Бентли Литтл - The Disappearance

But he said nothing. Not yet. Tomorrow he’d talk to everyone about it, but tonight they all needed a good sleep. Besides, paired up, they should be all right. For one night at least.

How many cult members were there? he wondered. The Home had been pretty well cleaned out, though Father and maybe a few others had escaped. But how many were spread across the country, hiding in farmhouses like the one in New Mexico, living in little pockets amid the unsuspecting families of small-town America? Father could be amassing an army right now, an army whose sole pupose was the destruction of Joan and her friends.

Now he was just being paranoid.

Wasn’t he?

“Cell phones on at all times,” Reyn advised. “We need to keep in contact with each other.”

Gary nodded in agreement.

Stacy patted Joan’s shoulder. “Come on, roomie. Let’s go get your stuff. Then I’ll show you around your spacious new digs.”

The weekend passed quickly and, thank God, uneventfully.

On Monday, Joan spent the morning in the registrar’s office, along with Gary, filling out forms and explaining to a succession of clerks and administrators the broad outlines of what had happened. Neither of them was officially reinstated yet, but the machinery was in motion and they’d been assured that everything would be fine. Eventually.

It was much easier dealing with her instructors. She didn’t give them any details, but even the ones who didn’t care whether she showed up or not were perfectly willing to allow her to remain in their classes, do the work and take the tests—even if she wasn’t officially enrolled. She met with each of them before class began to find out what she’d missed, and while there was a lot of reading to catch up on, there hadn’t been any tests and weren’t any coming up in the next few weeks. It would be pretty easy to get back up to speed.

It was simple talking to her teachers; her fellow students were a different situation altogether.

She started sensing something wrong in physical anthropology, her first class of the afternoon. She arrived early to speak with the instructor and was in her usual seat before any of the other students arrived, but Janie Kendricks and Rob Magnussen, who usually sat to either side of her, purposely chose desks on the opposite side of the room, and by the time the entire class had assembled, there was a visible boundary of empty desks around her. That seemed strange, but the room was large, the class small, there were a lot of empty seats and the configuration could have been just a coincidence.

It was in her psych class that she truly knew there was a problem. As before, she spoke to the professor prior to the start of the class, but there were a couple of students from the previous session who’d remained behind to talk to the teacher, and by the time she finished writing down her reading assignments and the address of a Web site on which one of the instructor’s monographs was posted, the rest of her class had started to arrive. Moving away from the lectern toward her seat, she nearly ran into Leigh Lathen. She and Leigh had known each other since their freshman year and had always been friendly, but now the other woman scowled at her and fixed her with a glare so hostile that Joan was taken aback.

It had to have something to do with the Home. Though she’d given no interviews and done everything she could to stay out of the spotlight, Joan’s name and face were all over the newspapers and TV—especially those damn cable channels. She didn’t even want to think about what was happening in cyberspace.

Maybe Leigh was religious and somehow offended by her connection with a sect that mainstream America considered a cult. Maybe she had a friend or relative who was a Resident or Penitent and had been arrested. Maybe…

She gave up. The truth was, she had no idea what the problem could be. It bothered her, though, that Leigh seemed to be upset, and, determined to set things right, she tapped the other student on the shoulder.

Leigh whirled around. “Leave me alone!”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“Why would you do something like that?”

Joan looked at her, confused. “What?”

“You know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Leigh turned away.

“Whatever you think I did, I didn’t ,” Joan insisted.

“Right.”

Other students were looking at her, Joan noticed, and the expressions on their faces mirrored Leigh’s: a mixture of anger, antagonism, disappointment and disapproval. Curt Souter was staring at her as though she’d shot his dog. Marie Pearcy looked like a woman whose husband had been seduced by Joan and stolen away.

What was going on here?

“Marie…” she began.

“Don’t you even talk to me.” The other student focused her gaze on the professor at the front of the class, her mouth set in a hard, straight line.

The lecture began before Joan could find out what the problem was. She paid attention, took careful notes, but was aware at all times of the unfriendly glances directed at her by her classmates. It was a weird sensation, made all the more difficult because she didn’t know why it was happening or what was behind it. The lights dimmed as the instructor began a PowerPoint presentation, and that made her think about the Homesteaders’ new facility with computers. Her MySpace and Facebook pages were gone, she was not officially enrolled in this class due to the hacking of Father or one of his minions, and it was not much of a leap to assume that her classmates had been sent malicious e-mails bearing her name. She could clear this up quickly if she could just talk to the other students, but after class ended they shunned her, refused to speak with her and exited the classroom quickly.

Frustrated and discouraged, Joan packed up her books and looked toward the front of the class where the professor was preparing for his next lecture. Her teachers would probably be next, sent falsified messages threatening them or propositioning them or telling them she wanted to drop their classes. Father was playing with her, piling on the problems one layer at a time in an effort to break her, and she knew that she had to be strong in order to survive the onslaught. So did Gary and Stacy and Reyn and Brian.

What would happen after the psychological noose was tightened? How far would Father go in order to get back at her?

She knew the answer to that. He had spent five years tracking her and her parents. He had killed her mom and dad and kidnapped her in the middle of a counterculture festival filled with thousands of people. He would stop at nothing.

Father’s sense of revenge was Old Testament.

He would not stop until she was dead.

Outside, the campus was bathed in autumn light, orangish and indirect, and though her watch said it was shortly after two o’clock, the light made it look like four. She looked around for Gary. He was supposed to meet her here, but there was no sign of him. Her pulse quickened slightly. It was probably nothing, but she knew what Father was capable of, and she was the one who had insisted that the four of them be alone as little as possible.

The walkways were crowded, but Gary was tall and usually easy to spot. Today, she knew, he was wearing a red shirt. Glancing both to her left and to her right, she saw no one who looked even remotely like him.

But…

But she saw a very tall man with a very bald head standing alone on the grass next to a marble sculpture. He seemed to be the only person who was not moving, and though he was kind of far away and it was impossible to tell for sure, it looked like he was watching her.

Joan’s breath caught in her throat.

She turned away. Not quickly, not obviously, but casually, subtly. She focused her attention on a building, on the sky, scanned the walkways for Gary once again, then pretended to randomly glance over at the sculpture.