by Fiona Quinn
I fought to pull myself back to the here and now. “Okay?”
“You’re very still, staring out that window.”
“Yeah.” I sent her a smile. “I was just—whew!—kind of overwhelmed by a memory. There was this man. He did…really bad things. Sometimes he pops up unbidden, and I relive that time.”
She gripped at the top of her dress, pulling the rounded neckline tighter around her throat. “Bad?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You and me…We’re going to be okay. Eventually. We’re both going to right our ships and sail off into a gilded sunset.”
Destiny’s focus wavered off. “I hope so,” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The next day was very much a repeat, only it was my turn at the red-eye, and Destiny took the early bird dinner shift.
Yesterday, Prescott and Finley assured me that Destiny was safe. And I was safe to hang with her.
They should know, but compartmentalized secrets sure did wear on me. I wanted to know everything rather than dangling in the dark.
Trust.
I missed Striker already. We’d only been apart these two days, but he’d just come home from his own assignment.
We were two ships passing in the night.
It was important that when we were together that we made it special.
I needed to figure out how to uncork Destiny’s information and hand this mission back to the FBI. Sleeping in my own bed with Striker would be my reward for fast action. It would be helpful if I knew what was relevant. Tomorrow, Monday, Finley had set up a meeting for us. We’d do some information exchange then.
And to that end, I had a plan. I didn’t have warrants, so I couldn’t place audio in the garage apartment, but nothing stopped me from placing nanny cams. They covered the apartment except for the bathroom and would send to a feed in the cloud. We could go back and scan them later to see if Destiny had any visitors when I was away or if she led us to any top-secret stash of information.
Though, Prescott said that what they needed was all in her head.
So nothing for me to find wandering around the near-empty apartment.
I was lying on my sleeping bag with the box fan blowing air across my body, making my next tactical plans, when Destiny came in and double-locked the door behind her.
“If you had called, I would have come to get you,” I said, waggling my phone.
“That’s okay. I got a ride from Huahine.”
“Whose that?”
“Short order cook on the weekends.” She picked up a towel. “I’m going to go take a shower and wash away this fry grease.”
She moved to a window and forced it open. “There’s supposed to be a storm later tonight.”
“That’ll be a welcome relief from the humidity.” I gave an exaggerated yawn. “Right now, it’s sapping me of all my energy.”
I closed my eyes and must have fallen asleep, waking again with the shriek of unoiled hinges as Destiny exited the bathroom.
When Destiny emerged, she was wearing a loose cotton dress like the ones that Deep had put into my backpack. It fell nearly to her ankles and had a Laura Ingalls vibe to it.
So did her hair, now in a thin French braid, hanging down her back all the way to her hips.
“Oh my goodness.” Frowning down at my burner phone, I clutched the top of my shirt with my other hand as I cast my hook.
Destiny looked up and froze.
“No way,” I mumbled in astonishment. I scrolled up the article that I had queued as my way to broach my own past and hopefully demonstrate a parallel with Destiny’s. “Wow.” I lifted my gaze to catch on hers. “Did you read the news today?”
“No. I have enough troubles of my own. No need to go borrowing any.”
I canted my head. “Then how do you know?”
“What?” Her face was a blank.
“What’s going on in the world? What’s safe and unsafe? I mean, growing up, I wasn’t really aware of anything that happened outside of our compound. It took me leaving and, you know, expanding my awareness to see all the things that I had no clue about. Things to keep me safe, things to make me think. Even laugh.” I smiled and turned back to the article. “Things that make me grateful that I had the courage to separate myself from my upbringing.”
That set the hook. Now I just needed to slowly reel her in.
Destiny moved over to the chair in the living area. Spinning it, she could face me where I lay. “What does the article talk about?” She pulled her feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her legs, peeking at me from behind the barrier.
“Well, let’s see.” I scrolled back to the top. “This is out of Denver.”
She leaned forward and rested her chin on top of her knees.
“It says here that they’ve arrested seven members of a cult-like group.” I glanced up at Destiny. “Cult-like? In my experience, you’re either in a cult, or you’re not.”
She nodded tight little bobbles without lifting her chin.
“Though people in a cult really hate the word. I only learned it once I’d run away.” I didn’t wait for her to show surprise or ask any questions. As I looked at my phone, I could feel her concentration as she laser-focused on me.
“Craziest thing—which is saying a lot for a cult—it looks like the seven are being charged with abusing a corpse and child abuse.”
“The child that was abused was it some kind of sacrifice or something?”
“No. The kids—” I scrolled down to that part. “According to the sheriff who found them, there was a thirteen and a two-year-old.”
“Not hurt, though?”
I shook my head. “It says they’re fine. They were taken in by social services.”
“Okay.” She breathed out. “What happened about the dead body?”
“Let’s see…Okay, here it is. They had the corpse set up in the corner of the back bedroom. It was wrapped in a sleeping bag and draped with strings of Christmas lights. And they had put glitter eyeshadow on the face, but there were no eyeballs.” I glanced up from my phone. “Mummified. Do you think they did that ritualistically like, I don’t know, like the Egyptians?”
Destiny stared at me wide-eyed, shaking her head.
“Maybe they just left the body outside in the desert? I read somewhere that if you bury a body in the sand and it kind of bakes under high heat, the body mummifies by having all the moisture vaporize. I can’t tell you if that’s true or not, something I read.”
“It says mummified?” She made a stink face.
“Yeah, they think it’s the cult leader who told everyone she was a god.” I swiveled to look out the window and said kind of under my breath. “I wonder what will happen to the adherents.”
“What did they believe in?” Destiny asked.
“Seems like from the rest of the article, that the followers were brainwashed, and their money was handed over. But who knows? Someone who’s never lived communally with others and worked for the greater good always thinks it requires brainwashing.” I chewed on my top lip, thinking. “There are some people who are just tired of thinking and want to hand over the responsibility to someone else. I was told that was the best way to go about life, you know? That if someone told me what to do and what not to do, then things are easier. I was led to believe that if I had too much information, I’d just be lost and anxious, not knowing the right way to go, what to think, and do.” I caught Destiny’s gaze, trying to read her. “I’m finding that as I live life, and get out in the world, hearing ideas, trying on different thoughts, it’s kind of freeing actually. I’m making my way in the world. Making decisions that are best for me. And I’m still young. I have time to learn.”
“Do you think you’ll have to give that up when you get married? You know, give yourself over to your husband, honor his wishes through your obedience.”
“Oh, I’m already married.” I wrinkled my nose.
She droppe
d her feet to the floor, wrapped her arms around her stomach, and leaned forward. “Where is he?” she whispered, then sent a frantic glance toward the door.
“Don’t worry. He’s not coming here. My husband Zebedee’s not abusive, and he’s got five other wives to manage. He was doing what he was told to do by his leaders. And I left so I don’t have to do that anymore. Zebedee has no idea where I am.” Now I just had to remember that name. I had meant to say Zebadiah, but it had come out wrong. Call him Zeb, I told myself.
“How old were you?”
“When I got married? A teenager. It had been planned by the elders before I even met Zeb. I mean, it was a small place. We all knew each other, but the men stayed away from the women. The women were supposed to serve in silence. I only got to know Zeb, you know—talk to him, for three weeks before we had the ceremony. Yeah, I don’t recommend that. Especially because he’s pretty old.” I wrinkled my nose to show my distaste. I was thinking about what the rules were at The Grove when I made up this tale.
“But if you’re married, that’s kind of it, isn’t it? You’re stuck until one of you dies.”
“That’s what they told me. But it turns out, that’s not what the laws say. A man is only allowed to marry one woman at a time. Our marriage wasn’t legal. So…yeah, I guess I’m not married.” I laughed. “Well, there’s a realization for you. And up until I said that, I thought I needed to save for a divorce. Are you married? Do you have someone in your life?”
“Me? No. Well almost. Same thing. A man was chosen for me. He was my uncle.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“The place where I grew up had its own rules. Barnabas was his name—still is.” Her face had blanched. “His name is Barnabas. He’s fifty-four and looks every minute of that age with his paunch belly, varicose veins, and comb-over.” She gave a full-body shiver. Her face scrunched with distaste. “His teeth were yellowy-brown from tobacco chew and crooked.” She gestured at her mouth. “All crowded forward into a glob. And his breath always smelled of beer. Always. First thing in the morning, he came into the office reeking of beer.”
“Was this at a business?”
“Business… yes. You know, when you talk about things, it sounds like we might have left the same kind of environment. I was homeschooled like you were. And I was in a compound like you were. The male elders told me what I could and couldn’t do. Where I could and couldn’t go. What to believe. What to think. Whom to marry.” She picked at her nails and chewed on a cuticle. “My biggest problem right now is that what I was taught doesn’t seem to be reality.” She pointed at a science book on the floor that still had its friends of the library twenty-five cents sticker on the cover. “I’m reading that, and it’s crazy what I’m learning. Back in California, I was told that the saints saddled T-Rex’s and rode them around like I might ride a horse.”
I nodded.
“And what schooling we got was mostly what was useful to the community: reading, writing, computer data entry, math. I’m very good at math, and that’s why I got to work in the office. My friends, they had to work in the fields growing our food or in the arts house.”
“What did they do in the arts house?” I turned on my side resting my head on my bent elbow.
“Crafts that they’d sell online. Mostly hammocks.”
“The office sounds better. Unless Barnabas was there.”
“He was there a lot. But still, it was better than being out in the fields under the hot sun from dawn to dusk.”
“And that’s why you fled? To get away from having to marry?”
She stilled. Finally, she rotated her lips in a circle as if unsticking them from her teeth. “Why did you leave?” she asked.
“There was a fire that burned down the compound’s storage warehouse. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to just disappear. Something just snapped for me that night.” I pulled that story from my family’s tale of how my great (to the seventh generation) aunt escaped from Williamsburg to go spy in New York. Something familiar. Something I would remember if it came up again. I was throwing out a lot of details that I’d need to keep straight. Destiny was supposed to marry Barnabas. I was already married to Zeb. She’s from California. I’m from Ohio. Don’t mix up the details!
“Yeah,” Destiny was saying. “It was time for me to get married. I climbed out of my bedroom window and took off barefooted across the fields.” Her face drooped. “I left my siblings behind.”
“How many?” I peeked down to make sure my phone was still recording this. D.C. had one-party consent laws, and I definitely consented to having this information heading to the FBI.
She paused again.
I raised my eyebrows to my hairline. “A lot?”
“Don’t judge.”
I shook my head.
“My mom was one of twenty sister wives, and I have seventy-three brothers and sisters.”
I threw my head back and laughed. It surprised the shit out of me, and by the wide-eyed look on her face, it surprised Destiny as well.
“Sorry. I was picturing you trying to save your siblings, and in my imagination, it looked a lot like a clown car.”
A smile spread across her face. “Yeah. You’re right. Well, there was no way to pull them out of that situation. I couldn’t care for them. It took me this long to start to care for myself. They’re going to have to save themselves.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Do you think they’re looking for you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean, if you don’t believe in their message, and you want to go, why not just let you?”
“If I had worked on the farm or in childcare or even in the craft room, I think they would have since I’m an adult.” She stared at the door as if she was waiting for it to burst open and the boogieman to be on the other side. “I don’t think they’d drag me back, no. Because then they’d have to watch me too closely. They had used my brothers and sisters against me. You know, like if I did something wrong, they didn’t whip me. They picked up one of my younger sisters and belted them in front of me. Of course, that gave them all the control they wanted. But I figured out that if I wasn’t there to see the belting, then they wouldn’t do it because it served no purpose.”
“So, what do you think they’d do if they found you?”
Destiny stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “Huahine set aside a to-go order that no one came to pick up. Weird because they paid for it over the phone with a credit card. He didn’t want it. He eats his fill as he goes along cooking. But he knows we’re trying to get our feet under us. If we’re careful, there’s like two-three days’ worth of food in there.”
“Serious?”
“Yeah, come fix up a plate, and I’ll start the oven. We can just stick them in for a few minutes to brush the cold off.”
I’d pushed as far as I could. But this was information. She knew something from the office that made her a target. She was in fear for her life. It was in her eyes. In her posture. In her inability to just answer my question.
If I was on the run like she was and had time to contemplate and make a plan, one thing I’d do was bring evidence out with me. A safety measure. Surely, that was what she’d done.
I hoped that after I introduced her to Finley and Prescott, she’d tell them where it was hidden.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Monday morning, Destiny got up before dawn. Today, she was scheduled at the diner for the four to noon shift. The breakfast rush was the most lucrative, and Destiny said she liked getting the work done and having a long afternoon to sit and read her school textbooks, learning what the rest of us had in grammar school.
My shift was the tail of the breakfast rush through the lunch crowd—seven to three. This worked out perfectly because this afternoon, I needed to meet with Prescott and Finley, and tonight I was having bridesmaid’s cocktails for Christen, who’d just come in from Iraq.
I’d told Destiny that after work, I would drive aroun
d D.C. and scope out some of the tourist things to do and make a list. I wanted to see Arlington Cemetery, the Smithsonian, and the memorials. I didn’t invite her to join me and had crossed my fingers that she wouldn’t ask to come along. She hadn’t.
Destiny picked her uniform off the plastic hook and headed into the bathroom to get dressed while I pretended to sleep.
I took advantage of the privacy to position myself cross-legged on the floor with my pillow doubled under my sits bones, my palms facing up as they rested on my knees.
In my training, both Master Wang and Spyder had taught me that the present is all there is.
But as I scanned my body, focused on my breath, and tried to descend into an altered conscience, my meditation this morning was interrupted with memories.
I knew better than to fight them away.
The goal was to not have a goal. To sit. To breathe. To allow quiet to find me.
But my busy buzzing hive of a mind did not allow for my normal meditative state. Typically, I sat, focused on my breath, and went blank. An intruding physical sensation might tug at me, an itchy nose, a strand of hair on my cheek. A feeling might bubble up—anxiety, what have you. A thought—I can’t forget to call… But rarely was I offered memories, especially memories that I was being force-fed.
I decided that rather than fighting it, which was a meditative no-no, I would let it run its course. Stand back and observe. And just like that, in my mind, I was back to being seventeen:
“Spyder?” I asked after meditation one morning.
“Yes, Lexicon?”
“I’ve been researching the laws of the Almajid.”
“And what did you find?”
“They don’t allow alcohol, and they don’t allow homosexuality. As a matter of fact, an act of homosexuality is punishable with the death penalty.” I smiled.
“And you have tapes of Hanasal hiring multiple men engaging with him sexually. Do you wish for him to be put to death for homosexual acts? Would this align with your morality?”
I dropped my head. “No, of course, it doesn’t align with my morality. But his being put to death would align with my sense of justice.”
