Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [21]
“Yes?”
“Do you have any idea how the dog got there?”
“There are many people who believe that I have the power to heal. But there are many that disbelieve it—vehemently. These types of people have perpetrated acts of violence against me and this church in the past, may God forgive them.”
She listened carefully to his words and his voice, listening for a note out of key that would signal to her that he had something to hide. One of the first things she had learned at the FBI academy, being one of the few authors ever allowed to attend, was that most liars gave themselves away without ever saying a word. She scrutinized him openly, looking for a tapping foot, a clenching fist, any revealing unconscious bodily movement. But he was solid, fixed. He concentrated on his words, choosing each carefully, speaking slowly. He seemed to speak as some people wrote, picking words specifically for their nuance and rhythm.
“So you imagined that to be an act of vandalism. Someone expressing anger that you were unable to heal Christopher?”
“I can’t imagine why anyone else would have done such an awful thing.”
“Forgive me, but it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Why would you kill one creature to express rage that another could not be saved?”
“It’s a good question and one I have been asking myself since I fell upon the dog’s body.”
Usually, skepticism of others was part of Lydia’s natural state of existence. The words people spoke, the faces they wore in public, were rarely the path to the truth about them. The inconsistent phrase, the shifting gaze, the unconscious movement were much more certain, though more subtle, indicators of the real story behind the face. She was looking for any of those things now. Hoping for one, in fact. Because as much as the possibility that this man was a psychic and a healer had appealed to her just moments earlier, now she inexplicably wanted him to reveal himself as a fraud.
“May I see where you found him?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure what she could possibly find there.
He led her through the church, again with his hand on the small of her back. It was an odd gesture, at once intimate and authoritative. His large hand made her feel small and, as a result, vulnerable and a bit shepherded. She wondered if this was a consciously manipulative action on his part.
He held the back door open for her and she walked into the lush garden. She hadn’t noticed it before, but in the center, nestled in a bed of leafy green fernlike plants was a small statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus. Standing about three feet tall and carved from some type of pink marble, there was something unusually beautiful about the sculpture. Lydia found many of the images of Madonna and Child to be cold in their religiousness, as if the emotional bond between mother and son had been forgotten. As if His sacred destiny made it that He was never Mary’s child. But He was once just a baby boy adored by his mother, wasn’t He? This had always bothered her about religion. It seemed to Lydia that someone had taken all the humanity out of it. But the face of this Virgin statue was etched with motherly adoration, a loving smile playing on her lips, her eyes brimming with emotion at the baby nestled secure and sleepy in her arms.
“This statue is remarkable,” said Lydia.
“So I’m told,” answered Juno. “My uncle, the priest who heads this parish, is a sculptor. He mainly works in wood. There’s a case at the back of the church that holds the crucifixes and rosaries he makes most often. The statue was a bit of a departure for him. He made it when we had the garden built.”
Though beautiful, the garden seemed neither as fecund nor otherworldly as it had in the dark or in her dream. But the flowers were meticulously tended, with not one weed pushing its way through the dirt. The earth looked as if it