Under the Beetle's Cellar Read Online Free Page A

“Oh, Richard, I don’t even want to think about it.”
    “But you have been thinking about it, haven’t you?” He glanced up at her. “You are following the coverage.”
    “To avoid it you’d have to leave the planet.”
    “I want to understand this,” he said. “Your reluctance here—is it because of your past unpleasantness with Samuel Mordecai?”
    “Unpleasantness!” Just like Richard to call the most unsettling event of her journalistic career an “unpleasantness.” “Let me remind you that when my cult story came out, Mordecai called and said if I didn’t arrange network television time for him to respond, he would mark my soul with a bar code identifying me as one to be made into a blood statue, whatever the hell that is. For months I got preachy, barely literate letters from some of his followers who were trying to set me right. And I think he’s the one who put me on the mailing list for all those right-wing religious tracts, which I am still receiving.” She stopped because she was out of breath.
    Richard Dutton sat up straighter in his chair. “I hear you, Molly, and I can see how strongly you feel. But you should be able to see my point of view here, too. We’ve got this huge story going on right in our own backyard, a story that has dominated national headlines for six weeks. The clock is ticking down on it. And we’re sitting here with an unfair advantage that we aren’t using. Surely you can see that.”
    She shook her head. “We don’t have an unfair advantage. If anything, it’s more like a handicap.”
    He clucked his tongue. “You know better than that. You appear to be the only journalist in the country who’s met and interviewed Samuel Mordecai. The only one. You have a relationship with him—”
    “Richard,” she interrupted, “Mordecai’s not someone you have a relationship with. Unless you’re willing to sit for five hours at a stretch and listen to his harangues.”
    “But you did talk to him—for several hours and—”
    “Several hours that were the worst of my life. And I include, for comparative purposes, the time the anesthetic wore off while I was having knee surgery and the time I went to divorce court.”
    Dutton laughed. “Okay. But you’ve already done the painful part here. You did the interview; you might as well get something out of it. And, Molly, the fact that you hated him from the start, that you saw through him, gives you—”
    “Richard!” Molly had been trying to treat it lightly, but now she lost all pretense at humor. “Richard, you don’t get it. I did see through him. I knew he was fanatical, and dangerous. I even suspected crimes were going on out there. When I left, I felt …  contaminated. And what did I do? I went to the sheriff, that bumbling old Bradford County sheriff, andtold him I thought Samuel Mordecai and the Hearth Jezreelites were evil and might be breaking some laws. I told him I’d felt threatened.
    “He asked how they’d threatened me, and I said Mordecai had lectured and bullied me. The sheriff said it sounded like what Reverend Willard did to him every Sunday at First Baptist. Not pleasant, but not exactly against the law.
    “He patted me on the head and said, ‘Now go on home, little lady, and leave this to me. I’ll check those folks out for you, sure enough, yes, ma’am.’ So I went home, good little lady that I am, and proceeded to write the story, because I had a deadline and, of course, that’s the main thing—meeting deadline, right?”
    “That’s what we do, Molly. There’s no dishonor there. As for your other actions, they were blameless. You did what any good citizen would: You told the appropriate law-enforcement officials about your suspicions, right? What more can you expect of yourself?”
    Molly groaned. The subject of Samuel Mordecai had been a sore one from the moment she met him two years earlier, and in the weeks since the school bus hijacking, it had become so agonizing that she