Summer of the Redeemers (23 page)

I ran after her. The least I could do was to keep an eye on her. She was standing in the doorway of what used to be an old Sunday school room. I remembered it when it was filled with long wooden tables and little chairs. Modeling clay and toys had once been available. Now there were mattresses all over the floor. Blue ticking peeked out from under gray sheets, and the smell of piss permeated the room. Clothes were hanging from two-penny nails that had been driven all around the room. Men’s, women’s, children’s. At least twenty people slept on the floor, and some of them obviously wet the bed.

“It’s a commune,” Nadine said. “I’ll be damned.”

I remembered the word, and I knew that it meant that all of them lived as one big family. But it was Nadine who’d supplied the true meaning of that word. “Can you believe it? They all live here, screwing and pissing at their pleasure. All together in this one room.”

I turned away. “Nadine, please, let’s go. I don’t like it here.” There was something about Nadine that bothered me too. She was always talking dirty in the barn, teasing and needling Greg and Jamey. This was different, though. She made the words sound dirtier here. Maybe it was just because we were in a church.

“Just be thankful you don’t have to live in this shit. Can you imagine? No wonder Greg wants to stay at the barn. At least he doesn’t have to witness …” She cast her arm about the room. “This!”

I touched her shoulder. “Please, let’s go. We shouldn’t be here. We could get into serious trouble. Nadine, if this preacherman is the old one, the one who was here before, he could hurt us. He killed Evie.”

She turned to me. “Did he, now?”

I nodded. “I think you’re right. I think he killed little Evie. Selena wouldn’t have done that.” I leaned closer, my voice dropping to an urgent whisper. “Please, let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

“Maybe we can get that old preacherman to come out,” Nadine said. She looked up and down the hall. “Mr. Preacherman! Mr. Preacherman! Come out here.”

“Nadine!” I grabbed her arm hard. “Don’t do that!”

“Mr. Preacherman, there’s a young girl right here with me wants to ask you some questions. Maybe you could … convert her.”

Her foxy eyes were glowing with amusement. Even as she looked at me, she shifted her gaze over my head, as if she saw something down at the end of the hall.

Involuntarily I stepped closer to her and grabbed her arm hard. “We shouldn’t be here.” I tried to hide my fear.

“Nobody’ll ever know, unless you tell them.”

“Nadine, please take me home. Now.”

“Bekkah Rich, you’re acting like a baby.”

“I don’t care. We shouldn’t be here. The Redeemers aren’t the only things we have to worry about.”

If Nadine heard me, it didn’t register. “Let’s look around the rest of the place.” She walked out of my grasp and went on down the hall.

There were five more old Sunday school rooms converted to mass bedrooms. A couple of showers had been rigged up in the bathrooms, and the smell of stale urine was even stronger here. It must have been awful trying to get up in the morning and get into the bathroom. At our house, with only five of us, there was usually a fight between Arly and me. I made a promise that when I got home, I wouldn’t complain so much about the minor inconveniences. If I got home, I’d do a lot of things differently. Effie and Mama Betts were going to see a change.

We went on down the hall, Nadine leading and me lagging behind, until we opened the door to the preacherman’s living area.

“Well, well,” Nadine said softly. “Looks like being the leader of the pack has certain advantages. In this congregation being the shepherd is certainly preferable to being part of the flock.”

We walked in through the kitchen, which had an oven and a coffeepot. There were little straw trivets hanging, bright green, pink and yellow, around on the wall, evidence that someone had decorated for him.

The dining room table was covered in papers, which Nadine riffled through without any hesitation. I held my breath and watched as she picked them up at random.

“Looks like a lot of church business,” she said. “There’re receipts for building supplies, charts for working.” She tossed them back and picked up another bundle.

“Nadine, that’s private business.” The rule at our house was inviolable. No one touched Effie’s manuscripts or The Judge’s private papers. No one read anybody else’s mail. Arly and I didn’t get much mail, but I kept a diary on and off. Those things were personal. We could leave them in our room and know that no one would ever pry into them. Now Nadine was opening envelopes and reading away, as if she had every right. And the expression on her face notched my own worries up higher and higher.

“Fucking bastard,” she said clearly as she tossed a letter on the table. “Mother fucker.” Her brown eyes pierced me and went straight through.

She swept the table clean with one long arm. Then she stood up and walked to the door. She didn’t tarry long in the den area, which didn’t have a television or a radio. She went back to the bedroom. There was a real bed in a bed frame, a chest of drawers and a closet filled with dark suits and two spare pair of shoes. I stood in the doorway and kept an eye on her. I couldn’t stop her, and I couldn’t leave.

“Well, well, the preacherman gets to have a few luxuries. I wonder if that’s compensation for preaching or playing the stud.”

I looked around. I didn’t understand. And I didn’t say anything. Nadine was white-hot fury. I could see it in the way she walked, hips thrust forward and arms deceptively dangly at her side.

She went to the chest of drawers and pulled out the top drawer. “Silk,” she commented as she held up a white shirt. “Reverend Marcus has classy taste.” She shut that drawer and opened the next, going
through each one. There were silk shirts, expensive underclothes and socks, all made by manufacturers Nadine knew. She said they were exclusive. In the bottom drawer she found several cheap sexy night-gowns. She held them up for me to see. “Wonder what preacherman’s doing with sexy sleepwear in his room? Think maybe he’s fucking a few of the cows in his congregation?” She arched her brows at me. “More likely it would be a few of the heifers, don’t you think?”

I could only think of Magdeline, and I wanted to vomit. I kept hearing footsteps coming down the hall toward us. It didn’t matter much to me if it was a ghost or the congregation coming back. The Redeemers wouldn’t ever let us go. We knew too many of the preacherman’s secrets.

With an expert flip Nadine tossed the mattress off the bed. Her arm swept across the top of the chest of drawers, knocking a bottle of men’s cologne against the wall with a crash.

“Hey!” I called out, but it was too late. She bent over the box springs and came up with a small notebook in her hand. Her eyes were all sly. “I found it,” she said softly, and sat down on the box springs to examine the papers. “I knew he wouldn’t leave it out on the table.”

I wanted to run and escape, but instead I walked to the bed and sat down beside her. The notebook was written in black ink. There were names and dates and addresses, and to the side an amount of money. “What is it?”

“Just a record of babies who’ve been sold. The Redeemers are what you might call a breeding colony. I knew it all along!” There was victory in her voice.

I stood up and backed away from the bed. “Put it back, Nadine. Let’s fix the bed and get out of here.”

Now I knew we were deep in it. Nadine had the look of a person with a high fever. Her face was flushed and her eyes slightly glazed. I didn’t know if she’d be able to drive the truck home or not. I could drive an automatic but not a shift. I wasn’t even certain I could get her to the truck. All I knew was that I didn’t want to stay in Reverend Marcus’s place another minute.

Nadine tucked the lists in her pocket.

“Put those back!” I had to make her think about what she was doing. “Nadine, if he comes back here and finds those lists gone, he’ll know we were here.”

Her eyes focused on me and they seemed to clear. “You’re right. I’ll have to copy this information.”

“We don’t have time!” I went to her and grabbed her arm. I pulled with all my strength, bringing her to her feet. “Help me with that mattress.”

Together we managed to put the bed back together. I smoothed the spread until it looked the way it had when we first entered the room. Then I made sure all of the drawers were closed properly. The preacherman was neat. He wouldn’t leave any edges poking out of his drawers. I picked up the cologne and put it back on the chest of drawers. Some had spilled, but the bottle hadn’t broken.

Nadine had taken a seat in a straight-back chair beside the bed, and she was copying the lists onto a spare piece of paper.

“I’m going to check and make sure everything else is just the way we left it,” I said. “When I finish, we’re leaving here.”

“Okay.”

She didn’t look up, just copied away.

I tried to arrange the papers on the kitchen table just the way they’d been. That was the only other thing we’d touched. Walking down the hall, I paused at a door we hadn’t opened. We’d gone so far, why not the rest of the way? I asked myself. I swung the door open and stood, rooted to the spot.

There was a narrow table covered in a starched white sheet. Beside the bed were two enormous tin bowls filled with towels. The room was antiseptic white, like Dr. McMillan’s office in Jexville. There was a glass cabinet filled with medicines and a counter with some gruesome-looking tools and scissors. I recognized the scissors as the kind the doctor used to cut off bandages and things like that. Beside the scissors were several syringes.

My gaze swung back to the examining table. At the end, facing me, were two metal holders. Stirrups. Jamey’s sister, Libby, had been to Mobile to some special kind of female doctor. He’d put her feet in stirrups, just like women who had babies. My stomach flipped and a chill raced up my spine until the hair on the nape of my neck stood straight on end.

It registered on me that there were no windows in this room. There had been one, but it was bricked up so that not even a trace of outside light filtered in. That was more horrible than anything else.

I closed the door before I started screaming. Five steps down the hall was another room we hadn’t explored. I pushed it open to reveal a cot and a throw rug beside it. The only other furniture was a night-stand with a Bible on it. The room looked like one of the prison cells I’d seen on television. I told myself that what I was seeing wasn’t real. It was like a movie that somehow I’d gotten started in my head and couldn’t stop. That helped for a minute, until I imagined Magdeline in that antiseptic room. Once I thought of her, I knew I had to get out. The walls were closing in on me, very slowly and without a sound, but it was happening.

“Nadine, let’s go,” I called down the hall to her. I couldn’t believe I’d spoken. I hadn’t intended to, and it didn’t sound like me.

To my surprise, she came out of the preacherman’s room and closed the door. “Five babies, Bekkah. Just this summer. Five. And before they came here, there were others.”

“Did you put the list back?” I had to think clearly. We couldn’t leave a trace that we’d been here. What we had found was frightening. I didn’t completely believe it. Nadine was good at making things up. She had a list, but that was all. And the rooms? Maybe they were just for sick people. With so many people living at the church, there was bound to be a lot of sickness.

Nadine waved the copy of the list at me. “I said I put it just under the mattress, the way it was. Let’s go.”

Nadine led the way through the house, back into the hallway and back to the sanctuary. I didn’t notice she carried something else in her right hand until we were walking under the Jesus on the cross.

“Wait for me in the truck,” she said, and she sounded normal, like the old Nadine.

For a second I hesitated. She was staring at the crucifix again. I had no responsibility to protect the Redeemers from anything Nadine chose to do. The starched white sheet on the high, narrow table had relieved me of any charge of responsibility.

The sun was hot on my cool skin, and I realized I was sweating a lot. It had run down my back and soaked into my shorts, but my skin was still very cold.

Almost dazed, I stumbled toward the cemetery. The rawness of a fresh grave made me catch my breath. There was a pile of red dirt almost a foot high, with an old shovel sticking out of it.

“No,” I said, denying it even though I could clearly see it. Someone had been out in the cemetery digging while Nadine and I had been in the preacherman’s home. Had they seen us? I dropped behind a tombstone and looked all around. There wasn’t a sign of anyone.

I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help myself. I crept toward the grave.

“Oh, no.” The words escaped with my last lung full of air. The open grave belonged to Evie Baxter. Somebody had dug up the dead baby’s grave.

I think my intention was to put the dirt back. I grabbed the shovel and lifted a heap. When I looked down in the open grave, there was a little white christening gown lying in the hole. I dropped the shovel and the dirt and knelt down to pull the gown out. It was still damp, as if it had just come from the creek.

I struggled to my feet and stumbled out of the cemetery, the gown clutched in my hand. At the truck I leaned my head on my arms against the burning hood. I stayed there until my arms felt like they were going to catch fire. When I finally looked up, Nadine was coming around the curve. She was jogging and grinning.

“Let’s go,” she said as she hopped into the driver’s seat. She spun the truck around in the loose sand, not a bit concerned that she might get stuck. When we were headed toward the barn, she looked at me, not even noticing the white rag I held in my hand. “Don’t tell a soul we were there, okay? You can’t ever tell, Bekkah, or we could both go to prison.”

Twenty-one

F
OR
the first time all summer, I contemplated voluntarily giving up my riding lesson. Jamey Louise was cleaning my last stall, so I told her I didn’t feel well and I was going home.

“You look like dog poo that someone set on fire and stomped,” she said, leaning on her manure rake. Her head was tied in a bandanna, and there wasn’t a scrap of makeup on her face. During the summer she’d lost the little bit of baby fat she’d started with, and her body was lean and better-looking than it had ever been. Maybe that was why Jamey Louise worked more willingly than she ever had before. She also said that her cup size had increased from a B to a C. And she’d turned thirteen.

Nadine had disappeared into her house and didn’t come back out. I gave Jamey the breakfast Mama Betts had packed, and she settled down in the shade of the barn to eat the bacon biscuits with homemade scuppernong jelly. Even Jamey was smart enough to realize Mama Betts made the best biscuits in the world.

I went to the back door and knocked real hard, but there wasn’t a sound inside. Nadine’s dogs never barked. I couldn’t imagine how she kept them so quiet. Picket would have torn the screen down trying to get at someone at our back door.

I knocked again and stepped back away from the house. It stank. Mama Betts was right that Nadine didn’t keep a clean house. The trash piles had grown and grown over the summer. Kali Oka Road didn’t have garbage pickup like Jexville had, but Nadine owned a truck and she could have taken her garbage to the dump. But she didn’t.

It smelled like something had died in the kitchen, and I backed up a few more steps. I sure hoped she didn’t ask me and Jamey to clean up the garbage mess. Shoveling horse manure wasn’t bad. The smell coming from Nadine’s house was enough to gag a maggot, as Arly was always saying.

On the third try, when Nadine never came to the door, I gave up and started walking home. It seemed like it took forever to make the short walk, especially when I got close to the Welford place.

Mrs. Emily Welford was the last person I wanted to see, so I just kept walking toward the house until I passed under the grancy gray-beard tree and slipped into the old swing The Judge had made for me in one of the oak trees. Arly and I hadn’t played parachuter a single time this summer. It was a game where we’d swing as high as we could and then jump out when the swing was at its highest point. We’d mark where we landed. The farthest parachuter won the game.

I smelled the delicious lemony scent of Mama Betts before I heard her.

“Bekkah, are you sick?”

“Maybe a little.” I was. My head ached and my stomach jumped and twisted. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

“Where were you last night?”

“Alice and I went down to Cry Baby Creek.” The urge to confess was almost more than I could bear, but I couldn’t. “We were looking for the baby.”

“Come in the house and I’ll make you some soup. You look positively gray, child. You don’t have a bit of color.”

I followed Mama Betts like a puppy. “Where’s Effie?”

“Your father’s coming home. She went to the airport to get him.”

“Daddy’s coming home? For good?” It was too much to hope for. But even The Judge couldn’t fix what Nadine and I had discovered.

“For the weekend.” Mama Betts gave me a look that took in a lot of territory.

“And Arly? Where’s he?”

“He’s working over at Arnett’s Nursery this afternoon.”

No one would be home but me and Mama Betts. “Can I have my soup on the sofa and watch
The Edge of Night
with you?”

She stopped walking and turned around to look at me. “Of course. You must be feeling mighty bad.”

I nodded. “I am.”

“Are you sick or guilty?” she asked, her blue eyes watching.

“Both.”

“Then you have some soup and a nap first, and then we’ll talk.”

At last the tears came. They filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks, but I never made a sound.

“Whatever you’ve done, Bekkah, it couldn’t be that bad.”

No matter what I’d done, Mama Betts would never think the worst of me. “I think I’m going to be sick,” I whispered.

“Sick in body or sick in spirit?”

“I can’t tell.” I got a grip on my tears and fought them back. What would I tell my grandmother, if I could? That I’d been digging in graves in a church cemetery? That I’d broken into a church and torn up a preacher’s bedroom with Nadine? That I thought maybe the Redeemers were selling babies because Nadine said so? And I wasn’t even sure of that because she’d told me not to tell anyone or we could go to prison. Surely Nadine would have to call the police if it were true. Mama Betts’ hand on my forehead brushed back my hot hair. She lifted my chin and stared down at me through her thick glasses.

“No matter what it is, I’ll still love you, and Effie and Walt, too. Now stop crying in this heat or you’ll make yourself throw up.”

I wiped the tears off my face with the back of my hand. I felt her arm around me, pulling me up against her stomach and bosom. The lemony smell was stronger than usual.

“I made your daddy a lemon pie,” she said. “Just the way he likes them with meringue four inches high. That’ll put him in a good mood.” She hugged me to her side as we walked across the lawn. “I think Effie and Walt have been neglecting you lately. You’ve been so busy at that barn we haven’t gone swimming or made ice cream. Maybe we should do that.”

I was afraid if I tried to talk I’d start crying again, so I nodded.

“Let’s do that tomorrow. We’ll all go to the Escatawpa River, where it’s really deep enough to swim. We’ll take a picnic and that old hand-crank ice cream machine, and we’ll have us a time. Does that sound good?”

In the back of my mind I remembered Nadine’s promise to take Cammie for a ride down the road. It didn’t matter. I wanted to be with Mama Betts and Effie. I wanted The Judge to show me how to do the different strokes in the medley races. I even wanted to see Arly.

“That sounds great.” My voice was shaky, but it held.

“Can you get off work?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s settled. I’m declaring tomorrow a holiday. Nobody works, not even you or Arly. It’s going to be a family day like we haven’t had in too long. Maybe after
The Edge of Night
you can help me peel some potatoes for a salad. And I’ll fry up some chicken. I’ll even make another batch of biscuits and some baked beans.”

“Can Alice come?”

“The child’s practically family. Of course she can.”