Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

I knocked gently on the door to Leroy’s room the next morning, hoping Lovesong would be the one to answer, disappointed when I saw Leroy open the door.

“Hey Leroy, is Lovesong up yet?”

“Hells yes, he been up since the crack of dawn. He set off for work early. He’s out in the fields already. I heard yellin’ through the wall last night. Did something happen between the two of you?”

“I guess you could say that. I’ll catch him when he gets home from work.”

I returned to my room and looked out through the French doors. Across the road I saw the reverend and his wife enter the church. I had noticed them doing this the past few mornings, obviously preparing their house of worship for the evening service.

I picked up Chet and took him downstairs where I found Maybelle in the kitchen.

“Well good morning, Noah. How are you on this fine day?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Actually, I’m not.”

“Really? You need some coffee.” She was already pouring me a cup from a pot on the stove. “It’s hot and strong and will fix you right up in no time.”

“I don’t want coffee.” I took a breath then blurted, “I need to break into the reverend’s house.”

Maybelle fumbled with the coffee pot before it slipped from her grip. It clanged on the stove top and in a stunned tone she said, “You need to do what? Why? Are you insane?”

“Reverend Jim and his wife are inside the church now. What exactly do they do in there each morning?”

“The reverend likes to rehearse his sermons while his wife tidies… cleans the windows, sweeps the floors, puts fresh flowers in the vases, things like that.”

“How long does it normally take them?”

“Noah, you can’t be—”

“How long?”

“It varies. Sometimes they’re in there for twenty minutes or so. Sometimes they’re there all morning. Noah, you can’t go breakin’ and enterin’ people’s homes. What if you get caught?”

“I guess I’ll have to take that chance. I think there’s something in that house I need to see. Would you mind looking after Chet for a while.”

“I ain’t gonna talk you out of this, am I?”

“No.”

“Then of course I’ll mind your damn dog,” she said, taking Chet from me. “I suppose he can help me tidy up the leftovers from breakfast.”

I started to head for the door before she stopped me. “Noah, don’t go doing anything you’ll regret.”

“If I don’t do this, I’ll regret it forever.” Before I left, I looked at Maybelle’s perfectly crimped hair. “Say, you don’t have a spare hairpin I could borrow, do you?”

As a journalist I’d done my fair share of breaking and entering in the past. I’d snuck my way past more security guards and picked the locks on more backstage doors than I cared to remember. If you wanted the scoop, you had to be prepared to break a few rules to get it.

On my way out to the reverend’s house, I constantly peered around me, making certain nobody had spotted me, and nobody was following me.

After quietly climbing the steps of the front porch, I knocked on the door to make certain nobody was home. I wasn’t about to break into a house with someone inside it.

When nobody answered, I tried the door handle.

The door was locked.

Perhaps in normal times the reverend might have left his house unlocked in his absence, given the fact that Clara’s Crossing was such a sleepy little town. But Reverend Jim had made it clear that these were not normal times, given the presence of such an untrustworthy drifter as myself.

Ironically, I was about to prove the reverend right.

From my pocket I pulled out Maybelle’s hairpin, knelt in front of the door and bent the pin to fit the lock. With a jiggle and a jimmy, I heard the lock give.

Quietly I opened the door and crept inside.

Somehow, the empty house was even creepier without the reverend and his wife in it. From the framed pictures on the walls, I felt the gazes of condemnation from Jesus and Mary and all the apostles, all of them watching my every step down the hallway, through the dining room and into the reverend’s study.

He had obviously returned the small chest to the shelf after I left the night before.

I took it down and placed it on the desk then opened the top drawer.

I was worried that perhaps the reverend had hidden the key to the chest elsewhere, concerned that I might try to do exactly what I was doing. But clearly, he thought locking the house was enough to deter my curiosity from getting the better of me, for there was the key sitting in the drawer.

Evidently, he had misjudged me, or rather, hadn’t judged me harshly enough.

I slid the key into the lock on the chest, turned it and lifted the lid.

There was the reverend’s precious Bible which I took out and impatiently tossed aside onto the desk.

That’s when I saw what else was in the chest.

What I knew I’d seen the night before.

There before me was an envelope, bent and frayed, stained and dirty and marked with what looked like a bicycle tire track.

And there on the front, the ink smeared in places, was Lovesong’s name and address in Joel’s handwriting.

Lovesong Valentin

Clara’s Crossing

Louisiana

I looked at the date on the postmark.

It was date stamped the day after Joel’s death.

Without being able to control myself, I started shaking.

This was the letter.

There in my trembling hands was the original letter that Joel had died for.

I had assumed it had never gotten to Lovesong. I had assumed it had been lost on the streets after the accident. Hannah, Joel’s colleague at Juilliard, had told me they had never received a reply from Lovesong. And Lovesong himself said he had tried to leave once but it was never meant to be.

But somehow the letter had gotten here.

Someone must have found it on the street…

Picked it up…

Slipped it into a mailbox…

Yet it had clearly never reached the person for whom it was intended.

Quickly I turned it over in my hand.

I saw that the envelope had been opened.

I pulled out the letter inside, the paper jittering and hard to read. And there it was, short and to the point, written with Joel’s careful hand. He always hated sending letters printed from a computer. He preferred the personal touch of handwritten ink on paper, even with the mistakes. He always told me how much he loved the imperfection of a handwritten letter.

Dear Mr. Valentin,

Thank you for sending us your somewhat unorthodox and old-fashioned application to attend The Juilliard School. It is clear, you have a gift. I would very much like to invite you to New York to perform an entry audition. If you do not have the funds to make the trip, we have grants available for students who display such an aptitude for music as yourself.

Mr. Valentin, from what I’ve heard on your cassette tape, your talent for music must be given a chance to flourish and grow. Yours is a gift destined to be shared with the world.

I eagerly await your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Joel Matheson

Professor of Musical Arts

“He never got it,” I breathed, my head spinning as I palmed a tear away. “Joel died for nothing. Lovesong never got the letter. The bastard hid it from him, and he never got it.”

All the grief and hate and sheer rage began to boil inside me all over again, but this time it wasn’t aimed at Lovesong. My blood was roasting over Reverend Jim.

“You bastard. You fucking—”

I stopped mid-curse.

For at that moment, there was something else in the chest that caught my eye.

I reached into the box and pulled out a piece of paper, yellowed and crinkled with age. On it was written a note.

To whomever may be blessed enough to find this child,

The Lord has punished me with a blind baby boy, so I see no choice but to summon the Devil and trade my soul for the gift of music, for this child adores a lullaby like a…

The paper didn’t have any more space for words.

I turned it over and saw—

… Lovesong

This was the note that had been left with Lovesong in the basket, when his mother Harper supposedly sold her soul to the Devil.

This was the note that the reverend’s wife found when she stumbled across the crying baby abandoned at the crossroads.

Only…

“I know this handwriting. I’ve seen this handwriting before.”

My eyes shot across the desk to the reverend’s Bible.

I clawed it toward me and flipped it open, thumbing through page after page after page, looking between the notes in the Bible and the note that had been left with Lovesong’s basket, my eyes wide and horrified at the way the S’s swirled like a snake, the way the L’s finished with a pompous flourish, the way the E’s were written like a backward 3.

“Lovesong’s mother didn’t write this note,” I whispered in horror. “The reverend did. It wasn’t the Devil who took her. It was him .”

My heart stopped at the clomp, clomp, clomp of footsteps on the porch steps.

I heard voices outside—the reverend and his wife.

“Oh fuck.”

I grabbed the note from Lovesong’s basket.

I grabbed the letter that Joel had written.

I heard the front door open, and the reverend say, “I could have sworn I locked this door on the way out.”

I tucked the note and the letter into the pages of the bible, then closed the chest, locked it, and returned the key to the desk drawer and the chest to the bookshelf.

Footsteps made their way down the hallway to the kitchen.

I grabbed the Bible and slid out of the study.

I turned into a room I hadn’t been in before, a living room, realizing the unexplored house was a labyrinth to me.

I heard the voice of the reverend approaching as he said, “I hope tonight’s sermon will be enough to let everyone know that Van Owen boy needs to be run out of town.”

He walked into the living room from a door at the far end.

I swiftly backed into a corridor, hearing his wife’s voice approaching.

“Well let’s hope Mr. Van Owen gets the message, before we start teaching him some southern manners.”

She turned into the corridor.

I stepped quickly and silently into the next room, a sitting room.

Jesus glared at me from a picture on the wall and I slipped through the next door.

I was in the hallway that led to the front door.

Creeping as quietly as I could I made my way to the exit…

Turned the handle…

Opened it…

And ran.