by Karen Harper
As she crunched through the snow or accidentally snapped a broken tree limb underfoot, Char told herself no one would be out in the dark woods to hear or see her. Surely hunters didn’t hunt at night, perched in their tree stands.
She stuck to the fringe of the field, her steps lit only by fitful moonlight through the clouds. The wind sometimes sighed and sometimes howled, as if it sensed her feelings. Should she have brought coats or blankets for the kids? Would they have shoes or boots to wear when they should not be outside this time of night? She had a flashlight in her backpack, but she figured she dare not use it this close to the cult grounds. She passed one of the historic graveyards here. Perhaps insane people years ago had tried to flee this place, only to be caught and brought back and punished.
When she could see the barren field where they had buried Lee, she leaned against a sturdy tree trunk. In the distance, wan lights shone from the main cult building. She both blessed and cursed the moonlight. She could see if someone was coming, but then she might be seen, too. Were the usual guards out at night when it was this cold?
She guessed at the time. Surely, after seven by now. She walked around, hugged herself in the cold. Why had she told Grace she’d come here, wait for them for an entire week? Since she was scared, she’d probably put it off. Matt would catch on when she couldn’t spend time with him—if he still wanted to be with her after she went behind his back like this.
She feared Grace wasn’t coming.
Her teeth started to chatter. She took off her backpack and poured a bit of the hot chocolate she’d brought for Kelsey and Ethan in a thermos. It helped some.
And then she heard a distant, shrill voice. Had someone spotted her?
She kneeled and screwed the cap on the thermos, stuffing it back in her pack, peering all the while out at the field. Unless the wind was playing tricks, the voice had surely come from over there. She stopped breathing so her puffy white breaths wouldn’t obscure her vision.
Someone was coming. A guard? No, thank God, a woman, but she seemed to be alone. If it was Grace, had she come to tell Char she would stay, that she couldn’t get her kids away? But no, two small, dark figures appeared from behind her as the three forms paused in the middle of the field, probably at Lee’s grave. It must have been a child’s voice she’d heard.
Her heart pounding, Char sprinted out of the forest, her eyes not on her cousins but the area behind them. No one. Not yet at least.
“Grace,” Char called to her, half whisper, half hissing. “This way—the woods,” she added, windmilling her arm.
“Oh, no,” she said as Char reached them. “I promised Sister Kelsey and Brother Ethan we were going to the playground with our cousin Sister Char, or they said they would not come along and leave their friends. Bright Star’s rules say we don’t go out at night, so we’re pretending it’s daylight.”
Char couldn’t believe it. Sister Kelsey and Brother Ethan? And brainwashed so that Bright Star’s rules held sway even out here? Maybe they could never escape him, but they had to try. Char picked up on Grace having to play along with her kids or else. What if they defied her, refused to flee—or called for help?
“All right,” Char said. “Of course. I was just thinking the woods was a quicker way to the swings and slides.” In the pale moonlight, she studied the serious faces of the two youngsters. Neither showed fear, excitement or curiosity. Were the Hear Ye followers drugged? And maybe Grace was not drugged now since “the master” didn’t want to hurt the child she carried. Char felt sick to her stomach. These kids seemed more lost than those on the mountain.
“I also told them we’d play fox and geese on the way,” Grace added. “You know, Sister Char, walk in all kinds of patterns and paths so no one quite knows who went where. It would make us geese hard to follow,” she added in a whisper the wind tried to rip away.
“Oh, great. Good idea, Sister Grace. Let’s do that real fast and then head for the playground.”
“We don’t get to play much,” Ethan said as he started to run in patterns. “Sisters, don’t go near Brother Lee’s grave now,” the boy called back over his shoulder.
“And remember,” Grace told Kelsey as she still stood staring at Char and her mother. “We are going to be quiet doing this. Brother Lee is asleep in the ground, and we don’t want to wake him.”
So Grace had a plan of her own, one of necessity because she no longer held sway over her children. According to the cult she hadn’t lost her husband but just one of many “brothers.” These kids had been indoctrinated by Bright Star’s polluting poison. These kids, maybe Grace, too, would need deprogramming and support, maybe from a dedicated social worker like herself or a child care worker like Tess.
Meanwhile, Char’s carefully laid plans to flee through the forest had to be abandoned. How long before Grace and these two kicking paths in the snow would be missed and the search begin? Keeping an eye on the cult building, Char ran clear to the forest, back and forth, making paths in the snow, now that they weren’t going that way. Grace moved slowly but, to leave even more confusion in the snow, she headed toward the shoveled-off path that led to an old building that had not been rebuilt.
“Enough,” Char told Grace after just a few minutes. “Time to go.”
“I know,” she said, out of breath. At least she looked hardy enough to make this trek. “Let’s head toward the playground.”
As the four of them trudged down a shoveled-off path, Char tried to plan a different way to get them to her truck from the playground entrance of this vast property. Once the kids realized they weren’t going back to their friends, to Bright Star and his rules, would they agree to get in her truck and be driven to Aunt Tess’s house? Well, Grace had planned part of this, so she’d have to take over again then.
They walked single file, Grace ahead, Char at the back, away from the big cult building.
Suddenly, pole lights snapped on behind them. No, Char realized, glancing back, not pole lights. Flashlights or lanterns, at least four of them. Someone from the main building was out, sweeping big beams across the field.
“Okay, sisters and brother,” Char told the little party ahead of her, “time to switch to another game. That’s the sign Bright Star wants us to play hide-and-seek.”
19
“If they find us, should we play dead?” Ethan asked. “Is it like that game where Master Bright Star brings us back to life?”
Ordinarily, Char would have carefully questioned both Ethan and Kelsey about things they’d said, but it was survival time. Those beams of light were bouncing closer across the snowy field. Their game of fox and geese helped as four men—no five—stopped to play their lights across the maze of footprints beyond the area the funeral crowd had beaten down around Lee’s grave. Two men went off toward the woods; three continued on their trail.
The women and children picked up their pace around the side of the building. At least we’re all in black, Char thought.
“If we really want to hide,” Kelsey whispered, tugging at her mother’s sleeve, “I know a way into this building. I saw Sister Amy sneak in with Brother Paul, so I told on them. I was sad they got chastised.”
Chastised? Evidently a Bright Star word. Char was sweating, but a shiver snaked up her spine. These children were innocent and yet dangerous. They’d been warped. Would they give them away if they hid? No choice now. She hoped that their pursuers didn’t know that Sister Amy and Brother Paul—and little Kelsey Lockwood—knew a way into the derelict, four-story building that loomed ahead of them—unless the entrance had been sealed.
Kelsey showed them a door that only looked as if it had a padlock closed through its hasp. Char opened the padlock. The door shrieked in protest as they hurried into utter blackness on sagging floorboards. The cold, old building seemed to creak in its very bones. They closed the door carefully behind them.
&nbs
p; “Just a minute,” Char said. “I’ll use my flashlight so we can see where to hide. Sister Grace and I will be with you, and we’ll all have to keep very quiet.”
Char fumbled for her flashlight in her backpack and shone it down the narrow hall. Cobwebs were laced overhead; the scurrying sound of mice or worse skittered away.
“Everyone, hold hands,” Char told them, taking Kelsey’s while Grace took Ethan’s and came last. Grace was holding up so far, especially since she’d looked so bad earlier today. But Char could tell the poor woman was running on raw fear.
As she led the way down the hall, Char whispered, “Sister Kelsey, did Sister Amy tell you what’s in here?”
Ethan piped up a bit too loudly. “In here they used to do tummies.”
“Lo-bot-o-mies,” Kelsey corrected him. “Sister Amy said that. Then I heard Master Bright Star say he’d like to do that to Brother Lee, but he had to do it another way.”
Char gasped. She heard Grace start to cry. Lobotomies? Kate had said they used to do those here and in other mental wards in the last century. The operation severed parts of the brain to make a mental patient more passive, rob them of a restless or rebellious personality. But could Kelsey ever testify in a court of law that Bright Star wanted to get rid of her father and had a plan to do so?
“Bright Star didn’t really mean that, didn’t do that—lobotomies. Oh, poor Lee...” Grace whispered.
“You should say Brother Lee,” Kelsey said, crossing her arms over her chest. “He’s not yours anymore. You are the master’s. You are chosen.”
Char blinked back tears. This was a nightmare. How dare Lee and Grace take their precious, impressionable children into that cult? How dare Bright Star ruin lives and send men to hunt them down.
She put a hand lightly over Kelsey’s mouth as the child started to say something else. Just around the corner where they huddled at the bottom of the stairs, the door they’d come in groaned again and the floorboards creaked under the weight of more than one man.
* * *
Matt tried Char’s phone, but it went to voice mail again. He didn’t leave a message. Despite the fact it wasn’t late, only around eight o’clock, she could have gone to bed. She’d been exhausted, emotionally drained yet angry. He knew the feeling.
He was going to head home for a shower and bed. But just as he got up from his desk, Royce appeared in his doorway. He walked in and took a chair so Matt sat in the one Ginger had occupied earlier.
“Didn’t hear you coming,” Matt told him. “I thought you’d gone out.”
“I did. An early dinner uptown with Orlando, Brad Mason and my local fracking foreman. On our way back, we—Orlando and I—saw the picketers have finally called it a night, but I’m sure they’ll be back at the crack of dawn. Hope they freeze their tails off. Clever, though, that sign about ‘Frackenstein.’”
“Clever but cruel. I confronted them earlier about it.”
“I appreciate that, Matt. You can stand up for me—be on my team—anytime.”
“But reasoning with them didn’t work. I told them to keep off the property, or I’d have the sheriff after them.”
“Reason never works with the likes of them, shortsighted bigots who can’t see the forest for the trees. I saw your light on here. I’m surprised you’re not with Charlene.”
“She’s exhausted after her cousin’s funeral today.”
“Sure, I understand. You don’t look too alert yourself, my boy. Listen, I hate to hit you with something else right now, but I wanted to make this clear before the Thanksgiving holiday hits and Orlando and I head back to Columbus so I can see Veronica. Look, I realize you’re indirectly linked to Gabe McCord through his sister-in-law. But I’d like you—Char, too, because she owes me—to get him off my back. All I need is incriminating questions from the sheriff while these do-gooder picketers are loose around here.”
“Gabe questioned you? Why?”
Royce nodded. “He even asked me to come to his office for it—real official. McCord thinks Woody McKitrick’s death might be a homicide, not an accident. Now, whether that could be tied to the attack on you or not, I’m not sure.”
Matt sat up straighter. He agreed completely about Woody but didn’t want to make accusations. And he’d never bring himself to blame Royce. “Let’s face it, Woody was sure-footed, in good health and used to heights.”
“McCord wanted to know how upset I was with him since he organized that first attempt at picketing from locals. I admitted I wanted you to fire him and you wouldn’t, freedom of speech and all that, not that you agreed with his point of view. The same point of view we’ve got parading back and forth outside our entrance again. You refused to fire him on principle and because you liked the guy, not because you thought he should try to stop the fracking, right?”
“I wanted to honor Woody’s sincere concern for the people and the place where he’d lived all his life. You and I have been over this, and, like I’ve said before, the drilling fractures more than the bedrock here. It breaks community bonds that Lake Azure damaged earlier. It makes some rich, keeps some poor and feeds the disagreement over whether drilling hurts the environment. Like strip mining and shaft mining, Woody called fracking the newest rape of the area.”
“Rape? Well, hell, it sounds like you ought to go join the Fencer girl on the picket line and change your PR speeches around here!” Royce roared, hitting his fist on the arm of the chair. “And now we’ve got her cousin Joe Fencer in the same position your buddy Woody had here at Lake Azure. Damn it, Matt, I want to know you’re on my side.”
“Don’t you think if I come down on Gabe McCord, he’ll think we’re in cahoots, as they say around here, covering for each other? You’re innocent, so let’s just let the investigation roll.”
“And have everyone suspect me? Besides, I’d rather have you in cahoots with me than him. I get your point, but just be sure you let me know if anything else is brewing about the local law watching me. I didn’t have a thing to do with Woody’s death, however much it might look like I have a motive. Even his own son had a motive, because I hear they were at bad odds about things. And I cared about Woody, too, had Orlando drive me up that damned mountain to tell his widow I was sorry about her husband’s death. While I was talking to her, Orlando had to deal with that crazy son of hers. Next we’ll see Sam McKitrick down here, like the Abominable Snowman off the mountain, getting in that picket line!”
“Sam sticks tight up the mountain, searching for nonexistent terrorists. Where did you hear he and Woody didn’t get along? Sam was away for several deployments in the Middle East. I guess when he came back, sick with PTSD, Woody couldn’t understand why he didn’t pick himself up, get a job and be a better husband and father.”
For once, Royce didn’t have a quick comeback. He looked flustered. “I heard that about Woody and Sam somewhere. Maybe Brad told me. My local workforce has ears to the ground. I’ll see you tomorrow before I leave. And you never answered my question about whose side you’re on.”
As he got to his feet, Royce reached over and rapped twice on Matt’s desk as if he had to knock on wood for something he’d said. As Matt stood, too, Royce threw an arm briefly over his shoulders and Matt hugged him back before he went out.
When Matt heard low voices and more than Royce’s footsteps in the hall, he glanced out and saw Orlando had been waiting for him, maybe listening, too.
* * *
The staircase didn’t creak as much as the hall floorboards, so Char decided to risk going up only one flight to hide from their pursuers. They tiptoed up the stairs. Men’s low voices moved around below, then came closer to the second floor.
The women and children ducked into a room at the far end of the hall, slowly, silently closing the door after them.
“Now, we’ll have to be very quiet, especially if they open the door
,” Grace said. “In hide-and-seek, they could be really close, and we could still keep hidden and win. And we won’t call out if they don’t find us. We’ll just tell Bright Star we won when we see him next time.”
Char flicked the flashlight beam back and forth. The skeletons of four rusted cots sat against the walls. There was one big piece of furniture, an old wooden gurney. At first glance, it looked like the table in the shed in the valley, but it wasn’t the same. She jolted when her light caught in a broken mirror over a rusty sink and shot itself back at her. The dusty room had cardboard boxes lined up along the other wall.
“In case they look in, let’s put the boxes on the old metal bedsprings, then we’ll get under the beds,” Grace whispered. “Me with Brother Ethan, Sister Char with Sister Kelsey.”
“And the two adults will be on the outside, curled up with our backs to the door in case they shine lights at us. Hold this flashlight,” Char told Grace as she bent to lift the first box. It wasn’t heavy, but it was coated with dust. At least four mice leaped out of it. Her instinct was to scream, but she fought it, then carried the box to the rusty springs of the first cot and placed it there, then put another box next to it. The men’s voices came closer. “Grace, get under here with Brother Ethan and Sister Kelsey can hold the light. We’re out of time.”
More like out of our minds, Char thought. All those jokes people made about the crazy cult on the old asylum grounds, now here she was risking herself and these lives. Who knew what Bright Star would do if he caught them? He wanted Grace’s baby for reasons that terrified Char, but he no doubt wanted all of them right now. And he’d blame her as the outsider, the instigator, so that he didn’t have to admit Grace wanted to flee.