Part 3: What Was Left
By: Shain Slepian
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Fiction, Series, Supernatural

Celeste had been in the town of Virgil for just a few months. She was well-integrated into the GracePoint Church community, and could make out the vague outline of a core group of people. The Church itself was a single long room that might look like a camp cabin if the high-slotted windows didn’t render the rooms so dark. The rows of benches curved around the center of the room and this core group always occupied the front row during services. As though blocking the main community from Pastor Amity.

Celeste knew that she would have to become part of this group in order to learn what she came to this town to learn, and she was working on that.

Church Day, which was randomly chosen each year, was announced a week ago and was given the Easter treatment in Virgil. This year it was November 1st, a Tuesday, and Celeste had spent the last week trying to gather as much information as she could. The core group of the Church contained some interesting people and Celeste got this vulnerable feeling whenever she spoke to one of them.

She questioned the guy that category that freaked her out the least, Toru. He had that ever-present toothy grin and slightly forward leaning stance that marked him as a part of this group, with the wide spread feet that make acute angles to the ground like he could pounce on you at any second. But Toru’s eyes were different, they actually moved to express emotions in response to contextual stimuli, which made him a real charmer compared to the others. Toru told her that the gathering was merely a rite of passage for the youth of 8 in Virgil. The kids put on a little talent show and were given gifts by the church leaders as a reward. It’s just a fun day for everyone, Toru had said.

Performing and unwanted gifts from a bunch of creeps. Celeste had had funner days.

Tell me about these gifts, Celeste said, do the kids ask for them?

Carol had “overheard” her all the way from the Church office and now came out add her expertise. No one needed to ask the children, Carol said, Kate and the others always know exactly what the kids want. Her little Anabel, who would turn 9 this year had been given a toy tarantula, and she just adored it.

A tarantula? Celeste was aghast. Anabel must have been pretty into them for Kate to get her something like that.

Oh no, Carol said, Anabel had had devastating arachnophobia since she was little, but with one little toy, those fears just vanished.

After Annie died, Celeste had been going through the files of cases she had worked on. God, she was brilliant, Celeste had thought as she turned through the records of cases Annie had solved. Most she’d heard about. Celeste devoured Annie’s stories when she came home.

Celeste had savored every moment of affection she received from Annie. That was love, she’d thought. Attention, touch, gifts, compliments. Squeezing my hand when I was scared of being on a loud street on a dark night.

But there was another way Annie affected love. Quietly, absently.

There were the cases Annie had never so much as mentioned, and Celeste knew why the second she’d opened the most recent case file. Celeste enjoyed stories of unfettered cleverness, smart moves like in speed-chess, her imagination ran wild as she projected silvery webs of suspended realities in her mind.

But Celeste hated gore. And Annie had seen her fair share of that throughout her career. Celeste had gagged and become dizzy when she saw Annie’s most recent case file. Annie would have been the one to hold her up and guide her to a chair, bring her some water or lay with her on the couch for hours until the sickening unease went away.

But Annie hadn’t come home this time. And “The Blood of Christ murders” file was what she’d left behind.

Celeste only had a few acquaintances in Virgil that weren’t Church regulars. When the local radio station announced Church day, Celeste looked for an excuse to go over to her neighbor’s apartment. Ximena was raising three children alone, and her eldest, Avery, would be old enough to have gone through the ceremony. Celeste brought her a batch of cookies, “because she just made too darn much again” and awkwardly maneuvered herself in.

Ximena was dunking her cookies into a fresh cup of coffee and that seemed to have put her in a talking mood.

“Avery did that ceremony thing two years ago. They did this cute little comedy sketch,” she laughed. “It was so stupid.”

“What did Kate give them?”

“Pastor Amity? Ugh, this hideous bat thing with these flimsy-ass wings and they refused to even touch it. They almost ran off the stage!”

“Avery’s afraid of bats?”

“Terrified! And the entire village knows that! They run away from batman costumes every Halloween.”

“Why do you all go?”

Celeste heard a toddler scream with delight in the other room.

“Avery! You better not be playing airplane with Claudia, she’s too little, baby.”

She rolled her eyes.

“You have kids?”

Celeste shook her head and smiled politely.

“The church is big in this town. It’s just always been like that. And I don’t get it, and don’t I go to that freaky-looking Church every Sunday. But sometimes, you gotta show up. Just to show everybody that you don’t think you’re above them, you know?”

“Hm, I bet all of Avery’s friends went too.”

“Exactly! You can’t let your kid be the one that misses out.”

“Ximena,” Celeste was about to ask if she knew anything about the murders, the first of which occurred on the outskirts of town. But she decided that might be dangerous at the last second. Instead she asked, “Should I go? I mean, what if I just skipped it? It feels weird, going without kids.”

Ximena shrugged. “Like I said, if you’re friends with Pastor Amity it might be weirder not to show up. It’s a big deal around here. You don’t have kids in the school, but none of mine are turning eight this year and I’ve been getting flyers in my kids’ folders every day.”

She gestured with a crumbling cookie at the fridge, where a magnet held the flyer in place. Celeste scanned the information on the flyer, it was everything that she’d heard on the community radio announcement. The last line hadn’t struck her as strange when hearing it on the radio. But now, she took note:

‘No photography.’

The rhythm of that statement was wrong. Not, no flash photography. Just no photography.

“Ximena,” she asked. “Do you remember what any of the other children got?”

After Celeste had first peaked inside the file, she’d left it sitting on the desk of Annie’s old bedroom for days. The very first image was enough to put her off mysteries altogether. The subject, pale and blank with dark vines of decay filling in the cracked lines near its nose. Above this, one eye socket was empty. A rusty star splattered around it. It looked like an eclipse of a Brown Dwarf toward the end of its life. There was no other socket. That and the space that had once been guarded by a small plate of bone and skin was exposed. The brain was gone, and the lips were tugged back in a grin like a police tape.

On the morning of Church day, Celeste was arranging her purse as cleverly and compactly as possible. She assumed that they would all have to leave their phones outside the Church, given the odd ban on photography. But she needed to make sure she remembered everything that happened today. Ximena hadn’t remembered a single present given to any of the other kids. Or what their acts were. Or any other part of the ceremony. Ximena didn’t think that was odd. Who cares about a bunch of 3rd graders doing magic tricks? She’d said. I was there for my kid. But Ximena hadn’t seen the file.

Celeste managed to arrange her bag so that the lens of a small camera was peaking out of an ID window in the bag. Whatever she saw at the gathering, she wouldn’t let herself unsee it.

Celeste’s appetite for mysteries was twisted by a nauseating association with what she’d seen in the file. Instead, she’d spend her days out among the blue jays. At night, she’d lay in Annie’s old bed. In sheets that may or may not have been there when Annie was younger. May or may not remember the still weight of her, dispersed in elegant lines. May or may not remember the way she groaned slurred musings into her pillow as she woke up with a brilliant idea and scrambled out of bed over to her desk.

And now Celeste was there. Turning and winding her limbs around each other, trying to make her body more hospitable. Wrapping herself in Annie’s old hoodies. Desperately blocking out any semblance of curiosity, morbid or otherwise. Occasionally reaching out to touch her wife, not because she’d forgotten she wasn’t there, but because she’d forgotten how painful it was to reach for her while knowing she wasn’t there, simply to recapture what it felt like to reach for her in the night.

And then Celeste was up. She didn’t want mysteries anymore. All she wanted was Annie. More of her, in whatever form she still existed. She dove into the file, and swallowed back the rising fluid in her throat and she began to read. Annie had collected dozens of photos, each of a body with the same head wound, the same rotting paleness and choking smile that the first body had. And yet, the cause of death for each was a single stab wound. To the back, the side, the chest: one wound that pierced the body clean through. The brain thing, the cerebral extraction, or explosion, whatever it was: it happened after death. The murder weapon was never located, accept in one case. The knife had gone into the person’s back but had stopped there, blocked by the breastbone. They had bled out more slowly than the others. Annie had made a note of the significance of one of that victim’s items: a heavy-looking crucifix, silver, big but attached to a chain, clearly a necklace. Annie’s bombastic scribbling next to it simply said ‘GracePoint! Gift.’ with an arrow connecting the image of the crucifix to a white van, speeding away. The words on the side were clear enough to read: ‘Blood of Christ Church.’ It was flanked on two sides with an open and a beckoning hand.

Celeste had hoped that she might leave the house at the same moment as Ximena so they could walk together. But when she heard a toddler’s scream from the quiet street corner below her window and saw Ximena frantically pulling a child back onto the curb, she resolved to get through this alone.

On the street shaded by the comfortably sterile and industrially suburban looking building complex, Celeste finally achieved the serenity to notice her body.

Okay, she thought, my heart is loud but not too fast. Slow down, breath into your stomach.

Her knees shook slightly and she solved this by pounding her feet against the pavement with heavy, fast steps. She could control her body. She turned onto Main Street, a block away from GracePoint Church. She could see what happens at these gatherings, and maybe figure out what Blood of Christ Church is. She could reach for Annie and touch her, only for a second, if only to act as an extension of her foresight. To see her last case through to the end.

She stepped off the curb as a shrill voice called her name.

She looked back while in free fall and her foot twisted with her. She landed on the side of her foot and her whole body crashed into the street. A group of well-meaning pedestrians gathered around and Celeste looked up in time to see a foot crash down on the small camera that had flown out of her purse. The voice that had called her name was behind her now. Carol, followed by her daughter Anabel rushed to help her up.

“I’m so sorry Celeste, I didn’t mean to startle you! Come on, I know where the First Aid kit is in the Church office.”

“Oh no, I’m f-” As she slurred her words out, something wet dripped down the side of her face by her temple.

When she pulled her hand away from her head and saw the generous sample of blood there, she felt the immediate sickening feeling in her chest and throat. As Carol pulled her toward GracePoint, it struck Celeste that no one would ever protect her from that feeling ever again.