Muffin But Trouble

by Victoria Hamilton

  Then Pish and I had announced our plans. In our enthusiasm, we had expected that the news of our decision, to transform my castle and property into an arts community, would be welcomed with glad cries and gratitude. We saw the future and it was glorious: jobs, investment, new shops, new shoppers, new people.

  What we had failed to appreciate was that we could not implant our vision into other people’s brains. We couldn’t force them to see how beneficial in the long run this would be for the town. And it was brought home to me that what I thought of as advantageous had another darker side. Property prices and taxes would inevitably go up. As for the shops I envisioned popping up to satisfy the tastes of the new people, would locals even be interested in what they had to sell? Would they be able to afford to shop there? And those people from New York City—musicians and writers and singers, fans of opera, literati and glitterati—meant that maybe Autumn Valeites would feel pushed out of their own friendly small-town ways. Would the new people blend with the old, or would there be a schism, an inevitable divide, with resentments building up on both sides?

  Who were these people who would come? locals asked each other, these New Yorkers, and Los Angeleans, these coastal elite city people who would expect Autumn Vale to change overnight from their beloved home into some metropolis of wine-swilling, biscotti-munching, kale-growing artistes. I couldn’t argue one truth: their town would inevitably change, and Valeites were not sure it would be for the better.

  The secretary departed, laden with coffee in take-out cups and a bag of donuts. After Mabel paid me, I piled my muffin tubs together and, feeling lonely and out of sorts with the Autumn Vale community, headed to the door. Graciela had offered me an idea of how to begin to integrate our vision with our friends’ lives. I would take her up on it.

  I had almost forgotten Isadore. She waited for me outside, her gray hair still confined in a hairnet, pacing and muttering. She whirled and faced me. “I got the job, out there at that place,” she said without any other greeting.

  “You went out there? You weren’t there when the sheriff raided it, were you?”

  “’Course not, that was in the middle of the night. I was out there in the late afternoon.”

  “Of course, right . . . I knew that. So the prophet gave you the job. Did he tell you what he needed?”

  She nodded. “Easy. He’s got bookkeeping ledgers at some other place and he wants them tidied up, he said.”

  Tidied up . . . hmmm. “What did you think of him, of the prophet?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “What do you think of him? What’s he like?”

  She looked mystified by my question. “I’ll let you know if I find anything out.” She turned to go back inside.

  “Wait, Isadore . . . !” She could be exasperating. I had so many questions. “Did you see Gordy there?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  She shook her head.

  “What did the place feel like to you?” She stared at me blankly. Maybe this wasn’t going to help. She was not one to describe atmosphere, or her feelings about a place. I considered and asked, “Where did you go? Did anyone talk to you?”

  “Yeah. The guy who runs the place—”

  “The prophet.”

  “Yeah . . . him. He sat me down in this hut, no electricity or anything. And he told the woman who did the books to show me her system. Then he left. She didn’t know anything about spreadsheets.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Woman named Mariah.”

  “Aha! That’s Barney’s sister-wife,” I said. “So they don’t have a computer there?”

  “Nope. Ledgers. I saw one of ’em. A mess.”

  “In what way?”

  She screwed up her mouth and stared at the sky. “Things crossed out. Underlined.”

  “What kind of thing would ledgers for a place like that hold? I mean . . . ledgers for a religious community.”

  She stared at me and blinked. “You don’t know anything about accounting, do you?”

  “Guilty. Dumb it down.”

  “Don’t know if I can,” she said, and she was not teasing. She didn’t know how to explain to me. She sighed. “They should have a general ledger that holds everything: assets, debits, credit, everything. Should cover income—tithes, donations, offerings—and expenses.”

  “Expenses like . . . ?”

  “Mortgage—if they’ve got one—building costs, utilities, wages, gifts, food, support for congregants, since they live on-site.”

  “I get it. So . . . do you think the prophet may be planning to file for a tax exemption, like you mentioned?”

  She frowned. “He didn’t say that to me.”

  “Not yet, anyway. He may still.” I was mystified by the whole bookkeeping thing. “Did you see where the prophet stays? Does he have his own hut?”

  “It’s someplace else where he keeps the ledgers, he said . . . that’s all I know. I gotta go back out there.”

  “Someplace else? What does that mean?”

  “He told me there was another place where the ledgers were kept. Someplace safe, he said. He told me next time to go further on Marker Road and turn off on Silver Creek Line. There’s a place there, a house; he said I’d know it when I saw it from the Trespassers Will Be Damned sign on the gate.”

  That was a new one; quite the threat. “But he didn’t tell you what the place was?”

  She shrugged and grimaced. “Some place he lives, I guess. He called it his meditation center.”

  I frowned. He didn’t even live with his congregants? Interesting. Thinking about the girl who had been found dead on the highway, I asked, “Did anything happen while you were there? I mean . . . was there any stir, or upset?”

  She frowned and twisted her mouth, struggling to put something into words. Her gooseberry green eyes flickered with some emotion in their depths. “There was a big secret, it felt like, something . . . something going on.”

  She was struggling to put it into words and her gaze kept flicking away. She was uneasy talking this much.

  “Like an undercurrent?” I said. “Something wrong that people weren’t talking about?”

  “I guess. Like I said, the prophet set me down to talk to the woman who did the books.”

  “Mariah,” I filled in.

  “She looked upset.”

  “In what way?”

  “Like . . . like she’d been crying.”

  “Did she say why?”

  Isadore shook her head. Intensely private herself, it was unlikely she’d ask what was bothering the woman. “Then that fellow who carries the sign—”

  “Barney?” I said.

  “Yeah. He came and got her. She said she wasn’t finished, but he said to move her butt, that the prophet wanted to talk to her. She was to go to him right away.”

  Why would the prophet want to talk to Mariah when he had just told her to show Isadore her bookkeeping system? Interesting. “About what time was that, Isadore?”

  “’Bout . . . I don’t know. It was starting to get dark.”

  “How long had you been there?”

  “Half hour.”

  “And you saw the prophet there the whole time?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t follow him around, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay.” I could tell she had reached the end of her frayed tolerance for conversation. “Please, Isadore, be careful.” I reached out and carefully, gently, hugged her. I let her go and she rocked back. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe you won’t even have a job now that there was a raid on the place.”

  “I’ll see tomorrow.” She turned and stumped up the steps into the variety store.

  I returned to my car and checked my phone. There was a terse text from Virgil. The murder victim had been identified.

  Chapter Ten

  He then texted You saw a girl there, one on the list named Cecily Smith, right?

  Cecily? She was the vict
im? No!

  It was like a punch to the gut. I stared at the text, then read the next line: Cecily, who was upset and crying, had told the deputies and Sheriff Baxter when they raided the camp that there was a girl missing, a girl named Glynnis Johnson. She had been there the day before but no one had seen her all that day. When she heard about a girl dead along the highway from the deputies who raided the camp, she got scared. There would be confirmation, but all the details matched, including the clothes Cecily told them Glynnis always wore. I was grateful the victim wasn’t Cecily, Lizzie’s friend, but still . . . a girl had been murdered.

  Glynnis Johnson . . . she was on the missing girl list, as was Cecily, and both girls had gone missing at about the same time. To me, that made a strong connection between the Light and the Way Ministry and the missing girls, and a possible link to the murdered girls who had been found in the last few years. I was sure that Baxter, Urquhart, Virgil and Dewayne would have already made that connection and would be investigating it. I thought of all the men I had seen at the camp and knew there were others there, ones I hadn’t seen. Was one of them a killer? And if so, why Glynnis?

  The poor girl was found on the highway. Had she been running away from the cult, and had she been followed? Or had she been beaten in the camp and her body disposed of along the highway? I texted Virgil with what little I knew, and that Isadore had been at the encampment the day before the raid and had noted that there was a bit of a commotion, an older woman being hastily summoned by the prophet. That could have nothing to do with Glynnis, of course. I texted an additional note, asking if he knew if Cecily wanted to leave yet. I was more than uneasy about the girl still being at the encampment.

  It was early, but I was tired already. Maybe I was overdue for a visit with my favorite nonagenarian, my substitute father/uncle/grandfather Doc English, the only fellow who had known most members of my family, including my actual grandfather, great-uncle and father. It’s a complicated history, but my father had fallen out with his uncle over the accidental death of his father. That lasted until my father died, when I was five. My mother, a strong-willed social justice warrior, had visited Melvyn Wynter, my great-uncle, once, but they had a huge fight and she never spoke of him again, apparently throwing out his letters unopened. My memory of that long-ago visit as a five-year-old was kneeling in the backseat of the car waving to my uncle Melvyn out the back window.

  Doc English had filled in lots of holes in my family history. He’s failing, somewhat, lately. It scares me, how bad his health is getting, but I’m holding on to him tenaciously. He can’t die, I’ve told him. I’m not ready to lose him. A visit and talk was just what the Doc ordered. I found him in the front living room of Golden Acres, which was once a house, but with a modern addition built on the back was now the retirement residence and long-term care home owned and operated by my mother-in-law.

  “What’s up, Doc?” I said, dropping onto the vinyl sofa beside him.

  He let his bottle-bottom glasses slip down his beaky age-spotted nose and eyed me rheumily over the top edge while holding up his book. “Young lady, I’m reading philosophy and Kant be disturbed!” He tapped the book’s cover, which is the only way I knew he was making a pun.

  I groaned, then chuckled obediently. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a hoot?” I eyed him affectionately, from his balding age-spotted pate to his bandaged foot. “Feet giving you trouble still?”

  “Whatya gonna do?” he said. “Diabetes is a bitch. Diabetes and gout combined are a bitch and a bastard.”

  “Mmm.” It was meant to be a sympathetic noise. He’d been having trouble with wounds on his feet not healing, but at his age there was always something, he ofttimes said. As a medical doctor who took his training after World War Two on the GI Bill, he knew what to expect and he knew how to take care of it. Conversations between him and his physician invariably wandered off into medical lingo that left me scratching my head.

  He grabbed a smudgy tablet from the side table and turned it on, his arthritic gnarled fingers tapping unsteadily at the screen. “What’s this all about?” he asked, handing it over to me.

  It was the front page of the Ridley Ridge Record. There were multiple local stories and some national: there had been a mosque bombing in Michigan, but no one had been injured; someone had been caught at the Canadian border smuggling drugs in a semi with specially welded compartments cunningly fitted into it; and the latest national job numbers were not encouraging. But the two stories that held my attention were strictly local: one was about the body found on the highway by renowned composer Anokhi Auretius, on her way to the airport after consulting with the owners about the new theater and recording facility being planned at infamous Wynter Castle; and another about Sheriff Baxter’s unfortunate raid on the Light and the Way Ministry compound.

  I clicked on and read both articles. The newspaper was highly critical of the sheriff’s decisions, and quoted an unnamed ATF source as saying there was no proof the religious group was planning anything at all. Another source said the raid had netted nothing: no guns, no drugs, no crime. There was much more; the story had been updated to indicate that the dead girl was known to be a local runaway who had apparently been at the religious camp for some time, but, according to Prophet Voorhees, had left of her own free will that very day. What happened to her clearly happened in the outside world, not in their safe and sanctified compound. Though Voorhees had been detained for questioning, the paper said, he and others picked up during the raid were most likely going to be released. A civil liberties lawyer who had been in Ridley Ridge on another case (that was the one Anokhi’s son-in-law had called in, no doubt!) had been about to book a flight out of the tiny local airport but had stayed when he heard about the raid. He gave an interview to the Record saying, among other things, that the prophet’s civil rights had been trampled and a lawsuit against the sheriff’s department and Sheriff Ben Baxter himself was a possibility.

  The murder victim had now been identified as Glynnis Johnson, a local girl who had been missing for some months—reported so by her parents, assumed even by them to have run away after some family trouble—and was now known to have voluntarily joined the Light and the Way religious group. It gave a brief overview of her life, as well as the bald fact that she had been having problems at home, arguments with her parents over drugs (a dramatically increasing problem locally, I wasn’t sure why) found in her room, and had lost her job at the hospital after stealing money out of fellow employees’ purses. She had left home after an argument with her mother in June. The journalist had done a thorough job, and in a sidebar gave a brief list of signs someone may run off to join a cult—trouble at home or in their life, a sense of aimlessness, and low self-esteem being the top three items on the list.

  It helped me understand Cecily’s situation. I was filled with sadness for Glynnis and her family, who clearly loved her despite her problems. The photo used was one of Glynnis’s mom sitting on what was presumably Glynnis’s bed in her still-intact room, weeping on the shoulder of her distraught father. Pain clutched my heart; I knew too well the agony of losing someone, all the what-ifs and should-haves. “Why do you think I know anything about this?” I said, wiping the screen with the sleeve of my sweater. Everything Doc handled was smudgy, including his glasses. It was a wonder he saw anything.

  “Don’t you always?” he griped.

  I admitted I might know something about both happenings. I told him about my connection to Anokhi, which he had already figured out, then I told him about my visit, with Lizzie, to the encampment, and my chat with Cecily. There was a list, I said, of missing girls from the area; Cecily and Glynnis were both on it. I wondered aloud if I could have helped Glynnis. What if I stayed longer at the encampment, or looked further? Was she still there somewhere, despite Cecily not seeing her that day? What if I’d gone into the structures, even the church Quonset? Had Glynnis run away from the cult, only to meet some bad dude on the highway, as she hitched, maybe even the kille
r who was murdering girls and young women over a several-year stretch? Reporters had been speculating that this murder was related to some in past years, spread out along the I-90 corridor from New York through Ohio and Michigan. It was one theory among many.

  “Seems to me the simplest answer is the likeliest, someone from that place got to her.”

  I nodded and sighed. “But who? And how did she get to the highway, if that’s the case?” I then griped about my worry about Gordy. “He’s so different . . . confident, but not in a good way. He seems happy, and I want him to be happy, but . . .” I glanced over at Hubert Dread, who sat in the corner playing chess alone. “I wish Hubert had made it clearer to Gordy that he was joking about all of those stories he told.”

  “Getting so you can’t even kid around,” Doc griped. “Are we raisin’ a generation of kids who can’t figure out if something’s real or not? Thought these millennials, or whatever you wanna call them, would know not to trust whatever’s on the internet, but they’re more gullible than I was before they shipped me to Europe. Who knew Gordy would take all that crap Hubert spouts as God’s own truth?”

  “I’m not blaming Hubert. Or at least . . . not totally. Gordy seems to believe we’re in the end-times, or something like that.” I remembered what the female cop in RiRi had said about the assumption that the group was made up of preppers, preparing for doomsday. It seemed that folks had been content to write the Light and the Way Ministry off as whatever flavor of lunatics they deemed least dangerous.

  I frowned and twisted my mouth. Hmm. If you were up to no good, that could work to your advantage, everyone writing your group off as a lunatic fringe doomsday cult. I tucked that thought away to pursue another day.