Stone Angel

CHAPTER 17

Few creatures began life in November; it was largely a killing season. But in the hour before dawn, owls and bats were folding up their wings. Insects and small animals enjoyed a respite from the carnage before the balance of power shifted and the daylight predators opened their eyes.

The cemetery was at peace, but one of its angels was missing.

The chilly air of a sudden cold front had mixed up a low-lying fog, and the sheriff’s feet disappeared in the mist as he stood before the bare stone pedestal and read the dates of Cass Shelley’s life and death. Seventeen years ago, he had meant to add a line to this engraving, a bit of poetry perhaps, but the right words had always eluded him. All these years later, he was still thinking about this unfinished business.

He turned to his deputy, who blended so well with the dark. Lilith’s ghost-white father had been the most superstitious man Tom Jessop had ever known. If old Guy Beaudare had been here yesterday and seen that angel weep, he would have been down on one knee in a heartbeat, rattling rosary beads and chanting prayers like a madman. Apparently, Guy’s daughter was more at home in the solid world and not a big believer in miracles.

“So you figure they’re coming right back?”

“It’ll be a while,” she said. “They have to lay boards in front of the pallet to move the statue over the ground. It’s slow work.”

“But real quiet and no tracks or ruts. So Mr. Butler never left town. Good job, Lilith. I guess you earned your pay this week.”

“You’re not going to fire me?”

“Never occurred to me. I knew I could depend on Guy to raise his daughter right.”

“You knew all along, didn’t you?”

“From the first day. But it’s good you told me.” Though he had only set eyes on Lilith three times in her life, it would have been awkward to fire the girl. He had so many years invested in drinking with her father, and an ocean of beer was a damn strong bond.

“I’m gonna tell the FBI to go to hell.”

“I like the sentiment, Lilith, but you might want to rethink that. Twenty years ago, they came to me with the same deal.”

“My father said you told them where to get off.”

“But after that, there were times I could’ve used their help. You can learn a lot from my mistakes.”

“So why did you turn them down?”

“They made my skin crawl with their little dossiers on the New Church crowd. Granted, Malcolm’s pulled off some shady deals, but the feds didn’t know anything about that. They just wanted to collect information on another church. They’re a lot like insects, collecting things without a brain to tell them why, collecting for its own sake. I wasn’t about to help them. So they asked my deputy if he’d like to make a little extra cash.”

“Travis worked for the feds?

“Not Travis – that worthless idiot. No, they used the real deputy, Eliot Dobbs. He’s long gone now. Got a better job up north. What with the other towns going broke and folding left and right, I didn’t really need another deputy, so I never replaced him. But I did miss the connection to the feds.”

He walked down the gravel path, inspecting tombs and looking for a likely place to hide. At his back, Lilith was asking, “How did you find out Eliot was working for them?”

“He asked if I would mind having a spy on the payroll. Said he had a baby on the way and needed the extra money. Hell, I used to help him spin lies for his reports. And then when I needed help, the feds came through for Eliot. A boy from Dayborn had run off. Jimmy was just a little kid then – way too young to be on the road. The feds helped us trace him to New York City, and I brought him back home.”

And New York was where Kathy had run to. He was sure of that now. Did every damn road in the world lead to that hellhole? The cop at the Missing Persons Bureau had told him there wasn’t a state in the union that had not contributed a child to the streets of New York. When Jimmy Simms came home again, he had probably flooded the whole school with tales of the city, hiding out and foraging for food. But Jimmy was a good five years older than Kathy when he made his run.

“I guess Eliot was gone when Kathy disappeared,” said Lilith.

“That he was. But it didn’t matter. The FBI wouldn’t have spent any time looking for her. We all figured she was dead. There was so much blood.”

He picked out a monument decked with cherubs. It offered good cover and a view of the empty pedestal. “This is as good a spot as any.”

The deputy put one finger to her lips and pointed east.

The angel was coming.

And she was magnificent, wings spread for flight and carrying a sword. The ground-hugging clouds obscured the hem of her robes and the pallet. She appeared to float along the path between the tombs.

Lilith crossed herself, and the sheriff decided his deputy did have a bit of Guy in her after all.

The sheriff pulled back to join her behind the monument just as Henry Roth appeared in front of the angel to set down two boards in her path. The planks immediately disappeared into the white soup of low fog. The angel veered left down another alley of tombs, heading toward the pedestal, and now the sheriff could see Charles Butler behind the wings, his shoulder bent to the stone, slowly moving her along.

Butler wasn’t wearing his three-piece suit. He was filling out a pair of jeans and a denim shirt like a regular working man with some muscle on him. Jessop liked the man better this way.

As Butler and Roth passed behind one of the low tombs, they were lost from sight and only the head of the angel and her sword floated past the pitched roofs with their crosses and crucifixes.

The sheriff and his deputy watched in silence as the angel came into full view again. Now she was rising straight up in the air. The two men worked a jack on each side of the pallet until she was level with the top of the stone platform. Butler was surprisingly strong. He stood on the pedestal and rocked the angel to dance it into place.

And now Butler jumped to the ground and picked up the heavy pallet and the planks. He did it with such ease, it might have been only a bundle of matchsticks he was carrying. Henry collected the jacks, and they left the cemetery together.

The deputy stood up and stretched her legs. “You really think this is Mallory’s idea?”

“I know it is. And now I got her connected to Charles Butler. Your cousin’s in it with ‘em. She backed up that story Butler gave me.”

The sheriff walked up to the statue and admired this new incarnation of Cass Shelley. The angel was so fierce, just like Cass when she was on the opposite side of an argument.

Lilith stood beside him. “Why is she doing this?”

“She wants them to know she’s coming for them.” And it showed a lot of style, this threat carved in stone. The girl really knew how to hate. “Now I need a way to head her off before someone else gets killed.”

“You don’t think Mallory killed Babe, do you?”

There was something a tad anxious about her tone, like she had a lot riding on his answer, and he had to wonder about that. What might Lilith be holding back?

“You said there were quite a few locals with a grudge against Babe,” she said, in an offhand manner, as though it didn’t matter, and now he was sure that it did.

“So you don’t see any reason to consider out-of-town talent?”

“What about Babe’s widow? She hated her husband, didn’t she?”

There was a trace of hope in her suggestion of an alternate suspect, and this bothered him.

“Sally Laurie didn’t do it,” he said with finality and the positive authority of hard fact.

Did Lilith crumble a little? Yes, she did.

“Sally made a pile off the Laurie connection,” he said. “Malcolm gave her a house on prime waterfront property. It was a bribe to stay married to Babe. But her source of income was IRS money. Those tax boys have a real keen interest in the New Church.”

“Why? Churches don’t pay taxes.”

“Nobody in the Laurie family pays taxes. Malcolm makes a healthy donation to the town treasury to stay on my good side, but no Laurie ever pays any taxes. Turned out to be legal, and after a while, the IRS took Sally off the payroll.”

“How did you know Sally was working for them?”

“I saw her spending cash in the next parish. Nobody in the New Church gets any spending money. They donate all their time to the church, and the church owns their houses, their VCRs, their dishwashers and every stitch of clothes on their backs. Even their groceries are bought with church vouchers. But Sally had cash – a lot of it. She was a first-rate businesswoman.”

“That gum chewing bimbo?”

“Sally Laurie was also your predecessor with the FBI.”

Well, that set his deputy back on her heels. He smiled. “It was my idea. When IRS stopped her paychecks, I told her it was a shame to waste a perfectly good government resumé. IRS gave her a nice recommendation to the FBI. She made out real well selling lies to those suckers. You should see the size of her bank account.”

“She told you all this?”

“Sally and me were good drinking buddies for years. I was the only one in town that hated the feds and the New Church as much as she did. Who else was she gonna talk to? I do admire that woman. But here’s the best joke. Travis used to be a member of the New Church, and everybody thought he was the FBI mole.”

“What about Fred Laurie? He skipped town, too. Could he have killed his own brother?”

“I would like to know what happened to old Fred. Though I’m not all that curious in any official capacity. I’ve got enough murder on my plate right now.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s dead all right. He didn’t take any clothes, and he didn’t have any money. Where was he gonna go? Maybe there was more than one gun in the woods that night. Maybe he just annoyed the wrong person. Augusta walks that land every night, checking the feeders and counting her owls. She wouldn’t have tolerated Fred out there with a gun.”

“Augusta? You’re crazy. That old lady couldn’t – ”

“Now don’t you sell your cousin short. Remember, Augusta has killed before.”

Lilith smiled, as though this were a cozy memory of baking brownies instead of a murder in the family. “She was a pistol in her younger days.”

“She still is. So try to stay on good terms with her.” The ground fog was dispersing, and his feet scattered the wisps as he moved along the path. He was wondering how far to trust his deputy. “I’m meeting that New York cop for a beer at the Dayborn Bar and Grill around noon. You know the place?”

She nodded, but failed to mention her recent visit there and the long chat with Riker. The bartender had been unable to tell him what the conversation was about. The man could only say for a fact that Lilith could down a drink even faster than her father.

She kicked up some gravel as she walked alongside him. “Dad spent some memorable nights in that bar.”

“That he did. I remember the night you were born. Your father came in with four boxes of cheap cigars, and the place just stank for days after that.”

He and Lilith’s father had celebrated all night long. Toward morning, Guy Beaudare had begun to cry; it had suddenly occurred to him that the entire universe, from the Big Bang to the last evening star, was one great conspiracy of heaven to birth the beautiful and perfect Lilith. A drunken young Tom Jessop had taken exception to this theory, as Kathy Shelley had been born several years earlier.

“Every man in that bar was relieved when your father left town. We were so sick of hearing about the latest cute thing you’d done. And I never met a man with so damn many wallet photos of the same kid.”

No need to mention that he had matched Guy, story for story, ‘Lilith’s so smart’ for ‘Kathy is smarter.’ And then Kathy had disappeared, and the sheriff had not listened to Guy’s stories anymore. He had learned to drink alone, shunning all talk among men with children, believing that Kathy was dead.

As the sheriff and the deputy were walking toward the bridge, Lilith was saying, “If those two split up, you want me to keep an eye on Henry Roth or Charles Butler?”

“Neither. There’s something else I want you to do.”

The sky was lightening in the east, clouds flaming in advance of the sun. A blue jay opened its eyes to the tasty sight of a beetle and devoured it alive and squirming. Overhead, a hawk was circling on the air, watching for groundlings. Every waking thing in St. Jude Parish was scurrying into motion, hunting food or running from sudden death.

A new day.