Chapter 67
Morning
Betty
Betty had six weeks to prepare for this morning.
Six weeks of planning to confront her father, tell him that she was calling the FBI—she had memorized Richard’s name and title from the Washington Post article—and planned to use it as a threat.
Leave me alone forever. I am not your daughter forever. You will never tame me forever.
Levi had made the mistake about a year ago, just before she got the job at the diner, when he sent that postcard from Las Vegas, and Betty had inadvertently thought he was in Paris.
She’d missed him so urgently that she’d used the flip phone to call him, ask if maybe she could join him.
His voice turned stony, and he said no, absolutely not, not in Vegas.
She’d assumed for a while it was because Vegas was so, at least from what she could glean from the internet and Ocean’s Eleven, sinfully outrageous, and Levi simply didn’t think she could handle it.
She was googling where else she could go in Nevada, just to be close to Levi, when a message board about Reno mentioned the three-year-old church that was becoming a phenomenon.
She skimmed the post, then reread it twice in case her brain was malfunctioning.
To be sure, there were plenty of megachurches popping up all over the United States, and Betty probably could have stuck a thumbtack on a map and been in the vicinity of one.
But the poster mentioned a new charismatic pastor named Aaron, no last name—“like Cher!” the poster had said—who claimed that he was one of Jesus’s disciples.
There were other men who pulled off this sort of fraud, certainly, but almost no one did it as well as her dad.
She clicked on the user’s profile, found their full name, searched them on Facebook, and there, buried in a sea of posts with Bible quotes, was a picture of her father with his arm slung around two parishioners.
Betty had to run to the bathroom to throw up.
She’d been willing to let the repression of her childhood go, to live in a world where her dad occupied his corner of the earth, and she occupied hers.
As far as she knew, he hadn’t tracked her down yet.
Levi had always warned her, though, at least before he left, that as the youngest, their dad would never willingly relinquish his grip on her, like she was his vessel built from his rib.
Like he owned her, really. She thought of how he looked at her as she approached adulthood, how he squeezed her arm until it bruised when he introduced her to Silas, how he lectured her from the pulpit in front of his entire flock. And Betty knew that Levi was right.
She’d obviously been careful, but careful was exhausting, and she stared at the picture of the man who for eighteen years of her life made all decisions on her behalf—how she dressed, how she learned, what she read, whom she befriended, and worst, whom she was set to marry—and she seethed until rage practically radiated off her.
Mallory knocked on her door and said, “Betty, are you okay?” and then opened it and said, “You just screamed, and I’m trying to sleep, so do you mind keeping it down? ”
She never told Levi, and she knew he was only trying to shield her, so she didn’t blame him either.
She dyed her hair another color and got a job at the diner instead of Bloomingdale’s, and one day, three insomniacs wandered into her shift, and then everything was different.
She met Caleb and did a commercial, and maybe, yes, she was getting sloppy, or maybe she was just tired of being so wary and wanted this all to be over.
Because as long as he was still out there, as long as the threat of him forcing her back under his wing still loomed, nothing about her could ever be normal.
This morning, with dew still coating the acreage surrounding her father’s church, what she wanted most was to just be normal.
She’d hitchhiked from the bus station in Reno and was now sitting under a tree staring at the compound, which looked like a renovated farmhouse with adjoining quarters.
She would threaten him first, and if that didn’t work, she would dial Richard Watkins and say that she’d found her father, the man who started the fire that killed her mother, and if that still didn’t work, well, then she was prepared to…
she didn’t know what exactly. Then she remembered that her dad somehow discovered that Julian was looking out for her, protecting her, on standby to alert her if her dad or one of his goons got too close, close enough to grab her, bring her back to him.
And that the pious pastor then sent someone to hurt him for doing so.
Betty stood. She would do whatever she had to this morning to buy her freedom. But also, to deliver payback for Julian.
She was halfway down the hill when there was an explosion and a burst of fire, then smoke erupted from the back part of the building.
She jolted and ran back toward the protection of the tree, and when she turned, she saw Levi slip out the front door.
But Levi wasn’t alone. A woman, somewhere in the middle of her pregnancy, trailed him.
And even from her perch under the tree, she recognized her sister’s voice, yelling, “Run!”