Authors: Koethi Zan
“I guess you haven’t been in touch with her recently. Sylvia Dunham is definitely not a member here. She is with the Church of the Holy Spirit. A rather interesting little sect, or community, or whatever you want to call it. Well, to each his or her own.” Her expression turned dour. Then she looked around at the sanctuary with obvious self-satisfaction, admiring her picture-perfect church with its tall windows yawning up over the shining hardwood pews. “They don’t have a church per se.” She stopped abruptly, as though she’d said more than she wanted to already.
Her eyes were on the door as she spoke again.
“If you’ll excuse me, I need to get things ready before our Wednesday-night Bible study.”
“Where can I find someone who is in that congregation?” I asked. I could tell she was planning to take my arm, probably to lead me out of there as fast as possible. Without even thinking, I avoided it by moving quickly in the direction of the exit on my own.
“The only person who can tell you about that congregation is Noah Philben. Probably the only one who will talk to outsiders at all. He’s the leader of it, if it isn’t blasphemous to call him that. He stays at their … compound, but you won’t be allowed in there.” She looked me up and down, seeming to weigh her next words carefully. She shrugged, but I noticed her tone was softer now.
“They have rented a space though, not far from here—on Route Twenty-two, right in the shopping mall with the Trader Joe’s on the way into town. It used to be the community center. I think he keeps an office there. There’s a white cross out front. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” I said, rushing to get the last words in as she closed the door in my face. The locks clicked directly in front of me.
I dug in my bag and found the small notebook and pen I had packed. I carefully wrote down Noah Philben’s name and the directions she had given to his rented office.
Just before five I wandered back over to the diner, figuring the waitress’s husband sounded like my best bet for now. The waitress was already standing out front, a light trench coat wrapped around her tightly, smoking a cigarette. I surprised her.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, this time not unfriendly. She gestured to a small wooden bench to the left of the door, and we sat down. She put out her cigarette on the arm of the bench, and I stared at it, transfixed, thinking of the fire hazard, as I watched to make sure each glowing ember burned out completely.
“Gotta quit these.” She turned to me, her newly applied lipstick glistening. “Now, why would a nice young lady like you want to write about such an awful story?”
I didn’t have a ready answer, of course, and was regretting mentioning a book at all. I could hardly pass for a real journalist and was wishing I could have come up with a better cover story. I’d have to make do, though, so I decided to treat the question as rhetorical, and only smiled in response.
“Haven’t there already been some books about this?” she went on.
“Three,” I said a little too quickly, a little too bitterly.
“So what’s the point? Hasn’t that story been told? Or do you have a new angle, as they say?”
“Those other three books were … incomplete.”
“Really?” Now she seemed intrigued and leaned in a little closer, so close I could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes. “My husband will be very interested to know that. What was wrong with them?”
I hadn’t thought through how to explain this, so I carefully avoided eye contact as I spoke.
“You’ll have to read my book, I guess.” I put on my best voice
of false cheer, which usually didn’t work very well. This time was no different, but she didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she had only asked the question in the first place to be polite.
“Not me. I can’t read that kind of stuff. Life is hard enough without filling your head with all those awful things.” She paused. “Those poor girls. I hope they are making it okay. My friend Trisha, she had an abusive maniac for a father. He ruined her life. She started drinking in high school, ran away, eventually started doing meth. She’s cleaned her life up now, but she’s not over it. Probably never will be.”
“I suppose you never get over something like that,” I said flatly.
“No,” she continued. “You never do. Trisha’s doing better though now, from what I hear. She moved to New Orleans last year. She thought the change would do her good. Had a cousin out there. When she was here—she worked here at the diner—I’d catch her looking off into space, staring at the window, and I always thought, she’s going off someplace dark in there. Real dark.”
At the words
New Orleans
, I bolted upright. Something was ringing a bell. Tracy had been from New Orleans originally, and she’d also had a rough childhood, so maybe that was all it was. I took out my notebook and jotted down a reminder to think about it when I got back to the hotel.
As I slipped the notebook back into my bag, a car pulled up, and the waitress waved to the man in the driver’s seat. She turned to me, as he approached us, and said, “I’m Val, by the way. Val Stewart.” She extended her hand to shake mine, saying, “Honey, I don’t know your name.”
I saw her hand coming toward me and froze. I had to respond normally. This would not be the only time someone would want to shake my hand, now that I was corresponding with live people and not just the ghosts in my head. I braced myself, but as she was about to make contact, I lost my nerve. I dropped my notebook and
bag, in what I was sure seemed an obvious ploy to avoid her touch. As I bent down to pick up my things, I nodded up at her and told her, in as friendly a tone as I could muster, that my name was Caroline Morrow. She smiled back warmly and pulled out another cigarette. Disaster avoided.
Val’s husband, Ray, was a small man, a few inches shorter than she was. He was very trim, in his sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a twinkle in his blue eyes. You could see right away what Val meant when she said he could talk your ear off. When he heard from Val that I was writing a book about the Derber story and specifically about Sylvia Dunham, he invited me home for dinner without hesitation. I begged off, even though I wavered. I wanted to go but couldn’t bear the thought of driving back to the hotel after dark. Instead, Ray insisted we go into the diner for a quick coffee.
Val rolled her eyes, “See, I told you, sweetie. Listen, I’ve seen enough of that place today. You two get coffee, and I’m going to run over to Mike’s and pick up a few things.”
Back inside, we sat at a booth, and as soon as we’d settled in, Ray started talking.
“Sylvia moved here about seven years ago. You probably know she’s from the South. Nice girl, but quiet, you know. It was a shame she took up with that Church of the Holy Spirit. It’s nothing but a cult, if you ask me.”
“Why do you say that?”
He hesitated, his eyes sweeping the room before he went on.
“Well, Noah Philben wasn’t always religious, I can tell you that.”
“You know him?”
He put his elbows on the table and bent his head toward mine, a conspiratorial look on his face now. “I went to high school with his cousin, so I knew the family. A sorry one, that Noah. He drank a lot, did some drugs. Left town after graduation and was gone for
several years. No one knows what went on then. Nearly drove his family crazy, but they didn’t like to talk about it. When Noah came back, he seemed a little off. Went back to work at the quarry for a few months but couldn’t keep that up. Then he started his ‘church,’ if you want to call it that.” At that moment, he pointed out the window of the diner.
“There they go.” I looked over and saw a white van with tinted windows pull around the square. “Church van.”
“The lady at the church on the square seemed pretty dismissive of it, to say the least.”
“Oh, that woulda been Helen Watson. You met her? Ha. Friendly one, eh? Well, she wouldn’t be too happy about anything having to do with Noah, that’s for sure. He was her high school boyfriend. She ran off with him when he left. She came back two years later with her tail between her legs. Never talks about those days. She says it’s none of anyone’s business. Later she married Roy Watson, who became the pastor at that church about ten years ago. People say she pushed him to go to seminary school. She always wanted to be a preacher’s wife, I guess. Now she thinks she rules the roost of this town.”
Not seeing how the town gossip was getting me any further, I tried to redirect the conversation back to Sylvia.
“I went by Sylvia’s house today. There was no one there—doesn’t look like anyone has been home for some time.” I didn’t want to admit I’d riffled through her mailbox, and felt a blush of shame creeping up my neck.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “I can’t remember when I last saw her. She keeps to herself, but usually comes in to the diner just about now, when I’m picking Val up. Maybe comes in once or twice a week.”
“Does she have a job? Anyone else I could check in with?” I felt I was hitting a dead end.
“Not that I know of. Not around here anyway. Guess I’m not as helpful as I thought I’d be.”
“What about her family? Did she ever talk about them?” I wasn’t used to asking all these questions. The last thing I ever wanted to do was engage people more; usually I wanted interactions to end as quickly as possible. Even my voice sounded strange to me, foreign, remote, like a bad recording of the way I imagined it in my head. I noticed I almost couldn’t formulate the right lilt at the end of a question.
“No, that was the strange part too. If I had to guess, I’d say she was running away from something down there, but she never really talked about it. She was from somewhere around Selma, Alabama. Town with a history. Maybe she just wanted out of there.”
It was on the drive back under the darkening sky that it hit me. I nearly veered off the road. New Orleans. Where Val’s friend had moved. It reminded me of something in Jack’s letter. Ignoring the fact that the sun was fading over the horizon, I pulled over onto the shoulder and hit my hazards.
My heart pounding, I pulled the letter out of my bag. The lake. The lake was Lake Pontchartrain. I reread the line. It still made no sense to me, but I knew now it had to be that lake, and if so, then it meant only one thing: this was part of Tracy’s story.
I went through the whole letter again. I needed Tracy. I needed her to tell me how this fit in with her past, to tell me what it meant. Somehow I would have to make her talk to me, maybe even meet me face to face, to think with me to see if there was meaning in this madman’s words. To figure out if he was leading us somewhere, and whether he meant to or not.
CHAPTER 7
Tracy’s story had come out slowly over the years, a little here, a little there. I pieced it together out of small details that slipped out, mostly when she was feeling particularly low, desperate and hopeless down there in the cellar. For the most part, she tried to keep her life locked away from us. Her head was a private area where she could escape from him and from us too, I suppose. She was paranoid about each delicate shred of information she told us being used by Jack to manipulate her mind. That was their battle.
He always had Jennifer to use against me, so he didn’t need to rely on my memories, at least not while she was alive. I suppose that was why at the time I didn’t understand how high the stakes were for Tracy, how critical it was for her to keep her previous life as a sacred place. It was a mistake that would cost me dearly in
those later months of captivity. Nevertheless, we spent so many countless hours together, it was impossible not to get a pretty vivid picture of her life on the outside.
Tracy was born to an eighteen-year-old high school dropout in New Orleans. Her mother was a heroin addict, with all the pain and suffering and horror that comes along with it. Men wandered in and out of their filthy apartment on the first floor of a Creole townhouse on Elysian Fields, one that looked like a crumbling cake that had hardened with age on somebody’s countertop.
When Tracy was five her little brother, Ben, was born right in the apartment. Tracy watched his birth from the corner and saw her mother take a massive hit of heroin during labor, an anesthetic so powerful that she barely moved as Ben’s head emerged. It was a miracle the child survived, and an even greater one that Child Protective Services managed to forget about this little corner of the world. Apparently the city of New Orleans had chaos enough to deal with elsewhere, and after a brief, perfunctory interview, the social workers had left them alone.
For years that brother was just about all Tracy had in the way of familial love and affection, and she fended for the two of them with all the fierceness I came to know was in her. Her mother provided little if anything for them. She rarely ate, so consumed was she by the drug, and there was never much food in the house, certainly not enough for both kids. So Tracy had gone out onto the streets of New Orleans to build an entirely different sort of life for them. In any other city, that might not have been possible, but in New Orleans, alternative lifestyles took on a new meaning.
Over time Tracy ingratiated herself into the world of street performer culture—would-be life dropouts and buskers looking to get discovered, while making their daily bread in service of the tourists
who swamped the streets. Tracy and Ben became their orphaned mascots, and they in turn protected the children from the horrors of nightlife in the city.
Tracy was a clever young girl who learned all the tricks—magic, juggling, acrobatics. She also had a gift for storytelling and charmed tourists and fellow street performers alike with her precocity. The other minstrels built a special dais for her in a back alley of the French Quarter. She would stand and recite poems or tell stories to the gathering crowd. Inevitably, as her audience dispersed, Tracy would overhear the wife in a couple saying they ought to call someone, someone ought to adopt her. Tracy used to dream of that—that some rich tourist would come along, fall in love with her and her brother, and take them away from their pathetic little strain of existence.
Sometimes they would stay out all night in the Quarter, Ben tucked away in an alley on a pile of dirty old blankets, but never out of her eyesight. She’d watch the drunks scuffle home and the prostitutes she mostly knew by name wandering back from their johns. Eventually the city would go quiet in the hour or so before dawn, and only then would she gather Ben up, sleepy-eyed, and trudge back to their grimy apartment. Their mother never asked any questions.