John Locke - Now & Then
“I heard they arrested you!” she said. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to pick you up!”
“It’s okay.”
“What did they do to you? Why didn’t you call?”
“Come inside, I’ll tell you everything.”
The Sheriff had already called Beth, so she and I sat down with Rachel. We’d gotten about halfway through the explanation when The Seaside’s phone rang. Beth took the call and after a few seconds, passed it off to me. I listened for a minute, asked a few questions, listened some more, and then hung up.
Rachel said, “Who was that?”
“Dr. Carstairs. He called about D’Augie.”
Rachel jumped to her feet. It was interesting to watch how her eyes lit up. “How is he?”
“He’s dead.”
Rachel’s knees buckled. She made an attempt to grab the arm of the love seat, but missed. She hit the floor before I could get to her.
“I’ll get a wet cloth and smelling salts,” Beth said, moving out of the room quickly.
I got Rachel up on the couch and elevated her torso. The salts worked. Beth handed me the towel, and I dabbed at Rachel’s face. When she came to she began flailing. It took a minute, then she was better.
“Is it true?” she sobbed. “D’Augie’s dead?”
“I’m sorry. I know you liked him.”
“What happened?”
“They’re not sure. He may have had a reaction to the antibiotic they administered for the burns. They never got a proper medical history on him, so they had no way of knowing.”
“Oh, my God!” she wailed. “Poor D’Augie.” She was inconsolable. So much so that I began to wonder if her interest in him could have been more than casual. On the other hand, her initial reaction was bogus. I’d seen enough fainters in my life to know that Rachel was faking it. But why?
Under normal circumstances I would have stayed home to help her work through her grief. But I had a date with Beth that couldn’t wait, so I gave Rachel a double sedative and tucked her in for the night.
It crossed my mind that I could be walking into an ambush at the church. But it didn’t feel like one, because Beth would be with me, and surely the Sheriff knew how easily I could turn things around by putting a knife to her neck if I needed to get away. While I didn’t think it was an ambush, I didn’t know what I might encounter when I got there, so I took the time to hide some light weapons and tools in my warm up jacket and pants. I opened my little leather kit, the one where I stored various tools of my trade, such as syringes and opiates and poisons and…
And noticed a vial was missing.
I shook Rachel until she opened her eyes. “Wh-What?” she stammered, deep in a fog.
I held the kit in front of her face and made her focus on it. “Rachel, listen to me. There was a small vial in here that I told you never to touch. It’s one of the deadliest poisons in the world.” I shook her again. “Rachel!” I said, and slapped her across the face. Her eyes opened to about half-mast and a crooked smile formed on her lips. When she spoke her voice had a sing-song lilt to it.
“You said he was trying to kill you,” she said.
“What?”
“He loved the Red Drink,” she said.
“You poisoned D’Augie?”
She giggled, as if laughing in her sleep. “D’Augie said Red Drink was to die for!” She drifted off again.
I pinched her nostrils shut till she started to choke. I shouted her name, and she gagged and shook her head. “Leave me alone!” she said, while trying to slap me away.
“Who was he?”
“Huh?”
“Who was D’Augie?”
“Huh? Oh. I dunno.”
“Why did he want to kill me?”
“I dunnooo.”
“Did he tell you anything about himself?”
“Huh?”
I shook her again and repeated the question. She tried to swat me with her hand.
“I’m serious, Rachel. Tell me what he said.”
“Just that he was named after his father and his father’s best friend.”
“His father’s name was Augie?”
“No. Augustus.”
I felt as though someone had drilled a hole in my chest.
“Dunno what the D was for,” she murmured.
The room seemed to swirl around me. I tucked Rachel in again and let her sleep. I didn’t have to ask her anything else. I knew exactly who the kid was, though I’d never known of his existence before that moment. D’Augie was named after his father, Augustus, and his father’s best friend, Donovan Creed.
Donovan and Augustus: D’Augie.
Augustus Quinn had been my best friend for more than fifteen years. We’d killed together, worked together, and defended our country. He was a monster of a man, born with a rare disease that misshaped his head and facial features. About four years ago Augustus had fallen in love with a young con artist named Alison, whom I’d recruited to work for my agency at Homeland. Around that time I had a medical issue that put me in a coma for three years. When I recovered, I learned that Augustus had kidnapped Alison and was keeping her in a concrete cell in his warehouse in Philadelphia. It’s a long story, but in order to rescue Alison I had to kill my best friend.
Fuck.
Augustus never told me he had a son.
Life’s crazy sometimes, you know?
Wow.
Ah well, fuck it.
I mean, there’s nothing I can do about it now, right?
Nothing to do but close that chapter of my life and move on.
Chapter 28
THE LAND AROUND the little church was flat, the lot surrounded by pines. The church was two stories high, made entirely of flagstone, except for the corrugated red metal roofing, the wooden door, and the windows. There was a slate floor standing area in front of the church that was maybe twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. To the right of the church were two flagstone columns that stood about fifteen feet high. The columns were connected at the top by a limestone cap. A few inches below the cap an old, cast-iron bell hung from a wooden beam. The rope for the bell clapper was long enough to reach the ground, but was tied off to a cleat so children couldn’t reach it.
We parked Beth’s car in the gravel area on the left side, and from that angle I could see a wooden balcony that extended from a small gable. Before exiting the car, Beth put her hand on my wrist, very gently. I looked down at it, and then raised my eyes to her face. She held my gaze a moment, then closed her eyes. I leaned over and lightly kissed her lips. She didn’t kiss me back.
I kissed her again, and this time she opened her eyes and returned the kiss. I started moving closer, eager for more, but she said, “It’s not our time yet.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “Because to me, it really feels like it’s our time.”
She smiled and lifted her hand from my wrist, and placed it to my face. I’d never felt so much energy from a person’s touch before, not even Kathleen Chapman, who I almost married.
“We’re meant to be, and it will happen, but it’s not our time yet.”
“Can I have just fifteen minutes of it now with you, across the street, on the beach?”
She did that adorable pouty thing she sometimes did with her mouth, then sighed and said, “I’m not ready yet, and you’re not ready. But when it’s our time, you won’t be disappointed. I promise.”
“A rain check then.”
“Let’s call it a heart check,” she said, placing her palm on my heart.
I looked past her, through her window, thinking of that gorgeous, deserted beach a scant two minutes away. “How about a quick ten minutes now, and when we’re both ready, we can deduct it from eternity?”
“You drive a hard bargain,” she said, “but no.”
“Well, you’ve certainly put me off my game.” I kissed her hand and we climbed out of the car. The second floor balcony above us looked to be about two feet deep, was covered, and appeared to be decorative. But once inside the church, I saw that it was attached to a small, hidden gable about six feet wide and eight feet deep. You reach that little room by descending into a trap door about four feet below the ante way and then crawling some twenty feet under the chapel until you reach a wooden ladder. That twenty foot crawl behind Beth was the toughest of my life. Being that close to her backside would have killed a lesser man. When we got to the ladder we climbed fifteen feet to a landing. Beyond the thick, locked, wooden door, stood the little gable room where I met Libby Vail.
Libby was thin, but appeared healthy. She was sitting on a window box, surrounded by stacks of old, moldy books and parchment.
“Hey Beth!” she said, brightly.
“Hi Libby. This is Donovan Creed.”
Libby and Beth exchanged a knowing smile that was so obvious it almost embarrassed me. Beth blushed and lowered her eyes and cleared a small space on the window box and sat there. It happened to be the only place one could sit in the cramped little area.
“Hello, Mr. Creed.”
I cocked my head to one side. “I notice you’re missing a fingernail on your right index digit.”
Libby laughed. “Do you always start conversations this way?”
“I do. Always.”
She turned to Beth. “See? I told you he’d be funny!” To me, she said, “Seriously, why do you ask?”
“I found it in the picnic basket Beth brought you one day. I figured you broke it when you scratched your initials on the bottom of the basket.”
Beth looked at her curiously. Libby thought a moment, then said, “Oh. I think that must have happened the night I was trying to channel Jack Hawley. I kept scratching my initials while saying my name.”
“Why?”
She looked at me sheepishly. “I was hoping to somehow cross the space-time continuum, like they talk about in the movies. Maybe get him to send me a clue of some sort. Crazy, I know, but wow, you’re really good. I mean, to find a fingernail and scratch marks and put all this together? I’m impressed.”
Impressed or not, I had to ask the question, in spite of Beth.
“Are you being held here against your will?”
Libby laughed, heartily. “No, of course not. If I were, I could just open the door to the balcony and call for help.”
I gestured at the tiny room, “Then what are you doing? Your parents and friends have been mourning you for nearly a year. The FBI came down…”
Libby held up a hand. “Please. Don’t make me feel guilty, I know all that. I’m just giving back. Some people join the Peace Corps, I hide in a church.”
“Except that your loved ones would know if you were in the Peace Corps.”
“I won’t be here much longer.”
“You stay in this cramped room all the time?”
“It’s more like a home base. I stay with different friends at different times. There’s a schedule, but yes, I sleep here sometimes, and this is where I conduct my research.”
“What are you researching?”
She gestured to the books and parchment paper. “The local churches and library have opened all their books to me. I’ve spent the past year filling in the details of my heritage. When I’m not reading, when the church is locked, I wander around the building. And when my friends come to visit, we go for walks. Beth and some of the day ladies drive me to parks or deserted parts of the beach. It’s easy not to be recognized if I’m wearing a wig and trying to blend in. Sometimes a group of us go fishing.” She pointed to a laptop. “Plus, I’ve got all the modern conveniences, iPod, iTouch, computer, TV…”
“I’ve heard some bullshit in my day,” I said, “but this takes the cake.”
She eyed me, curiously. “You don’t believe I’m here for historical reasons?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why’s that?”
I picked up one of the maps. “This is a terrain map.” I gestured to some sheets she’d tacked to the wall. “And those look a lot like geological surveys.”
“So?”
“So you might be researching your family history, but there’s more to it. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to keep your presence quiet.”
She said nothing.
Beth watched me with a tender light in her eyes that made me feel particularly good.
And then it hit me.
“You’re searching for treasure!”
She seemed about to protest, then saw my smug smile and gave up. She offered a smile of her own and said, “Wouldn’t you search for treasure if you were me? If you thought you could find it?”
“I would indeed.” I paused a moment. Then asked, “So, did you find it?”
She shook her head sadly. “Nope. All this effort, and not so much as a doubloon. We gave up months ago. We thought that by traveling around the island I might be able to sense Jack’s presence. But either I never got to the right place, or we were wrong.”
“We?”
“The original descendants and me.”
“No one kidnapped you?”
“Nope.”
“The eighty descendants have been hiding you, driving you around, trying to help you find pirate treasure?”
“At first.”
“No treasure?”
“Not a scrap.”
“Then why stick around?”
“Because the people around here have become my friends, and they need me. Every day different people, descendants of the original settlers, drove me around the island while I tried to pick up some sort of cosmic connection to Jack Hawley. The closest I ever came to getting a feeling was right here, in this old church.” She absently touched the necklace around her neck. “But Jack couldn’t have buried anything here. It was a highly visible location in his era, and the church wasn’t built until ten years after his death.”
“That’s interesting, but you haven’t answered my question.”
“Why am I still here if there’s no treasure?”
“That’s the one.”
Libby shrugged her shoulders and gave me a “you’re not going to believe me” sort of smile. She said, “You’re not going to believe me, but whenever I’d be somewhere more than an hour, people started showing up. They said being near me made them feel better. So I love the area, love the people, and they need me. I go to the hospital every night, and the nursing home, and walk through the halls. If someone is particularly ill I go in and sit with them a few minutes.”
I thought about how I tried to find her at the church that morning before dawn, and how I’d felt the power near the hospital, before it faded away.
“Can I ask where you were just before dawn this morning?”
“I went to the hospital to visit Jimbo Pimm’s grandfather.”
“Because?”
“He’s a cancer patient. He’d been at Savannah Memorial, but they sent him home to die last week. He took a turn for the worse in the middle of the night and Jimbo brought him to the hospital. While they worked on him, Jimbo came and asked if I might be able to help.”
“Did you?”
“Did I go? Yes, Jimbo drove me.”
“Did it help?”
“No. I mean, I can’t cure people, but he said I took away his pain. I hear that a lot, and do what I can, but it doesn’t last. I told him I’d sit with him again tonight, for an hour.”
I didn’t believe for a minute she had healing powers, but I couldn’t dispute the fact that something was going on. I’d seen what happened to the old people in the church yard. And there was no question that my mood elevated when I was around her. The room we were in was only five feet tall and I’d been stooping long enough to know my back should be stiff, and yet I felt not the slightest pain. I decided Libby must have something about her that altered people’s perception of pain when they were physically near her. I didn’t want to feel any pain later on, so I sat on the floor.
