A bouquet of roses, for all of her support, started him off on the right foot. The fact that she had not lifted a single finger in support of him didn't seem to temper her appreciation. Then again, judging by the amount of acrylic hanging off the end of her fingers, lifting them would be no easy task.
“Oh, Kent! You shouldn't have!”
He had always wondered if women who carried on with wide eyes about flowers really did find them as stimulating as they let on. He could see a cow slobbering over vegetation, but women were hardly cows. Well, most women weren't. Betty came pretty close, which probably explained why she had just rolled her eyes back as if she were dying and going to heaven over the red blossoms on this particular arrangement of vegetation.
“But I should have,” he replied with as much sincerity as he could muster. “I just wanted you to know how much your support has helped me.”
A quick flicker in her eyes made him wonder if he had gone too far. If so, she quickly adapted. “You're so kind. It was nothing, really. Anybody would have done the same.” She smiled and smelled the roses.
Kent had no idea what she could possibly be referring to, but it no longer mattered. “Well, thank you again, Betty. I owe you.”
Gag!
“Thank you, Kent.” Somehow one of the petals had loosed itself and stuck on her upper lip. It looked ridiculous. She didn't seem to notice. Kent didn't bother to tell her. He smiled genuinely and turned for his office.
Todd and Mary were like two peas in a podâboth eager to please Borst and fully cognitive of the fact that they needed Kent to do it. They both trotted in and out of his office like regular pack rats. “Kent, how would you do this?” Or, “Kent, I've done such and such but it's not working quite right.” Not that he particularly minded. At times it even made him feel as though nothing had really changedâ he had always been at the center of their world.
It was the way they straightened when Borst walked by that brought Kent back to earth. In the end, their allegiance was for Bossman.
Todd actually apologized for his behavior at one point. “I'm sorry for . . . well, you know.” He sat in Kent's office and crossed his legs, suddenly a tinge redder in the face. He pushed up his black-rimmed glasses.
“For what, Todd?”
“You know, for the way I acted that first day.”
Kent did not respond. Let the boy squirm a little.
“It's hard being caught in the middle of office politics, you know. And technically speaking, Borst
is
our boss, so we don't want to cross him. Besides, he was right. It's really his thing, you know?”
A dozen voices screamed foul in Kent's head. He wanted to launch out and turn this boy. Slap some sense into him. And he could've pulled it off, too. But he only bit his lip and nodded slowly.
“Yeah, you're probably right.”
Todd grinned sheepishly. “It's okay, Kent. Borst promised to take care of us.”
Todd obviously told Mary about the conversation, because the next time she sat her chunky self in his guest chair, she wore a grin that balled her cheeks. She dove right into a question without referring to the incident, but Kent knew they had talked. Knew it like he knew both she and Todd were, spineless, Twinkie-eating propeller-heads.
During his second week back, Kent began leaving for lunch through the front lobby. Despite his aversion to doing so, he'd done it before so he would do it now. He walked nonchalantly, avoiding eye contact but responding to the occasional call of greeting with as much enthusiasm as he could stomach.
They were all there, like windup dolls, playing their parts. The tellers whispered about their fanciful relationships and counted the money. Zak the security guard paced and nodded and occasionally swung his stick like he'd learned from some Hollywood movie. Twice Kent saw Sidney Beech, the assistant vice president, clicking across the floor when he entered the lobby, and each time he pretended not to see her. Once he saw Porkyâthat would be Price Bentleyâwalk across the marble floor, and he immediately cut for the bathrooms. If the bank president saw him, he did not indicate so. Kent chose to believe he had not.
By the end of the second week, the routines had been reestablished and Kent's most recent altercations with the bank all but forgotten. Or so he hoped. Everything settled into a comfortable rhythm, just like the old days.
Or so they thought.
In reality, with the passing of each day, Kent's nerves wound tighter and tighter, like one of those spring-operated toys in the hands of an overeager child. At any moment the spring would break and he would snap, berserk.
But the plan was taking shape, like a beautiful woman walking out of the fog. Step by step, curves began to define themselves, and flesh took on form. The emerging image was Kent's link to sanity. It kept him from going mad during the long hours of pretending. It gave him a lover to fondle in the dark creases of his mind. It became . . . everything.
He was setting them up for one major backstab.
He was going to rob them blind.
Week Nine
DAWN HAD come to Denver with a flare of red in the East. Bill Madison knew because he had watched the sun rise. From gray to red to just plain blue with a little smog thrown in to remind him where he lived.
Helen had called the previous evening and asked him to join her in the morning. They had talked twice on the phone since his last meeting with her, and each time Helen's words had rung in his mind for a good hour or two after the final click of the receiver. The prospect of seeing her again had brought a knot to his gut, but not a bad knot, he thought. More like the twisting you might expect just before the first big drop on a roller coaster.
“And why, precisely, am I joining you?” he'd asked good-naturedly.
“We've got some talking to do,” she said. “Some walking and talking and praying. Bring your walking shoes. You won't be disappointed, Pastor.” And he knew he wouldn't be. Although he doubted they would really be doing much walking. Not with her bad knees.
He stepped up to her porch at 6 A.M. feeling just a tad foolish with the tennis shoes on. Helen opened the door on his first ring and walked right past him and into the street without uttering a word.
Bill closed the door and scrambled after her. “Hold up, Helen. Good night! What's gotten into you?” He said it chuckling. If he didn't know her, he might guess she'd suddenly become a spring chicken by the way she moved her legs.
“Morning, Bill,” she said. “Let's walk for a minute before we talk. I need to warm up.”
“Sure.”
That's what he said.
Sure.
As if this were just one more day in a long string of days in which they had climbed from bed in the dark to meet for an edge-of-dawn walk. But he wanted to ask her what on Earth she thought she was doing. Walking like some marathoner in a knee-length dress and socks hiked above her calves. It looked ridiculous. Which made him look ridiculous by association. And he had never seen her take such bold strides, certainly not without a noticeable limp
He shoved the thought from his mind and fell in. He was, after all, her pastor, and like she said, she needed shepherding. Although, at the moment, he was following more than shepherding. How could he be expected to feed the sheep if it was ten feet ahead of him?
Bill stumbled to catch up. Not a problemâshe would begin to fade soon enough. Until then he would humor her.
They walked three blocks in silence before it began to occur to Bill that Miss Knee-Socks here was not fading. If there was any fading just now it was on his end of things. Too many hours behind the desk, too few in the gym.
“Where we going, Helen?” he asked.
“Oh, I don't know. We're just walking. Are you praying yet?”
“I didn't know I was supposed to be praying.”
“I'm not sure you are. But as long as I am, you might as well.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. Her Reeboks were no longer shiny and white like they had been a week earlier. In fact, they were not the same pair because these were well worn and the other had been almost new. Her calf muscles, flexing with each step, were mostly hidden by a thin layer of fat that jiggled beneath the socks, which encircled her legs with red stripes just below her knees. She reminded him of a basketball player from the seventiesâminus the height, of course.
Her fingers hung by her side, swinging easily with each stride.
“You ever wonder why God used a donkey to speak, Bill? Can you even imagine a donkey speaking?”
“I suppose. It is rather strange, isn't it?”
“How about a whale swallowing Jonah? Can you imagine a man living in a fish for three days? I mean, forget the storyâcould you imagine that happening today?”
He dropped his eyes to the sidewalk and studied the expansion cracks appearing beneath them every few feet. “Hmm. I suppose. You have a reason for asking?”
“I'm just trying to nail down your orientation, Bill. Your real beliefs. 'Cause lots of Christians read those old stories in the Bible and pretend to believe them, but when it gets right down to it, they can barely imagine them, much less believe they actually happened. And they certainly would balk at such events happening today, don't you think?”
She strode along at a healthy pace, and he found himself having to work a bit to match her. Heavens! What had gotten into her?
“Oh, I don't know, Helen. I think people are pretty accepting of God's ability to persuade a whale to swallow Jonah or make a donkey talk.”
“You do, do you? So you can imagine it, then?”
“Sure.”
“What does it look like, Bill?”
“What does what look like?”
“What does a whale swallowing a full-grown man whole look like? We're not talking about chomping him up and gulping down the piecesâwe're talking swallowing him whole. And then that man swimming around in a stomach full of steaming acids for a few days. You can see that, Bill?”
“I'm not sure I've ever actually pictured the details. I'm not even sure it's important to picture the details.”
“No? So then what happens when people start imagining these details? You tell them the details aren't important? Pretty soon they toss those stories into a massive mental bin labeled âThings that don't really happen.'”
“Come on, Helen! You don't just jump from a few details being unimportant to throwing out the faith. There are elements of our heritage we accept by faith. This doesn't necessarily diminish our belief in God's ability to do what he willâ including opening the belly of a whale for a man.”
“And yet you balked when I told you about my vision of Gloria's death. That was a simple opening of the
eyes,
not some whale's mouth for a man.”
“And I did come around, didn't I?”
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
She let it go with a slight smile, and he wondered at the exchange. Helen walked on, swinging her arms in a steady rhythm, humming faintly now.
Jesus, Lover of My Soul . . .
Her favorite hymn, evidently. “You do this every day, Helen?” he asked, knowing full well she did not. Something had changed here.
“Do what?”
“Walk? I've never known you to walk like this.”
“Yes, well I picked it up recently.”
“How far do you walk?”
She shrugged. “I don't know. How fast do you think we're walking?”
“Right now? Maybe three, four miles an hour.”
She looked at him, surprised. “Really? Well then, what's three times eight?”
“What's eight?”
“No. What's three
times
eight?”
“Three times eight is twenty-four.”
“Then I guess I walk twenty-four miles each day,” Helen said and grinned satisfactorily.
Her words sounded misguided, like lost birds smashing into the windowpane of his mind, unable to gain access. “No, that's impossible. Maybe a mile a day. Or two.”
“Oh, heavens! It's more than a mile or two, I know that much. Depends on how fast I'm walking, I suppose. But eight times three
is
twenty-four. You're right.”
Her meaning caught up with Bill then. “You . . . you actually walk . . . eight hours?” Good heavens! that was impossible!
“Yes,” she said.
He stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth gaping. “You walk
eight hours
a day like this?”
She answered without looking back. “Don't fall apart on me, Pastor. My walking is certainly easier to accept than Jonah and his whale.”
Bill ran to catch up. “Helen! Slow down. Look, slow down for just a minute here. You're actually saying you walk like this for
eight hours
a day? That's over twenty miles a day! That's
impossible!''
“Is it? Yes, it is, isn't it?”
He knew then that she was pulling no punches, and his head began to buzz. “How? How do you do it?”
“I don't, Bill. God does.”
“You're saying that somehow God miraculously allows you to walk twenty miles a day on
your
legs?”
She turned and lifted an eyebrow. “I should hope I walk on my legs. I would hate to borrow yours for a day.”
“That's not what I mean.” He was not laughing. Bill looked at those calves again, bouncing like a stiff bowl of jelly with each step. Apart from the socks, they looked plain enough to him. And Helen was asserting that she was walking twenty-four miles a day on those damaged knees that, unless his memory had gone bad, just last week favored hobbling over walking. And now this?
“Do you doubt me?”
“No, I'm not saying I doubt you.” He didn't know what he was saying. What he did know was that a hundred voices were crying foul in his mind. The voices from that bin labeled “Things that don't really happen,” as Helen had put it.
“Then what are you saying?”