Darkness at the Edge of Town (Iris Ballard #2)(9)
My poor brother was born with his heart outside his chest. Just a freak thing. Nobody’s fault. He had immediate surgery and has been fine since, but Mom always kept an extra-close eye on him. Me, I could climb onto the roof and leap to a tree, and she’d roll her eyes. If Billy tried to swim to the deep end of the pool she’d have to swim beside him the whole way. Mom loved me in her own way, I knew that, but it did sting when I realized she didn’t love me as much as she did Billy. Luckily I had my grandparents to make up for the neglect. Okay, neglect is a strong word. If I needed Mom she was always there to talk, and she worked like a dog to put food in our mouths. I was just aware that she loved me 1 percent less than my brother. But to be fair, I loved her 1 percent less than I did my grandparents. Okay, 10 percent less.
In my lesser moments, I used to blame Billy for my “neglect.” Why did he have to be so weak? So easily hurt mentally and physically? Why couldn’t he solve his own problems like I always did? Why was I the one who had to beat up our bullies? Why did he have to cry when they called us names? They won when he did that. His metaphorical heart was still outside his body, and the smallest slight bruised it no matter how many times I told him their opinions meant less than jack shit. That they were just vampires feeding off our strength, and we had to shove a crucifix in their faces or just stake the fuckers. He just couldn’t. He wasn’t built that way. He was all sugar and spice, whereas I got all the piss and vinegar. For years I thought that made me not exactly better than him, just…stronger. But when it came time for the challenge of a lifetime, I turned to the bottle and he to a potentially predatory religion. In the end we were exactly the same. But that meant if I pulled myself out of my self-imposed insanity, he could too.
“I’m not leaving until I check this place out. Just to set Mom’s mind at ease.” As if that would ever be possible.
Two days. Just two days. Yeah, not even I believed that anymore.
Chapter 3
Gia had to work and couldn’t meet me until the next morning, so I began as all good investigators do, by firing up my Web browser. When I heard war stories from veteran FBI agents about wading through thousands of fingerprint cards and file folders on the off chance of finding a link, I grimaced. The FBI had just begun utilizing the Internet when I joined, but we still saved weeks on investigations with that modern marvel. Of course if I still had access to all of the FBI’s resources I would have been logging onto them instead of Google first, but I did usually find myself on a Web browser at some point during my investigations.
My first instinct was to call Luke, but I’d quickly quashed it. I’d left him a message the night before cancelling our…whatever, just saying something had come up in Grey Mills. He hadn’t called me back. After twelve hours with no answer, not even a text, my brain revved into overdrive. Was he mad at me? Did he think I didn’t want to see him? Did he think I thought he wasn’t important enough to cancel another event for him? I considered telling him why I was in my hometown, but until I knew more about the situation I didn’t want him to worry. And Luke would probably want to do something. Come up or risk his job by performing illegal searches in the FBI’s systems. I didn’t want to drag him into my bullshit again. The last time he’d ridden to my rescue he took three to the chest. Not that I believed the situation with Billy had the potential to become that dire, but Luke still didn’t need to leap on his white horse. No matter how much, deep down, I wanted him to.
So all that Luke madness was racing through my mind as I began my investigation into New Morningism after lunch. Before I went to The Temple to nose around, I needed to know my “enemy.” It was one of the first things they taught us at the FBI: never go into a situation blind. It was right up there with never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.
Research proved harder than I’d anticipated with New Morningism. There was a website with a picture of the galaxy with a human form superimposed on it and the words “Click here to begin unlocking your journey. All are welcome.” So I clicked. That led me to a brief overview of the New Morning philosophy. According to its founder, Grand Journeyman Mathias Morning, the trappings of modern society and a bombardment of ideologies have overwhelmed all levels of human consciousness, and this overload kept humanity from enlightenment and from unlocking our true potential for happiness. He claimed that through encouragement from a community of like-minded individuals, meditation, and seminars about the true nature of the universe, enlightenment and happiness were attainable. A new morning could dawn. I rolled my eyes when I read that last line, though as sales pitches went it wasn’t bad.
The next page was just pictures. One was of the “Temple” in Dunlop, just a two-story gray turn-of-the-century Victorian with a tricycle on the lawn and a group of about twenty people standing on or around the porch. A little over half were young women, most looking to be in their early twenties, with three small children in front of them. The men were more varied in age, ranging from twenties to sixties, including the man with snow-white hair and beard standing dead center. A trim, hip Santa Claus was my first thought. It was the photo below, where Santa sat in a rocking chair, glasses perched on his sharp nose, with a child in his lap and two at his feet as he read to them, that told me this was the guru Mathias Morning. The action shots were of the members volunteering at a homeless shelter, meditating at a lake, and having dinner at one large table as everyone smiled and conversed. Like the Brady Bunch on steroids.