CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LUCY THORNE
Friday, 4:00 p.m.
Sheriff Hicks had insisted that it would be easier for him to come get Lucy and drive her out to the Dawsons’ place when she was done interviewing the Cooks. He didn’t say anything about the obvious fact that she’d all but ditched him for that interview, but this was clearly a proactive step to prevent it from happening again.
Or so she’d thought.
By the time they’d turned down the third poorly marked path, she reconsidered that assessment. Maybe he really had been onto something about her getting lost—there was no way her cell phone GPS would work out here.
“You said Noah was homeschooled?” This certainly wasn’t a trek a bus could be expected to make every day.
“A lot of the kids in the Church are,” Hicks said. “The public school curriculum’s not exactly what you would call liberal, but it does teach evolution and such. Most of the elders in the Church warn against sending kids there. If one of the parents can’t stay home, they send the kids to another Church family during the day.”
“Josiah Cook’s an elder, right?” Lucy asked. Hicks’s fingers flexed at the mention of the man’s name. And once again she was struck with the thought that this was personal to Hicks. Lucy knew that in fights like this, where beliefs became politicized, everything was amplified and all bets were off.
But there was something more to this for Hicks. It made Lucy want to pull at strings to find where this particular knot started.
“Yes, Josiah’s an elder.” The response was careful, neutral. She wondered if he’d had to control it, the way he was controlling his hands right now, forcing them to unclench.
“Seems to be quite popular. Josiah.”
Hicks hummed, low in his throat. “He’s the pastor. That means a lot around here.”
“Care to elaborate?”
The answer could not be more obviously no. His hat shielded his face still, the low afternoon light sliding along his scruff. “Man can do no wrong, it seems.”
“You don’t agree with that?”
“He’s defending the shield laws with everything he’s got,” Hicks said slowly. “Puts us at odds.”
“Why does he do it?” Lucy asked. “The laws can’t really have that much effect on their daily lives that he’s putting up this much of a fight.”
Hicks threw her a considering look before turning his attention back to the road.
“You have to understand something,” he said, the gruffness back in the slow drawl. “To them it’s bigger than that. To them it’s a modern-day holy war.”
“They’re feeling defensive,” Lucy said. It was part of her job to understand people whose mind-set she could never agree with. Hell, it was part of her job to understand people who killed because they liked the way blood felt on their hands. It still wasn’t easy to do, though. Her world, her life, her belief system were so at odds with what this Church preached that she struggled to grasp it. “Like their way of life is being attacked.”
He nodded once, his jaw tight.
“What would happen if the shield laws were overturned?” Lucy asked. “Would anything really change?”
Hicks was quiet for a stretch as if he hadn’t thought about that before; then he rolled his shoulders in a bit of a shrug. “Maybe not on the surface level, not by much,” he said. “An arrest or two would be made, but . . .”
When he trailed off, she prompted. “But?”
“It’s starting to feel like the Church’s future is tied to this battle,” Hicks said, his words hesitant. “It’s starting to feel like if they lose this fight, they lose it all.”
Lucy bit her nail as she considered that. She wasn’t a stranger to places like Knox Hollow, wasn’t a stranger to modern frontiers, these places people fled to escape a life they didn’t want. It wasn’t just a cultlike community hunkering down. It was . . . It was people like her parents, like the friends she grew up with. Like Brenda from the bar, who’d nagged at Hicks about getting into other people’s business. Like Annie, who gossiped freely but still clearly felt for the hurts suffered by her neighbors. “It’s symbolic, these laws.”
And shit, didn’t that make things complicated. Most people could be persuaded to listen to reason if they didn’t actually feel that strongly about a topic. But once their opinion became entangled with their sense of self, logic went straight out the window. “So it’s not so much a war over medical care as it is about . . .”
Hicks lifted a shoulder. “Freedom, I guess. Not being told what to do by people who think they’re smarter than Church folk, who think they’re better.”
“You sound like you sympathize with that sentiment,” Lucy poked at him.
“Just because I recognize the humanity in my opponent’s argument doesn’t mean I agree with the thinking.”
It was a rap on the knuckles, one she didn’t actually need but found interesting anyway. He was defensive of the True Believers Church even as he warred against it. Contradictions and sore spots—they were both so interesting. But were any of the sheriff’s relevant to Lucy’s case?
Josiah Cook. He was one of Hicks’s sore spots. That much was clear from just this conversation alone.
And the man was Eliza’s guardian. So there was that link. What did that mean about Hicks’s involvement in the case?
“Where did this start?” Lucy asked, trying to come at it from the side. “Your crusade. Josiah’s.”
“It’s been going on for decades.”
“No.” Lucy shook her head at the nonanswer. “This current wave of it. You mentioned something about a hearing for a new bill? Who introduced it?”
Hicks slid her a glance. “Peggy Anderson, the social worker I mentioned, has been the driving force behind the legislation. She—”
He broke off, tilted his head to one side. As if he’d just realized something.
“She wouldn’t tell me why she started up again this year,” he said, a little more guarded. “We’ve been working together, pushing for a change on and off for years now. Ever since—”
This time he didn’t continue, so she pushed. “Since?”
His fingers tapped the steering wheel. “Cora. She was a local woman who died giving birth. Her baby died, too.”
Lucy sucked in a surprised breath. “Eliza Cook’s mother.” It didn’t need to be a question. Lucy had just seen the pictures. The woman could have been Eliza’s twin, instead.
That actually got him to look over fully, a startled jerk of the head. He must not have expected her to know the name.
After a tense pause, the truck hit a pothole and Hicks relaxed, his eyes turning back to the road.
“Peggy had been friends with Cora,” he said. “Actually, Peggy was friends with Josiah, too. She took Cora’s and the baby’s deaths hard.”
“She was part of the community?” Lucy asked.
“Peggy had already left the Church by then,” Hicks said. “She was . . . angry, to say the least. That’s when she started trying to get the laws overturned. This last bill was the furthest she’s gotten.”
“And the Church thinks if it passes, everything will fall apart,” Lucy summed up.
Hicks lifted a shoulder once again in what seemed like passive agreement.
“What do you think?” she pressed.
There was another one of those silences; then he nodded once. “These days, the younger folks aren’t as . . .”
“Brainwashed?” Lucy guessed.
He sent her a look at that. “Well . . . right. You look at it now and you might think it’s a cult, but it was even worse when some of the adults were kids.”
“Worse than a fifteen-year-old dying from food poisoning?” Lucy said, though she was trying to keep the snark to a minimum.
Hicks huffed out a breath. “The stories I’ve heard . . .”
“Like what?”
This was the longest pause yet. “Look at the Cooks.”
“Rachel and Josiah?�
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“The model of a good Church marriage,” Hicks said with a bitterness that made her wonder if this grudge against Josiah extended to Rachel as well. Or was because of her. “Josiah has this favorite story that everyone in town’s heard. It’s when he supposedly fell in love with Rachel.”
“Something tells me it’s not as romantic as he thinks it is,” Lucy murmured, and the corner of Hicks’s mouth ticked up.
“Exactly,” he said. “When he was eleven, he’d broken his ankle. The elders prayed over it, rubbed some olive oil on the injury, and then made him run three miles on it.”
Lucy swallowed hard. “Did he manage it?”
Hicks shook his head. “He kept passing out from the pain. They threw cold water on him every time to wake him up and then forced him to keep running. To prove the strength of his conviction to the Church.”
“He tells it like this?”
“A little rosier, but, essentially, yeah,” Hicks said. “They . . . It’s not strange to them. This was how they were raised—it’s what the norm is.”
“Jeez,” Lucy breathed out.
“So, anyway, it’s the fifth or sixth time he’s passed out, and Rachel pushes through the watching crowd and rips the water bucket away from the elder,” Hicks continued. “She let Josiah hold on to her, and they finished running together.”
“Well . . .” Lucy wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. She could see why Josiah told the story: it painted Rachel in a lovely, flattering light. Lucy could picture that broad-shouldered woman as a little girl, her chin up, defying the world.
But it was also horrifying in its own right.
“That’s not all,” Hicks said, his fingers clenched on the wheel again. “As punishment, Rachel’s mother locked her in a crawl space for a week with only three pieces of bread and some water bottles.”
Rachel’s mother. That would be Cora’s mother, too. Eliza’s family. If this was a tale that was shared openly as if it were an endearing love story’s origin, what had gone on behind closed doors? And how had that affected the girls? Had it trickled down to Eliza?
“Josiah preaches about that story every once in a while,” Hicks continued. “And you know what he says?”
“To be honest, I’m nervous.”
“He says it was God who sent Rachel to him that day.” Hicks huffed out a disbelieving breath. “He said that she was proving her devotion to the Church with her week’s punishment. And they both came through it stronger for the experience. Just as the elders intended.”
“Yikes,” Lucy said softly. That was certainly a very specific environment to grow up in for Eliza. “But you said the younger people aren’t like that?”
“The old ways are dying out,” Hicks said, not quite an answer but close enough that Lucy nodded.
She watched him then. The way he’d told that story, it had sounded like he’d been there, not like he’d just listened to it too many times. There was that bitterness when talking about Josiah and Rachel’s past. And of course there was the verse, the easy way it fell from his lips.
“And you?” she asked gently. “When did this become a crusade?”
Hicks’s lips pulled back in a facsimile of a smile. “When I became sheriff, of course.”
The way he said it, he knew she wouldn’t believe him, knew it sounded like a load of BS. But there wasn’t much she could do about it now.
“Did you know Eliza, at all?” Lucy pivoted.
A long enough silence greeted the question that Lucy turned to look at him. She couldn’t tell if he was more or less tense than he had been the whole drive out, but the pause had her searching his face anyway.
“As well as I knew any of them,” Hicks finally said. It sounded as casual as he had been for the rest of the conversation. “I’m acquainted with most of the people who live in Knox Hollow.”
The underlying message that he was clearly going for was that, no, he did not know Eliza Cook any better than anyone else under his jurisdiction. Lucy hummed a little in the back of her throat, as if she bought that.
Then she tapped a fingernail against the truck’s window. “They’re pretty isolated out here, aren’t they?”
There wasn’t even a hint of any other house around, no property-line fences, not even the odd mailbox at the end of a long drive that would at least offer the suggestion of neighbors.
Hicks jumped on the topic change. “Liam Dawson got the land at a steal because it’s at the edge of what’s inhabitable. Maybe even a little past it.”
“What are they like? The Dawsons,” Lucy asked, because she knew so little about them so far, beyond the fact that they were Believers. Maybe that meant enough for people around here not to go any further, but it didn’t help her much.
“They keep to themselves mostly,” Hicks said. “Liam works out at the Cooks’ ranch sometimes.”
Rachel and Josiah had mentioned that as well. “Do you think he and Eliza—”
Before she could get the question out, the truck swerved, slamming into a ditch-size pothole. Since she hadn’t been braced for it, Lucy crashed against the passenger door, her knee banging up against the dashboard. A hurt sound escaped before she could swallow it.
“Sorry,” Hicks said, his voice rough, something lingering at the edges. Anger? Annoyance? “A rabbit dashed out.”
Lucy rubbed at her arm as they took a slight corner, and the Dawsons’ place came into view.
“Have they lived here long?” Lucy asked, trying to recover the flow of the conversation. “In Knox Hollow, I mean.”
“Born and raised,” Hicks said. “Both of them. People don’t tend to go far.” He glanced at her. “Or they run completely.”
Lucy ignored that, not quite sure if she should read it as a question or a jab. He didn’t know her well enough for either. She threw it back at him, the feeling starting to grow that he wasn’t being quite up front about his connection to the Church. “Which one are you, then? Born and raised or did you run here?”
Hicks shrugged. “Not exactly a destination you run to.”
“I don’t know.” She looked off toward the mountains in the distance. She liked working cases out here in places like this. Always had. “There’s a certain magic to it, too.”
His lips twitched up. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for the type.”
“To what? Appreciate nature?”
“To believe in magic,” Hicks corrected.
“Ah, you don’t know me that well, do you?” Lucy said lightly to hide the way he threw her. She didn’t like when she couldn’t figure people out, and she wasn’t sure she actually understood him.
He just smiled slightly. “No, I don’t suppose I do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SHERIFF WYATT HICKS
Three weeks earlier
Hicks brushed a fingertip over the tulip’s dusty-pink petal as he rearranged the bouquet next to the grave. The cheerful flowers had always been Cora’s favorite, so he tried to get them for her even when they were out of season.
He touched his palm to the earth just once—a hello, a goodbye—before standing and shoving his hands in his pockets.
It wasn’t long before a shadow fell over the grass. He didn’t even need to look to see who had joined him.
“Peggy,” he greeted the diminutive woman as she bent slightly to place her own flowers next to Cora’s headstone.
They stood there long enough for the slight chill in the air to sink in beneath his jacket, and still neither of them seemed to want to move. Finally, Peggy sighed and rested her hand on his arm. “Walk me to my car, would you?”
As if she needed help. He complied easily anyway, both of them leaving boot prints in the damp grass behind them.
“You didn’t seem too upset the other day,” Peggy said once they made it to the gravel path. “About the outcome of the shield laws hearing.”
It wasn’t a question, but it was. “We got further than we did before.”
Peggy stopped, dropping her hand
from his arm, studying his face even though he knew it was shadowed by his hat, by the forgiving angle of the sun. He was thankful. Peggy had hawk eyes, and after decades of friendship, she knew each twitch of his expression. “Not as far as either of us expected.”
He didn’t shuffle like a ten-year-old boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. But he wanted to. Instead he leaned into their trademark silence. Sometimes they could sit for hours, the two of them, and not say a word. War did that to you, created bonds that surpassed something as meaningless as conversation.
A small rodent skittered across the path in front of them and broke whatever emotion that had held them so still. Peggy’s nostrils flared on an inhale, her fingers uncurling from fists as she let the breath out. She saw something in his face that made her nod once and start back up in the direction of the parking lot.
“Saw Eliza there,” Peggy said, and Hicks had to force himself to follow her.
This was Peggy: she didn’t say things without a purpose. Of course she’d seen Eliza there. Josiah and Rachel had made Eliza sit in the front row as they often did at things like that. There had been increased publicity surrounding the hearings since that documentary came out, the one about the girl who had died in Tennessee because of similar laws there. Josiah handled the questions from those who seemed friendly toward the Church, dodged some of the more tenacious reporters, and effortlessly seemed to morph into the character of kindhearted preacher just defending religious freedoms for his people.
Rachel was always there behind him. An outsider watching her placid expression when Josiah dealt with the attention would think she was a meek pastor’s wife, brainwashed to follow her husband blindly. That was far from the true dynamic, though. Just last month when Hicks had received a complaint that someone at the Cooks’ ranch had pulled a gun on an overbold protester, he’d known it hadn’t been Josiah. No, that was Rachel all the way.
Hicks suspected Rachel and Josiah paraded Eliza out in an effort to help humanize them, make them more sympathetic. Look, we took in our orphaned niece and raised her as our own. Hicks guessed Rachel had come up with that as well.
“Eliza’s always there,” Hicks finally said to Peggy, careful despite how much he trusted her. He didn’t know what she was getting at.
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