Last Writes (31 page)

Jovanic left the path and shone the flashlight into a clump of pampas grass that lined the side of the path. He walked around behind the plants and a moment later called to Claudia. She followed his voice. “Is it Kelly?”

“No.” He was kneeling on the ground, his body blocking the dark form lying there. As Claudia moved around him, she realized that he would not know if it was Erin. Her eyes followed the flashlight beam over the body protectively curled in on itself to a face streaked with blood.

“Lynn!” Claudia dropped to her knees beside the security chief. “Lynn, can you hear me?”

Lynn Ryder groaned. Her eyes fluttered and rolled up. “What—what hap—?” She struggled to sit up, but Claudia pressed her shoulders back onto the grass.

“Just stay still, we’re going to get you some help.” Claudia turned to Jovanic. “Tell Rod to find Dr. Jarrett.”

Lynn looked up at her, frowning as if her vision might be blurry. She reached up and touched her head just above the temple; stared at her bloodstained hand. Her eyes seemed to get better focus and she scrunched them as if trying to recall what had happened to her. “Hit me . . . she hit . . . Brenn—”

“
Brenn? Brennan?
Kelly
hit you?”

“She was trying . . . take the girl . . . tire iron . . . turned . . . caught my head.” Lynn Ryder rolled onto her side with a moan, trying to get up.

Claudia put a hand on her shoulder. “You probably have a concussion. You shouldn’t move around.”

Jovanic returned from the path and crouched beside Claudia. “Rod’s gone.”

“What do you mean,
gone?”

“I mean he’s not where we left him and I couldn’t see him anywhere.”

“Oh hell, he must have gone to the church.” Claudia stood and drew Jovanic a few feet away, where Lynn Ryder wouldn’t hear. “Lynn’s hurt pretty badly, I think. Kelly’s missing with a tire iron; Erin and Kylie are missing . . .”

“Tire iron?”

“I’ll tell you later. We have to find Rodney before he gets himself into trouble. What should we do with Lynn?”

“We have to take her with us. I’ll carry her.”

“Joel, you’re still recovering from an infection, you shouldn’t—”

“I’m fine and we don’t have a choice. We can’t leave her out here alone.”

“Okay. We’re not far from the infirmary. We can take her there. Maybe there will be night staff on duty.”

Between them, they managed to get Lynn Ryder to her feet and Jovanic swung her into his arms without much effort. Claudia held the flashlight on the path ahead, but her mind was on the church, her heart praying they would find Kylie Powers in time.

 

As with most of the buildings at the Ark, the door to the infirmary was unlocked. Claudia held it open as Jovanic carried Lynn Ryder inside. As with the Victorian, all the lights were burning, but no one came to the front desk. She opened the door that led to the examining rooms and the room where Kelly had spent the afternoon.

“There’s a hospital bed in the back room,” she told Jovanic. “I don’t think anyone’s here, but I think she’ll be safe there until we can get some help. There’s really nothing else we can do for her.”

“We need to get to a phone and call 911.”

She helped him settle Ryder in the bed. “As far as I know, the only two landline phones are in the Victorian. One’s in Rita’s office, locked up. The other is in Stedman’s office.”

“Shit, we don’t have time to go back there.” He straightened and the front of his shirt was stained with blood from Lynn Ryder’s head wound. “Ms. Ryder, do you remember anything about what happened before you got hit?”

Ryder squinted at them through drying blood. “I just remember—Erin Powers came back with Brother Johnson. She was fighting with that Brennan woman. Why were they—”

“Erin and Kelly are sisters,” Claudia said. “Was Kylie with Erin?”

Ryder’s eyes clouded with confusion. “Kylie? The baby? No. Not with Erin.”

“With who, then? Was Kylie there?”

“Brother Stedman took her. Erin . . . wanted to go and dress Kylie for the con—consecration, but the other one was yelling.”

“What about Jermaine Johnson?” Jovanic asked. Claudia crossed her fingers and hoped that Kelly hadn’t gone after
him
with a tire iron. She had a sick feeling that to Johnson a tire iron in Kelly’s hands would be about as effective as a toothpick.

“Brother Stedman sent Brother Johnson to help . . .” Lynn’s eyes suddenly opened wide. “I have to go! The end of time—I have to—”

“You can’t go anywhere,” Claudia said. “What about the end of time? What’s going on, Lynn?”

“It’s time. I have to tell my—” Her hand flew up and covered her mouth. “Oh God, what do I do?”

Jovanic got in her face and he looked convincing: “Ms. Ryder, Lynn, listen to me. I’m a police officer.” He took out his badge wallet and showed her his ID. “I want you to tell me what you know about what’s going on tonight, and it has to be right now.”

“You’re a cop?” She grabbed his arm with both hands, holding on as if he were offering her a life jacket. “What time is it? Tell me! What time is it?”

He checked his watch. “Eleven twenty-five.”

“Oh, no.” For a moment, Lynn looked more like a freaked-out kid than the head of security for the Ark compound. Then her voice grew stronger. “You’ve got to help me. I need to call someone, get them over here.”

“Who do you want to call?”

“My—my aunt and uncle. The phone in Rita’s office, you can—”

Claudia stared at her, thinking she had to be concussed. “We’ll call them for you after we find Kylie. Do you know where Stedman took her?”

“No! I have to call them now. You’ve gotta let me—” She let go of Jovanic’s arm and tried to push herself up; fell back on the pillow, groaning.

Claudia hurried into the bathroom and wet some paper towels. The wound was above the hairline, hard to see in the black hair. She dabbed away the blood from Lynn’s face and assessed the damage. She would have one hell of a shiner by tomorrow.

“Lynn, we’ll come back as soon as we find Kylie, and you can call your aunt and uncle then. Right now, you have to stay here and take it easy.”

“I can’t, I’ve gotta go—gotta tell—”

She was growing more agitated, having trouble getting the words out. Jovanic narrowed his eyes in speculation. “Your aunt and uncle—are they your handlers?”

It didn’t seem possible, but Lynn’s face paled even further. Her eyes darted from him to Claudia. “Who
are
you? What are you doing here?”

“We just want to find Kylie,” Claudia said. “Did Stedman take her to the sanctuary?”

“They were going to Erin’s house to get her ready. Please—”

“Which house is the Powerses’?” Jovanic asked.

“Bethlehem. But—”

He started for the door. “We’ll come back for you as soon as we can. Stay here until then.”

 

They exited the building and started moving fast toward the village.

“What was that all about?” Claudia asked. “What did you mean, ‘her handlers’?”

Jovanic shot her a look. “She’s the FBI operative.”

“What?”

“It was a guess, but her reaction confirmed it. She’s the one. Those people in town, her ‘aunt and uncle,’ are agents. They’re posing as her relatives.”

“So, the times she went to see them she was actually reporting in?”

“That, plus an important part of their job would be to keep her deprogrammed, make sure she stayed as psychologically healthy as possible while she was working for them.”

“Being undercover for long periods of time has got to be extremely stressful.”

“Especially for someone who’s just acting as an informant, not an official agent who’s trained for it.”

“Rita mentioned that sometimes some of the members went with Lynn and helped clean their house because her ‘uncle’ was in a wheelchair.”

“The Feds would have spent a lot of time and effort setting the whole thing up before recruiting her from the group, or sending her in—whichever way they did it—especially considering how paranoid Stedman is.”

Claudia thought about it as they jogged along the path together. She remembered remarking to Agent Oziel during her debriefing with him about the irony in the chief of security being the one person whose handwriting indicated lack of honesty. He must have been laughing behind that poker face, aware of the biggest irony of all: that the chief of security was acting as an informant, working with the FBI. Small wonder Lynn’s handwriting had showed tension. Small wonder that she had been so upset when she caught Claudia examining her application essay.

Beyond the infirmary, the other common buildings were unlit and the grounds dark. Jovanic carried the Maglite and they ran as fast as the bouncing puddle of light on the path ahead allowed. Claudia could hear small creatures scuttling through the shrubs, and she remembered Stedman’s warning about coyotes and other predators. Those night creatures were not the ones that concerned her.

Lights up ahead.
A building rose out of the darkness, its interior lights shining like a row of peeping eyes in the night. Jovanic switched off the light. “What’s that place?”

“The dining hall.” Claudia slowed her steps. “What’s with all the lights? Joel, this isn’t right. They eat early here. After what Lynn said—” She broke off, not wanting to give voice to her fears.

They were only a few feet away now. Together, they approached the open dining hall door with caution. Then Jovanic moved in front of her and went to look inside. When he turned back, Claudia tried unsuccessfully to read the expression on his face. She pushed past him and stared at the scene inside with bewilderment.

 

 

 

Row after row of deserted tables. Plates of half consumed food. Seats left unoccupied mid-meal. The rancid odor of tilapia left out too long in the hot room made Claudia’s stomach churn.

A slight movement caught the corner of her eye. She swung around. A gray raccoon the size of a small spaniel crouched on one of the far tables, gorging on someone’s abandoned fish dinner. Its robber’s mask seemed oddly appropriate as it looked up and gave her and Jovanic the once-over before finding them unworthy of further consideration and returning to its meal.

Jovanic caught Claudia’s eyes and held them. Neither needed to ask the question aloud:
What the hell is going on here?

“This is nuts,” Claudia muttered. “This is weird.” She edged nearer to him, wrapping an arm around his waist, drawing comfort from the bulk of his physical presence and his strength. “I’m scared, Joel. Lynn said Stedman has Kylie; she said it’s the end of time. What are we going to do?”

“According to Rod, the altar would be in the sanctuary behind the church. If they’ve decided to move the ceremony up, as Lynn said, to after midnight tonight, everyone is probably gathered there.”

“Still, to leave in the middle of dinner—” She left it unfinished. “I haven’t been to the church yet, but I think if we just keep following the path we’ll come to it.”

Jovanic consulted Rodney’s hand-drawn map. “You’re right. The main path is the key. Look, it winds around the houses. Then there’s some empty space, then the church. Let’s go.”

A few minutes later they reached the outskirts of the group of homes the TBL members referred to as the village. Like the dining hall, lights burned through unshaded windows of virtually every home they passed.

“Which one is Bethlehem?” Jovanic asked.

“I have no idea. But it’s
interesting
that the Powers family lives in a house with that name, with Stedman calling Kylie the Chosen One.”

Jovanic looked at her with skepticism. “You mean he’s equating Kylie with Jesus? That’s pretty far out, even for this bunch.”

“Honey, you don’t
know
this bunch. Nothing is too far out for them.” She pointed out Emmanuel, the Diehl house, where she had visited Oka. Jovanic swung the Maglite over the door, illuminating a black ribbon that had been tacked up, announcing the elderly woman’s death.

They moved quickly from one house to the next, looking for the one named Bethlehem. Each house bore an engraved brass nameplate above its knocker, and on each door a small bound bundle of silvery dried leaves had been tacked up.

“Sage,” Claudia informed Jovanic after making a brief detour to check out one of the bundles.

“Why would they put sage on the door?”

She shrugged. “Usually, it’s used for smudging.”

“Would you like to put that in English?”

“It’s a Native American ceremony that’s gone mainstream among New Agers. It’s for cleaning and purifying a home. You burn sage when you want to get rid of negative energies or entities. But this just feels creepy. It makes me think of the Angel of Death passing over the homes of the Hebrews in the Bible.”

“Except that the Hebrews put the blood of the lamb on the door, not sage.”

And that made her think of Kylie in the hands of Harold Stedman.

 

They had nearly reached the end of the row of houses when an anguished cry tore through the night.

For the space of a millisecond Claudia wondered whether she had imagined that the sound had a human origin. Maybe they’d heard a coyote. But she knew better.

In the same instant, Jovanic had the Beretta in his hand. Together, they ran toward the sound.

Someone was coming toward them with a stumbling gait.
Rodney Powers.
About fifty yards from them he collapsed on the path. Harrowing sobs racked him, but Claudia ran past. She ran toward the building he had come from. It had no spire, no stained glass windows, but she knew instinctively that it was the church.

“Claudia, wait!” Jovanic called to her. “Don’t go in there.”

“Kylie—”

He caught up with her and grabbed her arms, forced her to face him. “Listen to me. You saw Rod back there. Do you think there’s anything you can do to help Kylie? I’ll go. Let me check it out first.
Stay here.
”