She didn’t answer. Pax said, “But I suppose you could choose to not be pregnant.” He reached into his pocket and took out the orange pill bottle. “No one would blame you if you considered other options.” He showed her the label. “These have your name on them.”
The reverend froze. After a moment she said, “Where did you get that?”
He rubbed a thumb across the dried mud on its side.
“I said, where did you get that?”
“I found it at Jo’s house,” he said. Not quite lying.
“I never took those pills.”
“I guessed that,” Pax said. The woman looked at least six months pregnant-bigger than Jo had been when he left. “But you thought about it.”
“Yes, I thought about it.” Her voice was almost a hiss. “But that was a moment of weakness. Fear. Once the baby started to grow…” She slowly shook her head. One hand rested on her stomach. “It became obvious how wrong I’d been. Crystal clear.”
“The hormones kicked in,” Pax said. He tried to remember what the doctor had told him. “Oxytocin, other opiates. There are chemicals that are released during pregnancy that-”
“This has nothing to do with drugs, it’s about right and wrong. I was weak. The younger girls, they have moral clarity. I’m not so lucky. I was a human long before I was a beta. I wavered.”
“The pills couldn’t have been so evil if you were willing to give them to Jo,” he said. “She knew you had them, and she called you the night she died. She asked you to meet her up at that clearing between her house and yours.”
“I’m not going to talk about this with you. Not here.”
“Yes,” Pax said, “you are.”
The woman did not move or change expression, but her anger rolled toward him like heat.
Pax had grown up thinking of empathy as the most Christian of feelings-loving your neighbor as yourself, indistinguishable from yourself. But it was only information, to be used or not used, for good or ill. He felt the reverend’s rage and hurt, and the knowledge drew a target around her heart. As he spoke he knew exactly where his words would strike, and how deep.
“You were handing out abortion pills, Reverend,” he said. “Tell me what happened, before I have to ask every blank in this trailer park about you and Jo Lynn.”
She stared at him.
“All right, fine.” He stood. “I’ll check back with you later.”
“Please,” she said. “Keep your voice down. My other daughters are sleeping.”
After half a minute she said, “She called me asking for the pills. She couldn’t come here, obviously, and I couldn’t just drive out of the Co-op in the middle of the night-too many people would see and ask questions. So I agreed to meet her on the mountain. We’d met in that spot before, when… when Jo helped me think about my options when I became pregnant again.”
“But I thought you were the one who ran her out of the Co-op.”
“Jo’s excommunication wasn’t my doing,” the reverend said. “I tried to keep the peace, but the white-scarf girls-”
“Right. I know how hard it is to hold on to a congregation.”
“You can’t begin to know until you’ve stood in the pulpit yourself,” she said. “But Jo understood my position here, with the younger girls. We always understood each other. Even when we didn’t agree, we were friends.” She saw his look. “I don’t care if you believe me or not.”
“All right. So you went up there to help your friend. You gave her the pills. Then what?”
“Then nothing. I walked back home.”
“That’s it? You trotted up there and then right back down-and then a few hours later she was dead.”
“It wasn’t until the next morning I heard that she’d hung herself. I was shocked. She was upset that night, but she wasn’t… I guess I didn’t realize how distraught she was.”
“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
The reverend looked away. “No.” Then she shook her head. “But I didn’t ask. I’d been in the same situation. I hugged her, and we went our separate ways. That was the last time I saw her.”
The woman was telling the truth, yet there was something measured in her words that made him think she was hiding something. What, he had no idea.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about seeing her that night, Reverend? Deke didn’t mention it. And I’m sure you didn’t tell the police.”
“You don’t know what some of these girls are like,” the reverend said. “How judgmental, how certain they are.”
“Because they’re pure,” Pax said. “And you’re tainted.” The reverend opened her mouth slightly, which Pax took to express outright shock. “I’ve been talking to Rainy and Sandra,” he explained.
“You have no idea,” the Reverend said. “If they knew I’d helped Jo-that I’d considered such a thing myself-they’d never trust me again.” In the kitchen, a thunk as the girl dropped a bowl or something as big. The reverend didn’t get up.
“One of them followed you up the mountain,” Pax said. “Tommy. Or one of the white-scarf girls. Maybe several of them.”
She shook her head. “No. Absolutely not. None of the girls-”
Outside, a car horn beeped twice.
“Somebody followed you,” Pax said. “Somebody close enough to you to find out your secret. They knew you were seeing her, and then they followed you up the mountain and saw you hand over the pills.”
“No.”
“And after you left, they killed her.”
The reverend stood up, went to the window. She pushed aside the drapes, let them fall back. “They’re here,” she said. He didn’t know who she was referring to. “I have to get ready now.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who followed you.”
She turned to him. “No one followed me, Paxton. I went down the mountain the same way I went up, and no one was on the path.”
“They hid from you,” he said. “They hid in the trees-it’s easy for them.” Sandra and Rainy could swing through trees like monkeys.
“No one followed me. Now please-get out of my house.”
Two beta girls about Rainy and Sandra’s height came into the room. They eyed Paxton. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, girls. He’s leaving now.” She marched from the room. A moment later the bedroom door slammed.
Pax sat in the chair, waiting. The two girls stared at him. The littlest girl came out of the kitchen to stare as well. Her pajamas were wet where she’d dropped her cereal.
He didn’t like the way they looked at him. Or maybe he didn’t like what he must look like in their eyes.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
The oldest girl walked forward. She was a thin beta with speckled skin like an otter’s. She seized his wrist. Her grip was gorilla strong and surprisingly painful.
He said, “Listen-”
She jerked him out of the chair. Then she fastened her other hand around the back of his neck and with absurd ease steered him to the front door. The other older girl ran ahead of them and opened the front door.
Outside, a dozen girls in white scarves looked up at him.
The reverend’s daughter released him. Pax didn’t move from the porch. His right hand trembled and he gripped the white railing as if it were a weapon.
A dozen yards away, four argos were stepping down out of open-topped pickups. At the end of the drive three other vehicles were coming through the front gate: a couple of sedans followed by a red-and-white four-wheel drive-Tommy Shields’ Bronco.
The entire community seemed to have woken up since he’d gone inside the reverend’s trailer. Beta women and a few men lined the drive, children running between them or holding on to arms or sleeping on shoulders. The older girls, the whitescarf girls, had gathered around the reverend’s trailer as if they’d been preparing to storm it. Maybe they had been.
One of the argos was the young man who worked in Deke’s shop-Gary? Jerry? He and the young argo woman he’d arrived with lifted enormous aluminum-frame backpacks from the bed of their truck. The argo man saw Pax and frowned, confused to see him there.