Page 93 of A Boy Called Lovesong

“No.”

“Then of course I’ll mind your damn dog,” she said, taking Chet from me. “I suppose he can help me tidy up the leftovers from breakfast.”

I started to head for the door before she stopped me. “Noah, don’t go doing anything you’ll regret.”

“If I don’t do this, I’ll regret it forever.” Before I left, I looked at Maybelle’s perfectly crimped hair. “Say, you don’t have a spare hairpin I could borrow, do you?”

As a journalist I’d done my fair share of breaking and entering in the past. I’d snuck my way past more security guards and picked the locks on more backstage doors than I cared to remember. If you wanted the scoop, you had to be prepared to break a few rules to get it.

On my way out to the reverend’s house, I constantly peered around me, making certain nobody had spotted me, and nobody was following me.

After quietly climbing the steps of the front porch, I knocked on the door to make certain nobody was home. I wasn’t about to break into a house with someone inside it.

When nobody answered, I tried the door handle.

The door was locked.

Perhaps in normal times the reverend might have left his house unlocked in his absence, given the fact that Clara’s Crossing was such a sleepy little town. But Reverend Jim had made it clear that these were not normal times, given the presence of such an untrustworthy drifter as myself.

Ironically, I was about to prove the reverend right.

From my pocket I pulled out Maybelle’s hairpin, knelt in front of the door and bent the pin to fit the lock. With a jiggle and a jimmy, I heard the lock give.

Quietly I opened the door and crept inside.

Somehow, the empty house was even creepier without the reverend and his wife in it. From the framed pictures on the walls, I felt the gazes of condemnation from Jesus and Mary and all the apostles, all of them watching my every step down the hallway, through the dining room and into the reverend’s study.

He had obviously returned the small chest to the shelf after I left the night before.

I took it down and placed it on the desk then opened the top drawer.

I was worried that perhaps the reverend had hidden the key to the chest elsewhere, concerned that I might try to do exactly what I was doing. But clearly, he thought locking the house was enough to deter my curiosity from getting the better of me, for there was the key sitting in the drawer.

Evidently, he had misjudged me, or rather, hadn’t judged me harshly enough.

I slid the key into the lock on the chest, turned it and lifted the lid.

There was the reverend’s precious Bible which I took out and impatiently tossed aside onto the desk.

That’s when I saw what else was in the chest.

What I knew I’d seen the night before.

There before me was an envelope, bent and frayed, stained and dirty and marked with what looked like a bicycle tire track.

And there on the front, the ink smeared in places, was Lovesong’s name and address in Joel’s handwriting.

Lovesong Valentin

Clara’s Crossing

Louisiana

I looked at the date on the postmark.

It was date stamped the day after Joel’s death.

Without being able to control myself, I started shaking.

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