Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

“How did you find me?” Joan asked Gary. She opened up a package of Doritos. “How did you ever figure out that I was here in Texas?”

It was a long story, but he wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it right now and he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell it. “They sent someone after me. Two people, actually. They were caught and gave us the address of the Home. I think they thought we’d be captured if we came here. I don’t think they were doing us a favor.”

“You almost were captured,” Stacy said.

He nodded. “That’s true.”

Joan was eating her Doritos. She no longer seemed to be paying attention to him.

“I went to your parents’ house,” he told her. “In Cayucos.”

“They’re dead,” she said simply.

“What?”

“My parents are dead.”

He had no idea how to respond to that. The only thing he could think of to say was, “How do you know?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did you tell the sheriff?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Gary shared a glance with Stacy, hoping she could indicate to him how he should react, what he should do, what he should say, but she shrugged her shoulders helplessly, raising her eyebrows in an expression of cluelessness.

“I got their address from Teri,” Gary continued lamely. He suddenly realized she did not know that Teri Lim was dead. He shut up. There was a minefield in every explanation, and he doubted that she could take much more bad news.

Her parents were dead?

Had the Homesteaders killed them? That would be his first guess, and he thought about the dead dog and the blood on the linoleum floor of their kitchen. If Joan hadn’t told the sheriff yet, Gary would. Drugging and kidnapping were bad enough, but murder would put those bastards away for life.

Where was Kara? he wondered. Had she been placed in a cell? She might be able to shed some light on this.

From outside came the sound of a helicopter. No. Helicopters. Plural. At first he thought they were from other law enforcement agencies, but seconds later, Stewart came into the room, frowning. “The press has arrived. I’ll try to keep them away from you—”

“No need of that,” Brian said. “I’ll talk to them.”

The sheriff fixed him with a hard glare. “I was thinking of Ms. Daniels.”

“Oh.”

“Could we have a minute?” Reyn asked the sheriff.

“Take all the time you need. I’m going out there to try to deal with this. If you need anything, ask Taylor. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“What the hell are you thinking?” Reyn turned on Brian as soon as Stewart was out of the room and the door closed behind him.

“I’m thinking of getting some national exposure.”

“Do you know what would happen if you spoke to a reporter? Every reporter would try to talk to you. Then they would start looking into your background. They’d find Isaac, who would reveal that you held him at knife-point. Then they would ask why you held him at knife-point and whether this was part of a pattern, and they would comb through your past and find every little thing you ever did wrong and broadcast it to the entire world. Do you want that to happen?”

“No,” Brian admitted.

“Okay, then. Just keep your mouth shut.”

Stacy put a finger to her lips, motioning for them to stay quiet. Phones were ringing all over the building. From the front of the sheriff’s office, they could hear Stewart shouting above the thwap-thwap-thwap of the helicopters. “I want no one in here! Is that understood? No one gets past these doors! Taylor? You and Billy drag out that podium we have in the conference room and set up some sort of press area in the parking lot out back! We’ll direct them there! I don’t know how long it’s going to take them to land and find their way over here, but we don’t have much time!”

The helicopters were getting louder, and there seemed to be more of them.

“Who’s at the compound?” Stewart shouted. “They’ll be going there first! Stall them! I don’t want anyone saying anything—‘No comment’ the shit out of them—but keep them there as long as possible!”

The tactic must have worked because while the sheriff’s office seemed to be in complete chaos for the next fifteen minutes or so, as far as Gary could tell, no reporters made it into the building.

After that, things calmed down, though the sound of the helicopters never completely went away. Stewart returned, and one by one, they were taken to another room and interviewed, their statements recorded, dictated to a stenographer and signed. Joan went first, Gary next. The questions were easy, and he answered them honestly, describing everything that had happened since the trip to Burning Man, leaving out only those incidents that would cast himself or his friends in a bad light. Between Joan’s eyewitness account of her captivity, what had been found in the Home and what he and his friends had to say, the Homesteaders were going to be in deep shit.

Joan had been crying after her interview, and she was still crying when he returned, sitting on the couch with Stacy, the two of them holding on to each other’s hands for support. Gary took over for Stacy as she went over to Reyn, and Brian left to do his interview. He held Joan close and told her over and over again that everything was going to be all right, the worst of it was done.

He hoped it was true.

After a while, she stopped crying, but they continued to sit on the couch, arms still around each other. If they weren’t where they were and what had happened hadn’t happened, he thought, it would have been nice.

A deputy walked past the door, leading a too-tall woman with too-short arms.

One of the Children.

The tactile memory of slimy skin and rough claws made him shiver. From what Gary understood, the Children were the product of incest, the offspring of Father and his daughters. Or granddaughters. Or great-granddaughters. The idea sickened him, and he thought about the photo of Joan’s mother, wondering if she was one of Father’s progeny. The possibility that Joan could be related to that man made his blood run cold.

Had Father tried to… ?

Gary pushed the thought from his mind, refusing to consider it.

It was evening by the time they were through. There was no motel in town or the department would have paid to put them up for the night. There wasn’t even a bed-and-breakfast, but the sheriff had invited them to sleep at his house, and his wife had set up couches and cots in the living room. The bed was made up in the guest room for Joan. Just as Antwon Stewart defied the stereotype of a Texas sheriff, his wife, My, left any preconceptions about a sheriff’s wife in the dust. A petite woman with a thick Vietnamese accent, she wore silk pajamas with no shoes and served them homemade spring rolls and pho for dinner. She was friendly and chatty and kept up a lively conversation throughout the meal, but Gary could understand only about a fifth of the things she said, so he ended up nodding a lot and pretending to agree with whatever she told them.

The sheriff had dropped them off but had not remained for dinner, and although he advised his wife not to turn on any television news so as not to disturb Joan, Mrs. Stewart asked after they’d finished eating whether any of them would mind if she put on CNN.

“It’s fine,” Joan said, managing a small smile. “I think we’re all curious.”

Mrs. Stewart turned on the TV, and after showing the results of a tropical storm that had hit South Carolina, a shot appeared of the Home, taken from a helicopter earlier that afternoon. The anchor gave an update on “the situation in Bitterweed,” revealing that authorities were questioning cult members, trying to discover the whereabouts of the sect’s mysterious leader, known only as “Father,” who had authorized the drugging and kidnapping of at least one UCLA student and who might be behind numerous other crimes over the past two decades. A picture of Father, taken from one of the framed photos found throughout the Home, was shown on-screen.