Muffin But Trouble

by Victoria Hamilton

  His expression lightened a little. “How do you always make me feel better?”

  “Because you know that I got you, babe,” I said with a smirk.

  He kissed me nicely, the PG version of our usual smooch, and let me go. “Okay, kiddies, Dewayne and I have news. Listen up.”

  Dewayne, with even deeper training and knowledge than my hubby, took command. “As you may know, Sheriff Ben Baxter raided this compound at oh-two-hundred hours and took into custody a few men, a couple that he kept for a time. He has now released both without charge. They will be coming back.” He met each of our gazes, and stayed on me. “What are your reasons for coming out here?”

  I took a deep breath. “We’re not sure of any of this, Dewayne, but some of our friends are here. Also . . . I have reason to believe that a woman I know to have serious mental health issues is here mistakenly. I have heard from friends that she was coming to find me, but she may have fallen into the Light and the Way Ministry folks’ hands.”

  “So we’re here to extract her.” He nodded. “The fellow named Barney has been chased out of the bus station in Ridley Ridge multiple times. If your friend traveled here by bus, she may have been intercepted.”

  “I’m not surprised. I don’t know how she got here, but she doesn’t drive. If Lynn showed up here on the bus she’d tell anyone who listened about me. If he befriended her and promised to take her to me, she’d have gone.” My voice broke on the last word. Pish took my arm and squeezed. Shilo supported me on the other side.

  “We’ll find her, honey,” Pish murmured.

  “Dewayne, this is private property, I understand.” I motioned to the No Trespassing sign. “I was told to leave last time I was here.”

  Virgil cleared his throat. “It is private property. The ministry owns a twenty-acre section, and the rest is farmland. The Light and the Way started, apparently, in a house in town, then moved to a rented farmhouse just outside of Ridley Ridge, but two years ago or so they bought this chunk of land.”

  “Property around here is not cheap, even undeveloped farmland. How could they afford that?” Shilo asked. “And who sold it to them?”

  “The sale was private and didn’t go through Jack, I can tell you that,” Virgil said, flashing her a smile.

  “I knew that,” Shilo said. “Jack would have told me about it.”

  “So my point is . . . are we doing anything illegal? I don’t want to get you guys in trouble,” I said. “Like I said, the prophet guy told me to leave.”

  Dewayne turned his dark sloe-eyed gaze to me. “Do you think someone is in imminent danger?”

  Shilo piped up: “Yes! I haven’t been here before and so I’ve never been warned off. I saw the photo of someone on this land—someone I know who is vulnerable—and I believe she’s in danger from herself and others.”

  Dewayne nodded. “That’s enough to go in on. If we have reason to believe someone is in imminent danger, we can make a case to the police.” He smiled grimly. “Sometimes it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. I don’t think Ben Baxter is going to vigorously pursue us. But let’s be swift; I’d rather we’re gone before Voorhees and Barney show up.”

  “Let’s go,” Virgil said. “Orderly, now, ladies and gent,” he said, with a smile for Pish, who had been uncharacteristically quiet.

  We all clambered up the hillside and through the locked gate, pushing our cloth bags of food ahead as we went. Dewayne led the way, Virgil followed us from behind. I stayed directly behind Dewayne. Lizzie, camera in hand, was clicking photos a mile a minute, weaving off the path, taking photos of us and the field across which we traversed. There was the encampment ahead, looking the same: laundry on the lines, a smoky fire in the open space. Women were gathered in groups by some of the huts, with children doing what kids do . . . running around after each other, playing tag, probably. Inevitably one fell and started shrieking, and a woman rushed over and picked him up, returning to the group with him on her shoulder.

  One of the women in the group glanced over and saw us, and soon all eyes were turned toward us. Belatedly I realized we might look a little menacing. I pushed ahead of Dewayne, but he was having none of that. He made me stay behind. Another of the older women, the one I had seen the first time I was there and who had been in the van with Barney, Nathan and Voorhees in Ridley Ridge, broke away from the cluster and strode toward us.

  “Who are you and what do you want?”

  I stepped forward, taking a deep breath. “I’m sure you remember me,” I said in my most placating tone. “I was here yesterday. We don’t mean to intrude, but we have some concerns about folks we love who are living here.” I had decided to focus on Alcina and Felice, first, because I didn’t know how to ask about Lynn. But I’d keep my eyes open. “We’d like to see them, to be sure they’re all right. We heard about the raid last night, and we want to help.”

  The woman looked with hostility to Dewayne and Virgil. “I don’t want them here,” she said.

  I watched her. “I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced. My name is Merry Grace Wynter. This is my husband, Virgil Grace,” I said, motioning to my hubby. He smiled, trying to look less intimidating. “Dewayne is our friend,” I said, hand on his arm. I felt a muscle flex on his forearm; he was tense. “This is Lizzie,” I said, pointing to the teen. “She was here with me yesterday. And this is Pish and Shilo. I was out here to talk to my friend Gordy Shute. Is he here? He can vouch for me.”

  Her expression was troubled, but not fearful, at least. That was a good start. I wondered how scary the raid had been for them all. It must have been terrifying, I realized, to have armed men march into camp in the middle of the night and seize Voorhees, Barney and others.

  “Gordy is around here somewhere.” Her glance slewed over to Dewayne, and she glared at him as she said to me, “Him and Nathan have been looking after things since the prophet and Barney were illegally seized.”

  Lizzie pushed forward. “I’m here looking for my friend Alcina. She’s just a kid, so you better damn well hope she’s okay. If I don’t find her I’m calling the freakin’ cops to arrest your asses.”

  The woman’s gaze turned to my young friend, her expression one of disgust. “Shut up, you filthy-mouthed little mongrel!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I gasped. It took me a long minute to process what she meant, but I got there, and I could see Dewayne had too, by the fury sparking in his eyes. I put my hand on his arm again and the muscle was leaping, a nerve pulsing under his skin. Lizzie, with her dark eyes and wild halo of frizzy hair, could be mistaken for mixed race. If I was right, that’s what this woman was implying and I wanted to hit her, not for the assumption but for the disgust in her voice and the hatred in her eyes when she said it.

  I held on to Dewayne’s arm and grabbed Lizzie, pulling her back. I so wanted to tell the woman off, but what I wanted more was to actually find Alcina and hopefully get her out of there, and Lynn too. And I wanted a chance to ask Peaches if she was Madison Pinker, and to find out about Glynnis Johnson, whose death haunted me. But most of all, I needed to find Lynn. “She’s worried about her friend,” I said, my voice tight with suppressed loathing. “If she hears from the girl herself that she’s okay, she’ll leave peacefully. Won’t you, Lizzie?” I gave my young friend a level look.

  Lizzie sulkily nodded. She turned away and started clicking the camera, which distracted the woman.

  “Stop taking pictures! This is private property.”

  Pish, the most diplomatic person in the world, stepped in between Lizzie and the woman, and the rest of us took the opportunity the distraction presented and headed toward the huts.

  I saw a familiar face. “Cecily!” I said.

  She was sitting with a group of women, some of whom had been crying. She said something to one of them, and stood, walking over to us. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asked. “We don’t know anything. Barney and the prophet aren’t back yet, and some of the women are scared. What’s
going to happen to us?”

  I put my arms around her and hugged. I wondered if she knew about Glynnis, and didn’t know if I had the courage to tell her. “Honey, no matter what, you and the other women aren’t in trouble,” I said, hoping I was telling the truth. A cold wind whipped up, raising a dust cloud in the open area near the firepit, mixing with ashes. “I was worried too, so I brought out some stuff. Some muffins and dry goods.” I handed the bags to her, and she gave them to a woman who had followed but stayed at a distance. “Who was that woman who came out to talk to us?”

  “That is Mother Esther. She’s the prophet’s first wife.”

  “First wife; does he have others?”

  Cecily shook her head. “Uh, no. He doesn’t.”

  “Why not, if his religion believes in polygamy?”

  She shrugged. I took her arm and pulled her away, keeping my eye on the others. It seemed that it was almost all women at the encampment, and that was a good thing. I didn’t know how long we had before Barney and the prophet showed up, and I didn’t particularly want to be there when they did, as I was intent on retrieving Lynn and getting her to safety. I wasn’t sure why, but there was a panicky sensation in my chest, a feeling that we were coming to some sort of tipping point.

  “Okay, you have to explain to me this multiple-wives thing,” I said. Mother Esther surged past us to organize or forbid the sharing of the food we had brought. It was too late for that, of course; the kids had already got the tubs of muffins open and were sitting around on the dry ground devouring them with great relish.

  “Plural wives is from the Bible, that’s all I know,” Cecily said. “Prophet Voorhees wants us to live as the original prophets lived, you know?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Do you think the original prophets lived as their cave-dwelling ancestors lived? Life moves forward, not backward,” I said. “We learn, we grow, and hopefully we do better. I don’t know why plural wives is a good thing, any more than plural husbands.”

  Cecily shrugged, her brow knit together. “Plural husbands . . . huh. I never thought of that.”

  “And if he believes it so fervently, why doesn’t he have more than one wife?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t care. The prophet said something about ‘complex marriage’ or something like that. I guess there was a community near here in the old days, way back, that had, like, free love and stuff.”

  “Way back? Like . . . the nineteen seventies?” I thought maybe she was referring to the free love generation of hippies my mother had always talked about fondly.

  “No, like the eighteen hundreds. It was called the Oneida community, or something.”

  Learn something new every day, I thought, but did not say. It was not pertinent to the current situation. “It doesn’t matter,” I said impatiently, wanting to get on with things and worried about spending too much time on-site. “Look, we’re here to help anyone who wants to leave.”

  Cecily looked nervous. “If I had anywhere else to go, I’d leave,” she said softly, shifting from foot to foot. “I don’t like this idea of getting married to some guy who already has a wife. It’s weird.” She wriggled her shoulders. “Or any guy. I mean, fu . . . dge that!”

  Lizzie had approached quietly and listened in. “Cec, you don’t have to stay here. You can come stay with me at my grandmother’s.”

  The girl brightened and stood taller. “Really? You mean it?”

  I wasn’t going to interfere; that was between Lizzie and her grandmother, with whom she lived when she and her mother weren’t getting along . . . in other words, most of the time. From then on, Cecily was our main guide. I saw Gordy still working on his roof, but fortunately his back was turned. I didn’t think he had noticed us, which was good. I had other priorities and didn’t want to talk to him right then. Virgil and Dewayne had disappeared past the huts. I had a sense that there was more on their minds than the missing girls, but it was better if they were out of sight. Two big, muscular men, one of them black, striding around the encampment would probably strangle my search. Their presence had appeared to rattle Mother Esther.

  I assumed the two ex-cops had assessed the camp and decided we weren’t in any danger, especially given we traveled in a pack. “Can you show us around, Cecily?” I asked, my nerves still on edge.

  Mother Esther had also disappeared. Shilo was making friends with the women and children, something she would be very good at. If anyone could attract Alcina it would be Shilo, who has some kind of unspoken bond with the elusive, charming girl. Pish was MIA. Maybe he had made friends with Esther; if any gay man could get through to her, it would be him, with a charm offensive more powerful than bigotry. Lizzie and I followed Cecily, asking questions.

  “How long have you been here, Cecily?” I asked, though we knew the answer.

  “June,” she said.

  “So you came here directly when you left home? You told me you had been sleeping in the park when Barney offered you a place to stay.”

  “Yeah, but I’d only been there one night.”

  I led the way back through the encampment, threading between shacks, trying to figure out the one that might hold Lynn. “We’re looking for Felice and Alcina Eklund, but I’m also wondering about someone else.” I turned my face away from the wind and pulled some hair out of my mouth. “Was there another woman who arrived around the same time as you, give or take a few weeks? She would be in her late thirties, very thin, blonde hair, brown eyes, kind of vague at times?”

  Cecily stopped and turned. “Do you mean Lynn?”

  My heart leapt. “Yes, Lynn!” There was a loud buzzer. “Prayer time again?” I asked.

  Cecily nodded, her cheeks flushing. “Every day, twice on Sundays. I have to go,” she said, her voice strangled. “I can’t linger.”

  Darn it. Gordy climbed down from the roof, and, with Nathan, was walking toward the cross-topped Quonset hut building, as were others. I hid from his view behind the wall of a hut. “Cecily, wait—”

  “No, I have to go!” she said, her tone panicked. “If I don’t Nathan will report me when the prophet comes back, don’t you see?”

  “But you’re coming away with me!” Lizzie said, as perplexed as I was at Cecily’s abrupt about-face.

  “I . . . I w-want to, but when the prophet comes back, and Barney . . . Nathan will tell them. And your grandmother’s place in town . . . they’ll find me,” she said, wringing her hands, looking terrified.

  “And then what?” I asked. I was alarmed by her fear; it seemed so out of keeping with what I knew about the encampment so far. There hadn’t appeared to be any physical punishment, or at least no one had mentioned it. I touched her arm. “Cecily, what is going on here? Has anyone hurt you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me what you know. Was Glynnis Johnson here? Did you know she’s dead?”

  Her eyes widened. “It’s true?” she cried.

  “Yes. She was found out on the highway. What about other girls; have any of them disappeared from here?”

  She still shook her head, then turned, running, her long skirts fluttering behind her like broken wings.

  “Cecily, what about Lynn?” I yelled after her. But she didn’t stop. “Damn! There is something seriously wrong here.”

  “I’m going into the meeting place and give them what for,” Lizzie said, her cheeks suffused with a dark red, her hands fisted at her sides, her camera swinging on its long strap looped around her neck.

  She is her grandmother’s (a sturdy pugnacious woman) granddaughter, that’s for sure. “No, you are not,” I said, grabbing her arm before she could march off and give ’em hell. “Number one, you could endanger Alcina by barging in and making trouble. And number two . . . priorities. While they’re all busy, we are going to search this place from top to bottom. If I know Lynn, she won’t be attending any prayer meeting. I’m going to look for her, and so are you, and you’re going to take photos of every place we go into.”<
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  The encampment was large, though, and I didn’t know how long we had before Barney and Voorhees returned. The place felt deserted. Most of the huts were empty—including the one Nathan and Gordy had been roofing but had deserted when the buzzer sounded—but there was evidence that mostly women lived in them. I had no desire to search the women’s belongings—that would be wrong on so many levels—but I did want to look for Lynn. So I entered every building, shelter and tent there was.

  The tents flapped in the breeze. Somewhere a bird cried, like the caw or screech of a raven or blue jay. Winter was coming. How were they going to manage? Western New York State gets miserably cold in winter. And even the shelters and huts . . . they were poorly insulated, if at all, and there was a moldy smell in some of them. I remembered the elevated view of the camp Lizzie had taken, and some huts that even appeared abandoned to the elements, shut up and with boards nailed over windows. What kept all these women here, in these conditions, with children? Had child protection services seen how they were living?

  One way or another they would see . . . the photos would document it.

  There was a tiny hut back from the rest, not as far away as the abandoned-looking one I had been thinking of from the photos, but along the edge of a wilder tangle of bramble bushes and a refuse heap. I almost decided not to check it out, thinking Lynn must, after all, be at the meeting. The shack had broken windows covered in cardboard and the door, some planks nailed together, hung on one hinge. But I’m thorough. I led the way down a path, through long grass and weeds. I could hear something inside, and the hair on my arms stood up. It was voices . . . or at least one voice, and weeping.

  I recognized that weeping. I had heard it every day of my life for two years. I shuddered, and strode up, banging on the door. “Lynn? Lynn, it’s me, Merry! I’ve come to get you!”

  The door flung open and fell off its one hinge, and there was Felice, Alcina’s mother. She was crying and pressing her fist into her gut, but she stood back and pointed to the bed. “She’s sick, and no one will help her. She’s been impossible from the start. She’s thrown things at people, and cursed them out . . . she even bit Mother Esther. Finally no one else would help her. But she’s sick! Can you help?”