Parishioner (13 page)

Doris tried to pull her hands away but Xavier held on tight. She bowed her head until it was resting against his shoulder. It was only then that the tears fell from her eyes onto their hands.

She panted and made small animal sounds that Xavier interpreted as despair. He put his
right hand on her shoulder and she moved to hug him. It was a fierce embrace, beyond innocence or love. There was strength in her arms—the strength to knock an old woman’s eye right out of its socket.

Xavier let her hold him. He’d walked past many tragedies in his life: dead men and women, sometimes children. He’d sold drugs to addicts who had death in their eyes, and women to men who had no love for women.

“She was going to kill you,” he whispered. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“I loved her,” Doris said.

“I know you did.”

“She loved me.”

“No. Never.”

Doris squeezed his neck hard enough to feel uncomfortable, but Xavier didn’t push her away. He held her close and even, somewhat reluctantly, kissed her cheek.

“I need to show you something, Dodo,” he said after the great long hug.

“What?” she asked, wiping her face against his yellow suit.

He took out the little red journal and showed it to her.

“That’s Auntie Sedra’s book,” she said.

“What does it mean?”

“Whenever we took in an orphan or sent one out she would sit down at the dining room table and write in it.”

“Did you ever ask her what it was she was writing?”

“She said that she was telling the little babies’ stories. You know, where they came from and where they were going—and when.”

“But you can’t read it?”

“I can’t read. I can sign my name and write Auntie’s name. I know some numbers but that’s all. I used to listen to stories on the record player at night. And I can recite a hundred poems that Auntie taught me.”

“You can?”

“Yes.”

“What poems do you know?”

“I know ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Doris Milne sat up straight with posture most modern young people never learned. She recited the poem with muted but still dramatic inflection while staring at a point midway in the darkening sky. Passersby turned their heads at the recitation and two older women actually stopped to listen.

Xavier was thinking that the woman-child brought him back to some old time when there was no radio or TV or movie theater. He wondered what was going on in Sedra’s mind when she kept Doris. Was the girl her whore or her daughter, her hand servant or adoptive blood?

When the poem was over the older women walked on and Doris was smiling, satisfied.

“We have to get you someplace safe,” Xavier said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“I know somewhere out of the city. I could take you there right now.”

“I need to get my things.”

“The hotel might not be safe anymore.”

“I’ve stayed there many times.”

“But Mr. Connors read my note,” Ecks offered. “He might have called the police.”

“I told him that I knew you and that things would be fine,” she said. “Aunt Sedra let him have sex with me sometimes in the summers when we went to the hotel so I could swim.”

“Did you like sex with Mr. Connors?”

“He used to bring me porcelain dolls,” she said. “And he never made me hurt.”

“Used to? You don’t have sex with him anymore?”

“He likes young girls,” she said, as if talking about someone who preferred plum jelly to clotted cream.

The rooms in which Doris and Sedra usually stayed looked down on Wilshire Boulevard not far from downtown. The hotel was old but retrofit for modernity, chic and at the same time stuck-up. All the employees of the Federal had stared at Xavier as Doris led him through the constricted lobby toward the elevators.

“Good evening, Ms. Milne,” a white man in a gold suit said from behind the concierge’s
desk.

“Hi, Mr. Connors.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, yes. Everything is fine.”

There was a suitcase on the made bed of the second bedroom in the suite. In the larger room there stood an old Chinese chest with doors lined with shallow drawers. The doors were set on hinges that swung open to reveal a closet filled with the dead woman’s clothes.

“Did you bring this with you?” Xavier asked.

“No. Auntie Sedra always sends it the morning before we come. That’s part of the reason I knew she was going to kill me.”

“Why?”

“Because every time before she had me put my suitcase in the closet space. She told me to pack but she didn’t put my bag in with her clothes.”

Each drawer had a brass keyhole in the center, and every one was locked.

“You got keys for these?” Ecks asked.

“Aunt Sedra always kept them hid.”

Twenty-seven drawers of cheap wood. Xavier smashed them one at a time while Doris went about repacking her suitcase.

Sedra was very organized, like most sociopaths Rule had been acquainted with. There was a drawer filled with platinum jewelry, also ones for gold and silver settings too; a drawer brimming with unset jewels and then separate ones for ruby, emerald, and diamond rings. And there was money: euros, dollars, bearer bonds, and gold coins. In the twenty-fourth drawer there was a folded piece of parchment that was the key to the journal’s code system: !-a, @-b, #-c.… At the bottom of the legend was a line of letters that stood for punctuation marks.

“I think Auntie would have wanted me to have that money and stuff,” the girl said to Xavier.

“I thought you said she wanted to kill you?”

“But that was only because I might get her in trouble,” Doris said simply. “It doesn’t
mean she didn’t love me.”

“Maybe she would have wanted you to have the money,” Xavier agreed. “But I think we’ll hold on to it for a while until we work out all the details of the murders and kidnappings. Maybe later on somebody can use it to help the people she harmed.”

Doris didn’t respond to his statements and accusations. She just looked at him brimming with California innocence.

Leaving the wrecked bureau behind, Xavier and Doris drove up the dark coast in silence.

After talking to Doris for more than an hour, Frank decided to ensconce her in the small room on the north side of the church encampment. Sister Hope, Frank’s stalwart number two at the church, took the girl off for food, a bath, and a night’s sleep.

“You were right to bring her here, Brother Ecks,” Frank said.

“She might have been there when Benol and her partner brought the three boys in. She’s the right age. I didn’t have the heart to interrogate her that far yet.”

“Do you want Sister Hope to ask?”

“No. No, I’ll do it tomorrow. But could you get Clyde to decode the contents of this journal using this.” He handed the red book and parchment page to the minister.

“Will you be going home?”

“I was hoping you’d let me sleep on one of the pews tonight.”

“That’s a hard bed.”

“I’ve always wanted to do that, Frank. Sleep in the room with no one else around.”

Frank smiled and then nodded.

Xavier slept on the front pew to the right of the Speakers’ Spot. He lay on his back, hands crossed over his chest like an undertaker’s approximation of eternal sleep. There was a half-moon peering in from the westernmost southern window. The lunar glow was peaceful, but it was the silence that made Ecks smile in his sleep: a hush so complete that it felt imposed by some greater being, some outer force too large to enter the church in its entirety. There was no electric hum or water flowing through wall-bound pipes, no cars from the road or distant music.

Even asleep Xavier reveled in the quiet. In that room slumber was a blessing, silence a sanctity, and breath the consecration and proof of the sermons Father Frank espoused.

“Brother Ecks.”

Xavier was aware in a separate, unconscious place in his mind that he had a role in life. His heart and mind, muscle, and even his rage were indentured to a fate beyond his control. He had not killed the white man with the crowbar in his chest. He allowed Winter Johnson to decide his own fate. Almost every step he had ever taken was the wrong step, and still he was there on this bench—a pawn of something possibly divine and definitely unknowable.

“Brother Ecks.” He felt a hand on his shoulder.

Xavier Rule had been born, he thought, with the potential for purpose. He could have turned away. He could have strangled Pinky in her sleep and never met Frank. He had lost hope, but hope had not forgotten him.

He opened his eyes to see Sister Hope leaning over him on the pew. She wasn’t smiling, but she never smiled. Her face was twice the size you’d expect. It dwarfed her head, which, in turn, seemed too large for her slender form. Her skin was the color of bright amber, and she had met menopause and conquered its storm like the conquistadors on ships bound for a new world.

“Hope,” he said.

“People may start coming in soon for morning meditations,” she said. “They don’t always come, but we would like to keep the room hospitable for them if they do arrive.”

“I’ve never seen you at Expressions,” Ecks said.