by Mike Doogan
He straightened up in his chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.
“The accepted practice is this,” the young man said. “Until you’re sixteen, there’s no dating and everything is done in groups. After that, if the adults think you are mature enough, you can walk out with someone. But what you can actually do with that person is carefully circumscribed and closely watched. After a year or so of that, if you are still interested in each other, the two of you can become engaged and take instruction that leads to marriage.”
“Whew,” Kane said, “that sounds pretty strict.”
“I suppose it does,” the young man said with a smile, “but this is a Christian community, so things like godly behavior and chastity are important here. Besides, like any community, Rejoice has an interest in people knowing one another well enough, and what marriage requires well enough, to make an informed decision.”
“And young people accept this and do what they’re told?”
The young man laughed.
“Not all of them, but it’s not really like a set of rules. It’s more like what I think they call cultural norms. Most people do things in this way because that’s the way they’re done. Some people don’t, but enough do that it’s the accepted way. Besides, it’s not always two young people involved.”
“Pardon me?”
The young man gave Kane a funny look.
“I would have thought that would be obvious. Rejoice is a small place, and the number of marriageable people here at any one time isn’t that large. So it’s not always two sixteen-year-olds walking out. In fact, it is normal to have some disparity in ages, and not at all unusual to have a considerable difference.”
“So you could have sixteen-year-old girls and . . .” Kane said.
“Forty-year-old men,” the young man said. “Just so. Or forty-year-old women and sixteen-year-old men. There was just such a disparity in the ages of my parents—that is, my father and my real mother.”
“So your mother . . .” Kane said.
“Is in her sixties,” the young man said, “but she doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Is divorce common here?” Kane asked.
The young man looked at his shoes for a moment.
“I’m not sure I want to talk about that much,” he said. “Technically, there is no divorce in Rejoice. But let’s just say that when two people don’t want to live together anymore, they find a way.”
Kane decided to let that go.
“Did Faith have any older suitors?”
“I wouldn’t know, unless they’d started walking out. But I can think of several unmarried men in Rejoice, and I can’t imagine that none of them is interested in Faith. Judith might know. She and Faith were best friends once, and I think they still talked.”
“Okay,” Kane said. “Thanks.”
Matthew Pinchon stood up and turned to go.
“Just one more question,” Kane said. “You seem like an intelligent young man. Don’t you find all these rules and customs a little confining?”
“They are meant to be confining,” the young man said. “We are trying to confine ourselves to Christian behavior. Those of us who don’t want to do so are free to leave. Those who stay accept the confines of living here.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Excuse me?”
“What if they don’t accept the rules, but continue to live here anyway?”
The young man gave Kane the same funny look.
“Why would anyone do that?”
“Wasn’t that, in a way, what Faith was doing?”
“Not really,” the young man said, doubt in his voice. “Maybe. I don’t know. But given who she is, the elders would be reluctant to act against her.”
“You mean, because she is the daughter and granddaughter of the leaders of Rejoice?”
“That, and Faith really is an extraordinary person. If she is truly gone, that’s a real loss to the community.”
“If the elders had acted against her, what would they have done?”
“I’m not really sure. Counseled her, I suppose. If that didn’t work, they might have posted her name on the Wall of Shame in the community hall here. We set a lot of store by public censure. And if that didn’t work, they would have banished her.”
“Have people been banished?”
The young man gave Kane a look he couldn’t read.
“I’m not really the person to ask about that, and I have to go prepare for my trip. So if there is nothing further?”
Kane waved a hand, and the young man left, to be replaced by Rebecca.
“What did you do to Matthew Pinchon?” she asked, sitting across from Kane.
“What makes you think I did anything to him?” Kane asked.
“He didn’t offer me any advice or instructions when he came out,” the girl said with a laugh.
“Does he usually?” Kane said.
Rebecca gave Kane a shrewd look.
“If you think Matthew was somehow involved in Faith’s disappearance, you’re wrong,” she said. “He still loves her, it’s true, and he’d never harm her.”
“How do you know that?” the detective asked.
The girl smiled.
“I have been studying Matthew Pinchon since I was twelve years old,” she said. “I want to know everything I can about the man I’m going to marry.”
It was Kane’s turn to smile.
“Does he know about the impending nuptials?”
“Not yet, but when the time is right, he will.”
Rebecca sounded thirty rather than fifteen when she said that, speaking with a certainty and maturity that impressed the detective.
“Are all the women in Rejoice so sure of their futures at such a young age?”
“You mean, was Faith this certain?” the girl said. She stopped to consider. “I don’t know. When you grow up in a place this small, in a culture that treats you like a woman much sooner than the larger world would, you begin considering your future much sooner than you might otherwise. I think I want to stay here, and if I stay I might end up married to someone twice my age, and I’m not sure I’d like that. So I’ve settled on Matthew.”
“And Faith?”
“Faith doesn’t seem to have settled on anything. Everyone used to talk about Faith and Matthew like their marriage was a foregone conclusion. But then, well, Faith just wasn’t there anymore.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Rebecca gazed over Kane’s shoulder for a moment, then refocused on the detective.
“I don’t know just how to describe it,” she said. “I mean, she looked the same and did all the same things, but it was like she’d shut down all of her emotions. She was more like a Faith robot than the flesh-and-blood Faith.”
The girl was silent for a moment.
“Of course,” she said with a shake of her head, “her mom was dying, or maybe had just died, so that’s probably what did it. Faith and her mother were close, much closer than she was with her father.”
“What can you tell me about their relationship, Faith’s and her father’s, I mean.”
“Faith loves her dad, I think, but Elder Thomas Wright is a tortured soul. I think he’s trapped by being the son of the founder and, if that weren’t the case, would have left Rejoice long ago.”
Kane looked at the girl. The silence stretched out. Rebecca blushed.
“Like I said, when every unattached male is a potential partner, if you’ve got any brains you pay attention.”
“Okay,” Kane said. “And what about Faith’s relationship with her grandfather?”
“Faith avoided her grandfather, but why should she be different from any of the rest of us? Except Matthew, I mean.”
Kane grinned at that.
“You seem to be close to blasphemy there.”
Rebecca grinned back.
“I know, or at least lèse-majesté. But you can live in a small town and believe in a faith without liking everyone
else who does.”
“What about Matthew? I take it he has a more charitable view of Elder Moses Wright.”
“That’s true, and it’s something I’ll have to break him of. But he takes special instruction from Foaming Moses and is always talking about what a great man he is. If Foaming Moses were a woman, I’d be jealous.”
Kane made some notes.
“What do you know about Faith’s friends and activities at the regional high school?” he asked.
“Not much, I’m afraid. We don’t have much to do with the kids outside Rejoice socially. We see them and know their names and say hi and stuff, but we don’t spend much time with them. The rumor was that Faith was seeing Johnny Starship. But if she was, she’d have been careful to hide it.”
“Why’s that?”
“A girl from Rejoice involved with a boy from outside would be bad enough, but with Johnny Starship it would have been much worse. His brother and father are involved in sinful business. And besides, his father and Elder Moses Wright are total enemies.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, one’s a preacher, and the other’s a whoremaster.” The girl blushed at the word. “What more reason do they need?”
He finished with Rebecca soon after, and while he waited for Judith to come in, he thought about what he’d been told. He didn’t know what to think about a place that seemed to allow forty-year-old men to marry seventeen-year-old girls. These things were routine in other countries, he knew, but not in America.
“Maybe Rejoice isn’t really part of America,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” Judith said, taking a seat. “Rejoice is its own place.”
“Sorry,” Kane said. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I seem to be talking to myself more and more as I get older.”
The girl reached over and patted Kane’s hand.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Rejoice must be a confusing place for an outsider.”
In the normal course of events, Kane would have thought nothing of the girl’s gesture. But after talking with the other teens, he wasn’t sure how to react to a young woman who was, in this place, of marrying age. Best to put that out of your mind, he thought, taking up his notebook and pen.
“Are all the young people in Rejoice this mature?” he asked.
“Not all,” Judith said, “but in a small place all of the adults know you and have expectations for you. The religious nature of Rejoice adds to those expectations. And because there are so few of us and so much to do, you are given responsibility earlier. Most of us respond to all this in the right way.”
“I suppose that makes sense, but I’m not used to speaking with young people who think and talk so much like adults.”
“Oh, we can talk like kids, at least among ourselves. But a lot of even that conversation is about Rejoice and our roles in it and what that means for our lives.”
“Did Faith talk about those things?”
“For a long time she talked about them more than most. Then she stopped.”
“About the time her mom died?”
“Just after, I’d say. I noticed because up until then, we’d been best friends. Then she started spending more and more time alone. I asked her about it, and she just said she needed time to think. So we just kind of drifted apart.”
“Do you know why Faith changed?”
“I don’t,” Judith said, “but Faith has pressures the rest of us don’t, being the Princess of Rejoice and all.”
“What?”
The girl laughed.
“That’s what we called it when we were kids. ‘The Princess of Rejoice.’ Because her grandfather is the founder and her father has taken over from him, everyone expects Faith to marry the next leader. A dynasty, you know.”
“Is she headed in that direction? Does she have older suitors here?”
“I’m sure she could have them if she wants, but I don’t think she is seeing anyone here. And I don’t see how she could be without the entire community finding out.”
“Is that experience speaking?” Kane asked.
Judith laughed.
“I won’t say that I haven’t thought about it, but it just seems so impossible to do anything here without everyone finding out.”
“How does Faith feel about being the Princess of Rejoice?” Kane asked.
“She was okay with it when we were younger. It seemed kind of fairy tale-ish to us then. But as we got older I think it bothered her. I’m not at all sure Faith wants to stay in Rejoice, let alone be its princess. And I think she is having doubts about our religion.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Not really, but one of the ways she changed was that she just started watching the services, became a spectator, you know. She just sits there and never takes part.”
“Do you know anything about her life outside Rejoice?”
“I don’t. I hear the rumors, particularly about her and Johnny Starship. And I did see them together once or twice. But I still find it hard to believe Faith would get involved with anyone as immature as Johnny Starship. Although I always wondered about those extracurricular activities that seemed to take up her afternoons.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, she is never here until right before dinner. And then there’s what she said to me on my last birthday.”
“What was that?” Kane said.
Judith gave him an embarrassed grin.
“Well, even though we weren’t as close, we are still friends,” she said. “We still tell each other things. Or, I suppose, I still tell her things. I was trying to decide whether to start walking out with one of the older boys who’d asked me, and that started me thinking about love and marriage and sex and all that. So I was telling all this to Faith, and she gave me a funny look and said, ‘Don’t expect too much from sex. You might be disappointed.’ ”
“What did she mean by that? Do you think she is sexually active?”
The question seemed to throw Judith off stride.
“I have no idea,” she said. “This isn’t Iran. We don’t have the morality police checking on virginity.”
Kane sat thinking for a moment.
“Can you tell me what she was wearing last Friday?’ he asked.
Judith gave him a smile.
“I’ll bet you didn’t ask Matthew Pinchon that,” she said. Kane opened his mouth to reply, but she said, “That’s okay. Men and women are the same in that way here as everywhere. Men see a pretty girl and think about what she’d look like without her clothes. Women look at her and wonder how they’d look in her clothes. Faith was wearing black corduroy pants, a white turtleneck sweater, white wool socks, and black walking shoes. She had a dark-blue down coat, black overboots, and a white knit scarf and hat.”
“Whew,” Kane said, “that’s as good a description as a cop could give.”
“We all know one another’s clothes very well, Mr. Kane,” Judith said. “None of us has that many outfits. Ostentation is not Christian.”
“Okay,” Kane said, “thanks. You young people have given me a lot to think about.”
Judith got up and started for the door, paused, and turned.
“Can you answer a question for me?” she asked.
“I can try,” Kane said.
“What’s it like, living out in the world?”
“The truth is,” Kane said, “I don’t really know yet.”
10
For I have been a stranger in a strange land.
EXODUS 2:22
KANE SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY IN INTERVIEWS WITH the adults of Rejoice, checking names off Thomas Wright’s list as he went. He had no trouble finding people, because they were all in public places, working. Kane dodged through the clear, crisp, thirty-below air, going from building to building and cornering them, introducing himself and asking questions that the workers seemed perfectly willing to answer without any fear of losing time from their tasks.
Some of the work was necessary to k
eep a community the size of Rejoice going: cooking in the cafeteria, medicating in the clinic, tending to livestock in the barns, gardening in the greenhouses, teaching in the school, and a half dozen people handling the paperwork that any modern American town, no matter how isolated, generates in the twenty-first-century.
Most of the rest seemed to be involved in making items to sell during the next tourist season. People knitted and sewed, threw pots and worked in wood, even ran a small printing plant, which, that day, was producing color post-cards of a Devil’s Toe ablaze in summer flowers and foliage and bathed in the summer sunshine that lasted nearly around the clock. There was apparently no end to the gewgaws tourists would buy, and Rejoice seemed determined to supply any imaginable legal want, and to keep the profits thereof. It was, Kane thought, like visiting Santa’s workshop, if Santa made moose-poop swizzle sticks.
Kane talked to the schoolteachers, the town’s doctor, and a sampling of the residents and got, when he added it all up, nothing useful. Faith put no strain on Rejoice’s social fabric, raised no questions troubling to its religious consensus, and spoke only when spoken to. The town’s account reminded Kane of what people said when one of their neighbors was revealed as a mass murderer: He was such a quiet, polite young man.
The town was, of course, concerned when Faith went off to the regional high school, concerned both for Faith, among all those outsiders, and for what she might bring back to the community. But Faith didn’t start smoking or wear revealing clothes or go Goth, and she spoke of her experiences outside Rejoice in steady, judicious, slightly superior tones, reassuring the adults that she was a solid young woman and that their way of life really was superior to that of those who lived outside.
Faith insisted to one and all that she was attending the high school because its course offerings would better prepare her for the Ivy League college she planned to attend, and explained the extracurricular activities that kept her away from Rejoice in the afternoons as extra polish for her résumé. Her first year at the school, she’d played Mrs. Gibbs in the school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, been co-chair of the canned-food drive, and worked as a copy editor on the student newspaper, The Devil’s Toe Imp.
As important to the adults of Rejoice were the things Faith had not done. She had not become a cheerleader, a position they were confident her personality and beauty would have won for her, or joined the girl’s basketball team, which would have suited her natural athleticism. With their skimpy costumes, either of these pursuits, the town agreed, would have exposed more of Faith to the world than Rejoice would have been completely comfortable with. That, plus the fact that she did not allow herself to be seduced by the secular teenage world of makeup and boys and parties, reconciled the residents of Rejoice to her choice.