Crazy Lady Read online

  “Who is this?” he demands, and the women dissolve like phantoms at his approach.

  “Mary,” answers Trina, while Wayne Browning examines her with the eye of a cattle-buyer.

  “Were you at Waco?” he asks from behind, fingering her head scarf, and she spins to confront him.

  “No. I just want to… I want to be part of Beautiful,” she says, but he dodges her gaze and uses a hand to sweep around the grungy compound with an air of pride.

  “You cannot be part of Beautiful. You have to be beautiful, feel beautiful, see beautiful. Everything here is beautiful. The Lord God has provided us with more beauty than anywhere else on earth. That’s why no one ever leaves here.”

  “I see,” says Trina, although she is having difficulty controlling herself at the spectacle of the dump surrounding her.

  “Come,” he says, walking away, knowing she will follow, and a few moments later she stands in an office that is only slightly less of a pigsty.

  “Are you a beautiful person, Mary?” asks Browning as he roughly takes hold of her chin and forces her head up to a bare light bulb.

  “I think so,” replies Trina, but as she tries to look into his eyes he turns away, spitting, “Don’t look at me. Have you no respect, woman? Would you look into the eyes of God?”

  “Um…” begins Trina, confusedly, but he cuts her off and rounds on her.

  “Keep your eyes averted at all times unless I tell you, all right?”

  “OK.”

  “Not ‘OK,’ Mary. ‘OK’ is trash talk. Say, ‘Yes, Our Lord Saviour.’ Do you understand?”

  Trina hesitates a fraction longer than permitted.

  “Yes, Our Lord Saviour,” yells Browning into her face. “Say it. Say it.”

  “Yes, Our Lord Saviour.”

  Then his features melt. It’s a game and he’s a master — now for the reward. “There,” he says sweetly, gently stroking her cheek. “You’re learning already.”

  Punishment and reward — just like his mother taught him. Do something wrong, get punished. Do something right — but what is right? That is always a matter of conjecture. Only God is infallible.

  It was a strategy well-learned as a child, and it has served him ever since. Keep everyone off balance; make rules that are illogical and then contort the Bible to validate them; cherry-pick the testaments, old and new, to justify anything. Isn’t that what all theologians do? And Wayne Browning is a Jesus figure all the way, although he has done considerably better than his predecessor, who never made it to the biblical three score and ten. As Trina keeps her head down, she sizes up the scrawny, though firmly muscled, man and isn’t at all surprised at his athletic build, considering that, according to Constable Zelke, he is servicing more than twenty wives.

  “You are welcome in our community,” says Browning amiably, the nice guy again, and Trina risks a peep. The old proselytizer turns away from her, so she stares at the back of his head, realizing that he is, if anything, shorter than she is. His waist-length brown hair, wispier than spider silk, is too thin to cover the stains of hair dye on his scalp, and his bushy beard has no trace of grey despite his age.

  What a fake, Trina is telling herself when Browning places his hands together in a sign of prayer and spins to face her.

  Trina’s eyes drop as he begins, sermon-like, “Mary. We are surrounded by filth and evil,” and she realizes that his power is in his voice as he continues. “Fornication, the wanton spilling of seed on the ground, greed, lust, and debauchery are destroying the world. We have to guard against those evils, Mary.”

  The illogicalness of the rant, considering his polygamous and incestuous relationships, is as blatant to Browning as it is to Trina, but God has provided him with an answer. “The Lord has chosen me,” he claims quickly, before she has a chance to work out a more negative response. “He has protected me against sin. I am like Adam who ate the apple of knowledge and brought learning to the world; like Jesus who was crucified for our sins. Now I permit my earthly body to be a vessel, to absorb the sins of mankind and to beautify them. That is why here you will see that everything is beautiful.”

  “Really?” questions Trina under her breath.

  “I am completely unselfish in my dealings with the Lord. I have given my body to Him for his great works. Believe me, Mary. Selfishness and greed are destroying the world. And this world is being destroyed. But here, everyone shares equally. There is no jealousy. Everyone gets the same measure.”

  Although you obviously get far more then most, Trina is thinking as she asks, “Where are all the men, Our Lord Saviour?”

  “They leave,” he says starkly, inviting no questions, but then he realizes that an explanation is called for. “We are very much like a convent in a way, Mary,” he says taking a gentler tone. “And just as all nuns become Brides of the Lord, here most — well maybe all — of the beautiful woman give themselves to the Lord through me.” Browning’s voice cracks with emotion, and he wipes away an imaginary tear as he continues, “It’s a very beautiful thing, Mary.”

  Especially for you, dirty old bastard, thinks Trina, wanting to throw up.

  But Browning isn’t finished. “Of course it’s not that simple,” he explains, as he sits at the desk and thrums his fingers impatiently. “If all God needed was for you to give yourself to him through me, we could do that right now.”

  Get ready with the kick-boxing, thinks Trina, but Browning is ahead of her.

  “No. There are many stages of enlightenment necessary before you can be purified and become one of God’s true servants through a visitation.” He pauses and leaves space for Trina to lure herself into his net.

  “What would I have to do?” she asks on cue, so now he backs off.

  “Enough for today, Mary. You must rest now.”

  “But —”

  “I said enough!” he yells — back to the punishment.

  “Yes, Our Lord Saviour,” answers Trina demurely, and then wants to know if she can join the other women.

  “One day, Mary. One day,” he says, then he escorts her down a brown corridor to a room and closes the door on her.

  “It’s two in the morning,” complains Joseph Creston from his Zurich apartment when Browning phones a few minutes later.

  “It’s started,” says Browning succinctly. “Undercover cop. She’s pretty good. They tried the same at Waco.”

  “What does she know?”

  “She was well briefed, and she’s wearing Janet’s scarf, so they must have her.”

  “I’ll have to think about this. What are you planning for her?”

  “I’ll just shake her up a bit, be even loonier than usual. Give her twenty-four hours and she’ll run back to Vancouver in bare feet.”

  Constable Paul Zelke’s cellphone rings a few minutes later.

  “Browning reckons we’ve got a plant in his joint,” says a voice without needing or offering identification. “He called a guy in England.”

  “Not us,” replies Zelke. “Maybe the Mounties.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll ask Mike Phillips in the morning.”

  Trina’s room is a cell and she knows it. It’s windowless, and the unpainted metal door is clearly not meant as an invitation to leave. The only furnishings are a canvas camp bed, a folding metal chair, and a battered pee bucket in one corner. It’s 4:00 a.m. She hasn’t slept — just dozed — when a key turning in the lock jumps her wide awake.

  “It’s time for your first lesson, Mary,” says Browning in a sultry, mesmerizing tone.

  “What…” she starts, but then, as her eyes accustom to the faint blue moonlight through the open door, she sees that he is naked. “Ah… um…”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” soothes Wayne, knowing what’s going through her mind as he slides into the room. “You have many, many trials to pass through before you are worthy enough to be accepted into the Lord’s body through me. But the first lesson — tonight’s lesson — is that we are beautiful as we are. That
is why we will begin as the Good Lord made us — without adornment.”

  “I don’t…” she mumbles nervously, but he piles on the pressure as he stands over her, building tension, waiting.

  “You may take off your clothes now,” he says, opening his hands and arms wide to demonstrate his own nudity as he adds reassuringly, “I get no pleasure from the flesh. I am above such things.”

  Yeah right, thinks Trina, but she’s cornered. “I’m… I’m not sure I’m ready…” she stammers, and Wayne takes a long thoughtful breath, holds the moment, and then lets her off.

  “OK,” he says lightly. “We can start tomorrow.” And he locks the door behind him.

  “OK,” sighs Trina in relief, recalling that according to Browning it is trash talk.

  Outside the door, Wayne inwardly laughs at his performance before skipping back into his room, where Daena XXIII and Daena XXII, both fourteen-year-olds who bear a striking resemblance to their spiritual leader, sleep naked in his bed.

  “Now get out of this,” Trina says to herself, once she has checked that her tape recorder is working and has added a short commentary. But a windowless room with a locked metal door is too much for her. The cellphone in her purse offers a way out, although in her cloistered quarters, the signal is barely registering. Emergency only she decides, putting the phone back, knowing that, as part of her amnesty deal with her daughter, Kylie will put her father in the picture if she isn’t home in seventy-two hours.

  “I’m going to a religious retreat centre for a few days,” she told Rick, not entirely untruthfully, but he eyed her suspiciously.

  “Just a few days,” she carried on quickly. “Just to get over the trauma of Janet.”

  “What trauma? What about me and the kids? You bring a raving loonie into the house, someone wanted for murder, and you need a break.”

  “Post-traumatic stress…” suggested Trina, ratchetting up the odds. “I nearly lost the guinea pig.”

  “You left him in the car.”

  “OK,” she finally admitted. “The fact is that I’d really like to believe in God. It would make my life much easier and I wouldn’t have to lie so much.”

  “Trina, who do you lie to?” he asked, confused.

  “My patients of course,” she explained as if he should have guessed. “I usually get ones who are on their way out, and I always tell them they’ll go to heaven — but I don’t believe it.”

  Trina has tried believing. She even goes to church occasionally. But she’s too curious and too cynical to accept that her patient’s sufferings are intended to ready them for their next great adventure.

  “Why would a good and merciful God do that?” she has questioned many times as she sat at the bedside of tormented patients while they endured the agonies of a journey that has only one possible end.

  However, Trina Button is not the only person with concerns about the immediate future. Her intrusion into the Canadian community has rippled across the Atlantic and sent Joseph Creston flying back to his London headquarters.

  “I warned you this would happen,” spits John Mason, but Creston stops him with a hand.

  “Browning can handle it. The important thing at the moment is to divert resources to other sectors and make sure all the books are straight.”

  “And what about Janet?”

  “The Canadian police must have her. The cop’s wearing her scarf.”

  “And Janet’s talking?”

  “She doesn’t even know what bloody year it is.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I hope there’s none. Browning reckons he’ll scare the cop off in a day or so. We’ll re-evaluate the situation in a few weeks.”

  Trina tests the door to her room for the ninth time. Her watch and her stomach tell her that it is morning — nearing 10:30 a.m. — and she is beginning to panic. Browning hears the handle, looks up from his computer to check the clock, and decides to give her another half an hour.

  In St-Juan-sur-Mer, David Bliss paces his apartment with leaden shoes as he constantly turns over the situation in his mind and tries to convince himself that it is just a nightmare. He’s even written a poem in the margin of his manuscript:

  If this be a nightmare

  Wake me soon

  That I may not suffer

  This intolerable torment.

  But as the sun sets on a black day, he momentarily brightens with thoughts that Klaus may not want Yolanda back. Didn’t she say I was the best lover she’d ever had, far better than him?

  What has that got to do with it? She must have loved him — she stayed with him for nearly three years.

  A knock on the door tries to shake him from the depths. Probably Daisy, he thinks — still tear-filled, still trying — and he’s tempted to ignore it, but the caller persists.

  “Yolanda!”

  She falls into his arms and he drags her inside. “He didn’t care,” she blubbers. “What?”

  “Klaus. He just said ‘Okey-dokey’ when I told him.”

  Don’t rush, don’t overact. She’s fragile, be careful. “I love you,” he whispers in her ear.

  “I know, and I love you too, David.”

  “So, Mary,” says Browning when he eventually opens Trina’s door. “Are you ready to begin your journey in search of the Lord?”

  “Actually… not today,” she says as she pulls herself up to her full height and tries to march past him. He grabs her upper arm with powerful bony fingers and whispers menacingly in her ear.

  “Hand over the tape recorder.”

  “What?”

  He squeezes hard. “Either hand it over or I’ll have you strip-searched.”

  “How did you…?” she begins, but notices that a posse of four of his wives are standing fierce-faced ready to carry out his merest wish.

  “That’s theft,” she protests as Browning snatches the recorder from her, but he just laughs.

  “No, Mary. This is Beautiful. Everything here belongs to the Lord.”

  Two minutes later Trina is walking the logging road back to Mountain Falls with Browning’s warning, “And tell whoever sent you to use a professional next time,” ringing in her ears.

  It’s ten miles to Mountain Falls and her car, along a road that leads nowhere but Beautiful. She could try calling Rick on her cellphone but figures that it’s better if he doesn’t know so, as she slogs dejectedly through the silent forest, she sorts through what she has learned about Janet.

  “Brainwashed,” she muses aloud, realizing how easy it could be for an insecure woman with low self-esteem to fall under the old charlatan’s spell. “Men are so lucky as they get older,” she complains loudly as she scuffs at the loose gravel. “They just get wiser, more mature, and more women. Hah! Look at me: barely forty with stretch marks, wrinkles, and cellulite. I just get more flab and more stupid. International investigator, pah! International idiot. Browning wasn’t fooled for a minute. Now what? Give up. ‘Never give up,’ the PI manual says. ‘No matter how great the odds against you, never give up. There’s always another way.’”

  The rattle of an approaching vehicle turns her head.

  “Our Lord Saviour thought you might want a ride back to town,” says the driver of the compound’s mini-bus, a girl in a brown head scarf who doesn’t look old enough for school let alone a driver’s licence.

  Trina hesitates.

  “Come on,” calls the girl cheerfully. “He’s a good man. He’s just like God. He only wants us to do the right things so that we will be saved.”

  “Have you been saved?” asks Trina as she squeezes into the rear seat alongside two skeletonized supplicants.

  “Oh yes. We’ve been saved,” calls the driver over her shoulder, and they set off singing, “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam…”

  “We’re cleaning up the records for Beautiful,” Mason tells Joseph Creston at lunchtime, but the company chairman seems unconcerned.

  “Browning called back,” he replies. “He’s got it in hand
. The cop ran. Just don’t use him for a while.”

  “OK, J.C.”

  “Any news of where they’re holding Janet?”

  Mason shakes his head. “Early days. I’ve got the guy in Vancouver that Browning found working on it.”

  “Good man.”

  Mason’s “guy” in Vancouver, Jody Craddock, is an excop turned private eye who is having no more luck at tracking Janet than the two RCMP officers assigned by Mike Phillips.

  Neither Janet nor her host has any reason to venture into the street, and as Trina is the old man’s only regular visitor it seems unlikely that she’ll ever be discovered.

  Clive Sampson may be fifteen years older and somewhat frailer than his guest, but company is company, and since the loss of his wife to cancer he has become addicted to solitaire and staring: the television, the floor, the walls, the ceiling — the depressing view has been much the same wherever he looked. Trina’s visits always perked him up, but now, as Janet slowly comes to life, he bubbles with excitement over checkers and Scrabble, and he fusses over her like a new puppy.

  Janet still meditates over her crucifix and chants religious incantations, but only when she’s alone, and now that her eyesight has improved she is even starting to read.

  “Trina should be back in a day or so,” explains Clive as he fishes a couple of ready-to-eat meals from the small freezer and pops them in the microwave. “She’s a lovely woman.”

  “I know,” says Janet, risking God’s wrath by using the kitchen window as a mirror.

  Without the head scarf she is less austere, although her pinched features, scraped-back hair, and glasses still give her the appearance of a girl’s school headmistress. The ebony-rimmed reading spectacles, part of Trina’s PI disguise kit, have brought the world into much sharper focus.