But as soon as they arrived in his apartment and he kissed her, her anger with him almost melted away. They went at each other like sex-starved newlyweds. Afterward, when she was lying in his arms, he grinned shyly at her.
“Whatever you want, Vera. I will wait for you.”
Her stomach flipped. Was that what she wanted to hear? His feelings for her were growing. And she felt nothing but lust. All she wanted to do was sleep with him. That was not a good thing on which to build a lifelong relationship. She kept thinking it would fizzle out. But it hadn’t. Sometimes she would lie awake at night remembering the way he touched her, the way he made her feel—like a vibrant, sexy, whole person. She was a middle-aged mother. Her feelings of lust should be set aside with her youth. But it was what it was.
But she had never totally considered his feelings and now wondered if she was being fair to him by considering him only as a lover, nothing more. She’d always wondered if you could have sex without love—if you could actually ever enjoy it. Good Southern Baptist girl that she was, she’d never truly considered that yes, you could enjoy sex with a man and not be in love with him.
Which was exactly what Bill had tried to tell her when she found out about his cheating on her.
Chapter 65
When Annie opened the unlocked door of the little house Cookie had lived in, she was surprised that the heat was still on. It was so nice and warm, in contrast to the cold November air. She walked into the empty living room, wondering what had happened to Cookie’s yoga things that were in there. Did her landlord take them? She was hoping to find something of Cookie’s. Anything.
Out of the hospital several days, Annie had just filed her latest story. During her research, she had been floored when she spoke to the FBI agents, who confirmed her suspicions—that the group of people on the mountain was a cult of sorts, that it was more than a front. Many outsiders were coming into the area to study with them. When she asked one of the agents about the anti-Semitism, he confirmed that he thought it was one of the precepts of the cult. She shivered, thinking about being on that mountain with a bunch of people who hated her because she was Jewish.
“These folks are very clever. They know the legal system and are working it. Until one of them steps out of line, there’s not much we can do about it,” the agent had revealed.
“Murder is out of line,” Annie had pointed out.
“Yes, but that had nothing to do with the cult. It was one individual.”
“It seems like the murders had a ritualistic element, with the runic patterns cut into the victims. I even heard them mention the word sacrifice when I was out on the mountain the night I was shot.”
He’d sighed impatiently. “Many murderers have a ritual. We don’t think it has anything to do with the group,” he’d said in a clipped voice, leading her to believe the case was closed.
But what about the word sacrifice, which she’d overheard that night on the mountain? Why was he ignoring that?
Why can’t I leave this alone?
She looked out Cookie’s sliding glass door at the mountains. She’d never known that Cookie had such a beautiful view—no wonder her scrapbook pop-out so accurately reflected the shape of those mountains. She saw them every day in all their glory. In fact, it was almost a straight line from her house to the mountains. Interesting.
She walked into Cookie’s bedroom, where it seemed to be even warmer. The warmth circled Annie as she took in the empty room. Even the closet was empty.
Where was Cookie? Annie felt the sharp, cutting pang of friendship loss, and she leaned against the wall, suddenly sobbing. It was almost as if Cookie had died. Annie had been so busy getting better, spinning her stories, that she hadn’t allowed it to sink in.
She slid down the wall and sat on the floor. A sudden heaviness came over her. Ah, maybe she’d pushed herself too hard. She had played with the boys earlier in the day and wanted to leave for the crop early, so she didn’t get a chance to take a nap.
Cookie was gone.
And nobody knew where to even start to look. There were the doctors who claimed she was an expert at escaping and reinventing herself. Didn’t she care about the people she left behind, if that was the case? Annie wondered if they were real doctors. Were they FBI? She had no idea and made a mental note to try to track them down.
And then there was Beatrice’s story that she told the police—that Cookie was traveling through time, or was adept at making herself invisible and moving through space? The police had shrugged her off as an old fool who’d finally lost her quantum physics marbles. But Annie knew better. Still, it didn’t help in trying to make sense of anything, and maybe it didn’t matter. Because Cookie was gone—and that was how she wanted it to be, or needed it to be.
Annie felt herself give way to weariness, lifted her knees, and draped her arms over them. She laid her head down. Closed her eyes. Man, she’d nearly lost her mind over this thing. Didn’t see things clearly at all. It was almost as if the whole thing were a misty dream. Maybe it was time to stop being a reporter.
“No,” a feminine voice said. “You must continue. There’s more for you to do.”
She struggled to lift her head up. Did she really hear that? Or had she slipped into sleep and was dreaming? She looked around and saw nothing. “Cookie?”
The windows in the bedroom flew open, and yet more warmth surrounded Annie. She watched as the brown leaves blew around, and she stood up to latch the windows. She turned around to a pile of leaves in the room. Oh well, it simply didn’t matter. Nobody lived there anymore. She shoved the leaves over to the corner and realized there was a piece of paper in the middle of it all. A picture. Annie brushed away the dirt. It was a photo of Cookie holding Elizabeth. A smile spread across Annie’s face, and her heart lifted.
“That picture looks old,” Sheila said as the group gathered around to see it.
“It was outside for a while, I think,” Annie said. “I’m just glad to have it. I’ll make copies for everybody,”
“I had seen another picture like that in her book, remember?” Vera said. “Whoever Cookie is or was, I believe she loved my girl.”
“Indeed,” Sheila said. “Does anybody know what happened to the baby?”
“She’s with her father now,” Annie said. “Zeb. Can you believe that? That beautiful little baby belongs to Zeb McClain, Tina Sue’s husband. He lied to me, obviously, when he said he didn’t know Sarah. At first, Sarah’s parents were keeping her. I’d feel better about that.”
“I wonder how Tina Sue feels about that,” Paige said.
“I bet I know,” Vera said, sitting down to her own scrapbook project, picking up her scissors. “It’s not pleasant. It’s not the first time he’s cheated on her.”
DeeAnn held up a recipe card embellished with pie stickers. “I can’t imagine a younger woman wanting to sleep with my husband. In fact, I can’t imagine anybody wanting to sleep with him.” She howled with laughter.
The other women joined in.
Annie took a deep breath, taking in her friends. Even with all the weirdness in this community, she guessed these women made living here completely worthwhile. Although her children’s schooling would need to be figured out with this Weekly Religious Education program. She had just begun to fight that.
And then there was this group of neo-Nazis living on Jenkins Mountain. She vowed to figure all that out. She knew there was more to it than the authorities were leading her to believe. But how to find out?
“At least one murderer is off the street,” Paige said.
“Make that two murderers,” DeeAnn reminded her. “Two murderers in a little over two years.”
“Interesting,” Vera said after a moment. “Both of them have connections to Jenkins Mountain and the Nest.”
“That’s no big deal,” DeeAnn said. “Most of the people at this table could say the same thing. Whether it’s us or our husbands.”
Everybody, perhaps, except for Annie.
&
nbsp; “I just can’t get over Zeb McClain as a guru. Jeez, what’s the world coming to?” Sheila said.
Something clicked in Annie’s brain. She’d known gurus before—both the real kind and the phony kind, the ones who wanted nothing more than their followers’ money or sex, or were on some ego trip, or just plain mental cases. Zeb definitely had charisma—just as other gurus had. She’d known women who appeared to be sane and intelligent, who would sink into submissive roles to be close to a guru. She’d known men who had sold their homes and handed over the money to their gurus. She’d known children who grew up in communes under gurus, never knowing who their father was or the outside world.
“Does anybody know who the police were getting ready to arrest when Luther confessed?” Annie asked.
“Wasn’t it Cookie?” Sheila said.
“At first,” Annie replied. “But didn’t someone say that they were getting ready to arrest someone else? I was in the hospital, and I kind of remember a conversation about this.”
“That’s right,” Vera said. “I was in the station with Mama when they brought the men in.”
“Men?”
“I couldn’t see their faces. It was pouring down rain. I was in my car. But once I was inside, sitting for a while with Mama and Bill, Detective Bryant came in, told us to leave, that they had just gotten a confession.”
“Okay, so if it was Luther that you saw, who else would have been there?”
Vera shrugged.
“Maybe it was Zeb,” Sheila said. “Makes sense. After all, he is the guru,” she added with a smirk.
Annie needed to hear someone else say that.
Would a man confess to murder to protect his guru? Oh, now. She was leaping to a conclusion, but her gut was telling that Luther’s confession was not exactly right. Did she believe he could kill somebody? Yes. Did she believe that he killed Sarah and Rebecca and tried to kill that baby? She wasn’t so sure. Nah, it was too crazy, even for her. And besides, they had Luther’s DNA all over the place—even on the baby’s clothing from the night he, evidently, dropped her off at Vera’s place. Annie’s brain was still foggy after her hospital stay. But her gut had a mind of its own.
Chapter 66
Annie left the crop a little early. She was still feeling a lack of energy and needed to chill on her couch and sort through some of her bizarre memories of the shooting and her hospital stay. As the blue lights of the TV screen flickered in the otherwise dark room, she sank into the couch cushions and noticed the stack of cards brought over from the hospital. She reached for them, thinking she really had not gotten a chance to look over them.
She heard the toilet flush and wondered which of her boys was roaming through the house. Soon Mike padded into the room.
“Hey, you’re home early,” he said and sat down next to her. “Something wrong?”
“Just tired,” she said. “Not myself.”
She opened one of the cards and laughed. That DeeAnn always made her smile. The next card was from her editor—very conservative blue. The card after that was thicker than the others.
“Give yourself some time, Annie. You’ve been through hell,” he said and placed his arm around her as she was opening the next card. A note fell out. It was from Hannah Bowman.
Please help me. I am afraid for my life.
Annie gasped. Tears stung her eyes. “Hannah,” she could barely say.
“What?” Mike said and reached for the note. “Good God. We need to call Bryant.”
“Wait,” Annie said. “She didn’t ask the police for help. She asked me.”
“Annie, I love you, but there is no way I am allowing you to go traipsing off to a godforsaken place to help a young woman who may be in danger. Besides, they’ve caught the murderer. He confessed.”
“Did you just say ‘allow’ me, Michael Jonathon?”
“Annie!”
“For God’s sake, Mike, do you think I’m a different person because I’m a mother now? Do you think that gives you the right to be in charge of me? Since when do you allow me to do anything?”
“Are we going to discuss semantics now? Because you damn well know what I mean. I mean I don’t want you putting yourself in danger. We moved here for you to be safer, for us to be here for our boys, remember?”
“I know, Mike,” she said and sighed. “But it looks like I’m still a reporter. And more than that, I am a person. This young woman has reached out to me, and it might already be too late.”
“The police have—”
“I don’t believe that young man killed those young women,” she said for the first time, even though she’d felt it for some time.
“I’m confused. Luther confessed, right?”
“People confess for all sorts of reasons. Not always because they are guilty.”
“What makes you think Luther didn’t kill those women?”
“It’s just a feeling I have, Mike. And this whole case doesn’t make sense to me.”
“So you’re going to risk your life because of a feeling you have? Okay,” he said, running his fingers through his dark hair. “So, what if your feeling is right? What if you go up to the mountain to rescue this girl and get hurt again, or worse . . . ? Annie, what would I and the boys do without you?”
His brown eyes were filling with tears. This wasn’t just a power play. He wasn’t simply trying to tell her what to do. He was genuinely concerned. Every once in a while, Annie was struck by the feeling that she didn’t deserve this man. He loved her and wanted to protect her. Why was her first inclination to be angry with him?
“I mean, you were just shot. If that didn’t scare some sense into you, I just don’t know what the problem is,” he went on.
She took a deep breath.
“Okay, Mike. I am scared. I don’t want to go back to Jenkins Mountain. But Hannah is in danger. And maybe there’s a reason she asked me and not the police.”
“Yes, but you can’t risk going up there. Let’s call Bryant.”
“Bryant!” If steam could come out of her ears, it would have been filling up the room.
“What’s your problem with him?”
“Where do I start? He’s sexist, for one thing, a smart-ass, for another. Not helpful. A liar. Shall I go on?”
Mike grinned at Annie. “So he just sounds like most of the cops you’ve known. C’mon. He’s a cop. He’s got to be a good guy, basically. Right?”
“Okay,” she said, hesitating. “I’ll call, but you have to promise you will let me handle it.”
“Pinkie swear,” he said and kissed her.
Chapter 67
By the time Bryant came to the door, it was close to midnight. Annie had not calmed down, even though Mike had made her some chamomile tea, which usually helped soothe her.
“Can I get you some tea or something?” Mike said to him.
The detective looked at Annie. “I’ll have what she’s having. Thank you.” He sat across from Annie at the kitchen table. “What’s going on?”
“I went to the crop tonight, came home a bit early, started going through cards, and this slipped out of the one that Hannah Bowman gave me.”
“Whoa,” he said, reading it over.
Mike sat a cup of steaming tea in front of him.
“But we have the killer now,” Bryant said.
“She gave this to me after Luther confessed.”
“Are you sure?” His eyebrows knit. “I mean, she may not have known about the confession at that point.”
“No, I can’t be sure,” she said. “Everything was foggy for me. I was on all this medication.”
He sipped from his cup. “Interesting,” he said.
Annie wasn’t sure if he was talking about the tea or what she’d just said to him.
“I was shot,” she told him. “It’s taken a while for me to sort through this. But nothing has made sense from the beginning. It’s one of the strangest cases I’ve ever covered.”
“What do you mean?”
“The
rune symbols are one thing, but the other things go in this order. The CDC showing up quickly during the second murder sighting, the FBI sending undercover agents here, and the way Cookie was held so long without being charged.”
The detective nearly choked on his tea. His eyes met hers as her husband sat next to her.
“Flight risk, my ass,” she finally said, glaring at him.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want answers, and I want you to help me rescue Hannah.”
“First, Hannah is in no danger. We have the killer. And second, why would I tell you anything? This is police business.”
Mike’s arm went around her in a protective stance.
“I’m a crime reporter, Bryant. I’ve worked on a lot of cases, but nothing like this. At some point everything comes together and makes sense. The more I think about it, I think we’re missing a huge part of the puzzle. But you know what? I can live with that. I don’t need to do your job for you. If you feel like Luther is your man, then fine. But how difficult would it be for us to go and check on Hannah?”
“Us?” Mike said. “I don’t think so.”
“I agree with your husband, Annie. Let’s not rush into anything. You’re barely healed from your wound. But here’s what I’ll do. I’ll give the bakery a call in the morning to check on her, okay?”
“Let’s call now,” Annie said.
“It’s almost one a.m.”
“The first shift is probably getting in now,” Annie said, handing him the telephone.
“Nah, that’s okay. I got it,” he said and pulled out his cell phone.
Annie’s heart was racing. Was Hannah in trouble? Were they too late? Why hadn’t she looked at her cards earlier?
Within moments Bryant ascertained that Hannah hadn’t been to work in two days. Her parents didn’t have a telephone, so nobody from the bakery was able to call to see where she was. If her parents knew she was missing, they would deal with it in their own community.
Bryant clicked his cell phone off. “Son of a bitch. She’s missing.” His face was an angry red.
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