Page 45 of Bitter Falls

That got a slow nod. “He caught me crying one day. I shouldn’t have told him, but...Remy was so easy to talk to. He wanted to help me,” she says. “He was a nice young man. Godly.”

Remy wasn’tthatgodly, from what I’ve gathered; he liked a good time just fine. But I let that slide by. “What happened the night he disappeared, Carol?”

She’s quiet for a few long seconds. She takes the towel off her head, and her damp hair cascades down, curling at the ends a little. She lets it shroud her face. “He was going to help me get out of town,” she says. “He was supposed to meet me and give me some money. But he never showed up. I waited, but...he just never came, and nobody ever saw him again. I thought maybe he got grabbed.”

“By the cult?”

She shrugs.

“Why would they take him? To get to you?”

Another shrug. She’s not meeting my gaze anymore. She’s lying to me. But at least she’s talking.

“Carol. Look at me.” She does, finally. There’s a bleak light in her eyes. Resignation. “Where would they have taken him?”

“I don’t know. They move around. They drive these RVs.”

A mobile cult? That sounds terrifying. “How does the cult work, exactly?”

“The usual way.” A bitter twist to her lips. “They drive us around and we preach to people, get gifts. Sometimes we recruit them, and they give up their family and money to get into heaven.”

“Do they? Get into heaven?”

“I thought so, once. But...” She hesitates, then looks away again. “But maybe it was really just a lie. We never had any money, and it wasn’t—it wasn’t like I think heaven would be. And the way they treated us...like chattel. You know what chattel are?”

“Yes.”

“Women especially. We had no say in anything. Not even in ourselves.” She’s talking around something dreadful, I can tell that from the tension in her body, as if she’s tiptoeing along a cliff’s edge. She pulls back, and laughs. It’s a strangely empty sound. “Anyway.”

“So how did you escape?”

“I didn’t. Not on purpose, at first. I was late coming back after I went into this little store, and this man, he—he tried to pull me into his car. The convenience store clerk, he saw what was happening and called the police, and they arrested the man who tried to get me. But I couldn’t leave, the police wouldn’t let me until I gave a statement. The RV left, and I saw it parked down the block; they don’t like to talk to the police. That’s when I realized...I realized I had a chance. I just decided to get away. I don’t really know why, exactly. I didn’t know what I’d do, where I’d go.”

“Couldn’t you have gone home?” Three years ago she must have been a minor. She looks like she’s barely twenty, if that.

“I didn’t really have a home before Father Tom took me in. I was in foster care.”

Vulnerable, no self-worth...ideal for a cult. Though she probably hadn’t brought them much material wealth, being accepted and feeling loved would have made her loyal. It was a minor miracle she’d broken free, actually. Most people don’t leave until things get so bad they just can’t excuse it anymore, they’re rescued...or they die.

I know part of the story she’s told me is true. But I strongly suspect that she’s still lying too. Maybe about small things; most people do. But she’s unnervingly good, and it’s impossible for me to judge whether she’s really being straight with me about the most important parts of her story.

“When did you get the backpack?” I ask that because I have nothing to lose, and it might rattle her.

It doesn’t. She blinks once, then says, “The day before he was supposed to meet me. Remy said it was an old one, he didn’t need it.” There’s a slight edge to it, though. Something that tells me I brushed a nerve. “I didn’t steal from him.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you did, Carol. What’s your real name?”

“Hicken—”

“I saw the name on the clock.”

She shuts up fast. Looks at me with a great deal more intensity than before. And I revise my assessment of her. She plays vulnerable with great skill. But she’s not vulnerable. Not where it counts. There’s an iron to her that shows only in flashes, and quickly vanishes beneath the camouflage.

She finally says, “I don’t know what my birth last name was; they never told me. My last foster family was called Sadler. So I guess Carol Sadler, not that it matters so much. I don’t even have anything to prove that. The church took it all when I joined.”

She sayschurchunconsciously. Notcult. And I know she’s not talking about the little clapboard place where she was finding refuge with Pastor Wallace.

“What was it called? This church?”Cult.

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