Т Паркер - The Last Good Guy

Carrie pursed her lips, green eyes scanning my face. “Well, I guess at least sort of. She was the one who took me to the cathedral my first time. She’d been there before, but not often. We had to make up this double lie to her sister and my mom so Daley could get away that morning.”

“What was Daley’s opinion of the pastor?”

Alanis shrugged. “Never said anything to me.”

Carrie was nodding along. “Me neither. You don’t think he’s got something to do with Daley, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

In my profession, I tell lies to get to the truth. People expect it and I don’t mind doing it. Except lying to the trusting. Trust is hard to betray. Ask anyone who’s hidden a diagnosis from a child, or cheated on a spouse, or had a faithful pet put down.

Maybe someday I could do better. Tell them not a lie but the truth: Hey — Daley is back now and she’s fine and she can’t wait to see you.

“How can we help you?” asked Alanis.

“Please let us help,” said Carrie.

I put one of my big mitts over one of each girl’s hands, small and warm as sparrows. I looked intently at them with my older-guy eyes in my older guy’s beat-up face. They looked back at me in their young, unique, and peculiar way, and they were afraid.

“Stay alert and together when you can,” I said. “Keep your eyes and ears open. Stay away from Adam, Connor, Alchemy 101, and the Cathedral by the Sea. Call me quickly if you see either of those men, or if something seems wrong. If anything is out of place.”

“It’s worse than we thought it was,” said Alanis.

“And we thought it was pretty bad,” said Carrie.

I waited with them in the Monarch Academy parking lot until Alanis’s father came to take them home.

Checked in with Burt again. Nothing unusual at Paradise Date Farm. Burt was worried that camera four had malfunctioned. “Hopefully it didn’t just drop off the wall and land in the barnyard,” he said.

Very hopefully, I said, and rang off.

I got some take-out from Thai Thai and took it to my office. Sat and ate while the air conditioner hummed, watching Main Street in the midday heat. Not much traffic. We don’t have much hustle-bustle in Fallbrook, except when school days start and end. Instead, we have classic cars, avocado orchards, and citrus groves. We have a terrific Christmas parade. And a nice 4-H show every year, if you want a lamb, a goat, a calf, or a pig. We have a handsome new library, a high school whose mascot is still a warrior in a feathered headdress, four bars, five tattoo parlors, just a few downtown traffic signals, one tennis club, thirty-eight churches, and a Christian Science Reading Room.

I thought back to a week ago, last Wednesday, when Penelope Rideout had walked into this office and begun her improbable tale. Enlisted me for her dangerous mission and sent me into the beating of my life. Puzzled, deceived, and angered me. Flirted and feinted and danced away. Into a private place of mine that had long been closed for repair. Years since anyone had come near it. But there she was.

I heard footsteps on the stairway, coming up. A figure arrived outside my door. A white shirt and a white hat, both pebbled by the glass.

He paused for just a moment, then stepped in and closed the door.

“Mr. Ford.”

“Pastor Atlas.”

“Your face looks better.”

“You came all the way here to tell me that?”

“I need to talk to you about Penelope Rideout.”

“That’s funny. As of Sunday, you’d never heard of her.”

“May I sit down?”

Atlas sat, crossed his legs, and set his hat over one knee. The hat was a white Parabuntal fedora, crisp and clean. He wore what looked like the same trim jeans, white shirt, and white athletic shoes he’d worn to preach on Sunday. Same shaggy blond hair, now dented and darkened above his ears by hat and heat. Same hopeful blue eyes.

He looked around the office, gazed out at Main Street, then turned his attention back to me.

“Penelope Rideout has been telling a story about herself and her sister, Daley, for almost fifteen years now. I was probably the first to hear it. In the story, Penelope, a trusting girl, falls for an itinerant evangelical preacher. Who befriends, drugs, and forces himself upon her, resulting in Daley. Is this approximately what she told you?”

“She said the preacher was you.”

Atlas stared at me for a long moment. The sunlight through the blinds hit the side of his face and brought a pale blue glow to one eye.

“Only part of her story is true. I was, in fact, an evangelical minister, traveling mostly by bus in the South, when I met Penelope Rideout. That was 1999. She was eight years old. After that, she came to hear me preach once, sometimes twice a year, until 2004. Then she didn’t come to any of my services again until late 2005. At which time she told me that she had had a daughter from our union nine months earlier. Allegedly this happened in my bus, involving the blood of Jesus laced with a date-rape drug, damning photographs, and a failed morning-after pill. I was thirty-five years old at that time. Married, a father of three. I had been preaching from my bus, and as a guest pastor, for seventeen very long years. And was on the verge of establishing my very own first church.”

A dark mood seemed to have come over him. He lifted the hat off his knee and leaned forward, out of the light.

“Go on,” I said.

“Mr. Ford, you couldn’t stop me now if you wanted. Penelope began accusing and harassing me not long after Daley was born. I don’t know if there’s a complete answer as to why. I saw that she was mentally ill. I read in the psychiatric literature that sibling rivalry can compound psychosis in the young, leading to more serious derangement. Later I learned that an additional sudden psychological trauma — such as the death of a parent, or both — will often incite a psychotic break. But as a man of God, not of medicine, I looked for answers in her soul. I saw a very bright, excitable, deeply unhappy girl. Filled with love. But with a blind, almost monstrous focus on herself. Creating a new self at the expense of her genuine self. And, of course, I looked into my own soul. Was I responsible? Had I somehow created this break with reality, or encouraged it to happen?”

The pastor regarded me. Challenging or observing? Waiting or preparing? He would have been impossible to read across a poker table.

“Did you?” I asked.

“After we first met, I saw Penelope Rideout once or twice a year, when I delivered a sermon at her church. And I also talked, prayed, discussed scripture, and sang with her and the rest of the Sunday-schoolers. I corresponded with many of the young people through brief notes, occasional postcards. I’ve always focused on the young. As the future of our planet, and the future of my ministry. When she first accused me of fathering Daley, I felt like I was being taken down by the devil’s own hound. A huge black thing, dragging me by the throat across cold ground toward the pit. Did I encourage Penelope’s break? No, Mr. Ford. I tormented myself for years with that question. And the answer is no. I do not see how that is possible.”

“Nothing she could have misinterpreted?”

“She misinterpreted everything.”

“No private tour of the Four Wheels for Jesus bus?”

Atlas sat back down, set the hat on his lap, and placed his hands over the ends of the chair arms.

“It’s very strange to feel filthy in my innocence. In denying my guilt. When you mention my bus in such a context, the bile rises in my throat and my stomach knots. When I hear the words Four Wheels for Jesus in this light, I feel that Jesus is being whipped and spit upon because of me. In some very strange way, Penelope has won. Like a suicide bomber. So, Mr. Ford — there were no private tours of my bus. I’ll tell you something that shouldn’t surprise you. In those early years, my wife and young children often toured with me. Driving those buses across the country, camping and setting up those tents and preaching and touching the poor and the humble, were among the happiest and most rewarding years of my life. Sleeping bags and microwave food. Hot dogs and burgers and donuts. We were poor as dirt, but we were carrying the Word. We lived the Word. Penelope Rideout’s lies — her vengeance — can’t take those years away from me.”