The Remnant (14 page)

"Do you need me anymore tonight?" she asked
Stan.

He shook his head, not looking her in the
eye. "Try to get some rest. You may need it."

She nodded, holding the door for them then
following out onto the porch. Stan continued on toward his car, but
when he turned back Paulie waved him off.

"I reckon you can take care of Cole
yourself," said the old man, smirking.

She nodded, smiling back.

"You look exhausted," she said. "I’m sorry we
had to wake you."

"I was up," he said, giving her a strangely
enigmatic look. "When you get to my age you’re kind of a like a
child again. You start to wonder if maybe you’re missing
something."

She laughed. "Like what?"

He shrugged.

There really was something odd in the way he
looked at her, as though trying to take all of her in with his
rheumy eyes one last time. She loved the old man so much it hurt.
To even think about him being gone one day was more than she could
bear.

"Do you ever pray anymore?" she asked,
quietly.

His eyes narrowed. In the dim porch light he
seemed to shrink. "Waste of time, Hon."

"You didn’t use to think so."

"Of course not. I was the one took you to
your first meeting in Mexachuli. Didn’t I read the Book of Mormon
to you every night?"

She nodded, recalling leaning back on the
sofa with the other kids listening to Paulie’s sonorous voice,
watching as he sometimes read, sometimes recited from memory.

"Some things are better forgotten,
sweetheart," he said, resting a hand gently on her shoulder.

"I know," she agreed, "but don’t you worry
about throwing the baby out with the bath water?"

He shook his head, and his hand drifted
slowly back to his side. "Once my eyes finally opened, they opened
wide. I prayed until my knees were raw and my voice was gone. And
then I prayed silently until I near passed out. I did that for days
on end. For weeks. You remember."

She nodded. Paulie had been inconsolable
after Clara and the kids were killed, but when they all made the
discovery that wrecked their faith he was devastated. For weeks it
was all Ashley could do to assure that the old man ate and drank
and got the semblance of sleep. She had been terrified that he
would pray his way to death. When he had finally risen to his feet
and shaken himself off there had been a hard light of anger in his
eyes. A man cheated by another can be overcome with rage. A man
swindled by his God has no outlet for his wrath but himself, and
for a time Paulie turned that anger inward.

"Don’t go back there," she whispered.

He sighed. "I’m not. I’m over my
disillusionment. I’m just clinging to some of my despair, and to
the people I love."

He reached out and pulled her to him, and she
breathed in deeply of him, rubbing her own cheek against his
stubbly one.

"I watched bees last night," she said,
quietly.

He held her out at arms length.

"Bees?"

"They were dancing in the air. I’ve never
seen bees act the way these did. It was surreal, like they were
trying to communicate with me."

He frowned. "Animals can get weird sometimes.
Don’t read something into it that isn’t there."

"I mean it, Paulie. I think they were trying
to tell me something."

He shook his head. "Like what? You don’t
think if there really was a God he could just walk up to your porch
and tell you what he wanted you to know?"

"What if that’s not the way things work? What
if there is some reason he’s so mysterious?"

"You never really gave it up, did you?"

She shook her head. "I tried. After I watched
what it did to you I wanted to. I hated God or the thought that
there was no God, but in my heart I wanted him to be there,
somehow. I still do."

"I want him to be there, too. I just know he
isn’t anymore. I wish I’d been there to see those bees, though. I
could have maybe told you why they were acting like that."

"I wish you had been, too," she whispered,
kissing his cheek.

"You and Marie are the last believers in this
valley, I reckon," he said, sadly. "The last real remnant of the
Brethren that were. Maybe that’s not a bad thing at that."

Ashley closed the door behind her, and leaned
against it, listening to Paulie’s truck cranking away down in the
drive. She heard a footstep and turned.

Trace was standing in the door to the den. He
had the beginnings of a pretty good shiner, along with the
scratches and cuts, and he was favoring his right leg. Marie had
shifted to let him enter the room, but she wasn’t giving much
ground yet to this interloper.

"Go back to bed, sweetheart," said Ashley,
nudging the reluctant girl back down the hall.

She saw Trace eyeing Marie quizzically but
ignored his look.

"You should put some ice on that eye and your
ankle."

He smirked.

"On my whole body."

She filled two plastic bags with ice and
wrapped them in towels. Maxie sniffed them and then snuffled his
nose under one. Trace laughed.

"Guard dog?" he said.

She smiled. "Not much of one, but he’s good
company."

"I guess you need that way up here in the
wilderness."

She sighed, leading him back into the living
room and shoving him down onto the sofa again. "I’m sorry, Trace. I
was sorry when we split up. I was sorry when the killings happened,
and we had to go into hiding, and I couldn’t tell you. And I’m
sorry now that it’s been so long that I haven’t seen you, but there
was nothing I could do. Nothing."

He winced as she placed the smaller bag on
his eye.

"Okay. It wasn’t like you owed me
anything."

She stared out the window into the gathering
light of day.

"I owed you a lot," she said, quietly. "I
realized how much more and more with every passing day."

"Like what?"

She gave him a wan smile. "Like how to
question. Because I was always ready to listen to someone else, to
let them tell me what the truth was, what I should do, how I should
live, what I should believe. Perhaps if I hadn’t I would never have
ended up here."

"I spent the past five years researching the
killings, Ash. Who the Angels are. I have names, identities,
eye-witnesses who can place them at the killings, men who sold them
the guns and explosives, men who sold them the airline tickets and
rented them the cars."

"None of them will testify, or live to."

Trace frowned. "I never intended to ask them
to. In my business I just have to have solid sources. I wasn’t
looking to convict the bastards. I just wanted to out them. Then
maybe the government of Mexico or the US would get off their
combined asses and look into Rendt and the Prophet’s empire
seriously."

"The Mexican government acted as if they were
glad to get rid of a commune of religious nuts," said Ashley.

Trace nodded. "They weren’t very forthcoming
during my investigation. But the people here in the valley, they’re
all witnesses. They could testify. You could."

"I’m not a witness," she said, shaking her
head. "I wasn’t there."

"What? I left you at Mexachuli just a few
days before the massacre."

"I wasn’t there," she said, quietly. A dark
sadness filtered through her as it did every time she thought about
the night of the killings, a guilt doubly powerful and troubling
for the agony and death it recalled. She
should
have been
there.

She sat beside Trace on the sofa again, close
enough to feel his heat. She wanted to reach out and touch his arm,
but she didn’t dare. Touch him and she knew desire would burn
through her like a wildfire. She wondered what it would have been
like if she’d given in to him back then rather than standing on her
faith. If he reached for her now she knew she’d fall into his arms,
and a part of her longed desperately for him to make that
advance.

"Who’s the girl?" asked Trace.

Ashley smiled ruefully. "My ward, Marie
Veras. Her parents and her older brother were killed at
Mexachuli."

"Motherhood suits you."

He placed his foot on the coffee table,
draping the other bag of ice over his ankle. Then he leaned his
head back on the sofa and closed his eyes. She wondered if the pain
was that bad or whether he was intentionally distancing himself
from her.

"Would you like an aspirin?"

"I’d like a quadruple Scotch."

"Sorry. You won’t find any liquor in the
valley."

"Figures."

"Would you like something to eat?"

"I’m not sure."

"Not sure?"

"I’ve been up all night. Again. Only got a
catnap on the plane. It’s been an exhausting two days."

He told her about his strange meeting with
the unnamed man in the bar, then his weird adventure in the tunnels
the night before-omitting the rats because he didn’t want her to
think he’d gone over the edge-and finally how he’d followed the two
Angels to the valley.

"You should have left it alone," she said,
quietly. "They had no reason to go after you until you started
researching them."

"I thought they’d murdered you and disposed
of your body, remember? I wanted justice. I wanted revenge."

She still couldn’t see his eyes, and now she
wanted to more than anything. Had he really been thinking about her
all those years the way she’d been thinking about him?

"I want it, too," she muttered.

He lifted the ice bag to stare at her.
"Really? Is that Christian?"

She shrugged.

"When I heard about the attack I rushed back
to Mexico," he said. "I had to con and bribe my way onto the site.
Once I was there, though, I knew the Mexican authorities were never
going to learn anything, even if they really wanted to. They had so
many Federales stomping over every inch of ground there was no way
any evidence would be left. It looked more like a three ring circus
than a crime scene. But there was still plenty of blood..."

Yes. There had been plenty of that. She had
insisted that Paulie give her every gruesome detail. The most
heart-wrenching thing had been the way the old man recounted the
shots continuing all night, almost at random. One here, then
another there. The hunters discovering new pockets of prey, a child
hiding in a closet perhaps, a wounded woman under a cottage. And he
had known that any one of those shots might be the one that killed
Clara or his own children who he had sent to hide as the battle
raged. Later, when he could not get back to them he’d had to be
restrained by the others with him. She wasn’t sure he’d ever
forgiven the men who held him. She knew he had never forgiven
himself.

The survivors at Mexachuli pieced together
the tactics of the attackers later, when they met at their
pre-arranged backup location in the mountains overlooking the
encampment. They could see the guard towers, in one of which a
man’s body hung over the rail. In the center of the wire-enclosed
town more corpses lay like fall leaves in the streets. Stan
estimated a force of as many as one hundred Angels. More than three
times as many as the Brethren had ever suspected even existed. The
few Brethren that made it to the fallback position did so by what
they thought of as God’s grace.

That was before Ashley took away even that
final solace.

"The Mexicans never came up with a complete
body count," said Trace. "They didn’t know how many were in the
encampment to begin with, and there were no records-"

"The Angels stole them.
They
knew how
many."

"So they found you again and attacked you
here?" he asked, raising the ice-bag and looking to her for
confirmation.

She shook her head. "No. We contacted them."
With that her voice trailed off.

He stared at her in disbelief, but she wasn’t
ready to continue.

"The LDS and their fundamentalist offshoots
have a lot more pull in high places than I ever suspected," he
said, at last. "They’ve pretty much ruined me, I suspect, which
makes me wonder why Rendt is so intent on getting rid of me
permanently."

"No loose ends," she said.

Trace nodded.

But she wondered if that was all he thought
about now, his career. So many men, women, and children died in the
Massacre, and then eventually the Brethren had lost their faith
because of Paulie’s
failsafe,
because of her
.
That
seemed like a much steeper price to pay for the church’s
pull
than Trace’s career.

"The LDS don’t have anything to do with it,"
she said. "It’s all the NLDS. They’re a sick bunch of killers and
child rapists."

Trace shrugged again. "They’re just one
branch off a rotten tree as far as I’m concerned. But I didn’t find
you again just to bring up that old argument."

She stared into his eyes, both of them
hovering on the edge of something that had been. Wanting it back,
fearing to approach it too close, lest they fall.

"Don’t worry about Stan and Paulie," she
said, shaking her head. "They’ll come around."

Trace frowned. "I’ll hold my breath."

"I’ll make you something to eat," she said,
rising.

But when she returned with an omelette and
bacon Trace was still in the same position, snoring lightly.
Maxie’s head was in his lap.

"Traitor," said Ashley, gently removing the
ice bags and shifting Trace back to a reclining position on the
couch. She covered him with blankets and closed the blinds.

As he pulled into his driveway Paulie paid no
heed to the four young Shepherds that split up to race alongside
his rusty truck. The dogs recognized him, of course, and would turn
into playful pups at one word now. But these were the most high
strung of his pack, and they took a moment to adjust to even his
own presence. They were trained killers, and should a stranger
approach the house any closer without word from him, they’d rip him
to shreds. He petted each of the dogs in turn before climbing
exhaustedly up onto the porch.