Solomon's Grave (20 page)

Nathan barely felt the cool air against his skin as they stepped outside. His legs were heavy, filled with clay.
Too much
, he thought.
It’s all too much
.

His world had always been clearly defined. Even his faith was a straight-edged resolve that never wavered. Now, he found himself in a place where mystery heaped itself upon more mystery.
Supernatural
was a word he never cared for in the past. Now it fit too neatly. Nightmares scratching their way into the real world. Daylight becoming more and more a bad dreamscape, not something of solace to wake up to.

Should talk of demons and ancient religions really be alien to him? The Old Testament spoke incessantly on the subject. God Himself warned the Israelites to worship only Him. Why would He bother acknowledging such dark creatures within the universe if they didn’t exist?

Peter Quinn certainly believed in them.

Dad, what have you gotten yourself into?

When they reached his car, he wanted to fall to the sidewalk and pray for God to clear his mind and open the thickening gray clouds in his head.

Of course, if he fell to his knees, Josh would probably call an ambulance.

“What was all
that
about?” Josh leaned against the hood of Nathan’s car, beside a large paper shopping bag.

Instead of answering directly, Nathan gestured to the hood. “That yours?”

Josh craned his neck to look beside him, and said, “Oh, yeah, right.” He picked up the groceries as he said, “You looked like you’d just seen a ghost or something.”

“Or something,” Nathan conceded. “Your timing was impeccable.”

Josh scratched the back of his neck with his free hand, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “Pretty
weird
timing, more like it. I don’t even know why I’m here.” He looked into his bag. “I mean, chips, soda and a loaf of bread... oh, man, Shirley put the bottle on top of the bread.” He nodded toward
The Greedy Grocer
. “I’ve really got to send my employees to Bagging School or something.”

Nathan looked at the club’s closed door. He turned and leaned against the driver’s door and stared at the convenience store. “Why are chips and crushed bread weird?”

“Just that I was done with my opening shift a half hour ago. Cashed out; Shirley cashed in. She’s good enough that I don’t need to hang around. Instead of leaving, I decided to get some stuff I needed. Like a craving or something.” He slapped the bag. “Don’t even need chips. I mean, isn’t this the same stuff you got the other night?”

Nathan nodded at the shopping bag. Not exactly the same, but close enough. “Craving? You pregnant or something?” Their apparently pointless banter had a strengthening effect on him. He took a breath and leaned his backside against the driver’s door.

“That’s just it. I’ve got plenty of bread at home. Half a loaf at least. Why I needed to stick around to get this,” he pulled the crushed bread out of the bag and laid it gently back in beside the bottle of soda, “is beyond me.” He sighed. “Anyhow, I saw your car when I was leaving and figured I’d poke my head in to see if you were, well,” he nodded toward the store, “in there.”

Slowly, the implications of what his friend was telling him registered. One thing Nathan had learned in life was never to believe in coincidence. He had been about to confess
everything
to Quinn—a man who had pretty much
admitted
to being a demon worshipper, then Josh arrived just at the right time to stop him.

He considered explaining all this to him, but decided against it. When he sensed God had  intervened in some way in his or others’ lives, it usually filled him with joy, a sense of confirmation. This time, it scared him to death.

“So,” Josh said, “what was going on with Whitey in there? About your dad, I assume?”

Nathan nodded. “Figured I’d stop by to check it out.”

 “The place gives me the willies. Looks like a college dorm room inside—well, not yours, but Marty Connolly’s, definitely.”

“You ever see my dad in there with anyone?”

“No. After you came by Friday, I took a peek. Dark outside, and the lights were on,” he spoke with a mock Bela Lugosi voice, “but no one was home...”

Nathan smiled. The expression felt alien to his face in light of everything that had happened.

“So,” Josh pressed. “Why did Drac look like he was going to bite you in the neck just now?”

Nathan felt infinitely better. A conversation of any length with Josh Everson made anything seem humorous. He wanted to tell him about his dreams, about Hayden’s disappearance, Tarretti and the cemetery. Even more so, the painting on the wall just now. It felt more and more like his only chance at mental salvation, the only way to put things in perspective. They could hash it out together and Josh would let him know that he wasn’t losing his mind.

Because he’d come so close to saying it all to the wrong person, he was reluctant. He needed to sit in silence, in prayer, before anything else passed his lips.

“Nate? What’s up? You’re looking all
ghosty
again.” Josh wouldn’t let him get off without some tidbit to make his shopping madness worthwhile.

Nathan shrugged. “Not much. Quinn’s a little crazy I think, and he might be into some bad stuff.”

“Bad stuff?”

Nathan shrugged again, not knowing what to do with his body. “I thought drugs at first, from the way Dad’s been acting. But I’m suspecting something a little more dark, now.”

He got a raised eyebrow in response.

Nathan whispered, not wanting his voice to carry too close to the door. “I don’t know, really. I think it’s some kind of cult. Quinn’s into something nasty, maybe demon worship.”

Now it was Josh’s turn to go pale. He wasn’t normally one to have a dark complexion as it was, so the simple fact that Nathan actually
saw
the blood draining from his face was unsettling. He raised a hand, “I really don’t know. Just a few things he said and all.” He hoped Josh wouldn’t ask what “and all” meant.

A thought occurred to him, and he slapped his friend’s arm. It felt good to have something concrete to suggest. “Listen, Josh, you’ve got Internet access, right?”

“Sure. I don’t suppose the old man had a computer at the church? I assume he’s turned up, by the way?”

Nathan needed to change the subject, get Josh focused on something other than what had happened here, or to Hayden. He needed information. “Listen, maybe you can look something up for me? No, there’s no computer at the church and they still don’t know where Reverend Hayden is. People are looking.”

“Sure, anything.” As he said this, Josh pulled a dirty pen from his
Greedy Grocer
shirt pocket and folded a section of the paper bag down as an ad-hoc writing tablet.

 “Do some research on the name Molech. It’s an Old Testament name. If I’m not mistaken it’s spelled M-O-L-E-C-H, or might be O-C-H. Depends on what version of the Bible you read.”

Josh looked up, “You want me to read the Bible?”

“No, I’ll handle that part. Already have the degree and everything, remember? You just do some surfing and see what comes up. I’m going to give you two other names to include. Don’t ask why.”

“Cool, a man of mystery.”

Nathan told him to include “Ammonite” and “Solomon.”

“Also, I suppose anything on a men’s organization which might revolve around any or all aspects of this. I doubt a search on the name itself would show anything, since it has the word ‘Hillcrest’ in it.”

Josh was a little less pale at this point. As he backed away to give Nathan room to open his door, he said, “Man, a cult in our town. Not cool.”

“Nope, not cool at all,” Nathan agreed, getting into the car. “But it’s just a theory right now. Anyhow, ‘Knowledge is Power’.”

More and more it felt like his imagination had simply gotten carried away. He tried not to dwell too much on details. When he did, a new wave of terror washed over him. Now was the time for action, to get something concrete under his feet. Josh would help. He made a mental note to sit down with him some day and offer up the whole story, but it would be good if he did his research with an unbiased eye.

In the meantime, Nathan had other matters to attend to. The parishioner with the broken legs, for starters. Hopefully, there would be word about Pastor Hayden when he got back to the church. And, he remembered with a brief flash of joy, his date with Elizabeth O’Brien tonight.

Nathan backed from his spot. Josh had reached his own car, dumping the grocery bag unceremoniously onto the passenger seat. With a sudden pang of guilt for getting him caught up in his personal mystery, Nathan pulled left onto Main Street and drove away.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Cabel Grille was named after the family who had opened the establishment fifteen years ago. It was sold after only two years, the Cabels deciding not to spend their retirement years tied to a restaurant, even with the healthy influx of customers. The Grille had become
too
successful in relation to the amount of effort they were willing to put into it. The newest owner was a young woman who lived a few towns south in Auburn. She was allowed to keep the restaurant’s name as part of the deal, to avoid scaring away loyal diners. She also left the menu pretty much as it was, except for the addition of more vegetarian items to the list.

Coming to the Grille had been Elizabeth’s idea, and Nathan was thankful for the gesture. It showed, at least in his mind, that she did not want to hide whatever relationship they might be cultivating. With the events of the past few days—this morning’s in particular—still swirling in his brain, and the congregation increasingly agitated over any lack of substantial news about Hayden, he felt more comfortable staying close to home. All through dinner, he suppressed the urge to cut the date short and call Josh, to see if he’d been able to uncover anything.

“Did you pay a visit to your father’s little gang?”

Elizabeth had ordered a Caesar salad and punctuated her question with a jab of her fork into a piece of chicken. Their conversation had so far been light, but she seemed to sense Nathan had something more on his mind than the missing preacher.

He nodded. “This morning, in fact. It was very weird, too.”

“Weird how?”

Nathan paused, waiting to see if the instinct to stay quiet returned. It didn’t. Since leaving Josh this morning, the thought of confiding in Elizabeth had blossomed. As with Josh, however, he wondered how wise it would be to tell her too much.

He decided to take it slow, gauge her reaction. “Well, it’s kind of strange.”

“Weird and strange,” she said. “My kind of story.” She lightly touched the back of his hand with her fork and left a miniscule drop of dressing on his skin. He found himself smiling, feeling the loving meaning behind such an innocuous gesture. Forget caution, he decided. If he was going mad, best she knew about it early.

“Where do I start? Before I came here, and for a little while after, I was having these really bizarre dreams.” Without waiting for her to comment on yet another interesting adjective on his part—he saw her mouth move as if to speak and knew exactly what she was going to say—he jumped in with a detailed description of the nightmares, focusing mostly on the temple.

When he was finished, she took another bite of her salad, chewed, and said, “Pretty creepy.”

The simple fact that she said this before bothering to swallow, muffling her words with the lettuce still in her mouth, made Nathan want to jump from his chair and embrace her. He couldn’t decide why, just that she was so utterly there, all the time, listening to him, interested. It was with this simple moment and his reaction to such a nondescript thing as talking with her mouth full, that he accepted how absurdly in love with this woman he still was. When he was not with her, he questioned any potential for their relationship, but when they were together like this, he wanted to be nowhere else.

“Then you’ll love this,” he said. “There was a painting on the wall inside the place this morning, exactly like the one in my dream.”

She thought about that for a while, then suggested, “Maybe you’d seen the painting somewhere before?”

He hadn’t thought of that. The idea didn’t sound right, though. “No,” he said at last. “No, I don’t think so. If I’d forgotten it, I would have probably remembered on seeing it today. To be honest, I think it was an original. But I’m no art expert.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“Kind of. I mean, the guy who runs the place told me.” He looked at her sideways while he lifted his cooling cheeseburger and took a bite. It tasted funny, and not until he chewed and swallowed did he realize what it was. “Garden Burger doesn’t mean it comes with lettuce, does it?”

Elizabeth laughed and slapped her leg. “Nope. It’s a veggie burger. No meat. For a while there, I thought you’d gone all New Age on me.”

Intrigued, he took another bite. It wasn’t bad.

She said, “Well, finish your Tasty Tofu and tell me what he said.”

He finished chewing, but his cell phone rang before he could say anything. He’d worn chinos and a sport coat over his white dress shirt (no tie, though—Elizabeth would’ve mocked him severely if he’d gone that far). He reached into the inside pocket of the coat draped over the back of his chair, and took out the phone.

“Sorry, one second.” He pressed TALK. “Pastor Dinneck.” He tried not to smile when he caught Elizabeth doing a lip-synch of his salutation, eyebrows raised in mock snobbishness. He listened for a moment, then said, “Yes, Claire. Yes, that’s a good time. See you Saturday... no, it’ll be my pleasure. Good night.” He disconnected and put the phone away.

“Sorry. I’d asked her to call back when she knew what time her mother was being released from the hospital. A small stroke. Claire’s husband is in Florida so I agreed to lend a hand.”

“Don’t let the hubby know his mother-in-law’s moving in. He might not come back.” She said it with all seriousness on her face, but Nathan smiled.

“You’re evil.”

She leaned forward, jutted her chin out. “Then ex-or-cise me!” she said, and growled.