Last Writes (13 page)

Swiftly riffling through the files, she came across an unlabeled folder at the back of the drawer.

A sheaf of papers, covered with handwriting she knew she had seen before.

This was the same nervous printing, the same extreme uphill baseline. What she read confirmed that the content had a similar theme to the handwriting she had been examining before Lynn’s interruption: the destruction of the earth and all the malefactors who had contributed to its demise; the desire of the writer to serve as a leader in the Temple of Brighter Light. The date scribbled at the top was two years earlier. The essay was in Rodney Powers’s office. The implication seemed clear: more than likely it was his handwriting.

Claudia puzzled it out. Stedman had given her Rodney Powers’s handwriting to examine. Did that mean he believed Rodney’s loyalty was suspect? Did he already know that Rodney had virtually kidnapped little Kylie from her mother? Or had he thrown it in as a ringer to test her skills?

Something about the handwriting troubled her. If only she had been able to keep the note Erin had taken back she could have compared the two. This sample didn’t jibe with her memory of it, and that conflicted with a basic tenet of handwriting authentication: If major differences existed between handwritings that were supposedly authored by the same hand, there must be a reason for those differences. Reasons could include mental state, medication, aging, and many other factors.

Still, it would have been helpful if she had Erin’s note to look at. She replaced the file and closed the bottom drawer. She was reaching for the next one when there was a light knock and the door opened.

 

The second visitor of the afternoon was Rita, who said she would show Claudia to the room where she would be staying.

“It’s just upstairs,” Rita said. “You’ll be on the same floor as Brother Stedman.”

As they climbed the stairs together, Claudia managed to hide the relief she felt that she had not been caught prying in the file cabinet. She had pretended to be looking for something in her purse under the desk. Thank heavens there hadn’t been time for her to open the second drawer. She would have been caught in the act, and what credible excuse could she have given for snooping in Rodney Powers’s files?

Rita was still speaking. “Only the brothers on the governing board have their quarters in the house, but all except Brother Stedman are on the third floor.”

“Does that include their whole family?”

“Oh, none of them are married. They’ve devoted their lives to TBL. We’re their family.”

“That’s true devotion,” Claudia replied, following Rita past Stedman’s office to a room at the end of the hall.

It had been pointed out to her that there were few locks in the compound, so she carried the envelope containing the handwriting samples with her. Harold Stedman had said she was to return them to him, rather than keeping them overnight. Maybe there was a good reason for his apparent paranoia. Confidentiality had already been breached the moment Lynn saw her own handwriting among the samples.

The room to which Rita took Claudia was small and spare, but pleasant enough with a twin bed and night table, a student desk and wooden chair, a matching chest of drawers. The quilt that covered the bed looked handmade, as did the lacy pillow on top. A set of small water-colors of nature scenes made an attractive grouping on the wall.

“Nothing fancy, just clean and comfortable.” Rita went to the window and pushed it open a crack. “I know it’s quite warm up here now, but if you leave the window open, the room will get a breeze and be nice and cool for you tonight. The bathroom is across the hall. You won’t have to share it with anyone. Brother Stedman has his own, of course.”

“Thank you, Rita. Where’s Kelly’s room?”

Rita looked uncomfortable. “Sister Brennan will be staying in Ararat.”

“Ararat?”

“When Esther took you to the dining hall, you probably saw a tall building in the distance? Four stories? That’s Ararat. That’s where the accommodations are for single workers.” When Claudia frowned, Rita added, “She’ll be comfortable there, I promise you.”

“Why isn’t she staying here?”

“We don’t have another room available.” Rita’s eyes slid away, giving Claudia the impression that she was being less than truthful.

“Could you tell me where to find her right now? I’d like to speak with her.”

“I’m sorry, Sister Rose, but I don’t know where she is at the moment. I expect you’ll be able to find her if you walk around a bit. Pretty warm weather to be outside, though.”

“
Somebody
must know where she is.” Claudia started to reach for her cell phone, then remembered that neither she nor Kelly had been able to get service in the hills.

“Brother Norquist might have taken her just about anywhere. They could be in a meeting room, talking, or he might have taken her to a classroom so she could hear one of the lessons. He might be giving her a tour of the facilities. There’s really no telling.” Rita headed for the door and added more briskly, “Dinner is at five o’clock.”

“Thanks, I’ll see you then.”

Rita excused herself and left Claudia to unpack the few items of clothing she’d brought along for her stay. She set her laptop on the desk, thinking she would check her e-mail, but there was no Ethernet cable or phone line in the room. No point in looking for a wireless connection. She wouldn’t be able to go online while she was at the Ark.

Almost pathetically grateful for the electrical outlet she found behind the desk, she booted up the laptop. Even though she wouldn’t be giving her lecture for a couple of days, she copied the PowerPoint presentation over to a thumb drive. The university would use its own AV system so she wouldn’t need to bring the computer with her.

Seating herself at the desk, she went through the handwriting samples once again, refreshing her memory, then opening a new word processing file on the computer. She quickly typed up her notes on the samples, powered down the laptop, and replaced the samples in the manila envelope, ready to return them to Harold Stedman.

She wondered how Kelly was doing and why there seemed to be some effort to keep them separated. Or was she just imagining things? Paranoia could be contagious.

 

 

 

“It all sounds pretty harmless,” Jovanic conceded when she phoned him late in the afternoon from the Ark’s office. “But I don’t like it that I can’t easily reach you.”

“It’s the hills around here, there’s no reception.” Claudia lowered her voice. “It’s not like they’re blocking calls . . . at least, I don’t think so.” She tucked away that question for later consideration.

Her request to use a landline had created a minor disturbance, even after she’d explained to Rita that her mobile phone had no reception here. She might as well have asked for an introduction to Jesus Christ himself.

It seemed that the office phone was kept in a locked drawer in Rita’s desk and Rita insisted that she had to get permission from Lynn Ryder before she could allow access. They were trying to avoid abuse of the privilege, she explained. As if that were a good enough answer.

Now Claudia regretted that she hadn’t just taken her car and driven away from the Ark, where she could speak freely, knowing her call would not be monitored. Here, she had no such certain knowledge, and she counted on Jovanic to understand that when she avoided talking about her covert reason for being at the Ark, it was an attempt at circumspection.

She studied his voice the way a good doctor listens to her patient. “How are you doing?”

“Fine. I got some curls in this afternoon, a few crunches. Felt pretty good, getting back to the gym.”

Of course he would start working out the moment she was out of sight. It would do no good to ask whether he’d gotten clearance from the surgeon. “You’re supposed to take it slowly,” she reminded him. “You don’t want any more setbacks.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Don’t do that. You know I hate it.”

“As much as I hate you hovering?”

“Okay, fine. Lift as many weights as you like. Do sit-ups till you throw up. You won’t hear a word from me.”

This time, Jovanic laughed out loud. “Baby, that’s why I love you.”

 

At dinner, Claudia and Kelly found seats at separate tables. They had scoped out the one where Erin told them James Miller presided as table captain, and Kelly made sure to wangle her way to a seat there. From across the room, Claudia could see from the way she tilted her body toward Miller that she had already begun working on him.

She took her own place with a family group that included Magdalena, the young woman who had taken charge of them at the previous evening’s rally, along with her younger sister, Rachel, and their parents. There was also a lovely African American woman of indeterminate age who said her name was Vera, and a whitehaired couple who appeared to be in their eighties.

The elderly woman stretched across the table and shook Claudia’s hand with the grip of a much younger person. She had a face with a thousand wrinkles, an osteoporosis-bent spine, and an oxygen cannula in her nose, but Claudia could see from the wicked glint in her eye that she was a firecracker.

“Oka Diehl,” the woman said by way of introduction. She pointed at her husband. “That’s George. He’s been trying to keep me in line for sixty-three years, but it don’t work.”

“I’ll bet it doesn’t,” Claudia agreed with a grin.

George Diehl’s boyish smile made him look like a schoolboy in an old man’s body. “She’s never quite learned what it means to be a submissive wife,” he said. “So I’ve just learned to put up with her antics.”

The bantering was interrupted for a lengthy blessing over the food, which was given by one of the governing board at the head table, but picked up again as dinner was served. As they began to eat, the conversation waned and Claudia seized the opportunity to ask her table mates how long they had been associated with the Temple of Brighter Light.

Magdalena’s mother sat quietly, waiting for her husband, the table captain, to speak. He had introduced himself to Claudia as Brother Samuel Kingston. “My wife and I were both raised in the church,” he answered her question with pride. “We’re third-generation TBL.”

“And what a little brat he was, too,” put in Oka Diehl. “Always getting into hot water; gave his poor mother fits, young Sammy did.” Her husband tried to shush her but his efforts were ineffective.

“That’s enough, Sister Diehl,” Samuel Kingston said kindly. “We don’t want to scare Sister Rose away, do we?”

“Well, you’re all grown up now, Sammy. Can’t spank you anymore. But there were always other boys to take your place.”

“Sister Rose came to the rally the other night,” Magdalena said, deflecting the attention from her father. “I took care of her and her friend, Sister Brennan.” This was said with a self-satisfied air, from which Claudia inferred that she was taking credit for Kelly’s and her presence at the Ark. Maybe brownie points of some sort were awarded for the number of converts members recruited.

“We were quite impressed with the presentation,” Claudia said, improvising as she went along. “Mr. Stedman’s talk about the end of time really made us sit up and think. We’ve been looking for answers and we feel as if
something
led us to the Rally.”

Samuel Kingston said, “First John 5:14, sister.
‘No matter what we ask, if it is according to God’s will, we will receive an answer.’
Since you were permitted to come to the Ark so quickly, Brother Stedman must have been convinced of your sincere desire to learn. I promise you, if you apply yourselves and study with us, you can be assured of being saved when the cataclysm arrives. You’ve arrived here just in time.”

“It’s that close?” Claudia gave him wide-eyed innocence.

“It’s right upon us, sister. It’s a blessing that you and your friend came to the rally when you did.”

George Diehl added, “You’ll start out with a class on how the Temple got its start, and what you can do to support its aims.”

“Oh, I thought we would be studying the Bible.”

“Well, of course you will, my dear, but that comes later. First, you need to know who we are and what we believe in. Remember, the Temple of Brighter Light is God’s chosen representative on earth. Understanding about the organization is an important part of learning how to avoid being destroyed with all the other nonbelievers. Our name is the Temple of Brighter Light because the light keeps getting brighter as we get closer to the cataclysm, and we are given new truths all the time.”

Claudia nodded as if in agreement, but her insides were churning, every inch of her being resisting what she was being told. Her inclination was to argue that they were being blinded by the light that they claimed imparted knowledge; that it was just a man-made organization—and why didn’t they start thinking for themselves? But to do so would be counterproductive to her goal of finding Kylie Powers. She pushed aside the mostly uneaten plate of macaroni-and-cheese, which already felt like a deadweight in her stomach, and turned to Magdalena’s younger sister. “How old are you, Rachel?”

“I’m eleven, but I’ll be twelve next month.”

Claudia smiled at her enthusiasm. “Twelve? You’re almost grown up. What’s it like for a girl your age to live at the Ark?”

Rachel looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Some things are different here from the outside. You don’t have television or video games . . .”

“Oh! My friend Rosalie Garcia told me about those things. Her family just moved here last month. She tells me all about what it’s like outside the Ark.”

Claudia noticed Rachel’s parents exchange an unhappy glance. Her mother said, “I’m sure she tells you how much better her life is here, where we’re safe and taken care of.”