He tapped his computer monitor. “But obviously, the readers who follow this site don’t always believe him. So he posts photographs of some of the letters he gets. That’s what this is.”
“Does that help us?” I asked. It wasn’t like I could simply go searching the world for someone called Anon—short for Anonymous, I figured.
Spud shook his head quickly.
“This is why you’re lucky to have a friend like me,” he said. “And more importantly, why I’m lucky to have my granny.”
He was smiling with victory. “Because when I first saw this, I thought I saw something familiar in the picture. And it’s hardly even in the picture at all. It’s behind the letter.”
His finger moved from the letter to the blue wall that was at the back it. Only a sliver was visible before being cut off: an energetic hue decorated with an unusual pattern of swirls, tiny angels sitting in the curves like they were in a pillow of clouds. The angels had hair and skin hand-painted in a metallic yellow so it appeared they were gold, though it was obvious the wall behind them was merely cheap plaster.
“That wall,” Spud said, “reminds me of my granny. My granny reminds me of going to church. And going to church reminds me of my Uncle Richard’s funeral, where the walls were decorated with gold angels on a blue wall that my little sister wanted to draw moustaches on.”
“Wait…” I jumped in with shock. “You’re saying you—”
Spud nodded. “This wall is from Saint Lita’s church, just down the road from here.”
I jumped forward, grabbing the mouse from Spud. My fingers drummed across the keyboard, typing SAINT LITA’S CHURCH ARLETA into a search engine. A website for the church had service schedules, contact information, and photos in a line. One of the pictures showed two priests and a deacon posing in religious garb beside a row of old pews. Over the shoulder of the priest furthest to the left was a blue wall with golden angels.
Spud hit the desk triumphantly. I was aghast.
“You’re actually brilliant,” I told him, unable to form any other words. He nodded like he’d known this already.
“So,” he said, “chances are the person who’s getting these letters attends this church, maybe even one of the cleaning crew or someone in the office who spends a lot of time alone there.”
“What time is the next service?” I blurted out. Spud checked the site’s schedule.
“It’s Catholic,” he said. “So Saturday evening mass starts at 4:30. But then you have 7:30 AM tomorrow, and 9 AM, and 11, and…”
His voice trailed off. “What, are you going to go down to the church and see if you can just spot someone who looks like they enjoy conspiracy theories?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s all I have. Maybe if someone overhears me asking questions I’ll catch a Glimpse…”
My voice trailed off. The chances of that happening were very thin, and both of us knew it. Spud didn’t look too enthusiastic about the idea. But when he didn’t answer, I entered the church’s address into my phone, heart racing.
Spud’s family started moving around downstairs, and once his younger brothers and sisters discovered I was there, the whole place turned into a zoo of screaming voices. I was nearly knocked backward when they all ran into me at once, and it took half an hour before I managed to get outside and head home. Spud offered to come with me, but his mother forced him to stay because they’d already planned a family trip to the beach.
So I went alone through the slowly-awakening neighborhood again, now interspersed by cars and trucks heading out for the weekend. Some of the daze-like feeling still lingered over me. I guessed that was my mental defense: continue to believe there was some reasonable explanation to all this so that I wouldn’t lose my sanity.
I walked quickly—the church service didn’t start for hours but I was eager to be home. My birthmark itched furiously so I unwrapped the gauze with caution. It was even redder than before, though the outside air helped to relieve the pain.
Seeing that the redness hadn’t subsided since I’d awoken only made me more concerned. There was one person in the world who’d know how to fix it. So when I got home, I headed straight for the back of the house.
To call my mom’s workspace an “office” was far too conformist of a term, a word that implied organization and efficiency and maybe even a sturdy chair, none of which my mom had. The previous owners had converted an end of the back porch into a storage space. My mom, ever resourceful, had painted the place cream and redone the wooden flooring herself, tacking up thin, colorful cloths to make it cozier. She had a desk and a stool in the corner that she’d gotten from a secondhand shop, two couches for her and clients, and bookshelves stuffed with old records and bottles on the far wall.
It was the strongest smelling room in the house, on account of the herbal invasion spread upon her desk, but I knew for every awful scent there was some ailment she could cure. Alli and I were sick the least out of everyone in our schools, and we’d never gotten a single shot from a doctor in our lives.
“I only work by appointment!” my mom said loudly to me, not looking from the tall notebook she was scribbling in, glasses over her eyes. “Walk-ins not welcome!”
“You’re supposed to heal me, you Hippocratic hypocrite,” I said, falling onto one of her torn couches, from the same secondhand store as the rest of the room.
“I didn’t take any Hippocratic Oath,” she growled, turning a page in one of the thick books open on her desk. “I’m not your doctor.”
This was the game we played—she would be researching something for a patient and I’d come in, and she’d act like it bothered her when it really didn’t. Half the time I wondered how Alli and I hadn’t driven her to get a job away from the house, especially when summer came and we were ten times worse of a distraction. I rolled over onto my back, looking up the walls. She had a guitar hanging on one side, from back when she was part of a girl band called Fruity Joos. They’d never really gone anywhere, except for the time the trio had opened for Aerosmith—she’d told that story to me dozens of times, and I guess it made her cool enough.
Next to that, like a stop sign that signaled the end of her guitar age, was her framed college degree. She’d studied zoology at UCSB. When I was old enough to know what that was, I’d asked her why she wasn’t working with penguins and lions and elephants, and she’d just said she had enough wild animals living in her home to suffice.
“I have an appointment in half an hour,” she told me when I didn’t leave. She looked up, blinking at me expectantly through the glasses.
“I’m hurt,” I told her with a whimper. She scrunched her mouth together. I held my hand out where she could see it, and she nearly jumped.
“What in the world, Michael…” she said with a gasp. “What have you been doing to that?”
She took me by the wrist and I was forced to sit up as she pulled my mangled finger closer to the lamp. The heat from the bulb made my finger burn harshly so I tried to pull away.
“Did you hit it in the car wreck?” she asked, not letting me go.
“No, I think it’s a rash,” I said.
“The skin is peeling bad.” She examined it closer, touching lightly. I winced.
“It’s hard too, are you sure you didn’t break a bone?”
“I’d be in a lot more pain, right?” I said, though the burning had left me speaking through my teeth. She let my hand go and took her glasses off. My hand trembled.
“Take this first,” she said, producing a slim blue cylinder labeled Arnica from one of the desk drawers. She popped the lid and a pile of tiny white pebbles tumbled into my other hand. They tasted like sugar.