Godless (31 page)

“Oh, hello.”
Mrs. Mayhew appeared startled and a bit embarrassed by Julia's approach. She quickly lowered the sealed envelope she had been holding toward the light as if trying to make out the contents. “I'm sorry, dear. I wasn't expecting anyone. Do you have an appointment?”

“I think I do,” said Julia. “But I'm not exactly sure where or with whom.”

Mrs. Mayhew stared blankly.

“I received an odd message asking me to meet someone at Christ Community Church. But there was no indication of who I'm meeting.”

“That
is
odd,” muttered the pastor's assistant.

A moment of perplexed silence.

“Wait. I wonder if your appointment has anything to do with this.” She handed Julia the envelope marked “Urgent and Confidential: For the Pastor's Eyes Only.”

Julia handed it back. “But I'm not the pastor.”

Mrs. Mayhew frowned at the comment. “I realize that. But someone put this envelope on my desk while I was rearranging the flowers in the sanctuary twenty minutes ago. And now, here you are. Hardly seems like chance to me.”

“So Pastor Ware is out?”

“Oh, no, he's in his office.”

Julia glanced toward the closed door. “With someone?”

“Alone,” said Mrs. Mayhew.

“And that envelope arrived twenty minutes ago?”

A nod.

“Do you think it might be a good idea to show it to him?”

“What, now?”

“Well, it is marked urgent.”

A look of annoyance swept over Mrs. Mayhew's face, as if delivering the envelope would thwart her effort to learn what was inside. “Of course,” she said weakly while raising an index finger. “Excuse me for just a moment, will you, dear?”

While Mrs. Mayhew slipped into the pastor's office, Julia checked her tablet for another update from Troy. All good news: Mr. and Mrs. Tolbert were doing fine, Kevin's plane had arrived and he was en route to the hospital, and the police had gathered clues linking the incident to a series of other spurious transitions that appeared unrelated to Kevin's activities.

She breathed a sigh of relief while typing a quick message to Angie.

As usual, she reviewed the message before tapping send. Something was missing. She added one additional line.

The door to the pastor's office swung open.

“Hello, Julia,” said Alex with some urgency. “Please, come in.”

She followed him into the office.

“Please, have a seat,” he offered, his eyes still fixed on the handwritten letter in his hand.

“I received a strange message a few hours ago asking me to meet someone here,” Julia began. “Something about getting the scoop on an important story.”

“Yes, I know. I just received this.” He handed her the note.

Julia looked up from the page. “Is this legitimate?”

Alex nodded slowly. “He was in my office this morning. There was blood on his sleeve and he said he wanted to confess something. But he left before explaining further.”

Julia glanced apprehensively at the pastor's assistant, who, it appeared, had no intention of leaving the room.

“You may as well sit down, Mrs. Mayhew,” the pastor finally said. “I think we'll want a third witness to whatever we're about to hear.”

The woman quivered like a little girl accepting a bright-red balloon. “How exciting,” she said, quickly planting herself on the sofa.

Julia joined her and Alex around the coffee table. The pastor placed his tablet in front of them and tapped in the contact code that appeared at the bottom of the note.

“Here goes,” he sighed while bowing his head as if offering a silent prayer.

They heard a click on the line. “Thank you for calling Confidential Conferencing.” Julia had heard the same woman's inflection every time she booked an airline ticket, pressed two for her credit card balance, or waited on hold for a government official. “Please hold while I connect you to your party.”

Mrs. Mayhew sat up on the edge of her seat as if anticipating a roller coaster's dip.

“Hello,” said a male voice.

“Frank? This is Pastor Alex. I received your note and I'm here with Julia and, I hope you don't mind, my assistant. I thought it might be a good idea to have a third witness.”

“Fine,” came a tense reply. “Thank you for honoring my request.”

Julia leaned in closer to the phone. “This is Julia,” she said. “Before you begin, can I ask a question?” She took silence as consent. “Why me?”

“Sorry?” said the voice.

“Why did you specifically ask me to hear your confession out of the countless possible journalists?”

“Why not you?”

“Well, I'm not currently part of a syndicate, for one thing. There's no guarantee I'll be able to convince someone to run the story.”

“They'll run the story,” he said dismissively. “And you'll tell it as it should be told.”

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

“Because you understand me.”

Julia felt alarm. “Have we met?”

“Not directly. But I know you pretty well.”

She swallowed hard. “How?”

Several seconds passed. “I dated your sister.”

Julia rushed through a mental checklist of Maria's flings. Then she remembered. A year earlier the police had used Maria in a sting operation to catch a man suspected of threatening Judge Victor Santiago.

“Matthew? Matthew Adams?”

A prolonged silence. “I can't tell you my name,” he replied nervously. “Nor can I allow you to speculate. I'm an anonymous source. Understood?”

Julia nodded toward the voice. “Yes, I understand.”

“Pastor Ware?” the voice insisted.

“I understand also,” said Alex.

“Me, too,” added Mrs. Mayhew eagerly.

The man continued. “The main reason I chose you, Ms. Davidson, is that I know you'll understand why I made the choices I did.”

“How do you know that?” Julia asked warily.

“You were part of my inspiration, for one thing.”

“Was I?”

“Does the title ‘Free to Thrive' ring a bell, Ms. Davidson?”

Regretfully, it did. It had been one of the more popular columns from her RAP Syndicate days, advocating genetic prescreening over blind conception. It was something she had written before meeting Troy, before discovering their infertility, and before viewing children as gifts to be received rather than products to be manufactured to match picky customer specifications.

“You said we should give babies the freedom to thrive by eliminating the risk of unnecessary disease and disability,” he continued.

Julia thought of Baby Leah.

“The last words of that article helped me make a very difficult decision. You said we should give the same freedom to those of us already burdened by both.”

Julia looked toward Alex with embarrassed eyes.

“What kind of decision?” the pastor asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You said the article helped you make a difficult decision.”

“My mother was doing poorly,” the man explained. “It was costing us a fortune, too much for me to pursue her dream that I become a college professor.”

“I see,” said Alex. “So you ‘set her free'?”

“Well, not me specifically. But yes, we chose a transition.”

“Who chose?” Julia asked.

“She did!” the man snapped with offense. “My mother chose to transition so that I could afford tuition.”

“I don't follow. How did my column help?”

“I was reluctant to go through with it,” he explained. “I guess I never fully recovered from my Catholicism.” A pensive chuckle. “My old priest even told me it would be a sin for her to volunteer. But your column helped open my mind to a less rigid religious view. Long story short, I came to believe that our bodies and minds decay so we should free those who suffer from unnecessary anguish.”

“Was your mother suffering?” asked Alex.

No reply.

“Frank? Was your mother in pain?”

“That's not the point,” the man said. “My point is that you, Ms. Davidson, will understand why I went down this path.”

“What path is that?” she asked.

“A path that got me in trouble with the law.”

He told his story. A wrongful death lawsuit against NEXT Transition Services had held up the man's transition inheritance money. The case had gone to a federal appeals court. It had hung on the opinion of presiding judge Victor Santiago. The man had written to the judge, hoping to open a dialogue. Somehow, someone had gotten copies of the letters and forged a final, threatening note. When the police found the judge dead in his chambers they had naturally assumed the man had been the culprit.

“But I know who the real killer is,” the voice insisted. “And I know who hired him to do it.”

“We're listening,” said Alex.

“The killer goes by the name Mori. He works for a lady who calls herself Serena Winthrop and a man named Dimitri.”

“Evan Dimitri?” asked Julia with alarm.

“You know him?” asked Alex.

“Not personally. But my husband has met him. A power player behind Franklin's campaign.”

Mrs. Mayhew's eyes became saucers. “Joshua Franklin?” she shouted. “The senator?”

Julia nodded. Then she remembered. Pastor Alex had mentioned blood on the sleeve of the man she now knew for certain to be Matthew Adams. “Did you…kill Dimitri?” she asked.

“If only I had.”

“Then what did you do, Frank?” asked Alex. “You arrived in my office this morning clearly distraught about something. You had blood on your shirt. Whose blood was it?”

“He threatened to turn me in to the police if I didn't accept another assignment.”

“What kind of assignment?” asked Julia, feeling the same dread that had pervaded her dreams.

“They hired me to help with at-home transitions,” Matthew confessed. “Everything appeared to be aboveboard. I had no idea…”

He stopped short as if realizing he had said more than he should. Then he continued through a breaking voice, “I can't forget their faces.”

“What faces?” asked Alex. “The ones that look like religious icons?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Can you give me names?”

“Brianna Jackson. Saul Weinstein. Josephine Green.”

A pause.

“Jim and Gayle Tolbert.”

Julia leaped to her feet. “Is that whose blood was on your shirt?” she shouted.

“I didn't kill them,” Matthew was saying. “I promise. The old man attacked us. That's when I realized the assignment was a sham. I ran. Mori, he's the killer, not me. I did nothing wrong. I'm a victim. I just did as I was told.”

Julia felt a rising nausea. “That's what the Nazis said.” She sneered at horrendous evil once again hiding behind complicit weakness.

The room fell silent. The man's story had been heard.

“Listen to me, Frank,” Alex finally said. “You need to turn yourself in to the police.”

“I told you, I did nothing wrong. Dimitri, he's the guy they want.”

“Of course,” the pastor continued. “But it seems you've been a pawn in something far more ominous than you may realize. Something beyond what we can see with our eyes.”

Julia, sensing the same, looked at her pastor. He returned her gaze.

“I don't believe it's an accident that the two of you have been brought to this moment,” he began. “Frank, you told me you have been having dreams. Julia, so have you.”

She nodded in unison with the sound of Matthew's sigh.

“You both asked me whether dreams carry meaning. Perhaps even a message. Well, here we are, together, receiving a message that couldn't be clearer.”

“What message?” asked Matthew.

“Julia,” said Alex, inviting her to explain what she only now, only vaguely, perceived.

“I was wrong,” she began. “Life is a gift to receive and protect, not select and discard.”

“Then why did you write—”

“Forget what I wrote, Matthew,” she interrupted. “That was before I realized.”

“Realized what?” he asked skeptically.

She couldn't find the words.

Alex intervened. “Julia has been growing in her understanding of what I said to you earlier today, Frank. Something the Bible calls repentance. Acknowledging you've been heading in the wrong direction, and turning around.”

“I told you before, I don't believe in sin.”

“But you know yourself to be a sinner, don't you, Frank?” He looked toward Julia. “Or should I say Matthew?”

The phone went silent.

“I can't explain why, but I sense it's no accident two people with similar dreams have been brought to this moment. God wants to save us from our own rebellion. He extends his hand, offering the grace of rescue. Julia took that hand. You can do the same, Matthew. Turn yourself in and start fresh.”