by D V Wolfe
“Do you think they had some help?” I asked.
Stacks scratched his head. “If I was a betting man, I’d say yes. In a big way.”
“Ok, connect some dots for me,” I said, stretching out on the carpet and closing my eyes, my hands behind my head. “Preacher man shows up, pisses off one congregation, starts another church and suddenly the whole town has got religion? And you think this might be what’s causing the ‘weird shit going down’ feeling?” I opened an eye to look at Stacks. “And what about the symbol?”
Stacks nodded. “I’m getting there. The owners of The Rowdy Hole aren’t the only ones who may have felt the preacher’s wrath.” Stacks got to his feet and I opened an eye to watch him move around the trailer. He made Noah stand up twice to look under him to see if he was sitting on what he was looking for. He finally found it next to the sink, under a stack of dirty dishes. He dropped the stack of folders on the floor next to me and I rolled over to one side to look at them.
“Is the stuff in these files going to permanently scar me?” I asked, noting all the rubber bands and binder clips holding the files shut. “Or make me an accessory to something?”
Stacks rolled his eyes. “I’m not that lucky.”
I sat up and pulled the nearest file into my lap, removing the rubber bands holding the bulging folder closed. I flicked one at Noah and then opened the file. Newspaper clippings slipped off the top of the pile and fell into the gap between my feet and my crotch. I reached to dig them out and a notebook and a hymnal fell out of the file onto the floor in front of me.
“Just put that anywhere, Bane,” Stacks said. “It’s not like it was carefully cataloged and organized.”
I dug the newspaper clippings out and set them on the floor in front of me. I spread them out next to the loose papers which I noticed were a police report and a photocopy of a letter. I stacked the notebook and hymnal to one side and stared at the rest.
“Barbara Mackey?” I read from the first clipping.
Stacks let out an exaggerated sigh. “You’ve got the wrong file. I had them in chronological order.” He reached to shuffle through the other files laying on the floor.
“You know,” I said. “For someone who files their documents chronologically, but under what looks like every dirty dish you own, you sure are particular.”
“Here,” Stacks said, picking up a different file, completely ignoring my snide comment. I glanced up at Noah and raised an eyebrow. He looked just as surprised as I was. This had to be serious if Stacks was just ignoring my jab at his housekeeping.
I glanced back down at the file Stacks had just tossed in my lap. Five binder clips held the thing shut, “Really, Stacks?” I said, motioning to the binder clips.
“I didn’t want to lose anything,” Stacks said.
This file looked a lot like Barbara Mackey’s: a handful of newspaper clippings, a police report, a picture of what looked like a crime scene with an older man sprawled across a floor, half on carpet and half on tile, a plastic baggie with what looked like a melted pill bottle cap, a crucifix, and a baby blue, miniature Bible.
“I don’t want to know how you got these,” I said to Stacks. “I really don’t have time to go to the slammer for aiding and abetting.”
Stacks rolled his eyes. “Just read.”
The newspaper clippings consisted of a short police blotter notice that Mrs. Terry Donahue had called the police on the night of May 25th at 9:34pm, saying that there were strange noises coming from her backyard. The police investigated and found nothing. The police assumed that the “intruder” had been a neighborhood pet, an opossum or a raccoon. The second newspaper clipping was a piece from the religion section of the paper. It showed a smiling old man waving a ladle at the camera. The headline below it said, “Gibbs, the Gift that Keeps On Giving”. I skimmed through the article and glanced back at the crime scene photo. It was the same guy.
“Royson Gibbs,” I said, reading the name on the third newspaper article, which was an obituary.
Stacks nodded. “From what I’ve been able to piece together, Gibbs was a devout member of the Nazarene congregation prior to the new preacher coming to the church. He started a soup kitchen and a food pantry downtown, he coached for the Special Olympics in the summer and he picked up litter on the weekends.”
“What was he,” I asked, “campaigning to be the next Jesus?”
Stacks put a finger on the crime scene photo and slid it out of the pile to rest above the other clippings and documents on the floor. I glanced up at it again and something caught my eye this time. There was a pill bottle lying next to the man’s head in the crook of his splayed left arm.
“So he what, slipped on the floor while he was trying to take his medication?” I asked.
Stacks shook his head. “He O.D.ed. On purpose.”
I shrugged. “Well maybe he was depressed and when the do-gooding didn’t cure him, he decided to punch his own ticket.”
Stacks shook his head slowly. He took all of Royson Gibbs’s file documents from me and carefully laid them on the open folder, pulled it towards him, and pushed the last unopened folder at me. I growled as I peeled off rubber bands and binder clips to get the file open. More newspaper clippings, another crime scene photo, a foot-long piece of rope in a baggie, a creased and wrinkled photo of two young boys, and a name badge that said Meals on Wheels and Ellie underneath it. There was also an old leather-bound Bible. I could feel Noah leaning forward over my shoulder to look at everything too.
“Ellie Miller,” I read off the obituary. I slid the newspaper clippings aside and I felt my blood go cold when I saw the crime scene photo. It was a woman, suspended in the air by the neck. Chin length black hair covered the woman’s face. The memory of my dad swinging from the barn rafters stabbed me in the gut. I glanced back at the picture from the obituary. It was her. The piece of rope in the file took on a whole new meaning and I shoved it away from me. “Stacks, what the hell?” I pointed at the rope. “Not only is that evidence but Jesus, why did you keep it?”
“Forest for the trees, Bane,” Stacks said, without looking at me. I cleared my throat and did my best to stuff the image of my dad, swinging from the rafters, back into the carefully sealed container where I kept all of my memories of him in my brain. “Ellie was a single mother of two,” Stacks said, he slid the picture of the two young boys toward me. “She started and ran the Meals on Wheels program for the Nazarene church. She was extremely religious. Why would she have killed herself?”
“Ok,” I said, trying to focus on Royson’s picture, instead of Ellie’s. “So both Royson and Ellie check out within,” I checked the dates on the obituaries, “two weeks of each other. Was there some kind of connection between the two? Did they have anything in common?”
Stacks gave me a sad smile. “One is a shame.” He moved Royson’s file to the side. “Two is a tragic coincidence.” He tugged Ellie’s file away from me. “So what do you call three?”
He shoved the first file on Barbara Mackey back at me. I spread out the clippings already terrified of what I was going to find.
And I was not disappointed. Beyond what I’d initially seen when I opened the file, there were several grizzly crime scene photos, a letter on pink stationery, an article about Barbara going to Romania as a missionary dated ten years before, what looked like a travel-sized Bible with purple butterflies on the cover, and a dirty rag in a baggie. I studied the crime scene photos first. The one on top showed the body of an elderly woman slumped over in an easy chair. I couldn’t tell if it was Barbara because someone had placed a white cloth over her face. There was a gun in her hand. I shuffled that photo to the back of the stack and felt the same cold, sinking feeling in my gut. The second photo was a close up of Barbara’s head, or what was left of it. The third was further away from Barbara, showing her position in the chair. She was reclining comfortably, from what I could see, except for being slumped to one side.
I dropped the photo. “Stacks,” I said.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Stacks nodded. “Precisely.”
I stared at all three open files. “So all three were devout, churchgoers at the Nazarene church, performed public service…” A thought occurred to me. “Stacks, did they all speak out against the new preacher? Publicly?”
Stacks nodded again.
“And all three committed suicide.” I checked the date on Barbara’s obituary. She’d died two weeks after Ellie. Making it six weeks since Royson, four weeks since Ellie and two weeks since Barbara had died. “They all died within two weeks of each other,” I said, looking up at Stacks.
“I went to the scenes after the cops to see what I could gather to test. I was able to find that pill cap,” Stacks pointed at the baggie in Royson’s file. “Under the stove. It must have rolled under there during the attack.” I was about to speak, but he was now pointing at the piece of rope. “That was what the police left behind after they cut Ellie down. They kept the end with the noose as evidence, but they left the other end tied to the beam in her basement.” I felt an involuntary shiver run down my spine. As if he had just realized what he was saying, Stacks gave me an apologetic smile, before moving on and pointing at the dirty rag in the baggie in Barbara’s file. “Obviously the cops kept the gun and the shell casing but I found this in the wastepaper basket in her bathroom. It has gun oil on it.” He finally paused and looked at me expectantly.
“And,” I began, trying to put the pieces together in my brain. “You’re studying their suicides because?”
Stacks’ face fell. “Because I don’t think they were suicides.” He moved the three baggies with the rope, the pill cap, and the rag together. “There was one thing I found in common with all three of these items.”
“Which was?” I asked.
Stacks met my gaze. “I found the same substance on all three pieces of evidence. Sulfur.”
5
I felt my eyebrows shoot towards my hairline. “Demons? I thought this was some kind of church-pew-pissing contest. Is that how the symbol fits in? Did you find it at one of the crime scenes?” I started picking up the crime photos, studying them, searching for anything that might look like the symbol.
“Slow down, Bane,” Stacks said. “I promise I’m getting to it. I didn’t see any evidence of the symbol at any of the crime scenes. I gathered up the belongings I could find, pulled police reports and pictures of anything useful from hacking the police case file server, and compiled these files before I had any idea that the symbol was involved.”
“But then?” I asked, doing my best to try to keep from yelling at him in anticipation.
Stacks got to his feet and moved back to the stacks of shit on his kitchen counters. Noah caught my eye and grinned. “He can sure be dramatic.”
Stacks pulled something out of the pile and I saw it was a bright pink piece of paper, not unlike the torn flier we’d found on the boarded-up window of The Rowdy Hole. He handed it to me without a word. The curved line with a dot under it that I’d seen on the torn flier was the top of the symbol. The symbol. The backward lowercase “f” with the closed loops and the dot in the top loop, looking like an eye. But something wasn’t quite right about it. A dove was resting on one of the arms of the “f”. Beyond that, there was an extra set of vertical lines, transecting the arms of the “f”. It looked similar. Maybe the extra lines were just flourishes, like the dove.
I looked up to meet Stacks’ gaze. “The church is using the demon’s symbol?”
Stacks nodded. “After St. Louis, I started researching. Malcolm Simpson, pastor of The New Covenant Church, former pastor of The Church of the Nazarene, has conflicting records as to where he’s from and where he went to school. In fact, six weeks ago, I’d found two different names for who his mother was, four for his father and in every combination of parents, he was listed as an only child. But in his column,” Stacks waved his hand over at a stack of newspaper clippings on a stool. “He often mentions growing up with a sister and a brother.”
“What happened six weeks ago?” I asked.
Stacks looked slightly annoyed. “I didn’t think I had to put up all the usual precautions when I was doing some light computer trespassing. These are preachers and churchgoers, right? I figured they felt guilty about searching for porn and they wouldn’t notice a little spyware, checking into records.”
“You got caught?” I asked. Stacks didn’t say anything, but he glanced at his front door. “So they’re the ones that installed the camera?”
“It’s either them or a government agency, but if a work order for a camera with my address came through a government funnel, I would have seen it by now,” Stacks said.
“Good to know you’re finding ways to fill your downtime,” I muttered.
“So it has to be the church,” Stacks said, lowering his voice.
I paused. “Can they hear us or something?”
Stacks glared at me. “Bane, if these are the demons, I wouldn’t rule anything out.”
I looked back down at the flier. Besides the other differences, the long stem of the “f” was curved more than I remembered it being. I pulled the necklace out of my pocket and laid it down on the flier, next to the symbol.
“Holy shit! Why do you still have that? Why did you bring it into my house?” Stacks sputtered, moving backward, away from the soul stone.
“Because it’s not like I could just leave it in the truck with the windows cracked. Don’t feel so special. There really isn’t a safe place to leave it. I figure it’s safest when I’m carrying it until there’s a good solution to get rid of it. I mean, besides putting it in a block of concrete and throwing it in the ocean or shooting it into space,” I said.
“I’m in favor of either of those options,” Stacks said, getting to his feet. He started ripping drawers open. “It won’t matter how careful I’m being if the red-eyed assholes are in town and suddenly that thing pops up on their radar. They’ll show up like missionaries from Hell…,” he paused. “Which if our assumptions are true, I guess they are.” He started digging through drawers again, throwing anything and everything that he came across, but didn’t need, on the floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Ah-ha!” Stacks said. He held up a dried bundle of what I recognized as sage and pulled a lighter out of his pocket. He set the bundle on fire and threw it in the sink. In seconds, smoke and the smell of sage was filling the air.
“Hey genius,” I said. “There’s no ventilation in here.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Stacks said. “I’ll put it out in a moment. We just need to interrupt the signal for now.”
Noah and I started coughing and Stacks sighed and disappeared down the hall and into one of the rooms. When he came back he said. “There, babies, I propped the bathroom window open. It’s on the opposite side of the camera so as long as they don’t have another camera pointed at…” He paused and I recognized the panicked look of a conspiracy-theory brain slipping into overdrive.
“Stacks,” I barked. “You can look for the camera later. Hell, we’ll help you. We’ll play a bathroom window game of “I Spy a Demon Eye”. Right now though, we have bigger shit to worry about.” I looked down at the soul stone necklace and then the flier. “What if it’s a coincidence that they look similar?” I looked at Stacks. “The symbols, I mean. They’re not exactly the same. It could just be a coincidence.” I pointed at the necklace. “I mean, I know that I’ve seen this symbol before. What if it’s actually like a church symbol and the demons just started adopting it, like a big middle finger to the church?”
“That’s just it,” Stacks said. “I’m not sure. There are a lot of coincidences, but I hadn’t put the church’s logo together with Mastick’s necklace symbol until today. I know they’re not exact matches, but I thought it was close enough to worry considering all the other strange shit that’s happening around here. That’s why I called you. The logo seems like a new addition to the church. It’s not on their o
nline presence. I just saw it on one of the pink fliers at the coffee shop this morning and it got me thinking.” He met my gaze. “And demon activity would explain a lot. Like Royson, Ellie, and Barbara’s deaths.”
