The snapshots I paged through evidenced all of this. I didn’t simply use my talent for the money that clients would pay me. It was an addiction. I had to keep watching people, had to keep studying their faces for ones that would fit my walls. I clicked through photos one after the other, checking a face and then the next, hundreds flashing by.
I’d been searching for Callista’s face without even knowing it. My mind was fixed on how close San Francisco was and how she might have been down in LA at some point, maybe even in the background of one of my photos. But I wasn’t going to let myself go further down that path. I clicked my monitor off and hid the newspaper again.
When 3:45 came around, I dug through my closet for a button-up shirt then ventured downstairs. Alli was in the living room and I passed by the TV screen just as a tentacle speared a screaming woman.
“Keep watching all that joy and positivity,” I told her. She looked over my formal wear and lifted an eyebrow.
“Have…fun,” she said. On screen, tiny octopus-shaped babies started to slither out of the woman’s head. Alli rolled back over again.
I hadn’t ridden my bike in months so it was a bit difficult finding it in the garage. By the time I had it, I was already so dusty and sweaty that I wondered why I’d even bothered to dress up at all. Nothing was going to stop me now though. The author of the blog was the only clue I had left.
I pedaled down the road and followed the crossing street to the right, avoiding pedestrians out for an evening walk. There was a cool breeze that flew into my face, making the bike move slower but wiping the sweat away from my arms and forehead: a fair trade to relieve this heat, I thought. Everywhere I turned, there were people I already felt I knew, either from school or from my venturing all over the town while hunting for good photographs. Arleta was like that: you knew one, you knew them all.
Most of the houses that I passed were rickety and uneven, the old wooden panels held together by boards added for support, concrete foundations crumbled after years of age. There were chain-link covered yards holding back snapping dogs, trucks jacked up on giant tires half as tall as I was, uneven sidewalks that made my bike bounce and swerve. Scrap vendors had tall strips of tin wired up as makeshift fencing, dozens of KEEP OUT signs attached in multiple languages. If you were just a visitor passing through, all of this reeked of urban decay. To me, Arleta was like a grandmother whose skin was wrinkled and whose bones were fragile, but whose smile could never be outdone by any younger and more beautiful supermodel.
Aside from the old cars and the cheap shops, one thing that Arleta had a lot of was churches. I passed at least five before I finally saw the tall, pointed steeple of my target ahead. ST. LITA’S CHURCH, read the sign in the grass out front. I braked my bike to a stop in front of it, catching my breath.
The main part of the church was built in a traditional style with giant wooden doors behind steps leading from the sidewalk, all surrounded by neatly clipped trees. There was a parking lot to its left with people hurrying to make it inside before the service began. Most of them were Hispanic, all dressed up far better than I was, and at once I felt out of place.
I hid my bike behind the bushes and dusted my clothes off with my fingers, ridding my shirt of the grass and bugs that had flown there. I strolled up to the doors with as much faked belonging as I could—covering my burning hand in my pocket—and stepped inside.
I was immediately greeted by a host of scents that were foreign to me: candles melting with gently smoking flames atop their glowing white pillars, and perfumes and colognes from the churchgoers around me. The chill of an overworked and buzzing air conditioner carried the smell of incense from the front of the church: a smoky and exotic sensation that entered my nose like crushed flowers and spices.
The stained glass windows glowed from the evening sunlight outside. Likely accustomed to visitors, the families around me didn’t even notice that an outsider was in their midst. I quickly stepped out of the entryway, finding an abandoned spot at the end of a pew in the back. When I sat down, something beside me caught my eye: the blue wall with the golden angels. There was no mistake, it was the same from the photo.
Where to begin my search? I wondered. I knew that Spud was right: there wasn’t much hope in finding one person out of this group. The children stuck close to their parents, families and pockets of old ladies scattered about—none of them looked like conspirators. The church was merely one long room with two columns of pews, split through the middle by a walkway leading to the cloth-covered altar. A woman sat behind the keys of an organ, and began to play.
Everyone stood so I mimicked their actions, picking up a hymnal and mouthing the words along with them. A bespectacled priest appeared with two altar boys in a line, one bearing a tall crucifix and the other a gigantic bible. They all wore robes: the boys in white, the priest in green, steps so practiced that none of them even came close to tripping over the ends of their clothes. Behind them strolled a single monk dressed in brown with a completely bald head. When the priest reached the front, the music stopped, and he started to speak.
I didn’t really understand much of what he was talking about because I never went to church, but I followed along with the people nearby. They would stand for some things and sit for others. I found the uneven harmonies of the old people mixed with the children to be soothing—so powerful, it even calmed my own tension.
It went on for about half an hour. My eyes continued to scan the faces around me. I couldn’t see a true Glimpse, but even without that I felt I was in the wrong place.
None of these people even appeared slightly out of the ordinary. Not a single face there could have held behind it the secrets of a plot to murder me. Even as the priest finished the reading and began his sermon, the only disturbance in the room was the snore of an old man who’d fallen asleep.
I turned my head to study the people who lurked in the back pews with me. One of the men on the opposite corner stared at the priest almost too intently. Another woman two rows ahead of him didn’t seem happy to be there. Dissatisfaction, I recognized. But murder? I couldn’t see that in either of their eyes.
I sighed, slouching a bit against the hard back of the pew. Maybe this was a waste of time. I might have had better luck hunting for a penguin in a desert.
“For the time is come,” the priest’s monotonous voice suddenly rose to a boom through the speakers, breaking me out of my reverie, “that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?”
My concentration was drawn to him again, his eyes reading from the book. I hadn’t been paying attention until now, but the fervent insistence in his voice was too much to turn away from. The priest was patriarchal and almost ancient, a short gray beard and wrinkly skin on his face, hands holding the side of the pulpit to steady himself. His eyes were bright blue, a color I could see even from across the church.