by Tom Lowe
Kate looked over her shoulder and could see her husband patiently waiting for her, the car window up, Peter listening to music. She was frightened, a dark sadness filling her pores, her eyes burning. “Please let me up. My husband’s here.”
Father Garvey pulled her to the edge of the table and pushed open her legs. She slammed her fists against his chest. “No! Please,” she begged, biting her lower lip. Within seconds he had penetrated her. The pain was intense. Hot tears streamed down her face. Father Garvey reached for her chin, holding it with one hand and turning her head toward him.
“Look at me, Kate. Look into my eyes as I enter you.” She looked at him, his face twisted, eyes fiery, nostrils wide. He pushed back and forth inside her, each stroke penetrating deeper. The priest said, “He who comes to the sacred table of the Lord without faith, communicates only in the sacrament and does not receive the substance of the sacrament whence comes life.” He drove deeper into her, his penis throbbing, ejaculating.
Kate screamed. “No! Dear God, no.” She looked over her shoulder and could see a small statue of the Virgin Mary. A painting on the wall of the Last Supper. Through the office door, across the sanctuary, was a stained glass window depicting Christ ascending to heaven. The room was spinning. She was nauseous, vomit rising in her throat. She looked out the other window into the parking lot. She could see the sky growing dark. Peter stepped from the car and walked around to the trunk. He got an umbrella for Kate, like he always did. She watched him and wept. “Peter, dear Peter,” she whispered. The clouds opened into a hard rain, engulfing the old church with the roar of a waterfall. Lightning cracked and thunder rolled, smothering the final grunts of Father Thomas Garvey.
CHAPTER ONE
North Florida, near Gainesville, present day
Of all the rides in the carnival, Courtney Burke felt safest on the ride that scared many people. She liked the double Ferris wheel the best. She loved to ride it at night, wind in her face, hair blowing, and the lights of the town like stars twinkling in the valley. She rode after the crowds had gone back to their cozy homes, gone back to warm places where beds had real pillows. On the double Ferris wheel, she was free. It was as if she had wings, flying high above the evil that crawled across the ground like the rattlesnake slithering on its belly. As a girl, she remembered almost stepping on a rattler behind her uncle’s barn, the same barn where bad things had happened. But that was in another world, a world that couldn’t hurt her again. Now, at age nineteen, she was free, free to travel the country with the carnival, free to ride the Big Wheel.
Courtney lowered the safety bar in the seat, pinned her long raven hair into a ponytail, and turned toward the ride operator. He was cute, she thought. Maybe two years older than her. She smiled, the dimples showing, her blue-green eyes wide, catching light like the crest of a breaking wave on a moonlit tropical beach. “Just a quick ride, okay, Lonnie?”
“I don’t know, Courtney. We’re gonna get caught one of these nights.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure, huh? C’mon let’s ride a wheel that turns but never takes you anywhere, unless you let it. Pretty please, Lonnie.”
Lonnie Ebert lifted his baseball cap and ran his hand though dirty blond hair that hadn’t been washed in two weeks. He glanced around the carnival grounds, his lean face unshaven, eyes searching for a sign of movement. Most of the carnies were asleep, stoned on weed, or in honky-tonks knocking back cheap whisky chased by cheaper beer. He licked his dry lips and looked at Courtney, her smile the brightest thing in the shadows of the midway. “I do things for you that I wouldn't do for no other girl.”
Courtney smiled. “I know, and I don't take it for granted. Okay? Press the button.”
“All right, but we gotta make it quick. If Big John catches my ass he’d fire me, or worse.”
“He’s gone to town. I saw him leave. C’mon, start this thing. I wanna to feel the rush.”
“Five minutes. Tops.” He pressed the green start button, the black dirt under his thumbnail visible as the lights popped on and the Big Wheel lurched into motion.
She grinned. “Thank you! Can you stop it at the top on the second time around for a minute? I love the feeling of being that far up. I’ve never been in a jet plane. But up there I'm on top of the world.”
Lonnie blew out a pent-up breath, ran his tongue on the inside of his cheek, and looked to his right, down the midway. “Just for a few seconds, and one time only.”
Courtney gripped the safety bar, electricity surging through the motors, gears groaning, metal popping, the Big Wheel defying gravity and lifting the double wheels higher into the night sky. She rose above the lingering smells of the midway, the spilled beer and half-eaten corndogs and cotton candy stomped into the sea of damp sawdust, the stench quickly replaced with a cool night breeze of blooming jasmine as the Big Wheel turned skyward in the warm summer night.
She sat in the center of the seat and glanced up at the harvest moon. It seemed so close, so big and bright. The wind whipped her hair as she raised her arms. Tonight, I'm a bird, a dove flying high above the world. She looked down. Lonnie smoked a cigarette and paced near the operator's stand, the tiny orange glow the only movement on the ground. Up here the wind caressed her face under a big yellow moon, and the stars seemed almost within her touch. She held her breath as a meteor streaked across the deep purple with a welder's spark of fire that sliced a fleeting crack into the heart of the heavens.
The Ferris wheel lifted her higher, almost to the summit of its cycle, the wind picking up. As the big wheel crested at the top, it descended quickly, going through its spinning cycle. She held her hands up and made a contorted, funny face at Lonnie, zipping by him on her way back to the top. “Yeeeeessss! I'm a bird,” she sang the words.
At the top of the cycle, the Big Wheel came to a sudden stop. Courtney looked down and blew a kiss to Lonnie, who removed his baseball cap and grinned. The night was suddenly very quiet. She raised her eyes up and felt as if she could see for a hundred miles in any direction. There was the nightglow of Gainesville, Florida, at the edge of the horizon. She saw the headlights of cars creeping down dark back roads in the distance. A flicker of heat lighting hung in the outlying clouds for a beat no longer than the blush of a firefly's belly.
The seat, attached by two metal pins as wide as her little finger, rocked back and forth at the top of the Ferris wheel. Courtney couldn't help but smile. She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the breeze on her skin, her mind in sharp focus, the world now smaller, her troubles and past seemed far beyond the horizon. She watched a plane flying low in the distance, climbing higher as it gained altitude after leaving an airport. One day I'll catch a jet plane to fly to some far away, romantic place. But right now this is the best seat in the whole world. My rockin' chair with a view that goes forever.
She glanced down. Lonnie was smoking a cigarette, looking across the darkened midway. A movement caught her eye. Someone in the shadows. A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt. He was standing between the RV's, campers and trailers, someone staring up at her. Even from the distance, she felt there was something wrong with the way the man was looking at her. The fairgrounds suddenly darkened. Courtney looked to the sky as a cloud shadow-danced over the face of the moon, and she thought of her deceased grandmother. Her Irish grandma, someone who spoke Gaelic and Irish cant, was believed by many to be a psychic. She used to say that Courtney’s ability to see things, to get a feeling that something or someone was not right -- that something was about to happen, was a gift from a higher power. “It skips a generation, baby girl,” Grandma told her one spring night on the steps of her grandmother's small home in South Boston. “Your mother never got it. Neither did your sister, but you sure did.”
She remembered looking into the old woman's sea-green eyes, eyes that smiled with insight and absolute love. “Use your gift wisely, Courtney.” People, mostly from the clan, the Irish travelers -- the gypsies, called the old woman a mystic, and they'd consult her for a
ll kinds of things. Some wanted to know about the future. Others wanted to know how to hide their past to protect their future. A few wanted to reach out to dead relatives. Most things, Courtney figured, based on the conversations she overheard between Mama Burke and her clients, had to do with sex. The lack of it. Too much of it. Men chasin’ it, and women fakin’ it. It’s all crap, really.
Courtney looked down at Lonnie, her seat rocking slightly as she leaned over the safety bar. The horror hit her in the gut. Please, God, no. She held her hand to her mouth and screamed, her lower lip trembling. She felt sick. She looked down a second time. Maybe Lonnie would stand up and say he was joking. But she knew the way he was lying in the sawdust was not the way a live person would fall down, his left leg twisted behind him.
Courtney knew that Lonnie Ebert was dead. And she knew the man in the hooded sweatshirt was the killer.
But she didn’t know why.
CHAPTER TWO
The image could have been a hallucination. I was that tired, physically and mentally exhausted. I flashed on my high beams. A ground fog was building in the night, and the high beams did nothing to help me see what I believed was a girl walking on the shoulder of the road. Nothing there. Maybe a deer. I stuck my head out the open window of my Jeep driving down County Road 314 through the heart of the Ocala National Forest. Max, my ten-pound dachshund, was curled on the passenger seat, fast asleep. It was near midnight, and I was glad there was no other traffic on what was undoubtedly one of the darkest highways in the nation.
The road twisted through canopies of ancient live oaks, thick branches stretching high over the highway and blocking out what little light was coming from the moon. I'd spent all day sanding and repainting the bottom of Jupiter, my vintage 38-foot Bayliner at Ponce Marina near Daytona Beach. I would have stayed overnight on the boat if it weren't hauled into the yard, propped up with jack-stands and blocks. Tomorrow, Jupiter would take her place back at slip L-20. Now I was heading home to my old house on the St. Johns River.
The image returned, ghostlike through the fog. A young woman, maybe a teenager, definitely walking on the side of the road. She wore jeans and a blue T-shirt, walking slowly, too near the pavement to be safe. Not that it was safe walking down a rural stretch of highway late at night through the heart of a national forest known as much for its body count as its beauty. It was the same forest where convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos had left some of her victims. And it had a history of murder and bloodshed dating back to the Spaniards slaughter of the native people.
The girl didn’t stop walking when I slowed down and pulled up beside her. Max awoke, stood on her hind legs, bracing to peer out the open window. I asked, “Can I give you a ride to wherever you're going? This is not the safest place in the nation to be taking an evening stroll.”
No response. The girl kept walking, hugging her arms in the humid night air, the chant of cicadas echoing through the dark forest. She swatted a mosquito. I drove slowly, keeping pace with her. “The mosquitoes will eat you alive out here. Look, I'm not trying to do anything but help you.”
Max barked. The girl stopped and turned toward us. She said, “I don't need your help. Please, just go away. Leave me alone, Okay?”
She looked at Max and the girl's agitated face softened for a second, a tiny smile at one side of her mouth. She bit her top lip and started walking. I could tell she'd been crying for a while. Eyes swollen, red blotches on her face, hair tangled like she'd been running before walking, running away from something or running to something. Even through the mosquito welts, through the confused and hurt face, she was a pretty young woman. And she was someone who might be zipped into a body bag if she walked this road all night. The T-shirt had two dark stains across her waist, like she'd wiped blood on her shirt. Something had caused her world to come crashing down, at least from her perspective something bad had happened. Right now the only thing that mattered was her safety. She was somebody's daughter, and she was all alone in a dark and dangerous place where no one should be alone.
I said, “You're hurting Max's feelings.”
She stopped again, looked at us, leaned closer to the window and said, “Excuse me?”
I smiled and Max cocked her head. Then Max did her little half bark. Sort of her way of asking, “What's up?” The girl smiled. It was a natural, beautiful smile. Her eyes, even from the spill light of my dashboard, were mesmerizing. They were wide, the striking look of the irises was even more pronounced because of the dark circles wrapped around the color. They were the shade of golden light through emeralds, and they were very frightened eyes. She inhaled deeply through her nose, and looked back down the long, dark highway. An owl called out from one of the live oaks, the grunt of bullfrogs coming from the swamp. I could smell smoke from a hunter's camp somewhere in the deep woods. I said, “Please, get in the Jeep. I'll take you into DeLand. It's about twenty miles away. Are you a student at Stetson?”
“I've never been to college. Look, I appreciate your generosity. I can tell you’re a nice guy. But I'm gonna be okay. I just need some space away from people. Your dog's cute.”
“I can understand how you need space, but there are better places to find quiet time. I’m Sean O'Brien. What's your name?”
“Courtney.”
“Nice to meet you Courtney. I live near here in an old house by the river. I've been sanding, painting, and working in a boatyard at Ponce Marina all day. Let me take you into town. There's a Waffle House open all night. Do you need money to catch a bus?”
She rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and said, “No thanks.”
“Look, Courtney, I'm too tired to hang out here on a dark road less than five miles from where police found a body last month, less than fifty feet off the highway. A runaway teenage girl. She'd been dumped like trash. Now, please, get in the Jeep.”
She leaned closer to the open window and looked at me, studying my face for a long moment, a small gold Celtic cross hanging from her long neck. “You said your name's Sean O'Brien, right?”
“Yes, why?”
“No reason. You lived here all your life?”
“Part of my life. The important part. Why?”
“How old are you?”
“Forty three. Why?”
“It's nothing. Look, I...”
Light raked across the left side of her face. I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw headlights approaching. I said, “Car's coming. Step back, I'm pulling off the road.” I turned the Jeep's emergency flashers on and eased off the road directly behind the girl. Within seconds we were passed by a pickup truck. And three seconds later I saw the brake lights pop on.
Not a good sign.
