by D. F. Bailey
Then in one wild twist, she broke free from him and tore the tape away from her mouth with a cry of rage. She wound her arms around him and began smacking him with the balls of her fists. He let her take out her fury like that, hitting him until she was spent. When she’d purged the anger and fear she crawled into his arms and wove her hands around his shoulders and began to kiss his neck and face with a tender passion.
Ten, twenty minutes passed. He had no concept of time, just a sense that they’d survived and that the battle was done and nothing else mattered. When Eve’s breathing settled into a steady, even rhythm she began to mutter single words, a laugh, another cry.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know. The Catskills, I think.” Then pointing downhill, he said, “The lodge is that way.”
But the thought of limping back to the lodge made him hesitate. It meant a return to his other life, the same life that had dragged him up to this precipice in the wilderness. Was there another way? A parallel existence that they could jump to and begin a different life? When he realized that these were the same questions that Kali used to manipulate her followers he shuddered and tried to clear his mind. Still, the questions lingered.
Finally he stood up and studied the uprooted tree and the broad gentle slopes on the far side of the valley. He wanted to remember them exactly as they were right now. Beautiful, indifferent, benign—without the backdrop of violence. Then he walked to the cliff edge and gazed over the precipice, down at the corpses of Kali Rood and Deacon Salter. They lay next to one another, their arms overlapping in an awkward embrace, their skulls smashed into lifeless pulp in this desolate, lonely place. In the open grave where they’d ended their second lives.
※ — TWENTY FIVE — ※
FINCH TURNED THE page on his desk calendar and sat next to the window in his writing room on the second floor of the cottage on Telegraph Hill. It didn’t look much like August outside. The morning fog had been cleared away by a steady drizzle and the temperature had dropped to forty-six degrees. Even global warming couldn’t upend the quirky seasonal cycles in the Bay Area. At least not yet.
“So. I’m heading down to see Dr. Christoff.” Eve emerged from the bedroom dressed in her business suit. Tuesday morning, time for her weekly therapy session. “After that I’m going to check in at the office. I’ve got a new funding idea for the Parson brothers to consider for the eXpress.”
She wore a gray linen outfit perfectly tailored to her tall, fit physique. She was beautiful. Her body was round and soft in all the right places, firm and muscular in all the others. She managed to look stunning even as she prepared for her post-traumatic stress therapy with Dr. Christoff.
“You feeling okay?” he asked. “Putting PTSD in one box. Company finances in another.”
“Hmm. I guess that’s classic compartmentalizing, isn’t it?”
“That’s what they call it. Just make sure you reserve a box for me.” He laughed, hoping she might respond with a smile. It worked.
“Okay, that is so bad it’s almost good.”
She let out a giggle and walked over to the desk where Finch sat typing the first few words of what he hoped would be the final installment of the five-part series he’d entitled “Death of A Second Life.”
“Seriously. You doing okay?” He didn’t want to change her mood, this glimmer of her old self, but he knew he had to ask this. To check in. He’d been worried about her from the moment they walked away from the bluff where Kali and Deacon had dropped to their deaths.
“I guess so.” She draped her arm across his shoulder and looked into his eyes. She kissed him. “As we speak, anyhow. How about you?”
“As we speak, yes, I’m fine,” he said.
As we speak had become their code phrase to address the ongoing trauma they’d tried to shake—alone and separately—since their return from New York. It was all about trying to live in the present moment. Twice Will had wandered into the bedroom to discover Eve rolled into a foetal ball on the bed, weeping quietly into her hands. Other times they would embrace one another and, despite their best intentions, they’d relive the catastrophe in the Catskills when they clung together at the cliff edge.
For his part, Will discovered that he could purge his own post-traumatic stress by writing about it. Every time he took up the task of preparing the feature articles that Fiona and Wally knew would propel the eXpress circulation into the stratosphere, he dug a little deeper into the horror of the mass suicide on the mountain. Soon he would excavate the last gems of emotion and intelligence that could be mined. His goal was to leave nothing uncovered. To guide the reader into the dark world that Kali Rood had created from her own trauma that began with Jonestown. She’d called it Salvation Nation. The Reverend Jim Jones had called it The Peoples Temple. Finch called it Fatal Mass Delusion.
“You going to mention the last details? From the debriefing with the FBI after we got off the mountain?” she asked. “Sometimes I think those two days going over everything with Vickers and Cruz did me more harm than good.”
She sat in the chair next to the desk and studied him a moment. A month had passed since Cruz and Vickers drove them from the lodge back into New York City. They’d spent two days dredging up the details covering the time since Eve had found the slip of paper with the link to @r3v3lationnow. And after they returned to San Francisco, she carefully read the first drafts of the four articles Will published about the serial killings, their abduction and escape. She recalled details he’d forgotten, sharpened his memory of other facts and events. The result was a must-read media frenzy. As of yesterday, Fiona reported that the eXpress was averaging over one hundred and fifteen million page views a day.
“Depends what do you mean by last details,” he said.
“The body count.”
She meant the string of sixteen murder victims, Kali’s “ghost shadows.” And the twenty-three suicides in the lodge. Over the following weeks more than twenty cult members died in Maine, Vermont, Texas, Oregon and California. Most of them from fentanyl overdoses ingested voluntarily one at a time. At least their suicides were less traumatic than those who’d died from the poisoned Kool Aid in the lodge. The FBI speculated that most of the recent deaths were assassins Kali had assigned to eliminate her targets—but the feds warned it would take months to provide incontrovertible evidence of murder conspiracy that the courts would demand.
In the meantime the toll continued to mount as police all over the country tracked down the members listed on the Salvation Nation computers. Only in the past four days had the killing trickled to a stop. But no one wanted to tempt fate and say that it was over.
“Yeah. That’s what I’m writing about now. I’m calling it The Aftermath in the final article.” He tipped his head toward the computer screen.
“And what about Kali’s autopsy?”
He knew she meant the postmortem discovery of multiple myeloma. Once the medical examiner posted his report, Cruz ran a clinical review and discovered that Kali had been diagnosed a year earlier. The cancer had spread to her liver and stomach. She’d refused treatment. Apart from her physician and the pathologist, Cruz couldn’t identify anyone else who knew about her condition.
“It’s all in there,” he said. “She knew she was going to die. So….” He held his hands aloft to suggest that her madness was complicated by an unexpected twist: the prospect of a prolonged, painful death.
They paused to consider the strangeness of it all, and how there seemed to be no way to account for the layers of evil that was Kali Rood.
“What are you saying about the survivors?” she asked, “Robert and Parker.”
“Well, if there’s one good guy I can point to it’s Parker Mason.”
During Finch’s last interview with Cruz she revealed that Parker Mason, Kali’s computer tech, had provided the system passwords to the FBI. That opened the gate to the databases and allowed the police to track down the foundation members and introduce the most vulnerable of
them to crisis counsellors.
“And believe me,” he continued, “it helps to have a good guy in a story like this. Just so readers don’t give up on humanity. Hell, we all need some hope to cling to.”
“Yes, that we do.”
He reconsidered what he’d just said. And Eve’s seeming agreement. If she hadn’t been completely open with him over the past four weeks, at least Eve had been honest about what she did reveal.
“If he’s smart,” he added, “Parker will cooperate with the prosecutor.”
“In which case he’ll get a walk.” Her expression didn’t offer much sympathy.
“As for Robert Casson, he’ll never walk the same way again.” He lifted a hand and let it drop in his lap. Following his arrest on the mountain, Robert was rushed to a hospital. An orthopedic surgeon tried to repair the tear where Finch had severed his achilles tendon. Two days later the surgical site became infected, a series of antibiotics failed to provide relief and the battle was on to save his leg. The prognosis remained mixed.
“Even if he recovers, the bastard faces some serious jail time.” Her eyes narrowed and Will could feel her bitterness.
He held her gaze and then glanced away. They’d reached the point in the conversation where they’d previously veered off to some other topic. The way forward always seemed too difficult. Robert Casson: the man who’d abducted Eve, covered her head, injected her with a near lethal dose of chloral hydrate, strapped her to a chair and then marched her into the wilderness with her hands bound and her mouth taped shut. Finch could sense her pain and wondered if Robert had done something more to her that she wouldn’t disclose. Something sexual. He knew that one day she’d have to recite all this at Robert’s trial. But as of today, she could barely utter his name.
She turned back to him with an inquisitive look on her face.
“So there’s something else I just remembered. Last night in bed.”
“What’s that?”
“Just before she jumped.”
Will wondered where this would go. So far they’d never talked about those last few seconds on the precipice.
“When she took the hood off my head. I was in shock, I think.”
He nodded.
“And then she said something. Her last words, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
“Something like, ‘Remember our bargain.’ And then she said a name I didn’t get.”
“Barabbas.”
“Barabbas?”
He nodded to confirm everything so far. “She said, ‘One month, Barabbas.’ ”
“Yeah. That’s it.” Her face lit up. “That’s exactly it.”
Finch shook his head as if he wanted to purge the scene from his mind. But that was impossible. He was a prisoner of the memory and Kali’s words were the verdict that sentenced him to an unbroken anxiety as he wrote the five articles detailing the rise and fall of Kali’s Salvation Nation.
“So what does it mean?”
“It’s something I’ve held back.” He studied her face, wanted to see a sign that she could absorb the final threat against her.
“Will, you need to tell me. It’s something about me, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “Look, you need to tell me right now.”
He blinked. She was right. Besides he couldn’t keep the ghost of Barabbas locked up any more. The phantom had become his cellmate, rattling around in a cage in his mind.
“She gave me one month to write the articles about her and Deacon and the foundation.” He pointed to his laptop, to the story he was just finishing, and then gazed into her face. Finally he saw what he needed, the well of strength that showed she could absorb one last hit. “And if I didn’t write it, someone would … hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” She seemed puzzled by this. “You mean kill me.”
He couldn’t say the words. He pressed his lips together and waited for her to continue.
“My God,” she whispered. “That’s why your name was added to the list.”
“Yeah.” He expelled a long jet of air from his lungs. “I’ve been thinking that, too. That I became part of her plan after I interviewed her.”
“She knew that once the serial murders were exposed someone would stumble onto the list. And if you were on it, that you’d figure it out and find her. Then she’d make you chronicle the whole scheme and tell the world.”
“And she could finally enter the kingdom of Jonestown. As an equal partner,” he said with a dull laugh. “Where it all started for her and Deacon Salter.”
They both shrugged. Could it be so crazy simple? Or was most of it explained by her terminal cancer? Or had some rabid dog bitten her soul when she’d arranged the murder of her foster parents and then pushed her boyfriend to his death? No one would ever be certain. No one would find a reasonable explanation in a world where reason itself didn’t exist.
“So how exactly did you come to make this bargain with her?”
“When I was in the lodge,” he said, “they held a pistol to my head. It was a game of one-shot Russian roulette. I had ten seconds to tell her the name of the person who’d been spared crucifixion the day Jesus died.”
“What?” Her face twisted with a look of disbelief. “Will, that’s insane. She’s as bad as Toby Squire. Worse.”
He chuckled at that. “Insanity may be the one and only thing they had in common.”
She paused to reflect on this and shook her head as if she needed to dismiss the thought. Then she looked at him again. “So that was Barsbass?”
“Barabbas. A common thief. Spared at the last moment.”
“And you knew that?”
He smiled. “It was my second guess.”
※
He listened to Eve gather her computer and shoulder bag in the downstairs hallway, then he heard her call up to him—“Good-bye, I love you”—heard the click of the door as it closed and moments later, the sound of her car engine catch and turn over. He stood at the window and watched the Acura glide down Alta Street and turn the corner onto Montgomery.
He waited another moment and tried to imagine the feelings he used to have, the sense of life pouring through his body. The sense of longing and ambition that once gripped him as a young man. The desire, the pure gusto for life itself. At least you can remember it, he told himself. More than could be said for Martin Fast, Jayne Waterston and Edmond Austen.
He wandered up the stairs to the roof deck and leaned against the railing and looked onto the Financial District and across San Francisco Bay toward Oakland and Berkeley. His adopted city had been good to him but at times like this, in his darker moods, he was struck by the obstacles he’d had to overcome to get where he now stood. Wally had once told him that the obstacle is the path. The older he got, the more Finch believed it.
From the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of two parrots landing on the eavestrough above his shoulder. Dozens of them nested in the trees along the Filbert Steps that descended from the top of Telegraph Hill to Levi’s Plaza. The parrots were beautiful birds that he once considered out of place on the hill but, like Finch, they’d adapted and made a home here.
As a joke, he’d named these two Fate and Fortune. Over the past week he’d watched the antics of the pair and realized he couldn’t distinguish one from the other. They liked to swoop over the balcony, perch on the eaves and fasten their talons securely to the edge of the aluminum trough. In a comic duet, they dipped their heads from side to side while he dug some seeds and nuts from the plastic pail he kept in a corner and tossed them up onto the roof shingles. The birds gobbled them up, cracking the kernels in their curved beaks and raising their heads as the minced nuts slipped down their gullets.
After a few minutes the birds finished their feeding, flew off and left Finch to consider the implications of Kali’s Barabbas ultimatum. After he’d come off the mountain in the Catskills he decided not mention it to Vickers and Cruz—or anyone else. It wouldn’t help his credibility if his work appeared to be compro
mised by extortion. And on the only occasion that he’d seen Wally over the past month, Will realized that he couldn’t tell him either—couldn’t burden his boss and mentor with another strain. Last week Fiona confided that the old man had moved his wife into a hospice unit to play out the endgame in her own battle. Wally didn’t need any more trouble.
Although he’d confided everything to Eve now, the threat hadn’t necessarily disappeared. Hopefully the cult disciple assigned to monitor Will’s five-part series would realize that later today, when the last installment was published in the eXpress, Will had completed his assignment. The story was now told, the bargain kept, and the ultimatum resolved. That was his new hope.
Still, you never know what kind of madness is lurking out there, he told himself. Someone steps out of the shadows to strike you down. How do you maintain constant vigilance against such lunacy? Better just to embrace your fate no matter what might happen. Let the world have at you, fend off the worst of it, and welcome all the love that comes your way.
※
Finch sat at his desk reading over the last paragraphs of the final installment on Kali Rood. Something wasn’t right. He realized that he couldn’t conclude with her suicide, the silent plunge into Deacon’s arms. He thought that he had to answer the doubts that plagued him as he lay beside Eve on the cliff edge. Over the past month those thoughts had distilled down to one pressing question. How can you really change yourself and make another, better life?
He gazed through the window looking onto Alta Street when he heard the metallic clip-clop of the mail slot opening and closing on his front door. He checked his watch. One-twenty. The mailman had come and gone two hours earlier, so what was this?
He stood next to the window and looked down onto the street. A man with narrow shoulders turned his back, pulled a hoodie over his head and began to walk toward Montgomery Street.
Finch raised the window and called out. “Hey, there. What’s up?”
An inane question, he thought, and for a moment he considered asking something more specific. The stranger glanced up, and for a second Finch caught a glimpse of his drawn, bearded face. He bore a gaunt, intense look. Before Finch could respond, a rush of fear sank through him. It took a moment for him to recover his senses, then he scrambled down the staircase to the front door. Lying on the interior doormat an envelop lay face-up, with one word written in capital letters: FINCH.
