Sins of the Bees

by Annie Lampman

  All my love,

  Isabelle

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  JULY 2001

  After Nick left for his outfitting trip, Silva locked Juniper in the house, saddled Tiko, and rode back up the trail to Almost Paradise. This time it was Sage who was left pacing the fence, whinnying at them. It seemed to calm Tiko, being the one doing the leaving instead of the one left behind.

  This time Silva knew where she was going, what to expect. What she knew she could fight back against. What she understood couldn’t wreck her—at least that’s what she hoped.

  When they got to Almost Paradise’s wire gate, she left it open, Tiko tethered in the shade where they might escape quickly. She walked to the main structure, cautiously scanning the surroundings, trying to analyze each detail and sort each possibility of where Isabelle might be.

  When she heard music coming from the main building, she stopped abruptly. The high quaver of a woman’s voice was joined by a few faltering piano notes, and then other women’s voices joined in until the singing swelled into form.

  The front door burst open, a pale-faced girl looking out past Silva, then, startled, right at her. “Oh!” the girl said, shock clear on her face. Then she cried out, “Mother Delores!”

  An older, heavy-bosomed woman, her gray hair pulled into a low bun, came to the door, appraising Silva, her expression inscrutable. “Sister Faith isn’t available for tours right now, but she will be back as soon as she can,” she said, her words devoid of any real meaning, her tone as stiff and rehearsed as a prerecorded phone message.

  Behind her, the building had fallen ominously quiet. Silva pictured Lenite women huddled behind the doors, clutching each other protectively, shielding themselves against the intruder.

  Then, unexpectedly, the older woman held the door open. “Please, come in,” she said, attempting a smile that didn’t move past her mouth. But Silva didn’t feel welcome, didn’t feel anything but a sense of building dread—alone with these people, at their house of worship. Finally this close to finding what she’d left Trawler for.

  Silva’s soul recoiled at the idea of submitting herself to the Lenites, a “guest” on their compound. The oppression of their faith was like weeds nothing could kill, each repudiation, each assault against them only serving for further growth—a spreading that overtook everything within its reach. But there was no choice. She stepped up the stairs and entered the sanctuary.

  Inside, a few high, yellow-glass windows let in light, but after the brightness outside, the central room’s interior was dim enough that Silva’s eyes had to adjust. The space was Spartan, a large wooden cross hanging at the far end, folding chairs lined up behind a sermon podium, an upright piano to the right. The singers—a cluster of women and teen girls—stood in front. Dressed in floor-length, long-sleeved, cuffed and collared dresses, their long hair either in braids or an anchoring of barrettes, they stared at Silva without reserve. There was a pall of concern hanging in the air, feeling of impending trauma, Silva’s visit part of something that hadn’t been rehearsed—though she’d obviously been expected. Everyone looking at her with a kind of knowingness that left her cold. She reached up instinctively to smooth her loose-blown hair.

  The older woman, obviously the one in charge, said, “I’m Mother Delores Dietz, and this is Sister Esther, Twelfth Maiden.” She held the pale-faced girl in front of her by the shoulders, as if squaring her off against an adversary. “Sister Esther, please welcome our guest,” she ordered.

  A Dietz family affair, Len’s mother a part of the compound, too, commanding the same subservience as her son, training up girls meant to serve her son’s needs, calling them by the number of their conquering, enforcer of Len’s patriarchy.

  Esther’s face blanched whiter than before. She stood very straight in her long dress, and that’s when Silva saw it—a perfectly round orb extending from underneath her apron.

  “Would you care for some coffee or tea?” she asked Silva stiffly, matching Faith’s formality of manners, though Esther couldn’t have been more than fourteen. A pregnant child-Lenite, her expression waxen and panicked—a girl far too young to carry a child, far too young for childbirth.

  Silva’s insides tightened with remembered cramps, a sorrow that overtook her so fast she didn’t have time to prepare for it. She wanted to reach out and pull the girl in close enough that they couldn’t grab her back, scream, What have you done to her? Fight back for all of them—Isabelle, Meg Larkins and her baby, and now Esther, too—all the ones who’d been lost, who’d been taken, captured alive, until they were formed into Len’s receptacles, emptied out and reshaped in the image of his making.

  Delores held out her arm. “Let us serve you. Won’t you please join us?” she said, walking to a set of linoleum-covered stairs, disguising her commands in the language of generosity, demanding that everyone in her purview follow a strictly prescribed protocol.

  “I came here to find someone,” Silva said, scanning the women’s shuttered faces, all of them watching her, her urgency and agitation juxtaposed against their watchful, careful reserve.

  “Yes,” Delores said simply, ushering everyone downstairs.

  The others didn’t speak as they descended, following Delores with a quiet rustling of skirts into an open kitchen space arranged with more folding chairs and tables. It smelled of cleaner wax and coffee, the sugary scent of fruit baking. Open shelves from ceiling to floor were stacked with colorful jars of home-canned goods—apples, pears, peaches, cherries, and green beans. Against the back wall, bags of wheat and powdered milk were piled waist-high around a back door like a bomb-shelter trench. Silva wondered if the door led to bunkers with more stockpiles—enough food to last years, even with a compound full of consuming Lenites.

  Esther ushered Silva to a seat at the end of a table and stood with her hands clasped behind her back, glancing quickly at Delores before asking if Silva took anything in her coffee.

  Folding her own hands in front of her, Silva said, “Cream, please,” her nerves roiling. She, too, could play the part—all polite manners and murmuring consent—even if all she wanted to do was jump up and run, pull Esther out along with her. She looked around to see how many more of the women and girls were pregnant, wondering again where Isaac had taken Faith’s child, where all the other young children were, where Faith was in the maze of this place.

  The women broke into choreographed action as though they’d rehearsed this, too—serving Isabelle’s granddaughter pie and coffee. Like Faith and Delores, they all seemed to know exactly who Silva was and why she’d come. They got out white ceramic mugs and plates and pulled pans of warm pie out of the oven, working in unison, the younger ones taking plates of pie and mugs of coffee to the tables where the older women were already sitting.

  Silva wondered if they’d all known Isabelle, if they all knew what had happened to her. If Isabelle—and, over a decade before her, Meg Larkins—had sat in the same basement kitchen, serving or being served as Silva was, eating pie off the same plates, drinking coffee out of the same mugs. If Meg Larkins, pregnant with Len’s son, had been served as a holy woman of the faith, under Delores’s thumb, servile and obedient all the way to her death.

  Esther brought Silva a piece of cherry pie and a mug of caramel-colored coffee, the cream already stirred in. Delores sat next to Silva and took a sip of her black coffee, studying Silva over the rim of her cup. When she set down her cup, the room suddenly went quiet.

  “You are here for Isabelle,” she said, each syllable laden with implied meaning. She had known what Silva was looking for all along.

  “Yes,” Silva said, glancing around, working to keep the emotion out of her voice, to act as calm as they all were, their faces and eyes as carefully veiled as if they were shrouded in cloth.

  Delores paused, tilting her head and regarding Silva the same way Len Dietz had in the hardware store—a look of muted challenge, asking something of her, expecting something of her. “I’m afraid she’s
no longer with us,” she finally said.

  Silva tried to stiffen herself against the words, but it was too late, her body sagging under the familiar crushing weight. No longer with us. Everything she’d feared, what deep down she’d already suspected: there might not ever be any redemption. She thought of Isabelle’s mound in the cross-studded graveyard and was overcome by a wave of nausea, the uneaten pie in front of her oozing thick red syrup out its sides as if it were bleeding out.

  Delores pushed her chair back and stood. “Come. I have something to show you.” She didn’t wait to see if Silva was following as she got up and walked to the bunker door.

  Silva hoped it would lead back outside where she might find escape—both from this place and the emotions overtaking her, building like a dam ready to break. Instead, Delores went down a short hallway and opened a door to a small, dark room illuminated with a million tiny blinking lights, the whole space filled with radio equipment: wires, boxes, switches, microphones, speakers.

  She flipped a few switches and the air came alive, a humming feed, disembodied voices crackling the speakers. She adjusted the squelch and turned up the volume, concentrating on one feed—a deep male voice, modulated and clear.

  “Why? you ask. I’ll tell you why. The world has become greedy. Greedy for wealth. Greedy for power. Greedy for everything that is temporal. It is up to us, my sisters and brothers. We must stop the darkness before it consumes us all. Before there is nothing left but husks after the plague of locusts has come—the world’s carnal appetites consuming, consuming, consuming. It is up to us, the Chosen Ones, to heed His call, who, in this evil world, can still recognize His voice. ‘Come,’ He says. ‘Come and bring to me your children, the fruit of your womb, and together we will build God’s Army.’ Do you hear His call? Will you heed His voice? The time is here. Be strong and rejoice. The Lord’s Army is marching forward—an unstoppable force.”

  Delores reached over, clicking the knobs off, and the sudden silence was deafening.

  Silva felt electricity spool and spark along the back of her neck. “Why have you brought me here?” she asked, stepping backward. There was nowhere to run, buried in the bowels of this place, no route of escape. Rising panic threatened to overtake her.

  “It is the Lord directing your path,” Delores said, walking to the last doorway in the narrow hall before stopping again. “The Dowry Room,” she announced as she opened the door, exposing a room full of thick woven rugs and large wooden chests, a commanding armoire on the back wall along with a tall, spindled wooden crib and high-backed high chair, lacy blankets and baby clothes stacked inside the open chests—hand-stitched Victorian items in soft cream hues, looking as if they’d been transported hundreds of years forward to Almost Paradise’s bunker.

  “What is all of this?” Silva asked, her heart speeding, her mouth gone dry.

  Delores walked over and opened the armoire’s doors.

  At first all Silva could see was yards and yards of white spilling out, and then, finally, she understood what it was. The same wedding dress Isabelle had painted all the maidens in, yards of white satin covered in hand-stitched lace embroidery and studded with pearls.

  Silva held herself very still, swallowing hard, trying to stop herself from shaking.

  “The wives of the Chosen One shall cleave unto the House of the Lord, their offspring forming the Nation of God,” Delores said, her eyes flitting to Silva’s stomach and back up again as though Silva were already destined to become one of them—a succubus to Len Dietz’s desires. Isabelle’s abandoned, grieving granddaughter, looking for answers to her own lost faith, come to be Len’s wife, taking up where Meg Larkins had left off.

  Silva choked back the waves of fear threatening to overtake her, tried to calculate a way to bolt past Delores and the others awaiting her in the church kitchen. She imagined being locked in the bunker dowry room, left with the baby crib and wedding dress until Len Dietz came calling for her.

  Delores placed the wedding dress back into the armoire and turned to face Silva. “Your grandmother didn’t heed God’s will. Will you?”

  Someone was walking down the hall toward them, and Silva’s nerves jumped with the wild hope that it was Nick coming for her, even if there was no way he could know where she was, in this place meant somehow to convince her, to pull her in among them, another of Len’s women. A woman who’d been carrying “the fruit of the holy union”—her body to be given over to Len, destined for his “holy family.”

  Instead, Faith rushed in, her face ashen, her eyes wide with alarm, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows to expose her thin, pale-skinned arms and raw-scrubbed hands, her apron and dress soaked with enough fresh blood that it looked as if she’d just sustained a fatal injury.

  “There’s a situation. The birth—” she said breathlessly, her voice as shaken as her expression.

  Delores stepped between her and Silva. “The Lord’s will be done,” she stated, her voice low and commanding, a silencing reprimand.

  Faith dropped her head as if she’d been slapped. “The Lord’s will be done,” she repeated, all the color drained from her face as she left, rushing back to the bloody scene from which she’d come. A birthing gone terribly wrong. A girl bleeding out according to god’s will.

  Silva’s insides responded, twisting and heaving until she felt as if she were about to be sick—the close air of the buttressed dowry room, the sight of so much fresh blood on Faith’s dress, the overpowering presence of Delores Dietz. Len’s mother seemed as bent on holding Silva captive as her son was.

  She could hear the women in the kitchen, the sound of their voices rising after Faith’s sudden appearance and departure—a swelling of volume, urgent, fast-blended syllables coupled with discordant, guttural moans rounded with vowels and the hiss of consonants so that it sounded as if dozens of people were chanting in a medieval language Silva had never heard before. The hair on Silva’s arms stood as Delores paused, looking out toward the voices as if she were translating the unintelligible moans into meaning—the all-seeing, all-knowing cult mother-figure.

  Delores addressed Silva. “Abigail needs my assistance,” she said, the words hanging heavy with dark meaning. She walked out of the room quickly, past the radio equipment, and to the kitchen where the women were assembled in a circle, their heads thrown back, their eyes closed and hands uplifted, swaying in rhythm to their guttural praying. They didn’t stop, didn’t open their eyes, as Delores walked past them. Silva followed her up the stairs.

  “There’s a storm brewing,” Delores said, stopping abruptly at the front door, holding Silva captive with her gaze. “ ‘And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of the dead and every living soul died in the sea. And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.…’ ” She paused, her hand on the doorknob. “ ‘There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations… the sea and the waves roaring in great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.’ ”

  Delores opened the door and stepped away to attend the birth-gone-wrong, releasing Silva.

  Silva made herself keep pace as she walked across the lawn toward the fence, every fiber of her being acutely alert. It was everything she could do to restrain herself from sprinting away so fast she kicked up clods of dirt and gravel, everything scattering in her wake.

  The sun beat down on the back of her neck, and the wind blew small cyclones of dust, the sky an eerie shade of purple-blue above the cemetery. Perhaps the canyon books were right after all. Perhaps this place was cursed. A place meant to eat you up and spit you out—your existence nothing more than a pile of bones. Almost Paradise’s grounds were filled with the remains of the lost, women and girls crying out from underneath the earth. A graveyard full of supplicants—shells sucked empty, husks left to drift. Isabelle’s honeysuckle nurse tree.


  Silva pictured the Snake’s waters running red, dead sheep floating down. Her nightmare of the gray woman swimming upcurrent, her agonized scream. Everyone always trying to warn Silva, not realizing it was too late for anything but mourning, everything put into motion long before she could do anything to stop it, before she could right any wrong, before she could enact any different outcome, everything over before it’d even begun. Storms raging around her, propelling her to her own annihilation.

  Tiko saw her coming and whinnied, tossing his head in impatience, as ready for flight as she was. She ran the last several yards to him, rushing to loosen the reins and rope from the fence rail. A bucket of water sat in the shade next to him. Isaac.

  She looked around quickly for him, the wild, trapped boy who reminded her of Nick—Nick, a boy who, in other circumstances, could have been another Lenite trained to harness his own destructive powers, abusing those beneath him. She wondered how fast Isaac, too, might run away if he were set loose, his leg made whole. Faith, too—Almost Paradise’s midwife, a woman who’d seen the direct results of Len’s preying, his pedophilia all a part of being “god’s family,” it seemed—another fresh grave coming soon, or perhaps two: one for the birthing child-mother, and one for her doomed fetus. Another and another and another. Enough to call out from the grave in voices meant to be silenced. Enough to haunt anyone all the way to their own tomb.

  She wondered what kind of warnings Isabelle had gotten before joining Len, conscripting herself to his “care.” Everything some form of recurrent injury she hadn’t been able to escape, a maiming that stretched a lifetime, a family line, no escape from the reality of her own personal fate—searching for something that could never be recovered, each loss renewing the devastation of all the previous losses until they built into a mountainous mass that sat atop her, pressing her into the unrelenting depths that had finally claimed her as their own.

  Silva leapt on Tiko and let him have his head, his hooves skidding against the trail’s loose rocks and dust, everything a blur of speed as they careened away from the compound. She imagined cartwheeling off the side of the trail, her body airborne as she fell hundreds of feet before smashing into the ravine that led to dark waters. She could feel the loss of traction, the ground suddenly gone from under her, leaving her plummeting, gasping for breath. The same as her nightmares, except she had already tumbled down, had already found what was waiting below in that abyss, rushing her own hasty escape.