Page 38 of The Children of Eve

He looked again at the picture of the artist. She had fierce, sad eyes. Seeley felt sorry for her. He wondered how much Riggins might have shared with her. However much it was, he hoped that should the time come, she wouldn’t require too much convincing to reveal it. He didn’t want to be forced to watch her die.

CHAPTERXXIX

Back home, I set about locating Wyatt Riggins’s stepbrother, the preacher. An internet search revealed no trace of a Regis Riggins serving as a pastor in either Utah or Idaho—which assumed Zetta Nadeau wasn’t misremembering either his name or location to begin with—and even broadening the search to anyone named Regis who showed religious inclinations didn’t produce promising results. I made a list of church and religious organizations in both states, from the Utah Valley Interfaith Association and Mission Northwest to the Rocky Mountain Ministry Network and the Idaho Episcopal Foundation, then set about calling each one, or emailing those that didn’t answer the phone.

After a couple of hours, I started to feel a pang of sympathy for the courtiers who’d been dispatched to scour the kingdom for a virgin wife-cum-nurse to tend to the aging King David. One of them eventually returned with Abishag the Shunammite, who was, one assumes, prettier than her name. As luck would have it, David was by then too decrepit to sleep with her anyway, so she was called upon only to keep him warm with her body, which, though probably not always pleasant, was at least better than being required to service him in other ways. The Playboy bunnies should have been so lucky toward the end of Hugh Hefner’s days.

Eventually, I got a call from a woman at the Utah Division of Multicultural Affairs who told me that, while she couldn’t be sure, she thought the pastor of Christ the Risen King Community Church up in Logan might be the man I was looking for. He signed his name “Edward R. Collins,” and the official forms he’d filled out for the division indicated that theRstood for “Regis.” An hour later, I was on a Zoom call with Pastor Edward R. Collins himself, who admitted that he’d googled me before responding to my message. He confirmed that he had a stepbrother named Wyatt, and while they weren’t exactly estranged, they were not in regular contact. Wyatt’s father had died in a mining accident before Wyatt reached his teens, and the widow remarried a year later to a widower, one Kobe Collins, a woodworker and part-time preacher. Kobe passed on both vocations to his older son, Edward, the only child from his first marriage, Wyatt being uninterested either in woodworking or the ways of the Lord, mysterious or otherwise.

“Wyatt and I don’t perceive the world similarly—this one or the next,” said Collins. He was a small, round man with heavy-lensed glasses and a haircut last seen on J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man comic books. However, he’d rejected the matching Hitler mustache, which was always a wise decision. His magnified eyes were watchful and gentle and his mouth settled naturally into a soft smile. He didn’t strike me as a fire-and-brimstone type, more as someone who had studied the New Testament and the Old and decided that, on balance, the New offered the better guide to living.

“Wyatt isn’t a Christian man, then?”

“I think Wyatt has seen too much of war,” said Collins. “That makes some men look to God and others cease to believe. But Wyatt was always inclined to stray from the path—or follow his own, to be more charitable.”

“Did you get along?”

“We weren’t alike, but we didn’t fight, or not often. My father foundWyatt frustrating, but he wasn’t a man easily roused to physical discipline, especially with children. He preferred reason and understanding, which worked with Wyatt, if only to a degree. Wyatt and I began to drift apart during our late teens. I grew closer to Christ and he grew closer to—well, everything that wasn’t Christ, I suppose. Once that began to happen, what little we had in common fell away. Wyatt left home, my stepmother—his mother—succumbed to breast cancer, and my father joined her in the next life not long after. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy: he died of a broken heart, a surge of hormones following the stress of her loss. The last time I saw Wyatt was at my father’s funeral, which was seven years ago now. Why did you say you were trying to contact him?”

“I’ve been hired by his girlfriend,” I said. “Wyatt left her without saying goodbye.”

“That sounds like him. On the morning we buried my father, Wyatt said he’d see me back at the house but never showed. Some people don’t like farewells.”

“There may be more to it than that,” I said.

Collins tugged at a small wooden cross around his neck. “I thought as much.”

“Why?”

“Because if every woman whose boyfriend skipped out on her started hiring private detectives, I might be tempted to set up an agency and reap the benefits. And—”

I waited.

“You’re not the first person to come asking after Wyatt,” he finished.

“Who was the other?”

“A man, an odd one. Shorter than the average and smarter, too. He didn’t bother with a Zoom call but cut straight to the chase by coming to see me in person a few days ago.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“Seeley. I’m figuring it’s spelled with threee’s, though I have no reason other than it’s how I pictured it in my head. No card or anything like that, just a name and a handshake. Knew his Bible, but only in the manner of the devil quoting scripture. He asked about Wyatt, and I told him what I’ve just told you, if without the additional family history. He thanked me for my time and proceeded on his way.”

“What about contact details?”

“None. Seeley accepted that I was telling the truth, or so I assumed. But later, after he was gone, I spotted that the lock on my storage shed had been broken, and I saw footprints in the mud at the back of the house: small ones, like an undersized man might have left. If he chose to believe me, it was only because he’d taken the trouble to search my property. He may even have been in the house while my wife and I were out, because she picked up a male scent, like an old-fashioned cologne or aftershave. I couldn’t detect anything, but if she says the house smelled strange, it did. Her senses are keener than mine.”

“Did this Seeley explain why he wanted to find Wyatt?”

“He told me he was a friend from back home who had lost touch—we were raised in Maryland, Wyatt and I—but Logan, Utah, is a long way for a friend to travel, and Mr. Seeley, for all his cordiality, didn’t strike me as a man of friendly mien. Furthermore, I didn’t recall him from my youth, and while his accent was close, it wasn’t Maryland close. He had the dates and places right, even named some names that meant something to me, but he could have found those on the internet or in the obituary columns. All told, he didn’t hold water, and I was glad when he went away.”

“Did he arrive by car?”

“On foot, but I live in town. He might have parked nearby, but I watched him from the window as he left. He must have walked two blocks before he turned.”

“He didn’t want you to see the vehicle or the license plate,” I said.

“That was my reckoning.” Collins tugged at his cross again. “Strange, isn’t it?”

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