“I’m not going back to prison,” he said stubbornly.
“Where were you last night?”
“Here. My parents will kick me out if I leave the house after dark. Ask them. They’re terrified you’re going to blame Barker’s death on me, that the past’ll come back to bite us again.”
“I’m not here to blame anyone,” Hunter said. “I’m only interested in the truth.”
Mike pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up. “No one’s interested in the truth,” he countered. “Only their own version.”
Ice covered a shallow puddle at Hunter’s feet. He broke the surface of it with his foot as he spoke. “What’s your version?”
Mike took a long drag, letting the smoke curl slowly into the air. “You wouldn’t believe me, even if I told you. My own parents don’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
Squinting toward the large piles of manure, now covered with black plastic, that would fertilize his parents’ fields once spring arrived, Mike took another drag on his cigarette. “Barker wasn’t the saint everyone thought he was.”
Hunter kept his expression passive. “Because he turned you in for smoking pot?”
“No, because he was having an affair.”
“Who with?”
“I don’t know. But I heard them. In his office. And it wasn’t Irene. She was canning peaches for the poor that day at Velma Lowe’s. I know because my mom was there, too.”
“What’d you hear? Voices?”
“Moaning.”
Rose Lee and Katie had both “helped” Barker at the church. But they would’ve been dead at this point. Was it Grace Mike had heard? “How do you know he wasn’t groaning with…indigestion, for instance?”
Mike mimicked the panting and release that often accompanied sex, then scowled at him. “If you heard that behind my office door, would you think I had indigestion?” he said belligerently. “I knew what was going on, even back then.”
“Maybe he was alone, caught up in a particularly arousing daydream.”
“No.” He shook his head resolutely. “I heard a female voice, too, begging him to stop.” Mike flicked his ashes onto the frozen earth. “I think they were playing some kind of domination game.”
There wasn’t any more ice to break so Hunter crossed his legs in front of him and looked up. “Do you know who the woman was?”
“I already told you, no.” He left the cigarette dangling in his mouth so that it bobbed as he spoke. “I tried to go around to the window, to climb up that tree outside his office. I didn’t want to miss what was going on in there. My hormones were pumping just hearing it. And I knew it’d be the sweetest revenge I could find—to catch the reverend doing something even worse than I’d done.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Hunter saw a curtain move in one of the windows at the house. It was obviously Mrs. Metzger. She didn’t like that he was talking to Mike, but that wasn’t going to stop him. Especially now. “So that’s why you were at the church during the middle of the day? You were angling for revenge?”
“I was supposed to scrub down the bathroom as part of my penance for smoking pot, something suggested by my dear parents,” he added bitterly. “Barker wasn’t expecting me for another two hours. But I’d been invited to a friend’s house. He had a bag of weed—” he grinned, clearly unrepentant “—and I wanted to get the work done first. So I dropped by early. I saw the reverend’s car in the lot, but the church was locked up and I was afraid to knock in case he was praying. I didn’t need to piss him off any more, you know? He was a harsh old bastard.”
“So how’d you get in?”
“The window in the bathroom was broken and didn’t close all the way. I wrenched it open and crawled through. Then I went to see if I could find the reverend. If he was cleaning or writing a sermon or on the phone, I figured I’d tell him I knocked but he didn’t hear me. If he was praying, I’d slip back out.”
“But then you noticed the moaning.”
“Damn right.” He flicked his ashes again.
“Did you see anything when you climbed the tree?”
“Someone was on their hands and knees behind the desk. All I could see was a bare thigh. But he was naked and riding whoever it was.”
“You’re sure it was a woman?”
He considered Hunter for a moment. “I know a woman’s thigh when I see one.”
“Is that all you remember?” Hunter asked.
“What are you looking for?”
“Another vehicle in the area? An article of clothing that only one person in town ever wore? A driver’s license?” he added jokingly.
Mike didn’t laugh. He finished his cigarette and ground it out with his foot. “There was one more thing.”
Hunter felt his muscles tense at Mike’s somber tone. “What’s that?”
“The person on bottom was wearing a collar.”
Hunter felt the hair on his arms prickle. “How do you know?”
“Barker had hold of the chain, was jerking back on it.”
“What happened then?”
Mike paused, studied him for a moment. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I didn’t know the Reverend Barker.”
Mike felt for the pack of cigarettes in his front pocket and pulled out a second one. “He spotted me almost as soon as my head rose above the windowsill. Our eyes met and I fell out of that damn tree. Nearly broke my neck in the process, but I got up and ran like hell.”
“Did he catch you?”
“Didn’t need to.” He lit up again. “He knew it was me.”
“Did you tell anyone what you saw?”
“Hell, no.”
The wind ruffled Hunter’s hair, which flopped into his eyes. He shoved it out. “Why not?”
“They’d say I was making it up because he got me in trouble the week before. And I couldn’t identify the woman. Didn’t have any proof. I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could say he was an adulterer without pointing at someone who might agree. Folks around here would’ve hung me for less.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
His jaw clenched. “Yes.”
“And what did they say?”
Mike let the smoke from his cigarette come out his nose. “My dad gave me a beating the likes of which I’ve never received before or since.”