Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

It wasn't so bad in here since she'd brought a lamp from home, one of the colonial ones from the basement. Now the cement walls of the church office and her mother's huge green metal desk glowed as if the room were continuously held in the glittering palm of God. She pulled out the bottom drawer. It was filled with old stuff: an ancient jar of fountain-pen ink, colored pencils, a blue ball of rubber bands, a booklet of baby Jesus stickers and a plastic container of gold stars. Yellowed business cards with antiquated lettering were scattered on the bottom. Her mother used the stars to distinguish particularly good Sunday school drawings: the divine doves of adolescent girls or the bloody pictures the older boys drew of Jesus on the cross.

She thought of the old church downtown: plywood nailed over the cracked stained glass and red graffiti tags sprayed over the fieldstone. Stuffed animals dangled from the bushes and trees outside: teddy bears caked with dirt, some missing eyes, and a few naked dolls, noosed like tiny babies with disconcertingly cheerful expressions and hacked-off hair. Across the street, the X-rated theater looked on with sly mastery. Before the church was vacated, crack heads forced open the back door and stole the antique silver communion chalice. The fiends, as her father referred to them, left a dead rat on the altar and with red lipstick wrote fuck you in the margin of the big leather Bible. Together they spent several days cleaning up. Her father used a broom to push the furry body across the marble, over the altar's edge into a paper bag. With a damp washcloth she'd wiped away the swear words, leaving a blotchy red stain over most of the Book of Isaiah. Mulhoffer had been smug about the break-in; her father was crestfallen and contrite. He still hoped to convince the congregation to keep the old building, turn it into a soup kitchen or a shelter for homeless men.

She peeled the label off a wax paper computer strip and stuck it onto a flier that reminded parishioners membership photos would be taken in two weeks. Already she'd folded and stapled hundreds of them and was almost done with the labels. Encoded in the names was secret information, confided by her father to her about people in the parish. Mrs. Hofner, who told everyone her husband died of a heart attack, had actually nudged an electric radio into his hot bath; or the Koenigs, whose eldest son hung himself in the backyard wearing his sister's prom dress and the Robertson newlyweds, who got involved with cocaine and kinky sex and were still in a detox center in West Virginia. Then there were the more mundane confessions, the loneliness of the older members, the disappointments of middle-aged ones. Sometimes her father saw people in his home office and Ginger would put her ear to the door, listen to a woman complain about her wayward husband and a mother tell how she'd forced her teenage daughter onto the pill.

Her father was away on Monday making sick calls. First he did the shut-ins, the handful of elderly Germans living in apartments downtown. He sometimes joked about the thick smell of sauerkraut embedded in their forties-style furniture and their knickknacks on pine shelves: dogs and elfish children in lederhosen. He always spent a full hour with Mrs. Mueller, who used to be the most powerful member of the church before Mulhoffer. She donated the money to buy the organ and made a special contribution every summer so the vacation Bible school kids could go to Holyland USA. Mrs. Mueller's grandfather started the glove factory, world famous for making long, elegant evening gloves of silk and satin and short pastel day gloves with pearl wrist buttons. Germans who fled the Third Reich were offered jobs in the factory, and this was how the church downtown got started. Though bedridden, Mrs. Mueller, a formidable lady responsible for both the expansion of the library and the new community theater building, still lived in an old Victorian on Main Street with a middle-aged nurse and a gardener who puttered around the lawn. Every visit Ginger's father gave her communion; he opened his black leather traveling case with the blue velvet indentations for the decanter of wine, the small chalice, a round tin that held the wafers stamped with lambs. He kept a lightweight tippet in his coat pocket, gold crosses embroidered on either end. Draping it around his neck, solemn as a melancholy magician, he offered up the cup to Mrs. Mueller's thrush-covered tongue, her white hair so thin that as she bowed her head, he could see blue veins through the translucent skin of her scalp.

Next he went to the Lutheran Home and held a lunchtime service. Organized in the makeshift chapel, a piece of red felt was thrown over a card table below a gold cross made by a resident out of Popsicle sticks. In wheelchairs and walkers they came, expressions ranging from reverence to resolve. Finally he ended the day with a drive over to the hospital, where he'd visit anyone the nurses said needed help. Last week he saw a boy whose face had been messed up in a fireworks accident and a woman who gave birth to a blind baby. He always looked in on the man with the goiter growing out of his neck and the diabetic woman who'd had her legs amputated just below the knees.

He wouldn't be back until late afternoon, so Ginger could afford to take a little break before batching the fliers. She opened the newspaper and spread it over her desk. That redneck councilman was rallying strong voter support for his theme-park proposal, stating that it would bring thousands of much-needed jobs into the area, and the woman with terminal breast cancer settled her case out of court with the electric company. Company spokesperson Lisa White, conceding that a settlement was necessary to curb bad publicity, continued to deny that power lines have any relationship to cancer. On the religion page, “If the Deerpath Creek mega-church were a business, you can bet people would be clamoring to pick up some shares of its stock,” an article began. Buried near the back by the movie ads was a police drawing of a man with a beard and in small caps: POLICE MAY HAVE BREAK IN PATRICK CASE.

On Saturday at approximately 1:00 A.M. police reported that a motorist driving south on Route 15 saw a young woman run across the Motel-8 parking lot toward the highway. “I couldn't believe my eyes,” the woman said. “because the girl was naked as a jaybird.”

Mrs. Alper from Valdosta, Georgia, was returning from a visit with her sister in Lynchburg, Virginia, when she saw the young woman sprint across the motel parking lot. Because of the angle of the highway, Mrs. Alper lost sight of the girl and only spotted her again in her rearview mirror. “She must have fallen because there was a man with a beard lifting her off the ground.” Alper didn't report what she saw until the next morning. “I had to convince myself I hadn't fallen asleep and dreamt it,” she said.

Local officials searched the hotel but no one fitting Alper's description was in residence. Mr. John Winslow, the night clerk, reported a man fitting the description had checked in alone the day before. When asked about the man's disappearance, Winslow responded that it wasn't particularly odd. “To avoid highway congestion and the heat, many people get early starts.”

Police detective Bret McMullan, who's been handling the case from the beginning, says there is no way of knowing if the girl was Sandy Patrick. “For all we know, Mrs. Alper may have witnessed a domestic spat.” Nevertheless, McMullan told reporters they would follow up all leads.

Patrick's mother, who is on leave from her job teaching kindergarten at Oak Grove Elementary School, says she's praying for the safe return of her daughter. “I know I'll see Sandy again,” Ruth Patrick said. “I just know she's coming home.”