Page 30 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

“St. Simon and St. Jude. So good they named it twice,” Marcus quipped.

The church might have had two saintly benefactors, but it was a wreck of a place.

Over the past thirteen years, it had been occupied by junkies, tagged by graffiti artists, set alight, boarded up, and bust apart on multiple occasions, in the meantime being stripped of a good proportion of its constituent building materials.

The surrounding area seemed to have declined in sympathy; a nearby housing project bore the unfortunate honor of being Maine’s worst, and the liquor store had the look of a heavily fortified bunker.

Kate and Marcus parked underneath a faltering streetlight, watched, carefully, by a couple of young men who were just boys, really, in huge coats, on the opposite side of the road.

“Talk about Lost Causes,” Marcus went on, philosophically. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No,” Kate replied. “But let’s do it anyway.”

“Well, I got your back,” Marcus said. “But I don’t like the whole ‘perfect sacrifice’ angle. That doesn’t sound like it’s going anywhere nice.”

“Let me see that photo.”

Marcus had found a photograph of Elijah Cox in his early twenties – graduating from some sort of Bible college in Utah. They had very little other information to go on.

“I got a reply from his employer, if that’s the right word.”

Cox worked for a publisher of religious books, typesetting texts and online study materials.

“What do they say?” Kate asked.

“Thank you for your interest in our products. Are you interested in making a donation?”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Well, he files a tax return every year, so he’s not being fed by ravens.”

“What?”

“Elijah, the prophet in the Bible went off to live in the wilderness during a famine. God sent him a pair of ravens, and the ravens brought him bread and meat twice a day.”

“Door Dash courtesy of the Almighty, huh?”

They looked at the graduation photograph.

Cox had a high forehead and chiseled features.

Piercing blue eyes. Otherwise, Kate thought, he looked quite ordinary: an earnest young man, surrounded by other, earnest young men.

Earnest, sometimes, was the precursor to fanatical.

But not always. So what made the difference?

Marcus handed the phone back. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I need to.”

Marcus nodded, a silent consent. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“My mom came. This used to be a nice part of town, you know? People in the neighborhood were so shocked by what happened outside their church that they made this… well, I guess it was like a kind of a shrine. Flowers, candles, cards…. My mom went down to see it but I…”

She simply ran out of words. In her heart, she was reliving those first, few, awful days.

When everything was numb. When there was still a certain incredulity, a feeling that this thing couldn’t have happened to them, to him, to her .

It was a thing that happened on the news, in far off places, to other people.

Not to her dad. Gradually, like the aftermath of a dentist appointment, the numbness ebbed away, to be replaced by raw, pulsing agony.

She stopped believing he would walk through the door.

Stopped getting out a bowl and a spoon for him when she made breakfast. Started to understand that “never” really, genuinely meant “never,” never and forever.

The hurt was unbearable. But it did get better, over time.

No, that wasn’t the right word. It became more possible to live alongside it.

It was a chilly night, the first proper hint of winter.

She was glad she’d brought gloves, gladder still when it fell to her to pry apart the boards blocking a fire exit at the back of the building.

Marcus couldn’t do it, on account of his broken fingers, and Kate was relieved at how easily the boards shifted.

“I think we just found his front door,” said Marcus.

“What if it’s not just his? You remember that warehouse with the baby?”

The first case they’d worked together centered on a sprawling former warehouse near the docks at Saint Port, a stone’s-throw from the Canadian border.

They’d expected to find a tobacco smuggling operation.

Instead, they found several dozen undocumented families from Central America.

A baby was literally in the middle of being born when they raided the premises.

Travel to interesting places – the Bureau job ad said. They weren’t exactly lying.

The interior of the church smelled of damp stone; they could practically feel the spores of mold and mildew as they breathed in the chilled air.

Marcus held the flashlight high as they picked their way through a succession of dungeon-like rooms, which appeared to be part of the basement of the church.

In every one, almost every one at least, something skittered across the room as they came in: the sound of panicked little claws on tiled floors or wood.

In one, they found a junkie’s kit, stashed rather tidily on a ledge above a fireplace: rubber tourniquet, spoon, candle-stub, plastic lemon.

The whole thing draped with cobwebs. The junkie, probably, long since become a ghost.

In the next room, the flashlight beam picked out an array of tiny fairy lights, strung across the walls and hooked around tacks or drawing pins at certain points.

Marcus went rummaging in one corner and suddenly the room was illuminated.

It was strangely pretty, suddenly reminding Kate of a college roommate who’d had tea-lights and candles everywhere.

She was, momentarily, so charmed by the scene that she didn’t notice what Marcus was staring at.

He wasn’t staring; he was transfixed, open-mouthed, gazing in shock at the walls.

Kate’s breath caught in her throat; it was like glimpsing someone’s mind, the 3-D installation of a deeply troubled soul.

Center of the piece was her – a furtive, slightly blurred snap; from the looks of it, she thought she was at the big Trader Joe’s by the railway terminus, post-run, a make-up-less mess, her hand basket full of the stupid things you grab when you’re hungry and you don’t have a sensible plan.

He had been this close to her. This close, and she hadn’t had a clue. The thought made her feel sick.

Arcing out from that central, stolen image, a web of lines, different colors of wool, stretching out to more photographs, news clippings, Bible verses, odd, mundane things: a receipt for a recent Starbucks purchase, two lattes, three muffins.

Marcus had been extra hungry that day. Another receipt, this one from the drugstore; this one depressed, embarrassed, and enraged Kate in equal measure.

“Vee, I’m just going to check next door.”

She nodded, preoccupied with the sight in front of her.

A local newspaper article about her winning an essay prize, in fifth grade.

Quotes from the Old Testament. For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God .

From the Book of Psalms: a fire goeth before him and burneth up his enemies round about . And then:

But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones. And I was weary with forbearing. And I could not stay.

She didn’t so much understand that line from Jeremiah – the gloomiest of all the prophets – as felt it.

It was like one voice talking to another across the millennium.

She understood the burning fire in the bones; in her case, it was the longing to know the truth, in each case she solved, but especially, to understand what had happened to her father.

On the floor, at the foot of the sprawling mind-map was a big, antique Bible, the sort of thing a religious family of the 19 th century would have spent a lot of money on and handed down through the generations.

Different owners would put their names in the front, and the book would thus double-up as a sort of family tree.

This one was different. It was heavily annotated throughout, in a tiny, almost illegible hand.

Typically, a small part of a Bible passage would be underlined, and next to it, in the margins, there’d be a note.

KATE – CALLED TO WITNESS

That was on almost every page. There were too many to count.

KATE - THE SAVED REMNANT

So was that. Along with multiple cryptic symbols, mentions of Denton, fire, and justice.

She took a couple of photographs, but the light from the fairy lanterns was too weak.

In any case, it would take weeks, months maybe, to work out what this was all about.

It was about obsession, that much was clear.

“Kate, you still there?”

Marcus’s voice startled her. “Yes, what have you found?”

Marcus said something indistinct by way of a reply. She went to the doorway to the next room, but he wasn’t there. There was a small set of steps in one corner of the room, leading, she imagined, to the main body of the church.

“Marcus, where are you?”

She tested the stairs with her foot. Rickety, but sound, she thought.

She went up, and as she did so, heard something that sounded like a faint cry.

It sounded muffled, distant; it could even have been from the street outside.

She scoured the area with her flashlight, realizing that she was now on the edge of the church’s central hall.

Unable to see where she was treading, she stumbled suddenly and fell, breaking the fall with her hands on the cold damp stone, hearing the light smash.

She had tripped over Marcus, who was lying unconscious at the edge of some lockers, a nasty-looking gash on his temple.

Had he tripped and hit his head?

There was no blood on the lockers. Nor on the floor. Nor on the edge of the nearby pew.

Someone had struck him. Someone who was here. Nearby.