“Why did they target the grocery store?”
“They think it’s a terrorist front, a sleeper cell, part of the Islamic State. They aren’t big fans of any outsiders, especially brown ones,” Nick answered. “The Lenites think they’re the only true patriots and Christians, guarding the Constitution for god and from the government.”
It would have seemed like a joke, had Silva not seen it herself—Len and his armed men, handkerchiefs covering their faces and semiautomatic rifles and ammo bandoliers strung across their torsos, looking more like the Islamic State fighters they feared than a small-town cult.
The newspaper photographs showed them holding two signs that read: FBI—Another Intrusive Tyranical Goverment Entity Doing What The Feds Do Best, Abusing Power & Oppressing the Backbone of America. And, Tyr-an-ny: is cruel, unreasonable, arbitrary use of Power or Control. People who couldn’t spell-check their own self-benefitting propaganda, but who readily took up arms over it. A tiny Idaho backwoods town a guerrilla war zone.
Silva had heard of the northwest’s doomsday, antigovernment preppers—people preparing for the coming apocalypse however they envisioned it: computing systems crashing, dirty bombs, EMPs taking out the power grid, financial collapse, looting, raids, disease, pestilence, terrorism, the government taking away everyone’s guns, assault on religious freedom, etc. A mass of chaos. People who believed the only way to make it through the end was to move to the hills, build compounds, and take up arms against anyone who opposed their brand of survivalist, gun-toting religion. But she’d never expected to be face-to-face with it all.
“All downtown was just refaced to look ‘authentic,’ so Two Rivers would draw in more tourism money—people banking on rich Lewis-Clark Trail tourists flooding the town, even though Two Rivers isn’t on the actual trail route,” Nick said. “The bank had a Sacagawea mural painted on its side, pointing the way, they hope, right into their accounts. The real estate ads show nothing but burbling-brook mountain scenes, no matter the drought or the fact that to get power and water to the properties costs more than the land itself. This place has never been able to sustain more than bunch grass and thistle and the kind of fanaticism that worries even fundamentalists.”
“How far is Almost Paradise from your ranch?” Silva asked Nick suddenly, everything forming in her head as she spoke.
“Not far enough. I used to ride up and explore there as a kid. That’s why Dietz wants the ranch. With the overland routes so heavily monitored now, the river’s the only access without checkpoints. The upriver trail ends just past the visitor center.”
“There’s a wall?” she asked, looking to Eli for clarification, trying to calculate the physical difficulties of reaching the compound, ignoring the complete unknown of what she would do once she was there. Walk up and knock on the compound’s drawbridge gate, ask if Isabelle Fullbrook was in? She felt as if she were in some superhero movie: a woman on her own, planning her own takeover, rescuing a harem of lost women who happened to include her runaway hippie-artist grandmother. Women who, it seemed, had gone willingly to Len Dietz.
“Oh, there have been big plans,” Nick said, answering for Eli. “Blueprints for a walled-in city complete with a firearms museum, munitions factory, reflecting pool, amphitheater, and market—just as soon as more followers are willing to pony up the cash. But it’s just a run-down ranch like any other around here. Don’t even need fences except to keep their elk in. Got their own private Idaho dystopia, but that’s about it. What they really need is a wall to keep their own people captive, not to stop the nonexistent hordes of outsiders from invading.”
Silva tried to imagine Isabelle living in such a place, nobody but Eli aware of her disappearance. What if she’d wanted to leave but couldn’t, a prisoner to Len Dietz’s captivity? What if she were still there now, looking for a way out, waiting for escape? Silva thought of her dream the night before she’d left Trawler—a trio of woman dancing on a hilltop. Three versions of herself looking back at her. Past. Present. Future. A pool of shared genes. The division of cells reshaping the DNA that might redefine them all.
She turned to Nick. “You said they were looking for a temporary caretaker for your ranch—until you get it back?”
Nick lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “You know someone who might be interested?”
Seeming to anticipate the trajectory of her thoughts, Eli watched her face. He leaned over and put his hand on hers. “Are you sure?” he asked quietly, his real question clear.
She met his eyes. This was what it’d always been coming to. She’d thought she was making the journey for herself, for her own life, but she wasn’t the only one who needed saving.
“You want the job?” Nick glanced back and forth between Silva and Eli in confusion.
“I can do grounds work,” she said. “I have referrals you can check.”
Nick leaned back. “Mack would be thrilled to have someone handed up so easily.…”
As if Silva were a willing sacrifice. And perhaps she was. Perhaps that’s what it’d been about all along—surrendering herself to the will of a fate she had thought was intent on her destruction, when in fact it was leading her to this moment all along. Hadn’t she, too, in her weakest moments, wished for something bigger than herself to take charge, offer her shelter and protection from herself, from all her life had become? Someone to give her security—even if it was a promise she knew couldn’t be kept?
She and Nick settled the job details quickly, Nick all seriousness, delivering grave-toned warnings about the situation she would be facing in the canyon—the visitor center occupation going on only fifteen miles upriver from his ranch, everything a powder keg of tension. He said she was about to enter into enemy territory, nobody in the canyon for miles in every direction, no way to contact anyone except by radio, no easy access for help. Told her not to underestimate Len Dietz, what he was capable of doing. Said he, Nick, didn’t want her going in blind, without being prepared, but she already knew what she was up against. She’d already been face-to-face with Len Dietz and his followers, had seen firsthand what kind of danger they posed. She was just surprised that Nick didn’t question her reasons for wanting to go to the canyon in the first place—Almost Paradise within striking distance of his family’s homestead. Instead they made arrangements for her to come down to the Larkins Ranch in time to get things in order before the first outfitting group arrived.
Eli stood when they were done. “Come. It’s time we consulted with the bees,” he said, as if the bees could offer all the answers they sought. All Silva really wanted to do now was race down each mile to Isabelle, all her pain and sorrow redirected at this one thing, this one goal.
Eli took them outside to a clearing tucked between pines and an open shed stacked full of hay in an irregular crosshatch, a calico cat stretched out on a shelf of bales. “Thought the coyotes found you out,” Eli said as the cat rolled to her back, yawning long teeth, Eli ruffling her belly fur before she had a chance to kick.
In the clearing, Eli’s rainbow-colored hive boxes looked like oversize children’s play-blocks. Clouds had moved in, the air layered heavy, filled with the sonorous humming of thousands of bees—a disciplined and orderly rank of nectar crusaders going from one clover blossom to the next so fast Silva wondered how they were gathering anything at all. When she held out her hand, one crawled on her finger. Tiny and golden, it was the color of pollen and honey, its hair fuzzed like baby hair, its globe eyes black and inscrutable. She could feel the touch of its proboscis long after it had flown.
Eli walked over to a shed full of dusty tarps and stacks of empty hive boxes as Nick backed up his truck, the two of them talking about how Eli’s field colonies were a strong, hearty breed, well-acclimated to the harshness of the canyon.
Silva was glad to have a moment to think through all the implications—going down to live in the canyon, seeking out Len Dietz’s cult on purpose as if she were one of his converts, as if their shared experience in Build It Be
st had convinced her of the error of her ways. She felt like a chain smoker, lighting a fresh cigarette from the one still hanging off her lips. Tied to this thing until the end, no matter what happened, no matter where it took her. That was the deal she’d made with herself after all. Six weeks and counting.
Eli walked over to her as Nick started loading hive boxes. “You liked the honey, the soufflé?” he asked her, the question somehow too personal.
Heat rose up her neck even as she tried to will it away. “Yes. I liked them,” she said.
Eli fished around in his pocket and handed her a piece of paper. The soufflé recipe. “You carry the pheromones of a queen. The bees already see you as one of them, part of the colony.”
“Nick’s the one getting your bees, not me,” she said, fighting back a well of unbidden emotion, like a contrary child self-declaring she couldn’t have the very thing she’d been offered.
Standing in the back of his pickup, the bed already stacked with hives, Nick saw them look his way and smiled, held his arms out wide. “The future of the Larkins Ranch. There’s a sweet irony to it, don’t you think? The future all wrapped up in bees.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
You can feel it coming—a whisper in the air above you, a wind that takes hold of the trees and sends them shivering. You stop and lift your arms, close your eyes, and wait as it swirls around you, rushing by with its whispering voices, so many calling so fast from so far away that you can’t understand them whirling closer and closer, faster and faster, shivering down your back, pulling at your skirts, wrapping around you so tight you open your mouth to cry out and that’s when it enters you, rushing down your throat, pouring itself into you. It’s cold, a feeling like choking, but then it warms inside you, swelling and filling you until you tingle with a pressure that sends the words cascading out of your mouth like silver water spilling from a fountain into the air, lifting from your outstretched palms, from your mouth, from deep within your dark insides, and you call out, singing in voices of the lost, your words coming faster and faster as it flows through you in languages you can’t understand. You try to give it all it wants, try to hold on as it takes you, but then you feel it leaving you again, leaving you right when you feel it deeper than you’ve ever felt it before, right when you think it’s going to take you all the way with it as it has the others, leaving them collapsed and shaking on the floor, their eyes rolled back in their heads in ecstasy, their tongues spilling limp from the dark cavity of their mouths, their dresses pulled damp against their own flesh. You want to be filled as they have been filled, but it’s leaving you, rising in a great swirling mass like the river’s mist as you sank below the surface, the gray water overtaking each of you as he lowered you one by one, sinking farther and farther until you felt as if you were drowning, as if you would never breathe again, until finally he lifted you from the depths of your submersion and claimed you as his own. And as it leaves you, it takes your song with it, leaves your voice cracked and torn, your words falling back to you like white feathers drifting slowly back down from the sky into your empty, outstretched palms.
CHAPTER NINE
MARCH 2001
As Silva wandered from booth to booth at the Two Rivers farmers market—the fragrance of flower bouquets wrapping the air along with the smell of trodden grass and fried elephant ears—she could feel people staring. A dozen faces turned her way as she stopped at a table full of dream catchers, their feathers meant to hold the good, their webs meant to dissipate the bad. She wished it was as easy as hanging one like a charm, as easy as believing in its magical powers of protection, directing your dreams to safe places.
The first time Eamon had taken Silva to a big mainland farmers market as a child, she had been overwhelmed by the crowding smells of sawdust and fried food and hundreds of strangers. Lost in the sea of striped awnings and flapping tents, she’d felt as if she were in a circus and any minute a flap-eared elephant would come trumpeting by, but somewhere between the gourd bowls, driftwood birdhouses, and lavender oil, she’d fallen in love. After that, going to farmers markets had become part of their routine together, their monthly outing away from the island.
She fought the urge to run away and escape all the deliberate perusal. She had the feeling that if she let down her guard, everyone in Two Rivers would be all over her, pawing through her personal business like shoppers eager to find some treasure—look what I found!—seeming to intuit what juicy tidbits she might provide. She wondered if Isabelle had faced the same kind of close scrutiny, living with Eli, the two of them falling so far outside the area’s social norms.
Eamon had valued his privacy, had lectured Silva once about gossiping, told her that the US’s original 1790 one-cent coin had been engraved with the slogan “mind your business” before it was changed to “in god we trust.” Told her that minding your own business had been a good idea then and was a good idea now. But it seemed as if there was no such thing as minding your own business here, people openly discussing Silva as she walked by. She wondered if they, too, were connecting her to Isabelle, if they all knew where Isabelle had gone, what she’d willingly taken herself into.
Making her way down the tables, Silva saw a woman minding a booth full of colorful produce. She was dressed in a long-sleeved, high-collared dress that went to her ankles, her blond hair in a thick braid that hung to her hips. A marker of Len Dietz’s clan of women.
“May I serve you?” the woman asked, standing up as Silva approached her table. She had an accent from somewhere else, soft and lightly twanged, as if they were in Appalachia instead of the middle of the Idaho wilderness. Her hands clasped carefully in front of her, her oval face smooth and pale—high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, light blue eyes, shapely lips. A delicate beauty, unexpected in a place like this.
A small girl with apple cheeks and wispy blond hair peeked out from behind the woman’s skirts, her arms wrapped around the backs of the woman’s legs. She glanced shyly at Silva, then ducked her head and fingered the embroidered cuff of the woman’s sleeve.
“Momma, may I please have more pie?” she asked, her voice as light as summer wind.
The woman looked down and wiped the hair back from the child’s face. “We must not be greedy. We must think of others before ourselves.”
The child glanced at Silva suspiciously, as though she were one of the others to whom her mother was referring, and assessed Silva with round baby eyes, a worldly wise soul staring from a cherub’s face.
“Your produce is amazing,” Silva said, and it was—heads of cabbage like cannonballs, flowered dill bundles standing as tall as her, strawberries as big as her dozens of fresh eggs.
“The Lord blesses us,” the woman said, looking at Silva with meaning, something beyond the words, her hand fluttering to her side like a pale night moth. “Are you looking for something in particular?” she asked, her posture perfectly upright, the air suddenly pregnant with meaning, as if she’d been waiting all along for the single question with which Silva had come.
“I’ll take these,” Silva said. She stepped in closer, picking up a basket of bright strawberries, meeting the woman’s eyes, ready to voice Isabelle’s name out loud for a second time that day, but the woman glanced past Silva’s shoulder and then quickly looked away, bagging the berries and giving Silva back her change without any eye contact or another word.
When Silva turned, she saw what had silenced the woman—two bearded men dressed in camo with pistols on their hips, walking straight toward them.
Heart racing, Silva walked away quickly, keeping her head down, following the flattened path past the tables and away from the market, aware of each piece of gravel, each glob of flattened gum. On the sidewalk, she sidestepped a child’s dropped ice-cream cone, ants and bees swarming the coagulated, dirt-covered mass. She fought the urge to look back at the woman and her child—a woman with sad, penetrating eyes. Men dressed like soldiers from a war that had been lost a long time ago, although here
the war seemed to be ongoing.
* * *
Sitting on the apartment’s narrow bed, Silva pulled out Isabelle’s packet again. She wondered what Eamon had thought when he’d gotten it in the mail—all those years passing, and then Isabelle dropping right back into his life as though she’d never left.
Since leaving Eli’s, Silva had wished she’d asked him more questions when she’d had the chance. Asked him about the life he and Isabelle had lived together, however briefly. What kind of woman Isabelle had been, what kinds of things she’d done and who she’d known, living near Two Rivers, so close to the Lenites. But more than anything, Silva wanted to ask how Isabelle had been seduced into following Len Dietz into the dark, leaving the fullness of her life behind when it seemed as though she’d led an idyllic artist’s life with Eli, just as she had with Eamon.
Now, with new context, Silva saw the twelve pregnant girls not as some random, disturbing artist’s study but as critical clues to Isabelle’s leaving, abandoning not only Eli but Eamon and Silva, too. Why would Isabelle have painted them and sent them to Eamon? Was it a cry for help, an SOS? The only thing she had to speak for them, for herself?
Silva put the paintings back and got the Dodge’s keys. She didn’t know where she was going, but she couldn’t stay holed up in the apartment above Becky and her occupation customers, Len taking care of “all the mothers.” Becky voicing it as though Silva were one of them, too, as though Len had already laid claim to her and the fetus inside her.
Keeping her head down past Build It Best’s front windows, Silva climbed into the Dodge quickly and tweaked the starter a second too long in her haste to escape, the starter’s high whine preceding her quick slam into reverse. She winced, picturing shavings of metal sifting down into the gearbox and gear oil pocketing in pavement dust. Eamon wouldn’t have approved.
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