Stacey was a mystery to me in many ways, but I could guess where she had gone after leaving the rooming house.
I drove up the street and parked in front of the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle. I leaned on the steering wheel and looked up at the ramshackle wooden structure, seeing it as if for the first time. The first floor was an old storefront with plate-glass windows that needed cleaning inside and out. Upstairs seemed to be some sort of meeting space: maybe an old dance hall from the days of the river drivers. On the third floor, a lamp glowed behind a shade. The clapboards were flaking blue paint onto the cracked sidewalk. A single match could have burned the whole place to the ground.
Faded lettering on the building identified it as the DOW BLOCK 1894. So the Dows were the original settlers in this neck of the woods. No wonder they acted as if they owned the town. Their ancestors probably had.
As I climbed out of the patrol truck, I readjusted the holster containing my .357 SIG. Looking up at the darkened sky, I saw a few faint stars veiled by clouds, as well as blinking lights I recognized as airplanes traveling to Europe and beyond. A transatlantic flight corridor passed directly over the state of Maine like a superhighway through the heavens. No matter how deep into the woods you went, no matter how far from civilization you believed yourself to be, you couldn’t escape the sound of jets or the sight of contrails.
The message on the lighted sign hadn’t been changed since my last visit. It still displayed St. Paul’s warning to the Philippians about dogs and evildoers. Sage advice, I thought.
I pressed my face to the darkened plate glass, but it was difficult to see more than a few feet inside. The first floor appeared to be some sort of storeroom. I could make out stacks of cardboard boxes and a sagging clothes rack with coats and dresses. Stuffed animals and baby dolls were lined up along a shelf.
A rickety set of stairs had been built along the side of the building: a jerry-rigged fire escape to bring the place barely up to code. I climbed to the third floor, where I had seen the light. A television murmured inside the apartment. I knocked and waited.
After a few moments, the door opened a crack, and a young woman in a shapeless cotton dress peered out at me.
“Hello?” she said with no friendliness.
She was very thin, except for her very pregnant belly. She had acne scars and limp brown hair, but her features were beautiful. A makeup artist would have viewed her face as an exciting canvas.
Warm air, scented heavily with garlic, flowed out into the night.
“I’m Warden Bowditch. I’m looking for Brother John.”
A man called from the next room. “Teresa, who is it?”
She slammed the door in my face.
I took a step backward and felt my lower back touch the railing. The wood creaked but held. It would have been a long way to the ground.
Before I could knock again, the door opened wide. A bespectacled man stood before me, dressed in a white shirt buttoned to the throat, creased black slacks, and white athletic socks. His neck was long; his wrists were skinny. He wore his graying hair in a buzz cut, white-walled around the ears.
“Yes?” he said.
“Brother John?”
“What do you want?” There was a twang in his voice that made me think of cattle roaming across distant prairies.
“I wondered if I could ask you a few questions.”
He inspected my badge and gun. “Is this an official inquiry?”
I gave him my best bullshitting smile. “No, but I hope you can help me with some information.”
He locked eyes with me for an uncomfortably long time. Then he nodded and stepped aside to make way. I entered a brightly lighted kitchen where a pot was bubbling on an electric stove and two cats were eating from cans on the counter. I could hear fake-sounding laughter coming from the television set in the room beyond.
Brother John padded off into the living room. One of the cats, a tabby, sprang onto the linoleum and began rubbing against my pant leg, leaving a residue of gray fur. I nearly tripped over it when I took a step forward.
The furniture in the living room consisted of a threadbare couch and a beanbag chair pushed beneath a reading light. The bone-colored walls were utterly without decoration. A big boxy television balanced on a table. Brother John pointed a remote control at it, and the picture winked off.
The woman had disappeared into the bedroom, but another cat, a calico, was curled up on the sofa. Brother John swatted at the cat, which gave a yowl and leaped onto the floor, hissing.
“Have a seat.” He indicated the cat-shaped depression.
I remained standing. “This won’t take long.”
“I’m going to sit, if you don’t mind.” He settled himself, stiff-backed, against the couch cushions. “I find this constant harassment wearying.”
“I’m not here to harass you, Pastor.”
“That’s what your colleague said this afternoon.”
“My colleague?”
“The woman warden.” He pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. “I had to ask her to leave.”
If Stacey had let him think she was a police officer, she could be fired, or worse.
“What happened?”
“I don’t want to have this conversation again.”
“Did she ask you about the hikers who disappeared in the Hundred Mile Wilderness?”
A cat jumped onto Brother John’s lap, and he began stroking it vigorously. “I’m not sure why it matters.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police that they had been here?” I asked. “You must have known that people were searching for them.”
“When they came in that morning, they introduced themselves as Christians.”
“They were.”
“My congregation isn’t some freak show to be mocked. Especially by two homosexuals.”
I tried to keep my face blank. “What happened?”
“They laughed at us. So I ordered them to leave.”
“You threw them out of your service?” I said.
“‘No one who practices deceit shall dwell in my house. No one who utters lies shall continue before my eyes.’ Psalm 101:7.”
The image I had in my mind of Samantha and Missy was that they were polite young women. I had a hard time believing they would have behaved rudely. But whatever they had been at the start of their journey, they no longer were when they arrived in Monson, at least according to the testimony of Steffi Ross. In reality, I knew very little about these women. Believing that the victims of violence are perfect little lambs instead of complicated human beings is a dangerous fantasy.
Maybe Samantha and Missy had behaved like brats; maybe Brother John had cause to ask them to leave the service. It still didn’t excuse his failure to report the incident.
“You should have told the police they were here that morning, Pastor.”
“And bring my church under suspicion?” His voice seemed to bubble up from the bottom of his throat like something viscous. “We had nothing to do with what happened to those girls.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because they brought it on themselves through their sinfulness.”
“What are you saying?”
“The Lord sent those wild dogs to tear them apart.”
Was this the point where Stacey had started screaming? Had she even made it this far? Steffi Ross had warned me that he was insane. It was all I could do not to punch the man in his self-righteous face.
“You really believe that?” I said. “You think their death was some sort of divine punishment?”
“God’s justice is not man’s justice.”
There was no point asking him where I might find Stacey. Even if he knew, this crackpot preacher wasn’t going to tell me. I tried to imagine what it must be like living inside his skull, seeing the world through his crazy eyes, but it was too much of a horror show.
I looked down at my hand and saw a fist. “I need to leave now.”
“I never should have invited you in,” Brother John said, as if I were a vampire. In his twisted mind, I was probably in league with the devil.
Two of the cats followed us into the kitchen. Whatever was cooking on the stove had started to burn.
As he closed the door on me, I said, “Can I give you some advice, Pastor?”
He hesitated. His eyebrows pushed against the tops of his glasses.
“When the state police show up at your door tomorrow, you should try giving direct answers to their questions. Homicide detectives aren’t big on psalms and proverbs.”
The door rattled in its frame, and the lock clicked. In the silence I could hear the drumbeat of my own pulse. I closed my eyes and tried to collect myself.
The investigators would want the names of every person who had been present at the church that morning. One of them might have been Chad McDonough’s man in the red tent. Maybe Samantha and Missy were the victims of a hate crime, I thought. People were still murdered in this world for being gay. It was a lot more plausible than a coyote attack.
I opened my eyes and gazed down on the village of secrets. In the houses below, televisions flickered behind drawn curtains, and woodsmoke rose like ghosts from chimneys. To the south was the oil-black lake stretching off into the void. To the north were the shadow-draped mountains of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Darkness seemed to be closing in around the town of Monson. It felt as if the only candle in a room was dying and about to go out.