Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(90)
This is entirely the fault of her father. He’s the idiot who dragged her here. Not kicking and screaming, but unconscious in the back of a car he’d “borrowed” for the purpose.
The car belonged to Ned Wilson, who would not have loaned it to Edwin in a thousand years. Ned says it was stolen. Edwin took a different view, for the vehicle has since been returned undamaged, and besides, he was doing Heaven’s work. Or so he claims, though I wonder if he honestly believes it.
I mediated the dispute, and all is resolved between them to my satisfaction, if not (entirely) theirs.
The woman, though . . . she’s not here of her own accord, and that was part of the bargain as I understood it. I thought I’d made this clear to her father, the aforementioned idiot, but there’s always the chance I failed in that regard.
For the sake of peace, I resolve to assume that the failing is mine. I am content to be the recipient of my own anger. Edwin wouldn’t survive it.
(So we make these deals, with ourselves and with others. Lies we agree to. Compromises we pretend are victories. But so long as they serve the greater purpose, I’ll make no apologies for my concessions, my behavior, or my bargains.)
The question now, of course, is what do we do with Ruth? Is she still the preferred key for our cosmic lock? The patterns are precise, and they are happiest when they’re followed to the letter, as if they were instructions for the assembly of a great machine. So what will it matter if we have slipped and improvised with regards to one small directive? Doesn’t everyone, when a thousand nuts and bolts must be accounted for? Surely there is room to adjust, in a universe so chaotic as this one.
I hope. I pray. I ponder, consider, and fret.
This isn’t how I wanted it to be.
I wanted to open my arms and wait, and see the young fledgling approach tentatively, but earnestly, into the arms of love—into the arms of infinity, the likes of which she never would have considered in that bizarre papist compound she frequented . . . long ago, in another life.
But now the situation has been forced to a crisis. There is no going back, no hope to reinstate the conditions of a week ago. There is only this woman, unhappily caged (and groggy, and confused, and angry), and there is only the plan, set into motion a billion years ago, or more.
When I think of it that way, I am reassured. For in a billion years, or more than that—how many small variables might slip, slide, or adjust themselves outside of the plan’s original scope? Surely not the deviation of a single number, in a single table, can upend the universe?
Leonard Kincaid would have argued with me.
But if Leonard knew everything, he’d still be alive. He’d still be here, at Chapelwood. A brother, instead of a martyr.
I’m the one who made him a martyr. Not when I killed him, though that was simple enough—but by virtue of the story I fed the congregation. Some of the members here knew him. A few of them respected him, even after his fall from grace. And when I told them about his demise, I reminded them that this was the man who had given us the keys to the kingdom. Even if it’s true that he’d fallen in his final days, it was still his work that brought us to the place where we are today: the very threshold of God’s Kingdom. We stand at the door and wait, because he was able to bring us here.
He is a saint, of a kind. I’ll hear nothing to the contrary.
Edwin Stephenson, on the other hand . . .
. . . I’m not so sure. I am reminded of the Catholic saint Peter, a rough-hewn man who lied (thrice, as I recall, before the cock would crow), was blunt, and was not entirely personable to those he sought to teach . . . and I wonder if there isn’t some lesson here to be retrieved from the old and false doctrine.
Then again, I rather hate the little Stephenson fellow, and I wish I’d never met him.
? ? ?
I should erase that. It isn’t fair. I dislike him, I do not hate him—and my preferences are no fault of his. It’s not his fault that he’s uneducated and brash, or that he’s thick-skulled and thin-skinned—an unfortunate combination in anyone, anywhere, however common it may be. It isn’t his fault that I find him abrasive.
Yet it can’t be entirely random, given that no one else particularly cares for him, either. We can’t all be mad or delusional. There must actually be something intensely and innately unlikable about him, something universally perceived and abhorred.
But he is true to the cause, even in his errors. There is a place for him here, I must remember that, even if I must drill it into my own damn head a dozen times a day. If nothing else, he might one day prove a fine scapegoat—should one be required, for something. Should our plans be delayed yet again, and yet more steps need to be taken before we can bring ourselves home.
But I don’t think it will come to that.
? ? ?
It’s too bad the police are closing in on Leonard as the axe murderer. If they haven’t figured it out yet, they will soon. They can’t possibly be stupid enough to miss the clues he left behind in his home, and Tom Shirley ought to know already, because I took a chance and told him of my “suspicions.” Though I do wish I’d had more time to comb through Leonard’s belongings before the landlady came knocking. I would be more comfortable if I were absolutely confident there was nothing to tie him to Chapelwood; but I’m only somewhat confident, and Shirley says that a portion of the evidence he collected has gone missing—an entire box, vanished into the ether.