His next programmed halt was at a meandering horseshoe bend. Kelly slowed the sled and lifted his head carefully. Noise on the north bank, perhaps three hundred yards. It carried across the water. Male voices speaking in the language whose lilts had somehow always sounded poetic to him – but quickly turned ugly when the content was anger. Like the people, he supposed, listening for perhaps ten seconds. He took the sled back down, watching the course change on the compass as he followed the sweeping bend. What a strange intimacy that had been, if only for a few seconds. What were they talking about? Politics? Boring subject in a Communist country. Farming, perhaps? Talk of the War? Perhaps, for the voices were subdued. America was killing enough of this country’s young men that they had reason to hate us, Kelly thought, and the loss of a son could be little different here than at home. They might talk to others about their pride for the little boy gone off to be a soldier – fried in napalm, dismembered by a machine gun, or turned to vapor by a bomb; the stories had to come back one way or another, even as lies, which amounted to the same thing – but in every case it must have been a child who’d taken a first step and said ‘daddy’ in his native tongue. But some of the same children had grown up to follow PLASTIC FLOWER, and he did not regret killing them. The talk he’d heard sounded human enough, even if he couldn’t understand it, and then came the casual question, What made them different?
They are different, asshole! Let the politicians worry about why. Asking those kinds of questions distracted him from the fact that there were twenty people like Kelly up the river. He swore in his mind and concentrated again on driving the sled.
Few things distracted Pastor Charles Meyer from the preparation of his weekly sermons. It was perhaps the most important part of his ministry, telling people what they needed to hear in a clear, concise manner, because his flock saw him only once a week unless something went wrong – and when something went badly wrong they needed the foundation of faith already in place if his special attention and counsel were to be truly effective. Meyer had been a minister for thirty years, all of his adult life, and the natural eloquence that was one of his true gifts had been polished by years of practice to the point where he could choose a Scripture passage and develop it into a finely focused lesson in morality. The Reverend Meyer was not a stern man. His message of faith was that of mercy and love. He was quick to smile and to joke, and though his sermons were of necessity a serious business, for salvation was the most serious of human goals, it was his task, he thought, to emphasize God’s true nature. Love. Mercy. Charity. Redemption. His entire life, Meyer thought, was dedicated to helping people return after a bout of forgetfulness, to embrace despite rejection. A task as important as that was worth a diversion of his time.
‘Welcome back, Doris,’ Meyer said as he entered Ray Brawn’s house. A man of medium height, his thick head of gray hair gave him a stately and learned appearance. He took both her hands in his, smiling warmly. ‘Our prayers are answered.’
For all his pleasant and supportive demeanor, this would be an awkward meeting for all three participants. Doris had erred, probably rather badly, he thought. Meyer recognized that, trying not to dwell on it in a punitive way. The really important thing was that the prodigal had returned, and if Jesus had spent His time on earth for any reason, that parable contained it all in just a few verses. All of Christianity in a single story. No matter how grave one’s misdeeds might be, there would always be a welcome for those with the courage to return.
Father and daughter sat together on the old blue sofa, with Meyer to their left in an armchair. Three cups of tea were on the low table. Tea was the proper drink for a moment like this.
‘I’m surprised how good you look, Doris.’ He smiled, concealing his desperate desire to put the girl at ease.
‘Thank you, Pastor.’
‘It’s been hard, hasn’t it?’
Her voice became brittle. ‘Yes.’
‘Doris, we all make mistakes. God made us imperfect. You have to accept that, and you have to try to do better all the time. We don’t always succeed – but you did succeed. You’re back now. The bad things are behind you, and with a little work you can leave them behind you forever.’
‘I will,’ she said with determination. ‘I really will. I’ve seen … and done … such awful things …’
Meyer was a difficult man to shock. Clergymen were in the profession of listening to stories about the reality of hell, because sinners could not accept forgiveness until they were able to forgive themselves, a task which always required a sympathetic ear and a calm voice of love and reason. But what he heard now did shock him. He tried to freeze his body into place. Above all he tried to remember that what he heard was indeed behind his afflicted parishioner as over the course of twenty minutes he learned of things that even he had never dreamed of, things from another time, since his service as a young Army chaplain in Europe. There was a devil in creation, something for which his Faith had prepared him, but the face of Lucifer was not for unprotected eyes of men- certainly not for the eyes of a young girl whom an angry father had mistakenly driven away at a young and vulnerable age.
It only got worse. Prostitution was frightening enough. What damage it did to young women could last a lifetime, and he was grateful to learn that Doris was seeing Dr Bryant, a wonderfully gifted physician to whom he’d referred two of his flock. For several minutes he shared Doris’s pain and shame while her father bravely held her hand, fighting back his own tears.
Then it turned to drugs, first the use of them, then the transfer of them to other, evil men. She was honest through it all, trembling, with tears dripping from her eyes, facing a past to make the strongest of hearts quail. Next came the recounting of sexual abuse, and, finally, the worst part of all.
It became very real to Pastor Meyer. Doris seemed to remember it all – as well she might. It would take all of Dr Bryant’s skills to drive this horror into the past. She told the story in the manner of a motion picture, seemingly leaving nothing out. That was a healthy thing, to put it all in the open in this way. Healthy for Doris. Even healthy for her father. But Charles Meyer necessarily became the recipient of the horror that others were attempting to cast away. Lives had been lost. Innocent lives – victims’ lives, two girls not unlike the one before him, murdered in a way worthy of … damnation, the pastor told himself in a voice of sadness mixed with rage.
‘The kindness you showed to Pam, my dear, that is one of the most courageous things I’ve ever heard,’ the pastor said quietly, after it was all over, moved nearly to tears himself. ‘That was God, Doris. That was God acting through your hands and showing you the goodness of your character.’
‘You think so?’ she asked, bursting then into uncontrolled tears.
He had to move then, and he did, kneeling in front of father and daughter, taking their hands in his. ‘God waited you, and saved you, Doris. Your father and I prayed for this moment. You’ve come back, and you won’t ever do things like that again.’ Pastor Meyer couldn’t know what he hadn’t been told, the things that Doris had deliberately left out. He knew that a Baltimore physician and nurse had restored his parisioner to physical health. He didn’t know how Doris had come to that point, and Meyer assumed that she’d escaped, as the girl Pam had almost done. Nor did he know that Dr Bryant had been warned to keep all of this information close. That might not have mattered in any case. There were other girls still in the control of this Billy person and his friend Rick. As he had dedicated his life to denying souls to Lucifer, so also he had a duty to deny their bodies to him. He had to be careful. A conversation like this one was privileged in the ultimate sense. He could counsel Doris to speak with the police, though he could never force her to do so. But as a citizen, as a man of God, he had to do something to help those other girls. Exactly what, he wasn’t sure. He’d ask his son about that, a young sergeant with the Pittsburgh city police force.