The red church (13 page)

Suddenly the sheriff didn't want to step inside. In his mind, he could hear the fluttery Halloween laugh from his childhood. The boards were clapping, claw-ing, the church door was a mouth, he was going to be swallowed, like Jonah into the belly of the whale. Like his brother Samuel.

He swayed dizzily and felt the preacher's strong grip on his forearm. "Are you okay, Sheriff?"

"Uh . .." Littlefield rubbed his temples. "Not get-ting much sleep lately. These damned—excuse me, Reverend—these doggoned murder cases must be getting to me."

"There's peace in prayer, Sheriff. You will find your killer. All things in God's good time." Littlefield felt his feet shuffle forward, almost against his will, and then he was inside the church. Most of the hay was gone. The handmade pews that had been stacked against one wall the day before were now lined unevenly across the floor. Brooms, pitchforks, mops, and buckets were scattered across the sanctuary. The room smelled of candle wax. They had accomplished a lot this morning. Or had they been working all night?

Behind him, Lester and Linda resumed their work. A woman emerged from the small wing at one side of the dais. Littlefield recognized her face but didn't know her name. She gave a short nod and began dusting the lectern. Littlefield thought he might sneeze, but he rubbed his nose until the urge passed.

"Looks like you'll soon be ready for a service," Littlefield said.

"There are different kinds of service, Sheriff. I work for God, you work for the people. But we're a lot alike, in a way."

"What way?"

"We both know there's more to this church than just nails and chestnut and rippled glass." Littlefield tried again to read the man's eyes. The irises glittered like muddy diamonds with many fac-ets, each facet hiding a different secret. Archer surely was well versed about the legends, handed down in his family for generations. Those were the sources of his childhood beatings. That he could maintain faith in God after such suffering was a miracle in itself.

"My father used to say, 'It's people what makes a church,' " Littlefield said. Archer smiled, showing perfect white teeth. "He was a wise man."

"Aren't you afraid of what people are going to say when you open the church again?"

"God delivered Daniel from the lion's den. He de-livered Isaac from Abraham's sacrificial altar. Why should I expect any less?"

"Well, for one thing, push never came to shove for Abraham, because he never had to deliver the knife blow. And Daniel didn't have a great-great-grandfather named Wendell McFall." The preacher let out a laugh that rolled from deep inside his diaphragm. The sound echoed in the wooden hollow of the church, the acoustics amplify-ing the power of Archer's voice. "Ah, the scandals and the ghost stories," he said. "There's only one ghost here and that's the Holy Ghost. As for the rest of it, I hope that the legends might draw a few curiosity seekers to our services. There are many paths to the one true Way."

"Amen to that." Littlefield walked to the dais, the fall of his boots resounding in the hollow of the church. He leaned over the railing that fronted the pulpit. The stain was still there. Littlefield's dizziness returned as he tried to attach an image to the ran-dom shape.

And he saw that it was the shape of an angel, or a Bell Monster, winged and fierce, with jagged claws and . . .

Yeah, sure. Sounds like something a murderer's lawyer would make up. It's nothing but a stain, old paint or some-
thing.

It was larger than it had been the day before, yet still retained its weathered quality, as if the stain had been embedded in the floor ages ago. And Littlefield wondered if it had been even smaller before Boonie's death. As if . . .

He didn't want to give legitimacy to his supersti-tious turn of mind. Telling Detective Sergeant Storie about the ghosts had been foolish enough. But now that the thought was trying to form, he held it out-side himself, examined it rationally.

. . . a s i f t h e stain is made from the blood of its victims.

There. Now that he admitted it, it seemed safe and perfectly silly. A psychotic killer wasn't on the loose. Something worse was on the loose, somehow finding legs and hands and a pair of eyes and a soul. A soul.

"See anything unusual, Sheriff?"

Archer's voice pulled him from a pool of dizziness. He met those brown eyes again, eyes that were now as dull and faded as the ancient woodwork of the church. Some famous person had said that eyes were the windows to the soul. Well, Archer's windows needed a good washing. Except then, you might be able to see inside.

"I don't believe you have anything to worry about," Littlefield said. "Now that you've cleaned up, there's no place for a killer to hide."

Except right out in the open.

Archer smiled, standing with his arms crossed. He was taller than the sheriff. "I never worry. I have God on my side, remember?"

"Yeah, but isn't that what the other side always says, too?"

Archer laughed again. "So they do, Sheriff. So they do."

Littlefield walked back through the church, Archer following. "I used to come to services here when I was young," the sheriff said. "Back when it was Potter's Mill Baptist Church."

"Oh, is that so? Being inside it must bring back a lot of memories." Littlefield didn't respond. He paused in the foyer to look up at the square hole in the ceiling. "You going to get a new rope?"

"Sooner or later. And I hope none of the congre-gation gets a crazy notion to hang their preacher."

"God stopped Abraham's knife." Lester and the Day woman were standing in the doorway. They drew back as he went into the sunshine. "Thanks for your time. Guess I'd better get on over to Zeb's." As Littlefield was getting in the Trooper, Archer called to him from the steps: "Say, Sheriff. Why don't you come back sometime for a service?"

"When?"

"First one's tonight at midnight."

Midnight. It figured. Nothing could be ordinary about this church.

Maybe he
would
come to a service, Littlefield thought as he drove away. Crazy as it was, maybe he would.

The thing with wings and claws and livers for eyes clicked sharp bone against Ronnie's window.
Can
you hear him aknocking?

Ronnie was trapped by the weight of blankets, fro-zen in sweat, clenched around the tight fire in his belly.
Close your eyes and it will go away. Close your eyes
—

His eyes were already closed. He opened them.

The sunlight coming through the window made his head hurt. He'd been asleep for so long that he couldn't remember where he was for about a minute. Plus he'd been having really weird dreams about the red church and a walking bloody thing and some-thing to do with Mom.

"Mom?" he called, his throat dry.

His nose wasn't as sore today, but he felt as if some-body had taken a hand pump and blown his face full of air. He licked his thick lips. "Mom?"

Tim came into the room, still wearing his pajamas. And he was eating chocolate-chip cookies. Mom was going to kill the little dork if she caught him eating cookies so early in the day. But, after the scary dreams, Ronnie was actually kind of glad to see his brother, though he'd never admit it in a million years.

"Where's Mom?" Ronnie asked.

Tim shrugged. His belly button showed below the fabric of his top. "Ain't seen her this morning."

"What time is it?" Ronnie groaned as he tried to sit up, then fell back onto the pillows.

"Almost eleven."

"Eleven?"
That meant that Mom was skipping church again. It was the first time she'd missed church two weeks in a row since Tim was a baby. Not that Ronnie minded, because his Sunday school teacher, Preacher Staymore, usually told him he needed to be saved, then made him wait after class while everybody else went to the main sanctu-ary for worship service.

Preacher Staymore would sit beside Ronnie and ask the spirit of Jesus to move into Ronnie's heart so that the child might be spared, and though Jesus loved the little children, there was only one path to salvation and that was through the blood of the Lord. And Preacher Staymore would tremble and put his palm on Ronnie's head and invoke the mercy and the power and the goodness, then ask Ronnie if he could hear the Lord aknocking. And the whole time Ronnie would be thinking about how Preacher Stay-more's breath smelled like a basket of rotten fruit.

"Can you hear Him aknocking?" the preacher would say, his eyes shining and glassy. "He's awanting in. And all you got to do is say, 'Come on in, Jesus. Come right on into this sorry sinful heart of mine and clean house.' If you won't do that one little thing, then don't go crying to the Lord when the devil comes to drag you into the pits of hell."

And Ronnie would always be afraid. That message, along with the preacher's pungent breath, made him hastily agree to be saved, to let the Lord shine His everlasting light into the darkness of Ronnie's heart, to throw the door wide open and say, "Come in, come in, come in."

Getting saved always filled him with a kind of warmth, as if something really
had
come into his heart. But the feeling always faded, and he'd slip back into his sinning ways. Preacher Staymore said there were two kinds of sin: the kind of the flesh, and
the kind of the spirit. Ronnie suspected that sins of the flesh had something to do with the naked women like those in Boonie's magazine, but his own sins were mostly those of the spirit Still, any kind of sin made his heart beat faster, and maybe that drove the Lord away, what with all the noise and commo-tion in his chest.

So every few weeks, Preacher Staymore would sense that Ronnie needed another saving. Ronnie was scared enough of the hellfire not to take any chances, even though sometimes he wondered, if the Lord was merciful, why would He make people go to such a bad hot place? And if sinners went to hell, what was the point of Jesus dying for them in the first place? And if the Lord was all-powerful, why didn't He just make people so they didn't sin? And if He already knew what happened in people's hearts, why did there have to be a Judgment Day when all the sins were revealed?

But those kinds of thoughts were sins of the spirit, and led to a fresh need to be saved. Ronnie didn't want to think about that right now. He had enough troubles, like a broken nose and his parents sepa-rated and a scary red church and bad dreams.

"Have you seen Mom?" he asked Tim.

Tim bit a crescent of cookie and shook his head. "Not since last night," he said, spraying cookie crumbs onto the floor as he spoke.

"Dang."

"The police are out again."

Ronnie sat up.
"Here?"

"No. They're over at Mr. Potter's."

"Mr. Potter? I guess maybe the sheriff wanted to ask him some questions." Tim shook his head. His bowl haircut made him look like a turtle. "I don't think so. Their blue lights were flashing when they drove up. And I saw the am-bulance over by the barn."

"You're fooling."

Tim's eyes widened behind his spectacles. "No, I ain't. You can go look." Ronnie rolled himself out of bed with a groan. He leaned against the railing of the top bunk, dizzy from spending nearly two days in bed. Through the win-dow, he could see two police cars on the Potter farm. The sheriff's vehicle was parked by the house. One of the deputies walked toward the barn, the sun glint-ing off his handcuffs and black shoes.

"You don't suppose . . . ?" Ronnie said.

"That whatever got Boonie Houck got Mr. Pot-ter?" Tim sounded almost pleased at the prospect. "That would be cool. Like one of those movies Mom won't let us watch."

Ronnie remembered his dream. Maybe it was just his overactive imagination again. "Did you hear any-thing last night?" he asked, trying to sound like he didn't care one way or another.

"Not really. I heard some bells ringing. I don't know what time, except for it was dark."

"I hope Mom is okay." Sure, Mom would be okay. Nothing would get her. Not even the thing with wings and claws and livers for eyes.

Ronnie thought of Preacher Staymore's words:
Can you hear Him aknocking? He's awanting in.
No way in hell would Ronnie let
that
thing come in. He shivered in the sunlight.
NINE

Sunday. A holy day, at least to the Protestants and Catholics and Mormons. Fools all. But Mama Bet comforted herself with the knowledge that they'd be burned by the light in due time. It was almost as if God had roped off a little section of the Blue Ridge and saved it for the Potters, Abshers, McFalls, and the rest. The original families came from Scotland and England, as white as the driven snow, though their hearts were as dark and Jesus-laden as any of their ancestors' hearts. And somehow those families had managed to protect this piece of valley at the foot of Buckhorn from invaders and outsiders. Kept it pure, except for the original taint that they brought with them when they settled in the 1780s.

You can't ever shake the blood.

She sat in her front porch rocker, looking out over the mountains she loved so much. Heaven ought to be this nice. A fresh spring breeze cut through a gap, working up from the foothills to stir the jack pines and locusts and poplars. The sky was clear enough for her to see the gray face of Grandfather Mountain forty miles in the distance. Even with her cataracts, she could make out the features that looked like a brow, a nose, and a long granite beard.