I turned to Lindy, but she shook her head. “No.”
I tried the woman on my right, a kind, grandmotherly woman named Edith. “Don’t mind her, it’s not personal. What part of town do you live in?”
“I heard that,” Lindy snapped. “And yes, it is personal.”
Edith’s eyes widened. “Oh my.”
Lindy let out an exasperated sigh. Then she bolted up out of her seat, kicking me in the side in the process. “You people make me sick,” she announced. “Nadine has been the heart and soul of this place and you don’t even care.”
She slung her handbag over her shoulder and hit the back of my head with it.
To a chorus of alarmed cries, I followed Lindy out of the shop and called her name. “Wait.”
“Fuck off.”
That wasn’t very churchly of her. “Please.”
She was almost a block ahead of me, even though her shoes clearly weren’t built for speed. “You’re talking about Nadine Brant,” I said.
That got her to stop. She had enough forward momentum that she stumbled slightly. “Do you know something?”
“I know she’s your former sister-in-law.”
Finally, Lindy turned around. Her eyes were still flashing mad. “Yes.”
“And you’re worried about her.”
Some of the anger in her face softened under the streetlights. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because you haven’t seen her in a while.”
Now Lindy just nodded.
“Can we go somewhere to talk?” I glanced over my shoulder, where the large windows of Bloom’s storefront were patchworked with faces watching us.
CHAPTER 24
“I introduced Nadine to Joel,” she told me a half an hour later, after we relocated to the bar at the Tin Can. “I didn’t know he was a psycho. Keir isn’t like that, you know. After I started working for him, I went to one church event and it wasn’t for me, and I said so. He never brought it up again. But Joel. Wow. I had no idea.”
I sipped my whiskey, glad that Lindy wasn’t a psycho too. “When did you introduce them?”
She had an Amstel Light in front of her and she spun the bottle around on the waxy surface of the bar, a thick coat of resin encasing a collage of crushed beer cans. “The Brant brothers didn’t make the best husbands. Their marriage was over long before Geoff got sick, to be perfectly honest. Nadine didn’t want to turn any heads. But when she was ready to start seeing someone seriously, Joel was the first person I thought of. I think it was about two years ago.”
“You know him through Keir?”
“Double A does security for the church,” she said, nodding. “So Joel is a client. I always thought he was charming, likable. And he’d lost his wife too. It just seemed to make sense.”
“He’s so charming but you didn’t want him for yourself?”
“Please. I have two brat kids of my own. I don’t want any more.”
I laughed. “Okay, so you introduced them.”
“They hit it off, big-time. I think they were engaged by the six-month mark. I started seeing less and less of her, but I didn’t really understand at the time that it was a sign of something being wrong. I just thought she was spending more time with her man.” Lindy rolled her eyes on the last word there, or maybe at herself.
“When did you figure out that wasn’t the case?”
“Well, when she got serious about Joel, she invited me to the women’s circle and I got in the habit of going. At some point I realized that those nights were literally the only times I saw her. Or even heard from her, really. I sent her an email that mentioned it, and I got a response back. From Joel.” She played with the end of her jumpsuit’s fabric belt. “I don’t know how long he had been reading her emails. Hell, maybe he’d even been responding as her. Maybe I’m the biggest idiot in the world. But he wrote that I was upsetting her with my insolent questions.”
“Insolent?”
Lindy shook her head, her mouth pressed into a thin line. “After that, emails to her came back as undeliverable. Her cell phone got turned off. So at that point, I was, you know, very concerned. I mentioned it to Keir and his response was kind of like, oh, Joel’s a good guy, it’s not our place to interfere between a man and his wife.”
“Ew.”
“Ew is right. I was shocked. I did a little digging about the church and I ended up finding this blog, it’s called Keystone Kult.”
I nodded and let her talk.
“I learned so much from this site. About the way they prey on people who are lonely—away at college for the first time, fresh out of a breakup, people who are looking to find meaning and community. They overwhelm new recruits with love and companionship. Sometimes it takes a few gatherings before the recruit even realizes it’s a religious group. Like the women’s circle. Free craft supplies, cool! No. Not cool.” Lindy finished her beer and motioned to the bartender for another. “Then, once they have you hooked, they isolate you from the people you know until you’re doing nothing but spending time with them.”
“Why?” I said. “I mean, what’s the point of this?”
She frowned at me. “You can’t ask a true believer what the point is. The point is that they believe, and they want everyone else to believe.”
“And Nadine—she believes?”
“Not long after I read all this stuff, I went to the women’s circle and I tried to talk to her about it and she said that it wasn’t the right time. She said she’d call me later and we could chat then. But of course she never did, and that was the last time I saw her. She didn’t come to the next women’s circle, and she didn’t come tonight.”
I remembered what Not-Kyla had whispered to Lindy earlier in the evening about last time. “Did something happen last month?”
Lindy’s nostrils flared. “I was just trying to help.”
I waited.
“I’m a sales consultant on the side,” she said. “Tupperware, Jamberry, Longaberger, although not so much of that anymore. Recently I started selling Damsel in Defense. I tried to get clever by handing out Tupperware stuff to the women with Damsel catalogs tucked inside.”
“Damsel in Defense,” I said, “which is what exactly?”
Lindy hoisted her purse onto the bar and produced a digital camera. “It only looks like a camera. It’s actually a stun gun.”
I took it from her and studied it. “Really?”
She reached over and flicked a switch, and a terrifying crackle issued from the thing along with a burst of light, much to the alarm of the bartender.
“They also make pepper sprays, tactical pens, concealed-carry bags like this one. Self-defense, girlified. This model is my favorite. I actually gave Nadine one as a gift a while ago. I can give you a catalog if you want.”
“That’s okay. But I take it this didn’t go over well at the meeting?”
She tucked the stun-gun camera back into the purse. “It really hit a nerve, no pun intended. I just wanted them to know that there were options. But instead it turned into a shouting match. Tense stuff. They didn’t tell me not to come back but I think it was implied.”
“Did you ask anyone there about Nadine?”
“Sure, and everyone repeated the same line about her kids, some emergency with her kids. But I’m telling you, I saw real fear in her eyes, that last time. I asked Keir about her, he said the same thing. Aiden was having some behavioral problems, whatever whatever.”
Based on what I knew of Aiden so far, it did seem like he was having such problems. But he was hiding out under a dead woman’s guest bed, and Nadine was nowhere to be found. So problems or not, somebody was lying. “Did you know Keir’s ex-wife?”
Lindy shook her head. “They were already separated when I got hired.”
“Did you know she’s dead?”
A nod this time, confused. “Why?”
“That’s how I got involved. Her daughter hired me to look into her death, and one of the first things I uncovered was A
iden Brant hiding out at her house.”
Her eyebrows knit together. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know, and he ran off before I could find out.”
“I knew something messed-up was going on. I knew it. That sunovabitch.”
“Do you know anything about the church’s involvement in protesting against reproductive health care?”
Lindy cocked her head to the side. “I know they did some Right to Life march a while ago. And I’ve heard Joel ranting about how birth control is ruining America or whatever it is that he believes—I try to ignore him when he gets like that.”
“What about Nora Health?”
“The abortion app?”
Lindy said it unironically; Constance Archer-Nash wouldn’t be happy to hear it. I nodded.
“I mean, I’m sure the church people don’t like it, but I never heard anything in particular about Nora Health.”
CHAPTER 25
I dreamed about church, about being an altar server in the sixth grade. I was trailing after Monsignor McFarland on Palm Sunday with a bucket of holy water while he dowsed the congregation in a shower from the aspergillium. As we walked down the center aisle, he dunked it into the bucket I carried again and again, water splashing up my sleeve, the linen fabric of my robe cold on my skin. With each splash, I grew more and more waterlogged, unable to breathe. And then Elise Hazlett was there, in the blues and pinks of every stained-glass window.
In this way, it was the same as all the dreams I had lately.
I woke up gasping, sputtering, as if I were submerged in water for real. The digital clock told me it was four in the morning but I got out of bed and turned on all the lights and double-checked the dead bolt on the door.
I didn’t want to be here anymore. Here, as in Toledo. But also as in this same dream, the stuck feeling. I could leave the area, but I couldn’t leave my own head.
Annoying, the way that worked.
I wondered if the new Keystone Christian Fellowship campus would be a formidable place like the churches of my youth, dark wood and stained glass, or if it would be modern and cheery to belie the dark undercurrent of manipulation that its members employed.
You could get away with a lot by putting a modern spin on things. Young people and slick marketing materials did wonders for Keystone, and for groups like Life Begins. But from what I’d learned yesterday at the college campus, it didn’t sound like they’d welcome Joel’s particular flair for marketing.
Aiden expected some kind of help from Rebecca, which seemed to imply that he couldn’t get, or didn’t want, that help from Joel. But what kind of help could involve both Nadine Creedle and Constance Archer-Nash?
* * *
Constance had five minutes to meet with me before she had to leave for the airport. “Literally five minutes,” she said as she stuffed items in her computer bag. “So talk fast. Dean, get me a coffee for in the car, please?”
Dean was her security guy, or one of them. His broad shoulders made an inverted triangle to his narrow hips and he was dressed in all black. If he resented being treated like a personal assistant, he gave no sign, just nodded curtly and left the room as I said, “So the kid who has been calling you—he has nothing to do with Life Begins.”
Constance, clutching a tangled earbud cord, looked puzzled. “What?”
“I’m saying Life Begins isn’t behind the harassment.”
“Then who is? Other than this random kid.”
“Well, I mentioned the Keystone Christian Fellowship to you the last time we talked.”
She put the earbuds into the bag and sat down behind her desk. “Yes.”
“It sounds like the guy in charge over there has some strange ideas about the way to get things done.” I flipped through my notebook until I found the exact quote. “‘Blackmailing city council to get protest permits revoked, leveraging surveillance on Planned Parenthood staff.’”
“Surveillance?”
“Not a far cry from surveillance and blackmail to trying to hack your systems, is it?”
“No one has hacked our systems. It’s our CRM. A company that lots of campaigns and businesses use.”
“So now you’re not concerned?”
Constance sighed. “I just don’t see how I can help you. Not that I mind your company. I’m just saying, as far as sharing information goes, I don’t know why this kid has been calling me and I don’t know what this random church wants from me.”
“Okay, well, suppose the attempted hack has been successful.”
“Perish the thought.”
“What information could they get about Nora users?”
“Oh, wow, everything—names, addresses, Social Security numbers, phone, email, all that.”
“Confidential medical data?”
She paused a second before answering. “Like what?”
“I don’t know, pregnancy-test results? Blood type? Prescriptions?”
“No, we don’t store that information. Our medical providers are the ones who’d keep that. We’re just a middleman.”
“Not even for the users who get contraception by mail?”
“No, we store their Nora account information, but their medical data is housed via our—you know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you all of this. Our service model is unique. But suffice it to say that the attack on the CRM wouldn’t have medical data even if it had been successful.”
“Humph,” I said.
“I thought that was good news.”
“It is.”
Dean the security guy reappeared in the doorway of her office with the coffee she had requested. “The car’s here, ma’am.”
Constance slung the computer bag over her shoulder, earbud cord dangling. “Roxane, stay, Dean can help you more than I can.”
She took the coffee and disappeared.
Dean looked at me flatly. “What is it that I’m supposed to help you with?”
“How come you don’t get to go to Chicago?”
“Is that really what you want to know?”
“Among other things.”
He sat down on the low, modern sofa where Constance had been sprawled out yesterday. He was so tall that his knees practically reached his ears. “Someone has to make sure things are secure here, too. Her body man travels with her.” He looked at his watch. “I have a meeting in five minutes.”
Everyone only had five minutes in this joint. “Okay. The attempted data breaches.”
“Security and IT security are two completely different things.”
“Okay, can you introduce me to someone in IT security?”
“He’s with Ms. Archer-Nash, heading to Chicago.”
I sighed. “Okay. Let’s talk security-security. Ever see this kid?” I showed him Aiden’s picture.
Dean shook his head.
“How about this guy?”
The security man looked at Creedle’s picture on my phone and narrowed his eyes. “Him, yeah. Ohhh yeah.”
I waited.
“There was a rally a while back, pretty early in the campaign. Everything was going fine until this guy and two or three other guys start making noise, going on about how Constance wants birth control to be mandatory or something—nonsense stuff. They were filming it, I remember that. I got the impression that the whole thing was designed to provoke someone into throwing a punch, or maybe they wanted to get arrested—I don’t know. Constance shut them down pretty quick—she has a knack for it—and we tossed them out and that was the end of it, but I got the sense that they were hoping for some big scene.”
“Had to be disappointing.”
Dean shrugged. Then he smirked and said, “For them, or for us?”
* * *
I went back to my motel room and found a record of the event on YouTube: PROTESTERS GET OWNED BY CONSTANCE CAN! The video had a quarter of a million views and it showed Constance at a podium with people packed in behind her, nodding along to what she was saying. Then the faces that formed her backdrop started to
turn to the right, the whoops and cheers fading until a disembodied voice could be heard: “Constance CAN’T make our women murder our babies!”
I recognized Joel Creedle’s rich baritone as he repeated the phrase again. The camera was still on Constance and she made a face, almost bemused. She said, “I hear you, but I can’t see you—the lights.” The crowd pointed him out and the camera panned around the room until it found him. Constance held a hand above her eyes like a visor. “Hi. We haven’t met, have we?”
The crowd tittered nervously. I could see tension in their expressions, ones that said This might go south in a hurry.
“Just in case some of you didn’t hear, this man is saying, what was it? ‘Constance CAN’T make our women murder our babies’?”
The camera went back to Constance as she said, “You’re right, I can’t—and won’t—do that. I’m glad we agree. Is there anything else on your mind, new friend?”
Creedle stammered indistinctly. Even though I couldn’t hear what he said, it was obvious that Constance had complete control of the moment.
The crowd clapped politely as security people escorted Creedle away.
“I’ll tell you a little story, while our new friend is leaving,” Constance said in the final seconds of the video. “When I was in grade school, I was such a nerd. Total teacher’s pet. This kid in my class started a rumor that I read the dictionary for fun.” She grinned, eyes sparkling. “I don’t know why he thought that was such an insult, or why I did. But I went home crying and told my mother all about it and she asked me, Constance, how did you respond? I told her, Well, I said nuh-uh no I don’t, et cetera, et cetera.” Constance paused here, and the crowd was silent again but this time it was with rapt attention rather than ill ease. “Then my mother said, He just wanted to get a rise out of you, which he got. The next time someone does that, don’t give him—and it’s always a him, right?—the next time that happens, no matter what it is that someone has said about you, put him on the spot. Any idiot can think up a line or start a rumor. But not everyone can think on their feet. And smart girls know better than to bother arguing with someone who isn’t a worthy opponent.”
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