Read Parishioner for Free Online Page B

dark bar where he had, only minutes before, considered murdering a woman over something he might have confessed to.
    My name is Frank
, he’d said,
and I think I can help you.…
    “Mr. Noland?”
    Xavier didn’t want to break away from the reverie. He enjoyed remembering, counting the moments that led to a completely unexpected deliverance.
    “Yes?” Xavier said.
    “My aunt will see you in the yard.”

    Doris Milne led Xavier through a sunken living room that was furnished with gaudy golden-colored wood and blue fabric furniture. The floor was wooly brown shag surrounded by walls hung with more than a dozen oils depicting differing types of flowers. There were rose, cactus blooms, and bird-of-paradise—pansies, poppies, and a spray of purple orchids that seemed as if it might sway if a breeze came along.
    There was the feeling of corruption coming from every innocent detail of this large parlor. The Parishioner didn’t know whether this was because of the story he was given by Benol or a sixth sense he’d developed in a long career of bad men and women plying their trades without concern or remorse.
    On the other side of the semisubmerged living room was a step up to a long sliding glass window. The transparent door was open, leading out to a brick-laid patio surrounded by tall cedars and set upon by dappled sunlight and shade bisected by bark and leaf.
    In a metal chair that had been painted pink sat a small, elderly woman in a jade-and-wheat-colored dress. Her feet didn’t go all the way to the bricks. On the pink metal table next to her was a tall, slender glass filled with a bright green liquid that Xavier was sure had a high alcoholic content.
    Hatless, her hair had been ruthlessly dyed an impossible black. Her face was neither round, oval, nor heart-shaped, but rather like a box with the corners smoothed by age. She was eighty, maybe more. Her dark eyes had all the awareness of a long life spent traveling on a one-lane highway with no exits and no end in sight.
    “This is Mr. Noland,” Doris Milne said with bland deference.
    The elderly white lady made an expression that was intended to be a smile.
    “Hello, Mr. Knowles,” she said, gesturing at another metal chair on the opposite side from her. This seat was painted turquoise.
    As Xavier moved forward Doris asked, “Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Noland?”
    “What’s in the glass?”
    “Lime rickey,” Sedra said with a real smile.
    “I’ll take one of those if it’s not too much trouble.”
    “No trouble at all,” Sedra said for her niece. “Go make up another pitcher, hon. Use the good gin.”
    And so Xavier sat under the shifting template of shadows and sun as Doris went off to mix the alcohol and Kool-Aid.
    The predators gazed lazily across the expanse of the table both of them deeply honest and still insincere.
    “You told Dodo that you were here about somebody named Ben?” Sedra asked.
    “Benol. That’s a woman’s name.”
    “Oh.”
    “Do you remember her?”
    “No. No. And I think I’d remember such a unique name.”
    “She and her boyfriend, Brayton Starmon, sold you three blond male babies for forty-two thousand dollars twenty-three years ago.”
    “Excuse me? What did you say?”
    “I said that I’m working for John and Minnie Van Dam,” Xavier replied, using names from Benol’s confession. “They hired me to find their son, Michael, who was kidnapped from a private child-care home by Benol and Brayton.”
    His voice was the hammer while the words were nails. Sedra gave almost no inkling of the pain or fear he inflicted, but Ecks was not fooled.
    When the old woman’s left eye fluttered Xavier was sure of at least one part of his client’s story.
    At that moment the cell phone in his breast pocket throbbed. A few seconds later Doris came out carrying a silver tray on which stood a large, sweaty tumbler filled with bright green fluid.
    “Are you two getting along?” the niece asked.
    “Like pigs in slop,”