Grounds to Believe

by Shelley Bates

  A rush of impatience so strong it was almost anger swept through Julia, and it was only with the greatest effort that she prevented herself from snapping at her brother-in-law.

  “Be careful,” Owen cautioned her. “I would hate to see you drawn away and deceived if Ross’s motivations turn out to be less than pure.”

  What about your motivations? Julia wondered. What on earth are they? “I will,” she promised, the lie cold on her lips. Affront and impatience battled angrily inside her, though she kept her face calm.

  “I know you will,” Owen said complacently, and got up. Julia started to her feet, but he wasn’t finished yet. He wandered over to the bookshelf, where her pictures were ranged in a clutter of silver and porcelain frames. He touched one of Derrick and herself, taken last summer during a hike along the river.

  “Derrick came for a Visit with me a few days ago,” he said. “He was quite upset.”

  “Oh?” She closed her eyes for a moment. Would this never end?

  “He’s afraid, Julia. Afraid that your relationship with Mr. Malcolm is going to jeopardize his Deaconship. The announcement hasn’t been made yet, after all.” Julia stayed on the couch, holding his gaze, waiting. After a moment, Owen filled the silence. “I have to sympathize with the poor guy. He hasn’t seen you in a couple of weeks, he says. He’s getting worried.”

  “I don’t know why. Everyone knows he’s the most suitable for the title.”

  “And everyone knows that isn’t all there is to it. He can’t be Deacon without you as his wife.” Owen made an impatient movement, and the picture fell on its face. “Don’t play games with him, Julia. It’s been settled for years. Why not say yes and put the poor boy’s mind at rest?”

  Julia turned her face away before he saw it set with rebel-lion. Why should she settle for a boy when she wanted a man, with a man’s responsibilities and thoughts? Why was no one asking about what she felt? Why did she sense that the only reason Derrick loved her was because he loved the Deaconship too? And why did this strike no one but her as backward?

  Ross was right. She was Derrick’s ticket to the big time, and she was done with catering to his and everyone else’s feelings before her own.

  “Julia?” Owen said, reminding her that he had asked a question.

  “All right,” she said.

  “All right, you’ll marry him?”

  “All right, I’ll set his mind at rest.”

  Owen smiled. “That’s our girl. It will make him so happy. Well, I’d best be going. Madeleine will be wondering what’s happened to me.”

  “Give her my love,” Julia said, and practically bounded across the floor to open the door for him. “And a special hug for Ryan.”

  “I will. See you Sunday. Enjoy the young people’s meeting.”

  She smiled for an answer so she wouldn’t have to lie. Then she locked the door behind him and picked up the phone.

  Ross returned the page so quickly she thought he must have been sitting next to a phone himself.

  “Is the offer of a ride and dinner still open?” she asked abruptly as if she hadn’t spent most of a week in total agony at being away from him.

  He paused, and with a sudden stab of apprehension she wondered if he’d changed his mind. He could be packing up to leave, for all she knew. Or at the very least, he’d go to the young people’s meeting without her, and take someone home who knew her own mind.

  Getting acquainted with one’s mind was a more painful process than she’d anticipated.

  “It is,” he said at last. “Nice to hear from you and all that. Aren’t you going to the meeting?”

  “I just had a Visit from my brother-in-law, and from what he said I may as well put on those jeans and ride through town in a—” she tried to think of the most shocking thing a woman could wear “—a red tank top.”

  “You wouldn’t get any argument from me.” A smile colored his tone. “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to know if you were seducing me away from the Elect.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said no, of course. What I don’t understand is why he thinks that thinking on my own means I’m getting ready to leave.”

  “Sometimes learning to think for ourselves unsettles people. Especially if they’re used to having their thinking done for them. Rules and regulations create a nice, safe environment where you know what the expectations are, but I’ve found it doesn’t allow much room for growth with God.”

  Julia thought of the young people’s meeting tonight. She’d been to dozens of them since she’d reached the Age of Understanding, which the Elect estimated to be twelve. The age where a child could be expected to make her own choices in matters of the Spirit, as Jesus had done when He’d stayed in the temple and allowed his parents to leave without him. But really, there wasn’t a choice. Had never been a choice. She could go to the meeting and hear what she’d been hearing all her life. Don’t do this. Don’t wear that. Say this and not that. Think this and not that.

  The prospect of a ride and dinner with Ross, in comparison, seemed like the kind of freedom she’d only read about in books.

  “You seem to know a lot about God,” she said.

  “I only know what He means to me,” he replied simply. “And what He’s done for me.”

  “But how can that be?” she asked, more of herself than of him. “You aren’t Elect.”

  “God is bigger than the Elect, sweetie. He can’t be forced into the boundaries of one group’s belief.”

  Melchizedek had always said that couldn’t be true. Worldly people in worldly religions were deceived, and that was that. But here was Ross, who seemed to have a better handle on spiritual matters than she did, proving Melchizedek wrong.

  Melchizedek couldn’t be wrong. He was the mouthpiece of God.

  But what if he wasn’t?

  Lord, help thou mine unbelief. The cry of the sinner echoed in Julia’s head. If Melchizedek was wrong, then the Elect were wrong, and everything she’d stood for all her life was just a big lie. She’d lost her childhood and half her womanhood wearing black and believing she was one of the chosen people.

  But what if she wasn’t?

  Nausea that had nothing to do with imaginary flu bugs began to roll in her stomach.

  “Julia? Are you still there?”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m here. But I’m very confused.”

  “I have a solution for that. Let’s get out of Dodge.”

  Running away never solved anything. But she could look at it a different way…as running toward something. Taking action, as Ross had said in the restaurant.

  She just didn’t know what it was yet.

  “All right,” she replied. “Now?”

  “Yes, now. It’s a beautiful day. By the time you get those jeans on, I’ll be there.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Any preferences on where we’re going?” Ross shouted over his shoulder.

  The wind had plastered a lock of hair against Julia’s lips. She pulled it away. “No,” she shouted back.

  “How about taking in a festival?”

  “I’ve never been to one. Melchizedek says they’re frivolous.”

  Ross laughed, and accelerated up the on-ramp to the highway. “Sounds like a good enough reason to go.”

  “There are some within riding distance of here,” she shouted. “If we’re going east, we could try Ainsley, Pitchford or Middleton. Pitchford starts today, I think, but it’s ninety miles away.”

  For a second he forgot to shift, and the motorcycle whined in complaint. He kicked it into gear.

  “Pitchfork?”

  “Pitchford. As in the Pitchford Plum Festival. I read the entertainment section of the paper in the bookshop, but don’t tell anyone.”

  He pushed the bike to the upper limits of its speed range. “Pitchford it is.”

  A shiver that had nothing to do with wind speed crept up his back. God’s hand was in this, no question about it. S
hould he let Julia in on the real reason they were going? Bad enough he’d encouraged her to give the young people’s meeting a miss so that he could get her alone and learn more about her sister and their family life. Worse that he’d caused her to break the rules about her example. But tell her that he was looking for a woman and child he’d never seen?

  She’d given up a lot for him, and would probably end up giving more once they returned to Hamilton Falls. The least he could do in return was let her in and share the quest.

  It wouldn’t hurt to have another pair of eyes to help him, either.

  When they rolled into Pitchford, they found roadblocks set up all around the downtown area, and tents containing booths and stages where local musicians played.

  He was thankful it wasn’t as crowded as some of the big-city events where he’d done surveillance. Still, finding a strange woman and child wasn’t going to be easy. He had to enlist Julia’s help.

  She was bending over a table where a vendor had spread a sparkling trove of bead necklaces. But from her expression, you’d think they were the contents of a Spanish galleon.

  She looked up when he stopped beside her. “It’s such a sin to look at these,” she said with a last reluctant glance. “I shouldn’t tempt myself. It only makes it harder. But then I see something like those sea-glass necklaces and I literally have to march myself away.”

  To put action to words, she squared her shoulders and walked in the opposite direction, where there was a stand selling sausages wrapped in pastry. He bought four and offered one to her, then looked up at the pricing board. “Two lemonades, too, please.”

  Something about the sign caught his attention. A design was painted on either side of the booth’s name—a snake with its tail in its mouth, and within the circle of its body, a depiction of the planet Earth.

  An apocalypse symbol. He’d seen variations of it in a number of his cases.

  Something—a feeling of impending change, maybe, or a sense that something big was about to happen—made him marvel at the intricacy of God’s plans for his life.

  “What organization runs this booth?” he asked the proprietor, a teenage girl with a ring in her left eyebrow.

  “My church,” she said. “That’ll be three bucks.”

  “What church is that?”

  “We’re a forward-looking group that focuses on heaven, not earth,” she replied, as if she’d read the marketing literature and knew it by heart. “We concentrate on the joy of the future rather than the sins of the present.”

  Ross ignored the cognitive dissonance that told him a kid like this should be out playing soccer and focusing on being a kid, not reciting somebody else’s cant. “Do you have a name?”

  She nodded. “We recognize each other by the sign of the Seventh Seal. Would you like to come to one of our services? It’ll be right after the fair closes tonight, in the town square.”

  Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Ray. And thank you, Miriam, wherever you are, for talking about pitchforks where someone could hear you.

  “I’ll look forward to that,” he said. “Do you know someone named Miriam?”

  The girl nodded. “That’s my aunt’s name. A bunch of women in my church use it. I picked Deborah, myself. You know, the prophet? But my mom still calls me Lisa, even though she knows I hate it.”

  Had he really expected Deborah/Lisa would just point and say, “Oh, sure, she’s right over there”?

  He took the lemonades and handed one to Julia. “Come on.” She looked up in surprise at his tone. “We have to talk.”

  He led her some distance away, where people lay on the grass on blankets and ate picnics out of baskets. Normal people. Ross couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a picnic lunch. Even as kids, his family had tended more to concrete basketball courts and takeout, not leisurely homemade lunches.

  “What’s wrong, Ross?” Julia asked. “Is the sausage bad? Mine was pretty good.”

  “Want another one?” He handed her the second sausage and took a fortifying bite of his own, stalling for time. He’d made the decision to tell her about Kailey, but how much further should he go? He had to talk about how Annie’s disappearance had changed his life without revealing how it had propelled him into cult investigations—and the whole reason he was in Hamilton Falls.

  “There are a few things I haven’t told you,” he began.

  She bit into her sausage and gazed at him, waiting. What had happened to Kailey had been such a huge part of his inner life that he’d actually never given any thought to how he might broach the subject aloud. And he was becoming more and more convinced that somehow, some way, the little girl with Miriam must have been Kailey. Otherwise, why had the Lord gone to all the trouble to direct him here?

  “Remember how I said that my wife and daughter had been killed by a drunk driver?”

  She nodded, and her eyes filled with compassion.

  “Well, that wasn’t quite true.” He looked up, but her face hadn’t changed. She merely waited for him to tell her in his own time. “I’ve never been married. About seven years ago, the woman I was living with joined a religious group called the Church of the Seventh Seal.”

  Julia sat up and glanced back toward the food stalls. “Didn’t that girl say something about them?”

  “I know. It may not be the same group. If it is, they’ve changed some.” Maybe they were going public, targeting a different demographic and easing up on the frumpy look for women. “Anyhow, the group I knew is one of those groups with guns, hiding out in the hills and waiting for the end of the world. Anne took our daughter with her. Kailey. It took me a year to find them again so I could serve her with custody papers, but when I did they disappeared, and I’ve been looking for them ever since.”

  She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. Which, in a way, she hadn’t. “You have a daughter? Alive?” She sounded a little winded. “You’re single? Not a widower?”

  “Yes. And no. But an odd thing happened. Some woman named Miriam called an old friend of mine trying to find me, and she told him that Annie is dead and she—Miriam—has Kailey. Until I talked to my buddy, I didn’t know for sure that Kailey was alive. I really was on a road trip looking for some kind of solace.” He gave her the ghost of a smile. “Which I think I might have found.”

  Sure, she was a little shocked, but if he hoped for an answering smile, he was disappointed.

  “I suppose it amounts to the same thing, Ross, but you didn’t have to lie about being married. Nobody’s going to condemn you for your relationships before you knew God.”

  “That’s what drove me back to God,” he said gently. “I had no one else to turn to.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him, focusing on some internal struggle. Then she looked up. “But about this woman, Miriam…you don’t think she kidnapped Kailey, do you?” Julia’s voice filled with the beginnings of fear for his sake.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it. I think she was trying to get her back to me. But there are two problems. A, she left the message and disappeared again, and B, the description we have of the girl doesn’t match what I know of Kailey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He explained about the age difference and the girl with gray eyes.

  Julia sat up. “How old do you think Ryan is?”

  “I know how old he is. He’s four.” He didn’t tell her the reason he knew was because of the information in the little boy’s file.

  “But he doesn’t look it, does he? They wouldn’t let him start preschool because he was so small and sick. If these people haven’t been feeding Kailey properly, she’s not going to thrive. She could be seven. She just might look five because she hasn’t had vegetables and grains and things that are good for her.”

  He fought down the surge of hope. “That still doesn’t explain the eye color.”

  “Ross, a baby’s eye color can be completely different from a child’s. Look at my friend Claire. Her baby pictures have big blue
china-plate eyes. Now they’re green. They started changing when she was in elementary school.”

  He gazed at her thoughtfully, almost afraid to let himself hope. But where he couldn’t put hope safely in human hands, he could put it in God’s. And the Lord seemed to know what He was doing today.

  “You could be right,” he acknowledged. “The reason we’re here isn’t because I wanted to set you on the path to perdition by taking you to a fruit festival. It’s so we can look for this Miriam and the little girl. My buddy says she told someone about a festival and a pitchfork. This is about as close as it gets to both.”

  Julia was already on her feet, picking up their cups and napkins. “What are we waiting for?”

  “The description I have of Miriam is that she’s in her fifties, wearing a flowered cotton dress and a gray sweater, with her hair pulled up in a bun.”

  “Except for the flowers, that describes half the women in the Elect,” Julia remarked. “But the good thing is, there aren’t going to be any Elect here. That’s got to narrow the field some.”

  “I have a feeling the older generation of Sealers have standards of appearance that Melchizedek would approve.” He caught up to her by the trash bin. “We’re going to put some thought behind this. The area isn’t that big. If each of us searches the fair in a grid, one from each side, we can meet in the middle and compare notes. Say, by the sausage stand in thirty minutes.”

  “Done.”

  “And no sneaking peeks at necklaces.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t worry. I know how to focus.”

  No doubt she did. Ross watched her until she disappeared into the crowd, and began quartering the booths and stalls, looking in shops, sliding into and out of groups of people, searching constantly for a woman with gray hair worn up. He had no idea what Kailey looked like now except for the sketch Ray had been able to get. Any little girl he saw chasing her friends on the grass or darting into a booth could be his daughter. He’d once thought he would just know when he saw her again, with some internal knowledge special to fathers, but in the long, hard years in between he’d come to learn that it didn’t work that way. At this rate, they’d both have to go in for genetic testing before he’d know for sure.