“You don’t know?”
“I know that’s what’s used to cut through metal, but I’ve never seen one.”
“They look like that,” Carl said, pointing to a couple dozen hacksaws hanging on a display a few feet in front of them.
Carl chose the sturdiest of the three models displayed, then, because it seemed like it might be useful in a small space, he also picked out an abbreviated version that allowed the naked blade to stick out about two inches in front.
At the cash register, when Beth pulled two twenties from her bag to pay for their purchases, Carl brushed her hand aside, “You can get the next round.”
Unfamiliar with bar lingo, Beth was still puzzling over the reference as they headed to the car.
They went next to a Walmart for a backpack to carry the tools they’d just bought and the two urns once they managed to get them. All they needed was a simple canvas pack, but the ones on the shelves were made of some thicker material that would float if the pack was lost from a boat. With color the only option open to them, Carl chose a khaki model, then headed to the checkout, where he let Beth pay for it.
Traffic was light inside the city, and when they entered the mountains it became nonexistent. The rain had stopped hours ago, so the roads were dry. But the clouds that had brought the rain were still overhead, obscuring whatever moonlight might have illuminated the landscape.
Without light from the city or the moon, the night was a void, the world outside the car existing only in small tableaus successively revealed by the Camry’s headlights. As Carl drove, he couldn’t help but view the darkness ahead as a metaphor for the turn his life had taken, and he could only guess what was going to happen when they reached Artisan.
Chapter 14
“HERE WE ARE,” Carl said, stopping at the Artisan sign on the near side of the bridge across the river. The car’s headlights illuminated about thirty yards of the bridge. Beyond that, they could see nothing.
“I’m pretty sure there’s no one in the information booth at night,” Beth said, “but we still probably shouldn’t get too close to the gate with the car.”
“I don’t want to have to cross this bridge on foot, so we should at least take it across and leave it somewhere on the other side.”
“Whatever you think.”
Carl put his foot on the gas, and they started across. Just on the other side, the road was flanked left and right by a dense cluster of tall fir trees with branches all the way to the ground, apparently planted as a landscaping feature by the town. He slowed the car to a crawl.
Beyond those trees, the natural woods began. On the left there was a small break in the foliage where he could see that, despite the recent deluge, the shoulder of the road seemed firm enough to support a car.
He stopped and put the Camry in park. “Let me have one of those flashlights, will you?”
Beth gave him one from the backpack at her feet. “Where are you going?”
“To see if this is a good place to leave the car.”
Carl got out and stepped onto the asphalt, where he encountered a damp chill in the air that quickly crept down the back of his neck and under his jacket. Easing the car door shut, he pulled the zipper on his jacket up a bit, and then flicked on his flashlight.
Moving to the side of the road, he discovered that the rocky soil there was as firm as it looked. With his flashlight showing the way, he walked about fifteen feet from the road and played his light toward the decorative firs, which he could now see were planted in a double row that formed a right angle. One leg of the angle ran along the road, the other, along the ravine bordering the river. He walked all the way to the trees, again checking the firmness of the ground. Satisfied, he went back to the car.
“How does it look?” Beth asked.
“I think it’ll do,” Carl replied, settling into his seat. He put the car in drive and slowly eased it off the road.
Advancing slowly, alert for any sinking sensation, he drove about ten yards, then slipped the car into reverse. With a deft touch, he backed up until he was as deeply hidden by the trees as possible. He cut the engine, flicked off the lights, and turned to Beth. “Where exactly is this hole in the fence?”
“Through the woods to the left.”
“Earlier you said it was about a quarter of a mile.”
“As nearly as I can judge.”
“The gate is about that same distance from here. So we’ve probably got a half mile walk facing us. Is it heavily wooded on the other side of the fence?”
“There’s a clear strip about three feet wide along the fence line, but beyond that, the woods are just like on this side all the way to the cemetery.”
“I suggest we head into the trees from here on a diagonal, then when we’re deep enough in that our lights can’t be seen from the road, we’ll angle toward the fence and walk along it to make sure we don’t miss the hole.”
“There’s also a clear strip beside the fence on this side. We should stay out of that until we find our spot.”
“I agree.”
The deluge earlier in the day had thoroughly soaked all the ground litter, so as Carl and Beth moved among the trees with Carl in the lead carrying the backpack, they didn’t make much noise. In fact the forest seemed eerily silent, as though holding its breath.
There was a lot of underbrush among the trees, much of it with thorns or stiff branches that grabbed and poked, making them follow an erratic course. From all his hiking experience, Carl had developed a pretty good sense of direction even in situations like this, and he managed to keep them heading the right way.
Distance was another matter. With their route so irregular and no lights on the road they’d left, it was hard to determine when they were deep enough in to head for the fence. So Carl made an arbitrary decision to look for it after they’d been walking for just under five minutes.
Slogging through the trees, with the night pushing in on them, Carl thought about how surreal all this was. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he hadn’t even known Beth Corbin existed. Now, here he was on some insane quest to steal her parents’ remains from the Artisan mausoleum. Even having lived through it, it was hard to understand how such a thing could have happened so quickly.
Behind him he could hear Beth breathing hard. He stopped and turned to check on her. “You okay?”
“Just a little winded.”
“Want to rest a minute?”
“Let’s keep going. The fence can’t be much farther.”
And she was right, because three minutes later, the dull sheen of galvanized chain link appeared in the beam of Carl’s light.
He turned to Beth. “How easy is this hole to see? It isn’t camouflaged is it?”
“It’s right out in the open.”
Remaining in the forest fringe, they followed the fence, shining light on it only as much as necessary so they wouldn’t reveal themselves to anyone who might happen to glance down the cleared line from the road they’d left. After about six more minutes of walking, Carl saw a patch of raw dirt around the base of the chain link. Drawing closer, he saw what they were looking for. Now they had to get under the fence and back into cover on the other side ASAP. But there was a problem.
“It’s too shallow,” Carl said. “I don’t think either of us can get through there without touching the metal.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I remembered it as larger.”
“So we make it larger.” Carl flicked off his flashlight and put it on the ground. He shucked off the backpack and dropped it next to his flashlight. With Beth holding her light so he could see, he opened the pack’s main compartment and fished out the small crowbar they’d brought. He then picked up his light and handed it to Beth.
“Come over here and stand just like that with your back to the road and both lig
hts on the hole while I work.”
Carl moved into position, brushed some loose debris from the shallow depression under the fence, then dug the hooked end of his crowbar into the moist soil. Expecting this to be a relatively quiet operation, he was distressed to discover the dirt here was generously laced with small rocks that caused his first stroke to produce a rasping sound so loud he cringed.
He paused a moment, worried that banks of lights hidden in the trees were about to come on and sirens start to wail. But neither of those things happened. Resigning himself to the fact there was no way to do this without making noise, he went back to work, scraping with the crowbar until he had loosened enough dirt to scoop out with his hand.
After about five minutes of hard work that produced a half dozen small rock cuts on his scraping hand and made his face radiate heat into the cool night, he stopped digging and stood up. His joints were stiff from being in the same position for so long and the knees of his jeans were wet from kneeling.
“I think that’ll do it,” he said, putting the crowbar back in the pack and wiping his scraping hand on his jeans. He picked up the pack and lobbed it over the fence. “Who goes first?”
“I will,” Beth said, holding the flashlights out for Carl.
He took them and held the beams on the hole while she dropped to her knees in front of the fence and rolled onto her back to make sure she wouldn’t inadvertently brush against the electrified metal as she went through.
Carl was as surprised at the speed and agility she demonstrated slithering under the fence as he was when she’d jumped so competently to the shed roof behind his house. Now it was his turn.
He passed the flashlights under the bottom rail to Beth, then used her technique to get himself through the hole he’d made, touching the fence only briefly and to no ill effect, with his jacket. He got to his feet and brushed himself off. When he had the pack repositioned on his back, Beth returned his flashlight.
“So where’s the cemetery?”
“This way.” She headed off into the woods.
It was her home turf, so it was natural she should lead. But Carl was still concerned that being the point man, she could be more at risk than he for . . .
What . . . ?
What were Meggs and Hanson capable of to keep safe whatever secrets they were hiding? Carl didn’t know. Wasn’t that why he’d brought the gun? Could they be involved in something so important they’d be willing to kill to protect it? That kind of thing was so far removed from Carl’s experience it seemed highly implausible. Even so, being out there in the woods with the only sound the occasional wet crunch of a twig underfoot or the rustle of their jackets against a shrub, his nerves were sizzling.
Minutes after Carl and Beth left the fence, the trees thinned and they found themselves at the foot of a three-foot high flagstone wall.
“This is it,” Beth whispered.
Carl looked across the dark, relatively treeless expanse beyond the wall. About four hundred yards away, he saw lights in the second floor windows of what he thought was the church parsonage.
“Cut off your flashlight,” he hissed, thumbing the switch on his.
“What’s wrong?”
“What are those lights in the distance?”
Beth looked away into the gloom and saw them for herself. “It’s where Father Hanson and the assistant pastors live.”
“I hope no one was looking out either of those windows a second ago.”
In one of those lighted rooms, Father Hanson sat with his back to the window watching the movie, Jerry Maguire, on the satellite hookup none of his flock was permitted to have. He’d already seen the movie twice over the last two years and remembered much of the dialogue. Tonight, as an experiment, he was watching it with the sound off, studying the actors’ facial expressions to see how much of the content of the scene they were conveying without words.
As he watched, he began to muse once again on how strange it was that a man who didn’t believe there was a God had become the spiritual leader of nearly three hundred people. That he had successfully pulled it off for almost five years had to mean he wasn’t as bad an actor as those savage reviews in London had said. In fact, he had to be a great actor to have made it work.
He reflected on the long ago gambling losses he’d incurred because of the Italian soccer team’s inept play. At the time, he hadn’t even known there was such a thing as The Brotherhood, let alone realized that’s who he was placing his bets with.
Become Father Hanson or try to breathe with a plastic bag over your head, those had been his choices. Of course, he’d taken the option that kept him alive. But it had seemed a terrible bargain. Now, here he was, revered, respected, loved by all these people. It was what he’d always wanted and never found on the stage.
Who could have predicted it would have worked out this way? Not only had he found career fulfillment in Artisan, he’d earned The Brotherhood’s trust so he now knew why this place existed. Moreover, he’d become part of management, second in charge after Meggs. That meant a nice monthly paycheck and control over the rotating enforcers The Brotherhood sent as assistant pastors. But losing another of his charges would put all that and even his life, once again, in jeopardy.
Where the hell was Beth Corbin? Had she really left Artisan with Carl Martin? He glanced at the phone, longing for Meggs to call and say everything was fine.
DOWN THE HALL, Sylvester Lothian, one of the enclave’s assistant pastors, stood at the window of his room and looked out beyond the hospital, to the cemetery, where a moment ago, he thought he’d seen a light.
But now he saw nothing.
Could he have been mistaken? He didn’t think so.
Chapter 15
“WHERE’S THE mausoleum?” Carl whispered.
“In the center of the cemetery. Down this wall about twenty yards, then straight in.”
“Which side has the door?”
“If we went in here, to the middle of the grounds, then turned left, we’d be looking at it.”
“I was hoping it faced this way.” Drawing on his memory of the place from his earlier daytime visit, Carl asked, “Does the hospital block the view of the mausoleum from the second floor of the parsonage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, we’ll just have to see when we get there. Let’s move down until we’re even with the mausoleum before going over the wall. No flashlights.”
IN THE PARSONAGE, Lothian stared at the point in the distance where he’d seen the light. Now that several seconds had passed in which it hadn’t reappeared, he began to wonder if he’d been mistaken in the first place. Suppose somebody from town was outside futzing around. What difference would it make? Besides, he didn’t want to have to get dressed and go all the way down there.
CARL LET BETH lead the way to the mausoleum. Even though she was more familiar with the grounds than he, their unwillingness to use their flashlights meant more than once she’d bumped into a headstone and had to adjust her course. Finally, they came to a huge domed shape that rose dimly out of the wet grass.
“This is it,” Beth said.
Close now against the wall of the mausoleum, there was no way anyone watching from the parsonage could see their lights, so Carl flicked his on. “I’m going to check the sight lines to the front of the building.”
He moved down the side of the big building to the corner. Letting his light dangle at his side in his left hand, he edged around the stone and looked toward the parsonage. He could just see the faint lines of the parsonage gables over the roof of the hospital. Everything below that was blocked from view. He turned to Beth. “Come on. It’s safe. They can’t see us.”
STILL IN HIS underwear, Sylvester Lothian picked up his radio and called the communication center.
CARL PLAYED HIS flashlight through the ma
usoleum’s iron door to the carved wooden door three feet beyond, then brought the beam back to the problem at hand.
As Beth had said earlier in Little Rock, the iron door was built like the door on a jail cell, with vertical bars filling a square above and below a thick horizontal iron slab containing the lock.
“If we cut out three of those bars,” Beth said, shining her light on the lower section. “I think I could squeeze through the opening.”
That assessment meant six cuts. But when Carl reached into the pack at his feet and got out the hacksaw, he quickly discovered something he should have realized when he first got a look at the door: The bars were too close together to allow the hacksaw to slide between them. Thankful that he had brought a solution to the problem, he dumped the big hacksaw back into the pack, got out the small version that was little more than a blade holder, and set to work at the top of the first bar.
In the quiet cemetery, the noise of the blade against the iron sounded to Carl like cars sideswiping each another. Toes curling with concern at the racket he’d made, he stopped work. “Jesus, this is gonna wake up the whole town.”
“I think it just sounds really loud to us because we’re stressed at being out here,” Beth suggested.
“Maybe, but I gotta do something to muffle this.”
Carl shucked off his jacket, then removed his shirt and put his jacket back on. “I need two hands to bear down on this blade, so when I get in position, wrap my shirt around my hands and hold it there.”
Beth put her still-lit flashlight down on the cement. When Carl was ready to attack the bar again, she covered his hands with the shirt. It took a moment for her motions to synchronize with his, but they were soon moving smoothly together, their cheeks almost touching.
The rasp of the blade against the iron bar was only marginally muffled by the shirt, but Carl was now more aware of Beth’s presence than he was the noise.
Even when he was making decent money, he and his ex, Carol, had never really been a team. If he wanted to eat Italian, she wanted French. If he wanted a rustic vacation at a lake, she insisted on a big city with a hotel whose rooms had gold bathroom fixtures. They disagreed on everything, from what kind of shrub to put by the front door to the brand of socks he should wear. So he had never experienced this feeling of working with a woman toward a common goal. And it felt damned good.
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