Parishioner

by Walter Mosley

  “Did you love your aunt?”

  If Xavier had been watching Doris from afar he might have thought a sudden chill breeze had kicked up. The girl began to shiver. Her small hands clenched and her eyes filled with tears that refused to fall. Her left heel was pumping up and down.

  He watched her go through this pantomime for two minutes or more before reaching out and taking her two fists into his left hand. Instantly she stopped shaking. She gasped, holding that breath like a practiced swimmer.

  When she exhaled the words came out, gushing like waters from a dam.

  “I could always tell from the tone of Auntie’s voice what she meant. The words didn’t always mean the same thing, but it was the sound of her voice that told me the story.

  “If she said, ‘Let’s go have dinner at the Federal,’ it could be that she just wanted to go out. Sometimes I could tell that she wanted the company. But it might mean that there was a man who wanted to have sex with me. It was always the sound of her voice and not the words she said.

  “After you got away …” Doris stopped talking for a moment. She looked up from her hands clasped in his. “We were going to kill you, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Xavier said. “I got that idea.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “That’s what creatures do,” he said.

  “After you got away Auntie said that it was bad. She said that you could hurt us and we had to move. I lived my whole life in that house and she said we would leave it behind. She told me to gather my gifts from the men and that she would pack her clothes. She said that I should bring everything down to the vault so that we could hide it in there until things died down and we could send people in to get our stuff.

  “But I could tell by the sound of her words that she meant to kill me down there in the vault. There was always a sound that she had. It was the same sound when she told me that Little Mr. Smith was dead, or when we planned to kill the men that Brayton needed to get rid of.

  “I told her I’d go down to my room, but instead I got the bat and snuck up into her bedroom. She was still in her slip. She didn’t hear me because her hearing was bad …”

  “You don’t have to go on, baby,” Xavier said. “I know what you did.”

  “I did love her. She was the only person I ever really knew. I broke the lock on her phone and called the taxi company to come bring me to the hotel. She has—had—an account with the Federal. All I had to do was say that she’d be coming that afternoon. She had already sent her travel bureau on ahead.”

  Doris tried to pull her hands away but Xavier held on tight. She bowed her head until it was resting against his shoulder. It was only then that the tears fell from her eyes onto their hands.

  She panted and made small animal sounds that Xavier interpreted as despair. He put his right hand on her shoulder and she moved to hug him. It was a fierce embrace, beyond innocence or love. There was strength in her arms—the strength to knock an old woman’s eye right out of its socket.

  Xavier let her hold him. He’d walked past many tragedies in his life: dead men and women, sometimes children. He’d sold drugs to addicts who had death in their eyes, and women to men who had no love for women.

  “She was going to kill you,” he whispered. “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “I loved her,” Doris said.

  “I know you did.”

  “She loved me.”

  “No. Never.”

  Doris squeezed his neck hard enough to feel uncomfortable, but Xavier didn’t push her away. He held her close and even, somewhat reluctantly, kissed her cheek.

  “I need to show you something, Dodo,” he said after the great long hug.

  “What?” she asked, wiping her face against his yellow suit.

  He took out the little red journal and showed it to her.

  “That’s Auntie Sedra’s book,” she said.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Whenever we took in an orphan or sent one out she would sit down at the dining room table and write in it.”

  “Did you ever ask her what it was she was writing?”

  “She said that she was telling the little babies’ stories. You know, where they came from and where they were going—and when.”

  “But you can’t read it?”

  “I can’t read. I can sign my name and write Auntie’s name. I know some numbers but that’s all. I used to listen to stories on the record player at night. And I can recite a hundred poems that Auntie taught me.”

  “You can?”

  “Yes.”

  “What poems do you know?”

  “I know ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Doris Milne sat up straight with posture most modern young people never learned. She recited the poem with muted but still dramatic inflection while staring at a point midway in the darkening sky. Passersby turned their heads at the recitation and two older women actually stopped to listen.

  Xavier was thinking that the woman-child brought him back to some old time when there was no radio or TV or movie theater. He wondered what was going on in Sedra’s mind when she kept Doris. Was the girl her whore or her daughter, her hand servant or adoptive blood?

  When the poem was over the older women walked on and Doris was smiling, satisfied.

  “We have to get you someplace safe,” Xavier said.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “I know somewhere out of the city. I could take you there right now.”

  “I need to get my things.”

  “The hotel might not be safe anymore.”

  “I’ve stayed there many times.”

  “But Mr. Connors read my note,” Ecks offered. “He might have called the police.”

  “I told him that I knew you and that things would be fine,” she said. “Aunt Sedra let him have sex with me sometimes in the summers when we went to the hotel so I could swim.”

  “Did you like sex with Mr. Connors?”

  “He used to bring me porcelain dolls,” she said. “And he never made me hurt.”

  “Used to? You don’t have sex with him anymore?”

  “He likes young girls,” she said, as if talking about someone who preferred plum jelly to clotted cream.

  The rooms in which Doris and Sedra usually stayed looked down on Wilshire Boulevard not far from downtown. The hotel was old but retrofit for modernity, chic and at the same time stuck-up. All the employees of the Federal had stared at Xavier as Doris led him through the constricted lobby toward the elevators.

  “Good evening, Ms. Milne,” a white man in a gold suit said from behind the concierge’s desk.

  “Hi, Mr. Connors.”

  “You okay?”

  “Oh, yes. Everything is fine.”

  There was a suitcase on the made bed of the second bedroom in the suite. In the larger room there stood an old Chinese chest with doors lined with shallow drawers. The doors were set on hinges that swung open to reveal a closet filled with the dead woman’s clothes.

  “Did you bring this with you?” Xavier asked.

  “No. Auntie Sedra always sends it the morning before we come. That’s part of the reason I knew she was going to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because every time before she had me put my suitcase in the closet space. She told me to pack but she didn’t put my bag in with her clothes.”

  Each drawer had a brass keyhole in the center, and every one was locked.

  “You got keys for these?” Ecks asked.

  “Aunt Sedra always kept them hid.”

  Twenty-seven drawers of cheap wood. Xavier smashed them one at a time while Doris went about repacking her suitcase.

  Sedra was very organized, like most sociopaths Rule had been acquainted with. There was a drawer filled with platinum jewelry, also ones for gold and silver settings too; a drawer brimming with unset jewels and then separate ones for ruby, emerald, and diamond rings. And there was money: euros, dollar
s, bearer bonds, and gold coins. In the twenty-fourth drawer there was a folded piece of parchment that was the key to the journal’s code system: !-a, @-b, #-c.… At the bottom of the legend was a line of letters that stood for punctuation marks.

  “I think Auntie would have wanted me to have that money and stuff,” the girl said to Xavier.

  “I thought you said she wanted to kill you?”

  “But that was only because I might get her in trouble,” Doris said simply. “It doesn’t mean she didn’t love me.”

  “Maybe she would have wanted you to have the money,” Xavier agreed. “But I think we’ll hold on to it for a while until we work out all the details of the murders and kidnappings. Maybe later on somebody can use it to help the people she harmed.”

  Doris didn’t respond to his statements and accusations. She just looked at him brimming with California innocence.

  Leaving the wrecked bureau behind, Xavier and Doris drove up the dark coast in silence.

  After talking to Doris for more than an hour, Frank decided to ensconce her in the small room on the north side of the church encampment. Sister Hope, Frank’s stalwart number two at the church, took the girl off for food, a bath, and a night’s sleep.

  “You were right to bring her here, Brother Ecks,” Frank said.

  “She might have been there when Benol and her partner brought the three boys in. She’s the right age. I didn’t have the heart to interrogate her that far yet.”

  “Do you want Sister Hope to ask?”

  “No. No, I’ll do it tomorrow. But could you get Clyde to decode the contents of this journal using this.” He handed the red book and parchment page to the minister.

  “Will you be going home?”

  “I was hoping you’d let me sleep on one of the pews tonight.”

  “That’s a hard bed.”

  “I’ve always wanted to do that, Frank. Sleep in the room with no one else around.”

  Frank smiled and then nodded.

  Xavier slept on the front pew to the right of the Speakers’ Spot. He lay on his back, hands crossed over his chest like an undertaker’s approximation of eternal sleep. There was a half-moon peering in from the westernmost southern window. The lunar glow was peaceful, but it was the silence that made Ecks smile in his sleep: a hush so complete that it felt imposed by some greater being, some outer force too large to enter the church in its entirety. There was no electric hum or water flowing through wall-bound pipes, no cars from the road or distant music.

  Even asleep Xavier reveled in the quiet. In that room slumber was a blessing, silence a sanctity, and breath the consecration and proof of the sermons Father Frank espoused.

  “Brother Ecks.”

  Xavier was aware in a separate, unconscious place in his mind that he had a role in life. His heart and mind, muscle, and even his rage were indentured to a fate beyond his control. He had not killed the white man with the crowbar in his chest. He allowed Winter Johnson to decide his own fate. Almost every step he had ever taken was the wrong step, and still he was there on this bench—a pawn of something possibly divine and definitely unknowable.

  “Brother Ecks.” He felt a hand on his shoulder.

  Xavier Rule had been born, he thought, with the potential for purpose. He could have turned away. He could have strangled Pinky in her sleep and never met Frank. He had lost hope, but hope had not forgotten him.

  He opened his eyes to see Sister Hope leaning over him on the pew. She wasn’t smiling, but she never smiled. Her face was twice the size you’d expect. It dwarfed her head, which, in turn, seemed too large for her slender form. Her skin was the color of bright amber, and she had met menopause and conquered its storm like the conquistadors on ships bound for a new world.

  “Hope,” he said.

  “People may start coming in soon for morning meditations,” she said. “They don’t always come, but we would like to keep the room hospitable for them if they do arrive.”

  “I’ve never seen you at Expressions,” Ecks said.

  Her eyes were darker amber. She grimaced sadly.

  “No,” she said. “I am the matron of the plant. I keep it running. That’s my job, my only penance.”

  “And what is your sin?” Xavier asked the question almost innocently, without force or even the expectation of being answered.

  The large face turned down and somehow in on itself. The dark beads of her eyes went cold.

  “In the old country my father was a drunkard and my mother had too many children. She died and during a famine when I was not yet a woman it was up to me to make sure that my younger brothers and sisters survived.…”

  In a rush of intuition Xavier understood that part of Hope’s self-imposed punishment was to confess her sin whenever asked. It was why she never left the church. It was her iron maiden to bear..

  “… I lured a boy into a trap I’d made. I killed him and skinned his body. I cut him into pieces and brought him home to feed my starving family. I did that fourteen times.”

  Xavier sighed and then stood. He wanted to apologize to the woman, but even that, he realized, would be another burden.

  She squared her shoulders and adjusted the loose, full-length black uniform that she always wore. They peered into each other’s eyes and accepted the pain they both felt.

  “Ecks!” a man’s voice commanded.

  The shout seemed to fit the situation. There would be no easy egress from the cannibal child-memory.

  Captain Guillermo Soto was striding down between the pews on a collision course with the Harlem hard man.

  “Guilly. How’d you know I was here?”

  “I called Clyde.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I’m placing you under arrest,” the LA cop exclaimed. He reached out to clamp his big hand on Xavier’s steel-banded left forearm.

  This was a mistake.

  Pivoting from his hip, Xavier pulled the larger man off balance. At the same time Ecks sent out a straight right fist that knocked the big cop flat on his back on the flagstone floor.

  But Guillermo Soto was not a soft man. He bounced from the floor with a .357 Magnum in his left hand.

  In his mind Xavier had already kicked the right-hand bench at Soto, was already crouching to his left and pulling the throwing knife he kept in a sheath on his right shin. In Xavier’s mind Soto was almost already dead.…

  “Stop!” Father Frank called from the doorway behind the Speaker’s Spot.

  Sister Hope stood there passively, understanding that she, at that moment, could not stay the foolish men.

  “I can’t stop, Frank!” Soto shouted. “This is my prisoner.”

  “This is sanctuary,” Frank replied.

  Xavier stood up straight.

  Soto lowered his high-powered pistol.

  “There’s a woman dead, Frank,” the LA cop said. “A man too, and one critically wounded. There’s a girl missing and a basement filled with the skeletons of children.”

  “There was a truck left out in the Arizona sun with sixteen dead workers in it,” Frank said. “There was a shoot-out in Chihuahua where women and children were caught in the cross fire.”

  A shudder ran through Soto.

  Xavier squelched the desire to kill the man.

  “It’s my job,” Captain Soto said.

  “I’m speaking to your faith.”

  “Did you kill them, Ecks?” Soto asked.

  “I shot the one guy and threw the crowbar into the other one’s chest. But they were getting ready to kill me and burn down the house. I think they wanted to remove Sedra’s body, maybe the skeletons too.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She was gone when I got there.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “You have all the answers you need, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Brother Ecks is blameless.”

  “You aren’t the law, Frank.”

  “I am within these walls.”

  “I have a life, man,” Guillermo sai
d, “and a duty.”

  “A life maintained by Hope and Ecks and the rest of us.”

  Guillermo Soto tucked his gun into a holster on his hip while staring at Xavier.

  Sister Hope turned away and left through the exit door.

  Frank watched both men with a wary and yet somehow world-weary eye.

  “Are you telling me everything, Ecks?” Soto said.

  “I told you enough.”

  “Where’s the girl?”

  “Free at last.”

  The big Mexican’s eyes narrowed. He seemed about to ask something else but swallowed the words.

  Turning to Frank he said, “I got a job to do. You can’t blackmail me or browbeat me or talk me down. I will find out what happened, and those that are guilty will pay. It doesn’t matter if you turn me over too. I will do what’s right.”

  “I would never betray your trust, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Your confessions among us are sacrosanct.”

  “Even if these crimes were committed by members, Frank,” Soto uttered through clenched teeth. “You’ve said more than once that you are not here to protect us if we stray.”

  “Just so,” the minister said.

  Another shiver went through the big cop’s frame and he turned on his heel, strode up the aisle and out of the church.

  Xavier was still thinking about the young girl who killed and gutted children so that her brothers and sisters could survive. For a moment he was nearly overcome by the feelings of empathy and impotence.

  “You will have to take her out of here,” Frank said.

  “Who?” Xavier asked; he was still thinking of the cannibal.

  “Doris. Guillermo might turn his work over to an associate and they could very well get a warrant.”

  “That would destroy the church,” Xavier said, the sheathed knife in his mind.

  “I doubt if it will come to that. But better be safe. Brother Soto may be having a crisis of faith.”

  “What will you do?” Xavier asked, trying to shake the knife out of his thoughts.

  “Pray for him. Maybe pray with him. He doesn’t like you and so it is easy for him to believe the worst.”