Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(49)

“Why would they take him? To get to you?”

Another shrug. She’s not meeting my gaze anymore. She’s lying to me. But at least she’s talking.

“Carol. Look at me.” She does, finally. There’s a bleak light in her eyes. Resignation. “Where would they have taken him?”

“I don’t know. They move around. They drive these RVs.”

A mobile cult? That sounds terrifying. “How does the cult work, exactly?”

“The usual way.” A bitter twist to her lips. “They drive us around and we preach to people, get gifts. Sometimes we recruit them, and they give up their family and money to get into heaven.”

“Do they? Get into heaven?”

“I thought so, once. But . . .” She hesitates, then looks away again. “But maybe it was really just a lie. We never had any money, and it wasn’t—it wasn’t like I think heaven would be. And the way they treated us . . . like chattel. You know what chattel are?”

“Yes.”

“Women especially. We had no say in anything. Not even in ourselves.” She’s talking around something dreadful, I can tell that from the tension in her body, as if she’s tiptoeing along a cliff’s edge. She pulls back, and laughs. It’s a strangely empty sound. “Anyway.”

“So how did you escape?”

“I didn’t. Not on purpose, at first. I was late coming back after I went into this little store, and this man, he—he tried to pull me into his car. The convenience store clerk, he saw what was happening and called the police, and they arrested the man who tried to get me. But I couldn’t leave, the police wouldn’t let me until I gave a statement. The RV left, and I saw it parked down the block; they don’t like to talk to the police. That’s when I realized . . . I realized I had a chance. I just decided to get away. I don’t really know why, exactly. I didn’t know what I’d do, where I’d go.”

“Couldn’t you have gone home?” Three years ago she must have been a minor. She looks like she’s barely twenty, if that.

“I didn’t really have a home before Father Tom took me in. I was in foster care.”

Vulnerable, no self-worth . . . ideal for a cult. Though she probably hadn’t brought them much material wealth, being accepted and feeling loved would have made her loyal. It was a minor miracle she’d broken free, actually. Most people don’t leave until things get so bad they just can’t excuse it anymore, they’re rescued . . . or they die.

I know part of the story she’s told me is true. But I strongly suspect that she’s still lying too. Maybe about small things; most people do. But she’s unnervingly good, and it’s impossible for me to judge whether she’s really being straight with me about the most important parts of her story.

“When did you get the backpack?” I ask that because I have nothing to lose, and it might rattle her.

It doesn’t. She blinks once, then says, “The day before he was supposed to meet me. Remy said it was an old one, he didn’t need it.” There’s a slight edge to it, though. Something that tells me I brushed a nerve. “I didn’t steal from him.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you did, Carol. What’s your real name?”

“Hicken—”

“I saw the name on the clock.”

She shuts up fast. Looks at me with a great deal more intensity than before. And I revise my assessment of her. She plays vulnerable with great skill. But she’s not vulnerable. Not where it counts. There’s an iron to her that shows only in flashes, and quickly vanishes beneath the camouflage.

She finally says, “I don’t know what my birth last name was; they never told me. My last foster family was called Sadler. So I guess Carol Sadler, not that it matters so much. I don’t even have anything to prove that. The church took it all when I joined.”

She says church unconsciously. Not cult. And I know she’s not talking about the little clapboard place where she was finding refuge with Pastor Wallace.

“What was it called? This church?” Cult.

She stares down for a long, long moment, then says, “It’s called the Assembly of Saints. Anyway. I’m really tired now. I need to sleep.”

Before I can even comment, she’s pulling back the covers and climbing in, still fully dressed. She pulls the covers and a pillow over her head and burrows in like she intends to vanish into the soft cotton.

I’m not going to get anything else from her tonight. I’ll try in the morning, but for now I leave it alone and go back to my computer. I send a summary of what I’ve learned to J. B., and document it in my online case notes. I make a note to investigate the name Carol Sadler, not that I think it’s going to lead me anywhere useful. By the time I’m done, I’m pretty exhausted, but I still need to check Sam’s voice mail.

I listen to what he reads me, and I open a document and run the message again as I type in names from the post he’s narrating. There are six. One of them is Remy Landry. If the post’s author is correct, five other young men have gone missing in the past few years. Just . . . vanished. Two left their dorm rooms at college and were never seen again. One was in high school and vanished after track practice. One on his way home from work. And the last one from a bar. Just like Remy.