Scaler’s clarification sparked howls, but he remained undeterred through the publicity furor, perhaps because applications for Kingdom College went up by forty per cent and donations to his ministry went up fifty. The increased donations added new acreage to the holdings and a new library and dormitory to the campus, creating, as one editorialist put it, “The only structures built by Hurricane Katrina.”
Beside the distracted Scaler was his wife, a plain woman with an awkward nose, her major role in Scaler’s drama restricted to the utterance of amens after his pronouncements and singing hymns in a reedy, nasal voice. There were pronounced spaces between her outsized upper incisors, giving her a rabbity look. With a fluffy paste-on tail and penciled-in whiskers, she would have made a convincing Halloween bunny.
I saw the bunny shoot a couple of side-eyed glances Scaler’s way, as if surprised by his newfound taciturn demeanor. She aimed a perplexed glance at the senator, who looked back and shrugged. Despite the gesture, I thought I saw a split-second of fear cross his face.
“Reverend Scaler,” a reporter asked, turning from Tutweiler, “you built this college and remain chairman of the board of regents and spiritual advisor. Will you not share a few words with us on what has to be one of the major accomplishments of your life?”
Scaler blinked several times, then rubbed at his right eye. He held out his hand, fingers moving in a grabbing motion. An assistant quieted the hand by giving it a microphone. Scaler leaned toward the mic, his eye closed tight. “I have something troubling occurring in my eye,” he said. “An affliction that’s been ongoing. I promise I’ll have an important statement within the week. One that will –”
“What’s wrong with your eyes, sir?” a reporter called. “Will it involve surgery?”
“No, no…nothing so drastic. Thank you all for coming out on this momentous day.”
“But, Reverend, surely you can –”
Scaler held up his hand. Blinked. “I’ll speak soon. In fact, I am already speaking. When my words are in the light, they will ring from earth to sky. This I promise.”
“I don’t understand, Reverend. You’re speaking and yet you’re not speaking? It doesn’t make sen—”
But Scaler had already handed the microphone back to the assistant and resumed his look of distraction. Tutweiler cleared his throat and continued his platitudes. The camera cut to a reporter from a local affiliate, a sturdy young woman with the distinctly un-Southern name of Jonna Arnbjorg.
“And that’s the news from the groundbreaking ceremony for the new library and dormitory at Kingdom College here in West Mobile. Most of today’s events featured Jeffords Tutweiler, Dean of the college, with only a few puzzling remarks from the often-controversial Reverend Richard Scaler, blaming an eye affliction for the uncharacteristic brevity of his input.”
“If Scaler has an eye problem,” Harry groused, thumbing the TV off, “he got it from four decades of wearing blinders.”
But, truth be told, Richard Scaler’s narrow field of vision appealed to a great many people. In a Bible Belt state like Alabama, few in office dared to challenge the uncompromising views of the Reverend Richard Scaler, knowing it could mean fast passage to another line of work.
Outside the sun was rising and would soon transform the air to hot syrup and the sand to a griddle hot enough to sear the soles of your feet. A Dauphin Island copmobile was approaching, Jimmy Gentry’s face behind the wheel. He continued to the end of the street where the asphalt crumbled into the sand, exited and walked to the beach, hands in his pockets. He stood in the wet sand at the water’s edge and looked seaward.
Harry and I wandered out. “S’up, Jimmy?” Harry called before Jimmy saw us approaching. “Expecting twins?”
Jimmy dipped his finger in the foam of a broken wave and held it aloft in the breeze, discovering what my face had noted: a southwest wind, the basic rule this time of year. He plucked a foot-long piece of driftwood from the sand, a spar bleached by salt and sun. He chucked it out a couple dozen yards, watched it bob eastward.
“You know tides better than me, Carson,” he said. “Where you think the boat came from?”
“West somewhere. If the boat was launched on an ebb tide, it would have floated out into the Gulf, reversed on the incoming. There’s a lateral drift because of current and the west wind.”
Jimmy said, “Or the kid could have come from a boat way out on the water. Someone dropped her in the rowboat, kicked it away.”
Jimmy’s words flashed pictures into my head. A blur of faces, one small and utterly helpless. A horizon of gray water in all directions. A tiny boat rocking alone on pitching waves.
Though I’d seen every form of human cruelty and thought myself professionally inured to emotion, the pictures kicked the breath from my lungs. I felt my knees loosen and my eyes dampen at the thought of human hands placing a baby in a boat, human eyes watching it float away. I took a deep breath, blanked my mind of the images, and slipped my shades over wet eyes, as though the sun was bothersome. I turned back to my companions.
“Coast Guard know anything?” Harry was asking Jimmy.
“They’re gonna check suspicious-looking boats out on the water. But they figure anyone doing that kind of thing would be long gone.” Jimmy shook his head. “Of course, you guys would be zeroed-in on that kind of mentality.”
Jimmy was referring to Harry and my participation in a special unit in the Mobile Police Department, the Psychopathological and Socio-pathological Investigate Team, or PSIT. We were the sole members of the unit, laughingly called Piss-it by everyone in the department. If a case showed signs of involving a seriously damaged mind, it landed on our desks, generally superseding our normal caseload of shootings, stabbings, and the like. The PSIT reviewed over a dozen cases a year, with only one or two that truly fit the psychological parameters. I learned something from every case, generally something I didn’t want to know.
“I don’t envy the DI cops,” Harry said as we crunched back across the sand to my home. “How would anyone figure where the kid’s journey started?”
I grunted my sympathy. The Dauphin Island Police Department was made up of ten full-time cops and five volunteers handling a mainly upscale resort community. Petty theft, drunkenness and speeding were the major crimes. However that kid came to be in that boat, it would be sad and strange and probably ugly beyond anything the normal mind could conceive.
Turning back to the sea, I tried to imagine it from jet height, the blue of the water and the green and white of the island and mainland. If I knew enough, I could superimpose arrows over the image: the direction of last night’s currents and wind.
I didn’t have those arrows. But I knew someone who might.
Chapter 4
Dr Kurt Matthias was on the hunt, walking with a slight list through the Hong Kong market, the bag slung over his brown-jacketed shoulder tipping him a few degrees to his left. The bag’s interior rattled with his footsteps, glass tubes clicking together like ice.
The air brought Matthias’s nose the smells of incense and soya, fried eel and garlic. When the air shifted, it brought the scent of sea water, some dockage only a few blocks distant, the babble of the market occasionally broken by the blast of a freighter’s horn. In the maze of booths, melons vied for space among spices, clothing, and jade carvings. Smoke wafted from charcoal burners, and heat from the coals joined the heat rising from thousands of bodies in the market. A hodgepodge of languages and dialects mixed with the screech of parrots and the cackling of caged chickens.