The Hunt. Andrew Welsh-Huggins

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      9

      THERESA SULLIVAN WAS ON THE PHONE in the office of Zion Episcopal on Grubb Street in the Bottoms when I walked in. She set the receiver down and looked at me in that way of hers I’d grown to appreciate. The way people look when they spy a cockroach on the kitchen counter.

      “What?”

      “Parson around?”

      “Not here. He made a run to the camp.”

      I nodded. Among Roy’s many missions was his street medicine work: checking on the health needs of people in a homeless shelter tucked in woods along railroad tracks just minutes from downtown. It was annoying the way he made the rest of us look so bad.

      I said, “Actually, it’s you I came to see.”

      “Me?”

      “That’s right.”

      “For what?”

      “It’s about a case I’m working on.”

      “What kind of case?”

      I gave her the rundown. She frowned when I mentioned Bronte Patterson.

      “Hang on,” she said, gesturing at the phone.

      I left the office, walked down the hall, turned right, and entered the sanctuary. I sat down in the second pew. It was chilly and dark inside, the only light coming in through the stained-glass windows. The air smelled of incense, wood polish, and mildew. The building looked airlifted straight from a small English town, with its stone block exterior, wooden altar, and arched ceiling, as if the architects had stripped a nineteenth-century sailing ship for lumber. Some plaster was coming off the walls here and there, and jigsawed patterns of painted plywood filled in a few stained-glass gaps, but it was in pretty good shape, thanks to the money the diocese had put into it to lure Roy in as priest. Much better shape than the flea market that had operated there most recently. Or the crack house before that. I pulled out my phone and checked my messages. Nothing new from Shelley or my mom. My dad’s surgery was scheduled at week’s end, and there was nothing to do but wait.

      Theresa stepped inside the sanctuary and slipped into the pew beside me.

      “Bronte Patterson,” Theresa said. “That ain’t good.”

      “So I gather. But maybe not as bad as a serial killer.”

      “Unless it’s one and the same. Is this girl from here?”

      “Mount Alexandria.”

      “Where’s that?”

      “Little city about an hour east. I grew up in a town near there.”

      “Always figured you for a country bumpkin. You trust the brother?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I mean do you trust him? Is he really worried about his sister? Or does he want her found for some other reason?”

      “Like what?”

      “Like, maybe did he do something to her when she was younger, and he’s feeling bad about it now?”

      “Do something?”

      “Use your imagination, QB.”

      “I’m not sure—”

      She chuffed in exasperation. “Did he fuck her?”

      “Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

      “It happens.”

      “Yeah. But he’s raising her son. Seems like that counts for something.”

      “What about Jessica’s stepdad?”

      “What about him?”

      She rolled her eyes. “Did he fuck her?”

      “I have no idea. Why are you asking me this?”

      She rubbed her hands up and down her thighs, from the cold or from something else, I wasn’t sure. She was wearing a long-sleeved yellow patterned dress over brown leggings, and a gray sweater coat over the dress to ward off the chill. In the past couple of years she’d gone from dressing the way you did selling yourself on the streets, which is where Roy found her, to looking like a grown-up Pippi Longstocking.

      She said, “She ran away, right?”

      “She left Mount Alex to come here after high school. Her brother didn’t say if she ran away.”

      “Girls like her, they’re not sucking strangers’ dicks at 1 a.m. because they feel like it. They got pushed into it. And most of them got pushed by someone or something at home. Or near home. It’s like when you step in dog shit.”

      “Dog shit?”

      “You know how bad it smells? And how the smell don’t go away? How hard it is to get it off your shoe?”

      “Sure. People say I step in it all the time.”

      “How about not making it about you for once? That’s how these girls live every day. Like their whole life is one big pile of it. I’m just saying for starters it’d be nice to find out who put it on her shoes.”

      I said nothing. The sanctuary was silent except for the sound of traffic up the street on Broad and a mechanical hum coming from someplace near the front. I glanced at Theresa, but she wouldn’t make eye contact.

      I said, “I get what you’re saying. But how does that help us find her?”

      “Who knows? She stepped in enough crap, she could be easy to track down.”

      “Either way, I’m going to need to hit the streets, start asking about her.”

      She nodded and rubbed her thighs.

      “It’d be nice if I had someone to help me. Not exactly my territory.”

      “That’s obvious,” Theresa said. I looked up and saw that Roy had entered the sanctuary while we’d been talking.

      “So, СКАЧАТЬ