Crazy Lady (14 page)

“No. None,” she says and laughs. “But he cares for me.”

“I love you, Yolanda. I don't just care for you. I've always loved you.”

“I must go. Klaus would not like me talking to you.”

“What are you saying? Does he own you?”

“He does not like me talking to other men.”

“So he decides who you can speak to and who you can't?”

“I should not have followed you. I should never see you again.”

“Did Klaus tell you that as well?”

“I have to go.”

“Tell me you don't love me,” he shouts as she prepares to cut him off. “At least do that for me.”

“I can't,” she says, and he hears a click that ricochets around his mind like a pistol shot.

“Give me back my heart,” he cries, knowing his words are going nowhere, and he puts a Billie Holiday disc in his player and listens to “Lover Come Back to Me” as he turns back to his manuscript with a clear knowledge of where he has gone wrong.

There's no redemption, no benefit to my protagonist, the masked man
, he tells himself, realizing that the incarcerated man's lifetime quest for true love was finally trashed; his story — so full of optimism and inspiration — ends in disaster and offers absolutely no hope for people who already think their lives are shit.
I lift them up then chuck them onto the rocks
, he tells himself as he considers dumping the whole thing in the bin.
Life's supposed to be happy ever after; what am I supposed to do, change history to suit Hollywood?

The community of Beautiful may appear exactly as its name implies from the outside, but inside is where Trina is hoping to find herself, and she buddies up to a couple of long-skirted giggly teenagers pushing a supermarket buggy in the nearby community of Mountain Falls.

“Hey. Like your scarves,” chats Trina, eyeing the brown headwear similar to Janet's.

The young girls turn pink, titter, and scuttle away, so Trina heads them off in the dairy aisle. “Are you from
Beautiful?” she asks as innocently as possible, but it's immediately clear that they've been primed.

“Bye…” says one, and they spin the buggy back to fruits and veg.

Stronger measures
, thinks Trina, and she digs Janet's scarf from the bottom of her bag and quickly ties it around her head.

The confused look on the teenagers' faces as they meet up with Trina again in frozen foods tells her that she's winning, so she hangs back and lets them come to her.

“Are you one of us?” asks one of the girls, being careful to keep her eyes in her buggy.

“Similar,” admits Trina. “But I've been travelling a lot.”

An hour later, once the Beautiful bus service (a clappedout 1960s minivan covered in hand-painted warnings against the dangers of mortal sin) has collected them and half a dozen others and driven them, singing hymn after hymn, to the community, Trina watches the surrounding forest of Sitka spruce and pine open into a stockaded compound of rusted cars and farm machinery. As the roughly hewn wooden gates let the visitor into the Saviour's world, the smell of overburdened septic tanks and rotting garbage make her want to retch, and she recoils at the sight of ragged urchins scavenging in bins alongside squirrels and dogs.

The young women and girls who sang their way home in the bus melt away as a small group of older women in gumboots, head scarves, and mud-stained dresses gather around to eye the alien. Trina looks into the sunken listless eyes of the scrawny inhabitants, thinking that they fall somewhere between anorexics and drug abusers, until the silence is broken by a bark from a bearded old man with hair flowing to his waist.

“Who is this?” he demands, and the women dissolve like phantoms at his approach.

“Mary,” answers Trina, while Wayne Browning examines her with the eye of a cattle-buyer.

“Were you at Waco?” he asks from behind, fingering her head scarf, and she spins to confront him.

“No. I just want to… I want to be part of Beautiful,” she says, but he dodges her gaze and uses a hand to sweep around the grungy compound with an air of pride.

“You cannot be part of Beautiful. You have to be beautiful, feel beautiful, see beautiful. Everything here is beautiful. The Lord God has provided us with more beauty than anywhere else on earth. That's why no one ever leaves here.”

“I see,” says Trina, although she is having difficulty controlling herself at the spectacle of the dump surrounding her.

“Come,” he says, walking away, knowing she will follow, and a few moments later she stands in an office that is only slightly less of a pigsty.

“Are you a beautiful person, Mary?” asks Browning as he roughly takes hold of her chin and forces her head up to a bare light bulb.

“I think so,” replies Trina, but as she tries to look into his eyes he turns away, spitting, “Don't look at me. Have you no respect, woman? Would you look into the eyes of God?”

“Um…” begins Trina, confusedly, but he cuts her off and rounds on her.

“Keep your eyes averted at all times unless I tell you, all right?”

“OK.”

“Not ‘OK,' Mary. ‘OK' is trash talk. Say, ‘Yes, Our Lord Saviour.' Do you understand?”

Trina hesitates a fraction longer than permitted.

“Yes, Our Lord Saviour,” yells Browning into her face. “Say it. Say it.”

“Yes, Our Lord Saviour.”

Then his features melt. It's a game and he's a master — now for the reward. “There,” he says sweetly, gently stroking her cheek. “You're learning already.”

Punishment and reward — just like his mother taught him. Do something wrong, get punished. Do something
right — but what is right? That is always a matter of conjecture. Only God is infallible.

It was a strategy well-learned as a child, and it has served him ever since. Keep everyone off balance; make rules that are illogical and then contort the Bible to validate them; cherry-pick the testaments, old and new, to justify anything. Isn't that what all theologians do? And Wayne Browning is a Jesus figure all the way, although he has done considerably better than his predecessor, who never made it to the biblical three score and ten. As Trina keeps her head down, she sizes up the scrawny, though firmly muscled, man and isn't at all surprised at his athletic build, considering that, according to Constable Zelke, he is servicing more than twenty wives.

“You are welcome in our community,” says Browning amiably, the nice guy again, and Trina risks a peep. The old proselytizer turns away from her, so she stares at the back of his head, realizing that he is, if anything, shorter than she is. His waist-length brown hair, wispier than spider silk, is too thin to cover the stains of hair dye on his scalp, and his bushy beard has no trace of grey despite his age.

What a fake
, Trina is telling herself when Browning places his hands together in a sign of prayer and spins to face her.

Trina's eyes drop as he begins, sermon-like, “Mary. We are surrounded by filth and evil,” and she realizes that his power is in his voice as he continues. “Fornication, the wanton spilling of seed on the ground, greed, lust, and debauchery are destroying the world. We have to guard against those evils, Mary.”

The illogicalness of the rant, considering his polygamous and incestuous relationships, is as blatant to Browning as it is to Trina, but God has provided him with an answer. “The Lord has chosen me,” he claims quickly, before she has a chance to work out a more negative response. “He has protected me against sin. I am like Adam
who ate the apple of knowledge and brought learning to the world; like Jesus who was crucified for our sins. Now I permit my earthly body to be a vessel, to absorb the sins of mankind and to beautify them. That is why here you will see that everything is beautiful.”

“Really?” questions Trina under her breath.

“I am completely unselfish in my dealings with the Lord. I have given my body to Him for his great works. Believe me, Mary. Selfishness and greed are destroying the world. And this world
is
being destroyed. But here, everyone shares equally. There is no jealousy. Everyone gets the same measure.”

Although you obviously get far more then most,
Trina is thinking as she asks, “Where are all the men, Our Lord Saviour?”

“They leave,” he says starkly, inviting no questions, but then he realizes that an explanation is called for. “We are very much like a convent in a way, Mary,” he says taking a gentler tone. “And just as all nuns become Brides of the Lord, here most — well maybe all — of the beautiful woman give themselves to the Lord through me.” Browning's voice cracks with emotion, and he wipes away an imaginary tear as he continues, “It's a very beautiful thing, Mary.”

Especially for you, dirty old bastard
, thinks Trina, wanting to throw up.

But Browning isn't finished. “Of course it's not that simple,” he explains, as he sits at the desk and thrums his fingers impatiently. “If all God needed was for you to give yourself to him through me, we could do that right now.”

Get ready with the kick-boxing
, thinks Trina, but Browning is ahead of her.

“No. There are many stages of enlightenment necessary before you can be purified and become one of God's true servants through a visitation.” He pauses and leaves space for Trina to lure herself into his net.

“What would I have to do?” she asks on cue, so now he backs off.

“Enough for today, Mary. You must rest now.”

“But —”

“I said enough!” he yells — back to the punishment.

“Yes, Our Lord Saviour,” answers Trina demurely, and then wants to know if she can join the other women.

“One day, Mary. One day,” he says, then he escorts her down a brown corridor to a room and closes the door on her.

“It's two in the morning,” complains Joseph Creston from his Zurich apartment when Browning phones a few minutes later.

“It's started,” says Browning succinctly. “Undercover cop. She's pretty good. They tried the same at Waco.”

“What does she know?”

“She was well briefed, and she's wearing Janet's scarf, so they must have her.”

“I'll have to think about this. What are you planning for her?”

“I'll just shake her up a bit, be even loonier than usual. Give her twenty-four hours and she'll run back to Vancouver in bare feet.”

Constable Paul Zelke's cellphone rings a few minutes later.

“Browning reckons we've got a plant in his joint,” says a voice without needing or offering identification. “He called a guy in England.”

“Not us,” replies Zelke. “Maybe the Mounties.”

“Maybe.”

“I'll ask Mike Phillips in the morning.”

Trina's room is a cell and she knows it. It's windowless, and the unpainted metal door is clearly not meant as an invitation to leave. The only furnishings are a canvas camp bed, a folding metal chair, and a battered pee bucket in one corner. It's 4:00 a.m. She hasn't slept — just dozed — when a key turning in the lock jumps her wide awake.

“It's time for your first lesson, Mary,” says Browning in a sultry, mesmerizing tone.

“What…” she starts, but then, as her eyes accustom to the faint blue moonlight through the open door, she sees that he is naked. “Ah… um…”

“Oh, don't worry,” soothes Wayne, knowing what's going through her mind as he slides into the room. “You have many, many trials to pass through before you are worthy enough to be accepted into the Lord's body through me. But the first lesson — tonight's lesson — is that we are beautiful as we are. That is why we will begin as the Good Lord made us — without adornment.”

“I don't…” she mumbles nervously, but he piles on the pressure as he stands over her, building tension, waiting.

“You may take off your clothes now,” he says, opening his hands and arms wide to demonstrate his own nudity as he adds reassuringly, “I get no pleasure from the flesh. I am above such things.”

Yeah right
, thinks Trina, but she's cornered. “I'm… I'm not sure I'm ready…” she stammers, and Wayne takes a long thoughtful breath, holds the moment, and then lets her off.

“OK,” he says lightly. “We can start tomorrow.” And he locks the door behind him.

“OK,” sighs Trina in relief, recalling that according to Browning it is trash talk.

Outside the door, Wayne inwardly laughs at his performance before skipping back into his room, where Daena XXIII and Daena XXII, both fourteen-year-olds who bear a striking resemblance to their spiritual leader, sleep naked in his bed.

“Now get out of this,” Trina says to herself, once she has checked that her tape recorder is working and has added a short commentary. But a windowless room with a locked metal door is too much for her. The cellphone in her purse offers a way out, although in her cloistered quarters, the signal is barely registering. Emergency only she decides, putting the phone back, knowing that, as part of her amnesty deal with her daughter, Kylie will put her father in the picture if she isn't home in seventy-two hours.

“I'm going to a religious retreat centre for a few days,” she told Rick, not entirely untruthfully, but he eyed her suspiciously.

“Just a few days,” she carried on quickly. “Just to get over the trauma of Janet.”

“What trauma? What about me and the kids? You bring a raving loonie into the house, someone wanted for murder, and you need a break.”

“Post-traumatic stress…” suggested Trina, ratchetting up the odds. “I nearly lost the guinea pig.”

“You left him in the car.”

“OK,” she finally admitted. “The fact is that I'd really like to believe in God. It would make my life much easier and I wouldn't have to lie so much.”

“Trina, who do you lie to?” he asked, confused.