Hallowed Bones (31 page)

He hesitated, reading something dangerous in my face. "What do you want?"

"How did you know that Rebekah Mallory might be your child?"

"Are you completely insane? We've been over this. She isn't my child."

"Reverend, this isn't going to end pretty for you no matter how it goes. I've seen you pay folks to pretend to be healed. The police have your fingerprints on a baby bottle belonging to Rebekah Mallory--the bottle that contained the sedative given to kill her. We have enough circumstantial evidence to tie you to the baby's murder. If the DNA comes back that you're the father, you're going down."

It was a long speech and one I was rather proud of. I detested the man who stood before me. He held out the worst kind of false hope to people who were, in a word, desperate. He stole from them using the cruelest of weapons--their own fear and desperation.

"I'm not Rebekah's father," he said simply. "I'm not. I have no clue how my prints got on any baby bottle, if they're really there. This sounds like a setup."

"Keep hoping," I said, "because it's going to give me intense pleasure to nail you."

He didn't actually take a step back, but I think the hatred in my eyes and voice made him lean away from me. "I offer people hope," he said. "You don't see it, but I do. In a world where most folks know only suffering and pain, I offer the hope of a miracle. That's not a bad thing to do."

"Sure," I said. "You offer as much miracle as they can afford. But the sick thing is, you only offer the illusion of a miracle. If just once you had the real thing, it would be different."

"I did once."

He spoke so softly that I thought I heard him wrong. "What?"

"I've healed people. Truly. Not hundreds of them, but some."

"I don't believe you."

"Ask Doreen."

I remembered what she said about Oren Weaver, that he had the true power to help others if he could just tap into it.

"Who did you heal?"

The strangest look came over his face. "My wife.
Myra
. She was the first."

"
Myra
who lives in
Baton Rouge
and who you have to buy off with hush money for cars?"

He was startled when he realized how much I knew about his life, but instead of getting angry, he smiled. "
Myra
had something wrong with her leg. She had a lot of pain. Even so, she was a beautiful young woman. I think I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. I never even noticed that she limped."

I fought against the tidal pull of his words. Oren Weaver was a terrific orator. He had the power to lasso me with his words and pull me into his world.

"
Myra
lived in St. Francisville. She was an only child and over-protected to the point of abuse. She wasn't allowed to go places with her friends. Her parents used her bad leg as an excuse to cripple her even further. I met her by accident. My car broke down and I stopped at her house to use the phone. It was the first time I'd ever been inside one of the planter's homes."

I could see the moss-draped trees of the small town north of
New Orleans
. Tinkie and I had stopped there for breakfast on our way to
New Orleans
. It was part of the Episcopalian Louisiana--a rich planter class with treasured Anglo ties. Not for St. Francisville, the evils of Catholicism, and the mixed culture of southern
Louisiana
. These were purebreds, and as such, their daughters would be guarded against any untoward influences of life.

"They looked on a Baptist revival preacher as akin to Satan himself," Oren said. "I might as well have said the Pope sent me."

"I'll bet
Myra
now wishes she'd listened to her parents."

"I doubt it," he said. "I should have left her alone, but I couldn't. One day I met her down at the creek behind her house. I told her I wanted to baptize her. What I wanted to do was get her in the water with me. I wanted to see how her dress would cling to her when it was wet. She was so beautiful, and my thoughts weren't on saving her soul."

"You talked her into it?" My estimation of
Myra
's intelligence dropped.

"I told her I could heal her leg."

"Had you ever healed before?"

"It had never even crossed my mind. But as soon as I said it, I had a clear picture of her leg and what was wrong inside it. There was something growing, something that would move from her leg up to her stomach and kill her. I knew it as surely as I know my name, and I knew that I could stop it. With God's help, my hands could touch her leg and destroy that cancer. And I did." He held my gaze. "Because I loved her so much. God empowered that love."

Goose bumps danced over my skin. Doreen. How much of this had she known?

"Who else have you healed?"

"There was a time when
Myra
and I first married that I helped people. God gave me visions to see inside their bodies. I knew exactly what to heal and what to destroy." His voice grew tired. "But that was a long time ago. Now I have to pay people to pretend to be healed. But I'm still giving people what they want, what they really need, the hope that miracles still exist."

"You're bilking them out of their money. You're offering false hope."

"False hope is better than no hope at all, Sarah Booth, and if you don't understand that, you've got some hard lessons ahead of you. I'm not cheating these people. They don't really expect me to heal them, but they do expect to leave my revival with the hope that God has the power to somehow touch them. And who am I to say he won't?"

Oren Weaver was a dangerous man, and perhaps a wicked one. I'd lost the ability to tell if he was conning me, conning himself, or if he believed the words he spoke.

"Do you remember the baby with the birth defects?"

"Yes, I do." He locked his hands behind his back. "I didn't want to hold her, but the woman thrust her at me. I had to grab the baby bottle because it slipped from the infant's mouth. She couldn't even try to hold it. Her arms..."

"You didn't know that was Doreen's child?"

"How would I? The woman who brought the baby was Cajun or Creole. I assumed it was her infant."

I didn't believe him. The problem was, I didn't disbelieve him. It was the perfect explanation for the fingerprints on the bottle. And Pearline had confirmed his story.

"You haven't asked the most obvious question," Weaver said, his face tightening, "the one I keep asking myself each day."

"What would that be?"

"How a love like the one I shared with
Myra
could turn so twisted and ugly. We despise each other now, you know. She can't abide my touch."

"Let me guess. She caught you sleeping around." His mouth turned up slightly at the corners. "True, as far as it goes. I've never claimed to be more than a mortal man in the face of temptation. You have no idea how many women throw themselves at me. Not actually me, but who they think I am. I should have resisted, but sometimes the Devil led me to their beds." "You know what I hate about religion?" I asked. "I probably couldn't begin to assemble the list." His words stung me for a moment, but I rallied. "It's how convenient it is to blame everything on the Devil. Oh, just point at Satan and claim a momentary weakness and then ask for forgiveness." My jaw had clenched. "Well, some things can't be forgiven, and I'm willing to bet my family home on the fact that a jury of your peers won't be looking to send Satan to jail. They'll be very happy to see you behind bars if you killed that baby."

Since
I
was
on a tear of terrorizing potential suspects, I drove to the senator's house. Though I knocked and hammered on the front door, no one answered. I had the sense that someone watched me from inside the house, and that triggered my already hot temper.

Instead of leaving, I cut across the immaculate yard, pushed through some camellia bushes that had to be two hundred years old, and found myself facing a huge gravel car park. A young man in a chauffeur's uniform was scrubbing on a pale blue Jaguar. With the rush of the water hose and the volume of the radio, he didn't hear me. I eased up and stopped. The letters
C-H-A-N-D-A-L-A
had been spray painted on the car in Day-Glo orange. The chauffeur was doing everything in his power to remove the paint, but it wasn't budging.

I heard someone behind me and turned to find the senator frowning down at me.

"Vandals," he said. "Public figures are always a good target."

"What does it mean?"

He shrugged. "The kids who did it probably have a second-grade education. Who knows what they were trying to write." He motioned the chauffeur forward. "Call the dealer. Tell them to get another car ready, then drive this one over for a trade-in. They can repaint it themselves."

"Sure thing, Senator," the young man said. He hustled to do his employer's bidding.

Senator Clay looked down into my eyes. "I've asked you not to come here," he said. "Ellisea is upset."

"Ellisea seems to stay in a constant state of upset."

"She has medical problems."

I'd be willing to bet they were mental, but I didn't say so. "Senator, has anyone ever mentioned that your wife has become a political liability? That fit she threw Saturday night was a doozy. I'm only wondering how you kept it out of the newspapers."

"Ellisea has problems, but so does every other politician's spouse in D.C., or don't you watch the news?"

He had me there. Politicians were human, and under the microscope of the national press, their flaws were revealed on a daily basis. It was just that I hadn't been to a high-society ball with other political wives and seen them engage in a catfight.

"Why does Ellisea hate Cece so much?" I asked.

"I have no idea."

I saw something in his eyes that quickly vanished. Was it prejudice? I didn't always agree with Clay's politics, but he'd always seemed to uphold the rights of people to practice whatever gender or religion they chose. Like Doreen had pointed out, Clay was in a position to make sweeping changes on issues from the environment to the right to abortion. Was he, at heart, a man who devalued personal freedom?

"You might ask yourself why your friend has it in for my wife," he countered. "There's some jealousy there, I believe. Ellisea was a runway model. Cece may have aspired to that but didn't make it."

"Cece didn't aspire to any such thing, because at the time, a transsexual would never be allowed to become a top fashion model." That was a cold fact. "Does Ellisea frequent the Rainbow Boutique?" I asked. "It's a tattoo parlor on
Chalmette Street
."

"I have no idea what Ellisea does when I'm out of town. If you're asking if she has tattoos, the answer is no." He took a deep breath. "I have a flight to catch. Please don't come back to this house, Ms. Delaney. I won't be here, and as I told you earlier, it upsets my wife. I think it's best for all accounts if that doesn't happen."

He was asking, not threatening me. "Unless I have specific business with Ellisea, I'll stay away from here--if you'll give me your private phone number in
Washington
." It was a fair trade in my book.

He pulled a notepad from his pocket, wrote the number, and handed it to me.

"Senator, why don't you and Ellisea have children?" I asked. Most politicians knew the value of the family package when it came to marketing.

"Neither of us ever wanted a child. We were both focused on our careers," he said. He abruptly walked away. I turned to watch him and caught the flutter of a kitchen curtain. It was just a quick glimpse, but it looked like Ellisea. And it looked like someone had beaten the bloody hell out of her.

26

Hamilton had left a message for me at my hotel room,
inviting me to dinner. I left him a message accepting with great eagerness. I pondered the cultural implications of dining with a man. Why is it that dating centers around food? Or at least the pretense of food. Hamilton and I might not eat, but food was the offering.

Then again, with
Hamilton
, food could be a very sensual experience. Was the proffering of food in a dating scene just the teasing of one of the senses--taste? With other senses to be sated soon thereafter? Or was it part of providing by the male? "I be he-man and bring food"?

With a grin I remembered one time Tinkie had dated a man from across the river. He was a bad boy with a cute ass, a wicked grin, and a big motorcycle. It was a brief affair, though, when dinner turned out to be a bag of chips and a six-pack of beer. Tinkie was highly insulted. A man just had to work a little harder than that if he wanted to keep the attention of a Daddy's Girl.

"Heck, I didn't expect caviar," Tinkie had said at the time, "but I thought he might go to the trouble of setting the table or maybe frying up some catfish. It was just that he didn't think enough of me to make any effort at all."