The Case Against Owen Williams (43 page)

“Well, yes,” the man said. “My wife…”

He looked over Dorkin's shoulder.

“Jesus,” he said. “Look at that.”

Dorkin turned. A cloud of dirty grey smoke was boiling up above the trees and drifting off towards the creek.

“Send your wife in to stay with Mrs. Clemens,” Dorkin said. “And phone the fire department. I think it's the church.”

Dorkin set off down the street at a run. There were already other people running—children, men, a few women. From far away beyond the creek, Dorkin heard the faint sound of the bell in the tower of the fire station. His man would not have had time. Someone else had phoned already.

Clemens's Church of the Witnesses of the Lord Jesus Christ was on a little street only a block long, which ended in a thick wall of trees and bushes, beyond which would be the steep slope that ran down to the creek. Somewhere in there presumably was the path that Clemens and his daughter had taken from the back of the house.

The church stood in a little field, all mud and weeds and oddly reminiscent of the parking lot around The Silver Dollar
.
Like Clemens's house, the building had the appearance of having been cobbled together by some ragtag group of parishioners. It was a kind of rectangular shed perfectly plain except for the little tin-sheathed steeple, not more than eight feet high, that perched near the front of the shallow-pitched roof. The roof was also sheathed in tin, a fireman's nightmare. Once upon a time, the church had been painted white, but the paint was turning grey, flaking and peeling, leaving patches of bare wood. The fire was raging at the back of the building. There were half a dozen windows along the side wall. The last two had been broken by the heat, and dense smoke was rolling out. As it rose, it became grey, then white, but inside at its source it was black, as if choking for air, and inside the black there was an unholy, dark turbulence of fire. The smoke had also begun to seep out along the top of the wall under the eaves and around the base of the steeple, as the fire smouldered its way along the rafters.

Four steps led up to the front door of the church, but there was no porch, and Hooper was balanced on the top step, holding onto the little two-by-four railing and trying ineffectually to kick in the door. Carvell stood at the bottom watching. There were already dozens of people around the church and along the street, all talking and chasing around. More were arriving every second. In the distance, Dorkin heard the siren of the approaching fire engine.

“What's happening?” Dorkin asked Carvell. “Where's Clemens?”

“I think he's inside,” Carvell said. “The girl too, probably.”

“Are you sure?” Dorkin asked. “This could be a diversion.”

“No,” Carvell said, “I don't think so. One of the people next door said he thought he heard shots.”

“They must have bolted it top and bottom,” Hooper shouted.

He gave the door one final kick and retreated back down the steps, just as the fire engine rounded the corner of the street, sending the crowd scrambling for the ditches.

“You couldn't have done anything anyway,” Carvell said to Hooper.

The fire engine turned into the yard and swung around. Half a dozen men in ordinary work clothes were hanging onto the back and sides. Two of them threw off a pile of black firemen's coats, hats, boots. The other four freed the ends of hoses from the back of the truck, and the truck drove off again down the street towards a hydrant, flip-flopping the two hose lines behind it, as the rest of the volunteer fire-men began arriving in cars. They outfitted themselves from the pile of gear on the ground, and while they waited for water, a giant of a man mounted the front step with an axe, smashed the lock side of the door, kicked it in, and was promptly driven back by a rush of smoke.

“Do you think there's anyone in there?” he asked Carvell.

“Yes,” Carvell said. “But I don't think there's anything you can do about them now.”

“What the hell's going on?” the fireman asked.

“I'll tell you later,” Carvell said.

“It sure got a start,” the fireman said.

“I think it had some help.”

Along the street, the hose lines snapped full and became fiercely alive, fighting the men who held the nozzles. They directed one of them through the windows at the back into the inferno inside, the other through the front door down the length of the church, sending rows of chairs tumbling end over end towards the pulpit.

Within a quarter of an hour, the main fire at the back was out, but it had already burned its way up into the low attic under the tin roof and was smouldering forward along the rafters. It took over an hour to get it out. The firemen cut a hole through the gable at the front of the church, ripped off sheets of tin roofing, and cut more holes and poured water inside. Gradually, the smoke ceased. Then, when it seemed almost out, the little steeple gave an oddly human groan and settled backward into the roof. The firemen scrambled off their ladders, but for a minute nothing more happened. The steeple stayed where it was, half sunk at a forty-five degree angle into the roof. Then with a final groan and a rending of timbers, the whole thing came down bringing part of the roof with it into the front of the church.

Through all this, Dorkin, Carvell, and Hooper stood beside the fire truck, waiting their time, now and then getting notices from the fire chief, a fat, garrulous man, who addressed Carvell casually as George. Finally, the firemen came down off their ladders, and the hoses were turned off.

“I'm going to put more water on it later,” the fire chief said, “but if we're careful, we can go in and see what's there. You better put these on. It's going to be dirty and wet.”

He got three sets of boots, coats, and hats off the truck, and Dorkin, Carvell, and Hooper got into them and followed him to the back of the church.

The back door had been smashed with an axe. All that remained was a single upright board, blackened by fire, still attached to its hinges. On the other side, a heavy bolt holding some blackened splinters of wood was still shot into its housing. The floorboards inside were unsafe, and the firemen had laid planks across the joists. The three of them followed the fire chief inside. The stink of wet, burned wood was overwhelming.

Inside the door, there was an entrance hall, and to the right of that a small room. The fire chief stood to one side of the doorway, and one by one first Hooper, then Carvell, then Dorkin looked in.

The fire had burned up through the ceiling, and shafts of sun-light fell down into the room from cracks and holes in the roof above. The room held a desk, sodden and half burned, covered with debris from the ceiling, two chairs both overturned, and a couch. It was here that the fire must have been at its most intense—intense enough to burn through the floorboards so that the legs of the couch had punched through and the frame was now resting on the floor joists. The figure on the bed had been covered with a blanket that had been drawn up under the chin as it might have been in sleep, but the blanket, the clothing, skin, and flesh were charred and soaked into a single mass without distinguishable borders. The face on the pillow was like that of an Egyptian mummy, black, shrunk by the heat, the lips drawn back over the clenched teeth. It was evident that the figure was that of a woman, and there was in the face and the general proportions of the figure nothing that was inconsistent with its being the woman whom presumably it had to be.

Dorkin had never before seen so swift a transition from life to death. He was badly shaken, and as he stepped back from the door, he reflected that it was probably in that room and on that bed that Sarah Coile had also died before being taken to the gravel pit to be stoned and left for the dogs.

At the back of the entrance hall, a second door, charred to a cardboard thinness but still in one piece, led onto the platform in the main hall of the church. The ruins of the steeple filled the area by the main door, and in front of the platform there was the pile of chairs tumbled forward by the force of the fire hoses. A steady rain of black water was falling through the ceiling from the charred timbers under the roof.

On the platform there was a pulpit, blackened but upright, and just beyond it, lying curled up on its side as if it had been kneeling and fallen over, much less burned, much more recognizable than the other, lay the body of the Reverend Zacharias Clemens. Just beyond it lay a small .32 revolver.

When Dorkin and Carvell arrived back at the Clemens house, there were cars parked along the street and a small crowd of people on the lawn in front of the house.

“The Reverend's flock, I expect,” Carvell said.

Dorkin looked at them with a mixture of pity and distaste: men whose trousers stopped six inches above their boots, slatternly women in ill-fitting print dresses, people grotesquely fat or grotesquely thin, or cross-eyed, or wall-eyed, people whose limbs seemed somehow to have got hung on wrong. The misfits of the countryside whom Clemens had taught to see themselves as the chosen of God.

Inside, there were more of them. Elders, perhaps, or whatever the especially chosen were called.

“Hello, Ezra,” Carvell said to one of them. “Is Mrs. Clemens still here?”

“Upstairs,” the man said. “Upstairs with some of the women.”

“Does she know what's happened?” Carvell asked.

“I don't know,” the man said. “I don't know. I ain't been up.”

He looked fearfully at Carvell, then at Dorkin.

“But
you
know?” Carvell asked.

“Yes,” the man said. “I guess so.”

Mrs. Clemens was still sitting on the edge of the bed where Dorkin had left her. There were three other women in the room, sitting on straight-backed chairs facing her. They stared at Dorkin and Carvell without getting up or speaking. Mrs. Clemens seemed hardly aware of them.

“I'm afraid we have some bad news,” Carvell said to her.

She looked at him for a moment, then her eyes drifted away and fixed themselves on something only she could see. Then they became hard. She looked back at Carvell.

“That girl,” she said fiercely. “That whore. She was even leading her own father into sin. Everyone knew it.”

Carvell turned to the women.

“I'd like to talk to her alone for a minute,” he said. “Could you wait outside?”

They glanced at each other and, still without speaking, rose and went out into the hall. Carvell moved as if to close the door, then changed his mind and left it open.

“Your daughter,” Carvell began.

“I have no daughter,” she said, repeating what she had said before. “I had two sons.”

“Your husband's daughter, then,” Carvell said. “Elizabeth.”

“Nor his daughter either. She was his Bride in God. As I was. I first, then Elizabeth.”

She looked at Carvell impatiently as at someone who lived in ignorance in some outer darkness, hardly worth her attention.

“He was a prophet,” she said. “Like Abraham. He had the right to more wives than one. They freed him so that he could bear wit-ness to God.”

“And Sarah Coile?” Dorkin asked. “Was she also a bride in God?”

“That one! She took possession of his soul and left him no peace. She was destroying him. She clothed him in a coat of fire. She was a witch. An agent of Satan. She would have brought destruction down on our house. She would have scattered our flock and left them to the mercy of the storm. It was the devil in her that was destroyed so that her soul could be saved.”

She stopped.

“I was afraid,” she went on. “When the time came, I was afraid. The time came, as he always said it would. But I was afraid.”

“I don't want to distress you,” Carvell said. “But is there anyone we can get in touch with? Do you have relatives? I heard you were from the States.”

“I have no relatives,” she said. “I had a mother and a father and a husband and two sons, but I went out of their house because I had been shown the way.”

“Can we get in touch with them?” Carvell asked.

“No. It was long ago. Long ago.”

Downstairs, the people started to sing, raggedly, some hymn, and after a few bars, it was taken up by some of the people outside on the lawn.

“You should have heard him,” she said. “You should have seen him. The light of the Lord was upon him. I was afraid. But I was honoured still more that he should come to me. In the night. In a cloud of fire.”