“They look normal enough, don’t they,” Kerry said as I drove by hunting a place to park.
“You can’t tell a fanatic by his appearance.”
“They’re not all fanatics,” she said, and sneezed. She was getting a cold and she’d been snuffling and sneezing all morning. “A lot of them are disillusioned or have emotional problems.”
“Yeah,” I said. And a lot of them, I thought, will drop out later on even more disillusioned and with even greater emotional problems. There had been an article in the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle not too long ago—the Sunday paper is usually the only one I read —that dealt with dropouts from fundamentalist and ultrafundamentalist religious groups. Things were so bad with these people after experiencing a cultist dependency on leaders like Daybreak, authoritarian types who practice a kind of religious mind-control, that an outfit called Fundamentalists Anonymous had been formed to help them deal with the real world again. Maybe the Church of the Holy Mission wasn’t quite one of the wild-eyed ultrafundamentalist sects, but like the Southern Baptist Convention and other mainline fundamentalist churches, which Daybreak seemed to be patterning it after, it would bring more harm than good to some of its followers.
A car was pulling out of a space in the next block. I waited patiently while the driver, an elderly lady wearing a hat that looked like the rear end of a rooster, maneuvered her way clear; then I wedged us into the space. We passed several members of the flock as we walked back to the church. None of them was smiling; they all had a solemn mien. Services at the Holy Mission were serious business, no doubt. There aren’t many chuckles in fire-and-brimstone religion.
We went along a path toward the wing. Kerry said sotto voce, “What do we do if we run into Ray?”
“Ignore him. It’s Daybreak we want, not nightfall.”
She didn’t think that was very amusing; neither did I, for that matter. There was something about the place, now that we were on the grounds and breathing its sanctified atmosphere, that made me feel solemn and cheerless.
A middle-aged guy in a dark-blue suit and tie was standing at the entrance to the wing. Beyond him, through an open set of doors, I could see a plain raised altar, a podium with a microphone on it, and a section off to one side that contained an organ and some chairs for the choir. The rest of the space was taken up with rows of unpainted wooden pews. There were a few people in there, none up around the altar; Dunston, happily, wasn’t among them.
We stopped alongside the middle-aged guy and I said, feeling a little foolish, “We’re looking for the Right Reverend Daybreak. Can you tell us where he is?”
“Of course, brother. He is in the Sanctuary.”
“The which?”
“The Sanctuary.” He gestured at the boxy-shaped outbuilding. “For his hour of meditation. Perhaps I can help you? I am Reverend Holloway.”
“Thanks just the same, but we need to talk to the Right Reverend. It’s very important.”
“In what way, brother?”
“It has to do with money,” I said. “My wife and I are thinking of making a substantial donation to the Moral Crusade.”
That perked him right up. He said, “Come with me, please. If the Right Reverend has not yet begun meditating I’m sure he’ll be pleased to give you an audience.”
Audience, yet. As if he were right up there with the Pope.
We went with Holloway to the Sanctuary, and he took my name and disappeared with it inside. When we were alone Kerry said, “Why did you lie to him?”
“Quickest way to get results. If I’d told him the truth, do you think we’d be getting a fast audience? We’d be getting a fast runaround instead.”
“You’re not going to lie to Daybreak, are you?”
“No. We’ll be paragons of indignant virtue. Just let me do the talking.”
The Reverend Holloway was back in less than two minutes. He smiled at us gravely and said, “The Right Reverend Daybreak will see you,” as if he were announcing a miracle at Lourdes. “This way, please.”
We followed him inside. Some sanctuary; it looked like a glorified office building—no doubt this was where the take from the church’s various nontaxable enterprises was counted, blessed, and secreted. Through an open door I had a glimpse of one large, mostly bare room that may or may not have been used for meditation; three other doors along the central hallway were closed. We stopped before the last of these. Painted on the panel in dark-blue letters were the words: THE RIGHT REVEREND CLYDE T. DAYBREAK. And below that, in somewhat larger letters: THE MORAL CRUSADE. A hand-lettered sign thumbtacked above the knob told you to Please Knock Before Entering.