The crowd went crazy.
CHAPTER 26
A few hours later, I resurfaced from a YouTube rabbit hole of Constance-rally videos—the security guy was right, she was a master of getting control back from a rowdy crowd member. She had a chill, solid confidence that seemed unshakable, even though the woman I had encountered in her office the other day had been distinctly shaken. Grace under fire when it counted was a good quality in a leader, though. I was starting to understand what the big fuss about her was.
I left the motel in search of food. I unlocked the doors of the Range Rover with the remote but as I went to pull the car door open, a big hand slammed against it.
I whirled around and came face-to-face with Joel Creedle.
The other night, his charm had been easy to see. But now it was apparent why Nadine or his kids might be afraid of him. The wide jaw looked stony and the dark eyes flashed something volatile.
I ducked under his arm to avoid being trapped between the car and his body.
He said, “You’re not an honest person.”
An interesting intro. I said, “Are you?”
“We’re not talking about me. What are you doing up here, really?”
“That’s none of your business, and I’d suggest that you step away from me and my vehicle unless you want me to start screaming.”
He actually lowered his hand and backed up a bit. “You lied to Keir, you lied to the elders, and you lied to my face again when you showed up with that yearbook.”
“How did you find me here?”
Something—I wasn’t sure what—flashed through his face. “I’ve been tailing you all week.”
“Bullshit,” I said, but a chill snaked down my spine. I doubted Creedle’s surveillance skills were good enough to pull it off. I knew his vehicle, after all, and he himself had not noticed both Aiden and me on his tail to Detroit the other day.
But I didn’t know how else he could’ve found my motel.
“Why are you snooping around the Fellowship?”
“For a group that recruits so heavily, you aren’t being very welcoming, Joel.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know who killed Rebecca Newsome.”
An eyebrow went up, just a hair. “Rebecca?”
I watched him carefully. “Yeah.”
“She disconnected from the Fellowship. But she was a good woman.”
“Even though she was helping your stepson hide from you?”
It was a wild guess, but the punch landed squarely. “Aiden doesn’t need to hide from anyone except his God.”
“What about your wife?”
“What about her?” A note of desperation had come into his voice. “Where is she?”
“You don’t know,” I said.
Creedle took a step closer to me. “So help me, if you know where Nadine is, I’ll—” He cleared his throat, maybe remembering the whole thou-shalt-not-kill thing. “Tell me where my wife is. She can’t be on her own like this. She doesn’t know how to do anything on her own.”
“Wow, thank goodness she found you then.”
He didn’t pick up on the sarcasm, instead nodding solemnly. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know, Joel. Where’s Aiden?”
“At school.”
“We both know that isn’t true.”
“If he’s not at school, then I don’t know where he is. He resists my efforts to shepherd him. In the time of Jesus, he’d be an adult.”
“In case you didn’t notice, this is not the time of Jesus. This is the time of parents going to jail for truancy when their kids skip school.”
“He’s not my kid.”
We stared at each other for a while.
“If what you want is something to do with Rebecca or with Nadine’s son, you have no business harassing the Fellowship. We have nothing to do with them any longer. The women’s circle was very shaken up last night.”
“I’ll decide what’s my business and what’s not. What’s your big plan, Joel? What are you doing to do?”
The eyes flashed again. “My plan? My plan is to pray. I might suggest it for your own heavy soul.”
The chilly air whipped around us, catching Creedle’s tie in a brief dance. Then he decided he was done talking to me and turned to go. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “It’s the devil in people that makes them cynical and mistrustful of man.”
I wondered where on earth in the Bible that was.
CHAPTER 27
I drove aimlessly through the late-afternoon sun, unsettled. The paranoia I felt was like an aspirin on an empty stomach, a vague slithering sensation.
Maybe Creedle had someone else tailing me.
Maybe he’d LoJacked my vehicle.
That made a strange kind of sense, I realized. He said he’d been tailing me all week, but if he was doing it digitally, he might not know exactly where I was going.
And it could explain why he was so proud of himself, announcing it like that, when the smarter thing to do would’ve been to continue following me, not self-report that he was doing it since that would make me hyperaware of someone on my tail.
I turned on a side street and drove slowly past a row of small houses with long driveways, eyes on my rearview mirror.
No one was following me right now.
I pulled in at a gas station and grabbed a flashlight from the backseat.
It was close to dark now and the pavement was oily and grey as I dropped to my knees next to the rear driver’s-side tire and shined the flashlight up into the wheel wheel. I didn’t see anything, so I reached in and felt around. I came up empty, save for road dust and grease smeared on my fingers.
“Ugh,” I muttered.
I checked the other tires; nothing.
Then I balanced one hand on the bumper and used the other to shine the flashlight into the undercarriage, squinting in the dark for anything that looked out of place. There were tons of GPS trackers on the market, so I didn’t even know what I was looking for, just that I’d know it when I saw it.
A pair of work boots appeared next to the vehicle.
“You need some help there, honey?”
“No, I’m good,” I said, my eye catching on something small and rectangular stuck behind the valance panel near the passenger-side rear tire. I dropped down to an elbow and tried to reach the thing, but I couldn’t quite get my hand on it.
“You sure about that?”
I extricated myself from under the car and stood up. The owner of the work boots was a guy in a trucker hat and a grease-spotted blue shirt, a cinnamon toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He was tall, and his arms were long, so I explained the problem.
The guy’s eyes widened. “Who put it there? You on the lam or something?”
“Yes, I am on the lam. Can you help me or should I go buy a yardstick?”
“A yardstick, heh,” he said. He eased himself down to the pavement and reached under the car and patted around. “Holy mother, you weren’t kidding.”
“I never kid about being on the lam,” I said.
“Well, here you go.”
He handed the thing to me: about the size of an old flip phone, dirty, a length of duct tape stuck to it. A little green light blinked from the side.
I took a few pictures of it and inspected the thing for details. But it offered nothing but dirt.
My helper stood up. “What are you gonna do with it?”
If I destroyed it or left it at the gas station, Creedle would figure out that I’d cottoned on sooner rather than later. I said, “Where are you heading?”
“Indiana.”
I held up the tracker. “Mind if this thing hitches a ride for a while?”
The guy chuckled. “I s’pose not.”
* * *
“Keir takes a kind of libertarian view of most things,” Lindy Brant told me later. “Hands off, no questions asked. There’s no way he’d put a GPS tracker on someone’s car.”
“And y
et he’s a member of a church that monitors members’ phone calls?”
Lindy frowned. We were in her kitchen, a homey wood-paneled affair that looked like the inside of a log cabin. She had recently baked zucchini bread, which we were eating now. “Really?”
“I don’t know. I’m hearing all kinds of crazy things.”
“Well, why don’t we go ask him?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, but I don’t trust him.”
“He’s a good guy. Honestly, he is.”
“Your former sister-in-law disappeared, and when you asked him about it, he said it was between a man and his wife. That’s your definition of a good guy?”
She ran a hand through her blond hair. “Maybe I didn’t push it enough. I didn’t want to piss him off—I need the job.”
That was fair enough.
“And anyway,” she added, “it’s been months and months since Joel came by the office. I have wondered if they had some kind of falling-out.”
“About?”
Lindy crimped a sheet of foil around the edges of the plate that contained her zucchini bread. “I don’t know. I’m just saying, if Keir knew that Joel was doing crazy stuff like putting trackers on people’s cars, he wouldn’t be happy.”
I thought about it. When Keir Metcalf saw me inside Mancy’s Steakhouse, he could’ve ignored me, and he also could’ve told the elders he was with exactly what I was up to. But he hadn’t. Did that mean something?
* * *
If someone wished to lure me to my death, zucchini bread might be a decent way to do it. Fortunately, Lindy Brant had no ulterior motives, and it turned out that she might have been right about her boss.
“You found this where?” he said, squinting at the photo of the GPS tracker.
“Up under the rear bumper. I don’t know how long it’s been there. But I do know that Joel Creedle put it there—he showed up at my motel and bragged that he’d been tailing me all day. Or maybe longer.”
Metcalf’s house was a creaky old place with so many deer heads mounted to the walls that I felt like I was in a hunting lodge.
“If he thought there was a security concern,” Metcalf said, “he should have told me.”
Lindy nodded. “That’s what I said.”
“He’s lost his way. I don’t know when, exactly, but Joel has gotten … grandiose.”
“How so?”
“The Fellowship doesn’t need a massive house of worship and social hall. It was Joel’s idea, all of it. Everything feels out of control now though.” Metcalf sat down heavily at his kitchen table. “He wants to reach more people. That’s what we all want. Joel is persuasive, and our board of directors keeps voting yes. But what does any of this have to do with Rebecca?”
“Joel’s stepson was hiding out in Rebecca’s house. He was using her phone to make harassing calls to a local women’s health organization. And now he—and his mother and sister—are nowhere to be found.”
“What, you think Joel…? No.”
“I don’t know what to think. But something’s going on.”
“A women’s health organization?”
“Nora Health.”
“Ah.”
“Does the Fellowship have a stance?”
“Birth control is contrary to our nature. It’s wrong.”
“What about cancer screenings for low-income women? Is that against nature too?”
Metcalf frowned at me. “I know Joel has been involved in the preborn-defender movement. The Fellowship is firmly antiabortion, of course, but we don’t take an active role. We try more to effect change through example. Lindy, why didn’t you tell me about Nadine?”
Lindy piped up with, “I asked you about her. Weeks ago. Remember?”
“She’s been gone for weeks?”
“He never said anything?”
Metcalf shook his head. “He knows that I’m not a fan of the direction he’s trying to take things, so maybe that’s why. But this is definitely strange. Lindora, I’m sorry that I didn’t take what you said seriously the first time around.”
Lindy patted his hand. I wondered about the closeness between them, if there was more to it than the employer-employee relationship. “What should we do?”
Metcalf looked at her, then at me. “Can you give me a few days? To talk to him, and see what I can figure out?”
“He’s not going to tell me anything,” I said, “so okay.”
* * *
I was just leaving Lindy’s house after dropping her off when Danette Carrasco called me. “Would you be able to stop by tonight? I have someone I think you need to talk to.”
She sounded if not nervous, then at least pensive. “Sure, I can be there in thirty minutes.”
Unlike the other day, her house was literally vibrating with life this evening. Her husband was cutting the grass with his famous riding mower, one kid was playing a first-person-shooter game in the den, another was hammering away on a piano, and someone else was blaring trap music from the second floor. “I’m sorry,” she said, leading me into her kitchen for the second time that week, “but if I don’t let them be noisy, they won’t leave me alone. Here, Rivky, say hello.”
The other woman in the kitchen wore her hair under a tichel, twisted into a large bun at the back of her head. She gave me a shy smile. “Rivkah Andai.”
Danette said, “Roxane Weary, the private investigator.”
“Only in your kitchen would I hear such a thing.”
“I take that as a point of pride. Roxane, Rivky’s kids go to school with mine at the Great Lakes Science Academy. I was asking about Katie Brant in the school office this week, like I told you I would. Rivky overheard. Tell her what you told me.”
“My daughter, Emma, is in class with Katie. The two of them are friends.”
I nodded, trying to encourage her along.
“Katie stopped being allowed to come over to our house after her mother married that man. We’re Jewish, obviously.” She pointed to her head covering. “And he doesn’t like that. I thought that the girls had a falling-out at school because I stopped hearing about her—I didn’t realize she hadn’t been in class. Until, well, my husband came to me with the phone bill and he showed me all these calls, late into the night, to a number with a 519 area code. That’s Windsor. Neither of us had made the calls, but we talked to the kids and Emma admitted that she had been calling. Because Katie had moved there. I didn’t think anything of it until I heard Danette talking about her.”
Danette opened the fridge and pulled out a Coke, which she offered to me. I shook my head. “The woman in the office said that Katie had been enrolled at some girls’ school in Michigan,” she said. “And I looked up and Rivky was staring at us.”
“I just thought, so which is it, Windsor or Michigan? And I went home and I, well, I dialed the number that my daughter had been calling.” Rivkah looked a little nervous. “It was a casino.”
* * *
Rivkah’s daughter was the one playing the piano, the Moonlight Sonata at double time. She looked at me shyly without lifting her fingers from the keys. “Am I in trouble?” she whispered.
“No, honey,” Rivkah said, smoothing Emma’s hair. “Just tell her what you told me. About Katie.”
Emma stopped playing but kept her foot on the pedal, a minor seventh chord lingering in the air. “I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody, that’s what she said.”
I made my voice as gentle as I could. “How come?”
“Because of her mom. She said her mom would be mad if she knew Katie was using the phone. But we’re doing the rain forest right now and she’s missing it!”
Rivkah murmured, “In fifth grade they turn the classroom into a rain forest and everyone makes different animals and plants. It’s really cute.”
“How often does she call?”
“On Mondays, because Mom has class and I’m alone with Zevi and he doesn’t pay attention to me.”
“My son,” Rivkah supplied.
Emma said, �
��And sometimes I call her too.”
“She gave you the phone number?”
A nod.
I was pushing my luck but I tried anyway. “Did she tell you her room number?”
“What’s a room number?”
“When you call her, does she answer the phone or does the front desk answer?”
Emma didn’t say anything. I realized a nine-year-old would have no reason to know what a front desk was.
“What happens when you call the number?”
“She told me press the zero then say ‘Miss Newsome in six one five.’”
* * *
Things had come full circle, or at least something vaguely oblong. The cashout ticket among Rebecca’s possessions turned out to be a blockbuster clue, and I could only assume now that Barry Newsome was lying to me when he said he had a brief catch-up coffee with his ex and nothing more.
But why? What wasn’t I seeing?
I resisted the urge to head back up there tonight, wanting time to come up with some kind of plan.
The plan I came up with was a trip to the liquor store near the motel for another handful of tiny Jim Beams, which I lined up along the edge of the desk once back in my room and thought about the fact that Maggie still hadn’t called me back.
The best-case scenario was that she was ignoring me.
Going with that, I tried her from the motel phone—maybe she could be tricked into talking to me—but my client didn’t answer.
I turned on the television and caught a snippet of Constance Archer-Nash giving an interview at the Toledo airport. “We’re so close,” she was saying, “this is the home stretch. We just need to stay focused and not give in to bullies.”
A sign that I needed to go home: The television seemed like it was speaking directly to me. I uncapped one of the bottles and poured it into a plastic cup from the bathroom and tossed it back. I’d been thinking about this moment all day, and now that it was here, it was almost a letdown. Not the taste but what I wanted to feel, and didn’t. I was still in the motel room, a hundred miles from home, and I was still me.
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