Karin Slaughter - Faithless

“Uncle, huh?”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “We’ll take a close look at him.” He braked to a stop as the road made a sharp left into a dead end.

“ Plymouth,” Lena said, pointing to a narrow dirt road on the right.

Jeffrey reversed the car so he could make the turn without going into a ditch. “I ran their names through the computer.”

“Any hits?”

“The father got a speeding ticket in Atlanta two days ago.”

“Nice alibi.”

“ Atlanta ’s not that far away,” he pointed out. “Who the hell would live way out here?”

“Not me,” Lena answered. She looked out her window at the rolling pastures. There were cows grazing and a couple of horses ran in the distance like something out of a movie. Some people might think this was a slice of heaven, but Lena needed more to do than look at the cows all day.

“When did all this get here?” Jeffrey asked.

Lena looked on his side of the road, seeing a huge farm with row after row of plants. She asked, “Are those peanuts?”

“They look a little tall for that.”

“What else grows out here?”

“Republicans and unemployment,” he said. “This has to be some kind of corporate farm. Nobody could afford to run a place this size on their own.”

“There you go.” Lena pointed to a sign at the head of a winding driveway that led to a series of buildings. The words “Holy Grown Soy Cooperative” were written in fancy gold script. Underneath this, in smaller letters, it said “Est. 1984.”

Lena asked, “Like hippies?”

“Who knows,” Jeffrey said, rolling up the window as the smell of manure came into the car. “I’d hate to have to live across from this place.”

She saw a large, modern-looking barn with a group of at least fifty workers milling about outside. They were probably on break. “The soy business must be doing well.”

He slowed the car to a stop in the middle of the road. “Is this place even on the map?”

Lena opened the glove compartment and took out the spiral-bound Grant County and surrounding areas street map. She was flipping through the pages, looking for Avondale, when Jeffrey mumbled a curse and turned toward the farm. One thing she liked about her boss was that he wasn’t afraid to ask for directions. Greg had been the same way- usually it was Lena saying they should just go a couple of more miles and see if they lucked out and found their destination.

The driveway to the barn was more like a two-lane road, both sides rutted deep from tires. They probably had heavy trucks in and out to pick up the soy or whatever it was they grew here. Lena didn’t know what soy looked like, but she imagined it would take a lot to fill a box, let alone a whole truck.

“We’ll try here,” Jeffrey said, slamming the gear into park. She could tell he was irritated, but didn’t know if it was because they had gotten lost or because the detour kept the family waiting even longer. She had learned from Jeffrey over the years that it was best to get the bad news out of the way as quickly as possible unless there was something important to be gained from waiting.

They walked around the big red barn and Lena saw a second group of workers standing behind it, a short, wiry-looking old man yelling so loud that even from fifty feet away, she could hear him clear as a bell.

“The Lord does not abide laziness!” the man was screaming, his finger inches from a younger man’s face. “Your weakness has cost us a full morning’s work!”

The man with the finger in his face looked down, contrite. There were two girls in the crowd, and they were both crying.

“Weakness and greed!” the old man proclaimed. Anger edged his tone so that each word sounded like an indictment. He had a Bible in his other hand, and he raised it into the air like a torch, shining the way toward enlightenment. “Your weakness will find you out!” he screamed. “The Lord will test you, and you must be strong!”

“Christ,” Jeffrey muttered, then, “Excuse me, sir?”

The man turned around, his scowl slipping into a puzzled look, then a frown. He was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt starched to within an inch of its life. His jeans were likewise stiff, a razor crease ironed into the front of the legs. A Braves ball cap sat on his head, his large ears sticking out on each side like billboards. He used the back of his sleeve to wipe spittle from his mouth. “Is there something I can help you with, sir?” Lena noticed that his voice was hoarse from yelling.

Jeffrey said, “We’re looking for Ephraim Bennett.”

The man’s expression yet again turned on a dime. He smiled brightly, his eyes lighting up. “That’s across the road,” he said, indicating the way Jeffrey and Lena had come. He directed, “Go back down, take a left, then you’ll see it about a quarter mile down on the right.”

Despite his cheerful demeanor, tension hung in the air like a heavy cloud. It was hard to reconcile the man who had been screaming a few minutes ago with the kindly old grandfather offering his help to them now.

Lena checked out the crowd of workers- about ten in all. Some looked as if they had one foot in the grave. One girl in particular looked like she was having a hard time standing up, though whether this was from grief or intoxication, Lena wasn’t sure. They all looked like a bunch of strung-out hippies.

“Thank you,” Jeffrey told the man, but he looked like he didn’t want to leave.

“Have a blessed day,” the man answered, then turned his back to Jeffrey and Lena, pretty much dismissing them. “Children,” he said, holding the Bible aloft, “let’s return to the fields.”

Lena felt Jeffrey’s hesitation, and didn’t move until he did. It wasn’t like they could push the man to the ground and ask him what the hell was going on, but she could tell they both were thinking the same thing: something strange was happening here.

They were quiet until they got into the car. Jeffrey started the car and reversed it out of the space so he could turn around.

Lena said, “That was weird.”

“Weird how?”

She wondered if he was disagreeing with her or just trying to get her take on the situation.

She said, “All that Bible shit.”

“He seemed a little wrapped up in it,” Jeffrey conceded, “but a lot of folks around here are.”

“Still,” she said. “Who carries a Bible to work with them?”

“A lot of people out here, I’d guess.”

They turned back onto the main road and almost immediately Lena saw a mailbox sticking up on her side of the road. “Three ten,” she said. “This is it.”

Jeffrey took the turn. “Just because somebody’s religious doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them.”

“I didn’t say that,” Lena insisted, though maybe she had. From the age of ten, she had hated church and anything that smacked of a man standing in a pulpit, ordering you around. Her uncle Hank was so wrapped up in religion now that it was a worse addiction than the speed he’d shot into his veins for almost thirty years.

Jeffrey said, “Try to keep an open mind.”

“Yeah,” she answered, wondering if he’d let it slip his mind that she’d been raped a few years ago by a Jesus freak who got off on crucifying women. If Lena was antireligion, she had a damn good reason to be.

Jeffrey drove down a driveway that was so long Lena wondered if they had taken a wrong turn. Passing a leaning barn and what looked like an outhouse gave Lena a feeling of déjà vu. There were places like this all over Reese, where she had grown up. Reaganomics and government deregulation had crippled the farmers to their knees. Families had simply walked away from the land that had belonged to them for generations, leaving it to the bank to figure out what to do. Usually, the bank sold it to some multinational corporation that in turn hired migrant workers on the sly, keeping the payroll down and profits up.