Muffin But Trouble

by Victoria Hamilton

  Lizzie had drifted away again. I had lost my opportunity to ask Cecily if there were other girls from the list of the missing at this camp. However, having accomplished one of our goals, talking to Gordy, it was time to leave before we were kicked out. I began searching for Lizzie, hoping that perhaps she had found Alcina and her mother.

  As I strolled, I could feel that I was being shunned; somehow the prophet’s command had rippled through those few of his followers who were not enclosed in the Quonset hut. Whenever I asked a woman or child anything they shook their heads, as if I was speaking in tongues.

  Finally, though, I found my young friend behind the red Quonset hut; she was speaking to Alcina’s mother, Felice. I was relieved, and joined them.

  “No, Lizzie, really . . . Alcina is fine!” Felice was saying, her expression smiling and serene. She was gowned in lavender, her blonde hair braided into a coronet. She looked like she had stepped out of Little House on the Prairie. “We’re both fine!”

  “But she’s not going to school!” Lizzie griped.

  “Not that school. You know how much she hated it.” Alcina’s mom, Felice Eklund, was delicate and pretty, and had a lovely lilting voice, soft as a pansy petal, but her tone now had an edge to it. “We have a school on-site. She’s in class this minute.”

  Class? Did she mean the buzzer-commanded meeting? I was filled with dismay for Alcina. She had been homeschooled, or free-schooled, for most of her childhood. Free-schooling, as far as I understood, meant no specific curriculum and no set lessons or lesson times. That might seem like a recipe for trouble, and I had found Alcina to be a little odd, yes—a kind of ethereal, free butterfly of a child—but also intelligent in ways I couldn’t quite grasp. She read widely and voraciously. There were definitely gaps in her knowledge, but she knew how to learn, and that, to me, is the biggest lesson a school can and should teach. From being a skeptic I had been converted to free-schooling’s benefits, at least for some kids. Alcina was a poster child for the benefit of it.

  “Okay, we know she didn’t like the local school. She was too smart for it,” I said with an acerbic edge to my voice. Too smart, and too odd, I thought, but did not say. Alcina was shy and fey, wild and wary, but the local high school had forced her into a groove; the more she tried to fit in, to find her place, the further from herself she got. “But I don’t buy that this place and their ‘school’ are right for her either.”

  “Me neither,” Lizzie said. “Why couldn’t you stay on your farm and keep homeschooling Alcina? Why come here?”

  “Do you know how hard that was? Trying to take care of everyone, trying to keep track of everyone? Everyone thought it was so easy, and I was sick a lot, and . . .” She shook her head in exasperation.

  I examined her closely; on second look she didn’t appear quite so well. She was pale and hollow-cheeked. She swallowed convulsively and swayed on her feet. I was alarmed. “Felice, how is Alcina really? You can tell us if there are any problems, or if you have any concerns.”

  “She’s fine, Merry,” Felice said. But her tone had a hysterical edge to it, a fearful tension.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m . . . fine!” she said, staring into the distance.

  I looked over my shoulder, where her gaze had strayed. Barney was approaching. Felice, surprisingly, went to him and he put his arm around her. I was speechless.

  “This is Barney,” she said, putting her small white hand flat on his golf-shirted chest. From the edge of hysteria she had rebounded to a kind of bright and twinkly smileyness.

  “We’ve met,” I said tightly, trying to figure out their relationship.

  He leaned his face down and she offered a long, lingering kiss. “He’s my husband,” she said defiantly.

  “Oh, hell no! You’re not even divorced from Alcina’s dad yet!” Lizzie burst out, waving her hands around.

  Felice’s face colored delicately. “Spiritual marriage needs no permission from the state.” She smiled up at her husband. “Barney has been so wonderful. He loves children, and he’s so good to Alcina, so caring. He couldn’t love her more if she was his own!”

  Something was off, but I couldn’t figure out what. She seemed happy—she was smiling and bright-eyed—and yet there were dark smudges under her eyes. Maybe the sleep deprivation that seemed to plague them all. Did I dare risk asking about the missing girls on Urquhart’s list?

  Another woman, considerably older than Felice with silver threading her hair, tucked back in a kerchief, approached. “Barney, the prophet would like to speak with you.”

  He took her under his other arm and gave her the same long, lingering kiss, which she returned with enthusiasm.

  Felice smiled at her, then looked at me with an almost defiant gaze. Her chin went up. “This is my sister-wife, Mariah.”

  Chapter Eight

  All hell broke loose.

  “Your what?” Lizzie shouted. “What are you, the freakin’ Browns?”

  For those who don’t watch reality TV, that is apparently a notorious polygamous family who have or had (I’m not too clear on this; Lizzie filled me in on the reference later) a reality show.

  Lizzie bolted forward and grabbed Felice’s arm, tugging her to try to pull her away from Barney, while she shouted, “Take me to Alcina! Now!”

  “Lizzie, stop!” I said in a low tone. My young friend is occasionally erratic and holds strong opinions. I was with her in spirit, but I had been surveying the landscape, poking my head around corners, watching to make sure we were not noticed. Any place that promoted Barney’s beliefs was suspect to me. And I was right to be wary; things were getting dodgy.

  Folks I had thought were safely tucked away in the Quonset hut meeting now appeared; a few men, bearded and beady-eyed, clustered in groups between the two Quonsets. Even Gordy appeared, looking alarmed. Some of the men ambled toward us. Gordy tried to delay them and at the same time comfort Peaches, who was weeping loudly. This was headed sideways, and I did not want Lizzie in trouble.

  “Lizzie, you calm down now,” Felice said with a tremor in her voice.

  She looked frightened, and that worried me. She and Mariah (I had wondered if Mariah was the woman in the van I had seen in Ridley Ridge, but she was not, being a little younger and slimmer) clung to each other even as Lizzie still held on to Felice’s arm, tugging at it, while Barney started chuckling, crossing his arms over his narrow chest. He clearly deeply enjoyed watching the two of us horrified by Felice’s marital situation. Nothing could be accomplished with Lizzie shrieking at Barney and Felice, and him grinning back at us like a howler monkey, baring his teeth and haw-haw-hawing.

  I grabbed Lizzie’s hand and wrenched her fingers off Felice’s slender arm—she likely left a bruise—then physically lifted my young friend away from the group. There was no alternative; I knew what I had to do. “We’ll be leaving now,” I said loudly, over the squawks of indignation from Lizzie. I’m bigger, stronger and meaner than she is, for all her teen bluster, so when I threaded my arm through hers and clamped her close to my body, she had to go, bumping alongside of me like a skiff tethered to a powerful tug, her camera bouncing against her chest until she steadied it with her free hand.

  I led her away—she grumbled the whole time about civil rights and suffragettes and outdated stereotypical female roles—past the groups of men who watched, past Gordy and Peaches, and past the women and children who were streaming out of the meeting and gathering nearby. As I hauled Lizzie away I thought I saw Alcina hiding behind one of the bigger girls, but I was not going to pause to find out if it was her, not with a crowd of possibly angry men watching our every move. Felice said Alcina was fine, and she was, to my knowledge, a loving mother. I had to trust that.

  I wove between the buildings, followed by the gathering crowd. The far fence looked even farther away than I had thought it. This was troubling. A day that had started with such promise was devolving into a brewing storm. I shivered as a breeze stirred, tossing treetops and riff
ling dead grass. I looked back over my shoulder.

  Barney was there, among the men who were monitoring our progress with stony stares. I found him even creepier than I initially had when faced with him in Ridley Ridge, and I was worried. Alone, he was a loser shouting imprecations at women who could laugh in his face, but here, with the power of the whole cult behind him . . . I didn’t like it. Even as he guffawed there was a mean glint in his eye that made me wary. Felice had looked in turn defiant, then alarmed, then frightened. Mariah seemed to offer her more consolation in the situation than Barney.

  I thought that the group was gaining on me. No time to lose. “Come on!” I said to Lizzie, who was still resisting. “Lizzie, please . . . we can’t do another thing for Alcina if they decide to beat us up or get a court order against us.”

  “I’m not happy about this, Merry.”

  “That makes two of us.” I needed to think about this, how to contact Alcina personally—I had a definite feeling it wasn’t going to be easy—and how to get her away from there. It wasn’t going to happen in the middle of Lizzie’s cyclone of fury. She had stopped resisting, but she was dead weight, stumbling along beside me like a drunken sorority girl after a frat party. I hauled her all the way back to the gate, beyond which I had parked the car. I pushed her through the gap between the padlocked gate and the fence and followed, pulling at my snagged blouse and ripping it away from the chain link it was caught on.

  “Damn! This is a Michael Kors and now it’s ruined.”

  Lizzie growled, “Boo fricken’ hoo.”

  I marched her to the car and shoved her into the passenger side, slammed the car door and took the driver’s seat. We were swiftly on the highway headed anywhere but there. Lizzie twisted awkwardly in the passenger’s seat, her seat belt straining, so she could glare at me as she ranted and raved about Felice, Alcina, the encampment, and my own traitorous behavior hauling her away from there.

  I drove and appeared to listen, nodding and uh-huhing occasionally, but my mind was disengaged. All the horrible things that man had said to me in town played back in my mind. I hated to think that Alcina, that lovely, delicate, true-minded sweet fairy child was now his “daughter”—I shuddered—and subjected to who knew what teachings in their school. I trusted Alcina’s good sense to see the falsity of it all, but it must be hard on her. How could Felice allow it? I had thought of her as a good mother, but she was making me doubt it, as I thought of Alcina.

  The only bright spot, as I saw it, was that in Ridley Ridge Barney had seemed truly kindly toward the child he had seen; maybe grown women were a bane, but children were safe from scrutiny. I hoped that was true and our young friend had nothing to fear.

  I considered what I knew of Felice. With her husband and two children she had lived off the grid for a few years in an old gothic monstrosity of a farmhouse that, as far as I knew, the family still owned as the adults went through a divorce. The father was a long-distance truck driver and had supported his wife as she went through some kind of devastating illness from which she had apparently miraculously recovered. It was all odd, down to the fact that the dad had custody of their son, while she kept custody of Alcina.

  I needed to find out more about this cult, with the new added twist of polygamy and what appeared to be underage marriage, if Gordy’s determination to wed Peaches was anything to go by. And I was still worried . . . I hadn’t had a chance to determine if there were any other of the missing girls on Urquhart’s list at the camp, though I had seen some teen girls among the females gathered. Could the police use Cecily’s presence, even though it was voluntary, to go onto the property to find out?

  “So, what are we going to do about it?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Everything I said!” Lizzie shrieked in my ear, flinging her hands up in a gesture of ire. “What do you mean what? Weren’t you listening?”

  “Only dogs could have heard what you were saying,” I said, glancing over at her as I turned onto the main street in Autumn Vale. “So settle down and tell me what you said in ten words or less.” I could see her counting in her mind even as she fumed and glared out the car window.

  “Okay, so . . . how do we get Alcina away from that band of raving lunatics?”

  It was so exactly what I had been thinking that I smiled as I pulled up to Golden Acres and parked on the street. It was Lizzie’s day to volunteer and I had promised to drop her off there after our field trip. I undid my seat belt and turned to look at her. “That’s twelve words. Fourteen if you count okay, so. You could have left out raving.”

  “Ergh!” she growled. “I don’t know what you’re grinning about. This is serious.”

  “It is. And I was smiling because what you said is exactly what I was trying to figure out while I was not listening to you. I’m going to do some research, talk to Virgil, and we’ll figure something out. I do not want that child there any longer than she has to be, but she’s still underage and in Felice’s care. We can’t do anything that will be like kidnapping.”

  “To hell with that! I’m all for kidnapping,” she said as she yanked her scrunchie out of her hair and rebundled it, trying to make it neater. She pulled a second scrunchie off her wrist and used both to restrain her riotous mop. “We can hide her in the castle. You’ve got an attic.”

  Wouldn’t that look special to the outside world? I thought . . . Crazy woman kidnaps adolescent and chains her in attic of haunted castle. “Kiddo, I get it. I’m anxious too. But we have to do this right,” I said, watching her. Her face, from being spotty and unformed, was narrowing into the planes of adulthood. She had grown up so much in the three years I had known her. I reached out and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. “Maybe we can get Alcina’s father involved. He may not even know how she’s living. But we have to go carefully. She doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid!”

  “All right. Okay,” she grunted, heaving herself out of the passenger’s side, grabbing her backpack and camera from the backseat and slamming the door shut.

  “Hey, wait!” I pushed the button to roll down the windows. She leaned in. “You’re coming out to the castle to take more pics of the carriage house before they start working on it?” She nodded. “Don’t off-load the photos of the encampment. I’d like to see them. So let’s talk. Text me.”

  I drove back to the heart of town, parked and headed on foot down a side street to the library, Hannah’s haven, marked by a simple sign that dangles over the narrow sidewalk: Autumn Vale Community Library. It’s kind of a dingy space, with concrete block walls painted gray, florescent lighting, tables filling the interior and shelves lining the walls. High windows allow in light but give no view of the outside. The library was open, and there were a few patrons, Helen Johnson among them.

  “Helen, how nice to see you!” I said as she leaped up from where she was perusing a book on the Johnson family, one of the oldest in Autumn Vale, concurrent with the Wynter family, she had told me in the past. She’s a neat older woman, always dressed in comfortable mall-ish clothes off the sale rack in J. C. Penney, or if she’s splurging, Macy’s. I hugged her and she grasped my arm in an iron-tight grip. We made small talk as I plotted how to escape her clutching hand, chatting mostly about her latest project with the church, a mission to some less-fortunate families living in the valley between Autumn Vale and Ridley Ridge. There had been local flooding in the spring, and a few of the families were still struggling to rebuild. Turner Construction had donated time and labor, but could only afford to do so much, so Reverend Maitland of the Methodist church was recruiting local fellows to help get the places ready for winter. Helen’s husband, a retiree, was organizing, she told me.

  “Zeke has promised to do some of their wiring so they will have access to the internet,” Helen said, stealing a sly glance at Hannah and smiling. “He’s such a blessing, that boy!”

  Hannah’s cheeks pinked, but, her nose in a book, she gave no other sign of hearin
g. Helen kept talking, and I kept nodding while trying to pull my arm out of her grasp. Her conversation required no other participation, since it consisted of things I had heard before, or that didn’t matter to me.

  Isadore Openshaw was there too, eating an apple as she read a book. She’s a local eccentric. She was not born and raised in Autumn Vale, but came here to live with a relative who then died and left her his house, she being the only kin he had. She had been a teller at the bank run by my friend Janice Grover’s husband, Simon, but she was caught up in the scandal that almost closed the bank and hadn’t been back to work there since. After a long period of perilous unemployment, she found work at the local coffee shop bussing tables and washing dishes.

  She keeps to herself. Isadore is a friend to Hannah because Hannah doesn’t push. Instead, she pulls, asking Isadore for her help in the library. The woman shelves books, sorts donations, and also repairs damage, fixing dog-earred page corners and cleaning covers. Helen and Isadore have kind of an uneasy friendship, mostly one-sided, a determined effort on Helen’s part to comfort the afflicted even when they don’t want comforting. I do like Helen; she has a good heart. She also has a delicate sense of grievance, and an erratic attention to detail. I listen more than I want to because to pull away too soon is to upset that delicate sensibility.

  I finally managed to extricate myself and she went back to her reading. Isadore hastily hid a grin as I glanced her way. I nodded to her and headed to Hannah, pulling a chair up next to her power wheelchair.

  “Did you see Gordy?” she asked, setting her book aside.

  I nodded. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Hannah. I’m worried.” I quietly told her everything as she listened intently, occasionally interjecting a question. “Trouble is, he seems happier and more focused than he has since I’ve known him. How can we argue that he’s better off away from them if that is the effect the place has had? And he says he’s getting married. Peaches seems like a sweet girl, too.” I shrugged.