Rescue

time to think about Eddie and Melinda, of what I’d seen at the Haldon house and been told at the church by Vann Tucker and at the school by Christine Kiernan. I made up my mind, gave it ten more minutes to change itself, then got out of the Prelude. After opening the trunk and putting the gloves Nancy bought me in my pocket, I walked to the trailer.
    The old bucket was still where I’d toed it away from the front door. I knocked heavily on the jamb, anyway. Nothing. I used the glove to wipe off the knob I’d tried earlier and moved around the back.
    Chairs, camouflage cloth, everything looking the way it had on my first visit that day. Pulling on the gloves, I reached up to the rear door’s handle, then knocked once more before trying the handle, finding it still locked. I looked around, walked to one of the folding chairs, and brought it over to stand on. With the extra height, I could hold the handle at about my waist. I torqued it hard, got nothing. Again, the same. Third time was the charm, and with a shearing sound, the door came open for me.
    I waited, still standing on the chair, for two minutes. I didn’t expect an alarm, but I wanted to be sure nothing on two legs or four inside the trailer came over to check on the noise. It was quiet as a library.
    In fact, when I went in, it looked like a library. Shelving, most of it as makeshift as the picnic table and barbecue, lined the walls. All the books caused the narrow, shoebox design of the interior to seem even narrower. I was surprised. On the highway, Severn hadn’t struck me as the bookish type. Then I remembered Kyle Pettengill mentioning how, once off the booze, he had a lot of time to read.
    Closing the door shut out most of the faint light, so I left it open until I could find a flashlight next to the kitchen sink. Muting the beam with some toilet paper from the galley-style bathroom, I took stock of the place.
    I’d entered through the back door into a kitchen/dining area, the alcove for eating probably doubling as living room with the table folded away. Midships was the bathroom and a linen closet, the closet also crammed with books. Opposite end was the bedroom, with a double mattress wedged into space that looked laid out originally for narrow bunk berths. More books on shelving above and around the bed. The whole place had a dank sense to it, the air fetid, the sheets damp. Not so much a house closed up as a cellar closed in, not enough sunlight penetrating to dry it out.
    I got to work.
    A majority of the books, mostly paperbacks, were from Publishers I’d heard of like Ballantine, Avon, and Fawcett, but plenty of the others carried the imprints of Bethany House, Polebridge, and more I didn’t recognize. A few works by Charles “Chuck“ Colson in his post-Watergate incarnation. As with the Haldons’ coffee table, many of the titles had the Word “Christian“ in bold print.
    There was a separate section of magazines and promotional literature, the mastheads reading “Home to Jesus,“ “Holy Temple of Him Resurrected,“ and so on. Many of the promos featured men and women in what looked like prom outfits. Sweating faces and big hair, microphones in their hands and choirs behind them as they were caught by the camera in dramatic turns. The captions under the photos identified the preachers as the Reverend this and Sister that, but what struck me was the sheer number of different organizations.
    Then I got to a section of material that seemed to be more recent, specializing in “the Church of the Lord Vigilant,“ the Reverend Royel Wyeth and his “Lifemate,“ Sister Lutrice Wyeth. The newsletters read like a small-town paper with a decided “God Loves You“ theme. Inspirational poems were interspersed with calendared events and requests for contributions toward various line items on a seemingly endless budget of good works. There were photos of the exterior of an office building, the interior of a television studio, a “Christian Community“ of small white bungalows, a tent revival meeting, etc. Two things stood out, once you saw enough photos. There wasn’t a person of color depicted in any one of them, and there was no shot of a school as such. If Lonnie Severn roamed widely within the Christian band on the spectrum, he seemed to be focusing lately on this particular signal. I took some samples with a mailing address in Florida called “Mercy Key,“ the telephone area code listed as 305.
    The rest of the place held