“Oh, the usual,” Milo said easily. Now he’d had time to think. He put his arm around me and pulled me closer. “Sharon just got offered a great job in Boston, but we didn’t want to live in the city.” He laughed. “Really, we can’t afford to live in the city, at least not until I can find a job, too. But with this economy…”
Smit frowned. “And you are…?”
“Brian Kinney, sir.” He extended his hand and they shook. “It’s a great pleasure; I’ve read a fair bit about your ministry. It’s one of the things that brought us to Plymouth.” Milo smiled down at me and I was surprised he didn’t add, “isn’t that right, dear?” I had to physically stop myself from rolling my eyes.
“Well, Brian, if you’ve read a great deal about Sight Ministries, then surely you understand our views, and yet…” Smit paused, a grave look on his handsome face. “I suppose you have time to find work, but you should know that we prefer to see our wives home with the children. Once you’re married, your wife’s first duty will be to serve her husband—you—not an outside employer.”
Liz Smit was still clinging to her husband’s arm. I wondered why she got to work outside the home. Missus Smit was tall, nearly as tall as her husband, with sleek highlighted light brown hair. She had large, round blue eyes and a long, narrow nose and neck. She was pretty, although there was a jittery, bird-like quality to her darting eyes and pinched smile. She was studying Milo. I wondered what he would say next.
He chuckled nervously. “Well, yes, of course I’ve read your tenets of Biblical Partriarchy, but—”
“Ah, but you see, there are no buts.” Smit’s voice was excited.
He lives for this shit, I thought. For the fight, for the chance to demonstrate his moral superiority.
“That’s exactly the kind of thinking that has led our society astray. God’s covenants may not be bent for your convenience, Brian. Biblical patriarchy is a scriptural doctrine. Faithfulness to Christ requires that it be believed, taught, and lived. Not ‘once you find a job’ Brian. But each and every day.”
He turned toward me. “Ms. Stone, what is your profession?”
I felt the red creeping up my neck again. “I’m a…I work in finance.” I was channeling Anna Fuller now.
“And what about your father? Do you serve him well? This is your duty until the day he gives you in holy matrimony to Brian.”
“Oh, well, sadly, my father passed away a few years ago.” The best lies often have some element of truth.
Smit nodded thoughtfully. “I see. Yes, well then, you must devote yourself to your future husband.”
I smiled and gushed. “Oh, yes, I do, Mr. Smit.” I leaned against Milo. “I’m completely devoted to Brian.” I looked up into Milo’s amused eyes. “He’s my world. Er…along with my Lord of course.”
Smit looked us both up and down for a long moment, his hooded eyelids raised with what I took to be skepticism. He wasn’t convinced that we weren’t black sheep. Really dark, black-as-night sheep. As we waited for Smit’s response, I noticed that behind him most of the parishioners were now moving down a brick path toward a cluster of smaller buildings. The women split off toward one building while the men continued on farther. Time for fellowship.
I wondered if we’d be invited to stay. Smit was still studying us, absorbing every detail of Sharon and Brian. I felt like I was inside one of the new airport scanners, the ones that show everything. Even panties (or lack thereof).
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a white car pulling out onto the road from the far end of the parking area. I glanced back at the crowd moving into the fellowship halls. No one else was leaving just yet.
The day before, Mrs. Trimble had returned bearing a stack of car magazines and an Internet printout of the Honda Coupe she’d seen outside my house. It was a little bit too far away for me to be sure, but the white car heading down the church driveway was definitely maybe a Honda Coupe.
Just as Smit opened his mouth, I grabbed Milo’s arm. “Honey, I nearly forgot. We have to go visit your grandfather; he’s expecting us.” I looked back at Charles Smit and smiled. “Thank you for your hospitality and the wonderful sermon.” I turned to Liz Smit as well. “It was lovely to meet you both. Come on, Brian.” I dragged Milo away and hurried toward the parking lot.
“Well, that wasn’t very subservient,” Milo muttered as I pulled him toward the car.
“Milo, I just saw a white car leaving here that looked like a Honda Coupe. Like the car Mrs. Trimble saw Friday night. Come on.”
We hurried to my car. Milo went to the driver’s side.
“No way, I’m driving,” I said and grabbed the door handle.
“Sam…”
“Milo, move! Remember? Batgirl? Robin?”
He sighed and ran around to the passenger side and jumped in. “Charles Smit is not going to let you join his congregation,” he said as I backed out.
“Charles Smit is a misogynistic whack job and you couldn’t pay me enough to join his congregation. He’s basically preaching that women have to stay home, wait on their husbands and make babies. We can’t even talk in his church, for God’s sake. No pun intended.”
“Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?” Milo said and laughed, but he fell quickly quiet and when I glanced over I could see no amusement in his eyes. We were silent as I pulled the Mini up to the entrance. There was nothing remotely funny about the hanging of two young women. I spun the tires pulling out of the gravel parking area and accelerated down the driveway.
Two minutes later we were still alone on the road.
Milo blew out his breath loudly. “So where’s this Honda?”
“Well, there’s only one way out of this place.” I hit the gas and shifted into fifth. “We’re going to catch up and get the plate.”
We rounded the final bend in the long, curving Sight Ministries driveway a few minutes later. No white Honda. I skidded to a stop at the end of the driveway and leaned forward looking both ways down the road. Nothing white and nothing Honda Coupe-ish.
“Dammit,” I said, slapping the dashboard.
Chapter 21
“I’m getting into the DMV database right now,” I was saying as we walked through my front door. “and looking up every single—”
“Sam.” Dennis was standing in my kitchen. His thin hair was mussed and the whites of his eyes were streaked with red. I hadn’t thought it possible, but the baggy pouches under his eyes were even larger. His shirt was rumpled and his khaki pants had dirt stains on them. Turk was seated at the breakfast bar and staring at an array of eight by ten photos. Crime scene photos.
I walked slowly past Dennis and stared at the pictures. In the photos, a young woman was hanging by her neck from a thick branch of a huge oak tree. Only about half of the brown leaves remained on the tree and the photo, taken shortly after sunrise I guessed, was a study in contrasts; the dark lines of the tree and the branches and the body against a light sky. The shot was artistic; pretty, in a grotesque way. Like Anna Fuller, the woman’s bound hands and feet were tied together behind her back, arching her body into a reverse fetal position. Her hair was long, dark and curly and probably had been very pretty. It hung down to where her feet met her wrists, and I was reminded of a circus trapeze artist. But the bulging eyes, the protruding tongue, the blue face—that was far more horrifying than anything the makers of Charles Smit’s dreaded Halloween icons could imagine. I backed away, forcing down the bile that rose in my throat. Milo put his hands on my shoulders.
“This morning?” I asked.
Dennis nodded.
“Where?”
“This is behind the Mayflower Society House, near their library. By the parking lot off Winslow Street,” said Dennis. “We had extra patrols on all the major tourist spots, but this place is closed on the weekends in the fall and…” He sighed heavily. “We fucked up. We didn’t have anyone there.”
I touched his arm. “Dennis, there aren’t enough cops in Plymouth to cover every single
historic site. This whole town is historic, for God’s sake.”
He brushed off my arm. “I should have known. This guy’s messages have to do with the Pilgrims. The Mayflower. I don’t understand it yet, but we should have been covering this place.”
Dennis wasn’t going to stop berating himself any time soon so I changed the subject.
“What was the message this time? Was there a patch? And who is—who was she? Do you know yet?”
“Patch had a blotch of what looks like blood on it.” Turk handed me a photo and then picked his notebook up off the counter and read. “The message was ‘Guilty of willful murder, by plaine & notorious evidence.’ ‘Plaine’ spelled p-l-a-i-n-e.”
“But that’s not—”
“It’s not in the Mayflower Compact,” Turk said. “Muthah fuckah’s diversifyin.’”
I hurried to my desk and fired up Google. I typed in “Guilty of willful murder, by plaine & notorious evidence.” I was afraid nothing relevant would come up, but as I read the very first page a shiver ran down my spine.
Dennis, Turk and Milo had all come into the living room after me and were staring at me, waiting. They’d seen me shudder.
“It’s in a page called www.mayflowerfamilies.com,” I said. I read aloud. “John Billington the elder, one that came over with the first…”
I paused and lifted my eyebrows. Here was a Billington connection.
“Billington ‘was arraigned, and both by grand and petty jury found guilty of wilful murder, by plain and notorious evidence. And was for the same accordingly executed…’” I typed around some more.
“It’s from an account of the early Plymouth Colony written by William Bradford,” I said. “Of Plimoth Plantation. Billington was hanged on September 30th, 1630.” I leaned back and looked back up at Dennis. “He was the first person executed for murder in the Plymouth Colony.”
“What is that?” I stared at the glass in Milo’s hand.
Dennis and Turk had left hours ago; for the past ten minutes Milo had been making a racket in the kitchen.
“Taste it.”
“Uh… I’ll pass.”
“It’s good for you.”
I stared at the thick purple froth skeptically. “What is it?”
“It’s a fruit and veggie smoothie. I brought my Nutribullet back with me when I went home to get more clothes.”
“Fruit and veggies? In the same shake?”
“Yeah, it’s got spinach, grapes, blueberries, banana, grape juice and ground sesame seeds.” He took a big gulp and a purple mustache appeared on his upper lip. “Yum.” He licked his lip.
I stared up at him. “That sounds gross.” I grabbed a slice of the cold pepperoni pizza still lying in a grease-stained cardboard box on the coffee table. I folded it in half and shoved a third of it in my mouth. “That’s yum,” I said, chewing.
Milo shook his head with a smile. “You say so.” He continued to stare down into my eyes as I chewed, and once again, a flush crept up my neck. The pizza tasted like cardboard with marinara sauce and the cold, solidified cheese wasn’t breaking down. I chewed harder. I put the rest of the slice back in the box and finally managed to choke down what was in my mouth. I took a long draw on my beer, but still I didn’t look away from Milo’s eyes. The heat in my face was spreading down through my body. I had a mental flash of reaching up to him, putting my arms around his neck and kissing him. In the next scene he was picking me up and carrying me up to my room, romance novel style. Rhett Butler style. I shook my head. He was still gazing down at me.
“What? Come on, we’ve got a lot more to do here.” I took my beer around to my desk chair and sat back down in front of the computer. “Now that Dennis is gone I can look for that Honda.” I still hadn’t told Dennis about the break-in Friday night.
Milo sighed, flopped down onto the couch and stared at the piles of paper and photographs surrounding the pizza box. “It’s nearly midnight, Sam. I’m beat and I know you are too.” He took another big sip of the purple gunk. “Let’s get some sleep and start fresh in the morning. Based on the pattern, he isn’t going to kill anyone tonight. Tomorrow, Dennis and Turk will be able to tell us what the autopsy showed.”
Milo was right. So far, the killer had struck every other day, so with any luck, there wouldn’t be another victim waiting for us in the morning. But that only gave us another twenty-four hours before he would kill again. That afternoon we’d made a lot of progress in terms of understanding the messages and who John Billington was, but we still had no good leads on the killer.
I stared at my computer screen for a moment but the DMV site’s small print was swimming before my eyes.
“All right,” I said to Milo finally. “You’re right. Let’s get some sleep.” I brought Milo the pillow and blankets for his makeshift bed on the couch. As he made up his bed, I shut down my computer, organized my desk and threw away the rest of the cardboard pizza.
As I did this, I waged a mental battle. I could let him sleep in my bed. That couch wasn’t even long enough for his six foot four frame; meanwhile, upstairs, I had my parents old king size bed. It wasn’t really fair; me in that huge, comfy bed while Milo was wedged into my couch. We didn’t have to do anything. It could be innocent. I glanced over at him, the offer on the tip of my tongue.
Pepper was in the middle of the fleece blanket on the couch and was kneading as if his life depended on it. Milo looked up at me, saw that I was watching and said, “Look. Sam’s pussy does want to sleep with me.” He laughed and disappeared into the bathroom off the kitchen.
Furious, I stomped up the stairs. Milo had just reminded me why I pushed him away in the first place. He was a man, and men are crude and immature and have one track minds. “Just remember, Milo, Pepper’s a boy,” I yelled down the stairs.
In bed, I tossed and turned. Thoughts galloped around in my head like a herd of spooked mustangs. The sky was bright and I rose and stood for a while at my window, watching the waves advance and retreat over the glowing sand. I opened the window. I needed to breathe the air, to inhale its briny scent. At first I couldn’t get Milo’s stupid comment and my traitorous feline out of my mind. Pepper always sleeps with me.
Then I thought about Milo’s lovely dark chocolate eyes and the way he’d watched me chew that pizza. The amusement in his expression. His comforting hand that morning at church. I thought about him carrying me up the stairs and the ensuing events in my Harlequin Romance fantasy. About the heat I felt every time he was near.
A wonderful, cool breeze gusted in off the sea. I lowered my face and let it blow down the neck of my t-shirt. My attraction to Milo needed to be tamped down for a number of reasons. We had work to do. He was a man. A really hot man—he could do better than a freckled-faced, frizz-haired hacker with next to no income. He hurt me once before. And now I could add the purple gunk to my list of reasons to stay away from him. Spinach and grapes and sesame seeds? I would stick with my cheese doodles, thank you very much.
Finally, I closed the window and returned to bed. Rather than drift off, however, I lay awake, rethinking everything we’d uncovered that afternoon. We now knew that the Billington house wasn’t a random choice at Plimoth Plantation. Somehow the killer was equating these women to America’s first murderer—and punishing them in the same manner.
John Billington came to Plymouth on the Mayflower with his wife Elinor and two sons, John and Francis. He signed the Mayflower Compact. Ironically, the Billingtons were one of few Mayflower families to survive intact that first winter in Plymouth. While only one passenger died during the Mayflower’s two month journey to “Northern Virginia,” by the spring of 1621 more than half of the original settlers had perished due to illness.
But the entire Billington family lived to become a frequent source of strife in the settlement. Even Elinor was whipped and put in the stocks once, on charges of slander. Governor Bradford and Billington clashed frequently in those early years, as Billington railed against the Leiden Church and its in
fluence in the new colony. In a letter Bradford sent to England in 1625 the governor called Billington a ‘knave.’
When Billington was found guilty of shooting and killing John Newcomen after a fight in a tavern five years later, Bradford consulted with the leaders of the neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony before ordering Billington hanged. According to Bradford’s lengthy hand-written record of the colony’s early years, Of Plimoth Plantation, he was advised that Billington ‘ought to dye, and the land be purged of blood.’ To this day, Billington’s descendants proclaimed his innocence and cited Governor Bradford’s animosity as the reason behind his wrongful execution. By most historians, however, Billington was considered the United States’ first murderer.
Chapter 22
“Sam, get your ass down here; we got something.” Dennis’ voice entered my mind from a distance. “Sam!”
I sat up in bed. The sun was bright outside my window and Dennis’ voice was loud at the bottom of the stairs. Both were jarring.
“Sam, get up! I ain’t got all day.”
“Coming,” I called, scrambling out of bed and heading to the bathroom. The case was screwing with my sleep patterns. It was nearly two when I fell asleep this morning; normally I’d be out by eleven and back up around seven. It was going on nine.
I brushed my teeth and threw the frizz into a ponytail. My shiner had nearly faded; just a hint of yellow and green remained around my eye. I washed my face and put on mascara. Redheads need mascara no matter what the occasion; skimpy blond eyelashes are just not a good look for anyone. I threw on a Dad hoodie and some jeans and scurried down the stairs.
Dennis, Turk and Milo were in the kitchen. Self-consciously, I made my way between the three men and poured myself a cup of coffee. I had always been a morning person, but a morning people person? Not so much. I stirred in cream and sugar, turned around and leaned against the counter, blowing into the steaming liquid. Dennis was pulling some paperwork out of his briefcase. Turk was leaning against the sink and Milo had taken a seat in one of the stools at the breakfast bar. Once again, Milo’s hair was perfect. How did he do that?
Saints & Strangers (A Sam Warren Mystery) Page 12
