Текст книги "Revival"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Then she stood up.

The crowd bellowed hallelujahs. As she embraced Jacobs and covered his cheeks with kisses, several men tossed their hats in the air, a thing I had seen in movies but never in real life. Jacobs grasped her shoulders, turned her toward the audience—all of them agog, not excluding me—and dipped for his microphone with the practiced smoothness of an old midway showie.

“Walk to your husband, Rowena!” Jacobs thundered into the mike. “Walk to him, and praise Jesus with every step! Praise God with every step! Praise His holy name!”

She tottered to her husband, holding her arms out to keep her balance, and weeping. An usher in a green vest pushed her wheelchair close behind her in case her legs gave way . . . but they didn’t.

It went on for an hour. The music never stopped, nor did the ushers with the deep offering baskets. Jacobs didn’t heal everybody, but I can tell you that his collection crew stripped those rubes right down to their no doubt maxed-out credit cards. Many of the Wheelchair Brigade were unable to rise after being touched by the holy rings, but half a dozen of them did. I wrote down all the names, crossing out those who seemed as fucked over after Jacobs’s healing touch as before.

There was a woman with cataracts who declared she could see, and under the bright lights, the milky glaze really did appear to have left her eyes. A crooked arm was made straight. A wailing baby with some sort of heart defect stopped crying as if a switch had been turned off. A man who approached on Canadian crutches, his head bent, tore off the neck brace he was wearing and cast the crutches aside. A woman suffering from advanced COPD dropped her oxygen mask. She declared that she could breathe freely and the weight on her chest was gone.

Many of the cures were impossible to quantify, and it was very possible some were plants. The man with ulcers who declared his stomach pain was gone for the first time in three years, for instance. Or the woman with diabetes—one leg amputated below the knee—who said she could feel her hands and remaining toes again. A couple of chronic migraine sufferers who testified that their pain was gone, praise God, all gone.

I wrote the names down, anyway, and—when they gave them—the towns and states they hailed from. Bree Donlin was good, she had gotten interested in the project, and I wanted to give her as much to work with as possible.

Jacobs only removed one tumor that night, and that fellow’s name I didn’t even consider writing down, because I saw one of Jacobs’s hands dart into the gag-jacket before he applied his magic rings. What he displayed to the gasping, rapturous audience looked suspiciously like supermarket calves’ liver to me. He gave it to one of the green-vests, who popped it into a jar and hustled it out of sight posthaste.

At last Jacobs declared the healing touch exhausted for the night. I don’t know about that, but he certainly looked exhausted. Done to death, in fact. His face was still dry, but the front of his shirt was sticking to his chest. When he stepped back from the reluctantly dispersing faithful who hadn’t gotten a chance (many would undoubtedly follow him to his next revival meeting), he stumbled. Al Stamper was there to grab him, and this time Jacobs accepted the help.

“Let us pray,” Jacobs said. He was having a hard time catching his breath, and I couldn’t help worrying that he might faint or go into cardiac arrest right there. “Let us offer our thanks to God, as we offer our burdens to Him. After that, brothers and sisters, Al and Devina and the Gospel Robins will see us out in song.”

This time he didn’t attempt kneeling, but the congregation did, including a few who had probably never expected to kneel again in their earthly lives. There was that airy swoosh of clothes, and it almost covered the gagging noises from beside me. I turned just in time to see the back of Hugh’s plaid shirt disappearing between the flaps at the entrance to the tent.

 • • •

I found him standing beneath a pole light fifteen feet away, bent double and grasping his knees. The night had cooled considerably, and the puddle between his feet was steaming lightly. As I approached, his body heaved and the puddle grew larger. When I touched his arm, he jerked and stumbled, almost falling into his own vomit, which would have made for a fragrant ride home.

The panicky gaze he turned on me was that of an animal caught in a forest fire. Then he relaxed and straightened up, pulling an old-fashioned rancher’s bandanna from his back pocket. He wiped his mouth with it. His hand was trembling. His face was dead white. Some of that was undoubtedly because of the harsh glare thrown by the pole light, but not all.

“Sorry, Jamie. You startled me.”

“I noticed.”

“It was the heat, I guess. Let’s get out of here, what do you say? Beat the crowd.”

He started walking toward the Lincoln. I touched his elbow. He pulled away. Except that’s not quite right. He shied away.

“What was it really?”

He didn’t answer at first, just kept walking toward the far side of the lot, where his Detroit cabin cruiser was parked. I walked beside him. He reached the car and put his hand on the dew-misted hood, as if for comfort.

“It was a prismatic. The first one in a long, long time. I felt it coming on while he was healing that last one—the guy who said he was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident. When he got up from his chair, everything went sharp. Everything went clear. You know?”

I didn’t, but nodded as if I did. From behind us the congregation was clapping joyously and singing “How I Love My Jesus” at the top of its lungs.

“Then . . . when the Rev started to pray . . . the colors.” He looked at me, his mouth trembling. He looked twenty years older. “They were ever so much brighter. They shattered everything.”

He reached out and grasped my shirt hard enough to tear off two of the buttons. It was the grip of a drowning man. His eyes were huge and horrified.

“Then . . . then all those fragments came together again, but the colors didn’t go away. They danced and twisted like the aurora borealis on a winter night. And the people . . . they weren’t people anymore.”

“What were they, Hugh?”

“Ants,” he whispered. “Huge ants, the kind that must only live in tropical forests. Brown ones and black ones and red ones. They were looking at him with dead eyes and that poison they use, formic acid, was dripping from their mouths.” He drew a long, ragged breath. “If I ever see anything like that again, I’ll kill myself.”

“It’s gone, though, right?”

“Yes. Gone. Thank God.”

He dragged his keys from his pocket and dropped them in the dirt. I picked them up. “I’ll drive us back.”

“Sure. You do that.” He started toward the passenger seat, then looked at me. “You too, Jamie. I turned to you and I was standing next to a huge ant. You turned . . . you looked at me . . .”

“Hugh, I didn’t. I barely saw you going out.”

He seemed not to hear. “You turned . . . you looked at me . . . and I think you tried to smile. There were colors all around you, but your eyes were dead, like all the rest. And your mouth was full of poison.”

 • • •

He said nothing more until we arrived back at the big wooden gate leading to Wolfjaw. It was closed and I started to get out of the car to open it.

“Jamie.”

I turned to look at him. He’d gotten some of his color back, but only a little.

“Never mention his name to me again. Never. If you do, you’re done here. Are we clear on that?”

We were. But that didn’t mean I was going to let it go.

IX

Reading Obituaries in Bed. Cathy Morse Again. The Latches.

Brianna Donlin and I were scanning obituaries in bed on a Sunday morning in early August of 2009. Thanks to the sort of computer hocus-pocus only true geeks can manage, Bree was able to collate death notices from a dozen major American newspapers and view them as an alphabetical list.

It wasn’t the first time we’d done this in such pleasurable circumstances, but we both understood we were getting closer and closer to the last time. In September she’d be leaving for New York to interview for I-T jobs with the sort of firms that paid upwards of six figures at the entry level—she had appointments with four already penciled into her calendar—and I had my own plans. But our time together had been good for me in all sorts of ways, and I had no reason not to believe her when she said it had been good for her, too.

I wasn’t the first man to enjoy a dalliance with a woman less than half his age, and if you said there’s no fool like an old fool and no goat like an old goat, I wouldn’t argue with you, but sometimes such liaisons are okay, at least in the short term. Neither of us was attached, and neither of us had any illusions about the long term. It had just happened, and Brianna had made the first move. This was about three months after the Norris County tent revival and four into our computer-sleuthing. I hadn’t been a particularly tough sell, especially after she slipped out of her blouse and skirt one evening in my apartment.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I had asked.

“Absolutely.” She flashed a grin. “Soon I’ll be in the big wide world, and I think I better work out my daddy issues first.”

“Was your daddy a white ex–guitar player, then?”

That made her laugh. “All cats are gray in the dark, Jamie. Now are we going to get it on or not?”

We got it on, and it was terrific. I’d be lying if I said her youth didn’t excite me—she was twenty-four—and I’d also be lying if I said I could always keep up with her. Stretched out next to her that first night and pretty much exhausted after the second go, I asked her what Georgia would say.

“She’s not going to find out from me. Is she from you?”

“Nope, but Nederland’s a small town.”

“That’s true, and in small towns, discretion only goes so far, I guess. If she should speak to me, I’d just remind her that she once did more for Hugh Yates than keep his books.”

“Are you serious?”

She giggled. “You white boys can be so dumb.”

 • • •

Now, with coffee on her side of the bed and tea on mine, we sat propped up on pillows with her laptop between us. Summer sunshine—morning sunshine, always the best—made an oblong on the floor. Bree was wearing one of my tee-shirts and nothing else. Her hair, kept short, was a curly black cap.

“You could continue without me just fine,” she said. “You pretend to be computer illiterate—mostly so you can keep me where you can nudge me in the night, I think—but running search engines ain’t rocket science. And I think you’ve got enough already, don’t you?”

As a matter of fact, I did. We had started with three names from the Miracle Testimony page of C. Danny Jacobs’s website. Robert Rivard, the boy cured of muscular dystrophy in St. Louis, led the list. To these three Bree had added the ones I was sure of from the Norris County revival meeting—ones like Rowena Mintour, whose sudden recovery was hard to argue with. If that tottery, weeping walk to her husband had been a put-up job, she deserved an Academy Award for it.

Bree had tracked the Pastor Danny Jacobs Healing Revival Tour from Colorado to California, ten stops in all. Together we had watched the new YouTube vids added to the website’s Miracle Testimony page with the avidity of marine biologists studying some newly discovered species of fish. We debated the validity of each (first in my living room, later in this same bed), eventually putting them into four categories: utter bullshit, probable bullshit, impossible to be sure, and hard not to believe.

By this process, a master list had slowly emerged. On that sunny August morning in the bedroom of my second-floor apartment, there were fifteen names on it. These were cures we felt ninety-eight percent sure of, culled down from a roster of almost seven hundred and fifty possibles. Robert Rivard was on that list; Mabel Jergens from Albuquerque was on it; so was Rowena Mintour and Ben Hicks, the man in the Norris County Fairgrounds tent who had torn off his neck brace and tossed his crutches aside.

Hicks was an interesting case. Both he and his wife had confirmed the authenticity of the cure in a Denver Post article published a couple of weeks after Jacobs’s traveling show moved on. He was a history prof at the Community College of Denver with an impeccable reputation. He termed himself a religious skeptic and described his attendance at the Norris County revival as “a last resort.” His wife confirmed this. “We are amazed and thankful,” she said. She added that they had started going to church again.

Rivard, Jergens, Mintour, Hicks, and everyone else on our master list had been touched by Jacobs’s “holy rings” between May of 2007 and December of 2008, when the Healing Revival Tour had concluded in San Diego.

Bree had begun the follow-up work with a light heart, but by October of 2008, her attitude had darkened. That was when she had found a story about Robert Rivard—no more than a squib, really—in the Monroe County Weekly Telegram. It said the “miracle boy” had been admitted to St. Louis Children’s Hospital “for reasons unrelated to his former muscular dystrophy.”

Bree made enquiries, both by computer and telephone. Rivard’s parents refused to speak to her, but a nurse at Children’s finally did when Bree told her she was trying to expose C. Danny Jacobs as a fraud. This was not what we were doing, exactly, but it worked. After being assured by Bree that she would never be named in any article or book, the nurse said Bobby Rivard had been admitted suffering what she called “chain headaches,” and was given a battery of tests to rule out a brain tumor. Which they did. Eventually the boy had been transferred to Gad’s Ridge, in Oakville, Missouri.

“What kind of hospital is that?” Bree had asked.

“Mental,” the nurse said. And while Bree was digesting this: “Most people who go into Gad’s, they never come out.”

Bree’s efforts to find out more were met by a stone wall at Gad’s Ridge. Because I considered Rivard our Patient Zero, I flew to St. Louis, rented a car, and drove to Oakville. After several afternoons spent in the bar nearest to the hospital, I found an orderly who would talk for the small emolument of sixty dollars. Robert Rivard was still walking fine, the orderly said, but never walked any farther than the corner of his room. When he did, he would simply stand there, like a child being punished for misbehavior, until someone led him back to his bed or the nearest chair. On good days he ate; during his bad stretches, which were far more common, he had to be tube-fed. He was classed semicatatonic. A gork, in the orderly’s words.

“Is he still suffering from chain headaches?” I asked him.

The orderly shrugged meaty shoulders. “Who knows?”

Who, indeed.

 • • •

So far as we could tell, nine of the people on our master list were fine. This included Rowena Mintour, who had resumed teaching, and Ben Hicks, whom I interviewed myself in November of 2008, five months after his cure. I didn’t tell him everything (for one thing, I never mentioned electricity of either the ordinary or the special type), but I shared enough to establish my bona fides: heroin addiction cured by Jacobs in the early nineties, followed by troubling aftereffects that eventually diminished and then disappeared. What I wanted to know was if he had suffered any aftereffects—blackouts, flashing lights, sleepwalking, perhaps lapses into Tourette’s-like speech.

No to all, he said. He was fine as could be.

“I don’t know if it was God working through him or not,” Hicks told me over coffee in his office. “My wife does, and that’s fine, but I don’t care. I’m pain-free and walking two miles a day. In another two months I expect to be cleared to play tennis, as long as it’s doubles, where I only have to run a few steps. Those are the things I care about. If he did for you what you say he did, you’ll know what I mean.”

I did, but I also knew more.

That Robert Rivard was enjoying his cure in a mental institution, sipping glucose via IV rather than Cokes with his friends.

That Patricia Farmingdale, cured of peripheral neuropathy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had poured salt into her eyes in an apparent effort to blind herself. She had no memory of doing it, let alone why.

That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. These walks, some of them fifteen-mile marathons, did not occur during blackouts; the urge just came on him, he said, and he had to go.

That Veronica Freemont of Anaheim had suffered what she called “interruptions of vision.” One had resulted in a low-speed collision with another driver. She tested negative for drugs and alcohol, but turned in her license just the same, afraid it would happen again.

That in San Diego, Emil Klein’s miracle cure of a neck injury was followed by a periodic compulsion to go out into his backyard and eat dirt.

And there was Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008. A month later he lost his job as a blackjack dealer when he began to spew profanity at the customers—stuff like “Take a hit, take a fucking hit, you chickenshit asshole.” When he began shouting similar things at his three kids, his wife threw him out. He moved to a no-tell motel north of Fashion Show Drive. Two weeks later he was found dead on the bathroom floor with a bottle of Krazy Glue in one hand. He had used it to plug his nostrils and seal his mouth shut. His wasn’t the only obit coupled to Jacobs that Bree had found with her search engine, but it was the only one we felt sure was connected.

Until Cathy Morse, that was.

 • • •

I was feeling sleepy again in spite of an infusion of black breakfast tea. I blamed it on the auto-scroll feature of Bree’s laptop. It was helpful, I said, but also hypnotic.

“Honey, if I may misquote Al Jolson, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said. “Next year Apple’s going to release a pad-style computer that’ll revolutionize—” There was a bing before she could finish, and the auto-scroll came to a halt. She peered at the screen, where a line was highlighted in red. “Uh-oh. That’s one of the names you gave me when we started.”

“What?” Meaning who. I’d only been able to give her a few back then, and one had been that of my brother Con. Jacobs had claimed that one was just a placebo, but—

“Hold your water and let me click the link.”

I leaned over to look. My first feeling was relief: not Con, of course not. My second was a species of dismal horror.

The obituary, from the Tulsa World, was for one Catherine Anne Morse, age thirty-eight. Died suddenly, the obit said. And this: Cathy’s grieving parents ask that in lieu of flowers, mourners send contributions to the Suicide Prevention Action Network. These contributions are tax deductible.

“Bree,” I said. “Go to last week’s—”

“I know what to do, so let me do it.” Then, taking a second look at my face: “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t know if I was or not. I kept remembering how Cathy Morse had looked mounting to the Portraits in Lightning stage all those years ago, a pretty little Sooner gal with tanned legs flashing beneath a denim skirt with a frayed hem. Every pretty girl carries her own positive charge, Jacobs had said, but somewhere along the way, Cathy’s charge had turned negative. No mention of a husband, although a girl that good-looking must not have lacked for suitors. No mention of children, either.

Maybe she liked girls, I thought, but that was pretty lame.

“Here you go, sugar,” Bree said. She turned the laptop so I could see it more easily. “Same newspaper.”

WOMAN IN DEATH JUMP FROM CYRUS AVERY MEMORIAL BRIDGE, the headline read. Cathy Morse had left no explanatory note behind, and her grieving parents were mystified. “I wonder if it wasn’t somebody pushed her,” Mrs. Morse said . . . but according to the article, foul play had been ruled out, although it didn’t say how.

Has he done it before, mister? Mr. Morse had asked me back in 1992. This after punching my old fifth business in the face and splitting his lip. Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?

Yes, sir, I thought now. Yes, sir, I believe he has.

“Jamie, you don’t know for sure,” Bree said, touching my shoulder. “Sixteen years is a long time. It could have been something else entirely. She might have found out she had a bad cancer, or some other fatal disease. Fatal and painful.”

“It was him,” I said. “I know it, and by now I think you do, too. Most of his subjects are fine afterwards, but some go away with time bombs in their heads. Cathy Morse did, and it went off. How many others are going to go off in the next ten or twenty years?”

I was thinking I could be one of them, and Bree surely knew that, too. She didn’t know about Hugh, because that wasn’t my story to tell. He hadn’t had a recurrence of his prismatics since the night at the tent revival—and that one was probably brought on by stress—but it could happen again, and although we didn’t talk about it, I’m sure he knew it as well as I did.

Time bombs.

“So now you’re going to find him.”

“You bet.” The obituary of Catherine Anne Morse was the last piece of evidence I needed, the one that made the decision final.

“And persuade him to stop.”

“If I can.”

“If he won’t?”

“Then I don’t know.”

“I’ll go with you, if you want.”

But she didn’t want. It was all over her face. She had started the assignment with an intelligent young woman’s zest for pure research, and there had been the lovemaking to add extra spice, but now the research was no longer pure and she had seen enough to scare her badly.

“You’re not going anywhere near him,” I said. “But he’s been off the road for eight months now and his weekly TV show’s into reruns. I need you to find out where he’s hanging his hat these days.”

“I can do that.” She set her laptop aside and reached under the sheet. “But I’d like to do something else first, if you’re of a mind.”

I was.

 • • •

Shortly before Labor Day, Bree Donlin and I said our goodbyes in that same bed. They were very physical ones for the most part, satisfying to both of us, but also sad. For me more than her, I think. She was looking forward to life as a pretty, unattached career girl in New York; I was looking forward to the dreaded double-nickel in less than two years. I thought there would be no more lively young women for me, and on that score I have been proven absolutely correct.

She slipped out of bed, long-legged and beautifully naked. “I found what you wanted,” she said, and began rummaging through her purse on the dresser. “It was harder than I expected, because he’s currently going under the name of Daniel Charles.”

“That’s my boy. Not exactly an alias, but close.”

“More of a precaution, I think. The way celebrities will check into a hotel under a fake name—or a variation of their real one—to fool the autograph hounds. He leased the place where he’s living as Daniel Charles, which is legal as long as he’s got a bank account and the checks don’t bounce, but sometimes a fella just has to use his real name if he’s going to stay on the right side of the law.”

“What sometimes would you be talking about in this case?”

“He bought a car last year in Poughkeepsie, New York—not a fancy one, just a plain-vanilla Ford Taurus—and registered it under his real name.” She got back into bed and handed me a slip of paper. “Here you go, handsome.”

Written on it was Daniel Charles (aka Charles Jacobs, aka C. Danny Jacobs), The Latches, Latchmore, New York 12561.

“What’s The Latches when it’s at home with its feet up?”

“The house he’s renting. Actually an estate. A gated estate, so be aware. Latchmore is a little north of New Paltz—same zip code. It’s in the Catskills, where Rip Van Winkle bowled with the dwarfs back in the day. Except then—umm, your hands are nice and warm—the game was called ninepins.”

She snuggled closer, and I said what men of my age find themselves saying more and more frequently: I appreciated the offer, but didn’t feel myself capable of taking her up on it just then. In retrospect, I sure wish I’d tried a little harder. One last time would have been nice.

“That’s okay, hon. Just hold me.”

I held her. I think we drowsed, because when I became aware again, the sun had moved from the bed to the floor. Bree jumped up and began to dress. “Got to shake. A thousand things to do today.” She hooked her bra, then looked at me in the mirror. “When are you going to see him?”

“Probably not until October. Hugh’s got a guy coming in from Minnesota to sub for me, but he can’t get here until then.”

“You have to stay in touch with me. Email and phone. If I don’t hear from you every day you’re out there, I’ll get worried. I might even have to drive up and make sure you’re okay.”

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“You just stay in touch, white boy, and I won’t have to.”

Dressed, she came and sat on the side of the bed.

“You might not need to go at all. Has that idea crossed your mind? There’s no tour scheduled, his website’s gone stagnant, and there’s nothing but reruns on his TV show. I came across a blog post the other day titled Where in the World Is Pastor Danny? The discussion thread went on for pages.”

“Your point being?”

She took my hand, twined her fingers in mine. “We know—well, not know, but we’re pretty sure—that he’s hurt some people along the way while he was helping others. Okay, that’s done and can’t be undone. But if he’s stopped healing, he won’t be hurting anyone else. In that case, what would be the point of confronting him?”

“If he’s stopped healing, it’s because he’s made enough money to move on.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know, but judging from his track record, it could be dangerous. And Bree . . . listen.” I sat up and took her other hand. “Everything else aside, someone needs to call him to account for what he’s done.”

She lifted my hands to her mouth, where she kissed first one and then the other. “But should that someone be you, honey? After all, you were one of his successes.”

“I think that’s why. Also, Charlie and I . . . we go back. We go way back.”

 • • •

I didn’t see her off at Denver International—that was her mother’s job—but she called me when she landed, frothing with a combination of nerves and excitement. Looking forward, not back. I was glad for her. When my phone rang twenty minutes later, I thought it would be her again. It wasn’t. It was her mother. Georgia asked if we could talk. Maybe over lunch.

Uh-oh, I thought.

We ate at McGee’s—a pleasant meal, with pleasant conversation, mostly about the music business. When we had said no to dessert and yes to coffee, Georgia leaned her considerable bosom on the table and got down to business. “So, Jamie. Are you two done with each other?”

“I . . . um . . . Georgia . . .”

“Goodness, don’t mumble and stumble. You know perfectly well what I mean, and I’m not going to bite your head off. If I had a mind to do that, I would have done it last year, when she first hopped in the sack with you.” She saw my expression and smiled. “Nah, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. I can read her like a book. I bet she even told you I got up to some of the same doins with Hugh, back in the day. True?”

I made a zipping motion across my lips. It turned her smile into a laugh.

“Oh, that’s good. I like that. And I like you, Jamie. I did almost from the first, when you were skinny as a rail and still getting over whatever junk you were putting into your system. You looked like Billy Idol, only dragged through the gutter. I don’t have anything against mixed-race sweeties, either. Or the age thing. Do you know what my father gave me when I got old enough for a driver’s license?”

I shook my head.

“A 1960 Plymouth with half the grille gone, bald tires, rusty rocker panels, and an engine that gobbled recycled oil by the quart. He called it a field-bomber. Said every new driver should have an old wreck to start with, before he or she stepped up to a car that would actually take an inspection sticker. Are you getting my point?”

I absolutely was. Bree wasn’t a nun, she’d had her share of sexual adventures before I came along, but I had been her first long-term relationship. In New York, she would move up—if not to a man of her own race, then certainly to one a little closer to her own age.

“I just wanted that out front before I said what I really came here to say.” She leaned forward even more, the rolling tide of her bosom endangering her coffee cup and water glass. “She wouldn’t tell me much about the research she’s been doing for you, but I know it scared her, and the one time I tried to ask Hugh, he about bit my head off.”

Ants, I thought. To him, the whole congregation looked like ants.

“It’s about that preacherman. I know that much.”

I kept quiet.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“You could say so, I guess.”

She nodded and sat back. “That’s all right. That’s fine. Just from now on, I want you to leave Brianna out of it. Will you do that? If only because I never suggested that you’d have done better to keep your elderly prick away from my daughter’s underpants?”

“She’s out of it. We agreed on that.”

She gave a businesslike nod. Then: “Hugh says you’re taking a vacation.”

“Yes.”

“Going to see the preacherman?”

I kept quiet. Which was the same as saying yes, and she knew it.

“Be careful.” She reached across the table and interlaced her fingers in mine, as her daughter had been wont to do. “Whatever it was you and Bree were looking into, it upset her terribly.”

 • • •

I flew into Stewart Airport in Newburgh on a day in early October. The trees were turning color, and the ride to the town of Latchmore was beautiful. By the time I got there, the afternoon was waning and I checked into the local Motel 6. There was no dial-up, let alone WiFi, which made my laptop unable to touch the world outside my room, but I didn’t need WiFi to find The Latches; Bree had done that for me. It was four miles east of downtown Latchmore, on Route 27, an estate home once owned by an old-money family named Vander Zanden. Around the turn of the twentieth century the old money had apparently run out, because The Latches had been sold and turned into a high-priced sanitarium for overweight ladies and soused gentlemen. That had lasted almost until the turn of the twenty-first century. Since then it had been for sale or lease.