“What about the guns back at the camp?” Minerva said. “We could use those.”
“Yes,” Micah admitted, but their conversation stopped there.
The midmorning sermon was short, only fifteen minutes. His holiness Reverend Flesher was committed to organizing the search for Eli Rathbone, but he refrained from setting foot in the woods. Probably didn’t want a bird to shit on his head, Ebenezer figured.
Someone should tell him bird shit makes an A-1 hair conditioner, he thought. That would get him out to shake a few trees.
Ebenezer and the rest of them had been banned from the search, according to Micah. The Reverend’s hired men made the decree. Big deal. Hobbled as he was, Eb would be useless in any search even if he wanted to take part—which he did not. The four of them passed the afternoon watching the Little Heavenites come in from the woods. The worshippers would eat, pray, head out again. The Reverend beseeched God for the safe return of young Eli, who was without sin.
Ebenezer did not spot the missing boy’s parents. Evidently they had been in the woods since yesterday afternoon, when they first suspected their child had run away. They could be ten or fifteen miles from the compound by now—together, though maybe separate—delusional with grief, wandering aimlessly, calling out for their lost son.
The Reverend prayed for Eli’s parents, too. Helluva guy, that Reverend.
Flesher’s hired goons, the rifleman and the other one with a stupid bovine face—Ellen gave their names as Cyril and Virgil, respectively—supervised. They did so with a bored and vaguely hostile air, like ranch hands herding cattle. Ebenezer assumed they were overjoyed at the work: they got to keep the flock in line, following the orders the Reverend doled out, and at such time as Little Heaven came apart—and it would, as the cracks were already showing—they could take what they wanted and escape while the place went to hell.
At six o’clock, dinner was served. The mess was sparsely occupied. Those who were there spoke in whispers.
Should we head to the outside, talk to the police, and organize a proper search party?…
The Reverend, sensing the winds of dissent, stood and addressed the gathering.
“It is at times such as these, when we are at our greatest need, that we must band more closely together,” he said. “Did I not bring you here so that you could hear the word of God more clearly? And now, at the first sign of trial, you talk of fleeing back to the godless heathens who compelled our departure?”
The Reverend’s hands tightened on the table, twisting into claws.
“Do you want to be cast out of the Eden we have made? Do you? The boy will be found. God will bring him back. God is merciful until His works are questioned. Eli must wander the desert as Moses did until God brings him back, and He will. He will.”
Silence from the congregation—until a tremulous voice spoke up from the back.
“Are you sure this was the first sign, Reverend?”
Amos Flesher scoured the room until his gaze fell on a woman dressed in a plain smock. She sat with a man, equally plain, obviously her husband.
“What did you say, Sister Conkwright?”
“The first sign of trial.” The woman struggled to hold the Reverend’s gaze. “Because Sister Hughes broke her leg, remember? And… yes, a few other things.”
“Such as?”
Sister Conkwright’s hands knotted in her lap. Her husband set his hands over her own. She put her head down.
“Nothing,” she mumbled. “God is good.”
The Reverend let a few seconds tick past. His gaze settled on Ebenezer and the others for a moment—the flat, dead gaze of a viper—before flicking away.
“Sister Conkwright, if you or anyone here so gathered wishes to leave Little Heaven, you may. With my blessings.”
But the way the Reverend spoke, it was like he was inviting her to step off a cliff.
“Cyril and Virgil will escort you out. But once you are gone—just as it was with Adam and Eve from Eden—you are… gone.”
The congregation filed out. Sister Conkwright required her husband’s assistance, as she was shaking badly. The men and women of Little Heaven returned to the square to fashion more torches. The search continued.
19
THE CONKWRIGHT BITCH. She would ruin everything.
Amos Flesher paced his quarters. His heart bappity-bapped in his chest. Every so often, he slammed his fist into his palm. The meaty slap of skin was soothing.
To hurt is to love.
Who had said that? One of the nuns at the San Francisco Catholic Orphanage? He had been left on its steps as a toddler. It happened a lot in that city. A city of whores. Amos barely remembered his mother. His father was unknown—but Amos knew he must have been a great man. A man of God who had been called away to follow the same voice that Amos himself could hear.
Amos had lived at the orphanage for sixteen years. His was the longest residency in its history. The goal was to have every child adopted into a God-fearing family. But Amos never was. He would spend a few weeks with a family, but they always sent him back. One time, he had overheard his prospective mother and father whispering with the nuns.
Peculiar boy. Strange tendencies.
All the other boys and girls got adopted. Even the dwarfs and the ones with harelips and the ugly specimens with IQs no bigger than their belt size. They were shipped off to families who lived in sparkling houses overlooking the bay. Amos stayed at the orphanage with the nuns and the pea green floor tiles.
The nuns became his surrogate mothers. None of them took a shine to Amos—they treated him as a burden once it became clear he would never get adopted. But one of them, Sister Muriel, saw it as her duty to teach him the wages of sin. And the wage was high, oh yes. Your immortal soul.
Prurient desires are the devil rapping at the door to your soul, she said to him. If you give in, boy, you let Satan trip-trap in on his cloven hooves.
She meted out discipline for lustful behavior. It happened a lot with the older boys and girls. If Sister Muriel found out that a boy had been fiddling with his dirty stick or a girl with her pink button—and Sister Muriel had an unerring way of knowing this—those transgressions would be met with lashes.
Sister Muriel’s discipline did not extend to the encephalitic or soft-brained orphans—God’s children, as they were known—who were kept in a separate ward. Those unlucky souls should be allowed to act on the impulses other boys and girls must stifle, she reasoned. Amos had not seen it that way at all. All vice was an affront to the Lord, was it not? And if those imbecilic simpletons could not check their acts of self-gratification, why should they escape punishment? It wasn’t fair.
Once he turned twelve, the nuns began to assign duties to Amos so he could make himself useful. One of those duties was to preside over God’s children during naptime. Many of them had to be strapped down so they didn’t hurt themselves—some of them shook so badly that the bonds actually helped them sleep: they would struggle uselessly for a few minutes, then fall into an exhausted slumber.