Jonathan nodded. “Yes, I expected that would be the case, because it was hard not to feel that the indictment of Mr. Dupere was an indictment of healing ministers in general.”
“That’s what I thought you were concerned about.” Ken smiled here. He was relieved that he could fit Jonathan into the same group of folks from his church who had been calling him and visiting him all week. “And, I think more people in my congregation actually respected and followed the ministry of Mr. Dupere than in the other congregations represented there. That’s why I felt it important to join in the warning to all Bible-believing Christians, a warning against a wolf in sheep’s clothes, even more so for people in our churches.”
“I suppose the wolf looks most like a sheep to other sheep that have been following him for some time now,” Jonathan said, smiling at his own stretch of the metaphor.
Ken wasn’t sure if Jonathan was agreeing with him or criticizing his use of that old saying, but he smiled and let it slide past. He spoke more seriously. “I’ve had some long talks with people in my congregation that are devastated to learn these things about his ministry.”
“People who’ve actually been healed by him?”
Ken raised both eyebrows briefly. “Yes. In fact, some people are wondering about the healing they received in the past from him. You know, ‘How could I be healed, then, if he was so bad?’ Or even, ‘Does this mean my healing wasn’t from God?’”
Jonathan looked concerned, shrugging his shoulders slightly. “So what do you tell them?”
Ken took a deep breath and allowed his gaze to drift away from Jonathan, toward the corner of his eyes, as he remembered these conversations. “Well, Jesus tells a few people that it was their faith that made them whole. So I just tell my folks that maybe it wasn’t Mr. Dupere that healed them, it was just God responding to their own faith.”
Nodding his head slowly, Jonathan pursed his lips. “And you are confident that the accusations against Mr. Dupere are well founded?”
“I’m sure that at least some of it is true, and there are so many of these misdemeanors that only a few of them have to be right before I tell my people it’s best to stay clear of this guy.”
After a few more questions and replies, and parting handshakes, Jonathan thanked Ken for his time and his frank responses. He had found what he was looking for, enough to assure him that the case against Beau Dupere wasn’t just a disguise for attacking a prominent healing ministry. Even if he didn’t join in with condemning Beau Dupere, sins or no sins, this assurance would allow Jonathan to stay with Dixon Claiborne’s church until graduation in December, at least that’s how things stood when he left Ken Bennington’s office.
Back with More Questions
Anna cut off the cell phone call to her editor. He definitely was not going to let her drop the Beau Dupere story. Protesters had begun to appear outside his home church and the sign-waving crowds outside the Dupere household had grown larger and more ardent. This was news.
“His wife and daughters nearly crippled me emotionally, what’s he gonna do to me?” she said aloud, after setting down her phone. Even as she said these words, she knew they were not true words. Any emotional handicap she carried had entered the Dupere house with her.
She looked at the time on her phone. She had to be there in forty minutes, just enough time to drive there after changing into contact lenses and having a little drink. She reached for the bottle of sherry that she often tapped at night before bed, soothing her while she read under low light at the end of a tense day. The two glasses she drank that afternoon were a down payment on the tension she anticipated from meeting the miracle man, or the monster. The contact lenses were just in case he wasn’t a monster.
Only the most desperate kind of thinking, of course, would lead Anna to use alcohol to take the edge off her fear of the interview, without any thought to the way it would also take the edge off her driving. At the last major intersection on the Pacific Coast Highway, before she turned down the westward road leading to the Dupere’s house, she nearly ran over a cyclist, who inexplicably stopped in the cross walk just in time to let her slip past without a disastrous result. Anna drove ten-miles-an-hour below the speed limit the rest of the way.
This time, when she pulled into the driveway, the guards hit the open switch immediately. Inside the gate, Maggie was waiting for her. Anna parked her car at an awkward angle, as if diagonal parking against the edge of the curved drive. When she stopped the engine, Maggie opened her car door for her.
“Are you okay?” she said, bending slightly and looking like a mother receiving her child home from school after a disturbing call from the principal.
Given her slight intoxication, combined with the shock of the near accident, Anna didn’t even pause to wonder how Maggie knew. She just answered. “I’m okay, and so is that guy on the bike, thank God.”
“Yes,” Maggie said. “We were praying for you. Dad said you were going to have a near miss.”
As Anna stood from the car, she felt as if she had misplaced some gravity and was about to float free of the ground. Her head swayed as she tried to absorb Maggie’s words. “He knew?” That’s all Anna could manage to squeak from her clenched throat.
Maggie smiled sympathetically and took Anna’s left arm with both of her hands. “Let’s get you inside. I think you could use a glass of lemonade.”
Anna just nodded and allowed Maggie to tow her up the two porch steps and into the house. It was happening already, she thought. He’s already messing me up. She arrived in the kitchen and accepted a seat at the little table in the corner. Maggie stepped to the fridge and pulled the large handle, throwing her slight weight backward to break the vacuum seal of the tall door.
Watching Maggie, Anna didn’t notice a little girl with long sunny blonde hair walk up behind her. Emma stopped next to Anna’s left arm and placed one stubby hand on Anna’s bare skin. Unable to understand the words she was using as she spoke under her breath, nevertheless, Anna knew the little girl was praying for her. She felt a subtle warmth descend on her as the shock and the alcohol evaporated. Finally, Anna was fully present in the kitchen, just in time to receive the tall glass of iced-lemonade from Maggie with a humble “thank you.”
After delivering the drink, Maggie petted the hair of the little girl looking up at her and said, “Okay, Emma. She’s good now.”
Emma nodded and hugged Maggie around the hips before waving at Anna and marching back out of the kitchen.
“Thanks,” Anna said, her voice fading as she called after Emma. Emma looked over her shoulder and smiled just before she disappeared from sight.
Anna looked at Maggie, hoping for an explanation of everything that had happened since she pulled into the driveway. Instead, Maggie’s green eyes smiled and she propelled Anna toward the reason for her visit. “You’ll find my father in Peter’s room, I think.”
“But . . .” Anna started to question, but interrupted herself with the thought that perhaps it wasn’t good to question this sort of thing. Maybe she should just be thankful for arriving safely, for the purge of anxiety at Emma’s prayer. Her hesitation was enough to hand the initiative back to Maggie.
“C’mon, I’ll show you where it is.”
Anna stood, taking Maggie’s offered hand. She mused about the instant connection she felt with Maggie, like a sister or friend, though ten years separated them.
Dodging through the back hallway and up the winding main staircase, Anna followed through the house. She had been in dozens of celebrity multi-million-dollar homes. The elaborate architecture and bright open spaces of the Dupere home were familiar. But it lacked the ostentatious artwork or furniture of the stars, as if the home had been furnished with only the essentials, in spite of its pricey zip code.
On the second floor, padding silently down the main hallway, Anna could hear the sound effects that boys make when crashing and exploding vehicles in their games. She thought she could hear two distinct sets of voices screechin
g tires and crunching fenders as she and Maggie approached a half-opened door. Anna peered around the door to find Peter, a curly, dark-haired boy of six, on his hands and knees, steering a Lego car over tan carpet. Next to him lay Beau Dupere, stretched out on his side, driving his own Lego vehicle around a pile of blocks that resembled the rubble of a demolished building. Beau was a large athletically-built man. There on the floor next to Peter, he looked like a giant. He wore baggy tan shorts and a white polo shirt that emphasized the caramel color of his skin.
The boy looked up before Anna or Maggie made a sound, but it was Beau who spoke first, without looking up, in a voice that Anna took to represent the driver of the little car in his hand. “Well, Mack, seems like I’m gonna have to park it for a while. Got some business to attend to.”
Glancing at his father, Peter just went back to his noisy driving. Beau fluffed Peter’s generous locks and rose to his bare feet. No one except Anna seemed to wear shoes around the house. That made her self-conscious.
“See ya for swimming later, kiddo,” Beau said.
“Okay, Dad,” Peter said, without lifting his head.
Arriving at the door with his hand extended, Beau Dupere looked Anna over from head to toe. He took her hand and said, “Don’t worry about the shoes, you can wear whatever’s comfortable for you.”
Without thinking, Anna stepped out of her little brown flats and wriggled her toes in the thick carpet.
Maggie stepped in immediately, picking up the shoes. “I’ll take them down by the front door, so you know where to find them.”
Anna watched as Maggie stooped down and scooped up her size six shoes. When she looked up, she saw Beau still looking at her, reading her, it seemed.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to make you self-conscious,” he said, when she glanced away from eye contact. “It feels like I’m invading your privacy, I know. But it’s just the way I’m used to getting to know people. My family is accustomed to it. We just know we can’t have many secrets from each other.”
Anna started to chuckle, surprising herself as much as Beau. She hitched her purse up on one shoulder. “I usually have to warm up my subjects to get them to go deeper in an interview,” she said, to herself as much as to Beau.
He laughed lightly and said, “Okay, let’s start with proper introductions.” Once again, he held out his hand, but this time for a handshake, instead of taking her spiritual pulse. “I’m Beau Dupere. You must be Anna Conyers.”
Smiling very broadly, Anna added some vigor to that handshake and said, “Pleased to meet you, at last.” She suppressed a giggle, realizing how much easier it was to talk to him than to the mystical cult leader in her imagination. The man lying on the floor playing Legos with a six-year-old, and who cared about her self-consciousness over wearing shoes, couldn’t be the creepy guru of her darker fantasies.
Then a question occurred to her, as she turned to follow Beau down the hallway. “Does reading people’s minds cut out a lot of conversation around here?” she said, again feeling like she was just wondering aloud, but not feeling apologetic for converting her thoughts to words.
Beau looked around his shoulder at Anna, walking slightly behind him in the hall, and said, “I don’t really think of it as reading people’s minds. To me it’s more like reading their souls, almost a level below what’s on your mind.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “That seems a bit more worrying then, like me controlling my thoughts isn’t gonna keep you from knowing things about me.”
Beau led the way back down the central staircase, his voice echoing slightly in the open space. “I don’t worry about it, because I trust the one who feeds me the information. I have been uncomfortable sometimes finding things out about people that I would expect they don’t want me to know. But I usually discover later that they really did want someone to know. Everyone wants to be known, even on the deepest level, by somebody. Personally, I think it’s God that they want to know them like that.”
Not fully tracking with what he was saying, Anna asked a reflex question in return. “But doesn’t God know everything and control everything?”
As they stepped onto the cool tile in the front hallway, Beau replied. “The answer to those two questions is yes and no. God knows everything, but God hasn’t been in control of everything since he turned the garden over to Adam and Eve, just before they turned it over to the Devil.”
Anna caught up to him in the kitchen. She studied his profile for a second before he turned to face her. “More lemonade?” he said, noting the glass still on the kitchen table.
“Oh, no. This is fine,” Anna said. She wrapped one hand around the bottom half of the sweating, cold glass.
Beau nodded, but opened the fridge and pulled the lemonade pitcher out for himself, popping open one of the shiny white cupboards and extracting a glass like the one Anna held. As he dispensed ice from the icemaker and poured his drink, Ann followed his earlier answer.
“So you don’t believe God is in control of the world?”
Just as Beau looked up at her, they could hear Maggie calling to someone about Peter playing in his room by himself now. The reply to that news, from a woman’s voice further away, made Maggie laugh, though Anna couldn’t tell what she was laughing about.
Beau tied onto the momentary distraction. “I know people like to talk as if God has built these little people out of Legos and is walking them around, making them talk and fight or drive their trucks, or whatever. But that doesn’t represent the God of the Bible, or the God that I know from my experience.”
“So you believe people have free will?” Anna followed him now out the back door to two chairs under the balcony that wrapped around two sides of the pool. Three children threw a big red ball back and forth in the water, laughing and splashing. Two women, one of them Bethany—clothed in a pink cotton dress—appeared to be deep in conversation on the other side of the pool. Another woman sat under an umbrella watching the children play, an infant in her lap, looking as if he had just finished nursing, his little round head lolling drunkenly.
“Sure, without freedom humans aren’t human and aren’t made in God’s image. But that doesn’t mean that they exercise their freedom. Most people stay confined in a cage mostly of their own devising.”
Anna felt that this conversation was running away from her. She remembered seeing video of Beau preaching at a large church conference in Texas. He seemed to jump from topic to topic in that setting as well. Though she hadn’t been impressed by his preaching, he did seem clear about what he believed.
Sitting down across from him, Anna crossed her legs self-consciously, careful of her skirt that fell well short of her knees. She set her lemonade on the glass table and pulled her digital recorder from her purse. She fiddled with the controls and then held it toward Beau’s seat facing her. “Okay?” she said.
“You mean we weren’t even started on the interview yet?” Beau said, his eyebrows raised in mock horror. “That was some of my best stuff.”
Anna laughed. She could see why women fell for him. He was as charming as any actor she had ever met, and certainly as handsome. She didn’t expect jokes from him, however, given her image of the mystical guru she had constructed. As she thought these things, she could see him looking at her and turning more serious, crossing his legs with his right ankle on his left knee and his right knee pointing approximately at Anna.
She seized the silent opening, though she couldn’t tell why his mood seemed to change. “You started by explaining to me about how you don’t really read people’s minds, but it’s something else.” She suddenly wondered whether Beau’s sobering had been in response to her inner spark of infatuation.
“Right,” he said, his tone lower and more formal, his shiny smile less ready. “It’s not that I can hear the thoughts going on in your head, it’s more like I’m getting these thoughts in my own head informing me about something regarding you, your past, your present condition, like that.”
A puzzled squint
approaching the corners of her eyes, Anna said, “Okay, you say ‘getting thoughts.’ Where do those come from?”
“I figure that at least half of them are just my imagination, my own thoughts. I also think I hear things, or think things, that come from my enemy. But the rest come from The Truth that lives in me.”
“‘The Truth?’”
“Yes, God’s Spirit is The Truth, and The Truth lives inside people who invite him in. We listen to that Truth more or less all the time. I keep going for more.”
“More truth?”
“More of God’s thoughts communicated to me through The Truth he planted inside me.”
“Does that mean people who don’t believe in God the way you do, don’t have truth?”
“When I say that we have The Truth in us, I don’t mean to say that others can’t know something that’s true, or even teach and live by things that are true. But there is one source of all truth and that’s God. To live in that truth we have to surrender our ideas in favor of the ideas that come from The Truth.”
Anna decided to leave a topic that she felt was too theological or philosophical, in favor of more practical issues. “So the things that you know about people, that come from The Truth, what is the purpose of that?”
“God only gives us these abilities in order to benefit the people we meet, not to benefit ourselves.”
Anna nodded slowly, she switched her recorder to her left hand and reached for her lemonade. She was looking for more biographical information and less of these explanations of beliefs and practices.
“So how did this all start for you, the healing and the knowing things?”
Beau took a big breath and launched into a brief history of his church attendance and evolving faith, from his childhood conversion in the Evangelical Covenant Church in Kansas, to his connection with the new movement of which his home church was now a part. “The transition came for me when I was in a really rough time in my life, realizing that I was just living until I died, disconnected from my faith, with no meaning. I went to a meeting some friends from my old church recommended and I saw Jack Williams for the first time. The main speaker was Bruce Winters, who was more famous back then, but I got to talk to Jack after the service. That was after I got a huge dose of God dumped on me during a prayer time. Jack sorta scooped me up off the floor and started interviewing me, like he was thinking of hiring me for something. Eventually, of course, he actually did recruit me to take part in new churches he was planting around the West.”
If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1) Page 10
