All the Blue-Eyed Angels Read Online Free PDF

the floor.
    “You think this is really how they left it?” I asked.
    Diggs looked over his shoulder at me. He had one foot up on the windowsill for leverage, trying to drag the swollen old pane up.
    “I don’t know. If anyone has been here in the past twenty years, they sure as hell were lacking in the housekeeping department.”
    “Malcolm Payson’s lawyer said he didn’t let anyone in,” I said. “Once the investigation was closed, he hired my father to watch the place. I doubt Dad ever came here after everybody was gone, though.”
    “What about after your father died? Who watched the place once Adam was gone?”
    He finally got the window up with a screech of wood against wood that made me jump.
    “Malcolm paid some of the local fishermen to keep an eye out—paid them well, too, from what I understand. Deadly force was not discouraged,” I said.
    “So, no keggers, make-out parties, or Ouija fests on the hallowed grounds?”
    I looked around. No beer bottles, cigarette butts, used condoms. Not so much as a stray Little Debbie wrapper.
    “Doesn’t look that way.”
    Diggs abandoned the window and came to stand beside me, surveying the room. “How long did you live here, again?”
    “Nine years.” It felt stranger than I’d expected being back, trying to reconcile everything I’d known with the reality of what it was now. “I would’ve been here a lot longer if my mother hadn’t come out and dragged me back to civilization.”
    “That’s one way of looking at it.”
    I looked up when I realized he was staring at me. “And what’s the other way of looking at it?”
    “That your mother got you out of here before the shit hit the fan. If she hadn’t, you and your father would have died along with everybody else.”
    I didn’t have a response for that. I thought back to those years on the island with my father—the best years of my childhood, in most ways. Diggs wouldn’t understand that, though. Hell, I didn’t understand that. Before he started psychoanalyzing my early years, I went off in another direction.
    “There are cabins here, too—half a dozen or so, I think, on the other side of the island. The families in the church stayed there. Isaac shared the top floor of this house with his wife and kids.” I went through the house in my mind, trying to remember the layout. “My father was the only man who lived here at the house, besides Isaac. The rest of the bedrooms were for the single women and their children.”
    Diggs nodded. I knew what he was thinking: Isaac had set it up so he’d have ready access to any of the women or children he wanted, on any given night. I didn’t say anything. I wondered what kind of salacious hell he thought I’d lived through out here, before my mother swooped in and took me to the mainland.
    While I went through the meeting room, Diggs excused himself to take a tour of the grounds. He said it was to get a look at the place, but I knew he was just giving me time to adjust to my haunted homestead. Either way, I appreciated the gesture. Without Diggs and Einstein on my heels, I continued exploring.
    Isaac and his wife had been responsible for the interior decorating, though they could have used some pointers from the good folks at HGTV. There was the standard, Western ideal of Christ with lamb in his arms, brown eyes soft and forgiving, and another of the same Christ, a halo just visible through flecks of mold and mildew. A two-foot-tall, moth-eaten satin cross embroidered in gold with the words “Jesus Saves” hung by the door. Then, there were Isaac’s personal touches: oil paintings done by the preacher himself, mounted in handmade frames throughout the house.
    The painting above the fireplace was five feet across and maybe three feet high. I could remember standing in this spot when I was a kid, mesmerized by the scene Isaac had created: an ethereal Christ on the cross, a Mona Lisa smile on his wasted face, while in the background a thousand warriors