Stolen Away

“You gave us information, child,” Breckinridge said, gently. “Whether it was helpful, well, that would be premature for me to say.”

“Do you remember what you said?” I asked her.

She smiled at me, warmly. “I go into a trance, and I say things. Later Martin tells me what I’ve said.”

“I see,” I said.

Her hand, under the table, settled on my thigh.

“You have kind eyes, Mr. Heller,” she said.

She began to stroke my thigh. I began to levitate again.

“Your eyes,” I said, “are very old, for so young a girl.”

She continued to stroke my thigh. “I’ve lived many times, Mr. Heller.”

Now she was stroking something else.

“I can tell you’ve been around,” I managed.

“Here’s the address,” Marinelli said, returning with a scrap of paper for Breckinridge.

Her hand slipped away.

“You can reach us day and night,” he said. “We live on the church premises.”

“Thank you,” Breckinridge said, rising. I kept my place, for the moment. It wasn’t that dark in the room.

“We, uh, do appreciate you clearing out of this suite,” I said. “I’m the one who’s going to be using it.”

“We will be staying the night, you understand,” she said. “Or, actually-I will. Martin is going on ahead, by car, shortly, to prepare for weekend services. I’ll be going home by train, tomorrow.”

She was giving me what I might best describe as a significant look. I’m a detective. I pick up on these things.

“Do you need any expense money?” Breckinridge said.

“No,” Marinelli said. “If what we’ve said proves helpful, we would not be adverse to having our names in the papers. Like any Christian church, we are missionaries, spreading the word.”

I got up, “Well, thank you, both. Sorry if I was rude, earlier, Reverend.”

“All true believers begin as doubters,” he assured me, gesturing us toward the door.

“Safe journey,” she told us, and we were in the hall.

We sat in the Dusenberg at the curb for a while.

“What do you make of that?” Breckinridge asked.

“I’m not sure. Those two aren’t in the same class as Edgar Cayce, that’s for goddamn sure.”

Breckinridge nodded. “Marinelli certainly sends out mixed signals-talk of Christianity coming out of a satanic countenance, theological mumbo-jumbo that sounds more pagan than Judeo-Christian.”

“Sounds like a promising new religion to me-life after death, and psychosexuality, too.”

“But are they con artists?”

“Marinelli obviously is,” I said, shrugging. “I’m not sure about the girl.”

He nodded. “She seems to be sincere, like Cayce, believing herself to possess psychic powers. But does she?”

“I wonder. It’s interesting that when she started saying that the kid was dead, he snapped her out of it.”

Breckinridge looked grim. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. She knew one detail the general public doesn’t. She predicted a couple things-if they come true, I’m going to be suspicious.”

“I already am suspicious.” His hands settled on the steering wheel. “Are you ready?”

“No,” I said. “Let me out at the first all-night drugstore.”

“Why?”

“Where else am I going to find a package of Sheiks at this time of night?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Have somebody pick me up here around noon tomorrow-at the cafe on the corner, over there, will be fine.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“I’m going to do some poking around on my own,” I said.

Breckinridge, more mystified by me than by the seance we’d just witnessed, let me out at a drugstore. I made my purchase, walked back to the old four-story brick hotel and waited for Marinelli to leave.

Hoping to hell it hadn’t been some ghost feeling me up under the table.

9

My driver was a ruddy, blond, good-natured man of perhaps thirty named Willis Dixon, one of three patrolmen under the command of Hopewell Police Chief Harry Wolfe. Dixon wore a black leather jacket with a badge pinned on, a matching cap and khakis, with a black tie snugged crisply in place. A neat-looking uniform, for a local cop, but a distant second to the blue and pink costumes of the New Jersey State Police chorus boys.

“We been reduced to chauffeurin’ and other shit work,” Dixon had told me pleasantly, when he picked me up at precisely noon at the Princeton Cafe. I bought him lunch before we left, and heard all about how Colonel Schwarzkopf had frozen out Chief Wolfe and his staff-the first cops on the scene, after the kidnapping-from the inner circle of the investigation.

Right now we were rolling along a gravel road, cutting through the ominously lonely Sourland Hills countryside, snarled as it was with underbrush that thickened on either side into heavy, rugged, seemingly impenetrable woods.

“I’m going to pull over for a minute,” Dixon said. He had apple cheeks and a space between his front teeth, a moronic countenance that probably served him well as a cop; his eyes were dark and shrewd, and that’s what counted.

“Why’s that, Willis?”

We’d been on a first-name basis ever since I bought him lunch.

“It ain’t to take a leak,” he said, and grinned in his knowing dumb-ass way. “I think we’ll find something that just might interest you.” He pronounced it “inner rest,” which was precisely the kind of rest I could’ve used.

As he pulled over, I realized the undergrowth had been cleared up ahead, to make way for a sloping, landscaped lawn. We’d come upon the occasional farmhouse or shack, along the way; but nothing like this. Here, in the middle of this overgrown but desolate landscape, was what at first glance seemed a mansion: a gray three- story frame building with a white-pillared porch in front of which evergreens perched like obedient pets. A beautiful structure, really, of modern vintage, despite its modified Southern plantation motif.

We got out of the unmarked car and walked toward the big building, which on closer look resembled a hotel more than a private residence, but there were no signs to identify it as such or to attract business.

And it was obviously empty-though apparently such had not been the case for long. Several of its windows had been broken out, and it wore a general air of disrepair and neglect. Which was puzzling in itself: why a building of this size and worth would be abandoned made no sense at all. Had a bank foreclosed here, there’d have been at least minimal upkeep.

“Come around back,” Dixon said; he had dug a chaw of tobacco out of his jacket pocket and took a healthy bite.

Leaves and twigs under the thin frozen layer of snow crunched under our feet as we climbed the gently sloping ground, and circled around, to approach the rear of the building.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Dixon grinned at me, chewing his tobacco vigorously. “Pretty sight, ain’t it?”

The whole ass-end of the big building was blown out; two large barnlike double-doors, on the ground floor, had been torn away-one was missing entirely, another hung by a thread and a prayer. On the lower, built-up basement level, the wood walls between brick support posts had also been blown out. Lumber and refuse were