Hell on Church Street (21 page)

I stood up and moved to my left. The cat watched me go, stood up and wandered back into the kitchen. To my left there was a flight of steps, surprisingly steep. Gently, I took the first step, but the boards groaned like I had pained them. Ian might have been completely devoted to his
grandmom
, but he hadn’t spent his time keeping the house up for her. Van had said that his mother was a heavy sleeper, but every step I took creaked. Halfway up, another cat spat at me, clawed at my leg and darted down the stairs. I had to grab the railing to keep from tumbling backwards.

At the top of the steps, I took a moment. There were no windows in the hallway, and I couldn’t remember where Van had told me to find his Mother. I went left, creeping down the hall. Another goddamn cat hissed at me. It was scrawny, with a clipped tail and an arched back.

I tried to move past it, but the damn thing kept hissing, its hiss getting louder and building into a loud, awful growl.

I wanted to run. I didn’t want the old woman to wake up and start screaming. I didn’t want to have to look her in the eyes.

The cat kept growling. I stuck my foot out, just shook it in the direction of the goddamn beast. The cat took a couple of swipes at my shoe and I kicked it in the face. It darted away, thumped into a wall and ran away.

After I’d caught my breath, I went to the end of the hall. Mrs. Norris’s bedroom was facing the front yard, so I knew it had to be on the right. The door was closed.

When I turned the doorknob, my hand was slick with sweat. The door creaked like an old casket. I stepped inside. Directly in front of me a lot of moonlight shone through two big windows a few feet apart. It took a couple of long seconds for my eyes to adjust. I wasn’t even sure where the bed was. When my eyes settled down, I saw the big bed between the windows. I also saw Mrs. Norris sitting up and staring at me, cold moonlight glinting off the gun in her hand.

“You come up here…to kill me?”

I didn’t have any way to answer that question, so I didn’t even try.

“That’s my…son out there…in the truck?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

As my eyes adjusted, I saw her hair draped down both sides of her chest. She was wearing a white nightshirt and in the dark she looked a great deal younger. It took a second—because she’d surprised me, because she had a gun, because I was terrified—but I also noticed something else. It’s another of those details which did not register so much at the time, but which the years have brought clarity to: she was sitting on the left side of the bed, not in the middle. To her right was a dent in the mattress.
A big dent.

“Where’s Ian?” she asked.

I felt for the door.

She held the gun up with both hands. “I’m old,” she said, “but this here’s an easy…gun to shoot. And…I found the bullets for it…when I got home…
So
you take your hand…off the door.”

I dropped my hand. “Okay,” I said.

“Now, I asked you…a question.”

“I don’t know.”

“I know you’re lying, dear. You tell me…where my Ian is.”

“Please,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

She stared at me. I couldn’t see her well, but I think she might have had tears in her eyes. “Ian…”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

She lowered the gun. Her head drooped. I could have run. I knew it, but I didn’t run. I watched her sit there in the dark contemplating Ian. “My precious Ian.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“No,” she said leaning back into her pillows. “It was Van. That took my precious Ian.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “He was the one who sent me up here.” I was getting my steam back. I could run, but I saw more benefit in not running at that moment. “I don’t know why he killed Ian.” I started talking then. I told her I could go back
downstairs,
tell Van I’d done what he wanted me to do. She could be one step ahead of him. Or she could go out with me and confront him. Or I could lure him into the house. I talked for a while. I spun it. I sold it to her.

And she said nothing. She didn’t move.
At all.

It took me a while to notice. I get caught up in hearing myself talk, as you’ve doubtless realized. But it finally did break through. She wasn’t moving. I said, “Mrs. Norris.”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Norris?”

I took a step forward. The gun in her lap still glinted in the moonlight. I grabbed it. And she sat there, her head back in the pillow, her eyes opened. I touched her shoulder and she slumped back a little, her lungs releasing the last breath she had taken, a breath trapped there as she had slumped over and died.

“Well?” her son asked as we pulled out of the yard.

“She’s dead,” I said. “Your mother is dead.”

Van put his elbow on the
arm rest
of his seat and rubbed his face. When we got to the end of the gravel road, he turned and we went down another gravel road until we hit the two lane black top.

We were driving for a while in silence when he coughed and wiped some tears away and cleared his throat.

“You must find that pretty funny,” he said. “The fact that I’m crying.”

I watched him for a while as he wiped away more tears and stopped crying altogether. I thought of his mother dying of a broken heart, thought of Brother Card’s scream when he saw his wife dead on their kitchen floor, thought of Angela sobbing over the loss of her parents.

I shook my head. “Everybody loves somebody.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Van drove back to the hospital and pulled up to the curb, far from the entrance.

“Here?” I asked.

“Where else?”

“I thought you’d take me back to Church Street.”

“No,” he said. “It does neither of us any good to be seen together.”

“How am I going to get home?”

I didn’t mean anything by the question, but Van looked at me with pity. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re certainly a puzzle to me, Brother Webb. For a criminal mastermind, you are certainly clueless.”

“I’m not a criminal mastermind.”

“No, but you are a criminal.
As am I.
You can get out now. We won’t be seeing each other again, of course. I’d recommend you start running as quickly and smartly as you can.”

I opened the door and got out. I didn’t have anything left to say, nor did he, so he drove off and I walked back up to the hospital. I had to get back to Little Rock, but I didn’t have any money on me. I figured I’d go to the nurses’ station and use their phone to call someone from the church.

I was still thinking that when I heard someone call my name.

I turned and saw Brother Herschel walking out one of the side doors to the hospital. I waved at him.

Then I noticed he was with Nick.

They walked over to me, and Nick asked, “Was that Van?”

“Pardon?”

“The guy that just dropped you off. It looked like my brother-in-law.”

“Yeah, that was Van. We were talking.”

Brother Herschel smiled at me. “I’m surprised to see you up and about so soon, Brother,” he said.

I rubbed my shoulder. “Sore,” I said, “but okay. I’m a quick healer. Always have been.”

They offered to give me a lift home. I didn’t particularly want to talk to Nick, but I needed to get to the house as soon as possible so I accepted. I kept checking behind us to see if there was anyone following Nick’s car. Occasionally, trucks or cars would appear, but I didn’t see any signs we were being followed. Not that I could have known, I guess.

Nick drove, and Brother Herschel sat up front so I could sprawl out in the backseat. I actually fell asleep for a little while. Exhausted, I just passed out.

I dreamed. I’m not much of a dreamer, really. I never have been. Maybe my subconscious is too underdeveloped, or maybe there’s just not enough going on inside of me. I don’t know, but I rarely dream. The dream I had in Nick’s backseat disturbed me. I was in my father’s house. He sat on the back porch shooting at the trees. Angela and I hid in my room and she showed her breasts to me, but she had no nipples.

My father called, “Angela!”

“I have to go,” she said.

“No,” I said.

And then she was Bertie Mae Norris and she leaned over and kissed me. My mouth was bloody. I pushed her away and ran outside. Angela was sitting on Brother Card’s lap. I stood behind them. In the yard, Mrs. Card was picking up fallen limbs. I started to cry and woke up.

As soon as he saw that I was awake, Nick was ready with the questions.

He said, “I wasn’t aware that you knew the Norris family.”

He was talking, of course, about Doolittle. It took me a second, as I tried to shrug off the dream, to remember what Nick knew and did not know.

“Not very well,” I replied. “I didn’t know them until you introduced me to Sheriff Norris. You remember? His son is in our youth group.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“We had done some talking over the last few weeks about…” I could not remember Tim’s name “about his son. I think it had opened up an avenue for witnessing. We were talking about it here and there. I think the Lord was convincing him that he needed a change.”

Brother Herschel nodded.

Nick glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “I see,” he said. “It’s odd that Doolittle didn’t mention anything to Lacey about that.”

“How is Lacey? It must be a hard time for her.”

“Well, her brother is dead, and we have no reason to think that his soul was saved before he died…” Nick’s tone implied that I was an idiot. Or worse.

“I’m so sorry. Please tell her.”

“Odd that Doolittle wouldn’t tell her about this struggle he was having,” Nick said. “She and I have been trying to talk to him about the Lord for the last eight years, so it’s really bizarre that he wouldn’t mention it to her, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think he wanted to tell her yet. It was a disturbing thing for him, I suppose. He wasn’t a man given to examining his life.”

“No,” Nick said. “He certainly wasn’t.

“So we were talking. Just riding around and talking.”

“I came to see you a few days ago. Saw Van there. And
Ian lurking around
. Do you know them well?”

“Not very well. Just met them…as a result of this tragedy. Van, I believe, is a lawyer of some kind.”

“I believe,” Brother
Herschel
said, “he has some unsavory connections. That’s what I’ve been led to believe, anyway.”

Nick said, “His primary unsavory connection was Doolittle. I only see Van a couple of times a year. I don’t know Ian at all. He lives up in the mountains with his grandmother. No one sees either of them very much.”

“Tight family,” I said.