“I see. I apologize,” he said.
“What is it you seek?”
The man cleared his throat and said, “How many of you are there?” He waved with his pen.
We blinked, paused, thought for a moment. We could see the suspicion in his eyes. “Our numbers are great. We are many working as one.”
“Okay, okay.” He scribbled things down in his little notebook. “Do you all live here?”
“We’ve lost some along the way, but yes. All of us here make up the congregation.”
He nodded, took a handkerchief out from his shirt pocket, and wiped the sweat from his pink forehead. “Is everyone accounted for? Nobody missing?”
We thought of the boy, his father.
The investigator waited for our answer. Some of us shuffled our feet. Still others glanced away.
“Everyone is here.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Interesting. So, you can account for every single person then?”
“Yes.” We started getting annoyed. “Look. We have nothing to hide here. We’re quiet. Law-abiding and God-fearing.”
“I apologize,” he said. He could tell we were becoming angry. “I’m just trying to do my job. Just trying to get down to the bottom of things.”
And that was it.
He left.
We breathed a collective sigh of relief and continued on with our work.
He showed up again a few days later, holding a stack of papers in an envelope. We led him to a table, placed a cloth atop it, and poured him a drink of iced tea.
“Why, thank you,” he said, evidently stunned by the gesture, given the tone of his voice.
“We are civilized,” we replied.
“Of course.” He laughed, took a sip, and cleared his throat.
He had a habit of doing this. It annoyed us.
“What can we do for you?” one of us asked.
He opened up his folder and pulled out a few slips of paper. They contained a series of sketches and drawings that looked like symbols. It was a language, perhaps. We didn’t know. But whatever it was, it appeared ancient, primordial.
“Ever seen symbols like these anywhere?” he asked.
We shook our heads. “We have not.”
“You sure about this?”
“Of course, yes.”
He told us no one knew what they meant. He’d asked everyone he could think of, ran them through the police database, sought advice from anthropologists and university scholars versed in local lore. Everywhere he turned, though, he came up with nothing.
“If that’s the case,” we said, “then why do you think we can help you?”
“Friend of mine studied religion,” he answered. “Ancient sects.”
“We are not a sect.”
“Didn’t say you were. Just—”
“We don’t know any of this.”
He sighed. “Says this looks like something ceremonial.”
“What does this have to do with your investigation?”
He finished his iced tea. “Glad you asked. This little bit of information wasn’t released to the public, but it seems that these symbols, these bizarre-looking little stars and crosses and figures that could be letters and whatnot, well, they were carved into the skin of the dead woman.”
“And because we are a religious organization, you assume we have something to do with this?”
“I didn’t say—”
We pointed in a vague direction toward the horizon. “Why don’t you go and bother those crazy artists who come here and do drugs and dance around naked? They’re probably the ones that did it.”
“I’m only trying to gather information. That’s all.”
None of us noticed him standing there, just a few feet away, listening to everything the investigator was saying. It was only when the young man got up to leave, handing over his empty glass and excusing himself before walking over toward his car, that the boy came forward.
“What is it?” we asked.
The boy stared down at the ground. There were rocks and small pebbles littered about. He kicked at some of them with the tip of his dirty shoe.
“Those symbols? The ones that were drawn there on those papers?”
“What about them?” we asked, leaning in now.
“I seen them before. In a book my father carried with him.”
“Show us,” we implored. “Show us now.”
The camper was cramped and hot, and there were flies buzzing around inside, bumping against the torn mesh of the door screen, hovering over the dirty dishes in the sink, piled up for who knew how long. Stacks of paper filled the ground, and it was hard for us to move in there. In a section of the tiny laminate kitchen counter, next to the stove, its four burners charred black as the desert night, was a picture of a woman. She wore pants, and her hair was tied in a bun. Her left hand rested on her hip, and her other was placed on the window of a blue van. Her mouth was open, a tiny red O, as if she were in the middle of saying something. The woman’s eyes were radiant, glowing. This we could feel, even as we stood there, in that forsaken space. There were a handful of pebbles and a lit candle near the photograph.
“Your mother?” we asked.
“Grandmother,” the boy responded, as if knowing the next question already. “She raised me. My real mother... she left. When my father came back from the service, he took me with him.”
“Where?” we asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “All over. We slept in motels. Once we met some men on motorcycles. Followed them for a while. They gave my father drugs that kept him up for days. That was when he started seeing things. He started writing in his book.”
The boy riffled through a plastic bag and pulled out a spiral notebook. He held it out and told us to open it, to look through the pages. Inside there were scrawled images of distorted faces and scribbles, phrases, and words that made no sense.
“Witchcraft,” one of us muttered.
“Who is this devil?” someone else asked.
“The back,” the boy urged. “They’re in the back.”
They did look similar, though the marks on the dead woman’s body were distorted and blurred in the photographs the investigator had shown us. There was something sinister about the whole thing, something that made us feel as though we’d stumbled upon a situation not meant for us.
“Call the investigator back,” one of us said.
“No,” someone else replied. “They’ll think we killed her.”
“Let’s leave all of this alone. Pretend we didn’t see any of it,” still others insisted.
“I think he did it,” the boy said. “I think he killed her. That woman.”
They had stopped, he said, one night. A long stretch of road. Past the giant windmills churning their big, wide blades. He was fast asleep. His father had been driving for days. Without sleep, he explained.
“The squeak from the brakes woke me. I felt the camper stop. The engine turned off.” He took a deep breath. “I could see out the window.” He pointed toward the back of the camper. “Red lights flashing.”
“Was it the lady?” we asked.
“There was a voice I didn’t recognize.” He began to shake. “Then a scream.”
After that, there was nothing. He heard a loud thud, saw his father’s red, shaking hands, noted the look in his eyes.
“He was mad,” the boy said. “I tried asking him if everything was okay. But he stayed quiet.”
He only partially saw the name of the city where they were. Someplace with the words Hot and Springs in it. We knew then why her lungs were filled with water that had different mineral contents than the Salton, why she looked the way she did. She’d come from one of those expensive spas tucked away in the hills, those places that rubbed you down, sprayed your face with fragrant mists, where you could splay out under the hot sun and bake your skin until it itched and bubbled.