A Deadly Influence (Abby Mullen Thrillers #1)(74)

This was why it didn’t surprise her to see that Leonor’s parents were a warm, sweet couple. They lived in a lovely house with a well-tended garden. Inside, the house was clean and smelled of warm bread. The living room had a large couch on which Leonor’s parents huddled together. Abby sat in front of them on an armchair. A gray cat eyed her with unbridled hatred, and Abby suspected she occupied the cat’s favorite seat.

“Dale makes the bread in a bread maker every other morning,” Leonor’s mother, Helen, told Abby. “So we eat only homemade bread.”

Dale was an attorney. Helen was a librarian. They had that aura of numbness that followed a sudden, unpredictable catastrophe. When people realized the sense of control over their life was an illusion.

“Is your coffee okay?” Helen asked.

“It’s great,” Abby said, smiling. It was a bit weak, but it was hot, and she was mostly just grateful to be out of her car. It had taken her almost two hours and over twenty phone calls to locate Leonor’s parents, and she had done it all from her driver’s seat.

“I keep trying to understand what we did wrong,” Helen said. “We might have been too controlling. Leonor kept asking to go with her friends to Manhattan, and I was worried, so sometimes I said no. And maybe we invaded her private space. I kept cleaning her room even though she told me not to. And—”

“Mrs. Craft,” Abby said gently. “You did nothing wrong.”

“Then why did she join that . . . that—”

“Cult,” Dale said gruffly. “Why did she join that cult if we did nothing wrong?”

“She didn’t join that cult,” Abby said. “Almost no one joins a cult. She was recruited.”

“Same thing.” Dale shrugged. “They recruited her, and she made the choice to—”

“No,” Abby said. “She made no choice.”

“Detective Mullen, Leonor wasn’t taken against her will. She started seeing those people, and after a while she packed a bag and moved to that farm. She’s not gone; she still talks to us. But it’s like we don’t matter anymore.”

Abby sighed. People who were recruited to destructive cults left behind family and friends who were hurt and angry. They felt abandoned, spurned. Parents often felt like they had failed in their upbringing. It was another tool that played into the cult’s hands. When people in your old life were angry, you had good reason to stay away from them.

“It’s likely there was something that the cult recruiters used to get to Leonor,” Abby said. “But it could be anything. Maybe she had a bad breakup. Or she just fought with her best friend. Or her friends changed, as they often do at that age, and she didn’t feel like she belonged anymore. Almost no one is completely whole. Not to mention she’s a teenager. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Or that she made a conscious choice.”

“She was frustrated,” Dale said. “About something at school. About how they treated the girls and the boys differently.”

Leonor had mentioned that. “Imagine she felt particularly down about that. Maybe her math teacher talked to her in a patronizing way.”

“Her math teacher was a nice man,” Dale said. “I’m sure that—”

“Go on,” Helen told Abby. Helen knew what she meant. Dale had no idea and couldn’t even begin to understand. But Helen could.

“She sat in the school cafeteria,” Abby said. “Or the park. And she saw a group of friends her age. Boys and girls. And the way they talked to each other was different. Respectful. At that moment, it seemed just what she needed. They talked to her. And they showered her with love. Told her how smart she was, how clever. How she wasn’t like everyone else in that school. She was more like them. She hung out with them a few times, nothing too serious, and then they invited her to spend a weekend on that farm.”

Helen let out a gasp, and Abby knew she’d gotten it exactly right. There had been a weekend on the farm. There was almost always a weekend, or a three-day workshop, or a short, fun camp.

“They worked hard on the farm,” Abby continued. “Leonor hardly got any sleep. But everyone around her was happy, and they all worked hard. She wanted to keep up with her new friends who thought so highly of her. And they didn’t leave her alone for a single second. Kept talking to her. Feeding her the cult’s agenda. At first, it sounded weird, but Leonor’s polite; she didn’t want to argue. Or she argued, and they told her she made good points, and they should discuss them later. But the harder she worked, the less she slept, the more sense they started to make.”

“Did she tell you all that?” Helen asked.

“No,” Abby said. “But I’ve heard it all before. That weekend on the farm, was it longer than she expected?”

“It was during the summer vacation,” Helen whispered. “She meant to go for two days but ended up staying five.”

“And she didn’t call you during that time, right?”

“She said they frowned upon phones on the farm,” Dale said. “But she made it sound like a good thing. Like she was detoxing from her phone. I was proud of her for doing it. I hated all the time she spent with that phone.”

“Zero communication with the outside world,” Abby said. “Hardly any sleep. And everyone around her acting so sure of themselves. So full of purpose. When she asked questions or argued, they acted like they had the answers, but she’d have to stay longer to discuss it. Can you imagine how she felt?”