Little One

by Sarah A. Denzil

  “I’m sorry,” Fran said eventually. She thought of her lunch with Caleb, the brightness of youth twinkling in his eyes. “They were your friends.

  Mary leaned back onto her chair and shook her head. “I’m sorry for baby Judith, but not for the others. Especially not for him.” She wiped tears from her eyes and Fran saw her expression change. She went from sad to angry in a split second. Her voice hardened. “I just want to see it before I move on. I want to see his body. I want to know he’s never coming back to hurt me again.”

  “Of course, you do.” Fran took another sip of her water and breathed deeply to steady herself. “How are you? Physically?”

  The corner of Mary’s mouth turned up slightly. “I feel like death, but the smoke didn’t do too much damage. The drug withdrawal symptoms are the worst of it. James had me on some cocktail of painkillers and tranquilisers.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged, as though it didn’t matter.

  When the doctors came in to check up on her, Mary left. Fran obediently went through a series of tests before Detective Woodson arrived later that day.

  “Knock knock.” Woodson stood awkwardly in the doorway wearing the same filthy suit. He held himself like a man with the world resting on his shoulders, slumped over, hands pushed deep into his pockets. “Got a moment for a visitor?” The blank, shell shocked expression, and clear exhaustion on his face, made the attempt at a light-hearted moment fall flat.

  Fran shrugged. “Is this business or personal?”

  “A bit of both?”

  “All right, but you have to buy me a drink first.” Fran gestured to the water. She was feeling much stronger but still figured he could make himself useful while he took her statement.

  Woodson poured her the water and took the seat Mary had used earlier in the day. “How are you feeling?”

  “Some shortness of breath but the doctors say it’ll pass.”

  “Good,” he said. “You saved those kids, you know.”

  Fran bit her bottom lip. “Not yet I didn’t. We only saved them if they make it.”

  “I’ve talked to the doctors and they’re optimistic.”

  A weight lifted from Fran’s chest. She pulled air into her lungs and coughed. “How did you get to the ranch so quickly?”

  “Someone called the station about the fire in the mountains. Folks really shouldn’t be lighting any bonfires in summer. When I heard it was the ranch, I got together a team and figured it was now or never.”

  “He planned it,” Fran said. “He knew I was poking my nose in. He probably knew I’d been to the police. Inviting me was another way to start the madness.”

  “I think you might be right,” Woodson said.

  Fran sighed. “All right let’s get this over with. What do you want to know?”

  “As much as you can tell me.” He leaned forwards. “If you’re feeling up to the interview.”

  She told him an abridged version of the events, beginning with the Whitakers arriving in Leacroft, and ending with the fire. “I’ve got a lot written down, too. But this was all before I had any idea about Adrian.” She sighed. “That must be why Mary came to Leacroft. She wanted to speak to him. She hasn’t told me why, yet. What’s going to happen to Adrian?”

  “We’re still putting the facts together on this one,” Woodson said. “Right now, it seems that Roger Devon was the main perpetrator. There’s a lot to go through at the ranch and much of it was damaged in the fire. From eye-witness testimony, it seems your husband was trying to talk James out of the mass murder-suicide event. There’s nothing to suggest your husband has been a full member of the cult for many years.”

  In other words, the police couldn’t prove he’d committed any crimes, but she was sure they would try their best to find something. “Has he been charged?”

  “Not yet,” Woodson said. “He’s being treated on the ward. He’s in worse shape than you.”

  While that piqued her interest, she didn’t enquire further about Adrian’s health. She cared, but she refused to admit it to herself or let it show. “What about the kidnapped boy? Jayden? Has he been returned to his family?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They’re overjoyed.”

  “Were the other kids kidnapped too?”

  “Some have been identified as children who went missing a few years ago. We found Lucy Caruso. A little girl the cult members called Grace. Others may have been born on the ranch. There’s a lot to process. It’s going to take some time.”

  “Any idea how long the cult has been snatching children?” Fran asked.

  Woodson shook his head. “It could be decades.”

  “Before I came here, I went to find an ex-member. A man called Noah Martinez, if that’s his real name. I didn’t know about the cult then, but I knew he used to live with the Whitakers. He’d already killed himself before I got an opportunity to talk to him.” She pushed the memory of chewed socks out of her mind. “I don’t know if he was another child taken by the cult. I remember he left a strange suicide note. Perhaps he couldn’t rehabilitate into the real world.”

  “It happens,” Woodson said. “I guess people live within whatever parameters they’re set by whoever is in control. Whether it’s a parent, a prison guard, society or some fucking narcissistic cult leader. Leaving that all behind will probably be the hardest thing they’ve ever had to do.”

  Woodson closed his notebook, poured her another glass of water, and left her to get some more rest. She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t sleep.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Fran followed the signs along the hospital walls. Every corner she took led to another white corridor with blue-coloured swing doors. It was one week later, and the wildfires were still burning in the Catalina mountains. Air pollution was bad. Many homes had been evacuated. Airports had shut down. She couldn’t go back to England even if she wanted to, which was fine, because she had some loose ends to tie up.

  The children were going to be fine. With the poison absorbed from their tiny bodies, they woke with stomach aches and weakness, but the doctors were hopeful that any lasting damage would be minimal. It still twisted her gut to think about what they’d been through, but she’d never been so relieved in her life. And yet the sight of their unconscious bodies still plagued her at night. The experience had added to her nightmares. She dreamed of Chloe, Noah Martinez hanging by his belt, the cult children in the storm shelter and Adrian standing with Father James as they smiled down at the lifeless bodies of his family. One of those bodies was the tiniest of all.

  Detective Woodson had interviewed all the children one by one and informed her that he was confident Adrian had not been involved in the cult for many years. There was nothing to link him to the abductions from the last fix or six years, though it would take many months to sort through any possible crimes dating back any further. For now, Adrian was not under arrest, which meant that she could visit him.

  Fran had been released from the hospital, but Adrian was still struggling. When she finally found his room, she stood at the foot of his bed with her arms wrapped around her body. He seemed thinner. He was wearing an oxygen mask. His eyes were drawn back into his skull, ringed by purple-black circles, yellowed at the edges. He seemed older.

  “Franny.” He had to pull the mask away from his face to speak. His voice was hoarse.

  Despite everything, she placed a comforting hand on his arm. Yes, she was still angry, and she would be until the last of her days, but he had been her husband and friend for almost a decade and she couldn’t stand there, see him suffer, and not feel his pain.

  “You came to see me.”

  Fran pulled up a chair. “Don’t get any ideas. I’m here for answers.”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “Yes, you deserve those. It’s the least I can do.”

  Even though Fran had been eager to retrieve the answers to her questions, now that she was here, she didn’t know where to start. She decided to begin with the biggest, scarie
st question. She slid her tongue across her teeth, taking a moment to compose herself. “Is Mary your daughter? She hasn’t said so, but I can’t see any other reason why she would come all the way to Leacroft. Emily saw you and her having a heated conversation in the village. I think you might have lied to me about it.”

  Adrian closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillow. She saw the shallow breaths and the rise and fall of his chest. He was still in a hospital gown because she hadn’t brought him pyjamas. Should she have? She was still his wife for now, she supposed.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Eve, a woman I knew on the ranch, gave birth to Mary about twenty years ago. I’d visited it a few times and I did have a brief relationship with Eve. But there was a lot of… freedom in the community. I never knew for certain. The time you’re referring to in Leacroft was about that, yes. Mary came to me in the village and told me her mother always said I was her biological father. I told her that I’d never been with her mother.”

  “You lied to her.” Fran wrapped her fingers around the white, metal bedframe. “You lied to her while you were pretending to me that the Whitakers meant nothing to you.” Fran thought of the dinner party where Adrian and Elijah had made jokes and chatted about the Arizona weather. Adrian sat there pretending to be enthralled by stories of dust storms and hot summers as though he’d never experienced them before. How could he have been so cool and collected? If Fran had lived that sort of lie, she would’ve imploded from the pressure of it. Yet to Adrian it came as naturally as breathing. “They came to our house and you gave nothing away. How could you do that? How do you lie right to someone’s face?”

  “Elijah never knew me on the ranch,” Adrian said. “He was a fairly new member of the family, I think. I don’t know whether Mary had told him or not. I just went along with it. I have a way to compartmentalise things in my mind. I suppose I convinced myself of a whole different reality that made more sense, and I just thought… Well, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought you’d drop it eventually, you see, and I thought we could go back to normal.”

  “But I didn’t drop it,” Fran said. “Which goes to show how little you know me.”

  Her words hung between them for several seconds. This room, with the blinking lights and white floors, reminded her of the morgue where she’d said goodbye to Chloe one last time. Adrian had never understood Fran. He hadn’t gone with her. And he hadn’t seen what Mary and Esther meant to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d left the cult behind as soon as Roger began acting strangely. And I had no intentions of ever going back. I swear that. This is all something I never anticipated.”

  “You mean you thought you’d got away scot-free.” She let out a hollow laugh. “You thought you’d scammed and fucked and left them all to it so you could start a better life. Meanwhile, your own daughter had to convince a man twice her age to bring her halfway across the world to escape her abuser.” Her fingers tightened around the bedframe, anger pulsing through her, as alive as a parasite working its way through her body. She absorbed it. She allowed it to seep into her blood. She would live with it.

  During the last week, Mary had told Fran more about how she came to England. Elijah had been smitten with Mary and she’d convinced him to leave and start afresh somewhere. Mary tracked down one of the few people who had successfully left the Children of James, Noah Martinez, and convinced the three of them to move to England. She stole some money from James’s safe and bought the plane tickets with it. She must have chosen Derby because of its proximity to Adrian. He’d been a lecturer at Derby University for some years and she could have found him on the internet. She hadn’t explicitly told Fran about finding Adrian on purpose, but Fran was convinced that was the case.

  Noah had acquired fake passports for them and managed to get them into the UK. They’d been poor but managed to find a small apartment. Mary and Elijah soon left for Leacroft, presumably once she’d tracked Adrian down there.

  “What happened to Eve?” Fran asked.

  “Mary told me she died of cancer several months back,” Adrian said. “Perhaps that’s why she came to find me. That and Father James’s decline in health both physical and mental.”

  “Did you witness any abductions?” Fran asked.

  “No. I swear I didn’t.”

  “Did you see the children living in a storm shelter when you visited the ranch?”

  Adrian was silent for a moment. His eyes couldn’t meet hers.

  “It was why I stopped going.”

  “Your daughter was one of those children,” Fran said.

  “I didn’t know she was my daughter,” he said.

  It was all she needed to hear. Those few words said everything about his character. She stood up and the chair scraped back.

  “Did you follow me around Arizona? Did you keep a lookout to make sure we didn’t bump into each other? Or did you just think I was too stupid to learn about the cult?” Fran asked.

  “It was a risk coming here,” Adrian said. “I knew that. I almost came with you, but I was worried someone from the cult would recognise me while we were together. So, I let you come alone.”

  “You let me.” Fran let out a hollow laugh.

  Adrian shrugged. “I thought I’d best make my way here. Keep an eye on things. I got on a flight the day after you left. James, however, hid your interest in the family from me. I’m not sure when, but I assume he figured out you’re my wife. I didn’t…” Adrian’s voice cracked. “I didn’t expect you to hide things from me. I thought you’d tell me what you were doing. You usually do.”

  “I kept it from you because you’d become so controlling,” Fran said. It was a recent realisation. A hard-earned one. Adrian was good at hiding his controlling nature behind what appeared to be genuine concern. He was the perfect husband on the surface. He cooked, he cleaned, he cared. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t seen it for so long.

  “Is there any point in me begging?” Adrian asked.

  She saw the tears dropping onto those purple shadows beneath his eyes, but they failed to move her. “No.”

  “Then let me say one thing. My love has always been real, Franny. You made me a better man.” His lower lip wobbled. He pulled up the mask and placed it over his mouth and nose.

  Fran walked away convinced that he still didn’t understand. She knew he loved her, but she could never love him now.

  Epilogue

  Fran took her morning coffee and sat on the patio area outside her conservatory. She stretched out her legs and leaned back, enjoying the spring sunshine. Her garden was coming along. Daffodils poked out of the flower beds. Esther liked them. Mary was growing pink roses along their garden fence. She was Adrian’s daughter, there was no doubt about that now. She saw his eyes and the line of his jaw. Mary had been given some baby photos by Eve before she died. Miraculously, they survived the fire at the ranch. When they’d arrived back in England, Fran had compared them against the black and white pictures of Adrian as a baby. The resemblance was clear. Adrian continued to deny them a DNA test to confirm what they all knew. It didn’t matter.

  She was divorced from him now. She’d taken exactly half. Adrian didn’t sell the house, he bought her out instead. It was enough for them to settle down in Cornwall in a nice but modest three-bedroom property. One room for each of them. Fran told everyone that Mary was her daughter, and Esther was her granddaughter. It was good to be away from Leacroft, from the toxic intolerance of the village and Emily’s gossip. She had not signed up for a choir in Cornwall.

  Their house overlooked the Celtic Sea as it churned against the cliffs. In the evenings they cooked sausages on the barbecue, made themselves hot dogs smothered in ketchup, and took Cassie, the Cocker Spaniel, out for a cliff walk. Esther still didn’t run on ahead, but she did eat ice cream and cuddle up to Cassie as they sat on picnic blankets by the sea. She worried about Esther from day until night, but weekly exit therapy was helping. They’d all been for therapy, even
Fran. She hadn’t been immune to the draw of the cult, the promise of family and peace. She often thought about Caleb, who she now knew for sure was among the deceased in the farmhouse. She’d even considered attending his funeral, but they decided to leave for England before it took place.

  Mary had been given what she wanted—to see Father James’s body. There hadn’t been much to look at in the end. But the coroner assured her they’d made sure it was him. She was still adapting to her life away from the commune, especially the freedom of living without rules. Fran did everything she could for the woman who could have been her daughter. Even though sometimes she feared it wasn’t enough, she would catch Mary and Esther together playing with Cassie or sewing a dress and her heart soared. Mary even sold some of her garments online. Fran was convinced that she had a bright future ahead of her.

  Despite their happiness, a dark cloud hung over every blissful, sunny day. The case in Arizona. For months the investigation painstakingly examined all the evidence found at the ranch. From the bodies in the farmhouse, to the documents in Father James’s office, to the underground room where the children slept at night. Through many long interviews with Mary, Esther, the children and Adrian, they pieced together a case. Fran handed over her notes to the investigation. She hadn’t decided what to do with them yet. The tragedy of it all felt too heavy. Perhaps one day she could write about it but not yet.

  She’d heard from Detective Woodson that Adrian had been grilled about his involvement in the set-up of the farm. It was revealed how much child labour was used on the ranch and how the children would scrub floors and clean clothes while Father James took his favourite women up into the mountains for sex. She didn’t want to think about the terrible things Esther had been exposed to. Sometimes she looked at the little girl and wondered what was inside her head. At night she woke up in the dark with those images of the bunkers seared onto her brain. She’d never forget them. No matter what.