“Who is she? Do you know?”
“Mother Esther? She’s just . . . her.”
I got out my phone and texted Hannah, asking if she could find out who she was. “So what else did the tapes say?”
“The preacher said that women are made from a tiny piece of man, and she is formed to tempt and betray men. He said that women were created by God but were corrupted by Satan. If she isn’t kept under control, she will lead to the downfall of the United States.” Cecily’s plump cheeks colored faintly. “It sounds so stupid now that I’m away from it.”
I put my hand over hers on the counter. “Not stupid, honey; it’s mind control. Tell me . . . you said you were scared. What . . . or who were you afraid of?” I wondered if she would say anything about Bob Taggart. Had he been hanging around the camp?
“I don’t know why I was scared,” she whispered, frowning. “I mean, no one beat me, you know?”
“If you were scared, why didn’t you leave?”
Cecily shook her head and knit her thick brows together. “I don’t know. It’s like I can’t remember what kept me there. I mean, I knew I couldn’t go home; my dad won’t have me. But I felt like . . . like I was bad, and I needed to be punished. So I stayed. I kept hoping I’d be judged . . . I don’t know . . . worthy or something.” She sighed and rolled her shoulders. “I don’t understand myself. Seeing you guys . . . it woke me up, and I knew I had to leave. But I’m still kinda scared. Even now, I keep looking over my shoulder. It was . . . it was those tapes.”
“What else did they say?”
“A lot.” She picked at a fingernail and frowned, biting at the skin along her thumb. She stopped and looked up at me. “I don’t know if you’ll understand. What the prophet said, and the preacher on those tapes, that women needed to stay home and raise babies . . . it made a weird kind of sense after a while. The world’s messed up, right? I mean, there are all kinds of troubles in the world today. I started to wonder . . . is it because none of us are living right? Especially me. I’d been smoking, and doing weed, and stealing money from my dad’s wallet, and drinking his booze. I didn’t obey my dad. What if the mess my life was in was because I wasn’t following the real way? I mean, maybe it’s harsh, but maybe that was the way it was supposed to be.”
“Who benefits by women staying ‘in their place’?”
She looked down at our joined hands. “Well, men, I guess.”
“Right. When people tell you some way is the only way, always consider the why of it . . . who benefits?”
She nodded slowly. “I don’t get why what the prophet said made sense to me when I was there, and doesn’t now. And Mother Esther said that we needed to replenish the earth with . . . with white babies. Or whites were going to disappear.” Her cheeks turned a bright crimson.
Mother Esther’s “mongrel” comment about Lizzie came back to me. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You know that’s wrong, though.”
She nodded. “I never believed it. And I didn’t want to marry, like, Nathan, or Barney, or whoever. I hated them all after a while!”
“But the prophet made you feel guilty for wanting something else beyond having kids and obeying a husband.”
“It wasn’t the prophet, it was more Mother Esther. Whenever we would talk, Arden—the prophet, you know—would say he didn’t really give a crap. Except he didn’t say crap. She was the one who kept hammering away at it. I mean, I told her, yeah, I want kids. Someday.” She grinned. “Just not now.”
We all laughed. I was relieved by the spark of humor I had seen in Cecily. I found it interesting that Arden Voorhees didn’t seem to be overly committed to his Light and Way Ministry philosophy, as put forth by Mother Esther. “I’m proud of you for breaking free, Cecily. It took courage. Now . . . why did you guys want to come out here?”
The girls exchanged looks. “Cecily was wondering . . . she wants to try to go back and live with her dad, but they left things on bad terms. I said you’d talk to him for her.”
I felt a moment of consternation . . . I didn’t know Cecily well enough, and didn’t know her dad at all. “I don’t see why me talking to him would help. I’d say . . . get reenrolled in school to prove you’re serious, then try to talk to him yourself.”
“They don’t care, my dad and stepmom,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “They’re never going to talk to me. We left things on bad terms, you know, like . . . real bad. I’m scared they hate me.”
I sighed. “I know how you feel but trust me, your dad loves you. I’d bet they’ll take you back in.”
“So you won’t talk to him?” Lizzie said, immediately going into combative mode, as usual.
“I didn’t say that. Let me think about it.”
“You don’t have to,” Cecily said glumly. She cradled her coffee in both hands. “Maybe I’ll head for New York, like I was going to. I could probably hitch.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to him! I promise.” The thought of this girl, damaged already by what she’d been through, heading to New York City on her own was too much. I wasn’t sure she had learned her lesson at the Light and the Way compound and could easily step from one abusive situation into another. From my own experience it takes successive hard knocks to get it through the thickest of skulls; Cecily and I were very much alike, I was afraid. When I was her age I was exactly that same blend of knowingness and naïveté. However . . . as I noted another look between the two of them, I thought I may have been scammed into agreeing.
“Cecily, do you mind if we talk more about your experience out at the encampment?”
She shrugged. “I’ve already talked myself hoarse with the cops.”
“I still have a lot of questions, and some of them may not be ones the police thought of. I suppose they asked you about Glynnis?”
She nodded. “I don’t know what happened to her. She disappeared one night.”
Disappeared; I wondered where she had been before she was found by the highway. “How did she get along with everyone?”
“The older women didn’t like her as much as they liked me. She was so pretty. There was even talk that the prophet was going to marry her.”
“How did she feel about that?”
“She wasn’t happy, but it would have been better than marrying Barney or Nathan.”
“Aren’t there other men there?”
“Yeah, but they’re not around much. Some of them work for the construction company, some of them work on the farm. Most of them live somewhere else.”
“That’s weird,” I said. I was puzzled by so many aspects of the Light and the Way camp, but that explained why there were so many women and children and so few men around the camp.
“I never thought about it much. It was just the way it was. The prophet doesn’t let them marry, not until they prove themselves, anyway. That’s what Gordy is trying to do, prove himself worthy. The guys have a lot more freedom than the girls. Even when some of them did come for prayer meetings, we didn’t get to hang out with them much. Mother Esther kept us separate, though it was Barney who really enforced the rules.”
“So Barney is the boss?”
She shook her head. “He still has to listen to the prophet. But he’s around us more, so we have to listen to him.”
Lizzie growled under her breath; she was still anxious about Felice and Alcina, as was I. “Do they have cars? How do they get to the construction site?”
“Barney or the prophet drives them into town in the van. Or they stay off-site. Like I said, most of them only come back to the encampment on weekends.”
“So the women didn’t like Glynnis as much as they liked you . . . maybe there were other reasons than that she was pretty?”
Cecily shrugged and turned her mug in her hands. “She was snoopy, too . . . she got caught listening in on conversations, and she would go through people’s stuff.”
That was more likely why people didn’t like her. “Did anyone threaten her? Did she ever confide in you any
thing she had found out by snooping?”
Frowning and twisting her lips, Cecily thought that over. “She was really smart . . . smarter than me. She said . . . lemme think.”
I tapped my fingernails on the table as she stared off into space. She met my gaze.
“She said something like . . . anyone who thought the prophet believed any of his own lies was full of sh . . . sugar.”
“Is that all?”
Cecily rolled her eyes. “I had a few other things on my mind, and Glynnis . . . you had to know her. I really liked her, but the girl was a drama queen. She liked to say mysterious stuff and then just look mysterious when you asked her to make it clearer.”
That worried me. What did Glynnis know? And had it led to her death? “When Glynnis disappeared, did anyone say anything to you all?”
Cecily shook her head. “She had talked about running away,” she whispered. “She said there was something wrong about the Light and the Way. She told me she was going to leave, but I didn’t tell anyone, I swear. But that’s why I didn’t think anything when she was gone.”
Plus, there wasn’t time; she was gone, but then she was found by the highway soon after, maybe the very next evening. “You may not have been the only one she told, right? About thinking there was something going on at the encampment?”
“I guess not.”
“Is there anything else you can remember about her? Maybe about her snooping?”
“She was caught a few times away from the women’s camp. That wasn’t allowed.”
“You had boundaries?”
Cecily nodded. “We could go as far as the church hut, but no farther, supposedly, though I saw Mariah wandering back in the field at times. She said she was looking for herbs.” She sniffed in disgust. “If so, she never found any.”
I thought of the prophet’s hut, with its stock of “luxuries” like Pop-Tarts and electronics. They couldn’t have anyone telling the girls what they were missing, I suppose. “But if she found anything, she never told you.”
“No.” Cecily looked off into the distance. “Mother Esther used to take her aside all the time and talk to her. That’s why some of us thought Mother was getting Glynnis ready to be the prophet’s next wife.”
“Did he ever seem to take a special interest in her?”
“It was all Mother Esther. To us girls she said Glynnis was good breeding stock, whatever the heck that means. Sounds gross to me. She never said that to Glynnis that I know of. Anyway, like I said, the prophet wasn’t around much, except to lecture us about once a week, and I didn’t think he paid any attention to Glynnis.”
“How do you think the prophet would have taken it if Glynnis did try to run away?”
“He would have found out. He had snitches.”
“Like Barney and Nathan?”
“More Barney than anyone, but Mother Esther, too.”
Lizzie’s phone rang and she answered it. After talking for a moment, she looked up. “We gotta go, Cecily. Grandma needs her car back. I sure hope Mom comes back sometime soon so I can use her car. Grandma’s always wanting to go to church or shopping.”
The girls left after I promised to talk to Cecily’s father. Our conversation had left me with a vague sense of unease. Nothing about the Light and the Way Ministry added up.
Chapter Seventeen
But I had a dinner party to prepare for, and talking to Cecily and Lizzie had put me behind. I tidied the castle kitchen and returned to my own house, talking to Pish on the phone as I did some prep work for dinner. Lynn had been awake for a while and had told him what she remembered. She had, a couple of months ago—or more, she wasn’t too clear on times—decided to come find me. She swore I asked her to. That was clearly impossible because I hadn’t spoken to the woman in years. During the time I worked for her Lynn often imagined she had spoken to people and that they had promised her things. She was a pathological liar, I thought, but I was starting to wonder if she had very real mental health issues that had gone undiagnosed. Instead of becoming exasperated with her all those times, I wish I had tried to get her help.
Lynn did say one interesting thing that Pish passed on to me: one night, not long before she was rescued, she swore she heard a girl screaming. She didn’t know when it was. She was prowling the encampment looking, she admitted, for drugs, even weed, which she assumed someone would have. She seemed to think she was in some 1970s-style hippie commune, Pish said. She thought the prophet was like the hippie king, or something, a guru maybe, when it was more like a fundamentalist/survivalist camp.
A girl screaming. I vacuumed the living room and replaced the scented candles, wondering . . . what did that mean? Was Lynn hallucinating? Was she lying? The police were coming to interview her from her hospital bed. They were, of course, intent on finding out if Glynnis Johnson’s murder could be attributed to anyone living at the Light and the Way Ministry compound. So far there was no evidence either way, and neither Sheriff Baxter, whose jurisdiction the encampment was in, nor any other police service could prove a link. Already facing lawsuits for his ill-timed and poorly planned raid, Baxter had to be sure before going back in.
But given the last few months of Glynnis’s life, it made sense to think that those at the compound were most likely to have killed her. Or did it, given the deaths of other girls going back several years? If she was running away, as Cecily said she had been planning, it could have been misfortune; perhaps there was a serial killer driving the back roads of our area, just looking for easy victims, and she had tried to hitch a ride away from there.
Pish, in full protective bulldog mode, was staying at the hospital to make sure the detectives didn’t bully Lynn. I said to come join us at my house when he got back, if he felt up to it.
• • •
Our company had arrived.
I love my Craftsman house. We have a long covered front porch that is wheelchair accessible; I was thinking of our friend Hannah when I insisted on that. When you come in the front door, there is a smallish office to the left, and then you enter the great room from the foyer. It is spacious and comfortable, open concept for the most part, with natural wood built-ins, glass-doored shelves on both sides of a stone fireplace that hold books and treasures from both Virgil and my life. You move from there naturally into the large kitchen, and from there the eating area, overlooking the stone patio out back.
The lights were dim and there was a fire in the fireplace, so it felt cozy, and conversation was flowing. We have a U-shaped leather sofa with soft cushions in every corner, and our visitors looked supremely comfortable, propped up against the cushions drinking scotch and wine in cut-crystal glasses. It was nice to have company in our new house. As much as I love the castle, entertaining there always felt like it was either a grand affair or we were letting the place down. Here in our human-sized abode we have a gorgeous kitchen where people can gather at the breakfast bar while I cook and Virgil grills on the patio off the kitchen.
After cocktails I moved to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on dinner. Virgil grabbed the container of steaks that had been coming up to room temperature for about an hour. Our guests, lonely for our fascinating company, trailed us. I set out canapés on the island, and Urquhart nabbed some shrimp, then followed my husband out the back door into the chilly evening air.
There is a lovely seating nook in a bay window that overlooks the patio, all framed in the natural wood that dominates our Craftsman home. I had custom cushions and curtains sewn for the nook, so the windows were framed in natural shades, lots of olive green, burnt umber and sienna. Dewayne and Patricia sat there with ADA Elisandre Trujillo, who had insisted we all call her Ellie. They chatted in an animated fashion, laughter rising and falling. Dewayne is a natural raconteur, and his stories range from pathos to humor, as he easily assesses the proper temperature of the conversation.
Urquhart was still out on the patio having a beer with Virgil as he grilled the steaks. We were serving standard Autumn Vale fare: t-bo
nes and baked potatoes, with a big green salad. It doesn’t do to stray too far off the beaten path. I had worried that Ellie might be vegan, as my friend Shilo is, but I needn’t have worried. The assistant DA called herself a hypocritical carnivore, and I confessed I was the same. We both love animals and yet consume meat. Maybe someday I’ll come to terms with my hypocrisy and become a vegetarian.
I had also made another protein, though, for anyone who wasn’t fond of steak. Ahead of time I had prepared boneless skinless chicken thighs stuffed with a delicious blend of cream cheese, cheddar and green onions. I popped those in the oven with the baked potatoes (which had already been baked once; this was their second delicious bake stuffed with cheddar) and set the timer.
Ellie slid down from the banquette seating and sat on the floor near the breakfast bar crooning into Becket’s fur; my cat was milking it for all it was worth. “I’ve heard the stories about him surviving in the woods for a year.” She looked up at me as I used a mandoline to sliver red onions. “How is that possible?”
“I’ve never been sure,” I said, watching my marmalade cat stretch luxuriously and roll over, his lovely ginger fur contrasting with the dark wood flooring. “He knows these woods a lot better than I do. I’ve begun wondering if he used the fairy tale houses as shelter in the worst of winter.”
Ellie cocked her head to one side. She’s a lovely woman, petite and brown-eyed, with curly, almost frizzy, hair. She’s the kind of woman people underestimate, I’d bet; she looks cute and fluffy, but her voice is mesmerizing, and there are flashes of deep intelligence. “What do you mean by fairy tale houses?”
I explained how there were structures in the woods behind our house that I didn’t know what to make of at first. There was one built of river rock, like a cobblestone tower about seven feet tall, and another of now-rotting wood cut with a skil saw to resemble gingerbread. “Then a young friend, Lizzie Proctor, was going through some of the old photo albums left in the castle attic. There was a photo of me, with my father, grandfather and great-uncle. It was going to be a fairy tale woods for me, a kind of elaborate playhouse.” I shook my head and tossed the slivers of red onion into the salad bowl. “I never knew,” I said softly.
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