by Betty Webb
Elevate. So Adam’s father had used that word, too.
CHERCHEURS: “But those deaths, Monsieur Arneault. Since you were the person who oversaw the property in Quaydon where the deaths occurred, do you not feel in the least responsible?”
Unfortunately, Arneault had apparently refused to answer the question, and the rest of the article was filled with more religious gobbledygook. Having little interest in religion myself, I started speed-reading through it to the end, which I found unsatisfying. Something seemed to be missing. Then I remembered that newspaper articles were written in what journalists refer to as “pyramid” style, with the most important information up front, the details coming later. So I scrolled back to the beginning of the article. Only then did I realize I had begun reading on page 28 of the magazine, which had no headline or byline, just the words, “Continued from page 27.” But there was no page 27. In fact, there was no page 26, either, or page 25, or any page before that. Whoever had transcribed the article had either skipped the magazine’s first twenty-seven pages, or those pages had somehow become lost. The only way I was able to tell when the magazine was printed was by its issue date on the bottom left of each page.
Using the same search engine, I typed Quaydon+tragedy+Divine Temple of the Holy Cross, pressed Enter—and hit gold.
MASS ASSASSINER DANS LE CULTE DE QUAYDON, screamed the headline in La Vérité, the French version of an underground newspaper. I hit the “translate” link and read, Mass murder in Quaydon cult. The subhead told me, “Only La Vérité brings truth to the cover-up!”
According to La Vérité, six months before Chercheurs’ print date, fifty-three bodies, almost half of them children, had been found dead at the church’s center on the outskirts of Paris. All were members of The Divine Temple of the Holy Cross.
After several months of in-fighting, the Divine Temple of the Holy Cross had split into two sects, one led by Maurice Abraham Arneault, the other by René Pichard and Clément Theron. The group headed by Pichard and Theron believed the story about God ordering the biblical Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn son was a parable, not a news account. Arneault’s group believed the Bible should be taken literally. After all, the Bible was God’s holy word, and you can’t cherry-pick Scripture, they claimed.
Four months later, the Pichard and Theron group apparently changed their minds and adopted their former members’ beliefs. But unlike the other group, they also decided they should act on those beliefs. From what the police and other investigators discovered after being summoned by a neighbor who’d heard gunshots, the carnage began with the sacrifice of Laurent Pichard, René Pichard’s firstborn son. Using the end of an iron cross, the elder Pichard, surrounded by his inner circle, had ritually stabbed his three-month-old son to death on the sect’s altar.
La Vérité reported that the first murder passed unnoticed by neighbors, but a few days later, the other killings began. Those were noticed, but by the time the police were alerted, fifteen inner circle members had died from poisoning, thirty-eight more from various other causes, including gunshot, smothering, and bludgeoning. All, with the exception of five infants still in swaddling blankets, were wearing white ceremonial robes at the time of their deaths. Each adult male lay on his back near his white-clad wives—the sect was polygamous—but the children, eighteen in all, were grouped together.
In the interviews that followed, Arneault claimed he’d known nothing about the impending death ritual, saying that after the original schism, his group—now called Les Enfants des Abraham, or The Children of Abraham—had severed all ties with The Divine Temple of the Holy Cross.
“This entire made-up story of a ritual slaughter is ridiculous,” he’d told La Vérité. “And it certainly had nothing to do with me or Les Enfants des Abraham. When René Pichard had a nervous breakdown, some unfortunate things happened, but neither I nor any of my people were involved. We may believe what we believe, but in practice Les Enfants des Abraham follows the laws of modern society.”
“You lying son of a bitch,” I whispered. “You murdering son of a bitch!”
Once I had calmed down, I resumed reading, and discovered that because of the incendiary nature of the story, press coverage of the ritual murders had been squelched. The official cause of the deaths had been attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Unlike the rest of the French press, La Vérité continued to report the rumors that Arneault had been seen in the vicinity of the “death house” at the time of The Divine Temple of the Holy Cross tragedy. At the end of the article was a blurb noting that Arneault had ultimately been cleared of any responsibility. The French court accepted the testimony of several people, each one a member of Les Enfants des Abraham, who swore that their leader had been having dinner with them at the time the killings took place.
I believed La Vérité’s version, because at the age of four, I had witnessed Maurice Abraham Arneault and his golden-haired son—commit mass murder.
35 years earlier
Helen hardly remembers the ride in the old school bus from the Flagstaff forest to Phoenix, but when the bus she’s on turns down another city street, she realizes this might be her last chance to save Christina. Abraham wants her child dead. The only thing that has kept her alive so far are the protests from her daughter’s twelve-year-old “husband,” the young killer Christina calls Golden Boy.
But what can Helen do? Christina, silent since last night, sits on her lap, her eyes as blank as the bright sky above the bus. She and the child are so tightly packed in, neither can move. Abraham has forced them to sit between Brother Steve and Brother Joseph, two of his most trusted followers. Both are armed, and as they proved in that bloody forest meadow, they will kill on demand.
As the bus trundles slowly a past a hospital, Helen gets an idea. They are sitting in the long seat that faces the bus’s exit. Out of the door’s glass panels she can see that the sidewalk in front of the hospital is crowded with white-clad nurses, men carrying lunchboxes, Hispanic women strolling along with their beautiful, dark-eyed toddlers. If she can somehow get Christina off the bus and into that street, those people will surely help her.
Out of the corner of her eye Helen she sees Brother Steve’s gun. She recognizes it as a revolver, the same kind of gun her own father owned. When she had turned thirteen and blossomed, he started taking her into the woods behind their house for target practice, saying, “A young lady needs to know how to protect herself.”
She hadn’t done a good job of that, had she? Liam is dead, along with little Jamie, and as soon as they reach the promised new settlement in California, Abraham will most certainly kill Christina. Probably Helen, too, not that she cares anymore. At this very moment Abraham is telling his golden-haired son how necessary more killings are because Helen is no longer a faithful follower. She is an apostate, and neither apostates nor their children should be allowed to live and spread their poisonous lies.
Pretending to wipe dust from her thigh, Helen studies Brother Steve’s revolver. The holster has no cover flap, leaving the pistol’s handgrip within easy reach. She looks back out the window to see the hospital growing smaller in the distance. She knows she should plan her next move more carefully, but the sidewalk ahead is less crowded, and she can already see the green sign that says I-10 - LOS ANGELES.
It has to be now.
In one lightning move, Helen tears Christina’s clutching arms away and yanks the pistol out of Brother Steve’s holster. Screaming “I’ll kill her myself!” she aims as best she can at the glass panel above the door. At the same time she kicks her daughter in the chest, slamming her against the exit door.
But a split second before Helen pulls the trigger, Brother Steve hits Helen’s arm, knocking the gun downward…
…and the bullet finds Christina instead.
Chapter Twenty-five
I managed to hold myself together until just before nine, when Jimmy received a call from Wolf
Ramirez. The tribal elder was asking so many questions that Jimmy turned to me and said, “I’d better get back there. They’ve run into a plumbing problem. Want to come with me? Or do you still plan on driving to Kanati?”
Part of me wanted to return to the Rez with him and forget all about Maurice Abraham Arneault and his son, but the screams of the dying were too loud to ignore.
“Sorry, still gotta make that trip. Have fun.” My smile must have resembled a death’s head grin, but concerned as Jimmy was about the house, he didn’t notice.
“Oh, yeah, plumbing’s always fun.” He gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and left.
Once I lessened my control I began to shake again, but not from fear.
From rage.
Kanati’s Adam was the murdering spawn of a man who had killed dozens. The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, had it? I now even understood why three bodies had been dumped so far north from Kanati—one in Scottsdale, one on the Rez, and the other further north on the Beeline Highway. The man revealed in those old newspaper accounts hadn’t been stupid, and neither was his son. By dumping the bodies of their dead many miles north of Kanati, Adam Arneault had purposely implicated EarthWay. Given its parasite-friendly dietary beliefs, the back-to-the-land commune made the perfect red herring. But it wasn’t Adam himself who had told me about EarthWay; it was Gabrielle, whom I’d begun to trust.
Unable to keep my mind focused, I turned off my computer and put the CLOSED sign on the door. Then I went upstairs.
The familiarity of my apartment, ragged though it remained after Snowball’s tender administrations, calmed me. I eased myself down on the sofa and took a few deep breaths, feeling my stomach muscles unclench. I didn’t understand everything yet, but so far I had figured out this much. Despite her obvious talent, Megan Unruh had been raised by a cold-hearted woman who couldn’t even love herself, and the resulting lack of confidence made Megan the perfect mark for any group offering salvation. As for Ford and Alene Laumenthal—my poor Reservation Woman—the couple had been working their way through the waning commune system until they found Kanati, which they’d believed to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Ford had been the leader in their misguided search for salvation, Alene his whither-thou-goest follower.
But I couldn’t figure out why—despite Kanati’s gourmet meals—those people had died of starvation.
Now that I was calm enough, I made a couple of phone calls on my cell, getting voice mail each time. As I waited for the call-backs, I busied myself by packing what remained of my life here into banker’s boxes; if I didn’t return from Kanati, at least Jimmy wouldn’t be stuck with the job.
While working, I listened to John Lee Hooker On the Road, the live blues album that included my father playing backup on his Gibson dobro. Of the few things I could remember about him, that one event shone most brightly. My mother had taken me to the nightclub where Hooker was playing, and my father had been asked to perform along with the blues legend. I remembered sitting on my mother’s lap when he and Hooker launched into “Boogie Chillen,” which segued straight into “Boom Boom.” The pride on my mother’s face had stayed with me throughout all these years.
Ignoring the lump in my throat, I folded another shirt and put it on top of the others. How had I wound up with so many black tees? And why, once they’d become too ragged to wear, hadn’t I thrown them out?
Easy answer. As alike as those tee-shirts might look to a casual observer, each was unique and bore a particular memory. The shirt I’d bought at the old Sears store, for instance. I’d been wearing that when a killer had dumped me in the desert and left me there for dead. The shirt from JC Penny? I’d been wearing it when Jimmy first walked through the door of Desert Investigations and applied for a job. I folded that one even more carefully than the others.
Now for the final carton.
I fully unpacked that box because I wanted a final look before duct-taping it closed.
I wanted to see the photograph of my blood-stained blue dress, the newspaper headline…
CHILD SHOT IN HEAD REMAINS UNIDENTIFIED
I wanted to touch these artifacts again and draw strength from them.
As my murdered father’s dobro sang through the apartment’s stale air, I hugged the photo of the dress to me.
And thought about vengeance.
The first call-back came in just after ten. It was Pete Ventarro, from the Medical Examiner’s office. “It’s her,” he said.
“Who?” My mind was a hundred miles away, maybe two hundred, in a forest glen littered with small bodies.
“The gal you sent me a sketch of the other day when I was so busy. People have been calling her Reservation Woman, but yeah, she’s Alene Laumenthal, the wife of the also-deceased Ford J. Laumenthal. The mother was just here and ID’d her. She’s taking her daughter’s body back to Wyoming for burial as soon as the ME releases it.”
I closed my eyes in relief. No pauper’s grave for my girl. Granted, she wouldn’t be buried next to her bully of a husband, but he hadn’t deserved her anyway.
“Thank you, Pete,” I whispered.
“Hey, is something wrong?”
“Not anymore.”
“There’s, ah, one more thing.” Pete sounded embarrassed, which wasn’t like him.
“Which is?”
“Since you’re the one who found her, the mother wants to meet you. And she wants to see where her daughter was, um, found.”
“Dumped, you mean.” I felt my anger rising again at the thought of her alone in the desert, tossed like a sack of garbage.
“Dumped, yeah, but I didn’t put it that way to her, because I wanted to, you know, ease the blow as much as possible. Not that it would make any different in the long run, because, you know, well…” He cleared his throat. “So could you, I mean, I know it’s unusual, but I’m thinking it would…”
There are times when vengeance has to take a backseat, and this was one of them, because even the dead had a right to compassion. Maybe somewhere someone had done the same for my mother.
“Yeah, Pete. I’ll do it.”
Forty minutes later I met the widowed Faye Chambers at the Airport Comfort Inn. She was waiting for me in the lobby, a sweetly plump woman with permed brown hair, wearing a plain black dress. Her faded eyes were rimmed in red, and her hands clutched at a manila folder.
Before she let me lead her to my Jeep, she wanted me to see her daughter as a living, breathing person, not as the lifeless husk she’d had to identify. I sat next to her for as long as it took while she opened the folder and showed me the pictures of Alene as a baby: “She was such a good baby, never cried.” Alene as a toddler: “Always getting into things but you couldn’t get mad at her, you’d just laugh.” Alene as a kindergartener: “Her teacher said she might grow up to be a musician because she would play the class’s xylophone by ear and get it right the first time.” Alene as a teenager: “That’s her prom dress, she insisted on picking it out by herself and I was nervous about that because you know how girls can be, but look at her here, the dignity and grace.” Alene the week before she’d left home: “She looked so full of hope that day.”
Starvation-shriveled Reservation Woman had not been beautiful, but the Alene in the photographs was. Her skin glowed, light shown in her clear blue eyes, her smile dazzled. “She was a catalog model, you know,” Faye said. “For The Plus-Sized Beauty.”
Faye took out the company’s catalog and flipped through the pages. There was Alene wearing a dusty rose evening gown, looking like a princess. There was Alene dressed in a red, white, and blue sailing costume, ready to board a yacht. There was Alene, curvy and irresistible in a sleek black swimsuit.
“I was so proud of her.”
I squeezed Faye’s hand. “You had a right to be.”
“But when she met that man, he made her feel bad about herself.”
Faye’s back, which had been bowed, straightened. “All right. I’m ready to go see the place now.”
Still holding her hand, I led her to the Jeep.
A half hour later we stood at the spot where I had found the woman I’d known only as Reservation Woman. The Pimas had memorialized her with a white cross. The ground was covered in freshly planted flowers, and the cross shadowing them was looped with colorful strings of beads. I had added a necklace of my own, beads of multi-colored quartz interspersed with small bits of turquoise. We desert people would never forget Alene’s brief sojourn among us, and would always pay homage to her spirit.
“It’s so beautiful,” Faye whispered.
“Just like your daughter.”
