Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake #4)(48)

Carol may be homeless, at least for now, but she cares about being clean.

The shower’s still running by the time I’ve examined everything. I end up looking at the Bible more closely, because the annotations seem . . . odd. Often they have dates attached to them.

I try something. I close the book, set it spine down on the work table, and let it fall open. It flops to a page that Carol must have frequently read. One verse—Colossians 1:26—stands out. It’s been decorated with childish-looking stars.

Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints.

Saints. It rings a bell from something she said earlier. Remy’s with the saints. I check a few more annotations. Chillingly, she’s heavily marked the passages that have to do with the subjugation of women, with the note memorize. There’s a quote written out on the inside cover of the Bible that I don’t recognize: So shall you bring Me saints, that I may take them unto Me for the war to come.

The attribution at the bottom of that is F.T. No chapter or verse number.

I try scanning First Thessalonians. It’s only four chapters, and short verses. I find only one reference to saints at the end, but it doesn’t match this quote at all. I’m no Bible scholar, but something seems off, and I don’t know what it is exactly. I try riffling through the copy again, looking for notations, and finally in Lamentations I find something circled with a star beside it, and a handwritten note in the margins: Father Tom’s message 4/2012.

F.T. Father Tom.

I abandon the Bible and move to the computer, but a Google search for Father Tom just turns up dozens of entries for parish priests. That bothers me, and then it comes into sharp focus. This is a King James Version Bible. She’s not Catholic. She’s some flavor of Protestant, apparently. And Protestant churches have pastors, not priests or fathers. Unless there’s a sect I don’t know about.

I glance up at the old-fashioned nightstand clock on the bedside table. It’s coming close on midnight now. No wonder I’m exhausted.

I keep staring at the digital display, not blinking. I don’t even know why until I see the white scripted name of the maker on the corner of the device. It’s small, but I can still read it from where I sit.

Hickenlooper.

No wonder that name seemed off.

I’ve missed a call; I had my ringer off. My phone buzzes to alert me to a voice mail, and I check the sender. It’s from Sam. But it’ll have to wait, because I hear the shower cut off, so I put the Bible back where I found it. I zip the backpack shut, and am at my laptop checking emails when she opens the bathroom door a few minutes later.

Her hair is up in a towel, but she’s completely dressed. Pink-cheeked and relaxed from the shower. She sinks down on the bed with a sigh and moves the backpack farther away. “That felt really good,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Sure.”

“And for the meal too. I haven’t eaten like that in a while.”

I sit back from the laptop and close the lid. I swivel the chair to face her. “How long have you been running from the cult?” It’s a blind guess, but the verses she’s marked, the name Father Tom, the dichotomy between that and the Protestant Bible, the RV following her . . . I think it’s a good one.

Her lips open in surprise, and I see panic flash through her. She glances toward the door. I raise my eyebrows, but I don’t say anything. Her escape impulse is strong, but momentary. “A while,” she says, then looks down. Her comfort is gone again. “Years now.”

“Three years?”

She nods.

“Remy helped you escape?”

Another nod.

“Carol, you need to tell me what happened.”

She’s going to lie to me; I can feel it. But she looks like she’s being completely frank.

“I’d already run away when I met Remy,” she says. “I was hanging around Knoxville, and I started going to Gospel Witness. The pastor, he was really nice to me, and he let me stay at his house. He found me a safe place to live after that, and for a while it was fine. I met Remy at Bible study.” She’s very still. Unnaturally so, I think. Trying not to betray anything with her body language. It works, because it’s hard to read a blank page. “He wasn’t—I mean, we weren’t together. We were just friendly. He had a girlfriend, I think, and I wasn’t looking for anything from him. It was just nice to talk to him. He was concerned.”

“He found out you’d been in a cult.”

That got a slow nod. “He caught me crying one day. I shouldn’t have told him, but . . . Remy was so easy to talk to. He wanted to help me,” she says. “He was a nice young man. Godly.”

Remy wasn’t that godly, from what I’ve gathered; he liked a good time just fine. But I let that slide by. “What happened the night he disappeared, Carol?”

She’s quiet for a few long seconds. She takes the towel off her head, and her damp hair cascades down, curling at the ends a little. She lets it shroud her face. “He was going to help me get out of town,” she says. “He was supposed to meet me and give me some money. But he never showed up. I waited, but . . . he just never came, and nobody ever saw him again. I thought maybe he got grabbed.”

“By the cult?”

She shrugs.