Empire of Wild Page 14

  But Heiser didn’t seem to mind the younger woman squashed up against him. “Good of you to make it, Cecile,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

  “Wait, where’s the Reverend?” Ivy asked.

  Good god, who was she to interrupt? But Ivy was right. He was not in the booth or anywhere else in the coffee shop.

  “The Reverend is getting some extra rest this morning,” Heiser said. “There’s obviously something going around—maybe he’s got the same thing Cecile had. But anyways, we don’t need to bother him with these details.”

  A heavy-set waitress brought Cecile a black coffee in a beige mug, even though what she really wanted was a cup of hot water with a wedge of lemon. Still, she said a polite thank-you.

  Mr. Heiser checked his phone, then pocketed it, giving them his undivided attention. “Ivy here has brought up a good point, which we should talk about before we plan the next event and review the budget,” he said. He looked sombre, dumping little, round containers of half-and-half into his coffee. “Ivy, why don’t you go ahead and share with the group, please.”

  She cleared her throat, pink in the cheeks. Cecile’s own cheeks were a little closer to red. Take one day off and the whole world goes to the devil.

  “Mr. Heiser and I were talking about the Reverend’s fatigue at the last sermon, and I suggested it might be a good idea for all of us to take some time off, just a few days. Maybe we could even do something fun.”

  “Fun?” Cecile hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She sipped the acrid coffee to stop any more words from leaking out. It burnt her tongue. Another penance.

  Heiser said, “I think we should consider it. Because, sadly, there is a bigger issue at play. Cecile?”

  “Yes, Mr. Heiser?” Finally, the adults were talking.

  “You remember the woman who staggered into the tent at the Orillia service last month? The one we had to call the paramedics for?”

  “Of course I do,” Cecile said. “She was at the last two sermons too, in Hook River.”

  “Yes, she was. Ivy, you saw her as well. She was with the boy who tried to get into the back area.”

  “Oh my!” Ivy leaned across the table toward Garrison. “They were so aggressive, you should have seen.”

  Heiser sighed. “I’ve hesitated to do this, but it’s time you all heard some hard truths about our beloved Reverend Wolff. I don’t usually share people’s personal details. But it’s become necessary in this case, so that we can better protect him and the ministry.”

  Cecile’s feet throbbed with her quickened heartbeat. What hard truths?

  Heiser leaned his elbows on the table and steepled his long hands in front of him. “When I came across Eugene, he was in a bad way. Drugs. Maybe other things—I can’t be sure. He appeared one night outside the tent. I don’t think he meant to be there, but just kind of stumbled in our direction. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  The table gave the obligatory amen.

  Cecile thought back to her first sighting of the Reverend. They’d told the cop it had been three years, but Mr. Heiser had shown up with him just a year ago after being away from the congregation for a week on business. Wolff seemed smooth and confident from the first day. But, she supposed, she shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone has a past. Even the holiest among us.

  “I saw something in him,” Heiser continued. “I don’t know what it was, but it was something powerful. Something that didn’t need to be led but needed to lead.”

  More murmurs and nodding.

  “And I thought, Heiser, you hold on to this man. You guide him just the right way and he will bring us into new territory, new glory. And so I approached him like one would a wild thing. I offered him coffee, water and a clean shirt. He accepted nothing, just sat down and wept. Seems Jesus had gotten there before me, because he was already broken open.”

  Wolff should have grown bigger in Cecile’s estimation for what he had overcome, especially given what she herself had overcome, but instead she realized she felt deceived. She clung to that feeling.

  “So I listened,” Heiser said. “Right there in the mud outside the tent. Seems this man was trying to run from some pretty dark stuff. He’d met a woman in Quebec who had led him astray.”

  “Oh my.” Garrison tugged on his beard. “Lead us not into temptation…”

  “Almost sounds like a TV show,” Heiser said. “Before he left her, she’d got him hooked on some pretty nasty stuff, all kinds of things, not the least of which was heroin.”

  “Oh no!” Ivy gasped.

  Cecile knew addiction. She’d leaned on the power of Christ to save her. But the Reverend? She was starting to think the Lord had saved her in the woods—that perhaps He didn’t want her subjected to a junkie, not now that she was healed.

  “Pretty shocking, right? Still, I decided right then and there he had been sent to us.” Heiser pointed up at the ceiling of the diner, draped with cobwebs and clotted with grease.

  Garrison and Greg both smacked flattened palms on the table, shouting “Yes!” and “Amen!” Spoons jumped and rattled and the waitress thought it was a signal they wanted more coffee. They waited her out while she poured.

  Heiser picked up the story. “So I brought him to the city first chance I got. Got him into a good rehab clinic, then introduced him to a theologian I know over at the University of Toronto who thought he had tremendous potential. And so, he trained there, living like a monk.

  “He worked hard and every minute of sacrifice was worth it, because he has become the most effective, godly minister we have ever had.”

  “Praise be,” Cecile and Ivy said at the same time. Cecile avoided making eye contact.

  “But now it looks like his old life isn’t done with him yet. In Orillia, the woman found him again. She was drunk and crazed. The Reverend handled it, rightly or wrongly, by insisting that she was mistaken and that he didn’t know her. Afterwards he was a mess. I took him back to the city with me for a whole week just to make sure he didn’t relapse. Remember that, Cecile?”

  She nodded. After that woman had gone off in the ambulance, Heiser had bundled a shaken Wolff into the back of his Town Car. She said, “This stalker did not like me one bit, not when she saw me trying to help the Reverend.”

  “Well,” Heiser said, “he made me promise, begged me actually, to make sure she never got to him. He knows that she is his weakness. She led him astray once and he was frantic that she would be able to do it again. So I promised our good, pious Reverend that we would protect him at all costs. That we would make sure this woman, this Joan, never gets to him.”

  Greg said, “At least she doesn’t know where we’re headed. Maybe we could just keep outrunning her. Maybe look into a restraining order of some sort?”

  Heiser sighed, unfolding his hands and dropping them to his thighs. “Actually, guys, I agree with Ivy. I think the best way we can handle this is to take a little break from tent-ups. When our mission calls us out onto the prairies, which I think will be soon, the problem should solve itself.”

  “How long a break?” Ivy asked. Cecile realized this was more than Ivy had bargained for.

  “Just for a week, seven or eight days to be safe. Think of it as a kind of family vacation.”

  “What do we do if the stalker finds us?” Greg asked.

  Heiser leaned over the table toward him, eyes crinkling in a wide smile that was all teeth. “Don’t you worry. I’ll handle her myself.”

  12

  SOUL COLLECTION

  Ivy wiggled her skirt back down, fished out her panties from under the bed and started talking as she threaded her pointed toes through the leg holes. “I think maybe Cecile knows about us.”

  Heiser hadn’t even put his cock away yet, but had his phone in his hand, checking emails. “Ivy, you’re going to have to be a little more specific.” He set the phone down so he could tuck himself into his pants.

  She sat on the edge of the made bed. “She’s being mean to me.”

  “
Jesus Christ, I do not have time for this.” Heiser bit his lip and lowered his head. “Please excuse my blasphemy.”

  She nodded, as if he were apologizing to her personally. What a pretty idiot this one was.

  “Cecile is a very busy woman,” Heiser said. “Sometimes she becomes irritable because of it.” He turned his back to Ivy and sent a quick text to his driver. “Part of the reason I like her is that she’s so driven, even if it does make her crazy sometimes.”

  “You like her?” Ivy folded her arms over her chest.

  Heiser sighed. “Ivy, I don’t have time for this.” He put the phone down again and reached over and lifted her chin. “Play time is over.”

  He excused himself and went to the bathroom to clean up. “Also, please look for an ideal retreat location, somewhere out of the way.” He paused at the bathroom door. “Preferably off our current trajectory.” Cecile would be pissed he’d asked Ivy to organize this. He honestly couldn’t care less as long as it got done.

  He turned on the tap and regulated the water to warm, but not hot. He dropped his trousers and leaned against the counter, flopping his dick over the edge of the sink. He chuckled to himself. Oh, Ivy. She was proving to be fun. Though he knew he really shouldn’t be letting her distract him right now, when there was so much going on. What with his project contracts and now this bullshit with Wolff, he didn’t have a spare moment.

  Lately, the church was taking up more time than he liked. Still, it was one of his better ideas. It was a gamble to be a consultant—the gaps between clients, the reliance on the success of his last job to secure the next, especially when navigating Indigenous relations in the energy sector. He’d vastly improved his odds by bringing the word of Jesus into the territories he had to sway toward resource projects. Once God was in there, especially as portrayed by the beautiful Reverend Wolff—one of their own—people were less worried about protecting their traditional lands. He dried off, zipped back up and regarded himself for a moment in the mirror.

  He never could have imagined having this life when he was a young man. An immigrant, an atheist, the son of a janitor—now here he was, fucking whomever he wanted, running a Christian ministry and raking in the big dollars from industry and government alike. The Reverend had brought in the masses, making the work of coming in behind to get project approvals so much easier. People loved seeing a reflection of themselves in the pulpit. Wolff was gold and Heiser would not lose him. But he was not worried: this Joan was no match for him.

  * * *

  Thirty years ago, Thomas Heiser had not yet truly understood what he was. So dogs liked him. So what. Other than a part-time summer gig as a dog walker, it hadn’t changed his life in any way. Straight out of college, he’d taken a job as a low-level adviser for the federal government. He was first stationed in Saskatchewan as part of the legal team sent out to assess treaty adhesion claims. When he wasn’t in his depressing cubicle, he travelled with two more senior advisers in a rental car. They stayed at a Days Inn while they took meetings in the band offices of surrounding First Nations.

  It was early spring and he was at the rickety desk in his small room, typing up his handwritten notes on a heavy word processor. Part of his job was to carry that monster around. Instead he usually left it in the motel and took shorthand at the meetings, notes he transcribed in his room.

  That first night, he noticed an odd smell, a swampy organic rot. And then he had the sense that he was being watched. He finished typing up the page, stopping only to rub the back of his neck where he felt eyes on him. Then he turned toward the window.

  Looking at him through the glass was a furry face, matted with hair and wild with debris and spit. The creature’s eyes were overly bright under a heavy brow, and its long snout ended in a large nose that was the colour and texture of sand. At first he thought it was a dog, a huge dog, front legs up on the sill, staring in.

  He saved his report to the disk drive, placed the handwritten pages in a pile at his elbow and snapped the lid back on the processor case. Then he took a deep breath, stood, pushed in the wooden chair and walked to the window. It was all very methodical. He’d always been calm.

  As he got closer, Heiser noticed the width of the thing’s shoulders and the immense height of it, even stooped as it was, shoulders rounded, neck thick to the point of grotesque. It opened its mouth and growled, a sound he heard through the thin glass as a slow cracking. Its front tooth was broken and brown.

  Heiser’s scream came up as bile. It choked him and he doubled over. When he looked back at the window it was empty, save for a gridded smudge on the glass from a greasy nose pushed against the screen.

  He managed to carry on with his work for the next two days, running on such tiny naps they felt like nothing more than long blinks. Finally, he had to know just what the thing was, why it had appeared to him and what it wanted. So on the third night, he brought a bag of A&W back to his room and left the cheeseburger outside on a paper plate just under the window ledge. He locked his door and sat in the stained fabric chair with the lights off, slowly eating a small order of fries, watching out the window.

  Just after midnight, it arrived. He heard it sniffing as it came around the corner. He got up and went to the window and watched as it stepped onto the cement walkway on the balls of its back feet, its hind legs without a canine haunch. It was covered in dense, black fur from head to toe. Heiser saw a glint at its waist—a silver belt buckle. No pants, but still, there was a belt. It peered into the cars and sniffed each in turn, avoiding the weak circles of light thrown by the bug-caked fluorescents in the roof overhang and the blue glare of TVs from the uncurtained windows. Heiser breathed shallow and quiet, watching as it made its way to his room, passing by his window without looking in. He waited for it to grab the burger, curious to see if it would use its hands like a human or gobble like a dog. It did neither. It stepped over the plate carefully, almost with grace. Then it walked up to the red motel door and politely knocked.

  He didn’t answer and eventually it went away. For the rest of the week, he locked himself in his room after the last meeting of the day. Each night he watched the parking lot through a small gap in the closed curtains. And each night the creature came, sniffed its way to his room and knocked at the door. On the eighth night, he let it in.

  * * *

  Ivy had let herself out, as she always did. Good girl.

  His phone dinged. He grabbed it from the dresser and opened a new email. Attached were half a dozen images of Cecile on her little foray into the woods. He wasn’t naive enough to leave Wolff without a watcher, especially not now, with Joan lurking. He selected a photo in the middle of the stream—Cecile with a leg thrown over the Reverend, her eyes closed, her mouth open.

  “Perfect,” he said. He just had to dig up Joan’s email address. Perhaps the only person who could keep her from her mission was Joan herself, and he was all too happy to help that cause.

  There was a knock at the door, and he went to answer it. His driver stood there with his dry cleaning.

  “Ah, thank you, Robe,” he said, standing back so the man could hang the suit and shirts in the small closet.

  “No worries, sir.”

  “And thanks for the email.” He held up his phone and shook it. “These are just what I was hoping for.” He laughed.

  Robe smiled wide and took a small bow, snickering through his broken front tooth.

  13

  HIDE AND SEEK

  Zeus sat at a long table on the second floor of the library. When Joan wasn’t around, this is where he went. It felt calming to be surrounded by stories but no voices. Home was full of voices—too many of them, and none of them saying anything he wanted to hear. He was already dreaming of escape: college in Toronto or maybe Vancouver. It’s why he worked so hard at school. If his dad had cared about him, he would have already moved in with him, away from the chaos that was Bee. But there was no room at his dad’s house for Zeus.

  Jimmy Fine had made his last t
rip through town five years earlier. One day he’d shown up unannounced in the same Impala, though the rumble of the engine was more wheeze than balls. He still wore his hair in a single, long braid, so thin now he had to loop the elastic around the end six or seven times. Two of his front teeth had fallen out, but maybe that was for the best. He had a quick, heated conversation at the front door with Bee, and then she pushed Zeus out onto the stoop and closed the door behind him, leaving him alone with his long absent father.

  Jimmy shook the boy’s reluctant hand. “Hey, son.” Zeus saw Bee watching them through the window drapes with narrowed eyes.

  “We’re on our way from a powwow, you know?”

  No, Zeus thought. How would I know?

  “And well, I just thought you’d like to meet your sister. She really wanted to meet you. Her mom told her all about you.”

  Her mom? Zeus stayed silent, trying to make sense of the man. Why would her mom mention him?

  “Anyways, she’s over in the car, there.” Jimmy started walking back to the Impala. Zeus just stood there in his white socks, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his basketball shorts, not saying a word.

  Jimmy was at the car before he looked back. “Hey now, don’t be shy. This is your little sister.” He waved him over. “Come on.”

  Zeus took each step slowly, with his head down. He watched the way his toes moved when he stepped. He counted the ants he saw—six of them. He wished the driveway went on forever. When he got to the car, the little girl opened her door and sprang at him, wrapping her long arms around him. Maggie was beautiful—slim, deep brown, her long hair let loose from serious braids. A line of glitter from her powwow makeup still clung to her hairline. She was sweet and friendly. But why shouldn’t she be?

  “Gee, you’re real big.” She laughed as she let him go, not meaning any harm but cutting to the bone the way children can do. “I can’t even fit my arms around you!” She tried again, though, squeezing him around the middle, nuzzling her face into his T-shirt, just above the round of his belly, just under the weight of his breasts. He kept his hands in his pockets.