As night closed in, Harl Evans sat back and watched Mike as he continued to read from Jason’s laptop. The set of the man’s jaw and the narrowing of his eyes told Harl that if Jason wasn’t already dead, he would be soon. He’d seen Mike angry before, but never like this.
“How dare he!” Mike looked up and glared at Harl. “You won’t believe what he’s written. About me!”
Harl fought to keep his expression neutral, swallowing his incredulity at Mike’s naiveté. Of course Jason hated him. Who wouldn’t after what Mike had done? The man had begun to believe his own press releases, statements he’d made up himself:
“Michael the Archangel, the messenger God has sent to give you abundant life!”
“Listen to the anointed words of Michael, God’s archangel, and find life!”
“Let Michael the Archangel pray for you, and God will rain blessings beyond belief.”
Harl had always liked that one with all the b words at the end. So did Mike. “Blessings beyond belief” had become one of his favorite lines, as in, “Send your gifts, and I will give you blessings beyond belief!”
Not God; Mike.
For a charlatan as sharp as Mike at shearing the sheep, it was amazing how he craved the approval and adoration of the shivering and newly poor lambs. Why one lamb might turn into a snarling wolf was a mystery to him.
“All I ever showed him was kindness.”
Harl’s stomach turned. His noble leader sounded like a thwarted, whiny child.
“And this is how he planned to repay me?”
Looked like one too with his lip pushed out in an angry pout.
Mike went back to reading. There were lots of disastrous things about The Pathway and about Mike’s misuse of the organization’s finances, but Jennie’s chapter was the pièce de résistance. With great emotion Jason told how he loved Jennie and wanted to marry her. He wrote of her sweet spirit and gentle heart. According to Jason, her desire to marry him was as strong as his to marry her—if you could believe him, and Harl did. He’d seen both Jason and Jennie plead with Mike. And anyone who read the book would believe too.
Mike saw Jason’s request to marry Jennie as a challenge to his authority, especially when the kid asked that Mike do away with the premarriage night. Mike refused the request, choosing one of the older men for her as a mark of his position of unquestioned and unquestionable leader. And the premarriage night was to go on as always.
“Allow one couple the right of selection,” he complained to Harl, “and before you know it, others will demand the same privilege. The beginning of the end.”
When three of Mike’s lieutenants went for Jennie the night before her marriage, Jason followed them to Mike’s quarters in spite of Mike’s direct order that Jason be confined to his room. Jason forced his way into Mike’s garish bedroom with the huge bed draped in red gauzy material and topped with the velvet quilt that Marty had made, all red and beige and white.
Harl couldn’t understand that quilt. Polygamy, okay. Great, in fact. But making the covering for the bed where your husband took one young woman after another? Marty was sicker than Mike, who was only doing what came naturally as the ultimate male authority figure.
Harl watched from the video room as Jason pleaded and Jennie begged and Mike became ever more furious with them both. Harl watched the lieutenants drag Jason off by force. Then he’d watched Mike take the hysterical Jennie against her will.
She was buried in the compound cemetery.
Now, miles and weeks away in Seaside, Harl looked up as rain began to beat on the windows, pulling him from memories of that unbelievable night.
“What if Jason wasn’t the one who took your missing disc, Mike?” As Harl had gone over that night just now, he realized Jason couldn’t have gotten to the video room. He’d been dragged away and locked up. All three of the men who dragged him off said he was never out of their sight the rest of that night.
Mike looked startled. “If it wasn’t him, who?”
“What if it was Andrea?” After all, she went missing too. And she was a thorn in everyone’s side, a rebel through and through.
Mike scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s a kid, and a girl at that.”
“She escaped when no one escapes. And she’s managed to stay hidden for several weeks. Of course, she didn’t have a family to rush home to like Peoples. And we didn’t try to find her. We were all better off without her. Even her father agreed.”
“Say it was Andrea, which I can’t believe. How would she even know about the disc?”
“I don’t know,” Harl admitted. “But Jason was never alone all that night.”
Mike rubbed his forehead, his anger gone. For the first time, Harl saw doubt in him. “Are we running out of time, Harl? Is it time to cut and run?”
Yes! “Let me finish what I have to do, and then we can fade away. Just a couple of days more.”
“It’s going smoothly?”
“Very. It’ll provide a nice tidy income.” To join the income from all the other deals he’d worked with The Pathway’s funds, all funneled neatly through untraceable offshore accounts.
Mike nodded. “Good. Now if we only knew where to find Andrea, we could tie up that loose end.”
Harl smiled. Much as he couldn’t believe it, he had found that particular needle in the haystack. The odds had to be a million to one against, like walking down the street in New York City and bumping into your first grade teacher from San Francisco or like winning the one hundred million dollar lottery.
But she was here, and he’d found her.