“You can describe him?”
“Oh, sure. Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a lithe less. Kind of a round face, with all his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face. Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, lithe pale eyes, girlish lithe nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding onto the side of the passenger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and… well, brutallooking.”
Meya said, ‘]t doesn’t sound as if there could be two like that. But it’s possible, of course. Maybe his change of expression was not recognition, but surprise at seeing somebody pop up like that.”
“No. He knew me. Because I remembered two nights ago, in the middle of the night, where led seen him. As soon as I remembered, I knew it was the same man. Five years ago Billy’s sister, my kid
The Green Ripper sister-in-law, Mitsy, disappeared. The family was frantic. She’d been in school up near San Francisco. She had just taken her things and gone away. Billy got time off from work and went up to San Francisco and nosed around and found out she had been hanging around with some kids who were connected with a religion called… damn! It will come to me.”
“The Unification Church, the Moonies?” Meyer asked. She shook her head. “Hare Krishna? Scientology? Children of God? The Jesus People? The Church of Armageddon?”
She stopped him and said, ‘`That’s close, that last one. It’s like Apocalypse. Wait a minute. Apocry- pha! The Church of the Apocryphal”
“Very interesting!” Meyer said
‘~Vhat’s an apocrypha?” I asked.
“It’s plural,”: he said. “Fourteen books or chapters which are sort of an appendix to the Old Testament and are not acceptable to the establishment. Seldom printed. They are bloody, merciless, and, some say, divinely inspired. Authorship unsubstantiated. I suspect that a religion based upon them would be… severe indeed.”
“A postcard finally came from Mitsy,” Gretel said. “It was mailed from Ukiah, California. It was to her mother, father, her two brothers, and me. All it said was, ‘Remember that I will always love you, but I will never see you again in this life.’ You can imagine how that hit us ale Mitsy was such a… such a merrier little gal. Pretty and bouncy and popular. Your standard cheerleader type. No steady boyfriend. She wanted to be a social worker and work with handicapped children.
“Anyway, her father hired an investigator, and he located an encampment of the Church of the Apocrypha about twenty miles southwest of Ukiah, off in the woods. He had tried to get in to find out if Mitsy was there, but he couldn’t learn a thing. Just about that time, her father my father-in- law had a stroke, a severe one. His right side was totally paralyzed, and he couldn’t speak or understand what anyone said. He died of pneumonia about four months later. Billy’s younger brother was working in Iran. So when we could, Billy and I drove up to the encampment, using the map the investigator had marked.
‘4There were little winding roads, and finally we came to the private, no-trespassing signs he had told us about, and the wire gate across the road. A young boy came out of a lean-to. He wore a direr white smock and he was trying to grow a beard. We said we wanted to visit Miriam Howard, Mitsy Howard. He nodded and walked away up the curving road beyond the wire gate, and out of sight. We waited and waited and waited. Billy got very angry. I had to keep talking him out of going over the gate. It was over an hour before that man came down the road. That same marz. He was five years younger, of course. He wore a white tunic with a
The Green Ripper
Chinese collar, and white trousers tucked into shiny black boots. He came right to the high fence and looked us over very carefully. He completely ignored the angry questions Billy was shouting at him.