Southern Cross

by Jen Blood

  “It is. But I’m not giving up on Cameron,” I said. “Whatever happens between you and me, someone still needs to bring him down.”

  “Diggs.” I turned to face her. She studied me for a few seconds, the pain in her eyes palpable. Her voice quieted. “Do you know how much blood I’ve got on my hands? Matt Perkins; Joe and Rebecca Ashmont… Max Richards. Will Rainier. And I still don’t know how much the fire on Payson Isle had to do with my father... But clearly this guy—Cameron—wiping the Payson congregation out had something to do with my dad.”

  “None of that’s because of you,” I said. “You didn’t pull the trigger, for Christ’s sake.”

  “But if I’d gotten the cops involved sooner, or I hadn’t pushed so hard, or I’d warned someone…” she said. She shook her head stubbornly. “I’m not asking for absolution here. I’m telling you: I’m done. I won’t watch him kill you, knowing I could have done something. I won’t lose you.”

  You already have was on the tip of my tongue, but I held back. Instead, I took a deep breath and nodded.

  “All right. We put a pin in it—for now. And we move onto Wyatt, and Jesup Barnel.”

  “Thank you.”

  It wasn’t hard to make the transition from one case to the other: I’d been thinking about Wyatt and Barnel all night. Well… when I wasn’t thinking about Solomon, of course.

  “Do you think Barnel did it?” she asked me. “Do you think he’s the one who killed Wyatt?”

  Before I could answer, Mae came flying out of the house with Rick on her heels. She headed for the car as soon as she realized I was inside, and I rolled down the window.

  “Have you seen Danny?” she demanded.

  “What do you mean?” I asked stupidly.

  “Danny,” she repeated. “He didn’t come home last night.”

  I got out of the car. Solomon followed suit. “He buried his father yesterday, Mae,” I said. “I’m sure he’s just taking a break. Trying to get some perspective.” Or, more likely, he was just too stoned to move.

  Mae looked at Rick.

  “That’s what I told her,” the kid said. He was the polar opposite of Danny: buttoned up and put together, his blond hair cut short, his smile straight and pearly white.

  “You know how he gets,” Rick continued. “He said he didn’t wanna go back to school yet. Maybe he’s just takin’ the day.”

  “He could be out with friends,” Solomon suggested. “Or a girl, maybe?”

  “Sure,” Rick said easily. “Could be.” I noticed that he wasn’t looking at Mae, which told me he probably had a better idea than he was letting on as to where Danny had gone. I wasn’t ready to call in the National Guard, regardless. I’d been a teenage boy, after all—one not unlike Danny. A kid like that… things get to be too much, sometimes you just need some space.

  “What about George’s place?” I asked. “Have you dropped in there? It could be he’s just bonding with the old man.”

  “George left town last night,” Mae said. “He went on up to the mountains. Said he just needed some time.”

  “Now?” I said in surprise. “It seems like that could have waited a few days…”

  “You know him,” she said. “He puts on a good show, but he’s takin’ this pretty hard. Just needs to get his feet back under him is all. Anyway, I dropped by his place this morning to feed the rabbits. Danny wasn’t there.” A tinge of hysteria crept into her voice.

  “Rick, why don’t you go in and get yourself some breakfast?” I said. “Give your mom and me a chance to talk. Everything’ll be fine, though. Danny will show up in no time, and you’ll be laughing about this by supper. You’ll see.”

  Rick looked at his mother. She nodded. He went inside wordlessly, leaving Solomon and me alone with Mae. Before I could reassure her, Mae looked at me with wide eyes, her hands clenched.

  “There’s something else,” she said in a whisper. Mae’s usually the coolest person in the room. Today, she looked ready to climb out of her skin.

  “What?” I asked.

  She wet her lips, her eyes sliding from mine. “Buddy told me about Wyatt’s cross—what got done to him, how they turned it upside down and all. He said he saw it before, too, back when Marty Reynolds got killed in ’02. He said maybe that’s why they took Wyatt.” I wasn’t making the connection between this and Danny. Her tears overflowed, spilling down her cheeks. “Diggs, Danny’s got the mark.”

  My stomach turned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Reverend Barnel’s cross. Danny has it.”

  Rage came before the fear—white hot and boiling over, catching me completely off guard. I fought to control it. Solomon touched my arm before I could speak. I held my tongue.

  “When did he get it?” Solomon asked calmly.

  “Two summers ago,” Mae said. Her voice was raw with emotion. “He was acting up: partying, drinking.” She looked at me, eyes pleading. “I know what that night with Reverend Barnel was for you—Wyatt told me what the reverend did. How bad it got. It was different for Wy, though: It put him on the right path. Set him straight. We figured maybe it was just what Danny needed.”

  I walked away, afraid I’d explode if I didn’t.

  I thought of that night more than twenty-five years ago: The feel of leather straps cutting into my wrists and ankles, strapped in before a crowd that just sat there, watching me writhe. Strangers’ hands on me. Bright lights. Sweat dripping from Barnel’s face onto my naked chest. Repent, Daniel. Beg the Lord’s forgiveness for spilling your brother’s blood. Turn your back on the devil. It’s the only way to get back to the light.

  Solomon pulled me back to the present, her hand once more on my arm. Mae was nowhere in sight.

  “You’re freaking out,” she said. You can’t get anything past Solomon.

  “You don’t think I have reason to?”

  “Are you kidding? I think anyone who tries to straighten out their kid by sending him to a guy like Barnel is batshit crazy. Haven’t any of these people heard of Outward Bound? Jesus. But the horse is kind of out of the gate now… It’s done. And maybe you’ve forgotten this, but someone was out taking potshots at the reverend last night.”

  “Danny didn’t have anything to do with that,” I said.

  She didn’t look convinced. “Why don’t we just focus on finding him first, then we can get the rest figured out.”

  “I still say he’s probably just off somewhere, blowing off some steam.”

  “Could be,” she agreed.

  “But you don’t think so.”

  She looked at me. “Do you? Really?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I hope so. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

  Chapter Ten

  SOLOMON

  Since it was a school day, it was easier than it might have been otherwise to do a blanket survey of Danny’s friends to see if anyone knew where he could be. Mae went over to the school and met with a couple of teachers, who in turn spoke with the students. The last time anyone had seen Danny was at the local Dairy Queen the night before. No one had heard anything from him since then. Or, if they had, they weren’t volunteering that information.

  The pall already over the Durham house was getting darker by the second; I wasn’t sure how much more Mae could take. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her—to all of them—if Danny met the same fate his father had.

  At just past noon that day, Einstein and I went up to my room only to find Diggs sitting on the bed with the Justice Daily News and his laptop. My neck was stiff and my back ached and my ass hurt. Once you pass thirty, apparently sleeping in a car has the same effect on the body as being run over by one. Diggs eyeballed me as I sat down at the edge of the bed.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No, as a matter of fact. I think my spine’s dislocated, thanks to you.”

  “I didn’t make you sleep in the car. You could’ve come in anytime.”

  “That kind of would have killed my poin
t, don’t you think? Anyway, I thought we weren’t supposed to be sharing a room. What happened to bunking with the boys?”

  “It smells like a locker room in there. And Rick’s depressing the hell out of me. All that kid does is read the Bible and stare out the window. It’s creepy.” He scooted over to one side of the bed, nodding to the other. “Just sleep—I’ll be quiet. And I promise not to grope you unnecessarily while you’re out, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  I didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead, I lay down on the bed beside him, kicked off my shoes, and stared at the ceiling. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I pulled up some files I had. I started researching Barnel a few years ago. Looking into his revival.”

  My eyes drifted shut. “And?”

  “I’ve got two thousand, three hundred and eighty-six names. Boys he branded during his sideshow.”

  I sat up. “Are you kidding?”

  “He’d been doing this since the ‘60s, an average of maybe one a week—more during the summer camp sessions, less in the winters. You do the math.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How the hell did this guy get away with this for so long? I mean, it’s not like he was just dunking people in the lake or laying hands… he branded them. That’s assault. That’s…” I looked at Diggs helplessly, completely baffled. “I’m not nuts here. Why didn’t anyone shut him down?”

  “This is a different world,” he said, like it was perfectly obvious. “His victims were all underage. All brought in by their parents. Around here, God’s number one. Parents are second in line. You don’t question either of them. Or at least you didn’t when I was a kid.”

  “So, not once did someone try to press charges? Report him to the Feds? We were at his tent meeting last night—anyone could have come in. If the cops saw him…”

  He shook his head. “Did you see anything last night that he could have been arrested for? The snake handling and the exorcisms and anything else remotely hinky were always done behind closed doors. Anyone in attendance was vetted first. In 1982, a kid named Wally Majors went to the police and the FBI investigated. Everyone clammed up. No one would testify. Six months later, the kid killed himself.”

  None of this was totally outside my sphere of experience, of course. I thought again of what I’d flashed back to during Barnel’s revival the night before. Was whatever the Paysons had done on Payson Isle really so different from Barnel strapping kids down and branding them?

  “What about you?” I asked. “You never went to the cops?”

  He laughed with the same kind of cool distance he always assumed when I asked him something personal. “It was more a matter of pride at the time. No one wanted to be the pussy who couldn’t take Barnel’s treatment. Later, of course, the only evidence I actually had of what happened…” he faded out, though I knew where he was leading: The cross, ultimately transformed into the messy burn that he’d always refused to talk about just below his collarbone.

  “How did you get rid of it?” I asked. “Barnel’s cross, I mean.”

  “Divine intervention,” he said with an awkward, cloaked smile. And that was the end of that conversation.

  Rather than press him, I looked over Diggs’ shoulder at Barnel’s endless list of victims. The names were color coded in red, blue, green, and orange, and listed alphabetically. “What do the colors mean?”

  “Effects after the fact,” Diggs said. “Blue is no discernible effect. Green is mental illness. Orange is a criminal record.”

  I spied Wyatt’s name in red. Guess I didn’t need to ask what that one meant. I scanned the list. Maybe half the names were blue, the bulk of the rest evenly divided between green and orange, with a lot fewer red scattered in among them. “How long have you been working on this?”

  “A few years,” he said. “I started while I was living here. I kept it quiet, though.”

  “Ashley wouldn’t have approved?”

  “Ashley didn’t approve of much.”

  That stopped me, if only momentarily. “Why marry her, then?”

  “Oh, you know…” he said with a vague wave of his hand.

  “Actually, I don’t, or I wouldn’t have asked.” My temper was rising again. It has a tendency to do that around Diggs. “We dance around this shit all the time. I’m tired of it. What did George mean the other day when he said you married Ashley because of me?”

  His eyes darkened. “Sol—” he began, about to put me off again.

  I shook my head. “You know, Juarez may not remember the first thirteen years of his life, but I still know more about his past than I do about yours, and you’ve been my best friend for seventeen years. Everything’s this deep dark mystery with you: the women you married, the scars you carry… hell, you won’t even tell me why you’re a vegetarian. I mean, Jesus, Diggs. Were you a cow in a past life?”

  He frowned. It felt like there was a war waging in his head: what to say, what to hold back. “You know more about me than anyone,” he said quietly. “You know that.”

  “I know the things I was there to see firsthand. No more, no less.”

  “Since when have you been all about sharing your deepest darkest, anyway? I mean, Jesus, Solomon. Have you joined a knitting circle, too? If you were looking for someone to help you get in touch with your feminine side, you’ve obviously picked the right guy.”

  “At least Juarez treats me like something other than his faithful sidekick,” I bit out. My cheeks burned. I looked away, wishing I’d never brought it up. I focused on Einstein, my head ducked down, fingers moving through his fur. Somehow, it felt like I was the one who’d revealed something—which is the reason I don’t usually do this emotional crap in the first place. Diggs was right: clearly Juarez was getting to me.

  “I don’t think of you as a sidekick,” Diggs finally said. His voice was even. Serious. I met his eye. Okay, maybe he didn’t think of me as a sidekick. It would have been a very different movie if Butch Cassidy looked at Sundance the way Diggs was looking at me just then.

  I rolled my eyes, aware that my cheeks were now officially burning just a shade cooler than the sun. “I just think you should open up once in a while,” I mumbled. Before he could respond, I took the laptop from him and focused every ounce of my energy on the screen.

  “All right… you wanna share, huh?” he asked. He lay back on the bed, arms behind his head, and started reading the paper. His voice had lightened considerably. “I could tell you about my first time. Now there’s sixty seconds worth remembering.” I shot him a glare. He grinned. “Of course, I remember your first time a lot better.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I know,” he said amiably. “Who can blame you? Now, let’s see… I was thirteen. She was seventeen. Jessica Montgomery...”

  He stopped. When he didn’t continue, I looked at him curiously. He was totally transfixed by a page one story on Wyatt.

  “What’s up?”

  “‘Local veterinarian Dr. Wyatt Durham disappeared from Jackson Burkett’s farm early in March,’” Diggs read.

  “So?”

  He sat up and took the laptop from me. “They’ve been calling him Roger this whole time—that’s why I didn’t recognize the name.” He scanned through the list and came up triumphant, jabbing his finger at the screen. I read the name he’d indicated.

  Burkett, Jackson R.

  “You think that’s Roger Burkett?” I asked. “It could just be coincidence.”

  “I doubt it.” He got up and grabbed his jacket.

  “Wait,” I said. “Where are you going now?”

  “The Burkett farm. It’s not like Sheriff Jennings is gonna keep us in the loop, and I’m sure the state cops haven’t put this together.”

  I sat up and retrieved my shoes.

  “You don’t have to come with me. I’m fine,” he said.

  “You want me to send you out there alone? No offense, but your track record since we got to Justice isn’t that great.”r />
  “I know you’re trying to turn over a new leaf,” he said with a smirk. I hate that smirk. “If this is too much action for you…”

  I slugged him in the arm. “Don’t push it, Diggins.”

  He pulled his jacket on, smirk still in place. “Yes, ma’am. And I can tell you all about Jessie Montgomery on the way.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  <><><>

  There was actually a part of me—primarily in the lower intestine region—that was a little hesitant about heading to the Burkett farm with Diggs. I tried to appease my intestines by giving Mae the details of where we were headed and when we should be back, thus ideally minimizing the chances that we’d be butchered along the way. Or, if we were, at least we’d be found quickly.

  I started rethinking my perspective about the time we left the outskirts of town for what appeared to be Deliverance territory, following a dirt road cut through a wall of trees in full bloom. I’d always lumped Kentucky in with the South, but the birches, maples, and oaks along the road were closer to the Maine woods than anything you’d find down on the bayou. It was still gray outside, a miserable drizzling rain falling. With the forest closing in, Diggs and my banter gave way to silence. Einstein stuck his head out the window, breathing in the fresh air. At least one of us was having a good time.

  “You okay?” Diggs asked when we’d been on the Burkett road for a good ten minutes. There were no cars in either direction—which could be a very good thing or a very bad thing, depending on your perspective.

  “Yeah,” I said. I kept an eye on the road behind us, searching for some sign that the hooded man—aka Cameron—might be back there. I checked my cell phone. Miraculously, there was still a strong signal. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look tense.”

  I eyeballed him for a second, noting the way his hands gripped the steering wheel. His nose was swollen and his eye was purple. “You don’t look that hot yourself. Considering what happened the last time we were alone in the woods together, I think ‘fine’ would be asking a little much, don’t you? How about we just celebrate the fact that I’m not fetal in the backseat, and run with that.”