That didn’t seem so terrible.
We’re not here to put on a show or provide entertainment. We gather together to worship the living God who wants to speak to us, and who wants to be glorified through us. If you’ve never experienced the grace of God, or if it’s been a long time since you have, then Keystone is the place for you. If you feel unworthy, unwanted, or unloved, like you don’t belong anywhere, know that you do belong here. Come join us. We’ve been waiting for you.
Okay, the last part did sound a little creepy.
I opened a new tab and searched for Keystone Christian Fellowship, then clicked on the Images tab. Modern life had rendered all of our attention spans so short that this was a reasonable shortcut that I employed in moments of annoyance.
Scanning the top row of results, I saw images of gatherings that appeared to take place inside a theater of some kind. Sunday services? I kept looking until I found an image that looked out of place—an old guy holding a picture frame. The headline snippet said, FATHER STILL WANTS ANSWERS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER UT TRAGEDY.
Curiosity piqued, I clicked and skimmed the article text.
… Toledo residents of a certain age remember where they were when they heard about the Antama Society drowning …
“Fuck,” I said, and read on.
… of Angela Wade, who died under suspicious circumstances during a party at the Antama Society’s “ministry house.”
Farther down on the page, I found the photo of the old man, captioned with: Roger Allen Wade now runs a website dedicated to eradicating all traces of the Antama Society in our community.
I wasn’t seeing how this fit together at all until I read to the bottom of the page:
The Antama Society has changed names and faces in the twenty-five years since, morphing from an insular group to a widespread Bible study called Keystone Christian Fellowship to a fundamentalist megachurch under the guidance of Pastor Joel Creedle.
Creedle was quoted in the article, saying, People who don’t understand what it means to believe in something will always find fault with us. They are sinners. I would never judge a sinner who knows that he has sinned. I myself led a life of sin but I turned from it when I came to know Jesus. That’s all I want for the sinners of our community. The sinners who self-medicate their soul pain with drugs, drinking, promiscuous sex, tattoos, abortions, immodest attire, homosexuality, pornography—I only want repentance for them, repentance in order to be resurrected to eternal life. Otherwise, they will receive eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire.
I had to stand up and walk away from the computer for a second, wigged out by the lake-of-fire business. So maybe Danette was right and this was on the culty side. I googled the name of the old man, Roger Allen Wade, hoping to find his website.
Easy enough.
It was called Keystone Kult.
Things didn’t get any clearer than that.
CHAPTER 21
Roger Allen Wade lived in a brick ranch in the town of Curtice, some fifteen miles to the east of Toledo proper. For whatever reason I expected a Doc Brown type in a shambling farmhouse with no-trespassing signs mounted on the edges of the property, but instead the home was orderly and inviting, and Roger himself was a big, soft-spoken man with a thick silver beard and a shirt that said CAT DADDY in a purple typeface that could only be described as zany.
“Hope you aren’t allergic,” he said, moving a fluffy white cat off an armchair. “I have three, but you probably won’t see but two.”
“Not allergic, but they never seem to like me.” As if on cue, the white cat batted my boot and ran away. “Thanks so much for seeing me on short notice.” After staying up most of the night reading posts on his Keystone Kult website, I had messaged him in the wee hours and asked if he would meet up with me, something he was more than willing to do.
Roger puttered in the kitchen behind me. “My pleasure. Scientia potentia est.”
I mentally groped for some high school Latin. “Knowledge is power?”
“If only everyone felt the same. Do you take sugar in your tea?”
“No thanks.”
“Is that preference, or discipline?”
“Preference.”
“I personally prefer coffee, namely, a nice bold Ethiopian variety, but I can’t have caffeine anymore. My heart. I’m disciplined enough to follow that particular suggestion of my doctor, but he can pry the sugar from my cold, dead fingers, as the saying goes.”
“It’s good to take a stand,” I said, and Roger chuckled.
He shuffled out of the kitchen with a tray balanced with two mugs and a packet of shortbread cookies.
“Such hospitality.”
Roger set the tray on the coffee table between us and slowly lowered himself into his recliner. “Don’t get too many visitors, to be honest. These cookies might be rock-hard.”
I took a mug and sipped. “Tell me about Keystone.”
“I hope this isn’t an elaborate ruse. To get me back into court. They’ve sued me, because of the website. Three times.”
“I promise, no ruses here.”
He studied me over the frames of his reading glasses. “I suppose this would be entrapment if it was.” Then he nodded, like his mind was officially made up about me. “Stop me if you know any of this already. Keystone started at UT in 1989. It wasn’t a church at all at first, but a newsletter that a couple of grad students put out. Roommates. It was called Antama, which is Greek for togetherness or some such thing. The goal was to introduce students to Jesus Christ. Not inherently a bad goal. Are you a believer?”
“I was raised Catholic. Now, I tend not to think about it much.”
Roger nodded. “Fair enough. The Antama newsletter turned into a campus group that had monthly meetings, then weekly. Then people who came to the meeting started moving into the house. Then the house was full so they started another house. By 1993, they had three of them. That’s when my daughter Angela fell in with them.”
He was getting into his element now. “She had always been a bit troubled. We didn’t have the language for it then, though. Now we might say depression, bipolar disorder. And at first, her involvement with the group seemed like a good thing. Her grades improved. She started dressing like a normal young lady.” Roger got to his feet and disappeared into the kitchen again. “Here’s Angela pre- and post-Antama.”
He handed me a pair of photos. In one, his daughter sported jet-black hair and a ratty leather jacket; in the other, she was blond and clad in a floral sundress, smiling vacantly. If a person’s wardrobe were proof of anything, the transformation was complete.
Roger said, “Those pictures are a year apart.”
“Wow.”
“The point is, the group sparked a radical change in her. But what could have been a good thing turned into something else. She stopped coming home as much. She stopped calling. We went to her house and were told she didn’t want to see us. Then eventually, that she’d moved. We never saw her again after that. There isn’t some big, dramatic moment where she renounced us and everything we stood for. We just had less and less of her, until she was gone.” He held out a hand for the photos. “Our poor girl drowned at a gathering at the house.”
“What kind of gathering? A … ritual?”
“They’re not Satanists, if that’s what you’re asking. She drowned in some kind of baptismal rededication. A thing like that—it does something horrible to you. I thought we had all the time in the world. That she would eventually come back to us. If I had known she wouldn’t, I would have tried so much harder to get her back.”
I nodded along at his words. I’d felt the same thing with my father, and still did—the sense that time had run out, stamping its finality on our relationship. I’d forever be the girl who had a shitty relationship with her dad. His last words to me would always be, Be nice but not too fucking nice. There wouldn’t be a resolution. It just was what it was, forever.
“So anyway,” Roger continued, “I made it my missi
on to keep tabs on them, in all their incarnations. An obsession, if you’d asked my wife while she was alive. For all the good it’s done—they have something like two thousand members now.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded. “Something about his approach resonates with people, this ultramodern ‘nondenominational’ open-arms nonsense that’s actually quite fundamentalist. Fire and brimstone. But people, young people, especially, get taken in by the glossy packaging. The hip logo, the fun gatherings.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“When I created the website, survivors came out of the woodwork to tell me about how they escaped. Some tried for years before they finally managed. It’s like the frog and the pot of water. You put a frog into a pot of boiling water and he’ll jump right out. But you put a frog into a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, he’ll just sit there and let you cook him.”
“You’re saying Keystone turns up the heat gradually.”
“Yes, until suddenly you have nothing and no one, and even if you did come to your senses and decide to leave, you wouldn’t even know how.”
“Bleak.”
“It is, really. And the public doesn’t get it. They know, oh, yes, the quirky little flower shop is owned by the Keystones. Oh, yes, the free legal clinic at the library on the first of the month is run by the Keystones. They’re very visible, but on the surface, you can’t see the manipulative tactics. You don’t see that they only use church-owned cell phones and email addresses. That everything they do and say online is monitored. There’s a software they use—UnityView. It allows members of home churches to see what other members look at on the internet. This is to discourage the use of pornography.”
I shook my head. “But, why?”
“It’s sinful. I’ve heard from survivors that if anyone slips up, forgets, or even accidentally clicks on a link somewhere, the home church group will publicly shame them, break them down even more. Like any cult, they’re good at what they do.”
I took a shortbread cookie and nibbled. A touch stale, but I’d had worse. “When you say cult, I think of David Koresh. Or Jonestown. This sounds deeply screwed up but not like Jonestown.”
“No, you’re right about that. It’s more subtle. It’s almost like how you walk into a store that sells candles. It smells great, it’s got dreamy music. Then you see the woman working there is a hippie-witch-whatever. You yourself may be a hippie-witch, or maybe not. Either way, she’s doing her thing and that’s just fine with you. That’s the stance the public takes with the Keystones. Kooky but harmless. Not even that kooky, not when you look at their core beliefs—not any kookier than any other evangelical Christian religion. But they’re incredibly manipulative, systematically isolating members from their friends and families until they have no one except the others.”
“Is Joel Creedle the Jim Jones figure here?”
“Oh, he’s something, all right. They don’t worship him, per se. He’s the senior pastor but the Keystone Fellowship is a home church network. Their focus is on small groups. Something to do with the New Testament’s description of early churches in the book of Acts.”
“So no big, once-a-week sermon?”
“They do have a congregation-wide weekly gathering, yes. They’re in the process of building this megachurch compound up north—while it’s under construction, they have their meetings at a movie theater, if you can imagine.”
I remembered the odd photos I’d seen. “Interesting environment for Bible study.”
“Most of the actual Bible study takes place in what they call home churches, which are large groups that meet in members’ homes on a weekly basis.”
“I think I read about that. The people living together in fellowship?”
“No, that’s something else. The ministry homes. People who don’t have families are encouraged to live together, six or eight people in one house. The home churches are more like what you’d imagine a regular church service to be, with readings and homilies, but in groups of twenty to fifty people.”
I sipped my tea. “So they get together twice a week.”
“Oh no, that’s just the beginning. They also have lifegroups, of fifteen people or so, and these meet on yet another day. There are women’s groups, parents’ groups, singles’ groups. Their members are busy every night of the week with something church-related.”
“Busy with what, though?”
Here his determination seemed to falter a little. “They do some good work in the community. I won’t pretend that they don’t. The legal clinic I mentioned—I’m sure that has helped a lot of people. They were running a CSA for a while and donating tons of fresh fruits and veggies to the food bank. But the good that they do is far outweighed by the harm.”
“Have you ever heard about them being involved in antiabortion protests? You know, the big, graphic signs?”
“The Keystones? No, I wouldn’t think so. Their beliefs are conservative and certainly antiabortion, anti-contraception, but protesting wouldn’t be their approach. They aren’t confrontational. I could see them opening up one of those pregnancy crisis centers, but not protesting. Unless things have changed.”
Maybe they had. I sipped my tea, which had gone cold.
CHAPTER 22
I called Maggie but she didn’t answer. In light of what Roger Allen Wade had told me about church members’ communications being monitored, I thought twice this time about leaving a detailed message, instead just saying, “Hi Maggie, it’s Roxane, I’m calling to check on you and Bea. Give me a call when you have a minute.”
I hung up wondering if she would listen to that and think I had lost my mind. If Roger’s claim of church-owned cell phones wasn’t true, she probably would. Maybe she would either way. Maybe I had. I wasn’t able to see where all of this was going yet, but there were too many questions to assume that there was nothing here to see.
Back in my motel room, I tried to find an address for Life Begins and was only able to turn up a post office box. But their events page told me they would be performing outreach on the University of Toledo campus that afternoon, in front of the Lancelot Thompson Student Union. I remembered appearances of such groups on the Oval when I was in college at Ohio State—specifically, I recalled the use of a bullhorn and counterprotesters from the women’s studies program. Shouting had probably never changed a single mind, but that only seemed to make the true believers shout even louder.
While I waited for the afternoon and a chance to find out if Aiden might be involved with the group, I tried to find out more about Nadine Brant Creedle. Yesterday, Danette had suggested that maybe she went to stay with family somewhere, but it seemed that her social network was scant—she had a sister in Indiana who told me over the phone that she hadn’t spoken to her in six months, a few cousins who didn’t answer my calls, and a father in a memory care facility in West Virginia. Then I reconsidered her deceased first husband’s family, thinking maybe she would turn there. The obituary I’d read listed a slew of relatives, including a sister and two brothers. I made a few phone calls and left messages and then, newly reminded that obits were gold mines for familial data, I looked one up for Cynthia Weary Shafer, my father’s sister.
… survived by her children: Caroline Horton and her husband, Bill, of Pittsburgh; Albert Shafer of Erie; and Josephine Shafer of Cleveland, Ohio. She is also survived by a brother, Francis Weary of Columbus, Ohio; two grandsons, Caleb and Louis; and several nieces and nephews.
So the girl named Andy was not Cynthia’s granddaughter.
My brothers and I counted as three of the several nieces and nephews—were there others?
A name would make all of this a lot easier. It wasn’t my business, but that had never exactly stopped me before. I returned to my search for pictures of the police academy grads in case one had them labeled, but no dice.
I called Tom. “There’s a brand-new patrol cop named Andy something who looks exactly like my dead aunt Cynthia. Do you know her?
”
“Your aunt Cynthia?”
“Har, har.”
“What is this about?”
“Zervos said something weird to me about her and now I want to know who she is.”
I heard Tom sigh. “What does your aunt have to do with this, exactly?”
“Sorry, Zervos said this Andy person looks so much like my dad that she assumed she was his daughter. So I looked at a picture of the recent academy class and sure enough, the family resemblance is clear. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“Is there a list of the graduating class that you could get for me?”
“Whoa,” he said, and I heard him walking away from the maze of cubicles in the homicide unit to somewhere that was quieter. “I can’t just look up personnel files.”
“I don’t need files, just names.” As I said it, I realized how bonkers it must have sounded. I cleared my throat. “Never mind. I don’t want to abuse your willingness to help me out by asking for something inappropriate. Even though I just did.”
Tom sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. Let’s begin again. How are you?”
He didn’t answer right away, and I got the feeling that I had crossed a line. Then he said, “I was glad to see your number on my phone, but you just wanted to call about a favor.”
I flopped backward on the motel bed. “I’m an asshole. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not an asshole. I just don’t get why it’s so hard for you.”
“Why what’s so hard?”
“It doesn’t matter. Everything is fine.”
“No, it does matter. What were you going to say?”
“Looking at this as something other than temporary. You and me.”
That threw me. “Temporary?”
“Because nothing about this feels temporary to me, but it seems like an afterthought to you. You didn’t mention you were going to Toledo the other day, then after somebody leaves an explosive at your office, you go right back to Toledo without mentioning it, again. Shelby told me that. When I went to your place last night, where I thought you still were.” He sighed again. “And obviously the solution here is that I shouldn’t assume I know what city and/or country you’re in at any given time, and I should always call before I just show up. But, I mean, would I really have to do that, if this mattered to you at all?”
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