  In the total brief blackness that followed, before any eyes could adjust after the flash of light, Angel reached forward with her stun gun.

  “I said, let God himself strike me—”

  Angel jabbed the prongs of the stun gun solidly into the calf of Shepherd Isaiah’s right leg. Just as another bolt of lightning flashed.

  He croaked, then convulsed as he fell forward, landing on the steps in front of the pulpit. He twitched twice, moaned into his microphone, then lay completely motionless before the entire congregation in the candlelit church.

  Angel fled at a full run.

  A woman in the back of the church screamed. Then another. Yet all the screams stopped suddenly when an image flickered on the wall at the front of the church.

  Angel had reached the projection room. It had not occurred to any of the adults around her that she could enter it by squeezing through the square hole in the wall that allowed for the projection of light. She’d gone looking for Nick earlier and found his Jeep parked behind the church. With her computer equipment. She’d retrieved it and gotten it ready, hoping for the chance to use it.

  And now was the time.

  She’d left her computer running, and all it took were a couple of quick mouse movements and a couple of mouse clicks.

  Then, up on the entire front wall, where normally the verses to hymns were shown from the church projector, there was Grammie Zora, sitting in her voodoo room. At first the image was fuzzy, then became focused as Angel adjusted the projector.

  **

  Grammie Zora’s voodoo altar was framed by two chairs facing each other, with the altar centered behind them. All the candles were lit, and Grammie Zora sat in the chair on the right, allowing her to view the plastic bead curtains that I knew were just off camera.

  “I’m here,” she called out. Her face was in shadow. “Where you remember the altar from your last visit forty years ago.”

  The candles in the church flickered, as if her voice had sent a ripple through the air. Moments later, the person she’d been speaking to appeared on the wall. Timothy Larrabee. White-haired, in dark slacks and a dark turtleneck.

  “Sit,” Grammie Zora commanded. She pointed at the empty chair.

  Larrabee sat. The positioning of the chairs in front of the altar and the way each faced the other suggested to me that someone had taken great care to make the arrangement fit in the viewfinder of the hidden camcorder.

  Grammie Zora’s voice was low, eerie. “When you last sat here, I pitied you. Such a sad boy. Because of that, I indulged your request.”

  “The curse worked.” He laughed, slightly nervous. “She died.”

  “The curse had nothing to do with it. I know now you came here because you wanted it known that your grandmother had been cursed. I have a witness. From the hardware store. She told me something years later because she needed to confess and had no one else to listen to her. The night your grandmother died, we both know that you—”

  “Are we here alone?”

  “My granddaughter is asleep in her room. Why does that matter to you? Are you afraid someone might overhear what you have to say to me? or what I have to say to you?”

  Larrabee gripped the edges of his chair, sitting straight. “No. Whatever you say is your word against mine. Do you still have that painting? I’ll purchase it from you. How does twenty thousand sound?”

  “Your word against mine? Are you talking about the past or the present?”

  “The present?” Larrabee seemed genuinely puzzled. “What do we have to talk about now? Forty years have passed.”

  “Let us leave the past for now. But I will use it against you if I must. There is the painting you gave me. I’m sure the police will find it interesting to know why. And, of course, the letters hidden in the frame have their use, too.”

  “Sell me the painting. You know the price I’m willing to pay.”

  “So you do fear the past?”

  “Name the price.”

  “Here is my price,” she answered. “Make sure what is happening in the present ends. This is my only warning before

  I go to the police.”

  Larrabee leaned forward in his chair, showing his profile against the candlelight as sharply as if it had been cut with a knife. “Make sure what ends in the present?”

  “The crown of thorns.”

  “You make no sense, old woman. I showed you the crown

  of thorns when I was a boy. My grandmother is no longer alive. It has already ended.”

  “Don’t play me for the fool. I know about the torture, the branding. It must end.”

  Frustration was obvious in Larrabee’s voice. “What torture? What branding?”

  “I saw the marks. I remember what they looked like on you. I’ve seen them again. On the others. Identical brands. It is continuing, and it could only be happening because of you. It is the Larrabee brand. Something that should have ended when our people were set free.”

  Silence dragged out before Larrabee replied. He sounded genuinely confused. “You’re telling me that others . . .”

  “My people, Timothy Larrabee. Held down, baptized, and branded with the crown of thorns. Who else can be responsible but you and your church?”

  “Your people?”

  “The people of my community. People with black skin. I want it ended.”

  “You are speaking to the wrong person.”

  “Did you come alone? Or once my messenger brought you the message about the crown of thorns, did others come with you?”

  Larrabee half stood. His intake of breath made his sudden comprehension was obvious. “I don’t believe this.” He slumped back onto the chair, burying his face in his hands. “I don’t believe this.”

  “So you are not alone,” Grammie Zora said. “As I thought.”

  Larrabee stood, turned, and shouted. “Get in here! We need to talk!”

  Seconds later, the clicking of plastic beads off camera gave away the presence of the person he’d called.

  That person spoke. Not to Larrabee. “Jeremiah, you can stay out there. I’ll be fine.”

  The voice was easy to recognize. Shepherd Isaiah.

  Larrabee faced the doorway. “It’s you, isn’t it? The only other living person who knows about my family’s horrible past.”

  Isaiah stepped into the view of the camcorder as he answered. “The laws of the land are godless laws. Too many of God’s people suffer injustice, and the godless courts set the guilty free.”

  “It’s you,” Larrabee repeated. He remained standing, almost a head shorter than Shepherd Isaiah. Larrabee clenched his fists. “It’s you. And the elders. That’s where you go on those nights. Your talk about Nathan Bedford and a third wave, it’s more than talk. You’re nothing more than a vigilante committee.”

  Isaiah showed no signs of anger. “My chosen ones follow me. I lead them on a path to glory.”

  “Glory? You hate blacks. I know that. Don’t forget, I spent three years with you in a cell. The same three years when you found out about—”

  “I don’t hate them. I hate that they have gone beyond their r
ightful place. In the Bible—”

  “No. Not here. Not more of your crazed Bible talk.” Larrabee did not hide his anger.

  Grammie Zora remained a silent spectator.

  “Crazed Bible talk.” A statement. “The same talk that makes it convenient for you to remain among us? Don’t forget, I know how much of the church treasury goes to you. Convenient when that crazed Bible talk lets you take from the flock.”

  Larrabee refused to back away. “You’re no different than

  I am. The flock really are sheep to you.”

  “They are my flock. They support my mission.”

  “A mission you hide from all but the Chosen. The rest—you take their gifts. Like trimming fleece.”

  “So be it. While sheep do need a shepherd, they also have their purpose.”

  “No longer,” Larrabee said. “When I tell them, this will be over. I’m a lot of things, but I will not be part of—”

  Isaiah put a hand on Larrabee’s shoulder. Larrabee shoved it away.

  Isaiah spoke gently. “Every one of my elders is prepared to swear that you’ve led them. All any judge needs to see is the scars on your own body. Why else do you think I chose that method? You, too, are a sheep waiting to be fleeced.”

  Larrabee backed away. He paced the room.

  Isaiah spoke with equal softness to Grammie Zora. “You said there was something more you could take to the police. What was the threat you intended to use on this man? What’s his secret?

  I thought the crown of thorns was all of it. He came to you as a boy?”

  Grammie Zora didn’t raise her head. She remained motionless, her hands folded in her lap.

  “Speak to me, old woman.”

  Larrabee interrupted. “How are you going to stop her from going to the world with what she knows? End your KKK stuff now. I’ll remain silent. I’ll leave the church, but I will remain silent. As will she.”

  “I will not let an old black woman prevent me from carrying out God’s mission.”

  “And God’s mission is to kill her so that she will never speak again?”

  “No!” Isaiah stopped, took control of himself. “No. I swore to God that I would never strike another person dead. Unlike you, my conversion in prison was real. No, I will only promise her that if she talks, someone, sometime, will come back and—”

  “Do not make those threats.” Larrabee raised his voice. “I agreed to help you build a church, not fund a white supremacist movement.”

  “You will not stop me. I believe the word as given to me by God. The word that puts us in our rightful place, a place that has been taken from us by the nonbelievers.”

  “The word that you’ve twisted for your convenience. End it.”

  “The word that I believe. You’re the one whose soul is damned for using it for your convenience.”

  Grammie Zora finally spoke. “Enough.”

  Each turned to her, as if surprised she was still in the room.

  Grammie Zora lifted a small pistol from beneath her shawl. She pointed it at the belly of Shepherd Isaiah. “Leave my home now. I have delivered my message. And you will listen.”

  Chapter 25

  “There are a lot of things I’d like to ask, Angel.”

  “Maybe some other time, Nick? I don’t feel much like talking right now.”

  I had knocked on the locked door of the projector room and asked her to let me in. She’d opened the door, then stood beside me, so quiet I could barely hear her above the rumbling of the rain on the roof. I doubt she realized she had reached for my hand.

  The vibes inside the church had changed radically. It had begun to rain again, and it fell heavily, underscoring our conversation with that constant noise. But the worst of the storm had passed. The lightning strikes were far more sporadic now, and had lost their dramatic visual effects because the lights were on full power in the church sanctuary.

  Below us, people stood in small groups, each group in animated discussion, as if a convention had just broken up. At the front of the church, Retha now held Billy Lee in her arms. Junior stood behind them, hugging Retha with one arm and stroking her hair with his free hand. They seem lost in a little world of contentment.

  Shepherd Isaiah and Timothy Larrabee and Elder Jeremiah had disappeared sometime during the incredible revelation that had appeared on the wall at the front of the sanctuary. And when it ended, the murmurs had begun, stopping when someone hit the light switch, and beginning again as people slowly stood from the pews and began to gather in clusters. Before going back to Retha, Junior had unwrapped the tape from my wrists and ankles to set me free.

  “I can wait on questions,” I said to Angel. “I know tomorrow the police are going to have questions for you, and if you want,

  I’ll be there with you.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Her voice was dull.

  “Let’s get your computer equipment together and go,”

  I said. As soon as we got out of the church building and into

  my Jeep, I’d call Jubil and tell him about it, and he’d send out uniforms to look for Larrabee and Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jubil would also want to see what I’d just seen. Tonight, maybe. Or tomorrow. I just wanted to get out of the compound and back into the city. The men who had been incriminated in the video footage were not my worry.

  “Yeah,” Angel repeated, same dullness. “Get my stuff and go.” I wondered what had taken her to the depths of her obvious sorrow.

  I didn’t know what else to say. My questions could wait.

  I knew the answers to some of them anyway. When Grammie Zora had seen the crown of thorns branded on the young man who’d visited with his father, she would have remembered the last time she saw it. That was the connection to Timothy Larrabee. The scars on his back were so similar. So she’d searched for him through Kellie Mixson and then sent for him. Maybe she intended to have the scene filmed by Angel, as enough proof for the authorities to stop the elders of the Glory Church. Or maybe Angel had done it on her own. That question was less important to me than my curiosity about the reason Grammie Zora and Angel had waited so long to make the incriminating evidence public.

  Other questions only Timothy Larrabee or Shepherd Isaiah or Elder Jeremiah could answer, whenever the authorities caught up to them. It was my guess that during three years of sharing the same cell, Larrabee and Isaiah would have shared a lot about their respective pasts. Maybe Isaiah noticed the crown of thorns on Larrabee, or maybe Larrabee had volunteered it. And Isaiah, in his twisted theology, had decided that it was time to continue the Larrabee tradition on a whole new generation. It saddened me greatly to think that he’d been able to assemble a group of men who wanted to follow him and his quest for white supremacy. It saddened me more that he’d used the Bible to justify it.

  But fanatics were fanatics. Pastor Samuel was right. The truths of the Bible gave them no power. But it was whatever power they gained that allowed them to misuse those truths.

  And so the innocent suffer.

  **

  In the room, I saw how easy it had been for Angel to set up her projection equipment. Because Isaiah had used a projector himself, all she’d needed to do was put hers on the table instead of the church’s. One cable connected her laptop to her projector.

  “You snuck to my Jeep and took it out while I was talking to Shepherd Isaiah earlier, huh.” One last effort at conversation.

  “This is where he locked me and Retha after he picked us up near the hospital. Except I found my way out.” She pointed at the square hole in the wall.

  “How do you think he knew where to find you?”

  “Nick, I don’t want to talk. I just want to get back to Maddie.”

  “Right,” I said. I had to remind myself it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. An hour after the flight that had taken Amelia away from me and back to Chicago. It seemed far, far later into the night.

  “Please take me home,” Angel said. “I’ll give you something that I found in the painting. Something I�
��ve kept hidden from you. That will make us even.”

  I met her eyes. “Sure.”

  “Even,” she repeated. “I don’t owe you. And you don’t owe me. That way Maddie and I can get back to our lives.”

  She left the other part unspoken.

  Without you.

  Chapter 26

  The next morning I found Pendleton at a marina well south of Charleston. One of the low-rent places, without any yachts. It was early enough that the morning air was still cool. A slight breeze rattled cables against sail masts.

  Pendleton had stripped to the waist. He scraped loose paint off the side of a sailboat as old and dilapidated as a dozen others moored to the same dock. He stood at my approach.

  “Your attorney said I could find you here,” I said.

  “What do you think?” Pendleton gestured at the sailboat. “Needs a little work, but when I’m finished, it should be okay.” He winced and held out his hands, palms up. “Blisters. I’ve heard about them. Just didn’t know they could hurt this much.”

  “I’ve read through the documents,” I said, not succumbing to his boyish smile.

  “Forty feet.” He patted the hull of the sailboat. “I don’t need much more than this. I started looking around at one-bedroom apartments in the price range I figured I could afford once all the legal stuff was finished. How depressing. When you think about it, a person doesn’t need much more room than a sailboat like this. I told myself that living on the water beats putting up with neighbors. And there’s the view. The worst marina in the world is still better than what you’d see from those crowded apartment buildings. So I figure boat living is the way to do it.”

  “If I understand what I’ve read,” I said, “there’s nothing left to dispute in court. Once I sign off on the papers, the deed of the mansion is transferred to my name. I get my portion of the trust fund. The IRS takes from your half.”

  “Everything you wanted, Nick. You haven’t told me what you think about the boat. What I’m going to do is move slowly down the coast. Look for a small town, maybe on the gulf side of Florida. You know, go where the wind takes me. When I find the place that’s right, I’ll know it. Hook up to services at some marina, find a job. A regular job. Pumping gas, maybe. Some kind of job where I don’t have to think, at least until I can find the courage to go beyond that. It’ll give me enough to pay for docking fees and groceries. It’ll be a simple life, but no one will know me. I’ll find out who I really am. Growing up as a Barrett in this town, it’s kind of like . . .”