I nod stiffly. It isn’t that I don’t believe her. It’s that I don’t want to have to believe her.
I have to wait only a couple of minutes before Jasper Belldene comes out of the kitchen. He’s holding two coffee mugs, and I admit, the smell of good beans makes me lose some of my edge. I gratefully accept and drink, even without milk or sugar. I need it. “How’s that head?” he asks me.
“Hurting,” I reply. “But it won’t hold me back.”
“They’re still driving,” he tells me. “On the interstate. Florida’s watching the GPS.” He clears his throat. “You can’t go at this alone, you know that.”
He’s right, of course. My instinct is to rush out there, but I don’t know what I’ll be running into even if I get a final location. I couldn’t win against the men from the RV. And if this leads back to Father Tom, to the cult that Carol was so terrified would find her again . . . then it’ll be infinitely darker than that. One gun won’t do it.
I feel very alone.
“You’re not offering, are you?” I ask.
“No. I got no dog in this fight.”
“Even if I pay you.”
“Ma’am, you can’t pay me enough to put the lives of my own children at risk to go get yours. That’s a fact. I’d advise you to look elsewhere, you want to drum up a posse. We ain’t in that business. I’ll point you where to go, and that’s the end of our dealings.”
My coffee tastes bitter for a moment. I drink it anyway. I don’t know when I’ll have another chance.
He drains his cup and says, “You may not have my help, but you’ve got my sympathy. I hope you get that boy back. No child deserves that.”
I nod and I hand him my cup when I finish it. He juggles both when his phone dings for attention, and looks at the message. He stares at it for a long second, then says, “I’m real sorry.”
He turns the phone toward me, and I read the text. It says Lost the signal. Batteries probably died on the drone. Last ping was up in Cumberland County, up near Catoosa.
I want to scream, and it takes every ounce of self-control I have to hold back that wild despair. Because like Remy Landry, Connor and Sam have just vanished into the dark.
Gone.
I sit with my head in my hands for a while and just let the magnitude of this roll through me. There’s absolutely no guarantee that this RV is stopping anywhere in Tennessee. It could be heading farther north, into another state. It could already have disappeared completely.
I call Mike Lustig, and I sound calm when I tell him what I’ve learned. He promises that he’ll feed the info back through the Tennessee law enforcement channels, and then he pauses. “How you doing, Gwen?”
“Not great,” I tell him. “At all. I don’t know what—what to do. I can’t just—”
“Yes, you can. Until we know where to find them, there’s not a hell of a lot that can happen. You know this.”
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t believe it. “Do you have anything at all on this Assembly of Saints? Or All Saints International?”
Lustig asks the logical question about why I’d ask, and I tell him my suspicions. He considers that in silence a moment. “Got to ask the question: Why would they hire you to find a guy they kidnapped themselves?”
“Because they knew my poking around would flush Carol out of hiding, if she was still around. I made it possible for them to get a shot at her.” I swallow hard. “But it won’t work again. She’ll cut off contact with the pastor and drop completely out of sight, if she’s smart. She’ll get the hell out of this state—”
“Why didn’t she?” Lustig asks. It stops me cold. “You found her in Knoxville. Doesn’t that strike you as odd, if she really wanted to get free? She could have been in Hawaii by now. Or Estonia.”
He’s right. I just assumed she didn’t have the resources, but now that I’ve met her, that seems even less likely. Carol—or whatever her real name is—could manipulate her way in life, cash or not. There has to be a reason why she stayed.
It comes to me in a wave of anger that I’ve been stupid. I’ve got no excuse except that I’m tired and distracted and terrified for those I love. I should have nailed this the second the man who kidnapped my son told me he was looking for Carol and the child.
Two possibilities: either Carol escaped with a young child from the cult, or Carol ran from the cult because she was pregnant. Either way, she stays in Knoxville because she wants to see that child, even if she can’t keep it with her. It makes sense now why the pastor was so committed to protecting her; he was also protecting someone more vulnerable.
I need to apologize to that man someday. “I have to go,” I tell Lustig. “Any possibility you can use some kind of surveillance system to locate that RV? Satellites? Anything?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he says. “Gwen? You stay put. Don’t do anything stupid. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I say. I’m lying, of course. But Agent Lustig and I have a guarded relationship, at best; we’re friends because of Sam, and it ends there. If Lustig could find evidence against me, even the thinnest, to tie me to Melvin’s crimes, he’d show up with a warrant as fast as if he’d teleported. He doesn’t think I’m good for Sam.
Fair enough.
I end the call and think about leaving. Lilah, who’s sitting in her rocker across the room, looks up. She has been knitting steadily, and doesn’t stop now. The rhythmic clicking of her needles sounds like claws on a window. I suppose it should be comforting.
“Wait until morning,” she says. “You’re bone tired, and those girls are too. One more night won’t hurt. You’re safe here. Can’t guarantee what will be outside our fence.”
I immediately wonder what ulterior motive she has, and maybe that’s unfair; the Belldenes have been straightforward enough about their motives so far. Maybe in this, Lilah’s being a mother and a grandmother.
I don’t imagine it’ll last past sunrise.
“Thank you,” I tell her. I feel dispirited and horribly lost. I can’t sleep, I can’t rest, I can’t think. My son is gone. I’ve tasted this bitterness before, but never quite this deeply. It’s the uncertainty that kills hope. “I need to use my computer. That all right?”
“Surely,” she says. “As long as you don’t need our Wi-Fi password. I ain’t sharing that.”
I don’t need that. I use my cell phone to provide the signal and yoke my computer to it, and I’m online in under a minute.
I start with the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area. It’s wild and more than a little desolate. I zoom out. There are far too many possibilities, too many directions, too many backwoods small communities, towns, farms. From satellite, a cult compound looks a lot like any other place. And lots of rural people have trailers and RVs.
I search the internet for most of the rest of the two hours that remain until sunrise, but I don’t come up with much. There is almost nothing on the Assembly of Saints except for a passing reference to a long-expired church in the northwest, an entirely different group. The only mobile groups I can find seem to be Romany travelers or groups of elderly retirees with a yen to see the country on the open road.
“Ms. Proctor?”
I blink and look up. Vee Crockett is standing in front of me. She’s wearing a frilly white cotton nightgown that’s too small for her, and the long sleeves barely cover her to the elbows. She sinks down on the sofa beside me.
“Couldn’t you sleep?” I ask her, and she shakes her head. I don’t think. I just put my arm around her, the way I would Lanny. She stiffens at the touch, but then she relaxes and leans against me.
“Did you find anything?” she asks me.
I wish I could say yes. But I need to be honest with her. “No.”
“Can I show you something?”
I nod. Vee pulls my laptop over and surfs to a video site—not one of the major ones—and pulls something up. “Look.”
It’s murky and dark, and I don’t know what I’m looking at, but the color finally sta
bilizes. “What is it?”
“These people, they explore weird abandoned places,” she says.
“Why?”
“For fun. Just look.”
The summary underneath says that it’s an exploration of an old, abandoned Civil Defense facility. I don’t know why she’s so intent on it until they push open one of the rusting metal doors on a concrete building, and the flashlights illuminate neat rows of beds against the walls. Surplus military bunks, by the look of it; they still have mattresses on some of them. Apart from that, the place seems empty and unremarkable . . . until the lights catch on something painted on the wall, and the camera turns to bring it into focus.
It’s a carefully painted quotation.
WATCH YE, STAND FAST IN THE FAITH, QUIT YOU LIKE MEN, BE STRONG.—I CORINTHIANS 16:13
The other wall holds a more ominous verse.
GATHER MY SAINTS TOGETHER UNTO ME; THOSE THAT HAVE MADE A COVENANT WITH ME BY SACRIFICE.—PSALMS 50:5
Vee freezes the video, and we stare at it together. The word saints seems to glow—a trick of the flashlight, but somehow it seems like a message. “Where is this?”
“Thirty miles from Wolfhunter, out in the woods,” she says. “Been closed up for years, I guess.” She clicks the play button. “Keep lookin’.”
I’m afraid what we’re going to see.
The rest of the bunkhouse seems normal enough—bathrooms, bare showers, toilets. In another few minutes they leave the concrete structure. The people shooting the video start out making jokes, but that stops soon. It’s eerily quiet where they are, and as they pan around the scene, I see a long, narrow white house like a church, adorned with an outsize cross on the side. They choose to explore that next. The doors are closed but open easily, and the video shows that the large space is completely bare except for a raised platform that holds a single comfortable chair. There’s something eerie about that too. I can almost picture a room full of people standing, or kneeling, on that floor while the person that chair belongs to . . . sits. And talks.
There’s another building, a mirror to the one that held bunks. The sign outside isn’t quite as faded. It reads THE GARDEN. I’m expecting some kind of plant nursery. But it’s still bunk beds . . . just fewer of them. Farther along, there’s a small area with playpens and old, abandoned cribs.
There’s just one separate closed door, and when the exploration team opens it, they find a room with a king-size bed. Other than the single chair in the church, that bed is the only luxury in the place so far. That’s all that’s in the room, and yet I feel sick. Maybe it’s the discolored stains on the bare mattress.
Or the quotation on the wall over the bed.
AND ADAM KNEW EVE HIS WIFE; AND SHE CONCEIVED, AND BARE CAIN, AND SAID, I HAVE GOTTEN A MAN FROM THE LORD.—GENESIS 4:1
As the explorers leave, they spotlight more quotations, carefully painted huge on the walls.
FOR THE MAN IS NOT OF THE WOMAN: BUT THE WOMAN OF THE MAN. NEITHER WAS THE MAN CREATED FOR THE WOMAN; BUT THE WOMAN FOR THE MAN.—I CORINTHIANS 11:8–9
That gem makes me flinch. It has to be proof, to these poor souls, that they were born inferior and always will be. That they have no life of their own. The other wall is arguably worse.
LET THE WOMAN LEARN IN SILENCE WITH ALL SUBJECTION.—I TIMOTHY 2:11
I feel cold staring at it. Oppressed and suffocating, trapped like the women who would have been kept here. These women likely believed in this twisted version of Christianity; they had to, to keep their sanity. But it also doesn’t escape me that there are twice as many beds in the other bunkhouse—which I think must be for the men—as there are here in the Garden for women.
Women held here were outnumbered as well as indoctrinated. Relentless subjugation. I think about Carol, about her facile manipulation. Did she grow up here? Is this the place she ran away from? No, it couldn’t have been. From all appearances, this place has been vacant a long time.
“It’s the Assembly,” Vee says. “I knew it as soon as I seen this video. Always was talk they had their own place around Wolfhunter, but I didn’t know where; I was only a kid when Father Tom moved them on to a better spot.” She swallows, looking at the frozen image of the last quotation. “I met him once. Father Tom. He came to our house to recruit my momma. She told him to shoo, and he left. But he was . . .” She pauses, thinking about it. “I thought I liked him back then. He was real nice to me.”
Maybe he hadn’t been trying to recruit Vee’s mother at all. Maybe he’d been after Vee. I shudder to think that, but I remember those cribs, those playpens.
That king-size bed with the stains and the quote looming above.
I don’t doubt that Vee is right. This was once the Assembly of Saints compound, before it left Wolfhunter behind completely and moved somewhere bigger. Somewhere better.
I hug Vee and say, “Thanks. This is a big help.” I try to smile. She tries too. We’re both a little shaken. “However did you find it? It wasn’t marked as Assembly of Saints, was it?”
“No. I just looked for creepy cult videos,” she says. “In Tennessee, ’cause that’s where he started out. That’s all I found, though. Wish I’d found the new place.”
“You did great,” I tell her. She needs that, as much as or more than my own kids. And she nearly glows under the light of that small encouragement. I see it, but I can hardly feel it. My heart is nearly dead, and it will be until we find Connor.
The dawn’s a layer of promise on the horizon, but I go and rouse Lanny, and get Vee to change back into her clothes.
“Where are we going?” Lanny asks me as she drags a loose black shirt over her head. “Do we know where they are?”
“Not quite,” I tell her. “We’re going to find someone who can tell us where to look.”
Because I’m going to find Carol.
And this time she’s going to tell me everything.
18
SAM
I don’t remember much of anything after seeing Gwen hit from behind, seeing her go down, and charging after the man who was taking Connor.
Just flashes.
The deafening shrieks of the kids’ panic alarms going off.
Connor being dragged to the dirty RV parked outside.
Bracing myself and getting good aim on the craggy face of the man who had my son.
It’s fuzzy after that. A sudden, spasmodic, overwhelming pain. Being down, losing the gun when it’s kicked from my hand. Being kicked again until I’m out.
I try to remember more but all I can see is Connor’s face, stark and terrified.
I wake up slowly, and the memory fades into an unsettling reality. I’m shackled by my feet to a U-bolt in the floor of the RV, and my hands are manacled together with a long chain through the same bolt. Just enough slack for me to sit tied in this dirty, frayed bucket chair that’s also bolted down.
They didn’t get me from behind, I know that; I had all three of them right in front of me. One slightly off to the left. When I concentrate, I think I remember seeing flashes of light as the pain hit and I collapsed.
One of them must have had a Taser, and he juiced me down until they could kick me unconscious. I’m bruised and sore, and I may have a cracked rib, but I’m better than I expected. One hell of a headache throbbing like a fist behind my eyeballs. None of that matters, because Connor is sitting in the chair across from me.
He’s tied down, too, same manacle setup. He’s bruised and scraped, but his eyes are clear and sharp, and I see the relief when he realizes I’m waking up. “Dad?” he blurts out, and I feel a complicated rush of emotion. Fear. Intense love. Rage that I can’t get to him. He doesn’t call me Dad often, and when he does, it means his defenses are low. It means everything to me that he trusts me that much. I can’t let him down. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I tell him. We’re not fine. This is bad. We’re in the dirty RV, rocking and rolling along bumpy roads; we’re not traveling a main highway, at least not yet. They�
�re taking some back way, avoiding any cops, I assume. It’s still dark outside, and I don’t think I’ve been out all that long. Minutes, I hope. Longer than that, this throbbing behind my eyes means I’m heavily concussed, and I don’t need brain damage on top of everything else we’re facing right now.
“Shut up,” says one of the men. There’s one driving, of course, and one sitting shotgun; the third one is in another bucket chair that’s swiveled around to watch us. He’s got a Taser sitting on the table next to him. No gun that I can see.
They don’t want to kill us. That’s good. That’s an advantage I can use.
“You’re not going to make it,” I tell him. “Cops will already be looking for you. And the FBI. You abducted a kid this time, not an adult. You know what that gets you? Amber Alerts. Federal and state investigation all over your asses. They’ll have you ID’d from the surveillance video at our house in a matter of hours, and how long do you think this piece-of-shit RV is going to stay anonymous? Just let us go. Let us go and call it good.”
“Next time you talk, you get this,” the man says, and touches the Taser. He isn’t listening. Or believes God is going to protect him, though they have to have some awareness of just how risky this is. They’ve been careful before. Something about this has made them reckless enough to break their patterns.
Nothing scarier than fanatics who don’t feel like they have anything to lose.
I shut up, because I need to be ready and able to protect Connor, if it comes to that. I memorize the layout of the RV. Lights are dim, yellowed with age, but they reveal matted, old carpet; a tiny, cramped kitchen with a cracked counter and locked-up shelves; four bucket-style chairs; a couple of small tables; and two bunk beds all the way at the back, just visible behind a sagging folding door. I guess the other folding door hides the toilet. The inside of this thing smells like a locker room baked under a heat lamp. I assume there’s usually a woman with them—the bait for their preaching—but if so, there’s no sense of a woman’s touch in here.
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