“Vagrants,” the store clerk told us. “Don’t like these artists. Ever since they been coming around, things in these parts have gotten funky.” He looked at us, smiled. “You folks are all right. God-fearing. Make no trouble. Call no attention to those of us out here who’d rather be left alone.”
We smiled. The men adjusted their suspenders, smoothed out their button shirts. The women pressed their skirts down and tightened their white head scarves.
It was one of them, for sure. They were probably out on the lake at sunrise, paddling along in one of their makeshift rafts constructed of discarded driftwood and frayed bits of twine. They probably saw her body, panicked, pulled out their cell phones, and called the authorities.
This was why we kept such distractions — things like phones and computers — to a minimum. They only worked to pull us away from the important tasks of prayer, fasting, and preparing for the Day.
We only had our television and radio with the one station we were instructed to listen to. There, in secret codes delivered by the preachers, we received our information.
The police officers stepped out from their cars, their guns clipped to their oversized belts, their black boots slick as oil. They wore puffy jackets even though it was hot. They strung up yellow tape. The medical examiners wheeled out a gurney from the back of their van as two men in a boat paddled toward the shore. Among the folds of the tarp we could make out her wet strands of hair, the web of veins poking from the thin pink membrane of her scalp.
The two men jumped out of the boat as it reached the shore. They wore rubber boots and gloves, and they hoisted the tarp containing the body out and onto the shore.
Her mouth was agape, her eyes open, the sockets empty, no doubt picked out by the wild birds who sat on the rocks and splintered telephone poles, watching us with sinister intentions. Her breasts were pale and flat, and the flesh made a rhythmic slapping sound as the men inched her farther and farther away from the edge of the water and up a small embankment, not too far from where we stood, clustered together, peering at the strange and foreign spectacle. Her belly was distended. Exposed like that, under the glaring desert sun, it looked like a giant egg, something a prehistoric creature would have laid. A series of black bruises dotted her arms and her right index finger was missing.
“The missing finger,” one of us muttered.
“Yes,” said a few others.
“It’s a sign,” said the first one. “Something’s coming.”
We bowed our heads then lifted them, closed our eyes, and turned our faces to the sun before walking across the gravel lots, past the abandoned homes and boarded-up shops toward our settlement.
They identified the body. Her name was Judith Arnold. Sixty-three years of age. A widow with a son and daughter. We heard them on the radio, their voices low and quivering. They asked the public for help in finding their mother’s killer.
“We are distraught,” the daughter said, in between sobs.
“We are begging you,” the son added. “If anyone knows anything, please come forward.”
More information surfaced as the days passed, as we listened and tried following the clues, looking for the sign we needed that would indicate our final departure.
She had been stabbed repeatedly in the stomach, chest, and back. The coroner’s office said there were strange words carved into her thighs: EROT, VALKUM, MEDCOLIUM.
“Evidence suggests the victim was assaulted and killed elsewhere and then brought here in an attempt to hide the crime.”
The medical examiner spoke, said the water in her lungs didn’t match what was typically found in the waters of the sea. “We discovered different minerals suggesting she wasn’t drowned here,” he explained.
There were trace elements of iron oxide, barium, copper, and magnesium.
“The victim was drowned, stabbed repeatedly, and had her skin lacerated. All of this postmortem,” the examiner said.
Police presence grew in the area in the days that followed. We saw the squad cars parked out in front of the grocery store, by the gas station and convenience store, and out near the empty unpaved streets.
“I’m telling you,” the store clerk said as we did our shopping, “it was one of those artist freaks. Likely did some ritual bloodletting. Now the cops are all up in our business. Who knows what else they’ll find? Who knows how long they’ll be here?”
He was angry.
“They said she was killed elsewhere,” we explained. “They dumped her body here.”
“Bullshit,” he replied, then apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that to you holy types.”
We smiled and forgave him.
Who here among us has not sinned or committed an afront to His Holiness, after all?
The police continued their inquiry. We watched as they kept patrolling the area. They, in turn, watched everyone and everything going on around us. They must have been pressured by the woman’s family. A private investigator was hired, a young man with a pair of thick-framed glasses and neatly ironed collared shirts was seen wandering up and down the lakeshore. He took pictures on his phone and spoke into it from time to time. We wondered who he was talking to.
“He’s recording what he sees,” the boy told us.
“How do you know?” we asked.
“I was standing a few feet away, behind a pile of rocks, and I listened,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
“Any word from your father?”
“No,” he replied. “It’s like he vanished into the air.”
He wasn’t a bother, and we all cared for him. We fed him, made sure he had clean clothing and that he attended the sermons we held each Friday evening in the tent.
Of course, we were bothered by the fact that his father had not come back. And some of us even went so far as to suggest that a search party be formed so that we might go out there and try to figure out where the man had gone. But we were not equipped to take on such risky endeavors, so we left it at that. And we tried never to talk about him.
We saw that investigator roaming around outside our property. He stood by the front entrance we’d erected when we first came. It wasn’t really an entrance. It was just two piles of stones stacked together. It was clear, though, to anyone passing by that this was a residence, a specific location, maybe even a home. He waved at one of us.
“Hello?” he hollered. “Can I approach?” He held his arms up as if he were surrendering.
We stopped what we were doing, and one of us said, “You may pass, young man.”
He was sweating, and we could see damp circles of perspiration underneath his armpits. He said he’d been hired by the victim’s family and was working closely with the county sheriff’s office to investigate the death of the woman named Judith Arnold.
“What a tragedy,” we said. We shook our heads and lowered our gazes.
“What do you all know?” He held a small pad and pencil.
“Only what we’ve heard on the radio. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. A real tragedy. Shame.”
“May He bring her peace.”
The man glanced around, taking in the trailers and vans where we slept, the old chairs and rusted drums, the broken crates and strips of tarp we’d found and made our own. We had our washbasin, the small tubs where we bathed, the outdoor firepit where we sometimes cooked our food or sang hymnals and spirituals to His Holiness.
“So, am I to understand that your group is something of a religious sect?” he asked.
“We are an order,” we explained. “We don’t like terms like sect or cult. Of which we are neither.”