Beth crossed her arms. “I won’t do it. I won’t sing today.”
Mom was already leaving.
“Mom!” Her anger melted into panic. “Please, don’t.”
The outside air was still chilly from the long desert night, the sunlight warm on her skin. Beth scanned the empty wastes surrounding the camp, expecting to see the flashing blue and red lights of patrol cars on the access road.
There was nothing but rocks and scrub and endless dust and the impossible stairway that snaked up the mountainside toward its bloody crown.
Where are you, Daddy?
The Family left their shacks to go to the Temple, gaunt and hungry, their cheeks sunken in their sunburned faces. They marched across crushed plastic and other garbage scattered in the dirt.
“Stop!” Beth raced to catch up to her mother. “Don’t!”
Mrs. Blanchard scowled at her. “Disgraceful.”
She froze, wilting under their stares. “Me?”
“She needs you now. You should be supporting her.”
“If you can’t,” Mrs. Chapman said, “stay out of her path.”
The Family had gone too far to think anything else might be true, right, or even possible. The only way to make the pain stop was to go all the way.
Even now, Beth felt pressure to go and sing her heart out while her mother mutilated her body. The Reverend said in order for her to atone, she had to bear witness, and without atonement, she’d be left behind to be destroyed in the great fire.
This was how the Family punished; they locked you out of Heaven.
Mrs. Young glared as she passed, her disfigured face making Beth shudder. David and Angela walked at her sides, holding her arms to support her. Her children didn’t wear the robes today, as their parent had atoned.
“Meet us at the rock.”
“What?”
Angela had appeared at her side, gripping her arm. “I said to meet us at the rock after it’s over.”
Beth broke down crying. “I have to take care of her.”
“Get her settled, then come find us. Just an hour.”
Wailing, she trailed after the Family members seeking purification, around twenty in all, dressed in their white robes. They filed inside the Temple.
Beth stayed outside, still crying. The doors thudded shut.
The singing started, muffled and discordant.
Mom needs me, she thought.
She didn’t want to be cast out.
Nonetheless, Beth didn’t move. She was stubborn. But more than that, she couldn’t bear to watch. She didn’t think she could handle it.
Someone roared with pain inside, echoed by the Family’s collective gasp and a smattering of applause.
The doors slammed open.
She flinched as Shepherd Wright staggered out, shaken and pale, cradling his left arm, which ended in a stump at the wrist, now wrapped in bloody bandages. He’d left his hand to burn on the altar. Freddie Shaw helped him stumble off in the direction of his shack as the doors swung shut again.
“Pray for him, Beth,” Freddie said.
“I will.”
Paralyzed, she wondered what the elder had done to deserve this. Had he been violent his whole life, or had he pushed someone important away? So far, the Temple confessions had all been summarized in a single word, one of the seven deadly sins. Only the grown-ups knew the full story from the group confessions.
Her mom knew, but for once, she wasn’t telling.
Beth backed up again with a whimper. Shrieks of shock and pain emanated from the Temple, as if the building itself was screaming.
“Mom?” she whispered.
Then they stopped.
She gasped as the doors banged open again. Three men lurched into the sunlight, carrying an unconscious Mr. Preston, his pants bunched around his ankles, a bloodstain spreading around the crotch of his robe.
Beth turned away. She didn’t want to see any more. She swayed on her feet as the heat and terror overwhelmed her. Exhausted, she sank to her knees.
The congregation let up a muffled cry inside the Temple. Something big was happening. Then silence. Soon, the doors would open again, and another victim would stumble out trailing blood.
Beth hunched forward to dry heave into the dust.
The doors thundered wide. Her mother stood in the entrance, her face and the front of her robe covered in blood.
Beth gaped at her. “What did you do?”
Mom offered a weak, wincing smile that broadcast agony and relief. Blood stained her chin. Then she opened her mouth, and it poured out in a flood.
She’d cut out her tongue and fed it to the flames.
Beth screamed for her.
From Red Peak’s summit came the distant echo of hammering. Today, it was an ominous sound, as if the men and women along the ridge were building coffins. Beth hurried along the rocky slope toward her friends, the only thing she still believed was real in this unending bad dream.
She found them in the shade of the petroglyphs. At the sight of her, they jumped to their feet clamoring about her mother.
“Mom’s okay,” Beth told them. “But I can’t stay long.”
Deacon hugged her. “Welcome to the club.”
“Yeah.” Too drained to think of anything else to say.
Aside from mealtimes, the kids rarely spent time together as they nursed their parents, who’d all made the burnt offering. Beth wondered if their true atonement wasn’t bearing witness to their parents’ sin but being forced to take care of them.
Angela resumed her seat on her favorite rock. “Now that Beth’s here, I can tell you.” She glanced at Josh next to her. “We both want to tell you.”
“She’s speaking for me too,” Josh said. “Go ahead, Angel.”
“This whole thing is wrong. You know it is. And the worst is yet to come. We should talk about getting out of here.”
Beth squeezed her head in her hands. She was saying the same things as Daddy. If they were right, Mom cut out her tongue for nothing. They’d all suffered for nothing. Everything the Reverend said was a lie. Her entire childhood.
“We don’t know it’s wrong,” Emily said. “God talks to the Reverend.”
Angela flung a stone down the slope. “Does whatever that thing is on the mountain sound like the God we’ve been worshipping all these years? This Spirit?”
“Emily’s right, though,” David said. “How do we know?”
Beth wondered herself. God could be pretty mean in the Old Testament.
Angela narrowed her eyes at her brother. “We know because Mom cut up her face, Dave.”
“Don’t—”
“Because we’re barely surviving on what they give us to eat. Because we have to walk two miles through hell just to get water. Because for a month and a half, everybody we know has been working themselves to death building a staircase going up a stupid mountain. Because there is nothing here.”
Wyatt guffawed. “It’s about time somebody started talking sense.”
“So my mom sacrificed her fingers for nothing,” Deacon fumed. “That’s what you’re saying. My mom’s a nutjob.”
“What I’m saying,” Angela grated, “is if God doesn’t swoop down and take us all away, we might end up on the altar next.”
“Mom wouldn’t do that,” David said.
“How do you know what she’d do if she thinks God told her to do it?”
“So what, then?” Deacon wondered. “We just leave? Where can we go?”
“Anywhere but here.”
Beth opened her mouth to tell them Daddy had gone to Medford to get help and would be back soon, but hesitated, unable to trust her friends to keep the secret. Another betrayal.
“I don’t like this either,” Emily said. “But that’s the whole idea, right? We’re being tested. It’s supposed to hurt. We’re supposed to suffer with joy…” Her voice trailed off, as if even she didn’t believe it anymore.
“You’re just repeating what you’ve been tol
d,” Angela said.
Emily blanched, fighting tears. “I don’t know anything else.”
“I can’t leave my mom,” Deacon said. “I won’t.”
Aside from Josh and Wyatt, Angela had no takers.
“Okay,” she snarled. “Then we’ll climb the mountain.”
Deacon and David exchanged a terrified glance.
“If God talks to us, we’ll do whatever he says, no matter what it is. If he doesn’t, we leave right then and there.”
Nobody said anything this time. Again, she had no takers.
“Fine,” Angela said. “We’re going all the way. If things get really bad, I’ll go to the bottom of the staircase and wait there for you for one hour. After that, I’m gone.”
Josh rubbed her back. “I’ll be there. I’m with you, Angel.”
“I’ll be there too,” said Wyatt. “With bells on. I don’t think it’s God up on that rock. I think it’s something else.” He glared at them. “If any of you tell on me, I’ll punch your lights out.”
Emily stared at him. “The Devil?”
“Forget it.”
Deacon blew out a sigh and stood. “Fine. I have to get back to Mom.”
“Me too,” Beth said.
The kids rose to their feet for the long walk back to the camp. Weak with hunger, Deacon stumbled and gripped his stomach with a wince. Beth wanted to reach out and hold him. They were running out of time. Some things had to be said, now or never. Angela and Josh walked ahead of them, holding hands. Beth envied them, how they loved each other and made it look all so easy.
She said nothing. Now was the best time to tell him how she felt, but it was also the worst time to risk ruining what she had. Instead, she took his hand. Deacon started in surprise then grinned straight ahead. Energy flowed along the circuit they’d made, surging until it filled her heart and then burst into the air as something bigger than herself. It wasn’t romantic, not now, but it was love.
“If things get bad, will you leave with Angela?” he asked her.
“I hope it won’t come to that.” She still held out hope Daddy would come back to put an end to all this, and she wouldn’t have to decide.
Deacon pointed. “Somebody parked a truck outside your house.”
Beth smiled. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
She ran toward her cabin, the horrors of her life forgotten. Her father was back, and everything was going to be okay.
She swept aside the blanket covering the door to her home. “Daddy?”
Daddy groaned on his bed, his clothes soaked through with sweat. Her pale mother slept next to him. She’d spit out her gauze and dyed her pillow with a massive dark red bloodstain.
Beth took a step toward him and froze at the sight of his right foot, which was bare, swollen, and bloody.
Someone had driven a large black nail into his body between the shinbone and the top of his foot. The nail was still there.
18
DREAM
Dr. James Chambliss was waiting outside her building when she pulled up.
Beth leaned across to open the passenger door. “Get in.”
He climbed in and shook water from his raincoat. “I don’t see why this couldn’t wait. It’s one o’clock in the goddamn morning and raining like hell.”
She’d called him on the way back from West Hollywood, still fresh from the swirling, fragmented vision she’d experienced after hearing Deacon’s song and the blasting horn at its end.
Beth drove them into the underground parking garage and pulled into her stall, where she cut the engine. “I almost remembered it all on my own tonight. It’s now or never.”
“Repressed memories never go away,” he said.
“They can be harder to retrieve, though. It’s been a long time.”
No hard scientific evidence even supported they existed at all. If an event overwhelmed coping mechanisms, it imprinted trauma on the brain. If the trauma was too overwhelming, the brain might blank it out, though it was still there somewhere. That was the theory.
Freud was never proven wrong about dissociative amnesia, but he was never definitively proven right either.
“Only for you,” he growled.
“Because you love me.”
He turned to scrutinize her through his round spectacles. “Because I’ve treated war refugees, and I’ve never found a patient as interesting as you.”
Beth very much doubted that. “What makes me so interesting?”
“Do you realize what you’ve got locked in your head somewhere?”
“A knot that can unravel my life,” she answered, remembering his catchphrase from his lectures back at Pomona.
“No.” He smiled. “The answer to the Medford Mystery.”
She shook her head as she got out of the car. So that explained his continued persistence over the years in trying to convince her to resume treatment. Why he’d dutifully shown up at her doorstep drenched at one o’clock in the morning at her request. He didn’t care about her. He’d never gotten over his fascination with the Family of the Living Spirit. Dr. James Chambliss wanted to be the man who cracked the bizarre mystery.
And in so doing, gain fame and professional standing.
Book deal, talk shows, cable news consulting gigs, the works.
Beth had always regarded his interest in her as touching but mildly alarming in its intensity. She was relieved to understand it at last, even if the explanation was a bit disappointing.
In the end, it didn’t matter. He could have his talk shows.
They rode her elevator up to her floor and entered her condo, where he shucked his dripping trench coat to reveal a professorial cardigan sweater buttoned over a pajama shirt. He seemed to take mental notes, scrutinizing her pristine home. Then he focused on the mess she’d made at the coffee table.
“Interesting,” he said.
“I’ll clean it up.” Beth hurried to the kitchen for more paper towels. She couldn’t stand the sight of it.
“Don’t bother on my account. I don’t have all night.”
“Then you can help. I won’t be able to relax with it there.”
Together, they swept the popcorn back in its bowl. This done, she considered soaking the red wine stains on the white area rug with club soda, but found them too unsettling. James moved the coffee table so Beth could roll up the carpet, then made himself comfortable on the couch.
“You know,” he said as she disappeared back into the kitchen. “Recalling repressed memories may benefit your mental state, but it may not completely heal you. You’ll need cognitive therapy so you can handle your triggers.”
Beth poured two glasses of wine and brought them into the living room. “I’ve already done a lot of work in that direction.”
James accepted his and set it untasted on the coffee table. “Beth, I tell you this as a friend and colleague. Everything is a trigger for you. Anything you can’t control. Unpredictability is like a burning match for your kindling. Like that party at the conference. It forces you to live in a box.”
She sat on the couch next to him and sipped her Cabernet. “I thought you only wanted to solve the mystery and find out where the bodies are buried.”
“The primary purpose here is treatment.” She’d offended him.
“What if nothing is there? They killed themselves, and that’s it?”
“Then we still learned something.”
Beth stared at him. “You won’t try to plant anything.”
He sighed. “If you didn’t trust me, you wouldn’t have asked me to help you.”
“Fair enough.”
With Deacon out of the picture, she wasn’t sure she’d ever make it back to Red Peak in the flesh. This might be her last chance. She gulped her wine and set it down.
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“We’re in a dim room—”
“No pocket watch this time?”
James sighed. “You’re still impossible, you know that?”
She settled
into the couch, suppressing a shiver. “I know.”
“We’re in a dim room that is safe, warm, relaxing.”
The room bled away as he droned on until only James remained, and then he too disintegrated to become words floating in the air.
“It’s the summer of 2005, and you’re fourteen years old.”
The bell called the faithful to the evening meal. Beth told her parents she would bring food back for them, but Mom pushed herself upright.
“You need to rest,” Beth said.
Her mother answered with a wag of her head that triggered a feverish wince.
Mom had once filled the house with her talking. Beth often prayed she’d shut up for once. For just one night, she’d hoped, she wouldn’t have to hear everyone’s personal business and her mom’s authoritative opinion about it.
This silence was far worse.
At twilight, the Family had shambled down the stairway, exhausted and starving but jubilant. The stairway was complete. They’d finished the test the Spirit had given them just as they’d passed the test of the purifications. Still God’s chosen, earning their way.
Only one test remained. Tonight, the Reverend promised, he’d reveal it.
“I’ll bring you supper, Daddy.”
“No,” he said. “Not tonight. I’d better go too.”
Whoever had hurt him weeks earlier had left crutches propped against the wall. Beth helped him sit up and positioned the crutches in front of him so he could grab hold.
The nail was still there.
She’d offered to pull it out, but her father had told her they’d promised to put it right back. Because they loved him, he’d said. They wanted him to be saved.
He gained his feet with the heartbreaking wail of a dying animal.
Mom edged toward the door with a determined smile, tottering from starvation. She’d put on her white robe again, its front still mottled by bloodstains.
“Let me help you,” Beth said in a firm voice.
She nestled against her mother, who placed her hand on her daughter’s shoulder for support.
Thank you, she imagined Mom saying. You’re a good Christian girl, Beth, even if you do always keep one little part of you for yourself and away from the Lord.
The Children of Red Peak Page 23