by Nic Joseph
“Did you drive here?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“Let’s go for a drive.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Now
The next morning, I woke up in my bed on fresh sheets. I walked out into the living room and found both Nell and Mike in the kitchen making breakfast.
“Pretty slim pickings here,” she said, turning to me with a smile. I watched as she sliced a green pepper and put the pieces in the skillet. Then she rinsed the knife and wiped it with a paper towel. She watched me carefully as she walked over to her purse and dropped it inside. “That’s the last of them,” she said.
I swallowed and nodded, taking a seat on one of my barstools. I glanced around the kitchen and saw that she’d taken the rest of the knives out of my knife block. I didn’t have to look in my desk drawer to know that my scissors were gone, too.
“Thanks,” I said as she put a plate of eggs in front of me.
She nodded.
Mike sat across from me and dragged his fork against his empty plate. He stopped and leaned back as Nell served him some eggs. I saw them share a glance, and I waited for whatever it was that he was about to say.
“Son…”
“I know,” I said.
“No, I don’t think you do.”
I put my fork down and looked at him. “It really doesn’t happen a lot,” I said.
“Enough,” he said. “Every time we end up here, you tell us it’s nothing, that you’re getting help. We’ve let it go on for so long.” His voice caught, and his eyes got watery.
I felt a chill rush through my entire body.
Mike’s voice didn’t catch.
Mike’s eyes didn’t get watery.
“You need to do something about this. We thought that you were getting better, or that’s what we wanted to believe—”
“I promise you, I just had a bad night—”
“Look at yourself!” he yelled, leaning over to grab my arm. In doing so, he knocked his plate off the table, and eggs went flying. He held my forearm roughly in one of his hands and lifted it toward my face. “Look at yourself,” he said again. “Please.” A sob escaped him, and then I was crying, too, because Mike definitely didn’t sob.
And then suddenly, he was yelling again, and Nell joined him, and I sunk back in my seat as my parents screamed at me for the first time in thirty years. As a kid, I’d waited for this, waited for them to yell at me, to get angry, to send me away. But they never did. They were patient, loving, and kind. Now, at thirty-seven, I was childlike, cowering in my chair, the disappointment and pain in their eyes more hurtful than anything I’d ever experienced before.
When they didn’t have any energy left, they both slumped back, Mike in his chair, Nell against the kitchen counter.
And as I sat there, all I could think about was how much my arms were on fire, how much I needed to release this pain, and how much I needed help.
• • •
Nell and Mike stayed for a while before saying goodbye in a fit of more tears, apologies, and prayers. They both squeezed me so close, I thought I would suffocate. I was ashamed and exhausted.
I sprawled out on my bed, my cell phone beside me, and I knew it was time to call Mary. To tell her what they all wanted to hear.
The truth.
I rolled over and was reaching for my phone when it rang. I frowned when I saw that it was a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hi, Detective Paul?”
“Yes.”
“This is Amanda, from Kendall Community Church. You came by last night?”
I sat up fully, gripping the phone tighter. “Yes, of course,” I said. “How can I help you?”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments.
“Hello?” I said. “Amanda? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’m here. And I’m ready to talk now.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I knew that Gayla was on my side, but I didn’t want to ask her to lie for me.
Not anymore.
It wasn’t fair to her, and there was no way in hell I was just going to wait for someone else to figure out what was going on.
I’d go out to the church and listen to Amanda, and then I’d fill Gayla in. And, if Brick found out, I’d ask for forgiveness later. Within ten minutes of the phone call, I was in my car and heading toward the highway.
There was barely any traffic, and I made it back to the church in about half an hour. It looked exactly the same as it had when we’d left the previous night, except that it seemed even quieter now than before. I pulled up in front of the door and parked the car. I walked up to the door and knocked before trying the handle. Unlike the night before, it was locked, and I waited. Before I could knock again, I heard rustling and then a click on the other side of the door, and it opened.
Amanda stood in front of me, her expression cautious but also frightened. She stepped back to let me enter the church. I was struck by a sense of déjà vu as I walked into the corridor. Before she closed the door, she stepped forward and peered out, her gaze scanning the street. She pushed the door closed and turned two large dead bolts before turning back around to face me.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “What were you looking for?”
“I’m not really sure,” she said. “Here, let’s go into the office.” She walked past me and led me back into a small office that Gayla and I had passed. Amanda took a seat and motioned for me to sit across from her in another metal folding chair. “Thank you for coming back,” she said, staring directly into my eyes. “I’m sorry I made you make the trip twice. When you came here before…I was just so surprised. And I was scared.”
“Why are we meeting here?” I asked. “I could have met you at your home.”
She stared at me for a moment and didn’t say anything, and it occurred to me that she was less concerned about convenience than she was about revealing where she lived.
“What are you scared of?” I asked, changing the subject. “You have to tell me what’s bothering you so I can help you.”
She continued to stare at her hands. “Maybe first, you could tell me something. Where did you get that symbol from?”
“Symbol?”
“Yes,” she said. “The one you drew during my exercise last night.”
“The one you said you’d never seen before?”
She didn’t respond, just watched me carefully, and I sat up straighter in my chair before answering.
“I saw that symbol because the woman I met at the hospital who was pretending to be Emily Lindsey drew it all over her body,” I said. It was the truth, if not the whole truth. “And now that I know that she may have stabbed a woman to death, I can’t help but think it means something.”
“So you have no idea why she drew that image?” she asked.
“None whatsoever,” I said. “But something tells me you do.”
She looked away again and didn’t say anything.
“Look, if you know something, you have to tell me,” I said. “Please.”
She nodded. “Emily was looking into an organization called Friends of Frank.”
I sucked in a breath. “I’ve heard of them,” I said, frowning as I leaned forward in my chair. “I found an old flyer of theirs in her notes.”
Her eyes clouded over. “So you do know about Friends of Frank?”
“Not really,” I said.
She nodded. “Friends of Frank has been around for almost forty years. Of course, it doesn’t have the numbers or presence it once did, but it’s as influential as it’s ever been, maybe even more so. It was started by a man named Frank Davies. Frank died in 1991. Today, it’s run by his son, Ellis Davies. I’m not sure exactly where it is today—they moved
about twenty-five years ago—but I know they’re still in the area.”
“Okay,” I said. “And what does this organization do, and how come I couldn’t find any information about it?”
“Because you’re not supposed to be able to. Now, as to what they do…do you mean on paper, or what they actually do?”
“Both,” I said.
She nodded. “Well, on paper, they’re a shelter for women who are pregnant and in situations where they don’t have anyone else to turn to and need support. Heavily underground, for women who have spouses or boyfriends who will stop at nothing to find them. It’s an incredibly tight network of people, and very few people outside the organization even know it exists.”
“And what does the organization provide these women?” I asked. “I’m guessing shelter? Food, supplies, safety?”
“All of the above,” she said. And then she added, “On the books.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what about off the books, Amanda? What is Friends of Frank? Really.”
“Off the books,” she said slowly, gripping the sides of her seat tightly, “Friends of Frank is the most horrifying, vile community I’ve ever encountered. It’s what nightmares are made of. It’s why I haven’t had a real night of sleep since I was a little girl. It’s why I’m a grown woman who is scared to turn off her light at night.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I don’t understand. You have to start from the beginning.”
“Okay,” she said, taking a breath. “Friends of Frank is a group that subscribes to the belief of communal parenting.”
“Communal parenting?” I asked. “What exactly do you mean?”
“All of the adults are responsible for taking care of all of the children. No preferential treatment allowed. Of course, everyone knows whose child is whose, but there are strict punishments for showing it.”
“How do you know all of this?” I asked. “Were you…were you one of the mothers?”
“No,” she said quietly. “I was one of the children. A long time ago, a group of us escaped. There were five of us.” She said this sadly.
“What happened to the other four?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We left and split up, and I never heard from them again. Except my sister, of course.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died three years ago,” she said. “I couldn’t help her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you mean that you couldn’t help her?”
“Gumball was—” She smiled sadly. “Sorry, Gloria. We used to call her Gumball. Gloria never fully came to terms with our childhood and what we saw the day we left the compound. It tore her apart. She couldn’t sleep either, and it drove her crazy.”
“She took her own life.”
She looked down and then back at me and nodded.
“What did you see that day?” I asked. “The day you left.”
She stared through me now, her gaze focused on something in the past, something I couldn’t see with her, and I struggled to get inside her head.
“Amanda,” I said. “What is it?”
“We saw them kill a child,” she said, and her shoulders slumped right after she said it. “I’ve never told anyone that. Can you believe that? I saw it happen, and I’ve never told anyone.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “Who’s ‘them’? What child?”
“A little boy,” she said. “I can still see his face. We snuck into this ceremony that they had every summer. I don’t know if they do it anymore. But when I was there, they made sure that we were not allowed up on the floor where they had the ceremony. That year, five of us snuck up, and we saw it. We saw what they did. Frank used his hands—his bare hands—and suffocated a boy in front of some of the others. The rest of the adults just stood there and watched. It’s an image I can’t ever get out of my head. The boy was sleeping at first. He woke up and…” She took a deep breath, the tears falling down her cheeks. “I just remember them wrapping his body up and giving it to one of the mothers. That’s the day we left.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“We walked and walked until we found a truck stop, and they called the police. They took us in, and that’s when Gumball and I got separated from the others.” She blinked back tears. “I never saw or heard from them again.”
“Did you tell the police what you saw?”
Amanda swallowed and shook her head. “We couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
She sniffed. “Because right before we left, we made a promise to someone that we wouldn’t.”
“Who?”
She bit her bottom lip and shook her head. “I can’t…I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”
“But—”
“I can’t,” she said firmly.
I sighed. “Okay, then maybe you can tell me more about what Emily Lindsey wanted from you.”
“It started with what I wanted from her,” she said.
“So you’re the one who contacted Emily?”
“Yes. The woman that we made the promise to…I just wanted Emily to check on her. I didn’t even know if she was still alive, but since my sister died, I haven’t been able to get what happened out of my head. I’ve read Emily’s blog, and she’s good. She can find out anything. So I reached out and asked her to check out Friends of Frank. But I told her she had to be careful, to be delicate. She promised she would look into it.”
“And she did?”
“Yes,” Amanda said. “She didn’t tell me much, just that she’d found something. Found the woman I told her about. But instead of telling me how she was, if she was okay, she just kept asking me questions. Like she wanted to know more or wanted to interview me. Then one day, she sent me a draft of a story she wanted to write, and I almost lost it.”
“What was the story about?”
“It was anything but delicate. It was mean, cruel, and one-sided. I don’t have any love lost for Friends of Frank, but I do for some of the people we left behind. I asked Emily to help me, but she had her own intentions. She kept trying to call me for an interview. And I realized that she was only interested in her story. That’s when I started ignoring her calls.”
“So why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because I could tell that the Emily Lindsey case is very important to you. And I need your help. The woman who I asked Emily to look for—if you promise to help her, I’ll tell you how to get in touch.”
“I promise to try my best,” I said. “But do you have another way to get in touch with them? Another number? Because I tried the one that Emily had, and an automated voice came on saying the number was disconnected.”
“Oh,” she said simply. “No, you made a mistake.”
“You think I dialed wrong?”
“No,” she said with a small, sad smile. “The number is not disconnected. You made a mistake in believing that ‘automated voice’ that said it was.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Gayla tapped a pen against the coffee table as we sat across from each other in my living room.
Detective Franny Bates, a friend of Gayla’s, sat next to me, her hands folded in her lap.
“Thanks for helping us out on this one,” Gayla said. “I can’t go in, because there’s a chance the woman who pretended to be Emily will recognize me.”
Franny nodded. “It’s no problem,” she said. “I just hope I can pull this off. Seems like they run a pretty tight ship.”
We’d printed up a full page of notes, and it was sitting in the middle of the table, but nobody touched it. We all knew what needed to happen. We had one goal—get Friends of Frank to trust that Franny needed their help and to give us a location.
An address.
A landmark.
Anything.
<
br /> Something to help us find the woman and man from the hospital.
Amanda had given us precise instructions for what we needed to do in order to set up a meeting with the women from this Friends of Frank organization—but it wasn’t going to be easy.
“Whatever you do, you need to convince whoever picks up that phone that you found one of their flyers and you need their help,” she had said. “It depends on who picks up the phone. Some of the women will probably give you a harder time than others. They never gave out that many of the flyers in the first place, and of course, that’s what Emily said when she called.”
“Won’t they be suspicious?” I had asked.
“If you get the same person that Emily got, yes,” she had said. “But I have a feeling from what Emily told me that they haven’t shared that too widely. They don’t want people knowing about the flyers.”
Franny reached over and dialed the number. She put it on speakerphone, and we all listened silently as the phone rang four times, just as it had when I called the first time.
The same voice I’d heard the first time I’d called filled the line.
“The number you have reached is out of service. Please hang up and try again.”
We all looked at each other, and then Franny cleared her throat and spoke. “No,” she said. “I believe this is the right number.”
There was still silence on the other line, and I stared at her. She bit her bottom lip and then spoke again.
“Hello?”
“Please hold.”
I sucked in a breath. It was the same woman, but her voice was only slight less robotic than it had been a moment ago.
Nothing happened for a full minute.
“Hang up?” I mouthed to Gayla, and she was the one to shake her head this time.
A few moments later, a woman’s voice came on the line.
“Hi, are you in danger?”
Franny looked at me as she spoke. “I think so,” she said.
“Okay,” the woman said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.”
