Shadows on the Sand

by Gayle Roper

  32

  This surf fishing was a lot more complicated than fishing out of Greg’s boat. First there was the size of the poles. Then there was the problem of casting into the incoming tide without getting all wet or getting your line snagged on the nearby jetty because you were a lousy caster. Stripers followed the smaller fish that came in with the tide and the hurricane residue. For some reason the middle of the beach between Twentieth and Twenty-First was a great place to catch the big silver and black fish. Made as much sense to me as stopping at a particular spot in the bay had, but then, I’m neither a fish nor a real fisherman.

  I was standing there, rod in hand, trying to tell myself my arms weren’t heavy enough to fall off when Greg stuck two cylindrical tubes into the sand.

  “Drop the rod in here until something happens. It’s too heavy for you to hold.”

  “Thank you!” I slid my rod into the holder and shook my arms to release the tension of holding the rod so tightly. “So we just stand here and wait?”

  He nodded. “But with any luck not for long.”

  The sky was gray, which might or might not mean rain, and the wind off the ocean was strong and humid, though not particularly chill. The water was agitated, the waves more pronounced than usual, and high tide would creep farther up the beach than usual. The massive Hurricane Marcel was hundreds of miles out to sea, but its reach was long.

  I sat on the dry sand and prepared to be bored. I was a doer, and sitting for too long was hard for me. At the moment the last thing I wanted was downtime in which to think.

  I watched a pair of boys about ten years old playing catch farther up the beach and wondered if they’d like a third. Then Greg sat beside me, and I decided I wasn’t bored after all, especially when he slid an arm around my waist.

  Clooney appeared in the distance, red spade and bucket in one hand, metal detector in the other. He stopped for a moment to talk to the boys, and he reached in his bucket twice and pulled out something for each boy. They studied what he’d given them as he started toward Greg and me.

  “Thanks,” one of the boys yelled after him, belatedly remembering his manners.

  “Yeah, thanks!” echoed the other.

  He gave them a little wave over his shoulder and continued toward us, his ponytail blowing out behind him.

  “Well, look who’s trying her luck,” he called as he neared.

  “You ever do this?” I called back, pushing away hair that had blown into my mouth.

  “Not me. Too much like work.”

  At that moment Greg got a strike. He jumped up, grabbed his rod, and began to reel in. Whatever was on the hook fought valiantly while he labored to bring it home as Clooney and I cheered him on. So did the ball-playing boys, who were excited over the battle between man and denizen of the deep.

  “I’ve never had quite this much trouble with a striper,” Greg managed between pulls on his pole and the quick winding of his reel. Then he pulled the rod high again and wound quickly as he lowered his bowed pole toward the water. Pull, lower and wind, pull, lower and wind.

  “Maybe it’s not a striper,” one boy yelled.

  Seemed an obvious possibility to me, but what did I know about stripers?

  “It’s a great white,” called the other and was then booed down by his buddy because there was no dorsal fin showing above the waves.

  Greg’s catch broke the surface, and both kid one and I were right. It wasn’t a striper. It was a ray.

  “Eee-yew,” shouted the boys. “Ugly!” They waded into the water to get a closer look.

  Clooney laughed. “No wonder you had trouble. Imagine all the drag from those wings.”

  With mutters and head shakes, Greg dragged the skate the rest of the way in, pulled the hook, and released it while the boys cheered. He grabbed another strip of squid and baited his hook. He cast over the foaming breakers and grinned at me.

  “Never caught one of them before.” He lowered his pole into a holder.

  The excitement over, the boys went back to playing ball, and it was just the three of us.

  “Here,” Clooney said to me. “I’ve got a present for you.” He reached into his bucket and pulled out a sandy woman’s watch. He held it out to me, and I took it.

  I examined the piece, delicate, feminine, gold with black numbers on a white face. Its band was more like a bangle than the usual stretch style of the numerous inexpensive watches I’d had through the years.

  “This is not a Timex,” I said. “This is a very good watch, and it’s studded with what I bet are real diamonds.”

  “You’re right. Those aren’t cubic zirconias, not on a Piaget.”

  “I bet someone misses it.” I could imagine a distraught woman coming back to the beach—this past summer? Last year? Whenever she realized she’d lost the watch? She’d spend time searching where she thought she’d been sitting when she took it off so she could go in the water. Maybe she cried when she couldn’t find it because it had been a special gift and its loss hurt.

  With gentle fingers I brushed off some of the sand that still clung to it. “Will it ever work again?”

  “Only a jeweler can tell you that. Regardless, it’s yours because of the symbolism.”

  I looked at him, uncertain what he meant.

  “There’s a time to every purpose under heaven.” He looked at Greg, who was studying the watch over my shoulder.

  My face warmed. “Clooney!”

  “It’s all good,” he said. “And it is about time. For both of you.”

  I made believe I wasn’t embarrassed. “So says a lifelong bachelor.” I closed my hand around the watch. “Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “What would I do with a woman’s watch?”

  I smiled to myself. Heaven forbid I think him a nice man. It went against his long-established image, an image everyone who knew him at all saw through.

  “By the way.” I hated to bring up a painful topic, but I had to. “I left a voice mail for you. Andi took off again.”

  Clooney swore.

  “I think she’s hiding from Bill.”

  He shrugged. “He’s a jerk, but I don’t think he’d hurt her.”

  “She left a note indicating that he killed Jase.”

  “She said Bill killed him?” Clooney seemed genuinely surprised.

  “B-I-L-K-I-L-J. Greg took it to the police.”

  Greg nodded. “They’re taking it seriously. They want to talk to him again, press him.”

  Clooney snorted. “Bill’s many things—arrogant, insensitive, stupid—but I doubt homicidal. He’s not the problem where Andi’s concerned. I mean, he is a problem, but not like you’re suggesting. The real issue is that cult, I’ll bet anything.”

  “What cult?” How’d we get from Andi’s running to talking about a cult? “You think she took off to join one?”

  Clooney tossed his shovel in frustration. It flipped once and landed blade down in the sand, handle quivering. “Of course not. She’s running from The Pathway, not to it. She’s been upset ever since it came out that Jase was a member.”

  Greg’s pole began to sing as the line played out. He raced to it, lifting it out of its holder and beginning the struggle with whatever he’d hooked.

  I stayed with Clooney. “I’m missing something here. Why should it upset Andi so much that a guy she didn’t know all that well was a member of a cult in Arizona?”

  “Because her parents are members.”

  “Yikes!”

  “Tell me about it.” He looked disgusted. “They suddenly got religion and forced Andi and her sister, Becca, to join with them.”

  My mind was zipping around corners and arriving at a destination that unsettled me. “She came to you after she ran away from The Pathway?”

  He nodded. “She’s such a brave little thing, but all this Jase business has brought back too many memories.”

  Another posttraumatic stress victim.

  He pulled his baseball cap off and slapped it back on, pulling his p
onytail through the back opening. “I’d like to string up her parents. First off, they weren’t some green kids who got taken in. They were in their forties. Andi’s mom might be my niece, but she’s got a lot to answer for as far as I’m concerned.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder which was worse: having my mother or having Andi’s.

  “Take it from me, Carrie.” His voice was fierce. “Religion is the bane of civilization, whether it’s those Muslim extremists or the megachurch guys in this country or a cult like The Pathway. It’s all about power. And money.”

  Oh, boy. How should I respond to that comment? “You could call me religious if you wanted, and I’m not that bad, am I?” Except where Mom was concerned.

  But he was on a roll and ignored me. “Terrible things have been done all through history in the name of God, from Cain killing Abel to the Crusades and the Inquisition to the fanatical bombers today.” His strong emotions were reflected in his tense expression. “Religion, all religion, should be banned! All it does is divide people and make con men rich.”

  I’d heard all this before on television talk shows and read it in books. It had been easy to discount in those circumstances. I could even feel smug because I knew those pundits were wrong. But this was Clooney, whom I liked a lot. What I said and how I said it mattered.

  I looked at Greg. Help! But he was busy fighting whatever was on his line.

  “You’re right that terrible things have been done in the name of God,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean that He approved. Come on, Clooney. I bet you know plenty of wonderful Christians.”

  “I do?”

  “Me and Greg and Lindsay and Mary P for starters.”

  Clooney made a little snorting noise. “I’ve got to go find Andi.” He turned and walked off with a careless flick of his hand, grabbing his shovel as he passed it.

  I watched him stride away, his pail and shovel dangling incongruously from one large hand, his detector slung over a shoulder. Why, smart as he was, didn’t he see the difference between a faith that hurt and a faith that helped? Didn’t he understand that believing in Jesus and living for Him should make a person better, kinder, wiser? Didn’t he get that it gave purpose to life and the strength to make right choices?

  But faith was invisible. It was about believing in things hoped for, in things not seen. Faith was about being conformed to the likeness of Christ in one’s actions, not about screaming on street corners or from pulpits or in grainy videos with one’s face hidden behind a mask. Faith, an accurate faith, was about making the hard decisions to do what was right when what was wrong was by far the easier way.

  I thought of my recent meltdown and my heart gave a little hitch. I’d never convince Clooney of all these thoughts if he’d seen me weeping up a storm in Greg’s car just a little bit ago.

  And I knew deep inside that Greg was right. I would have to talk to my mother. I would have to forgive her for both then and now. If I ever wanted to represent a valid faith to Clooney, I would have to make the hard but right choice.

  But not yet. Lord, not yet.

  33

  Eventually everyone became a liability, even people you liked. The only thing you could do in such a situation was get rid of them.

  Friends always felt betrayed when the tie was broken. They never saw themselves as weights pulling you down. They saw themselves as your equal when your superiority was so obvious to anyone who looked without prejudice.

  But supremacy and leadership required the tough decisions, and that meant severing ties that were no longer an asset. Look at Jason. He became a liability. He had to go. And he was gone. No regrets. Merely a matter of the survival of the fittest.

  No one was indispensible. No one. Not even your closest confidant. The spoils went to the victor, and he was the victor. He always had been, and he always would be.

  He breathed deeply, energy and excitement zinging through his veins. It was time for another to go. He’d seen it coming for some time. The big question was how total the disconnect would be. Another Jase?

  He smiled at his reflection in the tiny mirror. Probably.

  34

  I turned back to Greg just in time to see him land a good-sized striper. “He’s got to be at least twenty-eight inches.” He pulled out a plastic ruler much like a dressmaker might use. “Twenty-nine inches! Lindsay will have to use her recipe tonight.” He radiated pleasure.

  My reel started to hum as the line played out. I grabbed hold of the rod without taking it out of the holder.

  “Reel in!” Greg called.

  I clutched the handle or whatever you call it and tried to reel in, but whatever was on my line didn’t want to be caught. “Help!”

  Greg abandoned his rod to the holder and came behind me. He reached around me and helped hold the rod.

  “Here, you take it all.” I tried to hand everything off to him and duck under his arm.

  “Oh no. This is your baby.”

  With his strength helping control the rod and his knowledge helping me play the line, I eventually hauled in my own striped bass. It was a beauty, all silver and black, and I watched anxiously as he measured it to see if it was big enough to keep.

  “It’s a keeper.”

  I felt like I’d landed a hundred-dollar tip.

  “I’ll teach you how to clean it and filet it,” he said.

  Ack! The guy just grabbed his money back right out of my hand.

  I decided to quit while I was ahead and my arms still functioned. I shook my head when he offered to rebait my pole. I walked a bit away and climbed onto the jetty.

  “I’ll watch you from here,” I called.

  I sat on a huge flat rock and watched the windblown tide advance. Greg tossed out his line, stuck the rod on the holder, and came over to join me.

  I loved climbing on the jetties even though there were lots of signs that said Keep Off Jetty. Everyone ignored them, thinking they were Seaside’s attempt to protect itself from lawsuits brought by those unlucky enough to fall and break a leg while climbing. Every so often a true tragedy happened on a jetty, like the seven-year-old boy who fell off one in Ocean City a couple of years ago. His body washed up a few blocks south.

  But the jetties called to people in spite of their danger—or maybe because of it. I always felt like an intrepid mountain goat as I moved from boulder to boulder. I also loved the sensation of being out in the water without actually being in the water. And it was invigorating, being so close to the spray as it kicked up when the waves dashed themselves against the rocks—which they were doing with extra vehemence this evening.

  Sharing jetty magic with Greg was like sharing one of Lindsay’s grilled sticky buns with him, intimate and sweet.

  “Andi’s family is in The Pathway,” I told him after a few moments of comfortable silence. “Clooney just told me. She ran away from their compound.”

  “Ah. Poor kid. I wonder if she knew Jase from there.”

  “Clooney didn’t say.”

  A big wave washed right up to the edge of the boulder we were sitting on, the foam swirling inches from my feet.

  “Why do people fall for the cults?” I asked. “Especially the extreme ones? In your police work, did they ever teach you that?”

  “I went to a seminar on the topic as part of my continuing ed, and there was always constant information available about the cults considered dangerous or somehow skirting the law. The Pathway and Michael the Archangel were frequently in the bulletins. And there were always the Web sites that debunked the cults and kept track of their activities.”

  “The Pathway is illegal somehow?”

  “It’s hard to prove anything, but there’s lots of speculation and questions because they keep to themselves like most cults do. That us-against-the-world mentality is a cornerstone of cult teachings.” He looked at me. “Believe it or not, The Pathway has a very clever group of lawyers representing them. So far they’ve gotten them off any charge.”

  “Isn’t the head of th
e Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints polygamist group in West Texas in jail?”

  “Yes, but for forcing the marriage of a fourteen-year-old to her nineteen-year-old cousin and for marrying girls twelve and fourteen himself. The Pathway has been smart enough not to go that young a route.”

  “But they practice polygamy.”

  “They do, but not with girls little more than children. Sixteen is their usual age, but they get around it by having parental approval. They live on their compound in the southern Arizona desert, keep to themselves, and do whatever Michael the Archangel says.”

  Another wave licked at our boulder. “I just do not understand how people can turn their backs on our culture and standardized religion for something so off the wall. I mean, Michael the Archangel?”

  “I have a theory about why the women join, but I know why the men are attracted. It’s about power, money, and sex.”

  Pretty much what Clooney had said. “That’s pretty nasty. No fine points of belief or heart?”

  “I don’t think so. In these cults the men have all the power, both positional and sexual. The women are pawns, taught to be submissive, not in the healthy submit-to-one-another way of the New Testament but regardless.”

  “They take verses out of context and push them.”

  “They do, another cornerstone of the cults. ‘Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands’ without the balance of ‘husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.’ ”

  “Is there money in The Pathway?”

  “That’s the big question. When someone joins, he or she has to turn over all their finances to the leadership, which means Michael. The group claims this money is used for the care of everyone, but knowing the estimated worth of several converts and the primitive facilities at their settlement, there’s a contradiction. There’s hidden money somewhere, but to my knowledge no one’s been able to find it.”

  “They want to get Michael on tax evasion like they did Al Capone.” I sounded like I knew what I was talking about.