Karin Slaughter - Faithless

“Can I do anything?”

“No.”

He opened a box, “We found a book of matches in the girl’s room. They’re from the Pink Kitty. Why would I punish you?”

Sara sat on the bed, watching him root through boxes to find his jeans. “She didn’t strike me as the Pink Kitty type.”

“The whole family isn’t the type,” he told her, finally finding the right box. He looked up at her as he unzipped his pants and kicked them off. “Are you still mad at me?”

“I wish I knew.”

He pulled off his socks and threw them in the laundry basket. “I do, too.”

Sara looked out the bedroom windows at the lake. She seldom closed the curtains because the view was one of the most beautiful in the city. She often lay in bed at night, watching the moon move across the sky as she drifted off to sleep. How many times last week had she looked out these same windows, not knowing that just across the water lay Abigail Bennett, alone, probably freezing cold, certainly terrified. Had Sara lain in bed, warm and content, while under cover of darkness, Abby’s killer had poisoned her?

“Sara?” Jeffrey stood in his underwear, staring at her. “What’s going on?”

She didn’t want to answer. “Tell me more about Abigail’s family.”

He hesitated a second before returning to his clothes. “They’re really weird.”

“Weird how?”

He pulled out a pair of socks and sat on the bed to put them on. “Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’ve seen too many people using some sick religious justification for their sexual attraction to teenage girls.”

“Did they seem shocked when you told them she was dead?”

“They’d heard rumors about what we found. I don’t know how since that farm sounds hermetically sealed. One of the uncles gets out a bit. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about him I don’t trust.”

“Maybe you’ve got a thing against uncles.”

“Maybe.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “The mother was pretty upset.”

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to hear that kind of news.”

“She really got to me.”

“How so?”

“She begged me to find out who did this,” he said. “She might not like it when I do.”

“You really think her family is involved?”

“I don’t know.” He stood to finish dressing, all the while giving Sara a more detailed impression of the group. One uncle was overbearing and seemed to have a lot more power over the family than Jeffrey thought was normal. The husband was old enough to be his wife’s grandfather. Sara sat with her back against the headboard, arms folded across her chest as she listened. The more he told her, the more warning bells she heard.

“The women are very… old-fashioned,” he said. “They let the men do all the talking. They defer to the husbands and the brothers.”

“That’s typical of most conservative religions,” Sara pointed out. “In theory, at least, the man is supposed to be in charge of the family.” She waited for him to make a wistful comment, but when he didn’t, she asked, “Did you get anything from the sister?”

“Rebecca,” he supplied. “Nothing, and there’s no way they’ll let me talk to her again. I have a feeling the uncle would string me up by the short hairs if he knew I talked to her in Abby’s room.”

“Do you think you’d get anything from her anyway?”

“Who knows?” he asked. “I couldn’t tell if she was hiding something or if she was just sad.”

“It’s a hard thing to go through,” Sara said. “She’s probably not thinking right now.”

“ Lena got from the mother that Rebecca has run away before.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t find out.”

“Well, that could be something.”

“It could be just that she’s a teenage girl,” he pointed out, as if Sara needed to be reminded that one out of every seven children ran away at least once before the age of eighteen. “She’s pretty young for her age.”

“I imagine it’s hard to be worldly growing up in that environment.” She added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with trying to keep your kids away from the world in general.” Without thinking, she said, “If it was my kid…” She caught herself. “I mean, some of the kids I see at the clinic… I can understand why their parents want to keep them as sheltered as they can.”

He had stopped dressing, staring at her with his lips slightly parted as if he wanted to say something.

“So,” she said, trying to clear the lump in her throat. “The family is pretty wrapped up in the church?”

“Yeah,” he said, his pause letting her know he was aware of what she was doing. He continued, “I don’t know about the girl, though. I got this sense from her even before Lena told me she’d run away. She seemed kind of rebellious. When I questioned her, she sort of defied her uncle.”

“How?”

“He’s a lawyer. He didn’t want her to answer any questions. She did anyway.” He was nodding to himself as if he admired her courage. “I don’t guess that kind of independence fits into the family dynamic, especially considering it’s coming from a girl.”

“Younger children tend to be more assertive,” Sara said. “Tessa was always getting into trouble. I don’t know if that was because Daddy was harder on her or because she acted up more.”

He couldn’t hide his appreciative grin. He had always admired Tessa’s free spirit. Men often did. “She’s a little wild.”

“And I’m not,” Sara said, trying to keep the regret out of her voice. Tessa had always been the risk-taker while Sara’s biggest childhood infractions were usually education-related: staying too late at the library so that she could study, sneaking a flashlight into her bed so that she could read past bedtime.

She asked, “Do you think you’ll get anything out of the interviews Wednesday?”

“Doubtful. Maybe Dale Stanley will have something. They’re certain it’s cyanide salt?”

“Yes.”

“I checked around. He’s the only metal plater in the area. Something tells me this goes back to the farm. It’s too coincidental to me that they’ve got a bunch of convicts running around on that place and this girl turns up dead. Plus”-he looked up at her-“Dale Stanley’s house is a brisk hike from the Catoogah line.”

“Do you think Dale Stanley put her in the box?”

“I have no idea,” Jeffrey told her. “At this point, I’m not trusting anybody.”

“Do you think there’s a religious connotation? Burying someone in the ground?”

“And poisoning them?” he asked. “That’s where I get stuck. Lena ’s certain there’s a religious connection, something to do with the family.”

“She’s got a good excuse to be against anything that smacks of religion.”

“ Lena ’s my best detective,” he told her. “I know she’s got… problems…” He seemed to understand this was a gross understatement, but continued anyway. “I don’t want her running off in one direction just because it fits with her view of the world.”

“She has a narrow way of looking at things.”

“Everybody does,” he told her, and though Sara agreed, she knew he thought he was an exception. “I’ll give her this, that place is weird. There was this guy we ran into early on. He was out there by the barn toting a Bible and preaching the Word.”

“Hare’s father does the same thing at family reunions,” Sara pointed out, though her uncles’ two sisters tended to laugh in his face so hard when he began to proselytize that Uncle Roderick seldom made it past the first sentence.

“It’s still suspicious.”

She said, “This is the South, Jeffrey. People hold on to religion down here.”