The Never List

by Zan, Koethi

  “You might say that. What was on the news?”

  “That this Noah Philben—the pastor at Sylvia’s church—is wanted by the FBI. They won’t say why exactly, but there’s a standoff at his compound right now. It’s live on Channel Ten. Are you there?”

  “Um, no. We’re … going back to our hotel to wait it out.”

  “Should I meet you? Which hotel?”

  “We won’t be there for a while. It’s the Hermitage, on—”

  “Yes, I know it. Let’s say at nine tonight? The bar in the lobby.”

  Just as I hung up, we pulled into the parking lot of the church and looked at one another with dismay. It was nearly full. We had lost all track of time and only now realized it was Sunday morning. Not the ideal time to make our visit. Nevertheless, we knew it had to be now. We pulled into the last empty space, and as we stepped out of the car, we eyed one another’s filthy black attire from the night before.

  “Will they even let us in there?” asked Tracy, looking down at the mud caked on her black Converse sneakers.

  “Sure,” I replied, even as I remembered Helen Watson’s less-than-welcoming attitude before. “I don’t think they can turn you away from a church service. I think it’s the rules. We’ll sit in the back.”

  We heaved open the huge wooden doors of the church. Strains of stately organ music filtered back toward us as we slowly made our way through the vestibule into the main chapel, where we found row after row of decent, normal-looking families listening attentively to the service.

  When the last hymn ended, the congregation sat back down, and the minister gave the final benediction. As people started filing out, smiling and nodding as they greeted their friends and neighbors—and even us—I was struck by the general sense of well-being emanating from the crowd, a sense of genuine community.

  I looked up at the tall windows of the church, admiring the long streaks of light streaming beatifically through them, and remembered my first visit. I braced myself, thinking Helen Watson’s welcome would not be quite as warm.

  At last the church was empty except for the minister putting away the prayer book at the altar. We approached him with some apprehension, realizing we weren’t exactly wearing our Sunday best. He paused and turned his eyes slowly to us, examining us carefully.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, without much enthusiasm, I noted.

  “We’re looking for Helen Watson. Is she around?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, clearly relieved to be able to get rid of us so easily. “She’s hosting the coffee and doughnuts over in the reception room. Just through those doors.”

  We followed his directions and found ourselves at the entrance to a crowded room where Helen Watson stood greeting each family as they entered. When the last parishioner passed through the door, we started walking toward her. But the instant Helen Watson spotted me, her brows knit, and she quickly but gently shut the door to the reception room behind her and motioned for us to follow her down the hall.

  She led us to a small side chapel that seemed designed for quiet prayer and reflection. She closed the door of the room behind us, standing over us with arms crossed as she waited for us to sit down.

  She began with slow, considered words. “I don’t know who you really are, or why you are coming to my church again, but I have already told you I can’t help you find this Sylvia Dunham. I don’t know her. I’ve never met her. I have nothing to say. But if you absolutely must speak to me, I would most appreciate it if you would make an appointment. At another time.” She added, glancing up at the crucifix on the wall, “And place.”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Watson. I do apologize for bothering you here, but it is rather urgent, and we didn’t know where else to find you,” I said.

  She said nothing, waiting expectantly for me to go on.

  “Mrs. Watson”—I decided to dive in—“you will soon read in the papers that Noah Philben is wanted by the FBI.”

  I thought I detected a flash of shock underneath her icy demeanor, but whatever she was feeling, she kept it tightly under wraps.

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Nothing. Except your name is going to come up in some way, eventually, when the police figure out your past with him. It won’t take them long.” She raised her eyebrows, still not giving anything away. “They’re raiding his compound as we speak.”

  At those words, I noticed that Helen Watson’s shoulders dropped the slightest bit, and she took in a quick, sharp breath. She was trying to hide it, but this news was having a visible effect on her. Tracy saw it too.

  “You’re happy about that?” Tracy asked.

  Helen Watson paused, but then answered with some reluctance, “Yes, actually I am. I never … I never had a good feeling about … that organization.”

  “Why?” asked Christine, leaning forward.

  “To put it simply, I thought it was a cult. I’m not the only one who thinks that. But then, I don’t know anything about it.” She added hurriedly, “And the last thing I want to do is be involved in any of this.”

  “Mrs. Watson, I know when you were younger, you moved away with Noah. You were gone for a couple of years. What happened?”

  She drew herself up tall, seeming both surprised and offended that we would mention those events to her. I supposed this was the sort of thing people might whisper about in the church parking lot but would never say to her directly. She eyed us carefully and then sat down in a chair. She was certainly taking us more seriously now.

  “That’s true. And whom do I have to thank for spreading that information around? That was a hard time in my life, and I don’t want to relive it.”

  “What happened, Helen?” Now I was leaning forward. “Please tell us. Listen, if I tell you our own secret, maybe it will help you understand why we need to know.” I looked over at Tracy and Christine for permission to proceed, and they both nodded.

  “I know I told you before that my name was Caroline Morrow. That isn’t true. My name is actually Sarah Farber, and this is Tracy Elwes, and this is Christine McMasters. Do you recognize our names, Mrs. Watson?”

  She stared at us in disbelief. It didn’t feel good to be so famous. “Are you the girls—the girls who were held in Jack Derber’s basement for all those years?”

  “I’d call it a cellar really, but yes. That’s us.”

  Tears sprang up in Mrs. Watson’s eyes. “I’m so sorry those terrible things happened to you. But what does that have to do with Noah? I mean, he had his own issues, no doubt.” She was choosing her words carefully; it was clear she was afraid of Noah Philben. “But he had nothing to do with Jack Derber.”

  “That’s just what we’re trying to find out, Mrs. Watson. Did he have something to do with Jack Derber? We think there’s a connection,” I said.

  Tracy added, “And I think when you understand more about what Noah has done, you will see why it is so important for us to find out.”

  At this, she suddenly seemed alarmed. “What is he … what did he do?”

  “Human trafficking, Mrs. Watson. He was selling girls. His religious organization, or whatever you want to call it, was just a cover for it. And we think Jack Derber is right in the middle of all of it.”

  To our surprise, Mrs. Watson’s stiff pose disintegrated at those words, and she began to cry softly. She pulled out a handkerchief to dry her eyes, but the harder she tried to swallow back her tears, the harder she sobbed. Tracy and I looked at each other across the room. She knew something. Some kind of guilt had to be behind emotions this intense. We gave her a minute before continuing, none of us quite sure what to do.

  “Mrs. Watson,” I began, “I know this must be hard for you to realize that someone you … once loved … and whom you knew from your childhood …”

  Mrs. Watson shook her head and sat up straight as she covered her mouth with her hand. She stared out the window thoughtfully, and took a deep breath.

  “Not childhood. I moved here as a teenager. We started
dating when I was sixteen. But we were.… Excuse me.” She put both hands over her face and then took them away, her expression more composed afterward.

  “We were … so close … I thought—I mean, I was … troubled by the religious organization, but I thought—I thought it was just about money. You know, cults make people give them their money and all that. And even so I prayed so hard for Noah. I prayed for him every day. I hoped that he would find respite from those troubling feelings of his.”

  “What troubling feelings?” Christine asked gently.

  Mrs. Watson sat up, still trying to pull herself together. She dabbed her eyes again and sighed.

  “He was … everyone has their cross to bear. You know, temptations to resist. Noah had a lot of anger in him. His father was a wonderful man—the minister at my church. That’s how I met Noah. But as I got to know him more, I realized he hated his father. I couldn’t understand it. Maybe it was because his father held so much influence in the community yet didn’t take advantage of his role—for financial gain or personal favors or whatever it was that Noah valued. I don’t even know what Noah wanted to get out of it, to tell you the truth.

  “I noticed this feeling in Noah early on, but I ignored it then. I was young. He was young. I didn’t want to believe these feelings were present in the boy I loved. Also, with me, at the beginning, he was all sugar. Honey just melting off of his tongue. I was swept away. So we eloped and moved on to Tollen. There we were in a new town where I knew no one. He kept me completely isolated. It was … it was hard.” Her eyes filled with tears again as she thought back to that time. It was clear she hadn’t talked about these events since they had happened. This story had apparently been bottled up inside her, and once she started telling it, it seemed she needed to get it out. Whether she wanted to or not.

  “Mrs. Watson, did he hurt you? What made you leave?” Tracy asked softly.

  “I …” Mrs. Watson covered her face in her hands and sat there, still for a full minute. We waited. When she finally put her hands down, she had managed again to draw her face back into the firm aspect of an uptight preacher’s wife I’d seen before. “I don’t really want to talk about it.” She wiped away a stray tear.

  I stood up and walked over to the window, staring out at the picturesque square.

  “Mrs. Watson,” I began, not taking my eyes from the window, “those girls in white robes who were riding in vans around town—they were not there voluntarily. They were slaves. Some had been abducted, some had been sold by their boyfriends or families, some had been tricked. But they were all slaves. Having to do unspeakable things against their will. You see, Mrs. Watson, this wasn’t ordinary prostitution, as awful as that is. These girls were ordered up for torture. Is there a fate worse than that? Can’t you help us understand how that happened?” I turned to her, this time with tears in my eyes.

  She looked at each one of us in turn, clearly moved by my words but unsure whether she wanted to take the next step and confide in us.

  “Why did you leave?” I echoed Tracy’s question, more firmly.

  Mrs. Watson sat in silence, every kind of emotion crossing her face. She was not crying now, but I recognized a change in her breathing, faster, desperate. I knew this pattern well. She was about to break down.

  “I left because”—her voice became a whisper—“because he told me to do that.”

  “To do what?” asked Christine, whispering back.

  “He wanted me to”—she closed her eyes—“to sell myself.”

  She opened her eyes again, looking at each one of us to gauge our reactions. When we showed no surprise, only empathy, she went on, her words rushed.

  “We had run out of money. He had tried to start a church, but we only had a few parishioners in a little run-down hall he’d rented with the last bit he’d saved up. So he—he asked me to do something for him, for us. I told him no. And when I told him no, he—he beat me, and he locked me in our bedroom.

  “That night he went out, and I found a hairpin in my jewelry box. I picked the lock. God, it took me hours. But I did it.” I could see her reliving that moment in her mind, the relief of the lock finally releasing. “And when I got out, I just ran. I was too afraid to hitchhike—people did that back then—but I didn’t want to risk being alone with any man at that point, much less a stranger. I ran. I slept in the woods. It took me four days to get back home to my parents. My mother was wonderful. She just cried. She didn’t ask me what happened. She took me to the courthouse and had the marriage annulled, and then when I …”

  She looked confused, as if she didn’t even see us in the room anymore. Her eyes were glazed over, darting around aimlessly, panicked, and she shook her head, looking out the window, up into the sky beyond the town. Finally, she broke into sobs again, her emotions reaching their crescendo at last. It was hard to make out her next words, her voice was cracking so much.

  “And then when I found out I was pregnant, she took me somewhere to take care of that as well. Of course, I deserved not to be able to have children of my own after that. I deserve that. But I just couldn’t—I couldn’t have that beast’s child.” She was crying even harder now.

  Tracy leaned over and patted her shoulder softly.

  “For years I have harbored this guilt. This unrelenting guilt. And I’ve tried to do everything I could to make up for it. I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for this church and this community. And whenever I saw those vans drive by—” She broke off, unable to speak.

  That’s when I realized it. She knew. Maybe not everything, but just enough to be afraid. Afraid of Noah Philben. He had, after all, gone back to her town and started his operation right under her nose. Maybe to spite her. To punish her. And she kept quiet. She kept quiet.

  We all sat in silence, listening to Mrs. Watson’s soft sobs. Then she started to ramble.

  “I don’t know what made Noah like this. I don’t understand what created this beast. I honestly don’t. His family was so loving. So kind. They used to do things like … you know, they worked in soup kitchens, they ran food drives, they took in orphans, for God’s sake.”

  My ears pricked up at this. “Orphans?”

  “Yes, you know, they fostered children from around the state.”

  “Did Noah ever talk about any of these foster kids?”

  She only had to think about this a second before nodding thoughtfully.

  “Well, there was one I think he got quite close to. Even years later he referred to him as his brother, though of course they weren’t blood relatives. I think they stayed in touch after he was legally adopted by someone else. I know they wrote to each other for years. When Noah would get one of those letters, he would go off on his own into the wilderness to—as he put it—ponder and reflect. He would always come back saying he’d renewed his mission, that he was on the right path and couldn’t stop now. It was bigger than him. More important than us.”

  I tried to make eye contact with Tracy, but she was shutting me out, looking straight ahead.

  Helen went on. “I think—I mean, I know—I have something from those times. When I was packing my things, I had a drawer with some photographs and letters of mine in it. I shoved them into my purse. Mixed in with them were a couple of things that weren’t mine, a photograph and part of an envelope with an address. I—I kept them anyway. I don’t really know why. Maybe I thought I’d need to prove something someday.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I keep them here. In the office. I wanted to keep them locked up, and this is the only safe I have,” she explained.

  “Can we see them?”

  She stood up slowly and wiped her eyes. She led us down the hall to a well-kept little office in the corner and stepped into a closet. We heard the soft click of a lock, and then she came out with an envelope and photograph in her hand.

  “I’m sure it doesn’t mean much, but here is what I have.”

  She put the items on the desk. The three of us nearly bumped heads be
nding down low over the photograph. On the right was a youthful Noah Philben, about fourteen years old. He was laughing at what the other boy in the photo was saying, looking up at the sky. The other boy had been turning his head when the picture was snapped, so it was blurred.

  “What do you think?” I said, turning to Tracy and Christine.

  “Could be,” said Christine, “but not really definitive.”

  “Yes, I mean, the hair is much lighter, but that could be age.” Tracy leaned down even closer. “I can’t tell about the nose.”

  We turned to the envelope. It was addressed to a Tom Philben at a post office box in River Bend. It could easily have been a pseudonym. We needed to find out who owned that box—that was Jim’s jurisdiction.

  “May we keep these? Just for a while. We’ll return them. It’s very important, Mrs. Watson.”

  She hesitated but eventually nodded yes. We said our good-byes, thanking her over and over, and went out to our car. I took one last look back at this broken woman, finally released from her secret, sitting alone in that tiny room, looking small and helpless there against the wood-paneled wall, under the crucifix.

  We got into the car and sat still in the parking lot for a few minutes. No one spoke.

  “She’s lying,” Tracy finally said.

  “What?” said Christine. “About what?”

  “Tracy’s right,” I said. “She’s lying. She definitely turned tricks. She didn’t know whose baby that was.”

  “Why would you say that? Isn’t what she told us bad enough?” Christine seemed genuinely shocked.

  “Yes, but there is some reason she kept her mouth shut completely about Noah Philben all these years. Even though she obviously had the feeling those girls in the vans were not just worshipping in the woods. Why else did she keep that stuff in a safe? She knew. And she did nothing. And she carried all that guilt around with her. For only one reason—he knew she’d been a prostitute and that she’d aborted some john’s baby. He must have had some proof he was holding over her head all these years.”

  Tracy nodded. “That’s exactly right. But let’s just get out of here. None of that matters now.”