Harvestman Lodge

by Cameron Judd

  No problem from Eli’s point of view, though he wondered who would be those invited, and why.

  THE MEETING PLACE WAS FEELY’S CHURCH office, and when Eli and Melinda arrived, several cars were parked in the lot. Inside, waiting with Feely, was Donald New from the rescue mission, as well as Rev. Larry Cavness, who seemed older, somehow. Probably the still-fresh stress of having had a man whom he had just counseled put a pistol to his head and pull the trigger.

  The sound of a motorcyle pulling into the lot caused Eli and Melinda to glance at one another in puzzlement. Things grew even more startling when Benton Sadler himself strode into the church with a big politician smile spread across his handsome face. His big Honda Aspencade was parked outside beside the cars.

  Introductions were made as needed, hands were clasped and shaken, and Feely explained what was going on. As best he could, he summarized in general terms, what they would be seeing. He managed to bring in the delicate subject of Harvestman Lodge, and to warn that some of what they would see might cut close to the heart for some of them there. As he said this he was looking at Donald New.

  Melinda had made sure to glance at Sadler’s face when the words “Harvestman Lodge” were first mentioned. She was sure she noticed the tiniest flinch. Nothing extreme, though. She wondered what the reaction would be when he saw the image of his younger self, standing in the rear of the Lodge room along with Eli’s grandfather.

  “Melinda, if you would, please tell us how you came to possess the film you have transferred onto videotape for us.”

  Realizing she was about to confess to a technically illegal breaking-and-entering, she took the plunge and told how she and Eli had explored the empty home of his late grandparents, and in the cellar found the film, later learning (here she was sketchy on details) that what was on the film was a slice of history from Harvestman Lodge … an episode that would have probably been only of minor interest if not for the surprise appearance of a certain young face in the background of the scene. Melinda chose to maintain the suspense by declining to say whose face it was, curious as to whether they would recognize Broken Flower on their own.

  “And there are other faces you will know, too,” Melinda said. “Including your own, Mr. Sadler.”

  Now the well-known man’s flinch was not so subtle. He looked authentically concerned.

  “Melinda, the VCR is there and ready to go,” said Feely. “But give us fair warning here: is what we’re going to see going to be utterly inappropriate for a house of God?”

  “Slightly ribald, but that’s about all.”

  “Dancing girls,” Sadler muttered almost too softly to hear. “That’s what it’ll be, I’m betting.”

  “You’re right, sir,” Melinda said, and pushed the play button on the VCR.

  WHEN THE TAPE WAS FINISHED, FEELY asked to see it again, though Sadler didn’t look happy at the prospect of sitting through it a second time. But he didn’t rise and flee, so Melinda rewound and showed it again. This time, when it was done, Feely had tears in his eyes, and to Melinda and Eli’s surprise, so did Sadler.

  “You recognized her, I think,” Eli said, and both men nodded.

  “Who are you talking about?” asked New, his voice quaking.

  Feely provided the answer by rising, going to his office closet, and opening the door. On the inside of the door hung a poster about the dangers of child abduction. It’s main graphic was the famous image of Broken Flower.

  Without a word, Melinda ran the tape back to the relevant place, and silently pointed out the face of the little girl being carried out the rear of the building.

  New came to his feet, a man distraught. “So many times I’ve seen that picture of that poor unknown child … and never had any hint I was seeing the face of my own granddaughter!”

  “Granddaughter? What?” Sadler’s voice revealed his perplexity.

  The image on the screen was still frozen. New went to Melinda and plucked the VCR remote from her hand. “May I?”

  Without awaiting an answer, he ran the tape back only a slight bit further, and pointed, in tears, to the briefly visible face of one of the dancing girls.

  “My poor Emmie! My own daughter, dancing her life away, just to keep body and soul together, while wicked men carried off her child into a hell of their own making! It killed my daughter, my friends, to know she had put her child in a situation to be stolen away. It put my Emmie into such despair she ended her own life. Dear God! Forgive me for abandoning my own family and leaving them to this!”

  It was wrenching to see the man suffering. Cavness reached over and put his arm around the shoulders of his partner in ministry, speaking softly to him what comfort he could. There was little to be given.

  Eli spoke to Sadler, who was dead silent at this moment. “Sir, the man you were speaking with in the back of the room … ”

  “Will Keller. A man I remember well.”

  “He was my grandfather. It was in his house that Melinda – that Melinda and I, I mean – found the film of what we just watched.”

  Sadler thought hard for nearly a minute, brow furrowed. Then he laughed and pounded his brow with the heel of his hand. “I knew that sneaky scoundrel was up to something! Will Keller was very concerned by the direction we Harvestmen were moving … the ‘moral decline,’ as he usually put it. Bad elements had slipped in, you see, mostly in the person of some Parvins who managed to get into the group, Lukey Parvin most of all, plus some others. What had started out as a civic-minded, faith-oriented group was turning into the kind of organization that would, well, bring in dancing girls to entertain men who’d had too much to drink. It looks like mild stuff these days, but when you compare it to what the Lodge had been at its outset, and especially if you were there to see it first-hand, as I was, you understand how quickly the group was degrading. You could just feel it in the very atmosphere of the place. But, merciful God, to think that something far worse was going on right under our noses, to think that a child was snatched away and turned into a toy for the vilest kind of exploiters and human traffickers ... Jesus forgive us. Jesus forgive us for our blindness.”

  Donald New was silently sobbing into his hands, having listened to this. For the moment, he was Donnie Moody again, a man who had left his own family to crumble. He’d left his daughter to fall into a declining lifestyle, and that in turn had made her careless of the safety of a daughter to whom she’d given birth, out of wedlock, at sixteen.

  Emmie couldn’t have known, of course, that such an evil entity as the Flower Garden abduction and trafficking network had reached its tendrils as far as humble Kincheloe County, Tennessee, a place most in the nation didn’t even know existed. In those days, the Flower Garden had not even been exposed to the light of day. Law enforcement investigators were only beginning to nibble at the edges of the organization at that time, to learn that it was there at all.

  Sadler spoke again. “Gentleman – and lady – we now face a question that is long overdue, and for me even to ask it aloud will show you how much of a turn I’ve made in my thoughts about this. Here’s my question: Is this community of ours, here on the verge of celebrating two centuries of life, going to continue to bury this secret, or be courageous enough to admit the failures and evils of the past and wrest some meaning out of the suffering of the little girl we saw kidnapped just now? I say it is time to put aside that familiar human tendency to try to hide everything we don’t want to see, everything we think makes us, ourselves, look bad and ugly. I say forget all that. Let’s bite that particular bullet and purge our iniquities, if I may borrow a bit of biblical lingo. Call me a fool – plenty of others have, so why not? – but I think Eli Scudder might have been sent to this county for a purpose. Because it was time ... time to dig out what we’ve spent too many years trying to bury. And I was the one shoveling dirt into the hole faster than anybody else. I was wrong. Sheriff Hawes was wrong, going along with it. And Mr. Carl, too. We all got off the right road, this whole community.”

&nb
sp; “Amen, Benton,” said Feely. “Amen.” He paused as others nodded. “Are we in agreement?”

  There was a soft chorus of murmured assent.

  “Then be prepared to gather, all of us, at the office of the Clarion on Monday morning. Eli, your morning staff meeting is going to be crashed by a rather dignified group of intruders, and Mr. Carl and company are going to have the biggest story of the year placed on the table before them, virtually on a silver platter. And Melinda, I strongly suggest that, between now and then, you convince your news director to make an early Monday morning drive to Tylerville and be there as well. Both you and Eli have been involved in bringing these buried old facts to life, and both of your news organizations should benefit from your enterprise. The story nobody has wanted to talk about for years – except around the office water cooler or on the factory line – is about to be broken at the same time by our local paper and our nearest television news operation. A ‘simultaneous scoop,’ if you will, each news outlet openly and honestly giving due credit to the other.”

  “News partners,” Melinda said.

  “A good phrase, that, and exactly what I’m trying to get at,” Feely replied. “Will your station go for it?”

  “I think so. Especially when I tell them they are about to miss the chance to be involved in breaking a local/national news story if they don’t cooperate.”

  Sadler said, “My friends, good has been done here today. A hidden sin is about to be revealed. Truth is about to be laid before the world. I for one am ready to see it happen. This community does not need to celebrate two centuries of life still burying secrets.”

  “I agree, Benton,” Cavness said. “Don, my friend, what do you think?”

  Donald New wiped his face free of tears and said, “Friends, out across this nation there are, I’m sure, people who have had children stolen from them in infancy, and have seen the picture of the child called Broken Flower and wondered if she is their own child. We have the unique opportunity to answer that question and ease their minds from wondering if it was their child who wound up in a trash dumpster in LA after being abused for the entertainment of sick, evil men.”

  “He’s right,” said Feely. “That’s an aspect of this I hadn’t thought of.”

  “It was my fault, you know,” New said. “If I had been the man I should have been, Emmie’s life would have been better. She wouldn’t have been forced to do the things she did, like becoming a mother when she was still a child herself. She would have found a husband and had a family, and my granddaughter would have never been put into the situation that allowed her to be taken. My fault ... my own fault.”

  Cavness shook his head. “None of us ever know what might have been, for either the good or the bad, Don. We can only deal with what is, not with what might have been. Would-have-been is a door that cannot be opened.”

  “He’s right, Don,” Feely said.

  Don New pulled himself together a bit. “I can never stop regretting that I left my own daughter in a position that brought disaster to her, and to her own child. But I am not the man I was then, and I’m willing to own up to my mistakes and sins. We can only learn from sins and failures by facing them in the light. That is true for this county and this town as well as for me. Let’s move forward with this.”

  “Monday morning, then,” said Feely.

  “We’ll be there, preacher.”

  Eli said, “I should mention that Mr. Carl should be involved in this discussion, and he often isn’t there early on Mondays.”

  “He’ll be there,” Sadler said. “He and Deb will be getting a visit from me tomorrow, just to let him know how his Monday morning is going to shape up. When Deb knows I want Carl to be at his office bright and early Monday morning, believe me, his ass will be there.”

  “Mr. Sadler,” Melinda said, “I do want to tell you that I hope it won’t be a political liability to you, having your name associated with this story. Harvestman Lodge and all that.”

  Sadler smiled and shook his head. “Right is right, and this is the right thing to do. If there is political liability, then I’ll face it and deal with it. I’d rather be associated with helping bring something like this to light than with covering it up.”

  Melinda smiled and shook his hand.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  THE REGULAR NEWS STAFF WAS HAPPY to find the regular Monday morning meeting had been called off, until they were disturbed by an unexplained gathering of solemn men who entered Mr. Carl’s office, along with Melinda Buckingham the newscaster and a stranger a couple of staffers recognized as the news director for Melinda’s TV station. Eli was in there, too, and Keith Brecht was called in, and the whole situation seemed so strange that the staff could not see how it could be anything good.

  The negative vibe heightened ten minutes later when Mr. Carl, clearly very upset, bellowed loudly and so furiously his words were unrecognizable, and came storming out his office door. He strode down the hall toward Ruby Wheeler’s reception area, going out of view of the newsroom, as Benton Sadler came out of the office after him, calling for him to wait and also going out of sight.

  The news staffers looked at one another, confused and concerned, and two minutes later, Mr. Carl and Sadler came back together toward the publisher’s office, Sadler’s arm across Mr. Carl’s shoulder. They walked back into the office and closed the door behind them.

  “What the hell is going on in there?” asked Barney Cole, assistant sports editor.

  “Only God above knows,” somebody else muttered.

  Whatever discussion was going on in Mr. Carl’s office was at least quieter after the dramatic exit and return by Mr. Carl and Sadler. Voices could still be heard, though, muffled and impossible to understand, but sounding at times heated.

  Things got more confusing when Miz Deb appeared at her husband’s office door, escorted by Ruby. A soft knock and a few words through the door, and Miz Deb joined the group in the office.

  “Whatever’s going on, folks, I have a feeling we may all be looking for new jobs,” said Jake Lundy.

  “You think Sadler is buying the newspaper, maybe?”

  “I doubt it. I never heard any talk of him being interested in this business,” Lundy said.

  “I CAN’T LIE ... THERE’S SOMETHING THAT doesn’t feel right to me about making a deal like this between the newspaper and a competitor medium,” Mr. Carl said to his visiting delegation. “Especially on a story that maybe should be left alone anyway. Is it really good for this county and city to trumpet this kind of thing? For years now we’ve been agreed that, whatever happened at Harvestman Lodge, it was best kept buried.”

  “Things have changed, sir,” Feely said. “No one knew before that piece of film was found that a child whose sad face, and fate, would become known the nation over, was taken right here in Kincheloe County. It puts a new light onto the situation.”

  Mr. Carl was resistant. “What Kincheloe County needs more than anything else, Rev. Feely, is to draw new industry. Economic development! All we can get of it! And now we’re going to stand up and say, ‘Hey, you industrial developers! Come join us in Kincheloe County! Bring the wives and families to the place where your kids can be abducted by perverts and hauled off to become movie stars of the kind you’d never want them to be!’ Is that what we’re doing here, people?”

  Eli wanted to throw up his hands in frustration. He was almost ready to sacrifice his job and speak his mind, but to his pleasant surprise, Davy Carl spoke up first, in the kind of calm tone that speaks louder than the most passionate shouting.

  “No, Dad, that’s not what we’re doing here. What we’re doing is, we’re finally acting like newspapermen ... like what we should have been all along. Like journalists. The same for our television friends here. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do: preparing to report a story that has to be told. Now, I realize there is still ground to cover that we’ve not covered yet, such as all of us, plus the proper authorities, having the chance to decide for ou
rselves if the little girl on the film, apparently the daughter of Rev. New here, is definitely the same little girl whose image has become so famous as an icon. We need to redouble our efforts to find our missing bound newspaper volumes from the period when Harvestman Lodge was active but declining. Whether there is a link between the Harvestmen and the disappearance of the bound volumes, we don’t know. If there is, then there is probably relevant information in those lost newspapers.”

  While David was talking, revealing a welcome point of view Eli would not have expected from him based on earlier conversations, Miz Deb was being filled in by Keith and Kyle Feely about the earlier discussion that preceded her being called in by Ruby. Mr. Carl had brought his wife in, Eli was sure, because he could see where things were heading and knew how controversial the matter would be in his wife’s eyes. Best to let her see for herself that her much-admired Benton Sadler was in favor of revealing even the darkest secret of Harvestman Lodge, after years of self-protective secrecy. It was to instruct Ruby to call in Miz Deb that Mr. Carl had abruptly bolted from the room earlier.

  David surprised Eli yet again by turning to him and saying: “Eli, given that it was your interest, as a novelist, in Harvestman Lodge that led to the situation we find ourselves in here, would you summarize for us the best case you can make for moving forward with this story, and doing so in partnership with the television team?”

  Eli nodded and quickly gathered his thoughts.

  “There’s not much I can add to the case that has already been made so well. The reason this must come to light is that it is news, plain and simple. And we are news organizations.

  “As for doing this in partnership with our broadcast media counterparts, the reason for that is simply that both Melinda and I have been involved in gathering these facts. We have already been working in cooperation, in other words, so we may as well continue along that line.