Run Away(103)

She would kill him. And she would enjoy it.

She leaned her body out the window. She pointed the gun at his head.

And then she was gone.

From behind her, someone had pushed her out the window. Simon heard the scream and then a sick splat as she landed on the asphalt.

Simon looked up and saw another woman—an old woman wearing an odd gray uniform with red stripes—appear. She looked at him with concern, hurried out to the fire escape, and tried to stem the bleeding.

“It’s over,” the woman said to him.

He wanted to ask her who she was, if she knew Paige, anything, but his mouth had too much blood in it. He felt his body weakening and slackening, his eyes rolling back. As the darkness descended, he could still hear the sirens.

“Our children will be safe now.”

And then there was nothing.





Chapter

Thirty-Eight



One month passed.

Simon’s injuries required three operations, eighteen days in the same hospital as Ingrid, several morphine drips, and two weeks (thus far) of physical therapy. There was pain and damage and perhaps, in an odd reminder of Elena Ramirez, he would walk with a limp or even a cane for the remainder of his days, but his injuries ended up not being life-threatening.

Cornelius came out of it all with a sprained ankle and minor bruises. Rocco and Luther had both been killed by gunfire. Same with a hired hit man named Ashley “Ash” Davis. His partner, a young cult member named Diane “Dee Dee” Lahoy, had landed headfirst, cracking her skull. She had not yet regained consciousness and all indications were that she never would.

Detective Isaac Fagbenle tried to explain it to him, though it was taking some time for various law enforcement authorities to put it all together. There was something about a cult called Truth Haven and secret adoptions and hired hits.

But details were beyond sketchy.

To complicate matters, Casper Vartage, the leader of Truth Haven, had died of natural causes. His two sons claimed complete innocence and had top-notch lawyers protecting them. Maybe, the lawyers claimed, Casper Vartage had done something—that they couldn’t say—but he was dead now and his sons knew nothing.

“We’ll get them,” Fagbenle had told Simon.

But Simon wasn’t so sure. The two killers who could best testify as to what the Vartage sons may have done were both out of commission. The police’s best hope seemed to be the woman who had saved Simon’s life, a woman who identified herself as Mother Adiona. They couldn’t find a real name for her. That was how long she’d been in the cult. And they really couldn’t hold her. She had committed no crime other than maybe saving Simon’s life.

There was other stuff, of course. When Elena Ramirez learned about the illegal adoptions, Ash and Dee Dee, the police concluded, had killed her. There was CCTV of her at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store getting in a car driven by Dee Dee Lahoy. It was believed that she was then taken to an empty cabin and murdered there, but her body had not yet been found. When the killers then looked at the texts on Elena’s mobile phone and saw her communications with Simon, they knew that he had to be silenced too. There was more—how the half brothers, including Aaron Corval, had discovered each other, how they swore to keep their relationship a secret until they found their father, how one named Henry Thorpe discovered his mother too and that she had been a former cult member who ended up confronting and thus tipping off the Vartages.

But there had been nothing new about Paige.

During Simon’s fifth night in the hospital, when the pain was pretty bad and he’d hit the morphine pump for all he was worth, he woke up in a semi-daze to see Mother Adiona sitting by his bedside.

“They were slaughtering all the sons,” Mother Adiona said to him.

Simon knew this, though the motive remained murky. Maybe the cult was trying to cover up their past crime of selling babies. Or maybe the murders of these men were part of some weird ritual or prophesy. No one seemed to know.

“I believe in the Truth, Mr. Greene. It sustains me. I have been its servant for almost my entire life. I birthed a son, and the Truth told me that he would be one of our next leaders. I raised him as such. I birthed another son and when the Truth told me that this son would not be able to stay with us, I let him go, even though that meant I would never see my own boy again.”

Simon watched her through the hazy gauze of his painkillers.

“But last year, I used a DNA site because I wanted to know what became of my son. Harmless enough. Just a little knowledge. A little”—she almost smiled—“truth. Do you know what I found?”

Simon shook his head.

“My son’s name is Nathan Brannon. He was raised by Hugh and Maria Brannon, two schoolteachers, in Tallahassee, Florida. He graduated with honors from Florida State. He married his high school sweetheart and has three boys—the oldest is ten, and then six-year-old twins. He’s now a schoolteacher too—fifth grade—and by all accounts is a good man.”

Simon tried to sit up, but the drugs had left him too exhausted.

“He wanted to meet me. My son, I mean. But I turned him down. Can you imagine how hard that was, Mr. Greene?”

Simon shook his head and managed to say, “No, I can’t.”

“But you see, it was enough for me to know that my son was happy. It had to be. It was what the Truth wanted.”