She had been here in her dreams.
Ruby took the boy by the hand, gave the man at the front booth their tickets. She looked to the edge of the field and, as expected, saw the black dogs. She had long ago stopped trying to tell which dogs were which. Ruby figured they were probably on their fourth or fifth litter. But there were always two. And they were always near.
At three o’clock she saw Carson standing by the carousel. Ruby and the boy walked over. Carson took them behind one of the stands.
‘Big news. He’s about to pack it in,’ Carson said of the Preacher. ‘I just heard that he is going to go to — ’
Philadelphia, Ruby thought.
‘- Philadelphia,’ Carson said. ‘He lived there at one time, you know.’
Ruby knew. She had read the Preacher’s book. When the Preacher’s mama left Jubal Hannah, and moved to North Philadelphia, the Preacher was only four.
Ruby knew the past, just as she could see the future in her dreams. She saw her son grown tall and strong and wise. She saw him silhouetted against the waters of the Delaware River, at long last free from the devil within him.
‘Preacher said he’s gonna start a mission up to Philadelphia,’ Carson continued. ‘A storefront church of sorts. Maybe a second-hand store.’
This was in her dreams, too.
‘Did you get what I asked?’ Ruby asked.
‘Yes, missy. I sure did.’
Carson looked around, reached into his coat, took out a thick paper bag. He handed it to Ruby.
‘Let him think it was me,’ Carson said.
Ruby hefted the sack. It was much heavier than she thought it was going to be. ‘What else is in here?’
When Ruby peeked inside she almost fainted. In addition to what she asked Carson to get for her there was a fat wad of money.
‘There should be forty thousand there,’ Carson said. ‘You take it and go make a life.’
Ruby forced down her sense of shock, hugged Carson long and hard and tearfully, watched him walk away. He had developed a limp on the right side. An affliction, she imagined, from all the heavy lifting he had done for the Preacher.
When Ruby paid her two spool tickets for the carousel, and she and the boy stepped on the platform, she saw Abigail and Peter for the first time in years. How big they had grown. Her heart ached with their nearness. She wanted to throw her arms around them like she had when they were small. She couldn’t.
A few minutes later she saw the Preacher. Despite his troubles and the intervening years he still looked beautiful. Ruby reckoned she would have seen him this way no matter what he did to her.
He did not see her.
The Preacher put Abigail and Peter on horses. It all seemed to happen in slow motion, as Ruby imagined it had for St John.
The Preacher chose a white horse for Peter, a red one for Abigail. The two children were fraternal twins, but now they looked a great deal alike, as if they were identical.
Ruby then saw the Preacher put a small boy on a black horse. Ruby did not have to wonder whose child this was. The boy looked just like the teenaged girl standing by the cotton candy stand, the thin, nerve-jangled girl named Bethany, the girl who had come after Ruby. Ruby wondered how many girls there had been since.
Ruby helped her boy onto the horse directly across from where the Preacher stood. This horse was old, unpainted. Its eyes were a faded gray, but most surely had one time been a coal black, as black as the dogs that were always near.
The carousel began to turn; the throaty old calliope played its song. Ruby looked at her boy, imagined him years from then, saw in her mind’s eye a time when he would be powerful, unstoppable.
The Preacher, just a few feet away, had no premonition, even though the signs were clear and unambiguous.
Weren’t they?
Or maybe the signs would have been clear if the Preacher had truly been anointed. For Ruby, the moment was preordained, and spoken of in the Word.
And I saw, and behold, a white horse.
Peter began to laugh as the carousel picked up speed, his white horse moving up and down to the rhythm.
I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come!’ And out came another horse, bright red.
Little Abigail, so much like her brother, began to laugh, too. She held tight to her red horse.
I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw, and behold, a black horse.
The boy on the black horse was scared. The Preacher held him with his free hand.
Faster and faster they went, the sound of the pipe organ filling Ruby’s mind like a sermon. She looked at her boy. He seemed to know where he was, what it all meant. Ruby clutched the money close to her, and knew they would leave this night, never to return, just as she knew they would all meet again, in the city of two rivers. In Philadelphia.
And there would be a reckoning.
As Ruby held tight to the pole, she ran her hands over the smooth, unpainted surface of the carousel horse. She imagined, as she always had, that this horse had at one time been a lustrous roan. Now it seemed to be translucent. She could almost hear its heartbeat within.
I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I saw a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him.
In the months following that day the boy became very ill with tuberculosis, almost unknown in the modern world, but all too common among Ruby’s kind. She sat with him, night after night, a cloth over her mouth, the boy’s terrible rasping filling her nights.
One night, just outside the clinic in Doylestown, in the third month of the boy’s affliction, the two black dogs came and sat next to her. All night she patted their heads. In that night she had terrible dreams, dreams of men wrapped in barb wire, old men filled with stones. When she awoke to a white, healing light, the dogs were gone.
She went rushing into the clinic, mad with worry. They told her that, somehow, her boy had been healed.
They said it was a miracle.
*
Ruby grew to become a slender, beautiful young woman, and her charms were not lost on any man. She learned to use her wiles, borrowing many of the techniques of persuasion she had learned from the Preacher himself. She invested the money Carson Tatum had given her wisely, saving every penny she could, reading every book she could borrow.
One day she read in the newspapers of how the Preacher had proven himself to be the devil’s minion, how he had become a man who took souls unto himself, a man who did murder to avenge the loss of his stepsister Charlotte.
When Ruby learned of these dark deeds she knew the end days had begun.
On the day of the third church, Ruby — who had long since been known by another name, who had long ago forsaken her red hair — went to a street in North Philadelphia.
And Hades followed him.
They stood on the corner, across from the cathedral, watching. The people of the city milled around them, each parson to his tabernacle, each sinner to his deeds.
Mother and child, Ruby thought.
There are seven churches in all.
FIFTEEN
Jessica stared at the phone, willing it to ring. This had never worked in the past, but that did not stop her from the practice.
Long after the baby’s body had been removed from the basement and the church had been sealed as a crime scene, long after the CSU officers had collected their evidence, Jessica and Byrne had stayed behind, not a single word passing between them for what seemed an eternity.
The two detectives ‘walked the scene,’ recreating, in their view, what might have happened. They examined the point of entry, envisioned the route the killer had taken. Jessica knew this was a different exercise for her partner than it was for her. She had never known anyone more compassionate than Kevin Byrne, but she knew that he knew what the experience of finding a dead — murdered was the right word — newborn baby must mean to her, to any mother.