William Krueger - Northwest Angle

She risked a look up, as if to gauge some criticism she thought might be leveled at her for being that kind of victim. Cork hoped what she saw in their faces would only comfort her.

“Go on, Sarah,” he said gently. “Well, when I was sixteen, we found ourselves in Spokane, Washington, listening to a man named Reverend Jerusalem Hornett talk about the end of the world, which he believed was right around the corner. He said it was the responsibility of the righteous to be prepared to fight the armies of Satan. In his mind, that was the government and the Jews and the liberals and pretty much anybody who wasn’t a member of his church. For a preacher, he didn’t say hardly nothing about love. Everything he read from the Bible was all about killing and vengeance. My father, he just ate that up. Before you could snap your fingers, we were signed up with Reverend Hornett’s church.”

She stopped and drank the last of the coffee in her mug and asked timidly, “Could I have some more?”

Rose obliged, and Sarah watched the coffee pour as if it were gold.

“So you joined the church,” Cork said.

She nodded. “The Reverend had three sons. Joshua, he was youngest, was real good-looking and quiet and sweet, not like the other Hornetts, and if I didn’t particularly like the kind of people Reverend Hornett’s sermons drew to his church, I sure liked the look of his son. And he liked me, I could tell. The Reverend was married to a woman just as hate-filled as him, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued and sharp-witted like some kind of, I don’t know, vicious hunting animal. I’m telling you, she had a razor blade for a soul. It was like somebody broke a chunk off the hard rock that was her husband and used it to make her, too.”

“Any idea why they were like that?” Cork asked.

“The Reverend, he spent time in prison early on, which is where he claimed he had his vision of the End Times and was tapped by God to be some kind of general in the holy army. Abigail, hell, I believe she was born purely evil. Some people are like that.”

“I don’t believe that’s true,” Rose said quietly but firmly.

“Well, maybe she had a rough childhood then or something, I don’t know. By the time I met her, her heart was dead to anything except the Reverend and bringing about his vision of Armageddon.”

“You and Joshua fell in love?” Cork said, encouraging her to continue her story.

She shook her head. “More like we fell in lust. He was pretty ripe for picking. But Abigail was dead set against it. She had another girl chose for Josh, homely as tree bark but real strong and real set in her belief in all the crap the Reverend slung around. Long and short of it, I got pregnant, and Josh and me had to get married, and Abigail, I swear, hated my guts.”

“That must have been uncomfortable,” Rose offered.

“I thought I could handle her,” Sarah said. “I didn’t understand how heartless that woman could be.”

“Tell them what happened that summer,” Cork said.

Sarah drank from her mug and wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

“The Reverend moved a bunch of the church folks up to a wilderness area real near the border with Canada, where he had a kind of compound. It was real basic. No running water. No indoor toilets. No electricity. I don’t think it was ever meant to be a permanent place, just somewhere safe and isolated where he could make plans for another place he called the Citadel, which was supposed to be some sort of fortress for Christian soldiers to gather and ride out Armageddon. He had pretty elaborate ideas.”

“How was he going to pay for it?” Cork asked. This part was of particular interest to him.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, most of his followers weren’t much better off than me and my dad.”

“Okay, go on,” Cork said.

“Once we were there, we stayed. It became like a prison, real hard to leave. I didn’t ever once see a nurse or doctor. Abigail tended me, if tending you could call it. When the baby came, I delivered on a bunk in a log cabin by the light of a kerosene lamp. Me and Josh, we’d already picked out names for the baby. Eve if it was a girl, Adam for a boy. Well, it was a boy. But the minute I saw his face, I knew he was different. I understood about Down syndrome. I’d seen those folks on television and in magazines. When I looked at little Adam, I knew. So did Josh. He didn’t want nothing to do with his son. He blamed me. Told me I hadn’t taken care of myself right. The Reverend, he said it was some kind of judgment from God. My father, he just stayed out of it.”

She seemed on the verge of tears. Rose put her arm around the woman’s shoulders, and Sarah looked up at her gratefully.

“I didn’t care my baby was different,” she said to Rose. “I loved him every bit as much as if he’d come out perfect. In a way, I was glad he wasn’t perfect. I thought here is a person who will need me and love me his whole life, which was something I never had before.”

“I understand,” Rose said.

“Then one morning, a few weeks after Adam was born, when I woke up and went to get him out of the little dresser drawer I was using as a crib, he was gone. I screamed bloody murder, but everyone claimed they had no idea what had become of my baby. I tore around that church compound, pulling out my hair and crying like I don’t know what. Joshua, he couldn’t look me in the eye. But Abigail, she stared me down and said, and God help me these were her exact words, ‘Satan must have come to claim his own.’ If I’d’ve had a gun at that moment, I’d’ve shot that evil woman dead.”

Her green eyes were, at that moment, like jade knives.

“What happened after that?” Cork said.

She collapsed a little in her chair. “I went kind of crazy. There’s quite a spell where I don’t remember much. When I finally came around, I gathered that I’d been ranting about being the Virgin Mary and losing my son. I pretended to still be crazy, because I figured if I told them exactly what I thought of them, they’d kill me like they killed my baby boy. I thought about running away, but we were so far out in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t have no idea which way to go.”

“How long ago was this?” Cork asked.

She thought a moment, calculating. “Five, six years. I been biding my time since, waiting for my chance. When you folks showed up, I decided it was now or never.”

Cork asked, “Why didn’t you say something when Tom Kretsch and I were there the first time?”

“They’d’ve killed you for sure. They done it before and got away with it. They think they’re God’s special people and don’t believe in any law except what they say comes straight from the Bible to them.”

“Where’s Jerusalem Hornett now?”

“Died just before we came out here. One of his sons stayed back in Washington State to head up the church there while Abigail and Gabriel and Josh came out here with some of the faithful to start building the Citadel.”

“Those folks bought Stump Island with hard cash,” Cork said. “And all the construction they’re doing can’t be cheap. Do you have any idea where their money comes from?”

“Things go on at night. Boats come and go. It’s got something to do with that, I expect, but I don’t know exactly what.”

Cork looked down at Smalldog, still unconscious, and said, “Maybe when he comes to he can enlighten us.”

FORTY-FIVE

In the late morning, Rainy Bisonette took heated water from the stove reservoir and poured it into a big washtub, and she and Jenny washed little Waaboo. Earlier, Henry Meloux had left the cabin and gone with Stephen and Aaron to gather mushrooms and tubers and herbs. Aaron wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, but he’d gamely agreed. Walleye, who would normally have trailed along behind the old Mide, seemed interested in the baby, and he stayed, lying in the meadow grass nearby, and watched with interest as the women went about their work.