by H. D. Gordon
As I looked at him, I decided I would believe that, because in reality, that was the only thing any of us ever really get to decide about. The only thing we ever truly controlled.
What we believed in.
Chapter 32
Ross
“It’s really important that you believe me, ma’am, that you take what I’m saying very seriously,” the man on the phone said.
Sara Ross sat stalk-still at her desk, her back rigid. She was trying to figure out where she’d heard the voice before, because she was sure that she vaguely recognized it. Problem was, her work dictated that she speak with people all the time, and there was really no way to pinpoint the voice. The most she could tell was that it was a man. A young man…and he was crazy.
“I’m sorry,” Sara said. “Who did you say was calling?”
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that someone is out to get you, ma’am, people who mean you real harm. It would be best to hide out for a while, and definitely don’t go anywhere alone. If you do…you’ll regret it.”
Sara’s fingers twirled nervously in the phone cord. She leaned over in her chair and glanced out at the other cubicles. Everyone else was plenty busy clicking away at their computers, surely with deadlines to meet. “Are you threatening me?” she whispered into the phone, the first bit of fear spiraling in her gut as she said the words.
“No, ma’am,” the man said. “I’m warning you.”
Now Sara felt a flash of anger, and with it came an inkling. “Is this about my investigation of Heaven’s Temple and the going-ons at The Family Ranch?” she asked, feeling a swell of pride when her voice came out strong and indignant, but still lowered. She wasn’t really supposed to be working on the Heaven’s Temple story, and she preferred not to be overheard. “Do you work for Ronald Reynolds?”
There was silence on the other end. Finally, the young man said, “Just watch your back, ma’am. Be careful. Your life depends on it.” And then there was a tell-tale click as the phone disconnected from the other side.
Sara Ross stared at the phone in her hand before slowly placing it back in the receiver. A mixture of emotions was running through her. Confusion, fear, excitement. It had to be Reynolds’ people, didn’t it? As far as she knew, she hadn’t pissed anyone else off. Then again, she hadn’t known she’d pissed off the reverend, either. She’d been at a dead end to the story after leaving the ranch today, so why would Reynolds risk raising her suspicions again by threatening her? Also, if there was nothing to hide, there would be no reason to threaten. None of it made any sense.
At least, not yet.
Chapter 33
Joe
Michael hung up the payphone and turned to face me. “How was that?” he asked. “Did I do okay?”
I nodded, then shrugged, glancing around for the hundredth time to make sure no one was around. “Do you think sh-she buh-believed you?” I asked.
“As far as I could tell. I mean, she wasn’t laughing or anything.” Michael put his arm over my shoulders and walked with me back to his car. We were at a rest station about thirty miles outside of Peculiar, which was where I’d insisted we come, even though I was pretty sure Ms. Ross didn’t have any way to trace the call. Maybe I’d just seen too many television shows, but I couldn’t think of any reason not to be extra careful. I was pretty sure there was some law against making threats over the telephone.
“Hope she l-listens,” I mumbled.
Michael gave my shoulders a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure she will. I met her, and she’s not an idiot or anything. Only an idiot would ignore what I just told her.”
I nodded again, hoping he was right about that. When we got back in the car, I checked my watch, seeing that I only had two hours before I had to be at the ranch for dinner. It would take thirty minutes to get back to my apartment and another forty-five to drive out to the ranch after I got ready. In other words, time was basically up.
“Where to now, my lady?” Michael asked.
Despite everything going on, his dorky way of addressing me made me smile. My hand reached up on its own and brushed some of his dark blond locks off his forehead. “Huh-home,” I said. “I have w-work in a little bit.” It wasn’t a lie. Not totally.
Michael caught my hand before it could drop and kissed the back of it. “We’ve got work in a little bit,” he corrected.
I smiled, but it felt heavy on my lips. “Right,” I said.
Half an hour later, we were pulling into the parking lot that served my apartment. We hadn’t talked much on the ride back, because like always, Michael seemed to know when I needed to be able to recess into my thoughts. It was a good thing he let me, too, because I used the time to develop my story for tonight.
I leaned over and kissed Michael on the cheek, earning a huge smile from him and a painful swelling in my chest for myself. “Thanks for running muh-me uh-around today,” I said, preparing myself to get out of the car and get on with the inevitable, before I changed my mind and just stayed with him.
“Wait,” he said, making my heart sink. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little blue box. “I have something for you, remember? An early birthday present, I guess.”
I swallowed past the knot forming in my throat. “Muh-my birthday isn’t uh-until nuh-next week,” I stammered. I didn’t know what else to say. Aunt Susan usually gave me a card with money in it for the holidays and my birthdays, but other than that, I never really received presents from anyone. As I felt my cheeks growing red, I realized I didn’t know how to accept his gesture. I suddenly felt more awkward than I would have liked.
One side of Michael’s mouth pulled up, as if he was reading my mind. He lifted my hand and placed the blue box in it. Then he closed my fingers around it and kissed my lips in that wonderfully tender way he had, the one I was afraid of getting used to. I closed my eyes and just breathed a moment. Just for a moment.
“Here,” he said, pulling back from me. “You don’t have to open it now. I saw it a little while back and thought of you, so I had to get it. Your aunt told me your birthday was coming up soon, but I couldn’t wait, so I’ll just get you something else when your real birthday comes and…yeah.”
I couldn’t help but smile at his ramblings. “Thank you,” I said, the two words falling out smoothly.
“You’re welcome, my beautiful raven-haired girl. I’ll see you at work in a little bit, right?”
“Right.” That one was a lie. He would not be seeing me later, not if all went according to plan.
I got out of his car and into the solitude of my apartment as quickly as I could after that. I just couldn’t handle the way my relationship with Michael was evolving while dealing with everything else going on. I wasn’t sure what terrified me more, the idea of being in love, or the idea of facing another madman. All of a sudden, I felt overwhelmingly sad, sadder than I could ever remember feeling in my life, and part of me knew it was because Michael made me so happy. I laughed through my tears at that thought. It was one of the most ironically depressing things that had ever passed through my head.
I didn’t have time to mope, though, so I placed the blue box from Michael on my dresser and hopped in the shower. Twenty minutes later, I stood in front of my open closet, trying to decide what to wear. I settled on a long gray skirt and a simple white blouse. It wasn’t like I could Google what the appropriate attire to a cult dinner was, so I figured it was best to go with something just a bit nicer than my usual choice of jeans and t-shirts. After all, I needed Reverend Reynolds to be impressed with me.
After braiding my hair back out of my face, I was ready to go. Well, as ready as I would ever be, anyway. I flipped off the light in my bedroom, trying to ignore the blue box on the top of my dresser, but after standing there in the doorway of my bedroom for several seconds, I turned the light back on. Picking up the small blue box, I sat down on my bed and removed the lid.
A note of fine parchment rested underneath. It
had my name marked on the outside. I picked it up with shaking fingers and unfolded the silky paper. The words inside were written in Michael’s steady hand.
I could spend a lifetime
Searching the world
Hoping to find
Another raven-haired girl
But from sea to sea
And shore to shore
You are my only
Forevermore.
~M
I didn’t realize I was crying until a tear fell from my chin and onto the page. I folded the note and placed it beside me on the bed. Through blurry eyes, I saw there was something else in the box. My fingers shook again as I removed a delicate white gold necklace with a white gold pendant. The pendant was a small raven in flight. Even though it was silver in color, I knew the bird well enough to identify it. And, it was easily the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen, so I just didn’t understand why it hurt my heart so much to look at it.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. Was it possible that because I’d spent so much of my life learning how to deal with the bad, that it had left me unable to deal with any good that came? Or was this fluttery feeling in my stomach more than butterflies? Perhaps…foreboding?
These were just more questions I had no answers to, and I was fresh out of time to ponder them. I grabbed my keys and the black bag I’d packed earlier that morning and headed out the door for my date with a devil, making sure to leave the necklace from Michael on my dresser, along with everything else too precious to have a place in my messed up world.
Chapter 34
Joe
The drive out to the ranch flew by, probably because I wished it would last longer. Before I knew it, I was slowing the El Camino and pulling off on the long dirt road that led out to the church’s property. Then I was passing beneath the wooden sign that read The Family Ranch, and parking near the big white house that I knew served as the church, where I’d attended services yesterday. I admit, my heart was racing just sitting in my car and looking up at the huge wooden cross nailed above the entrance to the church. The past few days had gone by so fast, as though it all had been leading up to here. It was like time had been skipping seconds, or maybe I was just that nervous.
Today, the place was different. Last time, there’d been so many cars and people Michael and I had to park about a quarter mile down the dirt road and walk up to the church. Now, the only vehicles were a handful of gray conversion vans with the words Heaven’s Temple spray-painted in black stencils on the sides, parked near the west end of the place. The double doors to the big white house were closed instead of open, and it was quiet. Eerily so. Not even a slight summer breeze stirred the branches of the large old oaks that seemed to loom over me much more than they had just yesterday.
Standing there all by myself in the early evening light, the true seclusion of the ranch hit me. I’d looked it up online, and the reverend and his church owned a couple hundred acres of the immediate surrounding farmland, but honestly, the gravity of this hadn’t been conveyed when I’d been looking at the map of the place on the Internet. It wasn’t as bad as the middle of the jungle or anything, but if I somehow lost access to my car, getting to the nearest civilization on foot would be a task. On top of that, I’d noticed enormous corn fields to the north, south and west on my drive in. In other words, out here, if I were to scream, no one outside of the ranch residents would hear me.
“Hey, there,” said a friendly female voice behind me. I turned around. It was a plain-looking woman, late thirties or so, with muddy brown hair that was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and slightly slanted eyes. She held her hand out to me in greeting, a smile on her face. “I’m Dorie,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve met. Are you here for the family dinner?”
I nodded, shaking her hand and offering a smile of my own. “Yes,” I said. “The r-r-reverend in-in-invited me. I’m juh-Joe.”
The simple way Dorie reacted to this told me several things about her already. She nodded as if this was the first time she’d heard my name, and that she hadn’t known I was coming, when something in my gut was screaming that she knew exactly who I was, and had maybe even been posted here by the reverend to receive me upon my arrival. After all, if Reynolds was as evil as I suspected, he would surely have to be careful about just who he allowed to enter his ranch. As I glanced around to see we were totally alone in the front driveway of the church save for the cicadas that were only just beginning their evening songs, I thought this hunch was also probably right. Dorie was here to get me, and take me to her leader. Stupidly, I had to bite my tongue to choke back the laugh that came with that thought.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Joe,” Dorie said, she turned and pointed east, behind the church, where I could see other structures in the close distance. “The dinners are held in that big building across the lake over there. I was just heading over. Come on, I’ll take you.”
I smiled my thanks and followed her around to the back of the church and onto a path that led around the lake that was behind it. As we walked, Dorie began her pry for information.
“So, what’s your story, Joe?” she asked, in way that was so casual I could have mistaken it for nothing more than friendly curiosity if I hadn’t know better. “What brought you to Heaven’s Temple?”
This was a question I’d anticipated, of course, and this was also where that story I’d spent half of the day contemplating would start to come into play. I didn’t know it yet, but by the end of it all, I would have told the story so many times, played the character so close out of necessity, that it would be admittedly difficult to remember what the true tale was, and who I was in it.
The story was simple, like all good lies.
“I guess,” I said slowly, looking down at my shoes and letting some of the dark hair that had escaped my braid fall into my face. “I juh-just want to b-be huh-happy. To think there’s muh-more to life, you nuh-know?”
Dorie’s smile was warm and understanding, and she placed her arm around my shoulders. “I know the feeling,” she said. “In fact, I think you’ll find most of us here know the feeling. It means you’re a seeker, Joe. Good for you.”
I tucked my hair behind my ear and looked over at her through my lashes. “A s-seeker?” I asked.
She nodded and gave my shoulders a squeeze, walking along beside me the way a mother would with her child. I recognized it as a subtly dominate position for her to take, and marked Dorie down in my mind as someone I needed to be careful around. Very careful. Both for the fact that she was the person the reverend had sent to retrieve me, and because she was so invisibly deceiving. That gut feeling I always got was telling me Dorie was much more than she made herself out to be. Either that, or my stomach was just in knots about all of this.
“Yes,” she said. “Not everyone is a seeker. Many people are content to spend their lives believing what they’re told, not going in search of answers themselves.” Dorie smiled over at me again. “People like you and me, however, we somehow suspect we are meant for a greater purpose, so we strike out to find what that greater purpose is. We’re seekers. Father helped all of us here find our purpose. Maybe he can do the same for you.”
I let one side of my mouth draw up in a hopeful half smile. “I huh-hope so,” I said.
We were halfway around the lake now, and as we drew closer to the big building Dorie had pointed out earlier, I saw there were several other smaller structures surrounding the one we were heading to. Paved pathways led from one building to the next, creating a web work of walkways surrounded by flowerbeds and wooden benches. There were plenty of people back here, a small town’s worth, and they smiled as we passed by them, some stopping at random to wish us blessings and good evenings. Dorie, my escort, seemed to know every person we passed by, from the children, to the elderly and everyone in between.
And they all seemed so…happy. For some reason, I hadn’t expected this to be the case, and I hadn’t prepared for it. These people were seemingly
so normal, so content…good people. I don’t know what I’d been anticipating, not a concentration camp or a satanic ritual or anything, but something more depressing than what I was seeing now. As another person came up at random and hugged me, kissing me on the cheek and wishing for peace to be with me, I had to swallow hard to keep the heartache I was feeling off of my face. They had no idea what was ahead of them. They had no idea that their clocks were approaching their final ticks, and would soon die out…unless I could help it.
A group of children, each no older than five years old, went dashing by us, giggling and chasing each other into the building where the dinner was apparently being held. Their mothers trailed behind, smiling after the little ones. A flash of those white sheets from my drawing, of those tiny fingers and small shoes sticking out from underneath those white, white sheets, went through my head, and I had to dig my nails into my palms to stave off the sudden stinging in my eyes.