Into the Light (The Light, #1)(83)

After finishing my breakfast sandwich, I checked the clock. Since Dina Rosemont lived near San Francisco and it was three hours earlier there, her call would need to wait. As I waited to access the interstate in a slow-moving line of traffic, I pecked a text message to Tracy.



Stella: LUNCH SOUNDS GREAT UNLESS I’M CALLED AWAY. TELL ME WHEN AND WHERE.



And then one to Bernard.



Stella: I’M ON MY WAY, ABOUT THIRTY MINUTES OUT.



My phone immediately buzzed.



Bernard: MEET ME AT THE COFFEE SHOP. USUAL TABLE.



Shit!

My stomach twisted. No doubt he was pissed about my lack of progress. My continual dead ends were beginning to wear on me, and I was a hell of a lot more patient than he. I’d gotten my job based on results. In the last seven weeks I’d produced exactly nothing. I knew Bernard had faith in me, but faith wouldn’t keep me employed.

My lack of progress sure wasn’t for lack of trying. Since the afternoon I’d run near The Light, I’d spent most of my free time doing research, and not only at work. I’d spent hours alone in my apartment surfing the Net. After continually coming up empty on The Light, three nights ago I’d found something. It wasn’t about The Light, but it was interesting.

I was on one of those searches where I clicked site after site, following bread crumbs that kept me moving forward yet never seeming to reach a destination. I was about to call it a night when I poured one last glass of wine and stumbled across a blog post with an interesting thread of comments.

The original post was dated from over five years earlier, and buried deep in the Internet. It was written by a woman who claimed her daughter and son-in-law had been kidnapped by a cult. Though they’d disappeared, with the help of an investigator she’d located them. Once she did, she’d contacted the local police. Her daughter refused to speak to her, or anyone, but her son-in-law had sent a message saying that they were happy and willingly living within the community. Without probable cause, the local police refused to do any more. The woman took her concerns to the federal level, but without proof of wrongdoing, the authorities’ hands were tied. Her post asked for help understanding cults and asked why a young woman who had always had a good relationship with her family would suddenly turn her back on them.

Maybe it was the wine, but the post made me sad, and, of course, reminded me of Mindy. Though this woman’s situation was difficult, at least she knew her daughter was alive. The Rosemonts didn’t have that luxury. The last sentence warned people to recognize that even in this day and age, cults still existed.

Hours passed, and I found myself enthralled by the comment thread. The ones immediately following HeartbrokenMother372’s post were sympathetic to her plight. I continued reading, hoping that I’d learn if she’d ever gotten her daughter back. Unfortunately, I never saw anything else from HeartbrokenMother372, but the more I read, the more I wanted to know. With each comment I found myself questioning my belief and understanding of cults. There were more than a few posts that discounted their existence given modern technology, especially within the United States, stating the difficulty of being truly isolated in this day and age. I wondered if these people had ever heard of Waco.

With my bottle of wine about gone, I continued to read. Though none of the information I gleaned was referenced, I knew from experience that obscure sources often shed the most light. One man posted about his personal experience with living near what people in his community considered a cult. He called them a sect. He didn’t give the location of his town, city, or state, but he mentioned something about skiing. He also said that in all the years he’d lived there, he’d never seen any of the women or children who lived in the sect and had seen only a few of the men. Nevertheless he estimated that hundreds of people lived in the encampment. He claimed that the general consensus was that as long as the people in the sect didn’t bother the townspeople, the townspeople wouldn’t bother them.

As I scrolled I found posts referencing a group of people with whom I was familiar. After all, I’d lived in Michigan for many years and recognized the term Amish. It wasn’t uncommon in a rural area, especially south and east of where I lived now, down into Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to drive over a hill and meet up with a horse and buggy. To me the Amish were always good, moral people who simply shunned technology. Though I couldn’t imagine not driving a car or having my cell phone with me at all times, I accepted them for who they were and had never considered them a cult, but the comments made me think.

The definition I’d seen earlier had said that a cult was a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. I was relatively certain the Amish believed similarly to most Judeo-Christian groups.

Could that mean that cults didn’t need to have nonconventional beliefs? Could they truly exist in the open, where most outsiders turned a blind eye?

The comment that I hadn’t been able to shake was from a woman who claimed that for over a year she had been an unwilling member of a cult. The date on her post was from only one year earlier, and her online name was MistiLace92.

Everything else I’d read thus far had been from outsiders looking in. Even the original post was from a mother whose daughter had willingly gone to live with a group. This was different and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I read the comment.