The ordained, p.1
The Ordained, page 1
BOOKS BY TERENCE FAHERTY
The True Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Quiet Woman
The Owen Keane Mysteries
Deadstick
Live to Regret
The Lost Keats
Die Dreaming
Prove the Nameless
The Ordained
Orion Rising
Eastward in Eden
The Confessions of Owen Keane
The Chronicles of Owen Keane
The Scott Elliott Mysteries
Kill Me Again
Come Back Dead
Raise the Devil
In a Teapot
Dance in the Dark
Play A Cold Hand
The Hollywood Op
The Star Republic Mysteries
Files of the Star Republic
Tales of the Star Republic
The Ordained
Terence Faherty
The Gisbourne Press
Copyright 1997 by Terence Faherty
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means without written permission, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Publishing History:
St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition: December 1997
Worldwide paperback edition: December 1998
The Gisbourne Press edition: March 2020
Cover: Cover Story Design
Interior Design: Sue Trowbridge, interbridge.com
Author Photo: Paul Chaffee
This book is a work of fiction and the persons and places and institutions described herein are imaginary or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or places or institutions is entirely coincidental.
Print ISBN: 978-1-7324184-4-8
For Jesse Hubbard, Merritt Hurst, and Jack Palladay
Contents
Other Books
Dedication
Invisible Men
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Author's Note
About the Author
Invisible Men
Fort Littleton. The name meant something. I knew from the moment I saw it on the turnpike sign. It hit me the same way a familiar face in a crowd of strangers can. Not the face of an old friend or even an acquaintance. Just a face you’ve seen before. One you can study at length and maybe even place, without any real danger that the person you’re watching will remember you. That sense of security was a definite part of the feeling of recognition the name Fort Littleton conveyed. An important part. I wouldn’t have stopped if I hadn’t been sure that, even if it should turn out that I knew this place, there wasn’t the slightest chance the place would know me back.
I paid my toll at the booth that guarded the exit ramp. There were two booths, but only one was staffed, which placed Fort Littleton low in the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s hierarchy. I never determined if that slight was justified because I never saw the town. Like so many of the places that lend their names to turnpike exits, Fort Littleton was off hiding somewhere, behind one of the wooded hills. It was represented locally by two gas stations, an Amoco and a BP, set across from one another a hundred yards or so beyond the tollbooth gate.
I selected the Amoco because it was the older of the two and my experiment required a place that had been there twenty years before. The station looked familiar, but then every gas station looks a little like every other. This one was a long, low, gray block building with a black roof, set right up against a hill. There were three repair bays, all closed, and two gas islands, both self-service. I parked at the island closer to the building, got one of its mechanical pumps going, and then stepped away to take in the place, its smells and its sounds.
By then I was convinced that I had been there before, that I’d stopped at the station on my last trip west. See, I told myself, here you are again and nothing bad has happened. Nobody remembers you. You’re invisible.
The old pump clicked off emphatically. I got the nozzle out of the Chevy without spilling more than a pint of raw gas on its faded paint. Then I went to examine the men’s room graffiti, looking for my initials without finding them and smiling at the condom dispenser. It was an old machine, but it had a new name to go with its lofty new role: Health Station. The inside of the gray building had been turned into a convenience mart. I browsed the narrow aisles, selecting cheese-filled pretzels for me and a plastic bottle of 10W40 for the Chevy.
Then I took my place in the checkout line. I was only number two, but it promised to be a long wait. The woman ahead of me was telling a story to the man behind the counter. She was wearing a football jersey over shorts. I recognized the colors of the jersey as Penn State’s, but the player’s name and number didn’t ring any bells. Though unsmiling, the clerk was giving her the kind of attention storytellers dream about, turning away from her only to spit tobacco juice at a wastepaper basket lined with a plastic garbage bag. It was a tribute to his marksmanship that what I could see of the liner was still white.
I tried once to catch the counterman’s eye. Then the woman used the word “mystery.” I stepped back and pretended to study a display of authentic beef jerky.
“I know he’s sleeping with her,” the woman said.
“Brandie Connelly,” the man behind the counter said.
“Brandie Connelly,” the woman said, “from down at the bottom of High Street. He won’t say so, but he smiles when I ask him, so I know. He’s daring me to catch him at it. I’ve tried. I can’t ’cause it isn’t possible. But I know he’s doing it. I even know when.”
The man behind the counter shot a fresh stream into the waste-paper basket. “When?”
“Tuesdays and Thursdays, our old days to do it, only now he’s doing it with that tramp Brandie Connelly, who’s got nothing to do all day but steal people’s husbands. He gets off at the plant at four, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays he doesn’t get home till quarter past five. You know the drive.”
“Fifteen minutes,” the man said, “from the plant to the top of High Street.”
“At four every Tuesday and every Thursday I walk down the hill and watch Brandie Connelly’s house. I used to hide or pretend to be going somewhere else. Now I just stand in the street and watch. There ain’t no back way in, unless he’s dug a tunnel. That house is built right against a hill, like this place. At quarter past four, her stereo comes on, loud. I don’t see anybody. I don’t see him get there and I don’t see him leave. Then at quarter past five, my neighbor, Dawn, flashes her front porch lights. I can just see them from down at the bottom of the hill. That’s Dawn’s signal to tell me he’s gotten home. Right about then, Brandie Connelly comes out on her porch smoking a cigarette and smiling at me.”
“Whaddya do next?” the man asked.
“I go back up the hill. I go home and he’s there, sitting and smiling at me just like Brandie. I can smell he’s had a beer. I can smell he’s had more than that.”
“Maybe he’s stopping off somewhere else,” the counterman said.
“No,” the woman said, stamping her foot. “I know the miles to the plant: twelve.”
“Twelve, that’d be right.”
“And I checked the miles in his truck. From the time he leaves on Tuesdays and Thursdays till the time I climb that hill, he drives twenty-four miles. And there ain’t nothing between the town and the plant.”
“Nothing,” the man agreed, spitting for emphasis.
“So he’s getting into Brandies house, with me standing there. He’s getting in and he’s getting home again. You tell me how he’s doing it, cause it’s making me nuts.”
The next voice I heard was my own. “Whose idea was it for you to go down and watch Brandie Connelly’s house?”
The woman swung around to face me. She was missing a tooth, which increased her look of surprise exponentially. But she wasn’t too surprised to speak. “It was Dawn’s idea,” she said. “Dawn, my neighbor. She knows all about Brandie Connelly. Dawn’s husband took up with Brandie last year. Then he ran off and left them both.”
“So Brandie owes Dawn,” I said.
“Owes her?” the man at the register asked.
“How old is Dawn?”
“Twenty-two, twenty-three,” the man said.
“Twenty-two,” the woman said.
“What’s she look like?”
“Nice,” the man said. “Blond.”
“Dyed,” the woman said, and then her eyes doubled in size. I felt a moment’s panic at not being invisible anymore. But the woman wasn t seeing me. She was seeing High Street, seeing the blond neighbor who signaled when it was safe for her to climb the hill. Seeing the local tramp who was willing to play her stereo and smoke a cigarette in a good cause.
“Damn,” she said. Then she was running for her car.
The man behind the counter was bug-eyed now, and he wasn’t lost in visions. He was looking right at me. Seeing me. Memorizing me.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
I set down the oil and the pretzels and money for the gas and followed the woman out the door.
“Hey! Who are you?” the man called after me.
Someone they’d remember in Fort Littleton, I thought.
Chapter One
There has to have been a time when the Indiana State House was something people traveled to see. The local equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids or at least New York’s Woolworth Building. Something worth the train ride from Terre Haute or Evansville or the buggy ride from someplace less grand.
In September 1993, when I found myself there, the Indiana State House was no longer a tourist attraction or even the focal point of Indianapolis, although a principal street, Market Street, ended at its steep steps. This approach was compromised by newer, taller buildings, which lined Market’s last blocks, and by a series of bus stops spaced out along Capitol Avenue—the street at which Market teed. These stops, trash-strewn Plexiglas enclosures papered in handbills, made the big, copper-domed building behind them look like a glorified bus station.
I bypassed the capitol grounds, which boasted an example of every tree indigenous to Indiana, and climbed the steps presided over by Oliver Morton, Indiana’s Civil War governor. Not that I’d ever heard of him. The bit about the trees and Morton’s place in history was passed on to me by a guard stationed in the state house rotunda, a talking Adam’s apple of a guy. He also told me that the building had just been restored, its old brass chandeliers—once fitted with gas jets—rehung, and its original color scheme—determined by scraping down through layers of second thoughts—repainted. The result was Victorian and dark, but that didn’t bother me. I’d been called both things myself.
I was tempted to ask the guard what time the next tour pushed off, but I hadn’t driven out from Jersey to study Hoosier archeology. So I asked instead where parole hearings were held.
The guard directed me out the back door and across Senate Street to a brand-new building, also limestone but less ornate. I wondered in my idle way whether some future restorers would scrape its walls someday to find what colors were popular in the last years of the twentieth century. If so, the beige they’d find would be a letdown and a half.
I followed the signs for the B wing hearing rooms, as the state house guard had instructed. I expected to pass through a security checkpoint and maybe even a metal detector, but I never encountered either. I came to a crowd of people milling around a double door of dark red wood guarded by a young woman seated at a small plastic table. None of the milling people looked familiar, but I stopped and recited my speech.
The woman told me that the parole board was meeting next door. “Yeah,” a man from the crowd chimed in, “this here is a money hearing.”
I never found out what he meant by that, but I did observe that money hearings were a bigger draw than parole hearings. There was no crowd outside the next hearing room, no one at all in fact except for another young woman at another plastic table. She told me that I’d found the right place at last.
“They’re just setting the camera up now,” she added.
“Camera?”
“We videotape parole hearings.”
She was slight and dark and college age. Her red suit jacket lacked lapels and a collar and even buttons. Its ascetic lines were contradicted by the blouse beneath, which had more frills than a square dancer’s petticoats.
“Has the, ah, prisoner arrived?” I asked, looking around again for some sign of security. As far as I could tell, the door to the hearing room didn’t even have a lock.
“If you mean the subject of the hearing, he won’t be here. This hearing is for the public. There’ll be a separate hearing next week at the state prison. You’re welcome to attend that one, too, but most of the time family and friends prefer to address the parole board at the public hearing.”
I only had a second to enjoy my relief, as we moved right to the next point on the agenda. The woman pushed a clipboard across the table. “Will you be addressing the board? If you want to speak, you have to sign in.”
I picked up a pen and then stood there, acting as though, after a week of debating with myself and seven hundred miles of driving, I hadn’t actually decided whether I’d take a hand. Only it wasn’t an act.
The door behind the young woman opened and a pair of rimless glasses popped out, propelled by a sleek blond head. “We’re ready, Irene.”
Irene, I thought, a nice, old-fashioned name. I would have stood there all day admiring it, given the chance. Irene had other plans. She pushed the clipboard an inch my way. “You don’t have to speak if you sign up,” she said. “You can decide later.”
I scribbled my name, Owen Keane, on the first blank line. There were names above it, names I hadn’t read because I hadn’t been able to focus on anything but the waiting white space. Filling it up released my eyes, but Irene whisked the clipboard away so fast my terminal e stretched out across the page and down, like an ominous trend on a graph.
“Hurry in,” she said.
The hearing room was tiny. I’d been hoping for something large, in which I could distance myself emotionally from the business being conducted. I stepped right into the middle of that business, so thoroughly that the man operating the video camera turned the big blue lens my way, as though I were some late-breaking news. In the second before the camera flustered me completely, I noted that there were three rows of blue plastic chairs matching the table in the hallway. Four of the chairs were occupied. The parole board also numbered four, all men and all seated behind a long wooden table that faced the audience.
I hurriedly took a seat in the last row, next to the man whose phone call had brought me to Indiana. The man shook my hand and said one word, “Okie,” a severe contraction of my name. Then we sat and listened together.
Three of the men behind the long table were young. Two were white and one was black, and all were fitted out like mannequins from Brooks Brothers’ window. The fourth man was old, mixed his plaids fearlessly, and let his gray hair fall down across his forehead like a cowboy caught without his hat. He didn’t look up from the table when the youngster next to him spoke.
“This is a public hearing on the subject of parole for one Curtis Dwight Morell, who is currently serving a life sentence for murder in the Indiana State Prison. Let the record show that four of the five members of the parole board are present.”
He droned on, adopting a dry, official tone intended to give the video record the exact quality of a musty transcript, noting the date and naming the members of the board. I noticed that he was dividing his eye contact between the camera and the audience, more specifically between the camera and two women who sat together in the first row. The only other spectator was also up front, in the chair closest to the door. He was the first to stand when the speaker asked if there would be any public testimony on the parole.
He identified himself as the prosecutor of Huber County, the little corner of southern Indiana where Morell had lived when he’d been loose and committing murder. The prosecutor was from the same college class as the junior board members, but he lacked their fashion sense. His blue suit was a shade too bright for anyone but a game show host. He buttoned the jacket, apparently just to demonstrate that it would button, because he undid it immediately and stuck a thumb in his belt.
It was just as well that he was comfortable. His role, it seemed, was to recount Morell’s crimes for the record, and it wasn’t a short list. I knew it by heart already, so I only listened with one ear as he described the murder, the rest of my mind taken up with half-forgotten images of shallow graves and shotgun butts. The speaker then moved on to a second killing that had been plea-bargained down from first-degree murder for lack of hard evidence. I drifted further away, to a nursing home so real to me I could feel its sticky floor under my feet.
