by Meg Moseley
Miranda stood tall on the top step, her jeans and bright sweater in sharp contrast to the drab dresses and skirts of the pansy planters. “Don’t move to McCabe,” she said in a clear, strong voice.
In front of her, a ripple of surprise ran through the pansy brigade. Behind her, the teenager lowered his paintbrush and frowned at her back.
“Ladies, don’t let your husbands sell your homes,” she said. “Don’t let them quit their jobs. Mason never had a word from the Lord. Mason had a word from Mason, and it was: Run.”
A tall woman, a formidable tower of denim, stepped out of the ranks with a pot of bright yellow pansies in her hand. “Miranda Hanford, you should be ashamed of yourself. Touch not the Lord’s anointed.”
All stony determination, Miranda kept going. “Mason is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He—” She stopped.
The wind had picked up, slapping the halyard against the flagpole in a repetitive, annoying jangle. Clamoring for attention, it competed with Miranda, but she’d stalled.
She looked at Jack, her eyes filled with tears and misery. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can,” he said, “if you should.”
She studied her toes, then raised her head and addressed the crowd again. “Mason has been unfaithful to Abigail. I’ve spoken with her, and it’s true.”
Miranda’s pregnant friend gasped, the color draining from her face. “It’s Nicole, isn’t it? I had a bad feeling about those two.”
“Nicole,” the woman’s husband echoed quietly.
People standing nearby caught the name and repeated it on a dozen startled tongues.
“Nicole? What about Nicole?”
“I thought so … I saw things …”
“This explains …”
The pregnant woman, Wendy Perini, put her arms around her husband. They clung to each other. They were listening. They were giving Miranda her chance to speak, and Jack blessed them for it.
“It’s over,” Miranda told the crowd. “Mason’s leaving town to keep it quiet. That’s why he wants all of us to move. That, and he wants the tithes from the profits when we sell.”
“Tithes,” Jack said. “I knew it. Money, power, sex.”
“Somebody needs to drag that man outside,” Wendy said. “I want a word with him.”
The teenager set his paintbrush on the lid of the paint can. “I’ll get him, Mom.”
He disappeared inside the house. One of the older women followed him at a run.
Miranda’s shoulders sagged as if she’d spent all her energy. Jack tugged her toward the edge of the lawn. She gripped his arm with both hands, like Martha had clung to the newel post in fear of coyotes.
News of the drama in the front yard spread fast. People began to drift outside, through the half-painted front door and through the garage. One of the men on the roof climbed down the ladder and sat cross-legged on the grass, combing it with his fingers. Everyone watched the house and waited. The halyard smacked the flagpole again and again, clanging and banging like an alarm bell.
The tall woman in denim began gathering like-minded people to her side. She twisted her hands together, over and over, speaking quietly. Rallying her troops. But an equal number of people drifted away from her, toward Miranda and the Perinis.
The church divided itself into two camps, about equally matched. A few people, including the man who sat combing the grass with his fingers, remained uncommitted.
The Perini boy exited the house, leaving the door open. “He’s coming.”
Mason stepped into the doorway. His pleasant smile faded as he took in his waiting audience. “What’s going on?” He zeroed in on Miranda. “What are you doing here?”
Miranda disentangled herself from Jack. “Mason, would you tell us about your relationship with Nicole, please?”
Mason shook his head. “What relationship? You have an evil imagination.”
“How do you know I wasn’t asking about a pastoral relationship?”
He spread his hands wide, appealing to the crowd. “You know Miranda,” he said. “She has a history of this kind of thing. Lies and insinuations.”
“Oh, really,” she said. “I do remember disagreeing with you about a number of things, but I don’t recall lying about any of it.” She turned toward the Perini couple. “Robert, you’re in the inner circle. Do you recall that I told lies?”
“No,” Perini said bluntly. “Never.”
His wife kicked an empty plastic flowerpot, sending it onto the sidewalk with a shallow clatter. “Never,” she echoed. “Miranda’s not a liar.”
Mason smiled sadly. “Come now, Wendy. You aren’t privy to everything that goes on in this church. Neither are you, Robert. Trust me, though, when I say that Miranda’s rebellion has been brewing for a long time. She wants to malign my good name, after everything I’ve done for her, and that hurts.” His voice remained steady. Calm. He knew how to work a crowd.
“Listen up, folks,” he continued in that friendly tone. “Miranda’s been through a lot, and maybe she’s a little unhinged right now. She needs our prayers, not our condemnation.”
Perini let go of his wife and closed in on Mason. “I don’t think you’re telling the whole story. I’m starting to understand why Nicole left the church.”
“Nicole left because she’s a rebel with an attitude problem,” Mason said.
Wendy Perini put her hands on her hips, accentuating her pregnant belly. “I should call and get her side of it.”
Mason’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he clenched his hands into fists. “Don’t—don’t you bother that young lady,” he said, his face turning red. “She has nothing to do with Miranda’s crazy stories.”
“We’ll see,” Wendy said. “We’ll see.” She turned to Miranda. “Where’s Abigail?”
Miranda shook her head. No one else tried to answer the question.
Mason’s eyes darted every which way as murmuring spread through the remnants of his flock. Several of the younger women sat on the grass in a semicircle. Some of them began to cry. A handful of men drifted out of the garage and stood in the sun, talking in low voices.
Apparently satisfied with the damage she’d wrought, Miranda returned to Jack. Taking his hand, she whispered in his ear. “I almost feel sorry for him.”
“Don’t,” Jack said. “He doesn’t deserve mercy.”
“Neither do we. That’s why it’s called mercy.”
Jack didn’t know how to answer that.
The man who’d remained on the roof came down the ladder. He retracted it with a great metallic rattling, tipped it sideways, and gave a mocking salute to Mason. “I’ve heard enough. I’ve seen enough. You can finish your own roof.”
“You don’t understand,” Mason said.
“I do,” said the Perini kid. “I understand.” He ran lightly up the steps, right under Mason’s nose, and replaced the lid on the paint can. He had the same pale coloring as his old-maid sister, but the set of his jaw hinted that he’d be making his own decisions. “I’m done,” he said.
The door was half green, half brown, with a few stray brush strokes of green encroaching on the brown. He left the door open and joined his parents and his sister on the grass.
The tall, denim-clad woman stalked up the steps to stand beside Mason, and a few of his other supporters joined her. Five men and three women, they huddled there with Mason, speaking quietly. Jack strained his ears but couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Down on the road, a vehicle slowed. Silence fell, like the dark hush before the first drops of a rainstorm. No one spoke. No one moved.
Mason squinted toward the road, and his face changed. Smiling like a crafty fox, he waited.
About the time Jack had reached the end of his patience and was on the verge of saying something—anything—Mason cleared his throat and struck a pose like a politician on the campaign trail. Head high, chest puffed out, hands relaxed.
“Let’s get back to Miranda’s problems, shall we?” he sa
id. “Why doesn’t somebody ask her about her son who died? Her first son. The one she never talks about.”
Jack wanted to storm the steps and pop the guy in the jaw. “That’s off limits.”
“It shouldn’t be. She concealed the death of a child. Her own child. Check it out, Jack. There’s a secret grave on her property.”
“What?” Jack sought Miranda’s eyes. “Concealed? Secret?”
She nodded her head, barely.
Stunned, he tried to process it. He’d assumed Jeremiah was buried in a cemetery somewhere, beside his father’s grave. Legally. Or cremated, legally.
“A secret grave,” Mason repeated. “That’s a felony. Isn’t it, officer?”
Tom Dean walked slowly onto the grass. His gun hung from his hip. Handcuffs too. They glinted in the sun. He stopped a few feet from Miranda.
The cavalry had shown up again. This time, it was on the wrong side.
Dean had never looked more mournful. “Mrs. Hanford, is there any truth to this allegation?”
“It’s true,” she said in a steady voice.
“Let’s walk down to my car, ma’am.”
Jack’s mouth filled with a metallic taste, and he wondered wildly if Dean would read Miranda her Miranda rights. A sick joke.
Jack seized her arm. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Hanford,” Dean said. “I can’t pretend I didn’t hear what I just heard in front of a crowd of witnesses.”
“Don’t interfere, Jack,” Miranda said. “Please. Don’t do anything to get yourself arrested. The children need you.”
Dean gave him a warning look. “Let me do my job. Don’t even follow us down to the road.”
“Jack, I asked him to come,” she said. “Remember?”
Numb, Jack nodded. He let go of her.
She faced Mason, who still stood on the porch. “This is my choice, not your revenge. So don’t enjoy it.” She dug into her pocket, pressed something into Jack’s hand, and brushed his cheek with her lips. “I know I can trust you to take care of the children.”
He found her house key in his hand. Finally, she’d given him his own key.
“Don’t lose it,” she added.
“Miranda, you can’t do this.”
“It’s done.”
“My car’s down at the road, Mrs. Hanford,” Dean said. “If you’d come with me, please.”
She gave Jack a hug so swift that he hardly had time to hug her back, and then she walked away, her head high. In jeans, with that cute haircut and her big purse slung over her shoulder, she could have been a suburban soccer mom, except a deputy followed her, slightly to her left and back a few paces. At least he hadn’t cuffed her.
“Lord, no.” Jack came out of his daze and started after them, but a firm hand clamped his shoulder.
“Wait,” Perini said. “Don’t run off. Let’s think it through. What can we do?”
Jack looked between Perini and his wife. “Can y’all vouch for the fact that Jeremiah’s death was accidental, at least?”
They shook their heads in unison. “I never even knew she’d had a Jeremiah,” Perini said.
Jack’s throat went dry, and he ran, his feet pounding down the slippery gravel to the road. The patrol car was double-parked beside a black pickup. Dean had already shut Miranda in the backseat cage like a common criminal. He’d set her purse on the trunk of the car and was leafing through one of those file folders.
“Dean!” Jack skidded to a halt beside the car.
Miranda stared through the window, her eyes huge. He placed one hand flat on the cold glass. She matched her hand to his, just for a moment, then lowered hers and looked away.
He remembered his written statement. I, R. Jackson Hanford, will not report Miranda Hanford to DFCS or to any other government agency, for anything, so help me God. Fat lot of good that did now that she’d reported herself.
He turned to Dean. “Help me out. What can I do? Who can I talk to?”
“An attorney might be helpful.” Dean continued examining her papers. Slow as Moses.
“What’s in the files? Did she tell you?”
“Yep, she told me.” Dean closed the file and picked up her purse. It looked small in his big hand. “We’ll be at the station. On the back side of city hall, right downtown.”
No mention of checkers and coffee now. Dean was all business. He climbed into the car, slammed the door, and drove away. In the rear window, Miranda’s head bobbed like a bird’s as the car rounded the curve and caught a pothole. Then she was gone.
Hamlet’s words wept in Jack’s head. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
“Not my sparrow. No.”
He ran for his car.
thirty-one
Alexander Whitlow was out of town, and Miranda declined to use another attorney. No legal advice could have swayed her into telling her story any differently.
She remembered the sheriff’s name from the last election. Dixon Sprague. Carl had voted for him. A good man, Carl had said. A believer, even if he didn’t have the whole truth of God.
As if anybody did.
The air was chilly in the conference room. Or did they call it an interrogation room? The walls were bare, and the floor was dingy. A bleak place. So many people must have sat in the same chair, clinging to hope. Or losing it.
About the same age as Thomas Dean, Sheriff Sprague had that same cautious, slow-moving way about him, as if he had all day to search for answers.
A female deputy named Lucy Silva had done most of the questioning. She was thorough but not harsh, and she had a way of biting her lip before she asked the difficult questions. She’d already heard the whole story, but she kept circling back for more details.
Lucy bit her lip now. “Why, exactly, did Jeremiah run for the cliffs?”
Miranda had been dreading that particular question. “He disobeyed me about some little thing. He was afraid he’d get a whipping when Carl came home.”
“Was Jeremiah expecting a particularly severe whipping?”
“When Carl gave a whipping, he meant business. He wasn’t abusive though. He loved our children.”
Lucy Silva exchanged glances with the sheriff. “What did you do when you arrived at the cliffs and saw that Jeremiah had fallen?”
“I tried to reach him, but I couldn’t. I took Timothy and Rebekah and ran back to the house, screaming. Carl had just come home from work. I started to call 911, but he—he yanked the phone out of my hand and then pulled the line out of the wall.”
Sprague frowned and wrote something on his notepad. He hadn’t been talking much. Just frowning. Making notes. And referring to the files from Mason’s office over and over, although each one held only three or four sheets of paper.
“Carl ran for the cliffs.” A spasm shook Miranda. “He came back carrying Jeremiah.”
Sprague made another note. “Don’t go on until you’re ready.”
“Carl helped me prepare Jeremiah’s body. He built a little pine coffin that night and dug the grave in the morning. We had a funeral service while the little ones were sleeping. Carl said there was nothing morally wrong with what we’d done, burying our own child on our own property. Legally though …” She stopped, searching for the right words. “He was so afraid that DFCS would take the younger children. He was strict, but he loved them. And we knew of good families who’d lost custody of their children because of anonymous and false accusations. Carl said it would be even worse for us. Jeremiah’s home birth with an uncertified midwife was illegal. Not reporting his birth was illegal. So Carl didn’t report Jeremiah’s death either.”
Sprague looked up. “I don’t understand how you kept a five-year-old child’s life and death a secret. Didn’t anybody notice he was missing? Friends, family, neighbors?”
“We had just moved here. We hadn’t met the neighbors. We hadn’t found a church yet. We didn’t have family. We still hadn’t met Jack.”
“Was Jeremiah the o
nly one whose birth wasn’t reported?”
“Yes. Starting with Timothy, we reported them all.”
“What made your husband change his mind about that?”
“I convinced him that we’d have problems if our children grew up without Social Security numbers, but he never reported Jeremiah’s birth. Carl was so afraid of the law.”
“Whew.” Sprague scanned his notes again. “Let me sum it up. Based on his religious beliefs and what I might call paranoia about the government, your husband neglected to notify the authorities when your first baby was born at home. Five years later, when that child ran from a whipping and died in a fall, your husband was afraid you would lose custody of the two younger children. He buried your son on your property and forced you to live as if your firstborn child had never existed. Is that accurate, Mrs. Hanford?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Was your pastor involved in that decision?”
“No, it was my husband’s decision. We didn’t meet Mason until later. Carl made me go to him for counseling.”
“Made you?”
“Carl thought I was suicidal. I wasn’t. I was grieving for Jeremiah, but Carl wouldn’t let me cry, even in our own home. Carl wouldn’t even let me say his name. He wanted Timothy to forget Jeremiah, so nobody at all would remember him.”
“Now you have six children, and none of them know about your first child?”
“I told them, not long ago, but they don’t know the details. Nobody knows all the details except Mason and me. Please don’t drag Jack into it. He had no idea that Carl and I did anything illegal.”
“And today, with most of the church assembled for a workday at your pastor’s home, he shared in public what you’d confessed to him in private. That you’d helped your husband conceal Jeremiah’s death.”
“Yes. I had just accused Mason of … moral failures. So I knew what was coming.”
“You knew he would retaliate by revealing the problems that you’d shared with him in confidence? And that’s why you’d already called my deputy?”
“Yes sir. I needed to get it off my chest anyway.” She inhaled so deeply that her ribs hurt like they hadn’t hurt in weeks. “Maybe I’ll go to prison, but at least my children will go to their legal guardian—a man I trust—and not to DFCS. And I won’t spend the rest of my life worrying that Mason will turn me in.”