Salvage (22 page)

Owen nodded, but of course he couldn't understand, only sympathize, with baby Howie as much as with his parents.

"He wept so much in those first weeks at the house. Some nights I lay awake believing I was cursed. I
cried out to God
, Owen, to take the poor boy while he slept. To make it quick…" His lower lip quivered at the thought. "…and painless. But a quick and painless death is death nonetheless. One final gasp expelled into the ether, and then… Poof.
Rien
. Nothing. And I wished this on
my own son
, you understand. My own
flesh and blood.
"

In a sudden rage, Howard struck the mattress, scattering the pieces of the puzzle across the mattress. He calmed himself with a thin, jittery exhale through his teeth, squinting out through the slatted blinds.

Owen grasped the old man's hand, and squeezed it until Howard looked up at him. "This didn't happen to Howie because you prayed for him to die," Owen said. "If people died because someone prayed for it, this world would be a lot less crowded."

Howard smiled through his tears. "Yes, I suppose you're right." He studied Owen amusedly. "That's a rather cruel brand of optimism, wouldn't you say?"

"I learned it from my mother," Owen said with a brief smile. "Try to forgive yourself, Howard. I'm sure Howie would have."

"Mmn." His dry tongue peeked out to moisten his cracked lips. "But has Crouch…?" A strange segue, in Owen's opinion—
Who or what is Crouch?
Howard's gaze drifted from Owen's left eye to the other, searching for something. "Close the door," he said then, nodding toward it.

Owen stood and crossed the room. He peered out into the hall, which bustled with activity, then pulled the door shut with the serpent's hiss of its hydraulic hinge. He locked it, in case a nurse wanted to take more of the old man's blood, and returned to his seat at the radiator.

"What I say here, you don't repeat," Howard said, sotto voce, despite the privacy. "Do you understand?"

"Of course."

The old man nodded. He opened his mouth to speak, and then appeared to reconsider his words. Finally, he began: "The schism in that church began quite suddenly, I recall. One Sunday, it was business as usual,
God is love
and all that, and the next, it was agitated talk of
interlopers
and
Satan's pimps
."

"Imps?"

"
Pimps
. I'll explain in a moment." The old man swished a hand out toward the tray table, where his breakfast lay untouched, congealed scrambled eggs and dry bacon. "Would you be a lamb and fetch me that juice?"

Owen stood and brought it over.

"There's a lad." He tore off the top with jittery fingers. "With any luck it'll trick my liver into believing it's a screwdriver," he explained, and raised the container in a mock toast. "Chin chin." He drank the contents greedily, with a slurping, bubbly sound that reminded Owen, for one sick moment, of the bubbles from his severed oxygen tube as he drowned in the house at the bottom of the lake. He shivered, despite the warmth of the radiator.

The old man sucked out the last drops, smacked his lips, and shrugged, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, before setting it down on the window ledge. "Where was I?"

"Satan's pimps."

"Right, right. It is my contention, Owen, that the church's sudden change of direction was caused by a certain revelation, so to speak, at town council that very Wednesday. There'd been a guest speaker, you see, a government official from out of town, and he'd carried with him word of a certain impending development in the community—"

"The hydroelectric dam."

Howard winked. "Now you're playing catch-up. As you can imagine, word got around quickly. He was a wolf in sheep's clothing, as the minister himself might have said in one of his homilies. The phrase spreading around town was
Satan's pimp
. Having met with the man myself, I must admit, I rather liked the term. He'd come offering money, you see. What he'd called
fair compensation
. But it was understood the development would move forward with or without our consent. As an architect, I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of expropriation."

Had he told anyone about his job? Owen didn't recall, but he supposed it was just another example of small town curiosity. "More than I'd like to be," he said.

"As was Crouch."

That name again. "Who's this Crouch?"

"Our local pastor, in those days of milk and honey," Howard said.

"Not Woodrow?"

Howard eyed him queerly. "
Woodrow?
Where the Devil did you hear that name?"

"I met him, my first day here."

"You met—?" The old man flustered. "No, no, son, the pastor was
Crouch
. Everett Crouch." He gave Owen a sidelong glance, and then squinted out through the blinds as red lights flashed through them. Owen peered out. Down below, an ambulance had pulled up, and EMTs scrambled to open the back doors for an elderly woman wrapped on the gurney, who peered confusedly at all the commotion. He let the blinds fall back with a metallic swish.

"After the town hall meeting," Howard continued, "Crouch's sermons perverted into angry, paranoid rants of Noah and the Great Flood, about Babylon and Sodom and Gomorrah. All the wonderful examples we find in the Bible of God's everlasting wrath." He pronounced it like a last name:
Roth
. "Crouch even had new windows put in—this great, God-awful stained glass depiction of Moses parting the Red Sea."

"Mike said you used to be their lawyer."

"It's true. I separated from the church after the Schism, but Madge, your mother, stayed with him." He shook his head, Owen supposed, at her foolishness. "I suppose we always believed Crouch would have a change of heart. But he never did. When the flood came, your mother and I, along with many others, fled the church. We abandoned him. I suppose in Crouch's mind, we betrayed him."

"What happened down there in that church, Howard?"

"Crouch and his flock chose to stand against the flood. Crouch had them believing some madness about how God would spare His faithful. They stood against the deluge to protect their church. Little did those poor people know, they would have lost it with or without the flood." Howard nodded as if Owen had challenged him. "Flat broke, so they were. Everett Crouch had run that church into the ground well before the water overtook it."

"How does a church go broke?"

"Lack of membership. It was stripped of its tax-free status after the Schism. There were accusations of cult-like behavior, and with the events in Guyana still fresh in our collective subconscious, the government took the allegations quite seriously. You know, the Chinese call suicide
abandoning the body
," he said, still wringing his hands obsessively.

"Suicide? You think—?"

"Oh, quite certainly. It was never proven, but it's what I believe. It's why I pay for salvage. I suppose a rather morbid part of me expects to one day have evidence that Crouch and the rest of them died in that flood, to hold it in my hands. His final words to me were, 'Earth, do not cover my blood. May my cry never be laid to rest.'" Howard let the words hang before remarking, "It's from the Book of Job. I had to look it up." At last he turned to the puzzle he'd shattered, regarding it the way he would a mess made by a child. "I really wish I hadn't done that."

"You can put it back together."

"Howie wanted me to help him with it. I told him it was a child's game." His eyes never left the unassembled pieces. "I wasn't much of a father to him, I'm afraid. I hope he knew that I loved him, at the very least."

"I'm sure he did," Owen said, remembering the twinkle in the old man's eyes when he'd seen his son at the Pony, and the reverential way Howie had spoken to Owen of his father.

"Crouch and his Blessed Trinity killed themselves," Howard said with dismal finality. "Your mother and I tried to save them from him, and we failed. I suspect it's that failure we've all been hiding, the ones who escaped, as much as the dead themselves."

"But you have no proof."

"Belief is stronger than proof, Owen. The Reverend Crouch knew that more than anyone."

"But why would they kill themselves? Just because they were going to lose their church?"

Howard eyed Owen with cold cynicism. "Why does anyone do anything, son? For their
beliefs
. Out of
conviction
. Because God told them to," he added with a vicious sneer. "Or the Devil."

The Devil has many faces, Owen thought, remembering the words of Brother Woodrow, and again he shivered. "Why didn't you tell the police?"

The old man let out a resigned sigh, as if he'd told the story a hundred times before. "I spoke with Detective Selkie," he said. "He'd held similar theories, but without evidence, we'd have been holding up the town to unneeded media scrutiny, like Waco, Texas, after the siege. Like Jonestown. Houses had been
moved
, Owen.
Lives
disrupted."

"How many others? No one else believed you?"

"A chosen few," the old man admitted. "Oh, there are whispers. Never doubt that. The darkest secrets are always perceptible to others. The guilty wear them like badges, whether they choose to believe so or not. And Crouch has never forgiven us," Howard said grimly. "He took my boy into that lake with him out of vengeance. They wanted to be martyrs, you see. They wanted their deaths to remind us we were
all
victims of the flood. Of that
bloody
dam. 'Earth, do not cover my blood…'"

A long moment passed in relative silence, but for the muted sounds of the hospital beyond the door.

"Howard, did you know my father?"

"Naturally."

Owen eyed him with suspicion. "You're not…?"

The old man burst out in a good, hearty laugh. "Your father? Good God, no! I loved your mother dearly, Owen, but ours was a strictly platonic relationship. She'd made certain of that."

"But you do know something you're not telling me."

Howard squinted, appearing to be in thought. "Get my satchel, will you?" he said after a moment. "It's over there in the closet." Owen stood and opened the closet door. Howard had put his clothes on hooks and his shoes on the closet floor. A brown leather bag lay beside them. He brought it to Howard at the window.

The old man unzipped it and rummaged. His trembling fingers came up holding a photograph with rounded corners and muted colors, creased and smoothed out flat again. He handed the photo to Owen, who recognized several of the faces right away: his mother, youthful and smiling vibrantly, her dark hair in a stylish bob, and Howard on the other side of the group from her, much younger, handsome, his hair dark but still wild. There was the blond boy Lori had told him about, the boy he'd once been, sitting at Margaret Saddler's feet with a blonde girl about his age. There was Skip Wickman, young and smiling. The others were the same men and women he'd seen the other day in the lake, in his dream, in the tub—he was certain of it. They were the Blessed Trinity Mission… and their Reverend stood at the center of them, smiling wide, the sleeves of his white work shirt rolled up to the elbows, not Brother Woodrow, but the Shepherd, a man named Everett Crouch.

The photo nearly fell from his fingers.

He pointed, his hand shaking as badly as the old man's. "That's him? That's Crouch?"

"The very same," Howard said. "You remember him?"

The words stuck in his throat. After a moment, he managed to choke them out, "I do." He turned the photo over. The words
BLESSED TRINITY MISSION, July 1979
were scrawled on the back.

"My father's one of these people?"

Howard nodded.

"You won't tell me which one."

"Your mother would kill me."

Owen nodded. He'd already gotten much more out of the old man than he'd expected, and he didn't want to put up a fight. "Can I keep this?"

"It's yours," Howard said. Owen recalled he'd said the same thing, in the same way, about the watch.

"Thanks." Owen tucked it into his pocket. "Hey, you didn't happen to take that pocket watch with you yesterday, did you? I can't find it anywhere."

"The watch? I gave it back to you, didn't I?"

Owen shook his head. "I guess I must have forgotten it on the bar in all the commotion."

"I suppose you must have," Howard agreed. "Sorry to hear it."

"Oh well. It was a piece of junk, anyway."

"Yes, but it was
your
piece of junk. One man's trash…"

"Yeah," Owen said, standing up. "I'll come and check in on you tomorrow, if you're still around."

"Thank you kindly, my dear boy. And thank you for listening to an old man's ramblings. I don't know what came over me."

"Confession is good for the soul," Owen said, and patted him on the shoulder. Howard put a hand on his and shook it vigorously. He let it fall to his side while Owen crossed to the door. He had it unlocked and open when Howard spoke again. "When you speak to your mother, tell her I said, 'I still do.'"

"You still do what?"

Howard smiled wistfully. "She'll know what it means." Then he turned to face the window, his back to Owen, narrowing his eyes at the cloud-darkened sky.

1

OWEN BUMPED
into Constable Selkie on his way out. They were both distracted, Owen with thoughts of dead preachers, and Selkie with the death of his brother-in-law, his puffy red eyes watching his feet.

"Hey, watch it, pal," Selkie said, realizing too late who he'd bumped into. He grabbed Owen's arm affably then, his glower softening. "Shit, I'm sorry, Owen. I didn't know it was you."

"That's okay," Owen said. "I guess I should have been watching where I was going."

"Just come from the old man, huh?"

"Yeah. We had a good talk."

"Oh, yeah?"

"About Howie," Owen said, hoping the policeman wouldn't see through his half-lie. "I really wish it didn't have to happen."