The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  “Like a counselor.”

  “Kind of.”

  “I don’t need a counselor.”

  He smiles. “Good thing I’m not here to be your counselor.”

  “Because I don’t like talking about feelings.”

  “God, me neither,” he says. “Anything but feelings.”

  It sounds like a joke and for moment I draw in a breath and concentrate on the feeling of that. Jude used to try to make me laugh, and when I’d crack a smile he’d keep the joke going, like breath on an ember, making it grow into a fit of giggles that’d echo around the whole forest and make all the birds in the trees quiet. I’d go back to the Community at night afraid they’d somehow detect the smile hidden in the muscles of my face.

  I shake Jude out of my mind. The man in my cell is looking at me. “What’s the FBI want with me?”

  “The local police are no longer handling the investigation into the events at the Community. That’s been passed off to the FBI.”

  “So . . . this,” I say, waving between him and me with a stump, “is about the Community? The Prophet?”

  “It’s about what’s right for you. We’re most familiar with your case at the FBI. The warden and my bosses discussed it and they decided you warrant special attention. I’ve been appointed as your mental health coordinator while you’re in juvenile detention.”

  “Is that really why you’re here?” I ask. “My mental health? Or are you here to collect evidence about me? I’ve been through a trial; I know what people like you do for a living. You want to figure me out.”

  He laughs. “Oh, I already have. I knew everything about you the minute you walked into the courtroom with that candy in your mouth.”

  • • •

  My father taught me how to tell when you’re being swindled, and I think about that now, in my cell with this doctor.

  My father used to gamble at the greyhound races. He said he would never set foot in a casino because the other players cheated and the dealers dealt dirty. He liked the races because it was just him and the dogs, nobody to cheat him out of his hard-earned pay. He’d take me sometimes, always at night when the smell of yellow beer could grow right inside my skull, the aluminum seat freezing my rear. Lacy flocks of white moths clustered around the gargantuan lightbulbs along the track, beating one another to get closer to the bulb.

  “Why are they trying so hard to get to the light?” I asked my father once.

  “They think it’s the sun,” he replied. “They can’t tell the difference.”

  It was here that he taught me how to detect when a person’s lying. They got eyes too needy, like they’re desperate for you to believe the lie, and their stories are always too good to be true. Later, I remembered the signs, though I never mentioned them. They all sounded too much like the Prophet.

  “So, what’s your goal in all this?” I ask Dr. Wilson.

  “Helping you,” he says. “Just helping you. You don’t have to believe me, though.”

  “Good,” I say. “I don’t believe you. The FBI’s goal isn’t helping me.”

  “What’s our goal then?”

  “Figuring out who killed the Prophet.”

  His eyebrows rise. “What makes you think there was a killer?” he asks. “What makes you think the Prophet is even dead?”

  I make my face go still, but even so, I can tell that he sees it within me now, the lies unwinding like smoke.

  “You were nowhere near the Community when the fire started,” he continues. “That’s what you said in your statement to the police after you were booked.”

  “Well, if that’s what my statement said, it must be the truth,” I say, leaning my head to the side. The muscles in my neck hurt from propping up a mouth so full of lies.

  I cross my arms and wince.

  He points his pen at me. “Do those hurt you? Your arms?”

  “Sometimes,” I say.

  “Maybe someday you’ll get a pair of those bionic hands they’re developing,” he says. “The technology for prosthetics is getting better every day.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’d be great,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, that would fix everything.”

  He frowns and tucks his chin, scribbling something on his yellow paper. I try to read it, but I can’t shift the letters into words. I shut my eyes and wonder how I will ever beat people like this man, with his pen and his badge and his words. All I’ve got is a mouth and nothing to say.

  When I open my eyes, he’s still writing.

  “Where are you from?” I ask.

  “Washington, DC.” The name means next to nothing to me, beyond the sense that it’s far away from here.

  “You came up here just for me?”

  He nods.

  “You must’ve been thrilled to get that call. Middle of winter, travel for miles to interrogate some criminal girl.”

  “Firstly, I won’t be interrogating you. My assignment is what I said already, to get to know you. And, actually, I volunteered.”

  “Really?”

  “I believed I could help you. I wanted to try.”

  “Please,” I say, holding up an arm. “Don’t say that again.”

  There’s a long pause. He sighs.

  “Do you know what I do every day?” he asks. “For my job? I spend most of my time sitting this close to the vilest people on the surface of this planet. I sort out whether they’re lying, what questions I can ask that’ll produce a confession, what part of their minds can be turned against them. I do puzzles all day. That’s what my job has become. Turning these reprehensible people into puzzles because I can’t stand to think of them as human.”

  “Why do you keep doing it?”

  “I still love it, in a way, breaking someone down to their most basic building blocks, combing through it all and finding that one shining lie that puts them away. It’s a thrill. But, I don’t know, it’s nothing a really good computer couldn’t do. I never get to talk to people anymore. I never help anyone.”

  “So, what, I’m your vacation?”

  He smiles. “You might say that.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just, you might be sitting across from someone a lot worse than any of those people.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s all right,” I say, leaning back. “No one ever believes me.”

  He surveys me for a moment, weighing something behind his eyes. “You were right earlier,” he says. “The Prophet is dead. How’s that make you feel?”

  My eyebrows flatten. “I thought you said no feelings.”

  “Yes, of course.” He rummages in his bag, pulls out a sheaf of paper. “The autopsy came back the other day, and it’s basically not worth the paper it’s printed on.” He reads from the paper in his hand. “‘The deceased was badly burned. Most of the trunk, neck, and face were totally compromised. Inadequate lung tissue remains to confirm smoke inhalation. As a result, it is unknown whether the deceased died before or after the fire.’ And the arson investigators haven’t done much better. They found traces of accelerant, though they say that may have been the weatherproofing on the thatch roofs, which won’t stand up in court.”

  My muscles grow light listening to this. “So, you’re not even sure a crime was committed.”

  “I am sure,” he insists.

  “How?”

  He extracts a small manila envelope from his bag and starts pulling out photos.

  “Part of my job is to analyze crime scenes,” he says. “I haven’t made it up to the Community yet—the snow is so deep, the investigators have had to snowshoe in—but I’ve seen the pictures they brought back.”

  The photos show the Community as it must’ve looked after the fire was extinguished, empty bla
ck husks on a backdrop of snow, a gauze of smoke graying the air. I remember the smell, burnt-off grain alcohol and sagebrush, the bugs and beetles that lived inside the dung-and-mud walls squirming to escape the heat.

  The doctor places the photos in a circle on my mattress.

  “Twelve structures encircling a courtyard,” he says. “After the fire started, everyone escaped their houses before they collapsed. Every single person—old men, infants. Everyone,” he repeats. “Everyone, it seems, but the Prophet. There was plenty of warning, so why didn’t he?”

  I try to arrange my features normally, as though I don’t know the answer to his question.

  “I think he was already dead when the fire started,” the doctor continues. “The Prophet’s body was found lying on the floor next to his bed, facedown. The soft tissue was largely destroyed, but murder usually leaves its thumbprint and the medical examiner found no evidence of knife wounds, no gunshots, no blunt force trauma. They examined the contents of his stomach and found no poison. So how did he come to be lying on the ground?” He throws his hands in the air. “The question you always ask after someone dies under suspicious circumstances is ‘Did they have enemies?’ We don’t even need to bother with that question because of course he did.”

  “Why do you say that?” I ask. “Nobody in the Community ever disagreed with him.” No one but me.

  “He systematically brutalized an entire population,” the doctor says. “Even if they didn’t advertise it, it’s very possible someone out there wanted him dead.”

  “You didn’t know them.”

  “Maybe it’s possible you didn’t really know them, either.”

  I set my jaw. I want to tell him that these are the people who lashed their children with switches thick as forearms when the Prophet commanded, married their daughters off at sixteen to men generations older. These are the people who beat Jude until there was nothing left but a mess of blood and bone. They had to cover him in a sheet because it made the women sick to look at.

  I lean back so my spine presses against the concrete wall behind my bunk. “Why do you want to know the truth so badly?”

  “Because I believe nobody benefits when the truth is buried. Lies have a way of turning poisonous over time. I want justice. And for purely selfish reasons, I want to solve this. But I also want to help you. I wasn’t lying about that.”

  I rest my chin on my breastbone, staring abstractedly at the floor. “What would you do in exchange for the truth?”

  He cocks his head to the side. “What are you offering?”

  “My parole meeting comes up in August, when I turn eighteen. I need someone to recommend my release.”

  “And you want me to be that person?”

  “Maybe we could work out an arrangement,” I say.

  His eyes narrow. “And what happens if no one speaks up for you?”

  “Maybe they consider good behavior and let me go free anyway. But maybe I get transferred to the adult facility to serve the rest of my sentence.”

  “Sounds like you have a lot to lose.”

  “Sounds like you really want answers.”

  “Your information in exchange for my recommendation?”

  I nod. He watches me a moment, and I wonder if he can read in my expression that I will never tell him the truth. I’ll give him a version of events, a half-truth, but I haven’t told anyone what happened in those smoke-filled moments in January when I stood over the Prophet’s body and watched him breathe his last ungodly breath. And I never will.

  “All right, then,” Dr. Wilson says. “It’s a deal.”

  I sit up straighter. “I’d shake your hand, but . . .”

  He smiles.

  “So,” I say. “Where do we begin?”

  Chapter 9

  The lunch bell tolls, and the jail wakes up with the sound of doors buzzing unlocked and feet traversing metal walkways.

  “Why don’t we pick this up another day?” The doctor closes his notebook.

  “You just got here,” I say.

  “I’ll be back later in the week.” He lifts his stool up from the ground and tucks it awkwardly beneath his arm.

  I walk the opposite direction down the skyway, glancing behind me at Wilson’s back. He’s about to walk right out of here, to freedom. He can do that and I can’t. The moment I realize this, I hate him for it, just a little.

  In the cafeteria, I look around for Angel through the throng of girls with grizzled faces and big fists who make the blood jerk in my chest. Without hands, everyone else’s are a threat. Angel told me how these girls can fashion a weapon out of anything, an elbow, a bolt loosened from a classroom chair, a sharpened shard of plastic broken off a laundry basket. When someone gets you with one, they don’t just stab you once. They have a partner hold you down while they stick you in any soft places they can.

  Angel strolls in through the cafeteria doors, and the orange sea of bodies parts around her. She is one of the only first-degree murderers here and even the big girls with eyes like caged bulls’ steer wide of her. There are so many people here that it seems like every mealtime someone is glimpsing me for the first time, gaping as though they’ve never seen anything as bizarre. As though we’re not all missing some pieces.

  I stand behind Angel in line. She’s reading a book with a red cover. When I ask her what it’s about she doesn’t even look up. “Too complicated to explain,” she says.

  “Try,” I say.

  She pauses. “Do you know what Mars is?”

  I shrug.

  “Well, some people think we ought to go there. Leave Earth behind.”

  “It’s supposed to be better there?” I ask.

  “Supposed to be.”

  We wind toward the counter where the girls hold their trays out to the lunch ladies behind a plastic partition. A tray will be waiting there for me specially, everything on it items I can either suck through a straw or carry to my mouth with my stumps without much trouble.

  Nearly to the counter, a tall girl pushes in front of me in line and I lose sight of Angel. The back of my neck prickles. I glance behind me at the pulsing wall of thirty or so girls, pinched eyes and bulbous knuckles and shifting weight. I put an arm on the girl’s shoulder to push in front of her. “Get outta my way,” I say.

  Without looking, the girl jerks her elbow back and connects with the side of my face. I blink sudden tears and scan the room for a guard. None are looking this way.

  I dodge to the side so I can make sure Angel is still there in front of the girl.

  “Back in line!” comes the voice of Officer Prosser, one of the few guards who makes us refer to her by her official title. She has a pile of wiry red hair clutched to the top of her head with a large plastic clip.

  I step back. The line moves achingly slow, and when it’s my turn, I lever my tray up with my forearms and nearly run to where Angel’s sitting.

  “Calm down, crazy,” she hisses. “You weren’t gonna get shanked with that many guards around.”

  I shake my head. I touch my forearm to my cheek, which still stings from the sharp plane of the girl’s elbow.

  “God, you are greener than green,” she says. “Stop looking around at everyone. Keep your eyes down.”

  “It’s hard,” I say.

  “They’re not that scary,” she says. “See that one over there?” She nods at a brown-haired girl hunched over her tray, placing peas on her tongue and swallowing, one by one, like pills. “Her name’s Wendy. She’s going to Billings after this, that’s the adult prison. She confessed to assaulting her eight-year-old neighbor with a baseball bat. I read about it—they didn’t have hardly enough evidence to convict. Lots of girls confess just to feel like they’re doing the right thing. Sometimes the cops’ll make them think they can go home if they just say they did it, though you’d have to be a total idiot to believe th
at.” She swallows a huge mouthful of mashed potatoes. “These girls, naw, they’re pancakes. Most are pumped so full of Adderall they can hardly walk, let alone shank you. The real crazies aren’t allowed in gen pop. They live up in the hospital most of the time.”

  “It’s different for you,” I say. “You make them scared.”

  “Then give them something to be afraid of,” she says. “You’re a badass bitch. You’ve done way worse than half these girls.” She rummages with her fork into a small potpie and chews for a moment. “Is there some other reason you don’t like them?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  She gives me a hard look from the corner of her eye. “You just see it a lot, is all. Little country girls get thrown in here.” She waves to the other girls, and I know in that gesture she’s acknowledging their differences, their different-shaped eyes, some ringed in charcoal-like lines, their different lips with shades of sparkle and shine adhered to them. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t be the first time I got a roommate who had a problem with it.”

  “I’m not looking at them because I’m scared,” I say. “It’s just . . . for all those years, I never saw anybody different from me. The Prophet didn’t believe it was possible, all these people living side by side. He told us people who didn’t look like us were evil.”

  She nods her head knowingly. “Yeah. There are plenty of people out there who think the same thing.”

  “There was a boy I knew,” I say tentatively, and I know I’m speaking almost too quiet to be heard above the din of the cafeteria, but I can’t speak louder because it feels wrong bringing him to life in this place. “His name was Jude. He lived in the forest. I met him when I was fourteen.”

  Angel puts down her plastic fork. “He was your boyfriend?”

  I nod, though I never called him that.

  “And he was a different color?” she asks, wariness palpable in her voice.

  I nod again.

  “And what happened to him?” The way she asks it, I know she already knows the answer.

  I look straight into the miniature blue discs inside each of her eyes, inside the angry folds of her face, and tell her. “They killed him,” I whisper. “I think they really killed him.”