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“No. You’re too smart for that.”
“Thanks be to God I have never let you down. And I don’t plan to start now.”
“But by the time you recover her, the damage will be done.”
“The damage was done the moment she escaped and opened her big mouth. What more can she say now that she’s told the world we tried to kill her?”
“She knows details about the way we worship that I’d rather she didn’t share. What we do here is sacred. I won’t throw pearls before swine, won’t hold our beliefs up for the world to judge.”
“She’s probably already told. But we’ll get her back, and it won’t be too late. It’s never too late to punish the deserving.”
Ethan watched the crowd disperse. “I can’t believe she slipped through the hands of two hundred people.”
Bart lowered his voice. “She had to have help, as I said from the beginning.”
“Who helped her?”
“That’s what I want to know. And I won’t be satisfied until I find out.”
They’d called in at least two dozen people who’d been there that night, but all denied any knowledge of what had occurred.
“Once the fuss dies down, we’ll quietly reclaim her,” Bart said. “It’ll be safer then.”
With a sniff, Ethan nodded. It was going to be another hot day. After last night, he’d rather not be wandering around. And he didn’t want to be so close to Bart. Sometimes his head of security made him feel…strange. “Cancel my meetings this morning and send me three women,” he said. Then he searched his pockets for the meth he’d put there and hurried to the Enlightenment Hall, where the privacy of his room awaited. He wanted to get high and experiment with the women who were always so eager to please him.
But it was only an hour later that a knock on his door interrupted them.
“Holy One!” a breathless voice called from the hallway.
Ethan was pretty sure it was his housekeeper, Sister Maxine, but the sound came to him as if through a synthesizer. It took several seconds for him to realize he hadn’t imagined it, and even longer to bring the response swimming around in his head to his lips.
“Yes?” He’d had the women tie him to the bed so he couldn’t move. He didn’t want to leave the room, anyway. He’d been fantasizing about a most erotic encounter, one that didn’t include women at all.
“Holy One!” The second call came with enough urgency that his companions sat up.
“What is it?” he managed to ask.
“Courtney’s mother is at the gate!”
Rachel stood just inside the entrance of Portal’s store/café with Nate at her side, waiting for someone who worked in the restaurant portion of the establishment to seat them. They wouldn’t have any trouble getting a table. The place was almost empty. Apparently, even birders avoided this part of America at the height of the summer.
“You’re quiet today. You okay?” Nate asked.
“I’m fine,” she replied, but she already felt tired and dusty. She’d had only a few hours’ sleep and had to settle for a rudimentary bath. With such a limited water supply, a shower had been out of the question.
Somehow, Nate looked none the worse for wear. Dressed in a loose pair of khaki shorts that fell low on his lean hips and a T-shirt tight enough to delineate his rock-hard pecs, he hadn’t shaved and he hadn’t showered. But acknowledging that he could rough it far more gracefully than she didn’t make Rachel feel any better.
An elderly woman with white hair piled on top of her head and turquoise teardrop earrings smiled when she noticed them waiting. “Hello. Two for breakfast?” she asked, scooping up menus.
Rachel smoothed her pink cotton blouse and—thanks to the dust—ill-advised white shorts as Nathan nodded. Resting a hand at the base of her spine, he guided her to a booth along the perimeter. There were ten tables in the restaurant, but only one was occupied—with two ranchers, judging by their cowboy hats and weather-beaten faces.
Once they were seated, the hostess presented them with menus. Glancing out the window, Rachel could see heat rising from the earth in shimmering waves. The temperature here was exactly as Nate had described it—white-hot, hot enough to bleach anything. But with wood paneling and deep awnings, the restaurant provided a cool, shady respite. An oasis.
Thank God.
Of course, they’d have to contend with the heat later on. But in the meantime she accepted a glass of ice water from a young girl of about twelve.
“Thank you.” Rachel tried to catch the girl’s eye so she could get a clearer glimpse of her delicate features, but the child ducked her head and scurried away.
“Abby’s deaf,” the hostess explained. “She can’t hear and she can’t talk, but she’s the sweetest thing in the whole world.”
“Is she any relation to you?” Rachel asked.
The deep wrinkles on the woman’s face easily accommodated a smile. “She’s my grandchild. Unfortunately, her daddy isn’t up to much, so I take care of her every summer. I’d keep her over the winter, too, but she goes to a special school.”
Rachel guessed that the girl was part American Indian. Her bronze-colored, dewy skin was especially beautiful. “Maybe when she gets older.”
“Maybe.” The woman straightened their flatware. “This your first time in Portal?”
Rachel held her menu at the ready but didn’t open it. “Yes.”
“Where you headin’?”
Expecting Nate to enter the conversation, Rachel hesitated—but he was already perusing the list of entrées and didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“Nowhere,” she replied. “At least, not anytime soon. We’re renting the Spitzer place about three miles from here.”
“You’ve moved in? You’re new?” she asked in surprise.
“Yes. We plan to be here for a while. My, um, husband—” she stumbled over the word but made an effort to cover her gaffe by hurrying on “—is a wildlife photographer.”
“Really! Well, you’ve come to the right corner of the earth. We have one of the most biologically diverse areas in America here.”
They were sure hiding it well. So far, Rachel had seen nothing diverse about it. Hot and dry, more hot and dry, and desert scrub mixed with a few other plants that looked about the same. That was it. But she pretended to agree. “So we hear,” she said, and kicked Nate.
Lifting his head, he set his menu aside. “From what I’ve read, you’ve got more than eighty species of mammals.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” the woman responded. “I hear people talk about the wildlife all the time—hooded skunks, mountain lions, black bears, javelinas, raccoons. We even have quite a few different kinds of bats. One of ’em has these really big ears,” she said with a laugh.
“You have a lot of snakes, too, don’t you?” The expression on Nate’s face suggested the question was in earnest, but Rachel knew him too well. He was needling her.
“Oh, yes. Lots of snakes and lizards.”
“What about spiders?” he asked. “I’d really like to photograph a tarantula—a tarantula crawling out of an old outhouse would be a great photo.”
Suppressing a shudder of revulsion at the thought of such a creature living in their outhouse, Rachel kicked him again. “If you want to get started today, we should probably order, honey,” she reminded him.
The woman took the hint gracefully. “Heavens, yes. Don’t let me hold you up. I’m a talker. It’s because of living in such a small community.” She laughed again. “I’ll be back after you’ve had a few minutes to look over the menu.”
“Sure you want to photograph a tarantula coming out of an old outhouse,” Rachel muttered when she was gone.
“I’d rather capture a snake slithering across a woman’s bare stomach, but I only have one woman at hand, and I doubt my trusty assistant would cooperate.”
“Damn right.”
He chuckled under his breath.
“You could’ve jumped into that conversation a little sooner,” she whispered.
“Why? You were doing just fine. No need to overact. As long as what we say makes sense and appears to be true, the less detail, the better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with making friends and opening up, Nate.”
“Except that we’re lying, right?”
He had her there. “Except for that,” she reluctantly agreed.
“So…are you going to ask this woman about the Covenanters, or should I?”
“I will.”
“When?”
Her stomach growled. “After we eat.”
7
The woman who’d seated them also waited on them through breakfast, eventually introducing herself as Thelma Lassiter. Abby, her grandchild, came around once or twice to fill their water glasses.
After the ranchers left, Nate and Rachel were the only patrons in the restaurant. But they weren’t the only people in the building. Voices drifted over from the store section, Thelma’s chief among them as she greeted her customers like the old friends they probably were.
It wasn’t until they’d finished eating and Thelma had come to get their plates that Rachel brought up the Covenanters. “We’ve been hearing about a cult that’s moved into the area. Do you know anything about them?”
Losing some of her cheerfulness, she frowned. “A little. They live about five miles from here and have occasional meetings where they invite folks in to see the place. But they’re very unfriendly if you show up any other time. Even if you attend the Introduction, you get the feeling you’re just seeing what they want you to see and hearing only what they want you to hear.”
“So you’ve been there? You’ve been to an Introduction Meeting?” Rachel asked.
Thelma cast a serreptitious glance over her shoulder as if she was afraid she’d be overheard. But she couldn’t be worried about Abby. Was there someone else who wouldn’t like her talking about the people of Paradise? “I took Abby about six weeks ago. That Ethan fellow who claims to be a prophet saw her in the store one day and told me he could heal her—that he could make it so she can hear.”
Nate leaned back in the booth. “That’s quite a claim.”
“Chaske—my husband—was skeptical, too. He still is.”
Chaske was obviously the person in back, the one she didn’t want overhearing the conversation. Maybe he was the cook.
“He thought I was crazy for hoping,” she went on. “But…I believe in miracles. There’s got to be more to this life than the tangible things we deal with every day. I thought maybe one reason God sent the Covenanters here was to help Abby.”
Kicking off his flip-flops, Nate found Rachel’s feet under the table and began to play footsie with her. Under the guise of their cover, he could get away with goading her in any number of ways, and messing with her made this assignment a lot more fun. “Did they? Help her, I mean?”
He suppressed a chuckle at the sharp stop it glance he received from Rachel as Thelma shook her head. “No. Once I got out to the commune, Ethan told me I’d have to leave her there if I wanted him to heal her.”
“Leave her for how long?” Rachel kept trying to move her feet out of reach, but he wouldn’t let her. Although he knew he’d pay for it later, he was enjoying getting her riled up.
“A few weeks, at least. But…I couldn’t do that. As far as I was concerned, there was no one to look after her. No one I trusted, anyway.”
Nate thought Thelma’s practical side had served her better than her spiritual side. “So you took her and left.”
“Yes, but…I’ve gone back once since then.”
Pointedly clearing her throat, Rachel moved her feet again. “What happened?”
“They wouldn’t even let me in until I mentioned Ethan’s offer to heal Abby. Then they checked with him, and he gave me an audience. But he told me the same thing as before. We couldn’t come for brief visits. I’d have to trust him, have complete faith, or he could do nothing.”
He was tempted to tell Thelma about Ethan’s correspondence with Charles Manson. Nate also knew a little about Ethan’s mental health or lack thereof—tidbits his father had shared with Milt. But as much as Nate longed to convey the danger, he couldn’t reveal his true interest in Paradise. The best way to protect Abby and Thelma, and everyone else, was to get inside that compound and figure out what was really going on. And that required him to be judicious. “You can’t leave a child in the keeping of someone you don’t know,” he said. “You made the right decision.”
Thelma cast another glance over her shoulder. “It was my only choice. Chaske would’ve gone up there with a shotgun if I’d left Abby. He says there’s no way he’ll ever let her fall into the hands of a cult.”
Rachel finally resorted to pulling her feet up and tucking them under her, effectively ending Nate’s game. “You considered leaving her?”
“More so the second time,” Thelma admitted. “I wish Chaske had been there with me. The Holy One—that’s what Ethan’s worshippers call him—introduced me to several people who say he’s done miraculous things. One said she had cancer until he cured her. Another was in a wheelchair, suffering from multiple sclerosis. Three members of that man’s family told me he couldn’t even feed himself when he first met Ethan. You should see him now.”
“But MS is a strange disease,” Nate said. “It can advance and recede. Maybe his miraculous improvement had nothing to do with Ethan.”
“Then how do you explain the woman with cancer?”
Nate had heard the peddlers of various health tonics claim they had the answer to a whole list of incurable maladies. That didn’t mean it was true. It just meant they had a vested interest in making others believe, and it might be the same here. “There could be a lot of explanations,” he said, “a flat-out lie being the most obvious.”
“Why would they lie?” she countered.
“Because they want to believe what Ethan is telling them, and it builds the group’s credibility to outsiders.”
Rachel frowned. “Did it seem to bother Ethan that you wouldn’t leave Abby?”
“Of course. He told me he could give her a much better life.” Tears filled Thelma’s eyes. “That’s all I want for her—that she’ll be okay when I’m gone. He was disappointed, maybe even a little disgusted, that I wouldn’t trust him.” She blinked several times. “But there are all those rumors about their sexual practices….”
“What rumors?”
“He has some very…liberal ideas. People say orgies go on up there. But who knows? That might be a witch hunt. Most folks around here don’t like him much. The Covenanters are all I’ve heard about since they moved in, and none of it’s been good.”
“Maybe they are having orgies,” Nate said.
“If so, he certainly didn’t talk about it at the Introduction Meeting. And he denied it when I told him that was why I couldn’t leave Abby. According to him, it’s just superstitious folks bein’ scared and talkin’ about things they know nothing of. He said that sex and drugs aren’t part of the religion, freedom and acceptance are. But—” she sighed “—my husband is one of those superstitious people.”
Nate saw Abby going between the restaurant and the store. “Did Abby know he wanted her to stay?”
Thelma straightened her apron. “Oh, yes. She’s very smart. But she wouldn’t have any of it. She clung to me and kept signing that she was fine and wanted to go home to Grandpa.”
Hoping to add a little support to what her husband believed, Nate spoke up again. “Someone else told us about a woman who left the commune. Sounds as if she had it pretty rough when she was with them. Have you heard about her?”
