Karin Slaughter - Like A Charm

'Ma'am?' he prompted.

'Yes?' Mary Lou answered, shifting in the hard pew. She put her hand to her stomach to calm it.

Jasper walked towards her, down the stairs that lined the stage. He kept walking until he was about three feet away, looming over her.

Mary Lou squared her shoulders, willing herself not to fidget. He was a tall man and knew it. She could not help but glance down at the floor before bracing herself to look back up at him.

'Sorry,' he said, smiling as he kneeled down on one knee in front of her.

'What is it?' she snapped, aware she had no reason to. The truth was she did not like him standing so close to her. The sight of him was almost too much to bear.

The man had been badly burned, and up close his face was a synthetic looking mess, his skin stretched unnaturally tight in places, the pigment a patchwork quilt of varying skin tones around his cheeks so that from afar he looked as if someone had stitched his face together from borrowed flesh. He had no eyebrows or eyelashes, giving his eyes a perpetually startled look. His hands, too, were scarred, and the skin that bunched around his wrists resembled a slouching sock. Even in this heat, he wore his sleeves long, tightly buttoned at the wrists, hiding what Mary Lou imagined was an even more horrific sight.

He said something to his crew, and she tried not to watch him speak. The most startling thing about the man's appearance was his lips – an unnatural shade of pink, like the bright pinkness of a mouse's nose, and delicate looking, more suited for a maiden than an old black man with no facial hair to speak of. The lips had a constant sheen, as if they had been made for him only recently. Mary Lou had seen on television where a child's ear had been grown from scratch on the back of a living mouse. She wondered if the man's lips had been grown under similar circumstances.

The burns were not the kind of thing that could go unremarked upon. The first time they had met, the black man had explained to Mary Lou without her asking that he had been in an automobile accident. The car had exploded, burning alive his wife and child. He had barely escaped with his own life, and subsequent surgeries had healed his body if not his heart; he said the memories of that night still haunted him, and the part he played in the death of both his wife and child was something he could not forgive himself for, let alone forget. Drunk, Mary Lou suspected, but did not say.

Jasper Goode told her, 'We'll leave it here, then take it into the parking lot after lunch.' Mary Lou made a point of looking at her watch, and he added, 'They work better on a full belly'

'I'm sure they do,' Mary Lou answered, hoping her tone conveyed her displeasure.

'She don't look as bad as I thought she would,' the black man offered, as if the cross were a ship and not a symbol of Jesus's sacrifice.

'Well, good,' she returned, wondering if this meant they would charge less. She doubted it.

As if sensing her thoughts, he added, 'She'll still take a while.'

'You promised it would be ready for Sunday,' Mary Lou reminded him, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. She didn't think Jasper Goode was the type who went to church on Sundays, and if the decision had been left to Mary Lou, she would have hired Bob Harper instead. Five hundred dollars was a small price to pay to employ someone who was invested in his own salvation.

Jasper stared at her. 'I wants to thank you, ma'am, for giving me this job. It's kind of hard to get work for me now, and I appreciate it.'

She nodded, slightly taken aback by his admission.

Jasper held her gaze. 'You feelin' all right, ma'am?'

'I'll feel better when the cross is fixed,' she told him.

His mouth grimaced into what might be a smile. 'We'll have it on time,' Jasper assured her. He took out a white handkerchief to wipe at his sweating, bald head. He said something Mexican to the crew, and they scampered off, showing more hustle than they had shown thus far on the job.

Mary Lou shifted in the pew again, trying to find a comfortable position. Her office was over the old chapel, which was now the gymnasium, and the air conditioner there left much to be desired. If not for the fact that she could not afford to miss another day of work, she would have just stayed home today.

She let out a heavy sigh, staring at the pulpit. The blank space where the cross had been made the chapel feel hollow, as if the heart had been removed from its chest. It was a mystery how the cross had become damaged. A parishioner had mentioned something about the cross looking 'off one Sunday, and Mary Lou and Pastor Stephen had come in after the service, both staring up until their necks kinked. There had been a definite tilt to the side, but from the ground they had not been able to tell why.

A week later, Mary Lou was in the church office stuffing envelopes when Randall, the church custodian, burst into her office, mumbling something about a sign from God. This was not the first time that Randall, whose own mother admitted that he was slightly touched in the head, had claimed such a vision, but Mary Lou had followed him into the chapel to stretch her legs. They found the cross tilting almost sideways, the thick cables that anchored it to the ceiling vibrating as if under great pressure. As Mary Lou and Randall stood there, a great cracking sound filled the room, followed by a terrible, low moan, as if Jesus Himself was on the cross, His arm being ripped from His body. She could still see it play in her mind in slow motion: the arm of the cross snapping, the cables twisting and bending as the weight shifted. Sometimes at night, she could hear that awful low moan of the wood breaking, and she would begin to sweat uncontrollably, knowing that the breaking cross had something to do with her.

As a girl, her Uncle Buell had been what was called a lay minister, which meant he had received no special ordination from Christ, yet still chose to teach the Bible. His following had dwindled as Mary Lou got older, but there was always a core group of people who listened to his teachings. They worshipped Buell as they worshipped the Lord Himself.

Every Sunday and Wednesday, the basement of Buell's ranch-style house would be filled with ten to twenty people, all come to hear Buell speak on the Word. His favourite theme was what he called the insidiousness of sin. Sin was a heavy burden, Buell said, and it would eventually break you one way or another. A good man might beat his wife. A good woman might lie to her husband. These were simple ways that sin could break you in two. This split gave easy entry to more sin, more evil, into your heart. It was up to the sinner to seek out Jesus, to ask for redemption, to seek His help in becoming whole again. God never gave a sinner more than he could carry, Buell insisted. That was His gift to man: He would never break you beyond repair. In every aspect of man's life, even at the end of it, there existed God's opportunity for redemption.

'Only Jesus can put you back together once you've been broken by sin,' Buell had preached. 'And that part of you that is broken becomes all the stronger for it.' He called this strengthening the blessing of brokenness. Even on his hospital bed, dying of bone cancer, he had refused treatment, insisting God had broken his bones only to heal them and make Buell stronger. In the end, the morphine had convinced him there were angels in the room. Or maybe not. Buell was known to see angels without the benefit of drugs, too.

Mary Lou turned in the pew as she heard footsteps in the foyer. Pastor Stephen entered the chapel, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands tucked into his pockets. Stephen Riddle was the exact opposite of her Uncle Buell. His sermons were not about working for redemption, but being blessed with it. There was no burden Jesus would not take from you, no problem He would not solve. Stephen's favourite admonition was that it was a sin to worry, whereas Buell's charge at the end of every service was to go home and worry, to pick through your life and find out what you were doing wrong and pray to Jesus that He would help you correct it.