by Rose, Karen
Mercy bought something I made. Oh, dear Lord. Amos felt light-headed and had to lean against a tree.
DJ went even paler. ‘She did what? Me? She described me? Fucking hell, why didn’t you say that first? Did you get the license plate on her car? Send it to me.’ Another pause, during which DJ checked the screen of the device, before returning it to his ear. ‘Yeah, I got it. Thanks.’ He ran a hand through his hair as he listened again. ‘No, I haven’t seen the news lately, but thanks for the heads-up. I . . . owe you.’
He said the last two words like they tasted bad. ‘No, I don’t have any more product. We had to leave it behind when we moved. It’ll be a few months before we have a new batch.’ He grimaced. ‘Yeah, I know. The market’s shrinking, blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it before. But there’s still a market, right? The demand for shrooms isn’t just going to disappear overnight because a few cities have decriminalized.’ He stopped pacing, blowing out an impatient breath. ‘No. I’ve told you before, I do not have facilities to make meth even if I wanted to. Look, I need to go. Thanks for the warning. I’ll leave tonight as soon as I can get away. Can you keep her there? Like damage her tires or something?’ He exhaled heavily. ‘Right. I guess not. No, thanks anyway. I’ll see you tonight.’
He jabbed the device’s screen with his finger, then stood stock-still for a moment, his body still rigid. Then, using his thumbs, he began to tap the screen rapidly, tapping his foot as he stared at it, clearly waiting for something.
But what?
Amos got his answer – sort of – when DJ began to read from the screen.
‘Oh shit,’ DJ muttered. ‘It is her. Oh my God. Fucking hell. This can’t be happening. This cannot be happening.’ He slumped on the boulder, looking out toward the mountains, his expression slack. Numb. ‘You were supposed to die. Why didn’t I just kill you in the woods? Goddammit.’
Amos felt the same numbness, his legs trembling so much that he feared he’d crumple to the ground. It is her. Mercy.
My Mercy is alive?
The kernel of hope blossomed in his chest, followed by radiant joy. My Mercy is alive. But the happiness was quickly swallowed up by icy fear. If she was alive, who had DJ buried?
Or had he buried anyone? Amos didn’t know what to think anymore.
Except one thing was clear. DJ was leaving tonight.
And Amos would find a way to get himself and Abigail on that truck. His plan to smuggle her out in a hope chest would never have worked, not with DJ refusing to allow him to go into town even one time. I’ll figure out how to stow away in the truck bed and we can be free.
He had to save Abigail. And he had to warn Mercy.
Modoc County, California
Monday, 17 April, 2.45 P.M.
Rafe wished they were driving through the forest under different circumstances. It was a beautiful drive. A beautiful day. A beautiful woman at his side.
But the air was thick with tension as Mercy looked side to side as if she were a spectator at a tennis match. She was searching the trees, nervous since Erin had voiced her concerns.
Which were valid. Rafe hadn’t liked the way the man behind the deli counter had looked at them. He hadn’t liked the way the man had talked to the young woman behind the counter. And that he’d gotten on the phone as soon as they’d left?
Yeah. None of that felt right.
But he might be able to alleviate some of Mercy’s concern. ‘Burton’s not going to jump at you from behind a tree,’ he said quietly. ‘Not today, at least.’
Mercy cast him an anxious glance. ‘Am I that transparent?’
He smiled at her, offering his hand, palm up. Relieved when she took it and squeezed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Pretty transparent. About Ephraim, anyway. But I get it. He’s your worst nightmare and you had to literally face him just two days ago. So yeah, I get that you’re unsettled. But I’ve been watching, and I haven’t seen any sign that we were followed.’
She smiled tightly. ‘Thank you. That means a lot.’
‘And if you can’t relax on my say-so, I get that, too.’
She brought his hand to her lips and pressed. Not a kiss. Just contact. Vital and affirming.
‘You’re not alone, Mercy. Whatever happens between us, I will not let you face this alone.’
She lowered his hand to the console between them. ‘Gideon and Farrah are going to be pissed off.’
Rafe checked his rear-view mirror. He could see Erin’s blue Rover, but Gideon hadn’t caught up to them yet. Nor had Farrah and her captain. He’d been driving through the forest for nearly an hour, but the roads were twisty and even if Gideon or Farrah were behind them, they might not see them.
‘I can’t speak for Farrah,’ he said, ‘but Gideon will get over it. Besides, he’ll be more pissed off with me. I should have waited for him to answer my call before I left.’
She shrugged. ‘I would have pushed you to leave anyway. I was hell-bent on proving that I could contribute something important to the search.’ She turned to look out the window. ‘Because I feel guilty that I walked away back in February. Ran away, if we’re being technical.’
He made a scoffing noise. ‘Technicalities are highly overrated.’ He slowed when a turnoff became visible in the trees ahead. ‘We’ve gone about twenty miles, just like Ginger from the store said. And there’s the Private Property sign. You want to give this one a go?’
They’d already tried two side roads, but both had been dead ends.
She made a face. ‘Sure, why not?’
Activating his turn signal, he grinned over at her. ‘That’s the spirit!’
She laughed. ‘Sorry.’ Then she sighed. ‘I’m afraid we’ll find nothing, but also afraid we’ll find something. Which sounds batshit crazy, I know.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ He glanced back at Erin, who had followed them onto the side road. ‘And if we find nothing, we keep looking.’
Mercy drew a breath, bracing herself.
They drove in absolute silence for another twenty minutes, following the curve of the severely rutted road, still covered with snow. This deep in the forest, there wasn’t enough sunshine to melt it and the temps would remain cool for at least another month or so.
‘I can’t believe the snow is still here,’ Mercy said, reading his mind.
‘Could be worse. At least the roads are drivable. Some of the roads in Lassen don’t open until late June.’
They hit a deep hole and the Subaru bounced around. Rafe slipped his hand free of her hold to grip the wheel and wrestle them to the smoother part of the road.
Which still bounced them around.
‘Sorry about this,’ Rafe gritted out.
‘It’s—’ Mercy gasped. ‘Rafe. Look.’
He was looking. ‘Holy shit,’ he murmured.
It was a clearing of sorts. More like a campground. A very large campground. Two tall posts stood on either side of the entrance, a crosspiece spanning the width. It looked like the entrance to a ranch, minus the sign.
Erin pulled into the clearing behind him and Rafe rolled the Subaru to a stop, leaving the engine running as he opened his door, hand on his gun. ‘Stay here until I tell you that it’s safe, okay? If anything even looks weird, you drive yourself out of here.’
She nodded mutely.
Grabbing his cane, Rafe walked back to Erin’s Range Rover, his senses on high alert. He didn’t hear anything except the sound of their engines, but that didn’t mean they were safe.
Erin jumped to the ground, her hand also on the gun holstered on her belt. ‘What the actual fuck?’
Rafe just shook his head, almost afraid to hope that they’d found what was left of an old Eden settlement. ‘Let’s take a look.’
Modoc County, California
Monday, 17 April, 2.55 P.M.
Ephraim glared at the Cadillac. It was no longer
stuck in the snow, but he’d wasted precious minutes rocking it free. At least it still drove, just in case he needed it to get away if things went wrong. Wishing he’d stolen a vehicle with four-wheel drive, he shouldered his backpack and gathered his guns.
The Cadillac had fit in perfectly in Granite Bay and the neighborhood around Rafe Sokolov’s Victorian, but it was woefully ill suited to this terrain. Sokolov and Rhee, on the other hand, were probably able to navigate a blizzard of biblical proportions.
Luckily, he didn’t have to walk too far and he knew the area like the back of his hand. Eden had been located here for seven years, after all. He set off, taking a shortcut that would lead him to the former settlement. If he played his cards right and didn’t lose his cool, he could shoot the two cops and Sokolov’s sister, then take Mercy back to Eden in Sokolov’s Subaru.
If he was forced to get away in the Cadillac, he’d steal a four-wheel drive as soon as possible. He’d need the extra power to get up the mountain. The community had relocated to one of their previous hideaways, necessary since they’d left in such a hurry. And in freaking November. Snow had already been deep in the mountains and digging out new earth homes simply hadn’t been possible in the short time they’d had to evacuate after Miriam’s escape.
At first he’d been angry that Mercy and Sokolov had found the previous Eden, but it really was perfect. He could drag the bodies of the three he didn’t care about into one of the earth homes and leave them there to rot. Or be eaten. This time of year, with winter still hanging on and food in short supply, their bodies would be scavenged by hungry animals in no time.
And Mercy and I will be free.
Modoc County, California
Monday, 17 April, 3.05 P.M.
Rafe and Erin approached the clearing cautiously, but it became quickly apparent that it was abandoned. There was a central courtyard, circular in shape, about the size of an ice rink. Structures were arranged on the perimeter. ‘Twenty-six,’ Rafe whispered after counting them. They were vaguely domelike, with what looked like stairways leading down to open doorways.
‘Earth shelters,’ Erin said quietly.
Rafe brushed snow from the sloping side of the structure nearest to where they stood. ‘Covered in vegetation.’ Vines, mostly, but also some shrubs. ‘This area would have looked green from above. Which explains why Eden was never visible from the air.’ He’d pored over the satellite maps of the area around Mt. Shasta, but he’d never checked maps this far east. He didn’t know if the FBI had, either. It didn’t really matter, because the settlement was very efficiently camouflaged.
Erin turned in a slow circle, studying the layout. ‘The fence poles are twelve feet tall, around the outside perimeter, but there’s no fencing to connect them.’
‘They may have taken the fencing with them. Like the doors.’ Rafe’s instincts were screaming that something was very wrong here, but that was understandable given the horrors that must have occurred within the compound’s walls. ‘We need to radio for backup.’
‘But who?’ Erin pushed back. ‘Do we really want locals on the scene? They might be great, but at the same time, this is too big not to handle appropriately. We can’t take the chance that they’ll be sloppy with . . . all this.’
‘The FBI is leading the search for Burton and Eden, so Gideon can call Molina. And we’ll stay here until the FBI can secure the area.’
Erin nodded. ‘Agreed. I want to check out one of these earth shelters. Cover me?’
Rafe wasn’t so sure that was wise, but he followed her, drawing his gun from his holster. ‘Don’t go too far in. If they’re not stable, they could collapse on your head.’
Erin gave him an arch look. ‘Thank you, Professor Sokolov.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘I’m serious.’
‘And I’m not stupid.’
‘Jury’s out on that,’ Rafe muttered as she descended the stairs of the closest structure, her flashlight lifted over her head, angled down.
She turned to glare at him before disappearing through the doorway. Within thirty seconds she was backing out, pocketing her flashlight. ‘Empty,’ she said when she rejoined him. ‘But extensive. There are separate rooms inside. At least three in that one – what looked like two bedrooms and an open sitting room. If we walked to the back side of these homes, we’d see the hole for what was probably a stovepipe. There were gouges in the door frames, like there used to be hinges there. I think you’re right that they took the doors with them.’
‘Toilet facilities?’ Rafe asked.
‘Not in that one, although one of the rooms might have had an outhouse-type hole. I didn’t get that far. But there doesn’t appear to be plumbing. Or people.’
‘No tire treads in the snow, no footprints. I think it’s okay for Mercy to take a look around.’
‘I’ll go get her,’ Erin offered. ‘This snow isn’t easy to walk in.’
Rafe wanted to protest – I can do it! – but she was right. The snow was a bitch and his cane kept sliding when it hit the layer of ice beneath the most recent accumulation. ‘Thank you.’
A minute later, Mercy and Sasha were at his side. ‘This isn’t Eden,’ Mercy said. ‘Or at least not the way I remember it.’
‘How so?’ Erin asked.
‘We had houses,’ she said. ‘Actual houses, made of wood, with four walls and shingled roofs. The Founding Elders had really nice houses, but these all look the same. And this is smaller than I remember. There are how many structures here?’
‘Twenty-six,’ Erin answered.
‘We had at least forty.’ She went silent, turning in a circle to study the abandoned settlement, much as Erin had done, but her expression was distant, clearly lost in memory.
‘So Eden is shrinking in numbers?’ Rafe asked, and she blinked, her eyes refocusing.
‘I guess so. The layout . . . it’s familiar. This was the common area. Houses ringed the perimeter, just like these huts. Shared spaces were at two, six, and ten o’clock. Most families had cookstoves for small meals and general heating, but that hut at two o’clock would have been the shared cooking facilities for larger meals like turkey, wild boar, or deer. The hut at ten o’clock was the clinic. Six o’clock was the school.’ She walked to a slight bowl-shaped depression in the ground. It measured about six feet in diameter. ‘Fire pit.’ She pointed to the largest structure at twelve o’clock. ‘The church. Pastor’s home was next door. Outhouses used to be behind each home. I don’t see that here, but they could be hidden behind the huts. Can we walk beyond the ring?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Erin said. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘The outbuildings.’ Mercy started walking, cutting through the huts to the land behind them, and Rafe had to lengthen his stride to keep up, careful not to slip in the snow. ‘The stables. Amos’s workshop. The smithy. I can’t see them being belowground huts.’
The smithy. Where Gideon had been attacked and accidentally killed his attacker.
She stopped walking when she got to an area about twenty by twenty. It was flatter than the common area had been. Crouching, she brushed at the snow, then looked up.
‘Concrete slab. This was either the smithy or Amos’s workshop. They were a little away from the homes because of the fire hazard. The smithy always had a fire going, of course, and Amos’s workshop had so much sawdust.’ She moved to a similar area with level snow cover and, crouching again, revealed another concrete slab. ‘This was probably Amos’s place. They were always placed the same way, going clockwise.’ She settled on her haunches, looking out to the trees. ‘There was a generator between them that ran on gasoline. It powered Amos’s tools. His saws were the only things that ran on electricity, in all the compound.’
She stood up, frowning. ‘It doesn’t look so scary like this, does it? Just kind of sad.’ She continued on a clockwise path, a circle concentric to the ring of hom
es. ‘The stable would have been here.’ Her shoulders straightened. ‘Behind Ephraim’s house.’
‘What was his job, Mercy?’ Sasha asked quietly.
‘He was responsible for the animals.’ Her lips curved bitterly. ‘He was actually good with them. Treated them with respect. Even affection. Far better than he treated his wives and children.’ Her frown returned. ‘How could they have lived in such cramped quarters? Ephraim had four or five wives at any given time. Plus children.’
‘The houses extend out underground,’ Erin explained. ‘At least the one that I went into did.’
Mercy’s frown deepened. ‘How horrible. To be stuck in a confined space like that. With him.’
She looked beyond where the stable would have been, peering through the trees, growing suddenly still. Without a word she headed in the direction she’d been staring, and they followed, stopping behind her when she fell to her knees in the snow.
‘It was always behind the church,’ she muttered as she frantically parted the snow with her bare hands.
Revealing a cross made from wood. Painted white. Now that Rafe knew what to look for, he saw four more crosses poking up from the snow.
She’d uncovered the graveyard.
Rafe carefully lowered himself to his good knee, stretching his bad leg out sideways. Leaning on his cane for balance, he dug into his pocket for his leather gloves. ‘Put these on.’
She took the gloves, looking taken aback. ‘I won’t touch them,’ she said solemnly. ‘I know better.’
She was a lab tech, working with evidence every day. He supposed she had a right to look a little insulted. He smiled at her, keeping it gentle because she looked so fragile in that moment. ‘They’re so your hands don’t get cold.’
‘Oh.’ She put on the gloves, shaking her head. ‘Stupid of me.’
‘Hush,’ he admonished, then pulled out his phone to shine his flashlight on the cross. ‘“Damaris Terrill, Beloved Wife of Amos and Mother of Abigail”.’
Mercy looked a little shell-shocked. ‘He got married again. Had another child. A daughter.’
