The Heaven Trilogy (20 page)

“Good. Splendid idea. It’s good to have you back.”

Kent turned at the door. “One more thing, Markus. I kind of blew it with Bentley the other day. You wouldn’t mind putting in a word for me, would you? It was just a bad week.” He swallowed deliberately and was surprised at the sudden emotion that accompanied it. They said the grief would last a year, gradually easing. Evidently he was still in the stage where it could be set off with a mere swallow.

“Sure, Kent. Consider it done. And don’t worry. He and I are rather tight these days.”

Yes, I’ll bet you are,
Kent thought. He left before the revulsion had him doing something silly, like throwing up on the man’s carpet.

PASTOR BILL Madison parked his gray Chevy on the street and strode up to Helen’s door. She had sounded different on the phone. Almost excited. At least peachy. Like someone who had just been handed some very good news. Or like someone who had flipped their lid.

Given the last few weeks’ events, he feared the latter. But then this was Helen, here. With Helen you could never know. The New Testament characterized followers of Christ as peculiar. Well, Helen was just that. One of very few he would consider peculiar in their faith. Which was in itself strange when he got right down and thought about it. Perhaps they should all be rather unusual; Christ certainly was.

She had asked him to pray, and he had indeed prayed. But not simply because of her request. Something was happening here. He might not have the spiritual eyes that Helen claimed to possess, but he could sense things. Discernment, some called it. A spiritual gift. The ability to look at a situation and sense its spiritual origins. Like,
This face sends chills up my spine; it must be evil.
Not that he always operated in the most accurate mode of discernment. He had once felt chills peck at his heart, looking at a strange, alien-looking face on the television screen. To him it looked downright demonic. Then his son had informed him that it was a closeup of a friendly little creature found in the Amazon. One of God’s creatures.

That had confused him a little. But this thing with Helen—it was more than just a weird face on the boob tube. It was an aura that followed her around in much the same way he imagined an aura might have followed Elisha or Elijah around.

He rang the doorbell. The door swung in immediately, as if Helen had awaited his arrival with her hand on the knob.

“Come in, Pastor.” She wore a yellow dress, tube socks, and running shoes, a ridiculous sight for one who had trouble walking even around the house.

“Thank you, Helen.” Bill stepped in and closed the door, glancing at her legs. The musty scent of roses hung in the air. The old lady’s perfume was everywhere. She left him for the living room, smiling.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, following.

She did not respond directly but walked across the carpet humming her anthem, “The Martyr’s Song.” She had told him once that the song summed it all up. It made death worthwhile. Bill stopped behind her large, green easy chair, fixated on the sight of Helen walking. She was seemingly oblivious to him.

“Are you okay?”

“Shhhh.” She hushed him and lifted both hands, still pacing back and forth. Her eyes rested closed. “You hear that, Bill?”

Bill cocked his head and listened, but he heard nothing. Except her faint humming. “Hear what?”

“The laughter. Do you hear that laughter?”

He tried to hear laughter, but he heard only her soprano hum.
Let me to Thy bosom fly . . .
And he smelled roses.

“You might have to open your heart a little, but it’s there, Pastor—very faint, like the breeze blowing through trees.”

He tried again, closing his eyes this time, feeling a little foolish. If one of the deacons knew he was over at Helen Jovic’s house listening for laughter with her, they might very well begin the search for a new shepherd. After hearing nothing but Helen for a few moments, he gave up and looked at her.

Helen suddenly stopped her pacing and opened her eyes. She giggled and lowered her hands. “It’s okay, Pastor. I didn’t really expect you to hear anything. It’s like that around here. Some days it’s silent. And then some days he opens up my ears to the laughter and I want to walk around the house kissing things. Just kissing everything. Like today. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

She shuffled toward the kitchen. She had her socks pulled up to midcalf. A red Reebok logo splashed across the heel of her shoes. Bill swallowed and eased around the chair. She might very well have lost it, he thought. He sat on the green chair.

Helen emerged from the kitchen holding two glasses of tea. “So, you’re thinking that my elevator is no longer climbing to the top floor, am I right?” She smiled.

“Actually, I had given it some thought.” He grinned and chuckled once. “But these days, it’s hard to differentiate between strangeness and craziness.” He lost the grin. “They thought Jesus was crazy.”

“Yes, I know.” She handed him the drink and sat. “And we would think the same today.”

“Tell me,” Bill said, “did you see Spencer’s death in all of this?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“The night after we last talked, a week or so ago. When we talked, I knew there would be more skulls in the dungeon. I could feel it in my spine. But I never really expected it to be Spencer’s skull lying there on the ground. It nearly killed me, you know.”

“So this is really happening, then.” He said it calmly, but he found himself trembling with the thought. “This whole thing is really happening. I mean . . . orchestrated.”

“You have put two people in the dirt. You should know. Looked real enough to me.”

“Fine, I’ll grant you that. It’s just hard to swallow this business about you knowing about their deaths beforehand. Maybe if I could see into the heavens like you can, it would be easier.”

“It’s not everybody’s place to see things so clearly, Pastor. We all have our place. If the whole world saw things clearly our churches would be flooded. The nation would flock to the cross en masse. What faith would that require? We might as well be puppets.”

“Yes, well, I’m not so sure having full churches would be so bad.”

“And I’m not so sure the deaths of my daughter and grandson were so necessary. But when I hear their laughter, when I’m allowed to peek to the other side, it all makes sense. That’s when I want to walk around and start kissing things.”

He smiled at her expression. In many ways they were very similar, he and Helen. “So then . . .” He paused, collecting his thoughts.

“Yes?”

“In my office last week you told me you’d had a vision in which you heard the sound of running feet in a dungeon. To whom do the running feet in your dungeon belong?” He glanced at her feet, clad in those white Reeboks. “You?”

She laughed. “No.” She suddenly tilted her head, thinking. “At least I had not considered it. But no, I don’t think so. I think the running feet belong to Kent.”

“Kent?”

“He’s the player in this game. I mean, we’re all players, but he is the runner.”

“Kent’s the runner. And where is Kent running?”

“Kent is running from God.”

“This is all about Kent?”

She nodded. “And about you and me and Gloria and Spencer. Who knows? This might very well be about the whole world. I don’t know everything. Sometimes I know nothing. That’s why I called you over today. Today I know some things.”

“I see.” He looked at her feet absently. “And why are you wearing running shoes, Helen? You walking more these days?”

“With my knees?” She wiggled her feet on the carpet. “No, they just feel good. I’ve got this itching to be young again, I guess.” She stared out the window behind Bill. “It seems to ease the pain in my heart, you know.”

Helen sipped quietly at the glass, and then set it down. “I’ve been called to intercede for Kent, Pastor.”

He did not respond. She was an intercessor. It made sense.

“Intercede without ceasing. Eight hours a day.”

“You spend eight hours a day praying for Kent?”

“Yes. And I will do so until it is over.”

“Until
what
is over, Helen?”

She looked at him directly. “Until this game is over.”

He studied her, looking for any sign of insincerity. He could see none. “So now it’s a game? I’m not sure God plays games.”

She shrugged. “Choose your own words, then. I have been called to pray until it is over.”

Bill shook his head with disbelief. “This is unbelievable. I feel like we’ve been transported back to some Old Testament story.”

“You think? This is nothing. You should read Revelation. Things get really strange later.”

The sense of her words struck at him. He’d never thought of history in those terms. There had always been biblical history, the time of burning bushes and talking donkeys and tongues of fire. And there was the present—the time of normalcy. What if Helen’s peculiar view behind the scenes was really just an unusual peek at the way things really were? And what if he was being allowed to peek into this extraordinary “normalcy” for a change?

They sat and talked for a long while after that. But Helen did not manage to shed any more light on his questions. He concluded it was because she herself knew little more. She was seeing through a glass dimly. But she was indeed seeing.

And if she was right, this drama of hers—this game—It was indeed all just beginning.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Week Seven

LACY CARTWRIGHT leaned back in the lounge chair on her balcony, drinking coffee, enjoying the cool morning breeze. It was ten o’clock. Having a day off midweek had its advantages, she thought, and one of them was the quiet, out here under a bright blue Boulder sky while everyone else worked. She glanced over her body, thankful for the warmth of sun on her skin. Just last week Jeff Duncan had called her petite. Heavens! She was thin, maybe, and not an inch over five-three, but petite? Her coworker at the bank had said it with a glint in his eye, and she had suspected then that the man had a crush on her. But it had been under two years since her husband’s death. She was not ready to engage a man.

The breeze feathered her face, and she lifted a hand to sweep the blonde strands behind her ear. Her hair rested on her shoulders in lazy curls, framing hazel eyes that smiled. A thin sheen of suntan oil glistened on her pale belly between a white halter top and jean shorts. Some women seemed to relish baking in the sun—lived for it even. Goodness! A picture of a hot dog sizzling on a grill popped into her mind, and she let it hang there for a moment. Its red skin suddenly split, and the image fizzled.

Lacy turned her head and studied the distant clouds looming black toward the southeast. Denver had had its share of weather lately, and it appeared the area was in for a little more. Which was another reason she liked it up here in Boulder more than in the big city. In Denver, if you weren’t dealing with weather, you were dealing with smog. Or at the very least, traffic, which was worse than either. She ought to know—she’d spent most of her life down there.

But not anymore. After John’s death two years earlier she had upped and moved here. Started a new career as a teller and busied herself with the monumental task of ridding her chest of its ache. She’d done it all well, she thought. Now she could get on with the more substantive issues of starting over. Like lying out in the sun, waiting for the UV rays to split her skin like that hot dog. Goodness!

A high-pitched squeal jerked her mind from its reflections. She spun toward the sliding glass door and realized the awful sound was coming from her condo. As if a pig had gotten its snout caught in a door and was protesting. But of course there were no pigs in there, squealing or not. There was, however, a washing machine, and if she wasn’t mistaken, the sound was actually coming from the laundry room, where she had started a load of whites fifteen minutes ago.

The sound suddenly jumped an octave and wailed like a siren. Lacy scrambled from the lounger and ran for the laundry room. It would be just her luck that old Mrs. Potters next door was jabbing at the oversized nine-one-one numbers on her trusty pink telephone at this very moment.

Lacy saw the soapy water before she reached the door, and her pulse spiked, midstride. Not that she’d never seen soapy water before—saw it all the time, but never bubbling under a door like some kind of monster foaming at its mouth. She felt the wet seep between her toes through the navy carpet a good five feet from the door. She let out a yelp and tiptoed to the door. This was not good.

The door swung in over an inch of gray water. The washing machine rocked madly, squealing, and Lacy dove for the control knob. Her palm smashed it in, which under normal conditions would have killed the thing right then. But evidently things were no longer normal in this room, because the boxy old machine just kept rocking and wailing.

The plug! She had to pull the plug. One of those big fat plugs behind the contraption. Water bubbled over the top of the washer and ran down to the floor in streams. Frantic now, Lacy flopped belly-down on the shaking appliance and dove for the back. The plug stuck stubbornly. She squirmed over the lid so that her feet dangled, all too aware of the water soaking her clothes. She put her full weight into the next tug. The plug came free, sending her flying backward, off the dying machine and to the floor like a fish spilled from a net.

She struggled from the floor, grateful for the ringing silence. In all the commotion her hair had attracted enough water to leave it dripping. She gazed about, and her stomach knotted at the sight. A pig stuck in the door might have been better.

Before John died this would all have been different. She would simply call the precinct and have him run by to take care of things. For her it would be a quick shower and then perhaps off to lunch.

But that was before. Before the cancer had ravaged his body and sent him to the grave exactly two months before he would have made sergeant. An image of her late husband all decked out in those navy blues and shiny brass buttons drifted through her mind. He was smiling, because he had always smiled. A good man. A perfect cop. The only man she could imagine herself with. Ever.