Lost

by Laura K. Curtis

  Oh well, nothing for it now. Deborah had brought a rubber band along with the clothes, and Tara brushed her hair until it had some semblance of its normal shine and then captured it in a high ponytail.

  Time to go to work. The thought energized her, and she left the bathroom with a bounce in her step.

  • • •

  JAKE TOOK HIS time in the bathroom. Tara had come out looking revived, more like herself, for which he was profoundly grateful. He’d seen the kind of devastation an experience like the isolation shed could cause in a relatively short time, and though he knew Tara to be strong-minded, he’d been desperately afraid something fundamental might have broken inside her. She’d caught on to his hints about the place being bugged quickly enough, though, and he was certain she had the same idea he did about side trips on their way to the greenhouse.

  Not that he didn’t want to get out of the house, because he did. That was the only way he’d feel safe enough to have a real conversation with her, one not couched in misleading terms and covered in lies. He needed to know what she’d discovered about the Chosen in her weeks living in the compound and share his own information with her so that they could come up with a plan.

  Of course, his own idea of a plan would be to get her the hell out of the compound entirely and let him figure out what the Leader and his lieutenants—for Jake was certain that Aaron, Jonas, and Samuel, the men in charge of taking them to the sheds, were involved in both the innocent and the not-so-­innocent activities of the Chosen—were up to. Deborah and Joy were both high on his list of suspects, too, given the amount of freedom they seemed to have. The Leader didn’t seem to hold women in particularly high esteem, however, so he doubted they would be in on the deepest of the Chosen’s secrets.

  Thanks to Google Earth and the FBI’s intelligence network, he’d had a nice, long aerial look at the acreage owned by Owen Stephenson. Some of what he’d seen, he understood. The bunkhouses and main building, the laundry, gardens, fields, and now the floral greenhouse all made sense of parts of the map he had in his head. But there were huge sections that remained a mystery. Eventually, he’d have to get himself assigned to one of the jobs farther out on the property so he could examine the bigger greenhouses and corresponding storage units that seemed to take up the majority of land far from the house.

  But for today, he and Tara would stick close to the ranch house and see what—and who—they could uncover.

  When he left the bathroom, he saw her lying on her bed, one hand lying across her stomach.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah. Just still tired for some reason. I guess the purification really took it out of me. But I’ll be fine. Shall we go find the greenhouse? I am sure the flowers will help to cheer me up.”

  Outside the sickroom lay a long, dimly lit corridor. The walls were whitewashed stucco, and Jake rapped his knuckles against it as they passed. “Look at this awesome plasterwork. I bet it’s all original to the house. You don’t see work like this anymore.”

  “Yes, it’s lovely,” Tara agreed. “When Andrea—Pearl—and I first visited, we ate dinner here with the Leader and a few others. We saw a bit of the house then. The whole thing is beautiful.”

  “Yeah? That office we met The Leader in was pretty swank, too. This place was probably the talk of the town when it was built. I bet a lot of people in Twin Oaks would love to see the inside. What else did you get to look at?”

  “We ate in the dining room. Plus, we got a tour of the kitchen, and we got to see the front rooms briefly as well, since she wanted to visit with her cousin.”

  “It’s a shame they’re no longer here.”

  “Apparently, they both went on missions of some kind. I wish they’d at least write to say they’re well, but we have to trust the Powers to protect them.”

  Jake slanted a look at Tara, walking beside him. Damn, she was good. Her tone was so even, you’d never know she didn’t believe a word of the crap she was spouting. For a bizarre moment, he wanted to grab her and plant a giant, smacking kiss on her lips. Something completely outrageous.

  Could he possibly get away with it? Would Jason Norman do such a thing? Leading a double life was incredibly constricting in some ways, but in others, it was freeing. Jason was a lot more laid back than Jake had ever been, without nearly so many hang-ups. He was far less likely to worry about consequences.

  Jake glanced sideways once more. Tara stared straight ahead as she walked, and he got the impression her mind was working furiously at some problem. If he grabbed her and kissed her, she’d probably smack him, which wouldn’t do them any good at all.

  They reached the end of the hallway, and he asked her if she knew which way to turn.

  “No. I was kind of out of it when they brought us in. My gut says turn left, but I’m just not certain.”

  “Me, either. But I think I remember coming from that direction.” He pointed right. He was lying. Left, he knew, would take them out of the house. But he wanted a chance to look around unsupervised, and he doubted they’d get many opportunities as good as this one.

  Tara shrugged. “If you say so. Like I said, I don’t remember much.”

  • • •

  TARA FOLLOWED JAKE into a large, open room. They hadn’t entered the house this way coming from the sheds. She knew it, and she suspected he did, too. But she’d been aching to get inside the main house since the moment she realized Andrea was missing, and though she doubted they’d be allowed much freedom, she’d take whatever she could get.

  The airy room contained little furniture. At one point, it might have been a formal living room, but it clearly got little use in the ranch house’s current incarnation. They passed through it quickly and entered another, more cluttered room.

  And there, their luck ran out. A dark-haired woman with a prominent pregnancy belly was cleaning the furnishings with a dust cloth and a bottle of wood oil. The sight of two new faces startled her, and she clutched her supplies to her rounded stomach in a protective gesture. Tara didn’t recognize her, but that was no surprise. After their seventh month, pregnant women were sequestered in their own bunkhouse and were relieved of the heavier chores. She’d never been certain exactly what duties they had, but cleaning the main house was probably considered light enough work for them. Too bad she, herself, wasn’t pregnant.

  “Wh-what are you doing here?” The woman asked in a voice heavily accented in Spanish.

  “We came from the sickroom,” Jake said in a soothing tone. “We’re just passing through.”

  “Ah. You were purified.” The woman’s tension eased. “I heard.” She rubbed her hand across her belly. “We don’t eat with the others, so we don’t see newcomers. It is best for the babies not to be exposed to anything until they have been brought into the Chosen officially.”

  “Of course,” Jake agreed easily.

  “When are you due?” Tara asked.

  “In three weeks.”

  “Are babies delivered here?”

  “Yes.” The woman gave them both a curious look. “You are both new, aren’t you? All babies are delivered in the sickroom unless someone is very ill and staying there and cannot be moved. Then both mothers and babies move to the nursery for a few months.”

  “Are there a lot of infants living in the nursery?” Tara thought of Aurora, with her wide smile and the belly that stuck out from her thin frame as if she’d hidden a watermelon under her sweatshirt.

  “My baby will be the sixth, though Mathias and his mother are ready to move out. He is sleeping through the night. So she will go back to her bunk, and he will be moved to the infants’ room. She can visit him there, and she’ll take her turn in charge of the area as part of her duty rotation.”

  “I haven’t seen children around the community,” Jake remarked. “Where do they go?”

  “When they’re very small, they’re in the n
ursery and in nursery school. They start actual school at age five in the big building behind this house.”

  “Won’t you miss your baby if you have to move back to your bunk as soon as he can sleep through the night?”

  The woman shrugged. “He will be my third. I see them enough, and they have a much better life here among the Chosen, cared for by the Powers, than they’d ever have in the outside world. I might see them more out there, but it would be selfish of me to consider that above their welfare.”

  Tara had to restrain herself from mentioning that perhaps spending time with their parents might be beneficial to the children’s welfare. But then, maybe that was just her own prejudice, her own experience talking. She hadn’t had much contact with her parents as a child, having been shuffled off with various nannies and housekeepers.

  “Is your husband a member of the Chosen as well?” Jake asked.

  The woman blushed. “I am not married. I am honored to have been chosen to carry one of our Leader’s children.”

  Tara’s skin crawled. Honored. She wanted to shake the woman. Were the other children she spoke of also Owen Stephenson’s?

  Jake shifted the conversation away from the awkward moment. “I didn’t even realize there was a school here. Shows how much I know. But of course, it’s obvious. The children need to be protected, so they can’t get their education the way town kids do.”

  “Exactly. But, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to work.”

  “Of course,” said Tara. “We’ll get out of your way.” Rather than exiting through the door they’d entered, they took the door on the opposite wall. This led into the kitchen. The space had clearly been enlarged from its original design to become an industrial kitchen, where the meals for the rest of the Chosen were prepared. A familiar door at one end would lead to the dining hall, which was attached to the main house by a short, enclosed walkway.

  As with the dark-haired woman, the occupants seemed shocked to see Tara and Jake, and all work halted. A woman who’d been shaping some kind of dough into fist-sized balls backed away from her work and stared as if little green men had materialized smack in the middle of the kitchen.

  “Hi,” Tara said. “Don’t mind us, we’re just passing through on our way from the infirmary. We were trying to find our way out to the flower house?”

  “You can go out that door,” the man said, his eyes narrowed and suspicious. Tara recognized him vaguely, but couldn’t remember his name. He pointed toward a back door to the kitchen that led directly outside. Jake and Tara thanked him and headed out.

  The greenhouse lay some hundred yards from the main house. Jake slowed his steps as they left the house, and Tara matched her pace to his. He laid an arm across her shoulders and asked, rather loudly, how she was feeling. Recalling his earlier instructions, she told him she was still under the weather, and that they should take things slowly.

  He nodded. He waited to speak until they were about halfway between the house and the greenhouse.

  “How are you doing, really?” He asked in a low tone.

  “I’m fine. I was freaked out by whatever damned drugs they gave me in that shed. I don’t know how you survived it so easily.”

  “It wasn’t easy. But I have more experience than you do with that kind of thing. I knew what was apt to happen, I just didn’t have any way to warn you. And, unfortunately, we both ‘agreed’ to the isolation, so there’s no point in going to the cops and reporting it. Whatever drugs they used are long gone.”

  “I know. Plus, I’m not leaving here until I find out what happened to Andrea. That . . . ritual . . . convinced me more than ever she’s in danger. Especially since Sarah—I worked with her in the laundry—said there were rumors Andrea was having an unsanctioned affair. If what we did merited three days in isolation, imagine what the Leader would do to someone who bucked the system that drastically!”

  “If it’s true. The ‘unsanctioned affair’ may have been the first idea about how to explain her disappearance. One of the easiest explanations for a woman’s disappearance is always ‘she ran off with her lover.’”

  “Why would he change tacks and go for the mission story instead?”

  “I don’t know. But if her cousin had to go, too, then maybe the lover ruse became unwieldy. Or maybe he did send her away, but he did it because of the lover.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  “I know. We need to stay in the house as long as possible. Delay recovery. Finding a way to do a comprehensive search of Owen’s private quarters is the only way we have any hope of figuring out what’s behind all this.”

  “They’re not big on slackers around here.” They’d reached the greenhouse, and Tara lowered her voice as they started to walk around the outside of the building, ostentatiously admiring the plants.

  “There are cameras on the buildings,” she murmured. “And in the lights. Don’t be too obvious, but if you look at the security lights during the day, you can see the lenses just at the base, where the pole joins the lamp itself. I’d lay odds there’s audio, too, so be careful what you say aloud unless there aren’t buildings or trees or lights nearby.”

  He nodded. “Couldn’t you, I don’t know, pretend to have really bad cramps or something so we can stay in the infirmary longer?”

  “Unfortunately, they even keep track of the women’s cycles, and I’ve just had mine.”

  “How in the hell do they do that?”

  “You have to go to the ‘commissary’ and ask for whatever supplies you need. Stuff like soap and razors are replaced in the bathrooms as they wear out or get used up. That’s taken care of by whoever’s in charge of bunk maintenance on a given week, and there’s no reason they couldn’t handle feminine necessities the same way, but they don’t. I can’t help but believe it’s deliberate.”

  “Absolutely. It’s another way of controlling you. Forcing you to ask for things you require, especially such personal items, is psychological trickery.”

  Tara shrugged. “One way or another, it means I can’t play the weakling chick with cramps card.”

  He slanted her a grin that made her insides go hot and liquid. “I don’t think the weakling chick card suits you particularly well anyway.”

  She concentrated on planning, ignoring the spreading warmth. “Without any reason to stay in the infirmary, they’ll probably give us the boot no later than tomorrow, and we’ll be stuck back where we began. We have to take advantage of the time we have.”

  “I doubt there’s any point in searching the more public areas. Look how many people seemed to be allowed to wander freely through the ground floor. If there are secrets, he’ll keep them upstairs.”

  “No doubt. But he likely has some kind of security system up there. If he’s hiding things, he’ll have locks, possibly even cameras. How are we supposed to get by those?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think we can if all we have is tonight. We’re better off trying to get invited back. A guy like this doesn’t trust easily, but give me a little time to work on him. I bet I can get him to invite me in.”

  “You? What about us? You don’t even know Andrea.”

  “I can’t make guarantees. Everything I’ve seen and heard makes me believe he’s far less likely to trust a woman, though he might think you were too stupid to worry about.”

  “Excuse me?” Tara ignored her own plan to convince the Chosen of her gullibility.

  “I didn’t say I agreed with him. It’s who he is, what he thinks, that matters at the moment. This is a man who surrounds himself with people who literally worship him, then impregnates the women who follow him. That doesn’t show a great deal of respect for them. Without respect, there can’t be trust. He might not think you’re smart enough to put one over on him, but he also won’t give up his secrets to you.”

  “And he will to you.”

  “I didn’t sa
y that. I just said there was a possibility.”

  “We don’t have forever here.”

  “You’re telling me. Quite aside from anything else, if I don’t bring you back before the wedding, Lucy will kill me.”

  “Wedding?”

  “Damn, I haven’t even had a chance to tell you. Lucy and Ethan are getting married. Lucy wants you as her maid of honor.”

  “But I—”

  “Tara, I know you blame yourself for letting Lucy get into trouble, and I know the rest of your family made her life a living hell, but neither Lucy nor Ethan blames you. You’re like family to them, and they want you at the wedding. When you wouldn’t tell them where you were, it hurt them, but they understood you wanted your privacy. Until you stopped writing.”

  “And then they sent you.”

  “I volunteered to come. I had the time, the expertise, and I felt responsible.”

  Tara stiffened. “You’re not responsible.”

  “Probably not. I’ve been known to have an overweening ego and to think people take me far more seriously than they actually do. But whatever the reason, here I am.”

  They’d reached the front of the greenhouse, so they entered. Along the left side, potted orchids grew in a row, long, pale green stems ending in pink-white blossoms. These would be taken only a few at a time to the cart in town for sale at the highest prices. Along the right side and the back, large beds housed a variety of flowers in bright colors. These were to be sold as cut flowers rather than as living plants, and they didn’t bring in the same amount of money. Still, the Chosen did quite well with their flowers, especially the roses that grew in the central beds.

  As well as flowers, the Chosen sold fruit from their orchards; quilts, sweaters, and socks made by the more talented stitchers among them; and both paintings and sculptures created by men and women during the free afternoons once a week. The money went for supplies—like the razors Tara had discussed with Jake—they could not produce themselves. Those who went into town to sell the items carried letters to be mailed and brought back anything that had come into the post office box the Chosen kept in Twin Oaks.