Page 91 of The Witch's Orchard
“Did he check them out?”
“Sure, but, you know, he was still new to the job. I never felt like he was up for it… not like that. Not the way the job was handed to him in the middle of his own niece’s disappearance. I always thought the church… the Zieglers… I just never got a good feeling from them. Jacobs told me he investigated but…”
“Well,” I say. “I think I’ll do some extra investigating. Just to be sure.”
THIRTY
ITIME MY NEXT VISITto First Baptist for when the Friday afternoon prayer meeting should be letting out, and I’m not disappointed when I pull up and see several older men shaking hands with Bob Ziegler before heading down the steps. They all look somber and sad, and I recognize a couple of them as some of Shiloh’s dad’s friends who brought their tracking dogs last night.
They nod to me as I approach the church. I nod back.
“Any news?” one says. I tell him no.
“Afternoon,” I say to Bob Ziegler. He’s changed his suit since last night. “I’ve got some questions for you.”
“Miss Gore—” he starts.
“About your time in the Army,” I say, and I watch as most of the color drains out of Bob’s face and disappears behind the collar of his crisp navy blue shirt.
He recovers fast, offers the men around him a polite goodbye, and waves me into the church, across the foyer, and into the same office with the big desk Rebecca had taken me to. He shuts the heavy door behind us.
He walks behind the desk, but he doesn’t sit. He also doesn’t invite me to sit.
Instead, we stand on opposite sides of the desk from each other and,as is in both our natures after years of practice, we fall in, spines straight, shoulders squared, hands at our sides.
The look in his eyes is intense and defiant but not squirrelly, not angry.
I cut to the chase.
“You were in the Army before you were a pastor.”
“Yes.”
“You were in the Army because you were given a choice between the military and jail.”
He grinds his teeth by way of answer, so I keep going.
“You committed statutory rape and were told that you could go to jail or join the Army. Is that right?”
He grinds his teeth some more. I wait.
Behind him, on a bookshelf, is an array of framed photographs. Bob and Rebecca in front of the church. Bob and Rebecca at a fundraiser twenty or thirty years before. Bob and a man I vaguely recognize as Harvey Drake standing in front of a cabin made with huge, waxy-looking timbers, the sunshine illuminating Bob’s white hair and Harvey’s straight white teeth. Rebecca at a Christmas parade with Bob dressed as Santa. Rebecca receiving an award of some kind from a man in a suit.
Bob looks at me looking at the pictures. Then he looks toward the window. Then the ceiling. Then back to me.
Finally, out of things to stare at, he says, “That’s right. That’s what happened but—look, I had no idea about the girl. I was at a party. It was a big party, and my friend took me. I didn’t know anyone. There were a lot of drugs, a lot of drinking. I had sex with a girl I didn’t know.”
“She was fourteen.”
“I didn’t know.”
“And after?”
“After?”
“Have you ever had sex with another underage girl?”
“Certainly not.”
