The cynicism in India’s words and tone sent a shiver down my back, but I tried to keep my voice from showing my sudden apprehension. “Should we have a drum roll?” I asked.
“Sure, why not?” India rapped her knuckles on the table in a simulation of one. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She disappeared into the bedroom and returned with an oversized envelope. She set it on the table and extracted a photo. It was an 8 x 10 of a much younger India standing on a stage near a microphone. She was holding an armful of roses, wearing a crown, a bikini and high heels, and a smile bright enough to rival a sunburst.
“Miss Chevalier County,” she said. She handed me another similar photo. “Miss Bingham County Fair. I was also Miss Cotton Candy, Miss High Flyer, and Miss Dixon County Auto Show. And, would you believe, Miss Tax Freedom Day, for some accounting firm? I’d probably have been Miss Turnip or Miss Dill Pickle, if my mother could have located any such contests.”
In both photos she was certainly recognizable as the India I knew now: tall, long-legged, and slender, although the slenderness back then had a statuesque perfection different from her lanky look of now. Blonde hair long and lush, bikini more revealing and heels higher than anything I could imagine her wearing now.
She handed me a magazine clipping. In it she was wearing a miniskirt and boots, arms joyously outflung. She pointed to an oblong lump of equipment in the background.
“Air conditioners. It must have taken a couple hundred shots before they got the look of air-conditioned-ecstasy they wanted from me.”
“How did you manage it?”
“I imagined eating an enormous banana split, with hot fudge sauce and whipped cream. Something I could never eat back then, because I was always struggling to keep my weight down.”
Okay, the modeling world had its drawbacks, but I didn’t see any Christian scam here. Cautiously I came up with a neutral comment. “Being a model is the dream of any number of young women.”
“I liked some of it,” she said with a twinge of what sounded like regret. “But I never had the kind of ambition my mother had for me. She was determined I was going to be a supermodel, but she and my father were killed in a car accident before I arrived at the supermodel stage. Then I met Denton Waltenburg. He saw my photo somewhere and arranged to meet me.”
“Flattering. But who is Denton Waltenburg?”
“You’ve never heard of him?”
“No.”
She laughed without humor but with a hint of satisfaction. “He’d be disappointed.” She pulled out another photo. I thought it was going to be of him, but instead it was of a spectacular house. A huge, Spanish-villa looking house of tan-pink stucco, with lushly landscaped grounds, a formidable rock wall topped with wrought-iron spikes, and a glimpse of sun-glossed sea in the background.
“This was our home in southern California.”
A spectacular place. “Wow.”
“And you can’t even see the heated pool, the tennis court, the indoor theater, the workout room, the game room, the indoor waterfall, the six fireplaces, or the master bedroom the size of a small kingdom. Or my walk-in closet full of designer clothes.”
“What was Denton? A drug lord or movie star or something?”
Cynicism roughened her laugh. “No, not drugs, but it was crime all right. Wheedling money from people who couldn’t afford it and spending it on luxuries for us. A Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari. A Hummer just for fun. We didn’t own a Lear jet, but that was next on Dent’s agenda. Although, to be technical, it all belonged to the church, not us personally. Except that Denton was the church.”
The church. Now I was beginning to get an uneasy inkling of what this was all about.
“He was a TV evangelist?”
“Oh, yes. He had audio recordings and books published, and he traveled all over the country, very much in demand for his ‘messages.’”
“And this impressed you when you met him?”
“That, and the fact that he was doing something worthwhile with his life. He was mending messed-up lives, healing sick people. Helping the poor and ill and unloved. He cared about orphans in foreign countries and injustices everywhere. He knew words in half a dozen different African tribal languages. He had photos of himself with people in their villages. He wasn’t wasting his life on my shallow kind of life, which was using my face and body to sell shampoo and shoes and air conditioners. I saw myself sharing in all this worthwhile work. Although there was one small problem.”
I didn’t want to guess it, but I did. “Denton already had a wife.”
“Right. But he managed to divorce her without a big fuss, and she dropped out of sight in a villa in Portugal that the church provided for her. They had two teenage daughters who wouldn’t have anything to do with him after the divorce. He brushed that off as their worldly rejection of his higher spiritual beliefs, not his treatment of their mother.”
“You and Denton didn’t have children?”
“I was supposed to provide a new family to show God’s blessing on our marriage and Denton’s work. But that didn’t happen and somewhere in there I began to see how phony Denton and the church were. How much of the money that was supposed to go for good deeds and orphans instead went to provide a luxurious lifestyle for us and several other higher-ups in the organization. I learned that those tribal words Denton knew came from a researcher he hired. Someone else ghost-wrote his books. And those photos from jungle villages? Denton was in and out of those villages in the length of time it took to pop a flash bulb. I was shocked and disillusioned, and I wasn’t quiet about it.”
“How did Denton respond to that?”
“He told me I was foolish and unrealistic. He said we needed to show people that getting right with God brought prosperity and a good life now, that it wasn’t just some pie-in-the-sky afterlife thing.”
“Getting right included giving money to Denton’s ministry?”
“Oh, yes. Give to God, he’d plead from the pulpit or on TV, tears practically running down his face. It was all acting, just like Mary Beth and her Trafalgar. Except Denton raked in way more money than she could ever hope to.”
“But you stuck with him for a long time.”
She nodded. “I wish I could say I got out as soon as I realized what a big scam it was, but the breaking-point didn’t come until we had a big fight and he had his fist pulled back ready to smash me in the face. But he stopped, and I knew the only reason was because hitting me in the face would show. So he hit me in the ribs instead.” She touched the area lightly, as if she could still feel the pain. “He broke two of them.”
“So you ended the marriage?”
“As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Denton wanted to be rid of me. He had a new wife already picked out. They recently had a baby. God’s blessing on their marriage, as he’s calling it on the website.”
“Apparently you didn’t end up with a villa in Portugal the way the first wife did.”
“He and his church cronies offered me a bundle to quietly file for divorce. I was tempted, that’s for sure. But it felt like . . . blood money. I kept seeing all those little old ladies sending in money they sometimes desperately needed for themselves. I decided I’d rather be a bag lady than have that kind of money on my conscience.”
“So you rejected God along with Denton.”
“Sometimes I feel . . . something about God. I look around at the mountains and the inlet and the bay, and I think, this didn’t all just pop into existence by itself. A creative mind was behind it.”
“That’s a start. I think God’s working on you.”
She laughed. “Then he has his job cut out for him, doesn’t he?”
Forgetting my own doubts and confusion for a moment, I said, “He’s up to it. He was willing to send his Son to die for us.” Then I had another thought. “India, is it Connor’s motorcycle gang you’re hiding from? Or Denton?”
“That’s a problem, isn’t it? When you’re on the bad side of two outlaw outfits, you don’t know who may be after you.”
She spoke lightly, trying to make a little joke about her predicament, but we both knew how serious it was. I already knew how dangerous the motorcycle club was. Could Denton and his “church,” figuring she knew too much about their manipulation of donated money, be just as ruthless?
No wonder a normal, ordinary duplex on a normal, ordinary street had looked so appealing to India. She’d never lived that normal kind of life. Not with her ambitious mother. Not with greedy Denton. Not with hiding out in the middle of nowhere with Conner. Now she scooped the photos and clippings back in the envelope. At the last minute, after a hesitation, she pulled out one more and tossed it on the table. “Connor.”
A bearded, pony-tailed guy on a big Harley. Black leather chaps on his legs, red bandana tied around his head, wrist to shoulder tattoos on his arms. I couldn’t see a softer side to him, but apparently India had found one. She surreptitiously rubbed the corner of her eye, but her voice was back to normal when she said, “But I don’t really think anyone is after me.”
Did she really believe that? I doubted it. Not with the way she’d moved around, changed her name, and been careful to leave no trail. Even with me, she always paid her rent in cash.
“I just figure it doesn’t hurt to keep a low profile,” she added. “It’s the kind of life I prefer anyway.”
“Running around with me, trying to chase down a killer?”
She smiled. “It’s not a scam. Anyway, there you have it. My experience with Christianity. In my opinion God is mostly myth and most Christians are, to use Fitz’s word, hypocrites.”
“Somebody said something to me the other day that made me think. ‘Don’t judge God by the flaws of those who worship – or sometimes just pretend to worship – him.’”
“Well, I’m not inclined to take chances with any more ‘Christians.’” She said the word in a way that put it in quotation marks. She smiled again. “Except maybe you.”
Which, I realized, put a bucketload of responsibility on me. And I wasn’t sure I was up to it.