Matters of Faith

by Kristy Kiernan

  “How are you, Mrs. Tobias?” Rhoades asked. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to talk at the hospital.”

  Keeping the screen door closed I said, “Are you following me? I haven’t done anything, and I consider that harassment.”

  “No, we weren’t following you. We figured you were still at the hospital with Meghan,” he said.

  I didn’t like his use of her name. After all the legal formality—with their and Mingus’s use of Mrs. and Mr.—it felt entirely too familiar, aggressive.

  “Where I am is of no concern to you,” I snapped. “Now what do you want?”

  They glanced at each other, and Hernandez gave some sort of deferential nod to Rhoades.

  “Marshall here, Mrs. Tobias?” he asked, taking a step up onto the porch. I stood my ground behind the screen. I shook my head.

  “No.”

  “Is Ada Sparks here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  I wanted to lie and say that I did, and it would have been easy. But Mingus said they hadn’t done anything illegal, and I wanted to let them know that I knew that, that I was informed and they couldn’t intimidate me.

  But I was intimidated. I was nearly sick to my stomach with it. Yes, at forty years old, never having done a single illegal thing in my life, I was afraid of cops. So I lied.

  “They’re visiting family,” I said.

  They glanced at each other again and I clenched my teeth. I didn’t care how long they’d been together as partners, they weren’t psychic, and their little looks and raised eyebrows and carefully practiced wry smiles couldn’t communicate anything to each other that I didn’t recognize myself. They were cats with a mouse, so full of power that they didn’t even have to make an effort at it, just a little swat here and there would keep me running in circles.

  “Mrs. Tobias, we would really like to speak with Miss Sparks. Could you possibly let us know how we could get in touch with her?”

  I was nonplussed. They’d already had Ada. And why were they specifically asking for her and not Marshall?

  “They’ll be back soon,” I said cautiously. “Why do you need to speak with her? Have you gotten ahold of her parents?”

  “In a way,” Hernandez said.

  “How much do you know about Ada Sparks?” Rhoades asked, overriding his partner’s comment.

  “I—What do you mean?”

  “Did you know that both of her parents have been in the system?”

  In the system? What the hell did that mean? Okay, I’d seen my share of cop shows, how could you miss them these days? TV was filled with murder and mayhem and corpses, limbs and autopsies, detectives and crime scene investigators, and all manner of violence and substitute porn. I could guess what “in the system” meant, but it irritated me that they took it for granted that I would.

  I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t a criminal. This wasn’t my world, and I wasn’t going to pretend that it was.

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said. “I’ve never met them.”

  If Rhoades had been being careful of our tenuous communication so far, my professed naïveté obviously irritated him as much as their self-assurance irritated me, and he was silent for a moment before speaking in a flat, no-nonsense clip.

  “Ada’s mother was arrested eight years ago on suspicion of manslaughter. Her father has been incarcerated in several of our finest state pens on various fraud and theft charges and is currently wanted in New York State for grand larceny.”

  My knees didn’t weaken, go soft like you read about. It was my whole body that went limp, my fingertips slid down the old wood of the screen door frame, my eyes closed involuntarily, even the arches of my feet felt as though they’d lost their support. Oh, Marshall, I thought. Who did you fall in love with?

  Rhoades stepped up to the screen door and said softly, “Want to know more?”

  Hernandez appeared behind him, and though I knew it was the wrong thing to do, yes, I did want to know more, and so I unlatched the door with my rubber fingers and it swung slightly toward them. I backed up into the kitchen and pulled a chair out from the table and dropped into it as they came into the house, the screen door catching Hernandez on his battered loafers. I waited while their eyes adjusted after the brilliant sun in our side yard.

  I pushed a chair out with my foot and they both sat down at the table. Nobody spoke, and I stared at them in turn while they pulled out small notebooks and pens. Rhoades needed a haircut. Hernandez needed dental work. They both needed new shirts. I would have said something, asked something, but I was unable to form words, and was exhausted with the fact that I was, again, speechless.

  I just closed my eyes and prepared to listen, as if I were waiting on a bedtime story. Rhoades flipped through his notebook and began to speak.

  “Adaleide Marie Sparks was born to Oriole and Daniel Sparks in Alberta, Canada, in 1988—”

  “Eighty-eight? She’s twenty?” I asked, truly shocked. I’d thought she was eighteen, at the most nineteen. It was only a year or two older than I had assumed she was, but somehow the absence of the “teen” suffix changed her, made her more menacing, as if had I known that then perhaps I could have avoided all of this. Maybe I wouldn’t have allowed her frail appearance to soften me, I wouldn’t have chalked her tattoo and piercing up to an immature frontal lobe.

  He nodded and continued. Hernandez watched me closely, and I shut my eyes again, shutting him out.

  “Daniel is an American citizen and Ada has dual citizenship. They moved to the States when she was nine and moved around a lot. Daniel was in and out of prison and, from what we can tell, Oriole found places for them to live by joining communes, fringe churches, a few of them have been investigated as cults.”

  I must have made some noise. I know I didn’t scream because my mouth never moved, so that was only happening in my head, but I did something because Rhoades stopped speaking and reached his hand across the table as though to pat me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Hernandez cleared his throat. “Mrs. Tobias, we’re not here to upset you. We know you haven’t done anything but raise two pretty good kids. But, ah, there’s more you should hear.”

  I nodded. “Did you tell my husband this?”

  They both shook their heads. “No, ma’am,” Rhoades said. “We didn’t know a lot of this ourselves when we spoke to him. When we found out, we came straight here to see if she was here. We didn’t expect to see you.”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay. What else?”

  “While Daniel Sparks was serving time in North Carolina for forgery, Oriole evidently met someone else, and they took Ada and her sister, Zyphyr—”

  “Zyphyr?” I repeated.

  He looked at me solemnly. “Yes, ma’am. They took Ada and Zyphyr and moved to Nebraska to join the man’s community, which is sort of a weird mix of everything, from what we know. They’ve not quite achieved cult status, but they have been investigated several times.

  “It looks like the whole thing’s just a hodgepodge of whatever individual beliefs people bring to the group. They don’t believe in Western medicine, no immunizations or vaccines, no medical intervention, healing by laying on of hands and rebirthing, speaking in tongues, polygamy, we’re pretty sure they’re involved in illegal sexual practices involving minors, and there’s some sort of end-time component, which would seem to be at odds with their environmental concerns.”

  Rhoades shook his head and shrugged. “There’s no one guiding principle apparently, and not one single guru-type person heading it up that they’ve been able to discern, though these types of groups sometimes go to great lengths to protect that person from being discovered. There is some kind of council that the authorities can’t figure out yet. It seems to mostly be a group of loosely related fringe religious beliefs and environmental practices.

  “Of course, most of these things aren’t illegal and are protected under the laws of our country, but then some of it is
illegal and so they’re definitely a group on Nebraska’s radar.”

  I huddled over the table, my stomach heaving just slightly, the way it had when I was pregnant with Meghan, not enough to get sick, just enough to be miserable. “She said they sent her to school on a scholarship. I thought, you know, maybe they were just—Marshall has always had an interest in religions. He likes to explore them. Everyone he’s ever brought home has been . . . interesting.” I looked up at them and could tell there was more.

  “They have been paying for her college. Nothing as organized as a scholarship, just paying her tuition and books. They’re sending another member to college to get a medical degree.”

  “She never mentioned that.”

  “They think they’re doing it so they have their own doctors and lawyers to protect them. Keep the kids out of regulated medicine, defend their right to their practices, keep the state out of their business,” Hernandez said. “It’s kind of, well, it’s kind of brilliant if you think about it.”

  Rhoades glared at him and he shut up. I got the impression that Hernandez was the observer, detached, while Rhoades got more involved. Against my own judgment, I was starting to like, or perhaps respect, him a little. At least he was giving me information, which was more than I could say for anyone else.

  “Thing is,” Rhoades said, “some of their religious practices aren’t exactly benign. So, Zyphyr was born with several medical conditions—she was autistic, and deaf, with multiple learning difficulties. Rebirthing is some psychological thing where they put the person in something supposed to represent the womb, like a sleeping bag, or a sheet. Then they, I don’t know, they lean on the person, sort of squeeze them, trying to re-create the birthing process, like contractions, and the person is supposed to fight their way out of it, be rebirthed, and their emotional issues are supposed to be gone, I guess. So these people decide that they’re going to adopt that, only they’re going to make it a religious thing, heal physical ailments instead of emotional ones.”

  “Oh no,” I said weakly, almost a protest at what I knew was coming.

  “Yeah, they decided to do it to Zyphyr. Only it didn’t turn out so well. She died. Cause of death was suffocation, but she also had multiple broken ribs and one of her lungs had been punctured. Good, God-fearing people they are.” Rhoades sounded disgusted, even angry. His notebook flapped like a bird with a broken wing on the table as he jittered his hand up and down.

  “They tried to cover it up, buried her without reporting it, gave her a service, a headstone, everything. Said it was God’s will, that she was healed when she went home to him, so it had actually worked, just not quite how they had intended.”

  “Her mother, Oriole . . . ?” I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask, didn’t know what I wanted to know.

  “She was arrested, along with several other members. They all told the same story and said that Oriole hadn’t participated physically, but she had allowed it, and encouraged her other daughter, Ada, to participate.”

  I gasped. Hernandez nodded. “They wound up dropping the charges.”

  “But how—how come you didn’t know this?” I asked. “Why didn’t it show up?”

  Hernandez shrugged. “She was a minor, the charges were dropped, and her record was expunged. We only found out about it because one of our colleagues thought she recognized the name and found a news story on it. We got the mother’s records, followed her info, found Ada.”

  “Where’s her mother now?”

  “Nobody knows,” Rhoades said. “Her charges were reduced, she got out with time served, spent a couple of years with the group, got Ada married, and then disappeared.”

  “Married?” I asked faintly. “Ada’s married.”

  “Well, no, not legally she’s not. There was some sort of community-sanctioned ceremony. Probably danced around a drunk duck or something, who knows? They lived together for a time, then when she left for college they had some sort of annulment,” Hernandez said.

  “Lucky they didn’t rebirth her,” Rhoades muttered.

  “So, Mrs. Tobias, can you tell us where Ada and Marshall are?” Hernandez asked, clicking his pen and preparing to write in his notebook.

  “No,” I finally said. “I can’t.”

  Rhoades sighed. “I can tell you that this sort of information could be pretty important to any defense Marshall is planning to mount. It would likely make him look more sympathetic to a jury if it goes to trial.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “You’re willing to offer some sort of plea bargain?”

  He held his hands up. “Whoa, now we can’t do anything like that. That’s all big-time DA stuff. We’re just saying that if we could get a handle on exactly what happened, how Ada was involved, if she was the instigator. We just want to talk to her. This could put a different spin on things, that’s all.”

  Hernandez leaned forward. “We don’t want Marshall. We want Ada,” he said.

  “We just want to talk to her,” Rhoades said.

  They both got silent all of a sudden, and the quiet descended like smog—unpleasant, dirty. They shot each other another look, and Rhoades said, “We think she might have information on a pretty bad guy, Mrs. Tobias. A pedophile out of North Carolina. We figure she might give up some information in exchange for a reduced charge. Federal marshals will be here soon.”

  “Oh, God,” I groaned, cupping my forehead in my palms. They remained silent. “Look,” I finally said, not raising my head. “I don’t know where they are. I don’t even know if they’re together. I assume they are, and I assume they’ll be back, but I can’t get ahold of him and he hasn’t gotten in touch with me. So. I just don’t know. That’s the truth.”

  “Do you have any family he’d go to?” Rhoades asked. “Friends who’d take them in?”

  I shook my head. “My family is gone; he doesn’t even know Cal’s family. And Marshall’s friends are at college, and I wouldn’t know the first place to start there.”

  “I guess that’s where we’ll begin then,” Hernandez said. He recited all of Marshall’s personal information from college, his address at the dorm, his home and cell phones, his job at the frame shop. I nodded along. They already had the information; there was no sense in denying any of it. And at this point I wasn’t so sure I should be viewing them as the enemy anymore, though I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that they were telling me everything they had or everything they were considering.

  They both stood and reached inside their blazer pockets for their cards. Hernandez slid his across the table toward me, Rhoades handed his directly to me and waited for me to take it.

  The ease at which I fell into the good cop/bad cop cliché was surprising to me, but then clichés are born of reality. Put any two people together and one will stand out as the more difficult, one will be warmer, one will seem more intelligent, one more dour. Any marriage, any friendship, any business partner.

  The way married people made friends, or didn’t, with other couples, had always made me uncomfortable: evaluating how the women related to each other, the men, and then the cross-relationship. There had to be a certain amount of attraction, enough for friendship, but not too much for the partner’s comfort.

  I’d imagined that I was the warmer partner when I had been in college and Cal and I had met, the more intelligent, the more desirable friend. But when we’d moved here, it had been made clear that Cal was the preferred half of the couple, including, no, especially with the women. I was not to be trusted, and it took a long time for me to realize that I was the one seen as cold, distant, self-absorbed.

  My intelligence, the way I had defined it, did not matter. My talents with reversing microscopic damage to a canvas and matching medium and color were considered ephemeral and stumbled upon, not essential and time-honored, at least not here.

  This tenuous foursome—Rhoades and Hernandez, Cal and I—was reminiscent of those early overtures. Cal was the cooperative, forthcoming one, I the recalcitrant bit of yolk i
n the meringue. But my loyalty was to my child. I took the cards and remained seated while they let themselves out the door.

  MARSHALL

  By the time they were paddling up Fisheating Creek, the sun had warmed central Florida’s wilderness to a steamy mid-nineties and the only one who looked perfectly comfortable was Grandmother Tobias. She wore an old baseball hat with a Lykes logo on it and her gray hair foamed out the sides in frizz.

  Ada had emerged from her shower looking like someone else. She hadn’t reapplied any makeup and had drawn her hair back into two low, spiky pigtails. She’d removed her eyebrow ring, and she looked about twelve years old, as innocent and clean as Meghan. She’d only rebandaged one knee, the worst one, and the other one glowed with bruises, but was no longer swollen.

  Grandmother Tobias’s eyes had roamed over her and she seemed to approve of something. Marshall took a shower while she and Ada loaded up the old truck with rods and a cooler, and by the time they were jouncing down dirt roads to the edge of the creek, he could tell they had spoken enough that they were comfortable in each other’s presence. He was the one who felt like an outsider.

  But now that they were in the canoe, he took over the ways he knew how, steering upriver over the tea-colored water according to Grandmother Tobias’s directions while she showed Ada how to work a fishing rod. He was surprised to see that Ada did not flinch at threading a worm onto the hook. Apparently her vegetarian reluctance to hurt any living thing didn’t extend to invertebrates, and he was torn between an uncertainty about who she really was and pride.

  “Arms holdin’ up okay?” Grandmother called to him, glancing up the waterway. She pointed to a small inlet overhung by lacy cypress limbs, with an alligator sunning itself on a short bank. “See there? That’s where we’re headed. We’ll get some bluegills maybe. I’ve gotten bass there too. Your daddy caught a twelve-pounder there when he was just eleven.”

  “No way,” he said, peering over the edge as they glided into the inlet.