Chapter 47
Night Nineteen
Sybil
“So you actually know Elizabeth, erm, Betty?” Annabeth said. “Because I want to be thoughtful about how you bring this up.”
Annabeth had stayed in touch—in a professional way, nothing church-related—with Patience. She’d called her, and Patience had agreed, hesitantly, to speak with her again. Annabeth hadn’t mentioned Sybil and Zeke.
“I don’t want to spook her,” Annabeth explained. “It took me a long time to get her to see me as someone she could trust.” Her GPS announced there were police ahead, and she slowed to something in the ballpark of the speed limit.
“We did know Betty. We do know her,” Sybil said. She was sitting in the middle of the back seat like a child in carpool and leaned forward between the two of them. “She lived with Zeke actually.”
“As roommates,” Zeke said. “I was just…I don’t know, helping her out.” Sybil watched him flex and relax his fingers over and over again. She knew this meant his arm was stiff, and she knew that Timothy and his trainer were displeased that he’d taken time off to chase this wild lead down south.
“A lot of people around here thought the fire at the church meant that it would be the end of it,” Annabeth said.
“Or maybe that’s what a lot of them hoped.
They were losing family members to it, being, I don’t know, one mother said ‘put under the pastor’s spell,’ even though that might sound crazy.
But I guess they were happy to see it burn. ”
“I’m not religious,” Sybil said. “I’m not sure I get it.” She thought of her parents, thankful for their Jewish atheism, her hackles rising at the mere suggestion of being under anyone’s thumb.
“The Revivalist Church isn’t one of those things where you just show up on an occasional Sunday, sorry, Saturday for them, or go to Christmas mass,” she said.
“Everything about your life becomes about serving the church; whatever salary you earn—and around here, that can mean not a whole hell of a lot—goes back toward church offerings. You can’t really socialize outside of the group; you’re expected to spend just about all of your free time at services or in service. And the women—”
A car shot by on the other side of the two-lane highway, its brights on, cutting through the blackness.
Annabeth flinched and swerved to the side of the road, an overcorrection.
Both Sybil and Zeke were propelled to the right.
Sybil just swayed in the air, but Zeke’s elbow careened into the armrest, and he yelped.
“Sorry, shit, sorry,” Annabeth said.
“You okay?” Sybil said to Zeke.
He nodded, but she saw him blink quickly, trying to stave off the appearance of pain in unwillingly teary eyes. He grimaced, reached over with his left hand and massaged his arm.
“The women—” Sybil prodded Annabeth. The journalist was young, maybe late twenties.
She had jet-black dyed hair that was blunt cut to her chin, a double nose ring, and unusually pale, near translucent, skin.
She presented as both ambitious and disarmingly unprepared, a dangerous mix that, at least in Sybil’s former profession, could end in disaster.
Sybil could hear Eloise in her ear, telling her not to be so judgmental, telling her maybe this was half of Sybil’s problem, as if Sybil had all that many problems. And Natalie’s divorce lawyer was at least handling her primary one.
“Right, the women, they’re basically, like, think of a draconian society where women are just there to serve men. That’s the Revivalist way.”
“What does that mean?” Zeke said, his voice tight, his face a wince. He was still massaging his arm, and Sybil wished she were within reach to do it for him.
“Married young, there only to serve their ‘heads’—that’s head of household—pop out baby after baby, definitely no birth control, their entire purpose is keeping house, no higher education, that sort of thing.”
Annabeth flipped on her blinker, and they slowed, turning down an unpaved road that the GPS missed, marked only with a series of mailboxes. She’d been here often enough to spot it in the dark.
A sprawling ranch home rose to meet them at the end of the drive, a woman standing on the front porch illuminated by torch lights. She raised a hand as they approached. When Sybil got out of the car, she could see that Patience was at least five months pregnant.
“I hope you don’t mind me meeting you outside,” she said. “The kids are asleep. Matthew is in a meeting with the other elders.”
That she was Betty’s sister was immediately obvious.
Patience was taller, and her hair was a rich brown, but the geography of their faces was borne of the same map.
The straight slope of their noses, the perfect symmetry of their cheekbones, the shape of a heart formed with their chins.
Patience, like Betty, had violet half-moons under her eyes, and Sybil wondered if she, too, never slept.
Patience tugged her chunky knit sweater around her, as if the air were particularly chilly, which it was not.
Annabeth made quick introductions, and if Patience recognized Zeke, she didn’t betray it.
“And I’m sorry to sound ignorant,” Patience said. “But why are you here? Are you interested in becoming members?”
Zeke looked at Sybil, and Sybil looked at Annabeth.
Sybil made the decision for them. In order to get any answers, they had to be honest. She’d learned this in medical school: Don’t pretend that you don’t see the facts at hand, even if they’re not what you want to see.
Avoiding the unavoidable only delayed care.
Patience struck her as a woman who had dealt with her own set of truths; you don’t birth a litter of children and not at least become a little keen to some aspect of the world’s reality.
“You have a beautiful home,” Sybil said, because it was true.
She didn’t know what she was expecting for a pastor and his wife, but it wasn’t this, a new build, something that reminded Sybil of a Montana ski lodge that she might have flipped past in one of her magazines when they were redoing the house and she had nothing better to think about.
“Thank you,” she said. “My husband and our church built it from the ground up.”
“We know your sister,” Sybil said, then wished she had been less abrupt, but fatigue and urgency did that to a person. “We’re worried about your sister.”
Patience’s eyes flared and a hand, which had been cradling her belly, covered her mouth.
She glanced behind her to her front door, as if Sybil had summoned something evil, and Patience was waiting to see if that evilness were about to emerge.
When nothing happened, she stepped down the stairs and onto the driveway.
“You know Elizabeth?” Her voice was low, covert.
Sybil dug her phone out of her pocket. Pulled up the commercial Natalie had texted. Patience watched wordlessly, her face both pale and astonished. When it ended, Sybil swiped through her photos and showed her the photo of Betty and Pluto on Thanksgiving.
Patience’s hands were shaking.
“I haven’t seen her since…” She glanced around.
“I haven’t taken them to the church site yet,” Annabeth said. “At night, I’m not sure how much there is to see.”
Sybil thought of the photos from Julian’s files, now up on their makeshift evidence wall. The pile of ashes, that there were charred bodies underneath, a heap of burned wood planks where an altar used to stand, the top of a cross still slightly recognizable.
“Is she okay?” Patience asked, and now her voice matched her hands. Quaking, maybe terrified.
“She’s gone,” Zeke said from behind Sybil. “She’s disappeared, and we thought you might know where she went?”
“No,” Patience said, and now she was firmer. “I haven’t spoken with her since the fire.”
“So she wouldn’t have come back here?” Sybil pressed.
“Or maybe Levi has?” Zeke asked, and Patience’s eyebrows darted downward, her jaw setting.
Very suddenly, Sybil realized that it was indeed much colder than she first thought.
She could see Zeke’s breath; she could feel the goose bumps on her every limb.
Around them, forest bloomed up across miles, animals scuttled and whined and chirped.
Everything about this situation felt isolated, odd.
“We’re just concerned she could be in real trouble,” Sybil said again.
“I haven’t seen Levi in years. I don’t understand…you know him too?” She hesitated, looked at Annabeth. “I’m sorry, who are these people again?”
Just then the front door swung open.
“Steady,” Annabeth whispered to them. Then brighter, “Pastor Morrow, nice to see you again.”
Matthew Morrow was handsomer than Sybil had expected.
She had absolutely no experience with pastors, but Matthew Morrow had a striking resemblance to a movie star whose name was escaping her but who starred in some holiday smash rom-com that Eloise had insisted they watch together.
Blond, light eyes, a jawline with a hint of a five-o’clock shadow.
He was in a white button-down, freshly ironed, and dark pressed jeans.
If he were cold, as the night dipped even darker, he didn’t betray it. He slung an arm around his wife.
“Ms. Collins,” he said. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?”
“Investors,” she said, and Sybil was impressed with how quickly the lie rolled off her tongue. “We were waiting online together at Starbucks today; they mentioned they were curious about Revivalists. I told them I knew just the man to introduce them to.”
Matthew stuck out his hand toward Zeke, squinted as if his face looked familiar, but then seemed to move past it. “Pastor Morrow,” he said. “Welcome to our humble church.”
“I hear it’s not so humble,” Sybil said. “I hear it’s pretty impressive.”
She caught an ever-so-slight flare of his nostrils, that he had to address her, which delighted her.
She thought of Mark and how much she’d sacrificed for his career.
She wondered what Patience had sacrificed for Matthew.
Or maybe Patience didn’t consider any of it a sacrifice.
If you’d asked Sybil twenty years ago, maybe she’d have lied to herself about that too.
“Just serving the Lord,” he said.
“Amen,” Patience echoed.
Sybil wasn’t sure which one of them believed that.
Either? Both? Or neither of them.