Air. She needed air. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t even see straight. Her head was spinning again, a blur of trees and grass and sky. She felt herself slipping away. She could no longer hear the chants or the laughter or even the woman’s screams. Where were the sounds of traffic? Why did everything sound so muffled? So far away? The cord drew tighter, and soon she couldn’t hear anything at all.
CHAPTER 49
Justin’s hands were still shaking when he got back to the bus. He hadn’t bothered to wait for the rest of them. He still couldn’t believe this was what Father had meant by an initiation trip. He imagined it to be some test of survival like his so-called week alone in the woods. Or some marathon lecture series like their weekend revival meetings. But, Jesus! He had never imagined something like this.
He felt sick to his stomach, remembering that poor woman vomiting and all those screams. He yanked off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. The bus was empty. Thank God! Though he could see Dave, their driver, inside the McDonald’s, keeping an eye on things as he probably wolfed down an illicit Big Mac.
Justin slumped into one of the seats, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to stop shaking. He was sweating up a storm, so why was he shivering like he was cold? Fuck! He couldn’t get those screams out of his head. Those poor women. That wasn’t the way his grandfather had taught him to treat women. Even his dad could be an asshole sometimes, but he was good to Justin’s mom. No woman deserved to be treated that way. He didn’t care what the hell Father’s instructions were.
While he handed out Quarter Pounders and beer, Brandon had told them that they were about to learn an important lesson. All Justin had cared about was that finally he had some decent food and that being a warrior wasn’t such a bad thing. He’d hardly paid attention to what Brandon was saying. He must have eaten three Quarter Pounders and drunk four or five beers.
He had been feeling a pleasant buzz by the time Brandon led them to the park, where he continued his lecture about how they needed to put all bitches in their place, make them understand that men were still in power. He said women were the reason everything was going so haywire in the world. Women thought they didn’t need men, were off being lesbos, having babies on their own, taking good jobs away from family men and then crying to the government to protect them. The sluts and whores were responsible for spreading AIDS. They needed to be punished. They needed to be taught a lesson.
They sprayed the first woman who came by with beer, and Justin remembered laughing at her. By the third woman, they were grabbing and fondling and ripping. Her screams shook Justin as if waking him from a nightmare. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. That was when he started to think about Alice. What if Alice had been one of the women walking through that park? What if the others knew about her past? Jesus! Would they swarm her like a pack of wolves?
No one had seen him slip behind the trees to vomit up all those precious hamburgers. He stayed there, and when they were finished with the third woman and heading for a fourth, Justin helped her away, trying to make up for his part in the nightmare. When he knew she was safe, he left, sneaking back to the bus, still hearing the laughter and the screams ringing in his ears.
He didn’t want to think about it. He brought his knees up and hugged them to his chest. He needed to think about something, anything else.
He had only been to Boston once before when Eric was still at Brown. It had been one of their last family trips together. They had stayed at the Radisson. He and Eric had even gotten a room to themselves. Their dad let them order room service, which blew them away because he’d always been so tight with money.
They spent one day at a Red Sox game, then the Metropolitan Museum to satisfy his mom. But even that didn’t suck. It had actually been a good time, one of the few that hadn’t ended in a huge argument of some kind. It had left Justin with good feelings about Boston; feelings that now were replaced with sounds of women’s screams for help and the smell of warm beer.
He jumped off the seat and into the aisle, pulling off his T-shirt, wadding it up and kicking it under seat. Then he peeled off the rest of his clothes until he was standing in the bus aisle, wearing only his jockey shorts. That was when he saw Brandon standing in the bus’s door, staring at him. But instead of getting angry, Brandon started laughing.
“I knew it,” he finally said as Justin wrestled back into his blue jeans. “I knew you didn’t have the stomach for this. You’re a coward, just like your fucking brother, Eric. I need to get back and finish things like a real man.”
Then he turned and left, heading toward the park.
CHAPTER 50
Calm. He needed to stay calm and let the liquid course through his veins. Let it do its magic. Already he could feel its strength, its power.
Not that he needed much physical strength. The woman was small, easy to drag. And with the noise and excitement still going on close by, no one would notice the rustling of leaves and snapping of twigs.
But he needed to hurry. He needed to find a more isolated area. The sun was sinking behind the buildings. He didn’t have much time to set up, to get ready. Tonight would be different. He could feel it. Tonight would be the night. Somehow he just knew it.
He stopped, turned and waited while he stared at the woman’s half-naked body, leaves and brush dragging along between her legs. He smiled when he finally saw her exposed chest move just slightly, shallow breaths, barely noticeable. Oh, good. She was still alive. Then he continued dragging her. Yes, tonight he felt quite certain it would happen. He would finally see it tonight.
CHAPTER 51
Maggie drove with the windows rolled down, hoping it would squelch the churning in the pit of her stomach. As she drove, she tried to make sense of all that she had learned from the woman called Eve about the Reverend Joseph Everett. She needed to prepare herself before she confronted her mother. She’d need to arm herself with information for when her mother started to defend the man, because Maggie knew her mother would defend him.
She tried to put aside the horrible images Eve had conjured up. Instead, she should concentrate on the facts. Most of her arsenal of facts was general biographical stuff. As a young man, Everett had been kicked out of the army, an honorable discharge with no further explanation. There was no police record, despite the rape charge that was later dropped by the journalism student herself. At thirty-five he ran for the Virginia state senate and lost. Then three years later he started the Church of Spiritual Freedom, a nonprofit organization that allowed him to amass stockpiles of tax-free donations. Everett finally found his calling, but there seemed to be no information on where or if he had actually been ordained as a minister.
In less than ten short years, the Church of Spiritual Freedom claimed more than five hundred members with almost two hundred of them living on a compound he had built in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Ironically, the area was only a few miles from where the journalism student had been raped twenty-seven years earlier. Everett had either been innocent and had nothing to hide, or perhaps, Maggie couldn’t help thinking, he was superstitious and didn’t think lightning could strike in the same place twice.
If it was the latter, he had good reason to believe it. In the past ten years, he and his church had not been in any kind of trouble with the law-no IRS audits, no weapons violations, no building permit or zoning violations. The illegal-weapons summon at the Massachusetts cabin was the first violation, and even that could only loosely be connected to Everett’s church. In fact, everything seemed to be going quite nicely for the good reverend. He had even made some close and powerful friends in Congress, permitting him to buy a parcel of government land in Colorado for a sinfully low price. If things were going so well, why did he want to uproot and move to Colorado?