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  Anna knew what Heath meant: suspicious, Bible-beating, youth-group-leading, hyperpassionate young man swearing eternal fealty to God and nubile girls. A woman felt downright unintuitive not getting some sort of pervert reading off of him, but she didn’t get that vibe either.

  “You don’t always,” she said from experience.

  “Weird.”

  “Yup.” Anna drank. When she didn’t, she felt so much better. When she did, she couldn’t fathom why she periodically swore off the stuff.

  “Maybe Candace did stay with Proffit and he’s got her stashed somewhere unbeknownst to his fellow Christians.”

  “That works,” Heath said.

  “It would have to be someplace fairly close by. Daily care and feeding—”

  “God, I hope so.”

  “—and to get her down here with the other girls tonight,” Anna finished.

  “You’d think Beth and Alexis wouldn’t cover for him,” Heath said.

  “Maybe that’s exactly why they do, why they have ‘amnesia.’ Maybe Proffit told them if they talk he’ll kill their friend.”

  “Poor little buggers,” Heath said. Her voice was full of tears and wine and anger.

  “No kidding. If I had a heart it would be breaking,” Anna quoted the Tin Man.

  thirteen

  By nine the following morning Anna had a search warrant in hand. The evidence—if it could be given such a lofty title—was a scant mention by two traumatized teens that Candace stayed with Proffit, and Heath Jarrod’s unsubstantiated testimony of three childish voices chanting in the dark. Had it been anybody else, Anna doubted the judge would have been so cooperative. But the New Canaanites were strange, isolationist, standoffish. They lived differently, worshipped, if not different gods, then certainly a different faith of the Christian god than Loveland’s average church-going Presbyterian. People who are different are suspect. The judge was willing to stretch things a little where the welfare of a child might be at stake.

  Anna, Lorraine Knight and three men from the local sheriff’s department were at New Canaan by nine-thirty to serve the warrant. The scope of the paper was lenient: They could look anywhere a smallish thirteen-year-old could hide. The forty or so residents, at least twenty-five of whom were children or young women, watched sullenly as they searched the sprawling homes. The adult men of the town, clearly led by Sheppard, were belligerent but never stepped over the line of legality. Their threats were of civil suits and heavenly retributions rather than physical violence.

  The search and the demographics of the residents ratified Anna’s belief that the commune was rooted in the belief that polygamy was a religious imperative. The houses were divided into monastic cell-like rooms that housed two, three or four children each. Slightly more comfortable rooms with a single bed were evidently for the adult women. Each house had a spacious master bedroom with a queen-sized bed for the “father.”

  Though the judge had not been so generous as to allow the search of spaces too small to keep a girl, Anna noted the houses had well-organized offices. Each had a computer with Internet access and a fax machine. From a cursory examination of the papers in plain sight, it appeared the business of New Canaan was capitalizing on Colorado’s welfare system. With so many “single” mothers and out-of-wedlock children, the community was doing fairly well for itself.

  Of Candace Watson, there was no sign.

  Alexis and Beth were found locked in a room in Mr. Sheppard’s house. They had been put there, Mr. Sheppard explained, to think on their sins.

  Anna, with Lorraine, insisted on speaking with them. The weight of heavily armed lawmen and a warrant behind them, Mr. Sheppard grudgingly allowed it. The girls were up and dressed, the room’s two beds made with military precision and what looked like army surplus blankets. Anna had slept under one as a kid. They were a little scratchy but warm and serviceable. Both the room and the children were scrupulously clean. At a glance it was clear they weren’t hiding anything. There was no place to hide it. Blankets were tucked in, leaving the space beneath the beds visible. There were no closets and no dressers, no pictures, rugs, or curtains on the one window. Two identical sweaters hung on two of the four pegs in the wall. A single bed table with a lamp and two Bibles sat between the beds. In the corner was a stand with drinking water, an old-fashioned basin and ewer for washing and, beneath, a chamber pot with a lid. The room was Spartan and anachronistic but the children’s basic needs were met. It wasn’t illegal to lock children in a room with Bibles, though there were times Anna thought it should be.

  To her surprise, Mr. Sheppard left them under the protective eye of his wife. Either the press of feminine flesh, nearly half of it beyond his control, was too much for him, or he was confident Mrs. Sheppard and the girls would say nothing he did not wish them to.

  “Alexis,” Mrs. Sheppard said, “where are your manners?”

  “Won’t you please sit down?” Alexis asked politely. She and Beth sat demurely on one bunk, long skirts covering their knees, ankles crossed, feet to one side in an unnatural “ladylike” pose Anna hadn’t seen since thumbing through her mother’s magazines in the early sixties.

  Anna sat on the bunk facing them. She found herself wondering where in the hell they had found an actual honest-to-god chamber pot.

  “I’m going to leave you to it,” Lorraine said. “See if I can’t find the elusive Mr. Proffit.” She departed, closing the door behind her. Mrs. Sheppard remained standing, one hand on Alexis’ shoulder. Anna’s attention was caught by her long, slender fingers. The woman’s face was aged, not so much by wrinkles or bags, but by the careworn, almost pained, expression she habitually wore. Her hand was smooth. Young. Very young. Younger than Anna had first thought. Anna looked at her throat. It, too, was young. Mrs. Sheppard couldn’t have been much more than fourteen years older than her daughter, if that. She’d been little more than a child herself when she married.

  Anna left off studying her and focused on the girls, letting silence grow among the four of them. Silence worked better with adults than children. Children had not yet acquired the compulsion to fill it, but it was worth a try considering she had no better opening gambit.

  Seconds oozed by, thick as mud in the small closed room. Both children sat quietly, looking at her with nervous, expectant faces. Mrs. Sheppard was equally unmoved. It occurred to Anna that mother and children had probably been trained not to speak until spoken to. To be seen and not heard. To be used as the master saw fit.

  “So you’re under house arrest,” Anna said amiably. “What did you guys do to get locked up?”

  “We lied,” said Alexis.

  “Lying is a sin,” said Beth.

  “Who did you lie to?” Anna asked.

  “You. Everybody,” Alexis replied.

  That caught Anna off-guard. She’d been expecting something more domestic: lying about chores unfinished or cookies gone missing.

  “What lie did you tell me?”

  Alexis fielded this question as well. “We told you—told everybody—that Candace hadn’t gone with us on the hike, that she’d stayed behind with Robert, but it wasn’t true.”

  For a moment Anna was too stunned to speak. The one shred of evidence they had was being snatched away. If they had lied, she was back to square one. If they were lying now, she was back to square one.

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “Why did you say that if it wasn’t true?”

  This time Beth answered. “When we came back, Candace wasn’t with us and we thought we’d be in trouble because we’d left her.”

  There was a very believable edge of despair in her voice and Anna found herself halfway believing her. “Where did you leave her?”

  A look was exchanged between the girls. Nothing big, nothing flashy; Anna might not have noted it had she not seen that same look spark between them when she’d first come upon them in Heath’s camp.

  “We can’t remember,” Beth said.

  “Why did you decide to tell the truth n
ow? About Candace not staying behind with Robert?” Anna asked.

  “Because we’d got him in trouble. We never meant to,” Beth said earnestly. “We didn’t think of it like that. We just . . .”

  “Didn’t want to get in trouble?” Anna finished for her.

  “No.”

  The limpet’s face was open, her needs transparent. Anna could have sworn she was telling the truth. Or what she’d been made to believe was the truth. Alexis was harder to read. She had a way of hiding emotions that was beyond her years.

  “Did Robert tell you you’d gotten him in trouble?” Anna asked.

  “No, Fa—Mr. Sheppard told us,” Beth said. “Robert forgave us. He said it was okay and he loved us.”

  “When did you see Robert?” Mrs. Sheppard cut in sharply.

  The limpet looked horrified. “Now you’ve done it,” Alexis hissed.

  “Alexis,” Mrs. Sheppard said, and Anna could see those supple young fingers digging into her daughter’s shoulder.

  “Robert came by last night,” Alexis confessed. “He talked to us through the window.” She began to cry.

  “Did you go out with Robert last night?” Anna asked.

  “The door was locked,” Beth answered for her friend or half sister or whatever the hell their convoluted family relationship was.

  That wasn’t a straight answer. Anna stood and stepped to the room’s one window. It was an old-fashioned sash window with a hinged screen secured by a hook and eye. As a girl Anna had slipped out of a window very like it more times than she could remember. It would have taken little effort for them to climb out, go with Robert to the RV park for a bit of terrorizing, then slip back in with the parents none the wiser.

  And Candace—or at least some third girlish voice—had been with them. For a shuddering moment Anna was put in mind of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, a study of the Salem witch trials and the pack of young girls who grew wild and drunk on power till the town was strewn with corpses. Children were not inherently good. They were inherently ignorant and usually helpless. Once that helplessness was removed, the ignorance and ego of the young could be more heartless than anything adults dreamed up. It was possible they’d even done it without Robert Proffit’s assistance. In the country, it wasn’t unusual for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to drive.

  Earlier, while she’d waited for the warrant, Anna had returned to the RV park. The low angle of the light was superb for tracking, yet she’d found little to corroborate Heath’s tale but scuff marks that could have been made anytime since the last good rain made it out of the mountains and down to the flats.

  Anna turned back to the room where her captive audience watched her with an attention that would have flattered the most jaded actor. She looked at the girls’ shoes. They were well-used but clean. If they’d been rampaging the previous night, they had literally and figuratively covered their tracks.

  “Heath Jarrod told me you paid her a visit last night,” Anna said abruptly. “Tell me about that, Beth.”

  The girl looked dumbfounded: eyes wide and uncomprehending, mouth slightly agape. Genuine surprise. Anna was about to consign Heath to the loony bin, then Beth’s eyes filled with tears and the unlined face contorted in a spasm of guilt so heartfelt Anna felt guilty for seeing it.

  “Is Heath all right?” she asked, her voice returned to the babyish tremor it had been when she’d first walked out of the woods.

  Alexis took Beth’s hand. It wasn’t to comfort her; Anna could see the smaller girl wince from the pressure Alexis put into the squeeze. “We were here all night. Both of us,” Alexis said. “Praying and reading our Bibles. Ask my . . . my mother.”

  Anna wondered whom she was going to say at first. Robert Proffit? Maybe she’d concluded his nocturnal visit to the bedroom window of two underage girls had damaged his credibility in the eyes of the law.

  Because she’d been invited to, Anna said, “Well, Mrs. Sheppard?”

  Mrs. Sheppard was looking at her daughter in a new way. The featureless stoicism—or repressed pain—that had kept her face locked since Anna had first seen her was broken. She stared at Alexis as if she’d metamorphosed into a Kafka-esque cockroach before their very eyes.

  “The window isn’t nailed shut,” she said flatly.

  Alexis began to cry again, her face hidden in her hands. “Sharon!” Alexis cried in shock. Her mother slapped her.

  Sharon. She called her mother “Sharon” and her father “Mr. Sheppard.” Such a warm, fuzzy family.

  The bedroom door opened. “Proffit’s gone,” Lorraine said without preamble. “He took some clothes and his car.”

  “He went to find Candace,” Beth volunteered. “He told us last night when he came to say goodbye. He said he wouldn’t come back without her.”

  “Jesus,” Anna said.

  “Amen,” Sharon Sheppard murmured.

  “May we walk the rangers out?” Alexis asked politely as Anna rose to leave with Lorraine. Mrs. Sheppard looked at her watch.

  “You’ve seven minutes left.”

  “Please?”

  “Don’t tell Mr. Sheppard.”

  The girls leaped up with alacrity. Anna doubted good manners or a love for herself or her boss fomented this seven-minute revolt against the powers that be in the form of the clan’s patriarch. The girls probably just wanted out. To Anna, this was completely understandable. There were studies showing the threat of prison wasn’t much of a crime deterrent but it deterred her most effectively. Life in a box, as far as she was concerned, was not better than no life at all.

  Mindful their early release was only on sufferance, Beth and Alexis dutifully walked down the long hall with Anna and Lorraine, through the chapel, and out toward where the Crown Vic was parked.

  A ring of boys, ranging in age from seven to sixteen, had formed in the dirt yard. In another setting they would have been laughing and yelling as they pursued whatever game they were at. Here in New Canaan they muttered and snickered. Though this was probably due to the discipline of their pieced-together culture, it lent them an air of conspiracy and underhandedness.

  So intent were they on their game, they didn’t hear the women and girls approaching. Two of the boys knelt. Anna glanced over their heads to see what all the suppressed excitement was about.

  Within the circle of knees and booted feet was a kitten, nine to twelve weeks by the look of it, but it might have been older. When an animal is half-starved, size is an unreliable indicator of age. The kitten was black, with white paws and a white ascot.

  The poor thing was terrified. Each time it tried to escape, to break through the line of boys, it was thrust back with sticks, kicks, thrown stones.

  Anna’s blood pressure shot up thirty points. Her vision turned red at the edges. In the instant before she might have done something that would get her sentenced to life in a box, Beth, the limpet, shot by, long skirts flying, hair tumbling down. Shrieking like a demented banshee, the girl tore into the first boy she collided with, scratching and biting and kicking.

  Anna waded into the melee. Under the guise of controlling Beth, she managed to send three boys sprawling and bloody the nose of the leader, a boy bigger than she was but a coward all the same.

  The fracas was over almost before it started. Boys were sitting in the dirt stunned. Boys were crying. Three boys were bleeding, one from Anna’s elbow in his face, two from the fierce onslaught of the diminutive Beth. Anna was not dissatisfied with the carnage. Little remained in the world that could trigger a Viking’s berserker rage in her soul, but these boys had managed to stumble upon it.

  She picked up the kitten. It was sitting in the wreck of boys, head low, panting like a dog. By the time an opportunity to escape had been presented, it was too exhausted or sick or weak to take advantage of it. The cat didn’t fight but pushed its head down into the crook of Anna’s arm to hide there.

  Cat taken care of, Anna turned to Beth. Whatever had moved the girl to rush to the defense of the kitten had not r
eceded once the battle was won. Beth was no longer violent, she was hysterical. Tears poured down her face in staggering quantities, dripping from her jaw. Snot poured from her nose. Saliva frothed at the corners of her mouth. She clawed at her face and hair as if it were she and not the boys in need of punishment. By rights she should have been wailing, screaming, but the noises she made were shut behind clenched lips and sounded like the keening of whales. Alexis and Mrs. Sheppard held her between them. Mrs. Sheppard was alternately crooning and making sharp commands to snap out of it. Alexis had her arms around her friend but that was where the show of comfort ended. The taller girl’s face was as pale as her hair and utterly blank. Even in sleep the human face has emotion, an inner working that lends animation though the muscles are relaxed. The only faces Anna could remember seeing that were as empty as that of Alexis were the death masks on the marble tombs of medieval fighting men. Taking Beth’s hand, Anna set it gently on the kitten’s back so she could feel its warm, living fur. The strangled internal whoops slowed, then ceased. Beth opened her eyes.

  “See,” Anna said. “You saved the kitty cat. See how he’s all poked down in my arm? You saved him. He’s okay. I bet he’s even purring. Put your ear on him and see.”

  Beth mopped some of the mess off her face with the backs of her hands and carefully laid her ear on the cat’s side.

  “Is he purring?” Anna asked.

  “He is,” Beth said with surprise.

  “He’s happy you saved him,” Anna said. Cats not only purred when they were happy but often when they were hungry or scared, but Beth didn’t need to know that.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Anna asked.

  Beth stopped petting the kitten and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Okay,” she managed. The tears began again.

  “What are you going to name your kitty?” Mrs. Sheppard asked kindly, relieved that a key to the child’s sanity had been recovered.

  “No,” Beth cried. “I don’t want it.” She tore free of Alexis’ embrace and ran for the house. Mrs. Sheppard ran after her.