Page 72 of Shielding Instinct

Why was this happening, and what were the ramifications?

Petra hated the term “cult” because it came with ideas about Kool-Aid drinking Branch Davidians.

Where Rowan’s expertise was in indoctrination and severing systems to gain power—much like what happened to Russia, then Türkiye and Hungary, and of course, earlier and most profoundly to women in Iran in 1979…

1979 wasn’t all that long ago; Petra’s mom was a freshman in high school. No, not that long ago at all.

Rowan studied how governments shifted people away from allegiances to family and friends, shifted morals and convictions, and shifted wealth from their citizens' pockets to someone else’s.

And that all fell under the term psyops—psychological operations.

Psyops happened in spheres of influence as large as a nation or as small as a doomsday cult.

These were the thoughts that danced through her brain as Rowan’s phone continued to ring.

Petra was exhausted, and she wanted to just drop the whole subject. But justice was a pressure that built in her until she came up with a way to find release.

And right or wrong, she wanted to hand this all over to Rowan.

Rowan, who had nothing to do with this kind of crime.

“Hey, sorry about that.” Rowan was in her ear. “I walked away from my phone.”

“I came across something. I’m sending you an article,” Petra dove right in. She pressed send on the newspaper article about the Johnsons’ crimes which summed things up more succinctly than the others. She waited, giving Rowan a chance to read it over.

“Jenny Johnson is the name you gave Avery a few minutes ago.”

“It is.”

“Guilty. Husband, guilty. Looks like you were hanging out with the riffraff.”

“They’re here on the island with their three small children.”

“You have a narrative running through your head. You sound damned stressed.”

“I’ve had a difficult couple of days. Listen, would it be okay if I rambled around a bit—sometimes processing out loud is the thing.”

“Be my guest. I was just taking a scotch over to sit in front of the fire.”

“Here are my thoughts in no particular order. Ask questions if you have them. The kids are young. I mean lovely young children, four, six, and eight are my guesses. If the parents go to prison—which is a given—even with a lighter sentence, they won’t be getting out until the youngest is in his late teens. The oldest will be an adult. They will have missed their children’s formative years. If I was a mother – and I am making this up from my imagination, obviously, but if I were their mother, I’d be freaking the hell out to be taken away from my babies. But she showed no signs of stress.”

“You’re also assessing that as a doctorate in psychology. There are norms in social patterns. But for this individual, you don’t have a baseline,” Rowan pointed out. “The woman could be a sociopath and not give a shit about her kids.”

“Possible, I guess. But I’m telling you there was something completely wrong with the packaging. Putting the interaction I had with this information about Jenny going to prison for a decade plus doesn’t add up.”

“You’re a hundred percent sure it’s her.”

“And her husband. The articles I read reiterated many of the details I’d learned over the day. The number of kids, the state where they live. It’s her picture, for goodness’ sake. I cross-referenced with articles and pictures of her in her races. The husband and kids are there at the finish line.”

“So, what was off?”

“The way she looked at her kids.”

“More.”

“If I were a mother on a last family vacation—not something in my experience, granted. But pattern recognition. This mom is two weeks away from not being able to tuck her kids in bed anymore, not give them a kiss when they wake up. I’ve seen other families have to deal with that kind of separation, so I do have a baseline. And this wasnotthat. For example, let’s say that they came down here for this last vacation with their young children, and the next time this was available to them, the kids would be grown. I’d try to give them the best possible memories of a happy, loving, caring mother.”

“That seems reasonable. Is that not what happened?” Rowan asked.

---