Deadfall(14)

THE REVEREND RAYMOND P. DUNSTON

Church of the Holy Mission



THE MORAL CRUSADE



1243 Langford Street San Jose, CA. 95190



I put my eyes back on him and said, “Jesus Christ!”

“No,” he said, “merely one of His servants. You know who I am.”

I knew who he was, all right. Ray Dunston, Kerry’s whackoid ex-husband. What I had trouble believing was that he was standing here in my office, looking and talking the way he was. Five years ago, when Kerry had divorced him, he had been a woman-chasing, small-time criminal lawyer in Los Angeles. Two years ago he had taken a dive off the deep end: given up his practice and any number of normal activities, including sex, and joined one of those off-the-wall Southern California cults, where he had shaved his head and worn robes and spent his days chanting things like “Om mani padme hum.” Now here he was, wearing a three-piece suit again and with his hair grown back, calling himself the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston of the Church of the Holy Mission, involved in something called the Moral Crusade, quoting scripture and accusing me of being a fornicator. If that wasn’t enough to boggle a reasonably sane man’s mind I did not want to find out what was.

I said, “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“I’ve come to claim what is mine.”

“I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”

“Of course you do. My wife.”

“Your … you mean Kerry?”

“Kerry Anne Dunston.”

“For God’s sake, she divorced you five years ago!”

“For God’s sake,” he said piously, “she did not. Divorce is a pernicious invention of man. God does not recognize divorce.”

“He doesn’t, huh? Did He tell you that Himself?”

“Yes, He did.”

“He … what?”

“He told me so. We speak often, God and I.”

Oh boy. He had clear brown eyes that met mine steadily, all full of righteousness and calm reason, but behind them he was as mad as a hatter. I shifted uneasily in my chair and pushed back from the desk. I had figured him for a loony when Kerry first told me about the cult, and I had figured there might be trouble with him when she confessed that he’d been bothering her, trying to talk her into remarrying him and joining in a life of wholesome chanting in the commune. She had managed to keep him at a distance, and after a while he seemed to have given up and gone away for good: she hadn’t heard anything more from or about him in months. Or she said she hadn’t, anyway. What he’d been doing in the interim, obviously, was climbing another rung on the ladder of lunacy, and now he’d come in person to claim his soul mate. No commune this time, though. No sir. This time he expected her to live with him in San Jose, if not in the Church of the Holy Mission; to join him on the Moral Crusade, whatever that was; and to sit in on his fireside chats with God.

I stood up. He didn’t look violent, but with loonies you never know. God might have told him that if reason didn’t work, it was all right to murder fornicators.

“Have you talked to Kerry about this?” I asked him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Eberhardt was also on his feet. His mouth was still hanging open; he looked like a man trying to wake up from a confusing dream.

Dunston said, “No. She refuses to listen to the Voice of Truth. You’ve cast some sort of spell over her.”

“Spell?” I said. “What do you think I am, a witch?”

“Warlock,” he said.

“What?”

“She was never like this before you seduced her,” he said. “She always listened to me, obeyed me. But you enticed her, bewitched her, made her lie down in your bed.”

“I didn’t even know her when she divorced you!”

“ ‘How shall I pardon thee for this? Thy children have forsaken me, and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full, they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in the harlots’ houses. They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbor’s wife.’ Jeremiah, five: seven and eight.”

“Look, Dunston—”

“The Reverend Dunston. I am ordained.”

“Sure you are. Ordained.”

“But I do pardon thee, just as God will if you seek Him out. I forgive your sins and I forgive hers. I hold no animosity. I mean only to have her back.”

“She won’t go back to you.”

“She will. Yes, she will. God has decreed it.”

“He told you that too, did He?”

“Yes. That too.” Dunston turned abruptly and went to the door, opened it. At which point he looked at me again and said, “ ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.’ The Song of Solomon, eight: seven. Those whom God has joined together, no man can put asunder.” And he was gone.