Father Complex by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe [Ashe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gregory Ashe
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

APRIL 12

SUNDAY

11:28 AM

IN THE KITCHEN OF Gerrit Maas’s old farmhouse, Somers tried to think. He knew he only had a little time; the sheriff and his deputies and detectives had turned out in force after Somers had called. For the moment, Sheriff Engels was busy organizing a search for the fugitive Brother Newell, but Somers knew that wouldn’t last forever. Eventually, he and Hazard would have to give statements, and the sheriff would take over the interview with Gerrit. In other words, they needed to hurry.

But hurrying didn’t seem to be on the menu. With the sheriff’s permission, Gerrit had gone upstairs to change out of his church regalia, and Somers and Hazard had been left in the kitchen to wait. Through an open doorway, Somers had a line of sight on Neecie Weiss, the deputy who was currently making sure nobody in the house decided to make a run for it. Weiss was favoring her bad leg, but her face was impassive.

The house was like many of the old family homes in the area: the main floor broken up into smaller rooms with low ceilings and few windows, the plank walls painted white and the floorboards honey-colored under the varnish. The furnishings weren’t exactly Little House on the Prairie-era—the leather sectional crammed in the living room, for example, had clean modern lines—but many of the pieces were obviously antiques, some of them repurposed.

In the kitchen, Somers and Hazard sat at a table with a red-check cloth, smelling something that definitely contained a lot of butter and sugar, with undernotes of what he thought might have been brass polish. Quiet chatter came from the radio in the next room—he thought it was an AM band, either conservative talk or conservative religion, maybe both. Then steps came, and through the open doorway, Somers saw Neecie Weiss smile and nod, and a moment later Gerrit stepped into the room. He’d ditched the satin robe and the crown of bullets and even the gold-plated AR, and now, as he sat at the table in denim overalls and a flannel shirt, he looked a lot more like the man Somers had seen at football and basketball and baseball games.

A woman followed him into the room. She looked older than Gerrit, although that might have been partly her choice: she wore her graying hair long, in a braid that came almost to her waist, and no makeup. A simple gray dress. A clean white apron. She might have been pretty or even beautiful—she had the right bone structure—but frown lines marked her forehead and eyes and mouth. She was the kind of woman Somers couldn’t imagine ever having been a child, much less out of an apron. As though responding to Somers’s thought, she moved to the oven and opened it.

“Crack pie,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s no good warm. I planned it for Father’s supper, plenty of time to cool.”

“It’s only a name, Chief Somerset,” Gerrit said. “You ever had a gooey butter cake?”

“Sure,” Somers said with a smile.

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