“I bet you do, Boz, but that’s your job, right?”
She thought back to the words he’d said the last time she left his office and opened the door. “I’ll go back home. You’ve got everything covered.”
“You can’t leave, Miss Bergman—”
She turned to face him. “Are you arresting me?”
“Well, no, but—”
She walked out.
“Wait.” Martin followed her out, but a tired-looking receptionist stepped between them and grabbed the sheriff.
“Boz, the press are here.”
“Good lord, already? Where from?”
“International, I think. This English girl seems to know everything.”
Caitlin raised a hand to hide her smile and kept walking. Across the bustling office, an anxious deputy failed at holding back a determined young woman with dark skin and a distinct British accent.
Not determined, intense.
CHAPTER
67
IT TOOK ALL of Lakshmi’s willpower to restrict her contact with Caitlin to a quick nod on her way past. Instead, she started her phone’s voice recorder and fired question after question at Sheriff Martin over the reception desk, relenting only after the words no comment were replaced by the announcement of an official press conference at six that evening.
While not exactly great sound bites, the denials gave her enough material to pitch something to her boss. She threw her phone into her bag and went outside. Caitlin sat on the sidewalk two spots down from her rental pickup, her eyes tracking a sheriff’s department SUV pulling up to the end of the block.
A middle-aged blonde in scrubs coming out of the government building rushed past Lakshmi, then ran to meet the SUV. A deputy helped a young woman in her late teens or early twenties out of the passenger side. The blonde in the scrubs stopped feet away from the young woman.
Lakshmi grabbed her phone, opened the camera app, hit record, and waited.
The young woman took a small step. Scrubs did the same, but hesitantly. A second passed, then two; then the younger woman rushed forward, throwing her arms around the woman in scrubs and resting her head against the woman’s shoulder.
Lakshmi turned and saw Caitlin stand up and wipe tears from her eyes. She stopped the recording. “Gross.”
Caitlin looked her way, broke into a smile. “What’s gross?”
Lakshmi laughed. “It’s like seeing Wonder Woman cry.”
Caitlin laughed as well. “I’m choosing to hear the part of that sentence where you think of me as Wonder Woman.”
She beat Lakshmi to their own hug.
Lakshmi fell into Caitlin’s arms, only slightly aware that it was the first time they’d hugged where she hadn’t instigated the contact.
When they finally stopped, Caitlin wiped another crop of tears away and looked back down the sidewalk to the mother-daughter pair.
“One of the Dayans?” Lakshmi said.
The women separated, and Caitlin nodded. “The medical examiner’s daughter.”
“Should we—”
“Yes.” Caitlin headed toward the rental truck. “But not now. Let’s get out of here.”
Lakshmi unlocked the truck and went for the passenger door, but Caitlin had already climbed in and shut the door, leaving Lakshmi to drive. Another first.
She got in and found Caitlin looking through the things on the back seat. “My suitcase, my bag.” She reached into her laptop bag and pulled out her phone. “Oh, sweet technology, where have you been?”
She glanced up and pointed down the street. “Turn right here, then right again on the Forty-Two.”
Lakshmi pulled out, following her directions. “There’s a press conference at six, unless you want to get to the airport, which I’d totally understand.”
“Are you kidding? This is your big break, Lakshmi. Maybe even the story of a lifetime.”
Lakshmi turned onto the main road that led from Coquille to Coos Bay. “I’m not sure how far I can take it. I don’t even know if NPR will let me pitch it.”
“Let me worry about that.” Caitlin ran a power cord to her phone, dialed a number, and let it ring on speaker. A man answered in a huff.
“Bergman, where the hell have you been? I thought you wanted to make this work, but you left me high and dry for three days, and I’m supposed to have a follow-up piece for the three-states thing—”
Caitlin smiled. “I missed you too, Stan.”
Stan Lawton. Lakshmi recognized the name of Caitlin’s editor.
“I’m not kidding. You won’t believe the stress I’m under—”
Caitlin started the pitch. “I’m going to save your ass. I’ve got the best damned investigative reporter you’ve never heard of, and she’s got a story that’ll win awards, regardless of politics. Real news, Stan, like we both used to do. Not only that, it’s a scoop and she’s got access to the biggest witness to it all.”
“And who’s this reporter I’ve never heard of?”
“Lakshmi Anjale,” Caitlin said. “She’s been slaving away for peanuts at NPR, and she’s ready for the big time.”
“Jesus,” Stan said. “The name alone’s gonna—”
“Gonna what, Stan?”
“Nothing, just want to make sure I spell it right.”
Caitlin shot Lakshmi a smile. “Be sure that you do. Between the hits and shares this story will generate, it’ll have legs for weeks. Might even go viral, as the kids say.”
Stan Lawton said nothing for a bit, then finally returned. “Well, what’s it about?”
“Motherhood.”
“Christ, Bergman, are you kidding?”
“Fine,” Caitlin shook her head. “It’s about a cult, a mass grave, child molesters, an aging porn star, kidnapping, and corruption, all in a beautiful town in coastal Oregon.”
“And why aren’t you’re writing it?”
“Because I lived it. Now I’m gonna put Lakshmi on the phone, and you’re gonna make her an offer that shows you’re the editor in chief, Stan, no matter what your overlord wants you to print.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll talk to her. By the way, who’s this Anjale girl to you, anyway?”
Caitlin looked over and smiled. “Family. Treat her like she’s my daughter, Stan.”
Lakshmi smiled back, then chimed in like she hadn’t been on the phone the whole time.
“Mr. Lawton, my name is Lakshmi Anjale, and I’d like to pitch you the story of your career.”
Ten minutes later, she pulled into the parking lot of the Mill Casino and Hotel with a new job, a deadline, and Caitlin Bergman, a woman who thought of her as a daughter.
CHAPTER
68
CAITLIN SPENT THE next two weeks in Coos Bay with Lakshmi, helping the young woman shape the story and pointing her toward sources. Her predictions rang true; not only did the LA Voice have a hit, but they scooped the rest of the nation. Broadcasters and wire services alike came to Lakshmi for access. She even negotiated a podcast exclusive between the paper and NPR, just to mend any bridges burnt by her sudden departure.
Of course, she and Caitlin left Beverly Chandler, her private jet, and Tanner out of the conversation. While local outlets picked up on the disappearance of Promise Larsen and Magda, their incomplete stories couldn’t compete with the intrigue surrounding the survivors of God’s Hill, or the legend of Desmond Pratten, who made the whole tragedy possible by abusing the contrast of agony and release.
As days went by, Caitlin spent less time supervising Lakshmi and more time by the ocean, hiking through groves of coastal oaks to watch the majestic sea combat the wooded shores. Eventually she bought a new pair of running shoes, even ran through Coos Bay in tribute to Steve Prefontaine.
“Doesn’t staying where it all happened terrify you?” Lakshmi asked her.
“Not at all,” Caitlin replied. “It’s beautiful here, and the people are great. You know, without the Larsens around.”
After all the threats, Anders Larsen ne
ver attempted any kind of rogue justice, Jefferson-style or otherwise. If anything, he followed the typical old-white-man playbook and had his lawyer file libel and slander suits. They’d linger for years, ultimately doing nothing but draining bank accounts and keeping lawyers employed, but such was the way of the seventy-year-old bully who no longer had a son with anger management issues to abuse.
A week later, tipped by one of her LAPD connections, partly to keep Lakshmi’s presence at the Sperry mansion out of the story and partly because Caitlin had sat on the sidelines for long enough, she left Lakshmi in Oregon and returned to Los Angeles in time for the official identification of Linda Sperry’s skeletal remains, indeed found on the Laurel Canyon property. The articles both she and Lakshmi wrote led to complementary pieces about the Dayans’ Southern California origins. Those pieces brought forward former Dayans willing to speak about their time in the group and answered Caitlin’s lingering questions, including their name change from the Dayans to the Daughters of God.
The wild sexual exploration of the Dayans at their height led to some spectacular jealousies and more than one involvement with underage women, which meant more than one interaction with the authorities. To stave off future police investigations and any public perception that the Dayans were a wild sex cult, Daya decided that all men but Desmond must leave, and Desmond didn’t complain. Of course, many of the women had formed monogamous relationships with male members and followed their exits, cutting the numbers in half.
Since the majority of the enterprise had been funded by Linda Sperry’s investments, Daya and Desmond maintained the Laurel Canyon property, using Tanner as a caretaker who would handle simple banking tasks without ever declaring Linda dead. In addition, they made group members pool their financial ties for the betterment of the organization, allowing Daya and Desmond to siphon from those with outside investments, social security, or trust funds. Anyone who’d wanted to leave the group after that, like the Five, disappeared. When the final accounting had been completed, Daya and Desmond had been cashing checks for sixteen women, none of whom had been found to date, dead or alive.
“What about the Knowing?” Scott Canton asked, after hearing Caitlin’s account of the story during their first phone call post-cataclysm.
She laughed. “After that whole story, that’s what you want to know about?”
“I do this for free,” Scott replied, “and you carry more baggage than a freight train. I want to know why these women believed they’d seen the face of God. Was it Reiki, qigong, faith healing?”
Scott wasn’t the only one interested. After interviewing several of the former members and consulting psychiatrists, neurologists, and hypnotherapists, Caitlin published an article centered around the prevailing theory that Desmond had combined sleep deprivation, extreme physical activity, deep breathing, dietary restriction, fasting, and neurolinguistic programming with the art of the stage hypnotist’s speed trance. While no experts could reproduce the experience, they happily agreed with each other’s hypotheses rather than allowing for any spiritual connection between Desmond and the God he’d claimed to channel.
As for Caitlin, even a month out, she was aware that interest in her mother’s story, and subsequent outcome, had grown. Whether that meant follow-up calls from Oregon law enforcement, a friendly visit from FBI agents, or the occasional black car with tinted windows parked outside her place, the fate of Maya Aronson and Promise Larsen remained a question mark people wanted to make a period.
She’d been back on the bench in front her father’s plaque in the Abbey of the Psalms mausoleum for only a minute, not even long enough to get out his pack of cigarettes, when a voice she didn’t recognize surprised her from behind.
“Caitlin Bergman?”
The woman, a well-dressed, young-looking sixty-something in a bright floral dress, sat beside Caitlin on the bench. Her face had the creaseless perfection of a fair amount of work done by a skilled hand.
“You must be Beverly Chandler,” Caitlin whispered.
Beverly looked around, then nodded. “Thank you for meeting me—and keeping me out of the story.” She looked toward Caitlin’s father’s memorial. “Maya spoke about Matt a lot, before our Dayan adventures.”
“Really?”
Beverly smiled. “Not all good, but then, who among us can say we’ve done no wrong?”
A million questions came to Caitlin’s lips, but Beverly had already risen and turned toward the exit.
Caitlin stood. “Maybe we can speak more, when all of this goes away.”
Beverly stopped near the exit. “Maybe, but all of this doesn’t really go away until we go away.” She smiled again, then walked out.
Caitlin looked down at the bench and saw that Beverly had left a brand-new copy of She Taught Me to Fly by Carol Rusnak and the kind of prepaid cell phone bought at a drugstore. She double-checked that she was alone, then flipped through the pages of the book until she saw yellow highlighter on the familiar phrase. Unlike in her original copy, there was handwriting at the bottom of the page:
1-888-CNF-CALL #5423376
Caitlin stood and walked to the mausoleum’s central corridor. Confident that no one else was around, she picked up the disposable phone, dialed the toll-free conference call number, punched in the meeting code, and listened.
“One party is waiting on the line,” the automated operator informed her, but Caitlin didn’t hear anyone.
“Magda?” she said, still not hearing anything from the other end.
She looked down, checked her phone’s signal, then brought the handset back to her ear.
“Maya, are you there?”
“Sorry.” Magda’s voice came through. “I was muted, apparently. Promise had to show me how to use this thing. The gong here is very loud, so I tried to …” Caitlin heard ruffling. “Anyway, I got confused.”
Caitlin smiled. For a second, she felt like any one of her friends with a senior parent troubled by technology.
“They have a loud gong, huh? Sounds foreign. So I shouldn’t expect to run into you anytime soon?”
“I’m afraid not, not until we know Promise is safe, and I don’t think I’ll be able to return to the States anytime soon.”
“I think you’d be surprised. No one here’s trying to put the Larsen family back together again. Promise’s mom dropped off the map. Anders got caught up in arson investigations, had to sell his lumber mills. Some people even think of you as a hero—”
“I killed Daya.”
Caitlin sat back down on the bench. It was her turn to not speak.
“Caitlin? Did you hear—”
Caitlin cleared her throat. “I guess I figured that out. The police as well. Once they saw you with teeth, and alive.”
“I’m not sorry I did it,” Magda continued. “It happened fast and I hit her hard, harder than I thought, but she was going to sell Promise back into a life of hell. My only regret is that a life on the run means I’ll never see you again.”
Caitlin looked up toward the mausoleum’s skylights. “May never.”
Magda moved the phone on her line enough to make a muffled noise. Maybe she was fighting back tears as well. “I want you to know, you never were a ‘crystalline bird.’ I was. Maybe I still am. When I left you with Matt, any single day of my life would have broken us into a thousand pieces, all three of us. I don’t blame him for not telling you what he and I had done, or keeping you from whatever message I’d scribbled while tweaked out of my mind.”
Caitlin reached into her bag for a Kleenex. Sure enough, a tear escaped while she wrestled with the tissue pack’s plastic wrapper.
Magda continued. “I know you don’t believe in God—”
“I don’t not-believe in God,” Caitlin said. “I just—”
“Right,” Magda overlapped. “I don’t know what I believe in anymore either, but thank you.”
Caitlin sniffled. “Thank me? For what?”
“For being mad enough at me after all these years to
tell me to my face. Anger and love are both sides of the same coin.”
Caitlin laughed. “Well, shove a key in a lady’s butt, and you get a girl’s attention.”
Magda laughed on the other end, the way someone in tears would. “I don’t know when the end of days will come, but know that I will be there, looking forward to the time we’ll spend together in the Light.”
“Magda.” Caitlin stopped herself. “Maya? I don’t know what you’d like to be called now.”
“That’s up to you, my darling. Neither is the name I go by now.”
Caitlin shook her head and laughed, louder than anyone in a mausoleum should. “You’re kidding, right?”
A loud shush came from her left.
She looked over and saw the same woman who’d lectured her about smoking more than a month earlier, once again dressed in full-mourning black.
“There’s no talking on phones here,” she said, with just as much righteous judgment as she had shown during their previous interaction.
“Yeah,” Caitlin answered, covering the microphone. “I’m talking to my mother.”
“Is there someone there?” Magda said.
Caitlin waved the old mourner away. “Uh-huh.”
“Then this is good-bye, my darling.”
“What? She’s walking away—”
“Be well, Caitlin. Be strong and be true. The Daughters of God walk with you.”
“Magda—”
It was no use. The line went dead.
Caitlin called the number and entered the meeting code again, but no one answered.
“Damn it,” she yelled.
The old mourner returned. “This is a hallowed place of calm reflection. If you can’t—”
Caitlin stood up. “Lady, you shush me one more time and I’ll make sure you haunt this hallowed place for eternity.”
The old mourner took a step back, then went for the exit, yelling for security.
Caitlin threw her head back and laughed.
She stood up and touched her father’s plaque.
“Well, Dad. I was gonna do a whole heart-to-heart thing about how I can’t believe you never told me the truth, and how much I would have loved you, probably even more, if I’d have known you were my real father for my whole life. Then I probably would have said that ‘I know you were flawed, but to me, that’s what made you the perfect father.’ And I’d add some sort of joke, so I didn’t seem too emotional, like ‘And I should know, because I turned out perfect.’ You know, something classy and well thought out. But that lady’s definitely calling the cops, and I doubt you want anyone from the LAPD finding your only daughter talking to herself like a wackjob. So this one’s for you, Daddy.”
Sins of the Mother Page 30