“Always, Jake,” she promised him.
Jenna hung up, walked back to her uncle’s and got into her car. She was off to talk to Milton Sedge. While she was talking to him, she just might be able to figure out a way to get to the boys who claimed to have seen Malachi after Earnest Covington was murdered. She grinned at herself. She hadn’t met them yet, but she was sure they were pretentious little liars.
People judged so easily!
The Old Meeting House was a whitewashed building a little ways down the highway.
Sam estimated that it held a couple hundred people, tops, during meetings. There were no crosses or other symbols on the outside of the structure, and a carved wooden sign announced simply, Worship With Us. All Are Welcome.
He opened a picket fence to follow the brick walk to the front door. There was nothing ornate about the columns of the single-story structure. When he opened the door, he saw that there was simply a podium at the end, with a red runner leading to it. The pews were simple hardwood, and the kneelers were wooden as well, with no cushioning.
The room was shadowed in darkness, the plain, paneled windows allowing just a few streaks of light into the simple space. Sam thought that he had entered into an empty building at first, but as he stood near the entry, blinking against the murky shadows, he heard a voice.
“Hello, and welcome.”
A tall man with long gray hair, his face covered in a long beard and mustache, walked toward him. He was clad simply in a white dress shirt and ill-fitting black suit; his arms were too long for his sleeves and the pants were short.
“How do you do,” Sam said, offering his hand. “I’m Sam Hall, attorney, and I’m defending Malachi Smith.”
“Oh,” the man said, looking at him gravely. “I’m Goodman Wilson, pastor and elder of our little congregation. How can I help you?”
“Well, frankly, I wanted to know what you thought about the whole situation. You must be aware that many people believe that your religion is unorthodox. Do you think that Abraham Smith was so strict that his son—aware of other choices in society—might have thought that he was too strict?”
Sam was blunt and to the point on purpose: he wanted to see Goodman Wilson’s immediate reaction to such questions. He had half suspected that the pastor would immediately be on the defensive and show him the door.
He did not.
“We’re not quite as fanatic as many believe,” Wilson told him. He smiled. “We don’t believe in idols of any kind, and nor do we drink, swear, gamble or imbibe drugs. Actually, we have a number of ex-addicts in our fold, those who need guidance to stay on the straight and narrow. We welcome them, we welcome all.”
“But Abraham was a hard man, or have I been misinformed?” Sam pressed.
“Sit down, sit down,” Wilson offered. “Our chairs are hard, but…”
“A hard chair is fine by me.”
They sat together on the rear hard pew, staring up toward the simple podium.
“Thank you for your help,” Sam said.
Wilson gave a somewhat pained smile. “We do believe in justice. Not vengeance, justice. I knew Abraham Smith, of course. I knew the family, and I knew Malachi. The boy is quite amazing, really. He has a deep and fundamental belief in God. But he wasn’t among our fold.”
“No?”
“We don’t have music,” Wilson said. “No music, no dancing. Our faith is really simple—God requires that we appreciate what he has given us. The earth, the sky, the air we breathe. We work, because society demands that we pay for our living—and that we all pay taxes too, right?”
Sam smiled. Wilson seemed to think his words very entertaining.
“Jesus believed in simplicity. He didn’t need ornate clothing, and he didn’t need a mansion. He taught us to love one another. He didn’t sing to the masses—he spoke to them.”
“And Malachi needed music?” Sam asked.
The pastor nodded gravely. “I’m afraid I can’t help you if you need me to testify that the boy might have been crazy. He wasn’t crazy. He was honest—he had been taught not to lie. He came to me, though he did so in confidence, and he told me that he couldn’t see anything evil in the piano, and therefore, he had to leave our fold. I suggested that he think about it long and hard. I disagreed with his decision, but his deliberations were honest, thoughtful, competent.”
“He left the church because of the piano? Because of music?” Sam said.
“That surprises you?”
“I’d have thought that it might be something more…”
Goodman Wilson laughed. “You thought we might be slaughtering goats or chickens, and the boy was appalled by blood? No. Malachi told me he couldn’t comprehend a faith that didn’t see God’s beauty in music, and I explained the very basic nature of our beliefs. Malachi told me that he was sorry—he saw God in music. Do you have any religion in your life, Mr. Hall?”
“I believe in God, Pastor. But I don’t know who among us really knows what he wants,” Sam said. After what seemed to him like a respectful pause, he continued on. “Did Malachi ever offer any violence toward his family?”
“Never. In our congregation, children honor their parents. They pray, they reflect. They take the time to care for the elderly. They don’t steal, and they don’t fornicate. There is no bodily punishment that we offer them—just excommunication, if it comes to that. We are a family here, and that is a terrible punishment when you love your family.”
“How did Abraham discipline Malachi? As a good church member, he was said to beat him for infractions, but did he?”
Goodman Wilson was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “I worried, sometimes. Not that Malachi was beaten, but…parents can speak to a child in a way that is totally demoralizing. They can make a child feel as if they can’t do anything right, as if they’re worthless. I believe that Abraham could be verbally abusive at times, but, Mr. Hall, I don’t think that’s particular to members of our church. Sadly, I’ve seen many a father rip a child apart, and too often, that child can grow to believe himself worthless and incapable of doing anything right.”
“So, you would describe your church as a strict group, but certainly not fanatical,” Sam said.
Wilson laughed. “We are different. The Mormons are seen as different, as are the Amish. But we are Christians. We do believe in God in His Heaven, and we believe, equally, that there are evil forces. We believe in sin, but as Christ stated, true remorse brings us to the forgiveness of sins. We don’t seek to harm anyone else, and we don’t punish those who leave the church. We are all creatures of free choice.”
“All right, it’s true that we all have a tendency to mistrust each other, to be suspicious of what we don’t understand. You don’t believe that Malachi is a killer, so I’m going to assume that Abraham Smith had enemies.”
Wilson was quiet for a minute. “I’m curious that you’ve come here. I do read the papers, though I don’t have a television. The police say that Malachi is the alleged killer of Mr. Andres of Andover and Mr. Covington, as well. What enemies would they have had that they shared with Abraham Smith?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Sam said.
Wilson let out a long sigh. “Do I believe that Malachi is a killer? No. Might there be something in him that I never saw? Possibly. Did Abraham have enemies? Most definitely. Only two other families with children in that area belong to our congregation, and they keep very quiet. The rest of those people…they tolerate the Wiccans in the community, thinking of them as actors, really, drawing in the tourists. They tolerate Catholic, Jewish, agnostic, atheistic, Baptist and probably Buddhist. But us? We live too simply for them. They don’t understand that we honestly believe that we are judged daily, that God will come again, and that we can choose to lead pure lives, or we can choose to sin. If Abraham did have real enemies, they did not come from this church. We are of a like mind and, if anyone had a serious problem with him, they would have had a problem with all of us probably, and would have come to me.”
“Did he ever seem to be afraid of anyone? Did he have comments about the murders of his neighbor, or Mr. Andres?”
Wilson shrugged. “Well, he believed that God himself determined that Peter Andres should be killed. He told me he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the Grim Reaper himself or an avenging angel come down to kill Peter Andres. Then again, Peter Andres had said that Abraham was a wart not just on the community, but on the world, and that he was ruining his one and only child. I believe Andres intended to look into social services and see if he could get the boy taken away from Abraham, but to my knowledge, nothing was ever done. Andres was a big, scary man, and I’d believe more easily that he would have offered violence to the Smiths. But since he died first, he can hardly be suspected of Abraham’s murder.”
“No, of course. What about his neighbor?”
“Now, Abraham kept to himself, from what I understood. Except that he ranted and raved a lot—and yelled at Malachi loudly enough for people in the next block to hear. One of his punishments was to make the kid stand out in the cold, against the front of the house. I doubt if his neighbors liked that much—it’s embarrassing to everyone to see cruelty. Of course, they lived in the Lexington House, and the house itself has a reputation. I’m sure some people believe that evil lives in the house.”
“What do you believe?” Sam asked him.
“Does evil live on?” Wilson asked thoughtfully. “Evil remains, where it has always been, in the heart of man.”
“Of course.”
“Innocents—those who were loyal enough to risk their lives rather than tell the lie that they had signed the devil’s book—were the ones who went to the gallows, you know, back during the witchcraft scare,” Wilson said. “The trials were bizarre! Those who admitted to witchcraft and confessed weren’t hanged. Those who clung passionately to their belief that such a lie would be against God…they’re the ones who suffered the death penalty!”
