Fear Has a Name: A Novel (The Crittendon Files) Read online

  Pamela got up and went to him. He rested his hands on her shoulders and looked down at her.

  “I’m ready for this to be over,” she whispered and leaned her head against his chest. “I’m running out of steam.”

  “You’re strong, Pam.” Jack ran a hand up the back of her neck, fingers into her hair. “You’ve been a trouper. You need to go.”

  Oh, the relief.

  Yes.

  Leaving her head where it was, she squeezed him tightly, and whispered, “Pray for us, please …”

  20

  By eight the next morning, Jack was pleased with how right everything felt about the girls being on the road for Cleveland. Pam had risen when it was still dark, packed the muffins she’d made the night before, and thrown some things into one big suitcase. She woke the girls and had them in the car and on the road by seven, which should get them to Cleveland Heights by ten at the latest.

  There was no reason for Jack to sit around the house. He had showered and gotten dressed for work early when Pam was still scurrying about. The girls had been amazingly chipper for that time of morning. They were giddy about making the trip and anxious to see MawMaw and PawPaw.

  Sitting at his desk in the sprawling, quiet newsroom, Jack scratched out a list of things he needed to get accomplished, in no certain order, most dealing with the Evan McDaniel story.

  He had let DeVry know the night before that Pam and the girls would be making the trip to Cleveland. DeVry wasn’t concerned and once again comforted Jack by explaining that, because Granger had returned their belongings and knew the police were after him, his most logical move would be to disappear.

  Of course, Granger Meade had done nothing “logical” yet.

  Jack remembered that Barbara Cooley got into work early at Evan’s church, so he started by phoning her. She hadn’t heard back from any other church staff about seeing Evan the morning he went missing, but Jack assumed they would contact him directly. Although his email box was brimming with thirty-nine new emails, none of them pertained to Evan.

  “I did get one odd email back almost immediately, from Dr. Satterfield,” Barbara said.

  “Oh? Can you tell me what he said?”

  “Here, let me find it,” Barbara said. “Here we go. ‘Mrs. Cooley, obviously Mr. Crittendon convinced you there was some sort of mischief surrounding Pastor Evan’s disappearance. Please, let’s not stir up the troops. This is far-fetched media hype at its finest and will result in nothing positive. On the contrary, it will only generate innuendo and gossip. From now on, kindly restrain from sending out any more such correspondence. In Pastor Evan’s absence, please run any such communication by me for approval first.’”

  “Barbara, I’m sorry about that,” Jack said. “It sounds like I got you in trouble.”

  “Don’t you worry about it,” she said. “That’s nothing unusual for Dr. Satterfield. I thought it was a good idea, and I was happy to do it, for Evan’s sake; I just hope it gets some results.”

  At Jack’s request, Barbara gave him cell and home phone numbers for Sherry Pendergrass. She also told him that Patrick Ashdown and Rhonda Lowe were due into the church office soon. Jack planned on going to the church unannounced that morning to speak with them. He could do it by phone, of course, but he preferred to be able to see their facial expressions and body language.

  “There is one more thing, Mr. Crittendon.”

  “Please, call me Jack.”

  “Jack, okay,” Barbara said. “Since you asked for Sherry’s numbers, I thought you should know, I haven’t seen her at church at all.”

  “That would be since Evan’s disappearance?”

  “That’s right. Remember I told you—”

  “They met weekly like clockwork, but suddenly nothing was on Evan’s calendar with her for the week he disappeared, or any other week.”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Right, well, I know it’s only been ten days or so, but you have to understand, Sherry is a fixture here—Wednesday night, Sunday morning, Sunday night, and she comes to a women’s Bible study Friday mornings.”

  “She hasn’t been to any of those things?”

  “No. And she wasn’t on campus at all Sunday—morning or evening.”

  Jack was searching his notes for days and dates, but Barbara was a step ahead of him.

  “I’ve looked back at the calendar and checked the attendance sheet,” she said. “Sherry was not at the ladies’ Bible study the Friday morning Evan went missing either.”

  “Hmm.” Jack made a note of it.

  “Them fish don’t fry, do they, Jack?” She click, click, clicked her tongue.

  Boy, was she a character. And she had a point. Evan could have run off with Sherry Pendergrass.

  “I’m going to try to contact her,” Jack said. “Hopefully she can provide some insight.”

  “Anyway,” Barbara said, “you know I’ll be watching like a hawk for her at this end.”

  Jack thanked the secretary and told her he would be seeing her soon.

  Next he called the home phone number for Sherry Pendergrass but got only endless ringing. He tried her cell next, and it went straight to voice mail.

  “This is Sherry. Please leave me a message.”

  “Mrs. Pendergrass,” Jack said, “this is Jack Crittendon, a reporter with the Trenton City Dispatch. I am writing a feature story about Pastor Evan McDaniel and his disappearance. My wife and I attended a marriage seminar Evan and Wendy did at the church, and I know he is a good man.” Jack considered himself fairly deft at knowing what to say to get people to call him back. “Please give me a call. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

  Pam and the girls should have been well into their trip to Cleveland by the time Jack put the phone down. He began packing up his leather satchel to head for Evan’s church when his office line rang. It was Wendy McDaniel.

  “Is it too early?” she said. “I was just going to leave you a voice mail.”

  “Not at all,” Jack said. “I’m hard at it. How are you? What’s the latest?”

  “Oh, gosh, where do I start?” Wendy took a deep breath and exhaled. “Well, first of all, thank you for the fine story in the paper. I thought it was well done.”

  “You’re welcome,” Jack said. “I wanted to let you know a couple things. One, it was not as detailed as I planned, or as you might have expected, simply because my life has been chaos the past week. Two, I had Derrick Whittaker help me with it, for that reason. But I gave him all my notes and approved the story myself. I’m hoping the next piece will have my full attention.”

  “Perfect,” Wendy said. “And I want to know more about what’s happening with you and Pam and the break-in, but I’ve got some news I’m bursting to share.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The police believe Evan’s car was spotted on I-75 southbound by a traffic cam.”

  “That’s great news, Wendy. When was this?”

  “Friday. Three days ago he was alive.”

  “Could they tell if he was alone?” Jack regretted it the second he said it.

  There was a pause and a sniffle.

  “Alone?” Wendy said. “They didn’t say. What makes you ask?”

  “Oh … I don’t know.” Jack hesitated. “I guess it’s just the newsman in me.”

  “Jack, have you found out something you’re not telling me?” Wendy said.

  When are you going to learn to keep your mouth shut?

  A dozen answers and ways to explain raced through his mind.

  “Wendy, no,” Jack said.

  “There’s something …”

  He stood and silently cursed himself.

  “Please, Jack, I need to know everything,” Wendy said.

  “Look, this is nothing,” Jack said. “In my interviews, the name Sherry Pendergrass came up—”

  “Ohh … I get it,” Wendy said. “People are telling you there was an affair.”

&nb
sp; “No one has come out and said it,” Jack said. “The only thing that I felt was important was that she had a weekly counseling meeting with Evan, and the week he disappeared there was no meeting on his calendar.”

  There, it’s out.

  He wasn’t about to twist the knife by telling her Sherry hadn’t been at church since Evan disappeared.

  Wendy said nothing.

  “It probably doesn’t mean anything, Wendy, I’ve just got to cover—”

  “Okay,” Wendy said, “here it is. Sherry Pendergrass is a lovely, beautiful, very rich widow who is extremely lonely—I would say, to the desperation point. She’s leaned heavily on Evan since her husband’s death. But to my knowledge she is a very faithful, generous, God-fearing woman.”

  “Okay …”

  “Evan has counseled her every Wednesday for five or six months,” Wendy said. “He’s an excellent counselor. That’s his spiritual gift. People are comfortable with him. He listens. He asks the right questions. He prays. He gives wise, biblical counsel. She’s not the only woman he meets with one-on-one, and I have never had a problem with it. It’s other people who have a problem with it, Andrew Satterfield being chief among those. I swear he’s trying to get rid of my husband.”

  Jack sat back at his desk and scribbled some notes.

  “But the funny things is”—Wendy was getting revved up now—“Satterfield has encouraged Evan to meet with Sherry Pendergrass. Can you guess why the double standard?”

  “Why?”

  “What’s always the bottom line?”

  “I’m not tracking with you.”

  “Money, Jack. Sherry likes Evan. She trusts him,” Wendy said. “Over the months she’s almost come to depend on him, to a fault. Evan and I have discussed this. There’s nothing romantic going on, he assured me of that. But the thing is—and all this is off the record—her giving has increased dramatically since Joel died. Satterfield attributes it to her relationship with Evan. And he may have something there. She’s given special gifts to the church-planting fund, which is especially dear to Evan’s heart.”

  “So, Satterfield thinks it’s wrong for Evan to counsel one-on-one with women, except—”

  “Except when it’s with a rich widow who happens to be the church’s cash cow.”

  Okay, Jack understood that, but was Wendy completely naive?

  What kind of man was Evan McDaniel? From what Jack had seen of him at the marriage retreat, Evan was rock solid, and so was his marriage.

  But where was Sherry Pendergrass? Could she have run off with Evan? Jack imagined them driving to Miami and taking off on a flight to who knew where.

  “Does Evan have a computer at home?” Jack asked. “And have you gone through it, extensively?”

  The further this thing went on, the more Jack felt like it was a ministry project rather than an assignment for the Dispatch. He had a chance to help Wendy and her boys find their man.

  “I did that the first day he was gone,” Wendy said. “The police have it now. They said they’d bring it back within a day.”

  “Did you find anything?” Jack asked.

  “No.” Wendy paused. “That’s what’s disconcerting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His computer was clean as far as I could tell,” she said. “No history. Emails gone. Most of his files cleaned out.” After a moment of silence, she began to weep softly.

  Jack’s heart broke for Wendy as more doubts arose about her husband’s disappearance.

  “I didn’t tell you that before. I don’t know why. I wanted you to believe he hadn’t run off. He hasn’t; I know he hasn’t!”

  “But because his computer was recently purged you’re upset,” Jack said, “because it looks like he was preparing to leave. Is that it?”

  She cried openly. “God … my boys. My boys. What are we going to do?”

  Jack buried his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and remembered Rebecca’s coloring of Jesus in the fire with his three devoted servants.

  “Wendy, my seven-year-old daughter Rebecca recently told me something when Pam and I were going through a really, really hard time. Can I share it with you?”

  “Yes.” Her breath hitched.

  “‘If you believe in God—really believe—he’ll take care of you. Even if you have to go into a really, really hot fire.’”

  She cried openly.

  “Now get this part,” Jack said. “Only from the lips of a child: ‘You have to believe, or it won’t work.’”

  Wendy’s sudden laugh blended in with her sobs.

  Jack breathed a sigh of relief and vowed to find Evan McDaniel.

  21

  Granger was fighting sleep while driving the speed limit northbound on a two-lane Ohio freeway. As the sun dissolved the morning mist, he could better see for the first time the car he had stolen from the old man with the limp at the gas station the night before.

  The vehicle was medium blue outside with a light gray interior; totally average, older model, four-door sedan. He glanced over at the logo above the glove compartment: Chevrolet. He’d never been big on Chevys. This was an Impala, he guessed. The smell of cigarettes was deep in the seats and butt-filled ashtray. The windows were smudged with the same tar-and-nicotine coating that covered the windows of his old brown ride, which he had left at the gas station in Trenton City.

  He punched the lighter, dug in the seat beside him for the crumpled pack of Newports, fired one up, and reflected on the last twenty-four hours. After bailing from the gun shop, he had driven out of town, into the Ohio countryside. Its curvy, hilly, little-traveled roads—its green pasturelands, leaning barns, and stark blue skies—reminded him of the places he used to escape to when he was a youth in northeastern Ohio.

  He would light out there to the country in his old Charger, wind blowing back his hair, Springsteen cranking about those two lanes that could take him anywhere. And he would just drive and sing with the tunes about escaping, finding a girl, making something of his life.

  Sometimes he would pull off and park in the cinders up there on the ridge. It was so quiet. He would turn off the music. The breeze comforted him. The air was alive with the smell of grass and animals. Enormous white clouds enveloped him. Something inside told him God must certainly have created the landscape out there in that beautiful countryside, yet that same God seemed to have penned such a cruel script for his life.

  He would sit up there and just think, about the most recent berating by his mother, the rats that scurried about him in the shed at night, the most recent humiliation with the bullies at school, the fact that he was overweight and unattractive. He wished, oh how he wished, his parents would change, that he could live in a loving, uplifting home.

  He reflected on many of those same things after he fled the gun shop and town the day before and drove out through the middle-Ohio farmlands, which were not a whole lot different from those at home. His heart ached. Having seen Pamela, something mysterious and powerful was pulling him back to her. If he could just spend a few hours talking with her. But he knew better than to go back—her house would have been swarming with police after his fight with Jack.

  So Granger had just sat in the old brown clunker out in the country—thinking those same crummy old thoughts from his youth, and trying to figure out what he was going to do.

  When dusk came, he had crept back toward the city limits of Trenton City to get gas and a bite to eat and figure out where he was going to spend the night. He hadn’t planned on stealing a car at the gas station, but the perfect opportunity presented itself. The man must’ve been eighty-five. He shuffled ever so slowly.

  It was pitiful, what you did.

  Granger had watched the old gentleman limp from his car. His thin arms shook like crazy trying to get the gas nozzle back where it belonged. Quickly Granger moved in, explaining that he was sorry, but he was desperate and needed to “borrow” the car. The old guy’s mouth just hung open and he looked up at Granger with sagging, yell
owing eyes through crooked glasses. Never uttered a word. Didn’t seem to have an ounce of energy to protest. Just shuffled backward a step, got out of the way, rubbed the gray stubble on his hollow face, and watched Granger get in and drive off.

  After having driven around for some time that night, he parked the Impala in the Sterling Business Park, where it looked like many dozens of night-shift employees parked their cars while they worked. He slid into a space several spots away from any other cars, turned it off, and went for a brief walk and a smoke. He thought about getting on the road and just driving into the night, anywhere. He thought about driving back by Pamela’s house. Eventually he just climbed into the back of the Impala, locked the doors, and fell asleep.

  He awoke before dawn and got on the road, any road. He heaved a phlegmy cough that made him see stars as he always did in the morning, rolled down the window, and spat. Setting the cruise control just below sixty-five, he worked out the kinks in his legs. He wasn’t proud of himself for taking the old man’s car; he was ashamed. But as he looked out over the fog and rolling, tree-filled hills and leaned back against the headrest, he did feel a sense of accomplishment for letting Pamela go.

  You’ve given her back her freedom.

  Now if he could just escape from the cops, maybe he could start over.

  Did Pamela want him in jail?

  He hoped she didn’t think he was a monster.

  But he was a monster, of sorts, wasn’t he?

  Maybe behind bars was where he belonged.

  Like he always said, no one escaped the long arm of the law forever.

  Where are you going?

  He told himself he didn’t know. But the fact was, he was heading straight for home. Yes, home sweet home, where those two witch doctors raised him to be the loser he had indeed become.

  It made him sick.

  Sick, sick, sick.

  He grabbed another Newport, lit it, sucked the menthol smoke deep into his chest, and enjoyed the cool burn at the base of his throat. Then he cracked the window and blew out into the wind.

  He would pay his dear parents a visit before he was captured, give them a proper thank-you for all they had done for him.