Deadly Charm

by Claudia Mair Burney

  The Thunders were probably anxious to leave Rocky’s house, especially with Nikki’s star now rising. Dear Lord, I could hear a different kind of ticking clock now. I knew if I couldn’t confirm my suspicions soon, they’d be completely out of reach, and she might get away with this.

  Over my dead body.

  But, God, what if I’m wrong about all of this?

  But I’m right!

  Am I right, Lord? Did Nikki Thunder want to be a Gospel-preaching superstar?

  She seemed to thrive on attention. I needed to pick her brain, but could hardly stand to be in a room with her. She didn’t like me anyway, and she had the hots for my husband.

  Am I just crazy? Emotional? Did I make all this up because I feel threatened by her?

  I made my way through the hospital again and back to my car. Oh, Lord, this pain. Protect the babies.

  I believe.

  I didn’t know what I was doing, but God have mercy, I was going to do something. For Zeekie. In honor of all the infants in my dream who died at the hands of their own mothers, including my own child since I’d allowed a madman to kill her.

  But don’t let this hurt my babies. I believe!

  Remembering my dream about Zeekie brought to mind my God Dream. I prayed, prayed, and prayed for Jazz’s safety. I prayed marginally for Nikki Thunder’s, but I did pray! Maybe she’s the one I should have been praying for most. But perhaps I’d seen enough psychopaths to know they don’t change. How God would redeem someone like Nikki was a mystery to me. Again the scripture came to me.

  All things are possible to him that believeth.

  Could God reform Nikki Thunder? God could do anything.

  Would He?

  My daddy said God wanted to redeem all things back to Himself. Even Nikki Thunder could go under that umbrella of grace. I said a prayer for her.

  Your will, God. Have mercy on her. God knows that was one weak, halfhearted effort. But I didn’t have any more to offer.

  Perhaps working with criminals had affected me in the same way working homicide had affected Jazz. I couldn’t imagine Nikki Thunder going to heaven. I didn’t happen to be a spiritual romantic—not when I’d dreamed of her taking my husband. God forgive me, but that murderess could wear the black wedding dress I dreamed of and go straight to hell. I’d do whatever I had to do to keep her from hurting anybody else.

  She was on my watch, and I had my eyes wide open.

  chapter twenty-five

  IT SEEMED TO TAKE FOREVER to get to the Rock House. I dragged myself out of the Love Bug and shuffled into the church, my pelvic area screaming with pain.

  I tried not to think about how Rocky wasn’t there. The thought matched the agony of my physical pain as I walked into the sanctuary. Ezekiel sat in the front row with the children, Zekia with her head on her daddy’s shoulder. Zeke knelt on the floor by his leg. The poor child prayed in earnest. Joy sat next to Ezekiel, rocking in silence, her Bible on her lap. All greeted me warmly, but with the ragged edge of concern in their voices.

  Ezekiel spoke first. I don’t know whether he could read my face or God had spoken to him again. “You heard about Rocky?”

  I nodded. I went to each of them, passing out hugs despite my pain. “Where’s Nikki?” I asked, thinking she needed to be accounted for at all times.

  Ezekiel answered. “She said she needed some time alone. Too much has happened, Bell.”

  Indeed it had.

  Thunder had on a gray wool turtleneck sweater and black twill pants. He looked great. If he’d had on a silk smoking jacket, the only thing that would have surprised me is that he smoked. He had an old Hollywood-glamour quality, like a darker version of Duke Ellington.

  “She didn’t take her bodyguards with her?” I asked.

  Sister Joy rolled her eyes. “They’re at the house eating poor Rocky out of house and home.”

  And Rocky could care less about their excesses, bless him. One morning he’d confided, “Those are big dudes. They need a little more than the rest of us.” They probably ate an entire Black Angus cow for breakfast after they’d drained the thing of all her milk. But Rocky would have prayed for more food to feed them instead of complaining.

  I sat on a chair near Ezekiel, and Zekia put her head on my shoulder, as if it were perfectly natural for her to do so. The sweet girl. Ezekiel smiled when he saw it, as did Joy. They loved those kids.

  Zekia patted my tummy, lightly, but it had begun to really ache and I jumped.

  She bolted up, apologizing profusely. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Bell.”

  “Oh, no, honey, put your head on my shoulder again. I’m just a little achy today.”

  Joy frowned at me. “Are you hurting, sweetness?” Thank God I’d won her over, too.

  “I am, but I’m on my way home. I stopped in because I went to see Sister Lou after I saw Rocky.”

  Ezekiel looked surprised. “That was awfully nice of you, sissy.”

  It grated me when he called me that, but this was not the time for me to play the name game. “I was happy to do it, Ezekiel.”

  Ezekiel said, “You’re a psychologist. Do you believe my big sister is what they say she is?”

  “Do I believe she’s a paranoid schizophrenic?”

  “Yes, or do you believe it could be—”

  I couldn’t take his deliverance spiel. “Your sister isn’t possessed, Ezekiel. She’s sick.” He didn’t say anything to counter what I’d said. I went on. “I agree with her diagnosis, but she has some moments of lucidity that I found revealing.”

  “What do you mean?” Joy asked.

  I looked at Ezekiel. “Maybe you should have the children leave the room.”

  He looked at them. Zekia sat up and reached for my hand. He shook his head. “No, I’d like them to hear. They’re old enough to be included in everything now.”

  Relief relaxed the tightness I didn’t realize I’d held in my shoulders. I thought he’d made a good decision, one that would make what I needed to do easier.

  “At the hospital I tried to talk to her, but she’s not communicating much. She’s retreating inward.”

  “She did that with us, too. She seems stuck on the idea that I should have…”

  “What you should have done, you did. You released your son to Jesus and buried your child.”

  “I believe God could have done it. He could have raised Him.”

  “Yes, but He just doesn’t seem to be passing out resurrections nowadays, does He?”

  I looked at this man who’d hawked his miracle prosperity oil to the gullible masses. The anger that I’d barely kept in check since I’d walked away—been fired!—from my job seeped out at Thunder.

  “Why do you continue that fiasco, Ezekiel? Can’t you save that for the camera?”

  The kids looked away. Little Zeke looked up at me with an expression of shock on his face. He turned back to his dad, but at least I knew he heard me.

  Ezekiel didn’t hide his own frustration. “You don’t know anything about my faith, young lady.”

  “I know you were on the comeback trail, and come on, resurrections have got to be great television, whether or not they work.”

  “I wanted my son back. Haven’t you lost a child? Didn’t you want her to live? Didn’t you want a miracle?”

  I blinked at him. I hadn’t expected him to volley the question back to me. I thought of my little girl, impossibly tiny, but alive in the palm of Miriam’s hand. Adam had beaten me too badly for me even to reach up to hold her, not that they’d have let me. My baby girl took a single breath. Just one—a tiny little squeak that I think I heard only because that child consumed me. And then she went quiet and still, and Miriam whisked her away. Only later, when I could walk again, did I go to Adam’s backyard, to the spot where the grass had been disturbed. I knelt down where she lay under the dirt. I told her I was sorry. I tell her to this day.

  I’m sorry, Imani.

  “Yes. I wanted a miracle, but not a media event.”

 
; “I didn’t, either,” he said. “I didn’t want any media events at all. Ever! Unless I could win more souls to Christ through them. I started preaching when I was still a boy. I never wanted to be famous. I wanted to bring people to Jesus, but everybody around me pushed me because I was good-looking and had the gift of gab.”

  Joy interrupted our argument. “You had a God-given gift, Ezekiel, and people loved to hear you talk about the Lord.”

  He hung his head for a moment, then looked back at me. “The next thing I know, I had a board of directors and a Christian marketing company making up mail-order miracles in exchange for donations.”

  “How could you allow that?”

  “I wasn’t the one making all those decisions! You think I believe in miracle prosperity oil? I only wanted people to have some point of contact to activate their faith. I didn’t even think of it myself. I had a team of people deciding everything. Making up the miracles. But, Bell, sometimes God would answer prayers. Sometimes he would show up and heal. Or deliver. Or change. It was never me.”

  I thought about my ankle. God showed up and healed it. Ezekiel didn’t take a bit of credit for it.

  “I was a country boy who suddenly had the attention of millions of people, including women. Good Christian women, who weren’t quite as good as they should be.”

  “But you were the star. You could have stopped it all.”

  “I wasn’t a star! I was a dumb hick who’d gotten too much power too quickly. Do you think anybody prepared me to be famous? To have money I didn’t think possible, all the while having a team of people telling me it’s all from God. It’s a blessing. I came from sharecroppers, sissy. I had no idea how to be the famous Ezekiel Thunder.”

  He shook his head. Grazed his hand over his mouth before he spoke again. “Women wanting a piece of the man of God. Christian women putting their phone numbers in my front pocket like my wife didn’t matter. Well, everybody knows what happened. I had affairs. And then Toni became too good to be a real wife to me. My ‘people’ covered my sin, and not in a godly way. Nobody challenged me, because I was the anointed one. We had a huge ministry that did a lot of wonderful things for the kingdom of God. We fed hungry children. We got Bibles to people who never owned one. I felt obligated to go with the charade because I thought if it all fell apart, more people would be hurt than if we kept it together. I hoped God would help me change.”

  I’d never envisioned him as what he described. I always saw him as a hustler and a ladies’ man. I saw him as a narcissist like Nikki, only concerned about himself and his own interests. When I didn’t speak, he went on.

  “Even though I was a grown man, I still felt like that kid I used to be, preaching ’cause the older folks thought it was so wonderful to see a young man love God. They pushed me forward way before I was ready. And it all ruined me. In spite of all the pressure, I knew I was responsible for my own self, and I tried to change—God knows I did. I stopped the affairs. I tried to get my life right.

  “Twenty-some-odd years ago, I confided in a young girl who worked as my assistant. We spent many hours on the road and in my office alone, but I had no intentions toward her. She wasn’t even a pretty, fast gal. But she had a good heart, and I needed a good person in my life. I came to love her, and she loved me. She was going to be eighteen in a few months. I wanted to marry her.

  “One lonely night, just one, we made a mistake. She loved Jesus enough to leave me before she could do any more damage to her soul. Neither of us meant for what had happened between us to leak. A friend told the press. It was like David said, ‘I was wounded in the house of a friend.’ And nobody was more like David than I was.”

  He looked down at his hands again. Joy spoke for him.

  “He stepped down from the ministry. He dealt with all the shame, but he lost the woman he’d fallen in love with. All the people he made so much money for treated him like a leper. There was no more ministry. Ezekiel spent the next several years getting right with God.”

  “You every hear of St. Mary of Egypt, Bell?” Thunder asked.

  I had, but I couldn’t resist hearing her story again.

  Thunder continued. “Mary was a prostitute who didn’t work out of need—as many women who were alone in that time did. She did it because she loved men. One day she paid for a journey to Jerusalem using her body and considerable skill. A group of pilgrims were going to venerate the true cross, and she thought she’d go along for kicks.”

  His honey voice and delightful drawl captivated me.

  “On the trip she serviced every man who’d have her and a few who didn’t want her at first. When they got to the holy city and to the church, which housed the cross where Jesus paid the penalty for our sins, she couldn’t enter the door to get into the church.”

  The rat. He could really tell a good story. I wanted more.

  “She tried three times, and an invisible force barred her. She stepped away from the church and saw an icon of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. She was overcome by her own sinfulness. She said to the Lord’s mama, ‘If you help me get in, I’ll serve your Son for the rest of my days.’”

  I nodded, as if I were hypnotized. “Then what happened?”

  “The blessed mother answered her and allowed her entry.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “That’s not the amazing part. Mary became a believer that very day and took Communion. She went with three small loaves of Communion bread to the desert to pray. She spent the next forty-seven years living wild for God in the desert, repenting. Forty-seven years. I’m gonna need a little longer than that,” Ezekiel said wistfully.

  “But if you’ve repented, why have you been seeking all this media attention?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  Joy spoke up. “That young gal came into his life. She wanted him to be famous again. One look at him, a few stories about the things he’d once accomplished, and she decided to resurrect the dead herself. She talked him into that whole television thing, including the new version of miracle prosperity oil.”

  I considered the children. He and Joy spoke freely around them. They must have talked all these matters through before. I admired him for that. “Did she talk you into that before or after Toni died?”

  “After.”

  “Ezekiel, what happened to Toni?”

  “I told you. She got sick and died.”

  “How did she get sick?”

  “She kept having stomach problems. We were sure it was from stress. She was kind of delicate, you see.”

  “Tell me about the stomach problems.”

  “She couldn’t keep much down. In the end she kept vomiting blood. Couldn’t hold her bowels. It was terrible, but the doctor said it was natural causes. Gastroen—”

  “I know what it is, Ezekiel.” I didn’t mean to be rude, but I could barely hold on, the pain had gotten so intense. “Was Nikki around her? Did she feed her? Help her in any way?”

  “Nikki was a godsend, despite what had happened between us. She cared for Toni while Joy cared for Zekia and Zeke. She had a little medical training. Had studied to be an MA.”

  Shazam! A very unfortunate profile had emerged. Knocking off babies. Killing the people she should have been caretaking. A stone-hearted murderer.

  “How could she have stayed on after Toni found out about the affair?”

  “She begged Toni to forgive her and not to kick her out. She had no place to go. Toni looked at her as a misguided child. It was me she punished.”

  Misguided child, my eye. I’ll bet her performance eclipsed all Hollywood had to offer, surpassed only by her act at her son’s funeral.

  “I wanted her to leave, but Toni felt sorry for her.”

  “Ezekiel, how did the baby—the little girl you and Nikki had—die?”

  Under stress his accent stretched out. His drawl had a far more exaggerated quality. This wasn’t his TV voice. “Just liiiiiiike Daaaaaavid’s baby; she never thriiiiiived. Seven days after she was born she diiiiied.”r />
  I imagined Ezekiel had fed Nikki his “I’m like David” garbage. Actually, it was true, but I didn’t like it. She’d know exactly what buttons to push to maximize his guilt. Lord, have mercy.

  My abdomen area not only burned but shooting pain doubled me over. I tried to hide it, but my breathing became ragged.

  “Bell, you’re not okay.” Ezekiel said. “Let me pray for you again.”

  “Not yet. I want to ask you one more thing.”

  “What is it, sissy?”

  I smiled at him. He’d managed to become human in my eyes. I liked him a little more. “Don’t call me sissy.” I winked at him.

  He tried to suppress a smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I mentioned I talked to Sister Lou. She didn’t say much before she went back to speaking in Kl—in tongues. But she did say, ‘He was supposed to raise him from the dead. She told me he would.’ Who was the she Lou was talking about? Nikki discouraged you from praying for God to raise him, correct?”

  He nodded.

  “Who else could Lou have meant?”

  He looked thoughtful. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Did you talk to her about raising your kids from the dead before anybody died?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Have you actually raised anybody from the dead?”

  He shook his head.

  “Ezekiel, I think Nikki talked Lou into doing something to the baby and told her that you would raise him from the dead if anything went wrong. Have you known Nikki to be a liar. At all?”

  His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

  Joy answered. “She lied constantly. She’d say anything to get what she wanted or to cover her tail.”

  Like most psychopaths.

  I looked Zekia right in the eyes. “Baby, why did you give Zeekie the bath?”

  A look of terror crossed her face. She answered too quickly. “I wanted to. I want to be a mama one day.”

  Joy broke in, shaking her head vigorously. “They loved their brother, but he was a handful. He got on their nerves. She wouldn’t want to give him a bath, never showed any interest in such a thing.”

  I looked at the younger Ezekiel. “Zeke, what did you do in the bathroom?”