Bitter Falls

by Caine, Rachel

  I lose no time before examining the backpack she’s left behind, and just as I expected, I see Remy’s initials in black permanent marker on the inside of the front pocket. That makes it real. And grim. And I don’t believe that he gave it to her before his disappearance; he had it with him the night he disappeared from the bar. I saw it on the video.

  She knows something. Saw something.

  There’s nothing else of his left inside it. The large back part holds women’s underwear, a sports bra, a worn white nightgown made of cheap, light fabric with no adornments. Dirty clothing toward the bottom, neatly rolled and ready to be washed. In the smaller front area I find a battered paperback copy of the Bible—King James Version—with plenty of inked annotations. Some basic toiletries. A pair of cheap folding flat shoes, though it seems like those are for emergencies, since the soles are still clean. A washcloth almost certainly stolen from a hotel, a few miniature bars of soap, some nearly empty hotel complimentary shampoo bottles and lotions.

  Carol may be homeless, at least for now, but she cares about being clean.

  The shower’s still running by the time I’ve examined everything. I end up looking at the Bible more closely, because the annotations seem . . . odd. Often they have dates attached to them.

  I try something. I close the book, set it spine down on the work table, and let it fall open. It flops to a page that Carol must have frequently read. One verse—Colossians 1:26—stands out. It’s been decorated with childish-looking stars.

  Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints.

  Saints. It rings a bell from something she said earlier. Remy’s with the saints. I check a few more annotations. Chillingly, she’s heavily marked the passages that have to do with the subjugation of women, with the note memorize. There’s a quote written out on the inside cover of the Bible that I don’t recognize: So shall you bring Me saints, that I may take them unto Me for the war to come.

  The attribution at the bottom of that is F.T. No chapter or verse number.

  I try scanning First Thessalonians. It’s only four chapters, and short verses. I find only one reference to saints at the end, but it doesn’t match this quote at all. I’m no Bible scholar, but something seems off, and I don’t know what it is exactly. I try riffling through the copy again, looking for notations, and finally in Lamentations I find something circled with a star beside it, and a handwritten note in the margins: Father Tom’s message 4/2012.

  F.T. Father Tom.

  I abandon the Bible and move to the computer, but a Google search for Father Tom just turns up dozens of entries for parish priests. That bothers me, and then it comes into sharp focus. This is a King James Version Bible. She’s not Catholic. She’s some flavor of Protestant, apparently. And Protestant churches have pastors, not priests or fathers. Unless there’s a sect I don’t know about.

  I glance up at the old-fashioned nightstand clock on the bedside table. It’s coming close on midnight now. No wonder I’m exhausted.

  I keep staring at the digital display, not blinking. I don’t even know why until I see the white scripted name of the maker on the corner of the device. It’s small, but I can still read it from where I sit.

  Hickenlooper.

  No wonder that name seemed off.

  I’ve missed a call; I had my ringer off. My phone buzzes to alert me to a voice mail, and I check the sender. It’s from Sam. But it’ll have to wait, because I hear the shower cut off, so I put the Bible back where I found it. I zip the backpack shut, and am at my laptop checking emails when she opens the bathroom door a few minutes later.

  Her hair is up in a towel, but she’s completely dressed. Pink-cheeked and relaxed from the shower. She sinks down on the bed with a sigh and moves the backpack farther away. “That felt really good,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  “And for the meal too. I haven’t eaten like that in a while.”

  I sit back from the laptop and close the lid. I swivel the chair to face her. “How long have you been running from the cult?” It’s a blind guess, but the verses she’s marked, the name Father Tom, the dichotomy between that and the Protestant Bible, the RV following her . . . I think it’s a good one.

  Her lips open in surprise, and I see panic flash through her. She glances toward the door. I raise my eyebrows, but I don’t say anything. Her escape impulse is strong, but momentary. “A while,” she says, then looks down. Her comfort is gone again. “Years now.”

  “Three years?”

  She nods.

  “Remy helped you escape?”

  Another nod.

  “Carol, you need to tell me what happened.”

  She’s going to lie to me; I can feel it. But she looks like she’s being completely frank.

  “I’d already run away when I met Remy,” she says. “I was hanging around Knoxville, and I started going to Gospel Witness. The pastor, he was really nice to me, and he let me stay at his house. He found me a safe place to live after that, and for a while it was fine. I met Remy at Bible study.” She’s very still. Unnaturally so, I think. Trying not to betray anything with her body language. It works, because it’s hard to read a blank page. “He wasn’t—I mean, we weren’t together. We were just friendly. He had a girlfriend, I think, and I wasn’t looking for anything from him. It was just nice to talk to him. He was concerned.”

  “He found out you’d been in a cult.”

  That got a slow nod. “He caught me crying one day. I shouldn’t have told him, but . . . Remy was so easy to talk to. He wanted to help me,” she says. “He was a nice young man. Godly.”

  Remy wasn’t that godly, from what I’ve gathered; he liked a good time just fine. But I let that slide by. “What happened the night he disappeared, Carol?”

  She’s quiet for a few long seconds. She takes the towel off her head, and her damp hair cascades down, curling at the ends a little. She lets it shroud her face. “He was going to help me get out of town,” she says. “He was supposed to meet me and give me some money. But he never showed up. I waited, but . . . he just never came, and nobody ever saw him again. I thought maybe he got grabbed.”

  “By the cult?”

  She shrugs.

  “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.

  I quickly run their names on J. B.’s proprietary company search, and there are open investigations into all of them. There’s no commonality of place; they’re all over the southeast. But they’re all white, fit young men of a certain age: the youngest is seventeen, the oldest is twenty-two.

  I step out of the room, lean against the hallway wall, and call Sam. He answers on the second ring. When I check the time, it’s after one in the morning. “Hey,” I say. “You still awake?”

  “Yeah, I was hoping you’d call. Can’t seem to sleep, even though I’m tired enough to crash like the Hindenburg.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Too soon?”

  “Too accurate. Are you home?”

  “No, we stopped at another hotel. I figure we’ll hang here until Kezia gives us the all clear. Which shouldn’t be too long, right? Bon Casey and Olly Belldene don’t sound like masterminds.”

  I’m relieved he hasn’t driven straight back to Stillhouse Lake. Far too many unknown threats there. “Enjoy the room service,” I tell him. “I’m at a hotel too.”

  “How’s the case going?”

  “Interestingly,” I say. I press my back against the wall. There’s a headache forming behind my eyes, and I shut them for a moment. “She says she was supposed to meet Remy, and he was going to give her money to get out of Knoxville. But he never showed up, and nobody saw him again. And she’s got his backpack. Now that I know there’s a pattern of disappearances—thank you for that, by the way—I’ll hit her up with the other names in the morning and see what happens.” I debate for a second whether to tell him this, but plunge in. “She says she belonged to a cult. Well, she says ‘church,’ but everything about it screams ‘cult’ to me.”

  “Oh.” I hear the shift in his voice. “Like Wolfhunter?” Wolfhunter had been a toxic tangle, but at the rotten heart of it had been a nasty cult, with a cruel philosophy of oppressing women. Chattel. Carol had said that. Most of the cult was dead; the leader, I’d heard, had gotten away. But surely that wasn’t the same cult that Carol meant. As far as I knew, it hadn’t been recruiting openly like this one.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I can’t get her to tell me much yet.”

  “She’s still with you?”

  “Yeah. My plan was to get her information and then let her leave in the morning. Buy her a plane ticket and get her somewhere safe.”

  “Maybe it’s the connection, but I’m hearing a silent ‘but,’” Sam says. I love talking to him. He’s always either just a step behind or a step ahead. I never have to wait for him to catch up. “You don’t believe her.”

  “Not entirely, no. I’m afraid that she’s too good at playing the victim.”

  “Do you think she had something to do directly with Remy’s abduction?”

  “Maybe? I think there’s a whole lot she hasn’t said. Which means I can’t really afford to put her on a plane and have her drop completely out of sight. I don’t know what I’m going to do, exactly. I’m going to sleep on it tonight and decide in the morning.”

  “I wish we were home together,” he says. “And I wish you weren’t on your own with this.”

  “You’ve got my back.”

  “Always.”

  I let a beat go by. “How are they?”

  “Sleeping,” he says. “And in the morning they’ll be missing you as much as I do.”

  “Tell them I love them,” I say, and I hear the warmth flooding my voice. “And I love you too. Be safe.”

  “Love you, Gwen. Be safe.”

  I’m about to card back into the hotel room when I hear footsteps. I look up and toward the end of the hall where the elevators are; I’ve asked for a room close to the stairs, even though that’s also the one with the most risk of break-ins, because it presents a fast escape if necessary. I’m being paranoid, of course. There’s no way her cult could have traced us here.

  Unless they have a car in addition to the RV. No. I’d have noticed. One thing I never am: complacent.

  I relax when I see two uniformed police officers. Both African American women. They are walking briskly in my direction. I nod toward them, but I don’t get a nod back. They head for me with laser purpose.

  One of them says, “Back away from the door, ma’am.”

  They both put their hands on their guns.

  I’m still wearing mine, and all of a sudden it feels more like a hot red bullet magnet than a means of defense. I don’t know what’s happening, but I do as they say. I back up against the far wall. I put my hands up above my shoulders, key card stil
l in my right hand.

  They turn me to face the wall. I don’t resist, because I’ve looked over their gear and they look utterly authentic. And very, very tense. “I’m armed,” I tell them. “Shoulder holster, left side. I have a carry permit in my wallet, but it’s in the room.”

  “Keep your hands flat on the wall,” one of them tells me, and I feel my gun being tugged free. “Okay. Hands down and behind your back.”

  “You’re handcuffing me? What did I do?”

  “It’s for your safety, ma’am.” The handcuffs click on, and I instinctively pull against them. It hurts.

  “What the hell is happening?” I ask.

  “Sit down,” the officer facing me orders. She’s got thick eyebrows and a harsh set to her jaw, and I silently slide down. “Cross your legs and do not move until I tell you.”

  “Officer, my name is Gwen Proctor—”

  “I know what your name is,” she snaps. “You have the right to stay silent, and you’d best use it.”

  The other officer is knocking on the door, and it’s only a heartbeat later that Carol flings it open.

  She’s got a large red mark forming on her face that’s going to be a bruise soon. One eye is already swelling.

  And her hands are tied in front of her with one of the zip-tie flex cuffs I keep in my suitcase.

  Fuck. I almost have to admire her.

  “Help me,” she says. She’s sobbing. “Please help me!” She’s utterly believable as a terror-stricken victim.

  I feel the ground dropping out from under me, and at the same time a grim sense of my own stupidity. I went through her bag. I should have known she’d do the same the second I left her alone.

  Should have seen this coming.

  15

  SAM

  I get the call at 6:00 a.m. from Kezia that both of their suspects from Killing Rock are in custody, and we’re clear to head home. That’s good. I’ve tossed and turned all night, feeling like something wasn’t right. Like I needed to be on the move.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” I tell her. “Great work.”