“Your leader.” This sounded more and more like a cult.
Gordy’s stance had changed. He had appeared relaxed before, sure of himself, then a little uncertain, as he had in past, and now he looked tense. It was as though as the older man approached, he leached all of that pseudo confidence out of my friend. One thing I know for sure, if confidence is real, it remains unshaken no matter who is near, or who challenges you.
“Is that your Prophet Voorhees?” I nodded toward the tall, lanky man, now about thirty feet away, out of hearing, I hoped. Gordy, without looking, nodded. “Gordy, are you here of your own free will?”
“Of course I am!” He took in a deep breath and straightened up again. “Merry, you gotta stop worrying. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I gotta go.” He turned away and strode off, but veered toward the fellow, who beckoned. I had thought his prophet was coming to talk to me, maybe to throw me off the property, but they walked away, heads bent toward each other, in the direction of Nathan, who stood by a hut.
The encounter had left me uneasy, unsure of how much time I had before the prophet turned ugly toward me. Where was Lizzie? I worried about her now, in this atmosphere. I strolled through the encampment. I was being watched, I could see it, but I could feel it too. My skin crawled. Where earlier it had been a relaxed atmosphere, now it seemed, since Prophet Voorhees had spoken with Gordy, tense and watchful. The children were gone, as were most of the women. A buzzer shrilled somewhere. Folks, including Nathan and Gordy, headed into the blue Quonset, the one with the cross atop it.
I caught up with Lizzie, who had managed to find a friend in the camp, a girl who had briefly attended the local high school, but who had dropped out.
“Merry, Alcina and her mom are here!” Lizzie exclaimed, after introducing me to Cecily, a chubby girl with blonde shoulder-length hair and big brown eyes. On her the dress similar to the ones worn by all the girls of the encampment was ill fitting and unflattering, the puffy sleeves jammed under a thick cardigan making her look like a football player.
“We met once,” I said, remembering a school event a year or two ago. “You’re . . . wait . . . you’re Cecily Smith, aren’t you?”
She looked warily at me and narrowed her eyes, but nodded. I had already made the connection the evening Urquhart was over; she was on the list of missing girls. How many others might be at the camp? I needed to find out, for Urquhart and Virgil’s sake, but for the girls, too. “How did you come to live here?” I asked, eyeing the frumpy garment. I remembered when we met she had been wearing other unflattering clothes, too revealing and too tight; now she had gone in the opposite direction. The stylist in me longed to make her over. She didn’t answer, just shuffled her feet anxiously. “Cecily, why are you here? This place seems so . . .” I shook my head, unsure how to proceed.
She shrugged.
“C’mon, Cec,” Lizzie said, her tone both pleading and bossy. “Merry’s cool. Tell her.”
“My dad kicked me out of the house,” she said in a bored monotone. “He’s remarried, you know? And this new woman—Jessica—has her own kids, and he didn’t want me around anymore. I was smoking pot and drinking. He said he’d had enough, so he kicked me out and burned all my stuff.” She looked tired and was pale. “I was sleeping in the park in town when Barney told me I didn’t have to live like that. He brought me here.”
“And you’ve been living here ever since? Without telling your family?”
Her look hardened. “So what? They didn’t want me. Why should I tell them where I am?” Her eyes widened. “You won’t tattle, will you?”
Uh-oh. There was an ultimatum coming, I could feel it. Slowly, I said, “Cecily, it’s only right to let your dad know where you are.”
Her face reddened. She jammed her hands in her coat pocket and said, “You have to promise you won’t tell. Or . . . or I’ll go somewhere else. I’ll run away.”
“Cecily—”
“Promise, Merry,” Lizzie said, turning and glaring at me. “You have to!”
I fidgeted and fumed. “I won’t tell your father,” I finally promised, then swiftly, so she didn’t see the loophole, added, “Are you okay? Is anyone harming you?”
“No. It’s . . . okay.” The buzzer sounded again, an insistent shrill. “Look, I gotta go . . . the buzzer—”
“What about the buzzer?”
“It’s service. We’re supposed to go for prayers and meditation and to listen to lectures.”
“Stay a minute. Answer some questions,” I said, grasping her arm. I could feel tension radiating from her. “Look, you may not know this, but you’re on a list of missing girls. So your dad must have reported your disappearance.”
She looked uncertain. “He didn’t want to be blamed if people noticed I was gone,” she said finally.
“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe he really is worried.” I wanted to ask about other girls, but I didn’t want to scare her off. “Can you tell us a bit about this place?”
As Lizzie shifted from foot to foot, her gaze sweeping over the encampment—looking for Alcina, I figured—I got more information from Cecily than I was able to extract from Gordy.
Prophet Voorhees was the leader of the group, which seemed to be a charismatic religious organization with loose affiliation to some online church, though Cecily didn’t know what church it was. She no longer had her phone; Voorhees confiscated all tech when a new member arrived. That explained, I suppose, why Gordy had not responded to Zeke’s phone calls or texts. The confiscation was supposed to be for a month, but as far as Cecily knew no one had a cell phone, tablet or computer.
Their days were broken up into sections of work, prayer, confessions, meetings, more work, more prayer, more meetings. The meetings, she said, were most often presided over by the prophet’s wife, Mother Esther, and usually devoted to listening to taped recordings by a preacher from years ago. They lasted long into the night, sometimes all night.
That explained how weary she looked. It sounded like a classic example of brainwashing to me: keep people tired and bombard them with the information you want them to believe. I began to get this creepy crawly feeling up my spine, a tingling as I thought of a documentary I had recently watched on the Jonestown community mass suicide/murder. My mouth felt dry.
Discussion about their past was discouraged by Voorhees. You were supposed to leave your past behind when you joined, Cecily said, and focus all your thoughts and feelings on the group. The work was divided up along gender lines: men did physical labor like roofing, construction, going out into the community to work—some fellows worked for Turner Construction—while the women did the domestic labor in the community: sewing, cooking, gardening, cleaning, laundry—lots and lots of laundry—child-rearing, and teaching. Some of the women went somewhere else to clean, to make money, Cecily said. They were the trustworthy older women, and they did not blab to the younger girls.
“They complain about it all the time,” Cecily said, rolling her eyes. “We work, but the other women say we don’t work nearly hard enough.”
“I saw kids . . . whose are those?”
“Some of the older women have kids. A few families joined the Light and the Way a couple of years ago, I guess,” she said.
“Families? Where do they live?”
“Well, not together, of course,” she said. She frowned, her thick brows knit. “I guess that probably sounds weird to you. I suppose I would think it was strange too, before coming here. I heard a couple of the women whispering. I guess the prophet and Mother Esther broke them up, made them sleep in different places. They’re supposed to keep their eyes on God, or . . . or something.”
“So families don’t live together.”
“Well, I mean, the women keep their kids, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Us younger girls get saddled with the kids a lot. It’s supposed to get us ready for our lives.” She sighed heavily. “The men go off and work, I don’t know where. Some of them are construction
workers, but there are others that go off and work at some farm, or some . . . I don’t know . . . welding and stuff, and then come back and sleep in the men’s quarters. That shack over there . . .” She pointed at a narrow shack, one of the ones with cinder block steps and junk piled along it.
I squinted into the distance, trying to figure it all out. “Do you have new people coming all the time?”
“Yeah, kind of. I mean, there are some guys who drift in to live for a while, then disappear again when life gets real and they get clued into the fact that we’re not some free love and sex place, you know?”
Okay, so no free love and sex. Good to know. “But families join? Why?”
“Gordy says it’s because the world is getting scary, and people are looking for a simpler way to live. He says when the end-times come, all that will be left are farmers and people who know how to live off the land.”
“So you know Gordy?”
“Sure. I mean, I knew him from Autumn Vale. And here . . . the prophet likes him, so he has Gordy talk to us all, sometimes, in a meeting. He’s shared lots of stuff about what is wrong in the world today, about how the government is using all of us, and how there is a Jewish conspiracy behind it all, and how they control all the governments in the west. He reads from some book called The Protocols of something or other.”
I felt a wave of such overwhelming sadness and nausea that for a moment I thought I was going to toss my cookies. My friend, the young man I had relied on to take care of my property at times, the fellow I had trusted in my home . . . and he was spouting anti-Semitic garbage like that, conspiracy crap gleaned from discussions of a long-ago fake book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I had Jewish friends growing up, many of them in our building in New York City, where my mother and I lived with my nana. My grandmother was an honorary Jew, she always joked, dedicated to playing mahjong and baking babka, so I had heard one of her friends talking about the Protocols book; it was very old, and had been debunked time and again. It was not real and did not reveal a vast Jewish conspiracy to pervert the morals of Gentiles and so take over the world. And yet no debunking was ever enough. Sadly, there was not enough logic in the world for the dedicated conspiracy theorist.
However . . . I didn’t take Gordy for a true bigot. He was confused, yes, and he had read without discernment too many 4Chan and 8Chan discussions, but it all seemed, with Gordy, to be jumbled into a big conspiracy muck ball. He wasn’t clear on any of it, except that someone was in charge in this world, and it wasn’t him. He was a helpless cog in a giant international wheel; disseminating conspiracy theories was him trying to take control of his own life.
“Cecily,” I said gently, touching her shoulder, catching her eye and holding her gaze. “These people are not to be trusted. Please don’t believe what they spout. You’re smarter than that. And more rebellious. I know this may seem to hold answers to the confusion of life,” I said, gesturing to the encampment at large. “But remember . . . you’re isolated here, and they are in your ear twenty-four seven. They’re trying to pull you in. The plain truth is, there is no grand overarching conspiracy. It’s all in the heads of those who need to make sense of a confusing world. Please . . . don’t be misled.”
Wearily she shrugged and looked around anxiously. “But . . . the prophet calls Gordy his spiritual son, you know? He says Gordy is the kind of godly man all of us girls should be looking to marry.”
“Okay. What makes this prophet the boss of you?”
She looked taken aback and opened her mouth, then closed it again.
As for me, my mind was whirling feverishly, trying to figure this place, this movement, out. It didn’t seem real, any of it. I’m a pretty cynical soul. I believe that most online preachers, televangelists and cult leaders are in it for their own reasons, and those reasons have little or nothing to do with salvation. I don’t think they believe the crap they spew, any more than any con man. So what was the prophet’s takeaway in all of this? What was the scheme? There had to be something behind it beyond duping rubes into parting with their money and dedicating their labor and souls to his murky cause.
I asked a few more questions and Cecily said there had been several marriages, though she was not sure if they were legal in the eyes of the state. They were spiritual bonds, she said; the couples didn’t even live together after the ceremony. She was supposed to get married as soon as Voorhees decided to whom she would be “sealed.” Did she want to get married? I asked. She shrugged, too weary, it seemed, to have feelings one way or the other. As defiant as she was, and as reluctant to have me contact her father, she was clearly exhausted and uneasy. Her gaze kept traveling, as if she was scanning the horizon, afraid of trouble.
Not only was discussion about their past forbidden, I learned, but discussion about anything but what Voorhees said was actively discouraged, though he seemed to leave little time for chat anyway. Given what Barney, who Cecily admitted was a rabid skunk, had said to me and called me in RiRi, I asked her about how the women and girls of the community were treated.
“Okay. I guess,” she said with a frown.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, as long as we follow the rules, it’s all good. It’s a bit of a relief, knowing that someone is looking out for you. I like some of the women,” she said, the first spark of enthusiasm I had heard in her voice. “Some are mean, but others aren’t. They’re nice. It’s kind of like having five moms.”
“I can hardly deal with the one I have,” said Lizzie, who had returned from one of her explorations. I shot her a look.
Voorhees had finally discovered me talking to Cecily and was coming toward us, his sweat-stained dashiki flapping about his legs, revealing dirty thermal leggings underneath. Great, just what I needed . . . a smelly prophet.
Chapter Seven
He joined us and put his arm over Cecily’s shoulders. “Mrs. Merry Wynter Grace. Brother Gordy told me all about you.”
Cecily stood silent and acquiescent, head down, boot-shod toe tracing circles in the dirt. Her weary meekness was troubling. The girl had been a spitfire, which is what got her into trouble so often; I remembered Lizzie regaling me with tales of Cecily’s misdeeds. I’m not saying it’s good to kick your teacher, the last offense that got her thrown out of school, but I didn’t know all the details. “Did he?” I said in response to the prophet’s comment. “And what did Gordy say?”
“He said that you had been very kind to him in the past, and had given him work. I want to thank you for that.”
Well, wasn’t that special? Like I had done the glorious prophet a personal favor. I examined him. He was tall, and gaunt, with a graying beard. He wore a head wrap and a hood over it, but there were stray tendrils of greasy gray hair escaping. He looked exactly like a prophet should look, I suppose. As off-putting as I found him, I saw something in his eyes, a wily intelligence, and a sense of humor. He was a personality to be reckoned with. If I were a teenager, kicked out of my house and afraid—young, vulnerable, alone—his strong personality might feel like safety to me. He exuded an aura of surety, a follow me kind of confidence. “You’re thanking me for giving my friend, Gordy Shute, work?”
“I am,” he said, his voice holding a tone of amusement. His breath, puffed out with every word, had a weird onion garlic odor to it. “It seems to me that despite some personal failings—Gordy tells me that you have a sad habit of failing to maintain a womanly submissive spirit, though you have married a suitably robust man—that you tried to help him. As his spiritual adviser I want to thank you for that. I think you may have set him on the path to our community.”
Set him on the path . . . I opened my mouth then shut it. I was speechless. A womanly submissive spirit? I was dumbfounded. And I had set Gordy on the path to the Light and the Way Ministry? I sincerely hoped not. “Well, Mr. Voorhees, I feel you have a few personal failings of your own. The verbal attack on me on the streets of Ridley Ridge by one of your . . . members, a guy n
amed Barney, was rude and borderline assault.”
“Barney can be overly zealous, but he feels strongly that a woman’s place is in the home. We feel that women are happier when they follow nature’s dictates, and to be the center of the home is her natural place.” He hugged Cecily to him. “That’s not an outrageous belief, is it?”
I started counting to ten. One, two, three . . . many in society felt that a woman should have a submissive spirit and that her place was as the primary caretaker of children and the home. I suppose in some circles that is not an outrageous belief, even though I thought it was a load of horsepucky. Four, five, six . . . it was their right to believe so, and the women who followed had a right to do that, if that’s what they wanted. Seven, eight, nine . . . it was none of my business what others believed or did not believe.
Ten. Counting hadn’t helped; rage boiled over, and I felt my cheeks flaming red. “However, mister prophet, those beliefs don’t sanction publicly berating anyone who doesn’t follow them. You can believe whatever you want, but the moment you call me a jezebel or a harlot is the moment I consider if my boot will fit up your butt.”
He nodded with a smirk, as if he’d scored a point for the home team. Cecily glanced up wide-eyed, with a terrified expression, as if I’d rabbit punched the pope in St. Peter’s Square. “I hope you have a day filled with blessings,” he said, his tone tauntingly gentle, his smile beatific. He led Cecily away.
“Cecily, if you want to leave, you can come with us!” I called out.
He paused and turned. “A reminder: this is private property, Mrs. Grace,” he said, his voice still soft but underlain with steel. “I won’t tolerate my children—or my brethren—being misled or lured away.”
It was a warning, and I felt a little better hearing it, though it bothered me that Cecily meekly allowed herself to be led away. I had gotten under his skin, even if it was just a little. I belatedly realized that he not only knew I was married, but to whom. Interesting. Gordy must have filled him in on Virgil’s past as sheriff of Autumn Vale.
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