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“You really think it’s a good idea to go with him?” Aisha asked as Jade pulled on her coat.
“I don’t care if it’s a good idea or not. I’m going to find my daughter.” The sun was just starting to rise. The volunteer teams would continue their hunt for Dez here, but Jade was convinced they wouldn’t find her. There wasn’t any reason for Jade to stay in Glennallen. Elder Keith, if not the actual perpetrator, was involved in Dez’s disappearance. She had to get to him. Had to find out what he knew.
Aisha reached out to give her a hug. “I’ll be praying for you.”
“Thanks.” Jade ran her hand over the top of her hair, wishing she had her kerchief to cover up the mess. She hadn’t looked in a mirror all morning, which was probably a good thing.
“You ready?” Ben asked, tucking his radio into his pocket.
She nodded, grateful that he’d agreed to take her with him. She still needed time to absorb the details he’d shared earlier about his father’s death, but she knew she trusted him. He might be the only man in a uniform she did trust at the moment, but it was nice to feel like she had an ally.
“My car’s right out here.”
She followed him silently, trying to remember exactly how many miles it was to Eureka, whether that was before or after the part of the Glenn Highway with that steep drop-off. Last summer, one of the other daycare workers was run off the road and had suffered quite a few injuries. It would be even worse in the winter, where the dangerous temperatures and short daylight hours made rescue attempts all the more difficult.
Ben opened the passenger door for her, a strange gesture Jade hadn’t been expecting. “Thank you,” she mumbled.
“Mind if I put on some music?” Ben asked when he was seated beside her.
Jade could only guess what kind of music a white Alaskan state trooper would listen to and hoped it wasn’t country. He pulled up a playlist on his phone, a contemporary gospel soundtrack. Jade had no complaints.
Soon they were on the road, following a caravan of officers.
“So you’re new to Glennallen?” she asked after the first song ended.
Ben nodded. “I spent a few years as a public safety officer in Kobuk, then I was ready for a change from bush life and ended up here.”
Jade figured the polite thing, the expected thing, would be to ask for more details. What made you decide to go into law enforcement? What was it like working in the bush? But she remained silent and stared at the spruce trees, spindly, sickly looking things that stretched out for miles on either side of the highway.
“What about you?” Ben finally asked. “How long have you been in Glennallen?”
“Four years now,” Jade answered, and since it would be another hour or longer to Eureka, she told him more. About the heart attack that killed her mom shortly after her dad’s murder. About needing to get away from Palmer, away from the memories.
“It sounds bizarre,” she admitted, “but every Sunday after Dad died, I’d lay awake and wonder if I should go to Morning Glory. They were the only church I knew. We were family.”
She glanced at Ben, wondering if he’d tell her how stupid she sounded. Who would ever be tempted to go back to a congregation like that?
“I can understand. In a way.” His voice was slow. Thoughtful. “After my dad died, my mom started dating this real idiot. Lazy alcoholic, real piece of trash.”
Jade tried to keep a neutral expression.
“He was abusive almost from the beginning. Not toward me or my sister,” Ben added, “but he threatened my mom nearly every day. He’d push her around, but she always made it out like it wasn’t that bad. Like since he never used his fists, it was totally justified. I hated that man, couldn’t stand the sight of him, and I didn’t get why my mom just wouldn’t leave him. Well, she tried. Once. She found out he was cheating on her, and we moved out, but two weeks later he was knocking at our apartment door telling us how sorry he was and begging for a second chance. She gave it to him. And a third chance. Then a fourth.
“My sister Beth was out of the home by then, and I moved in with her my senior year of high school. Just couldn’t stand seeing Mom put up with that jerk. For a while I thought if I stuck around, I could keep an eye on her. Protect her. Maybe try to talk her into leaving. Then I finally came to realize she was never going to walk out. He told her so many times she was fat or she was ugly or she was stupid, and he was always railing on and on about how lucky she was to have him because no other man in his right mind would ever love her, and I think after listening to those lies long enough she started to believe them.”
Jade had never compared her relationship with Morning Glory to one with an abusive partner, but the metaphor fit.
“Interestingly,” Ben went on, “my sister’s also the victim of spiritual abuse.” He used the term so freely that Jade didn’t want to admit she’d never heard the phrase before.
Another perfect fit.
“She went to UCLA for their elementary ed program, and she got tied up in this Christian campus group. I went with her a couple times. Really dynamic group. Amazing worship music. I can see why she was drawn in. But the teaching got really skewed. First it was all about how God wants all his children to be rich and prosperous, and I know there are lots of churches who emphasize that, but these were nearly all college students living in studio apartments eating Ramen every night, and they were being fed these lies by this super sleazy pastor who drove a brand-new Jaguar and gave himself a full spa treatment every week. So he’s making my sister and her friends feel guilty because they’re not praying in the blessings like he put it. But then it got even worse.
“He got so focused on material riches that he told everyone they had to stop shopping at thrift stores. That God said he wanted them all to be the head and not the tail, so they couldn’t wear secondhand clothes. I mean, who’s ever heard a sermon about where college students can buy their hoodies from, right?
“The worst part was they had this whole discipleship program, which sounds all impressive, but it went way overboard. Everybody in the church was supposed to have a discipler. It’s basically a mentor, which is a decent idea except these kids like my sister were relying on their mentors for things like telling them what major to declare or what internships to apply for. And it wasn’t asking them for advice either. You needed your discipler’s permission to do just about anything. And you don’t even want to get me started on the whole dating part of it. First of all, if you were interested in someone, you had to confess that to your discipler right away. And it had to be someone from that same campus group or it was just a temptation straight from the devil to distract you. And then your discipler would pray, and if they thought God was telling them to, they’d approach that other person’s discipler and basically make it into this whole matchmaking ordeal. Talk about creepy.
“I went to a meeting once with my sister where a college sophomore went up on stage and confessed that she and another boy from that same church group had gone on a date without getting their disciplers’ blessing, and even though they got along really well, she knew God was telling her to call it off because she’d been unsubmissive.”
Jade didn’t reply. It sounded so similar to the schemes at Morning Glory, but she had a hard time picturing the same degree of control being exerted in other congregations as well.
“The really sad part,” Ben went on, “was that this group had a lot of great things going for it. The preacher was really gifted in evangelism. He started the group my sister’s freshman year, and by the end of that first semester, something like fifty or sixty students had gotten saved. Even for a big school like UCLA, that’s amazing. It could have been great, but somewhere in there the gospel got confused with this bizarre discipleship mentality. It was a real shame.”
“How did your sister get out of it?” Jade asked.
“Beth? She didn’t. She’s still living in LA, still going to that same church. They’ve expanded from just college ministry now, although that’s still one of their primary focuses. They’ve got this huge lot set up in Hollywood, big gaudy church right in the middle of the projects down there, and they’re still doing their thing.”
“Is she happy?” Jade hoped her voice didn’t sound too wistful.
“Happy?” Ben shrugged. “I assume so, although if she wasn’t, I’m not sure how she’d manage to tell me. But she’s doing well. She gave up on education and is now some executive type for this talent agency. She’s making bank, just like her pastor told her she should be. She had a discipler at UCLA, and one morning this woman called her up and said she had a dream that Beth married this dude from their church, so now they’re together and expecting their second kid. All that from one dream.”
Jade hadn’t prepared to spend the entire drive talking, but she found herself telling Ben about Lady Sapphire. “It was the same thing with our pastor’s wife. If she had a dream, no matter what it was or how weird it sounded, people believed it.”
“Sounds a lot like what my sister went through. What kind of dreams did this Lady ... what was her name again?”
“Lady Sapphire.”
“Yeah. What kind of dreams did she have?”
Jade stretched back her memory. “All kinds. Once she had a dream that this girl who was a few years older than me was trying to seduce one of the elders. She made her come up to the front of the church and confess her sin, and then they all anointed her and laid hands on her to cast out the spirit of lust. Another time there was this guy at our church who was bidding on a construction job, and she told him she had a dream where a demon was sitting on the site of the new project, so he withdrew his bid, and then it came out that the business went bankrupt and they wouldn’t have been able to pay him. So sometimes it actually seemed like it came true.”
“Did she ever say anything or have a dream that turned out to be false?”
Jade told him about Lady Sapphire’s dream of a child to carry on her husband’s ministry. “Even into her forties, she had the elders anointing her and praying over her all the time so she could have this child. I don’t know what she’s said about it now that Pastor Mitch is dead.”
Jade stopped as a sickening, sloshing feeling returned to her stomach.
Ben glanced over at her. “Something wrong?”
She couldn’t respond.
“Did I upset you bringing up all the stuff about your church?”
“What? No, it’s not that. I was just thinking.” She let her voice trail off.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is it about your daughter?”
Her body shuddered as she let out a sigh. “I was just thinking. Lady Sapphire thought God promised Pastor Mitch a child to carry on the Morning Glory ministry, but he never managed to get her pregnant. What if she’s decided Dez is the answer to that dream of hers? What if she thinks Dez is destined to fulfill that prophecy?”
Jade watched Ben’s throat constrict as he considered her words, but he didn’t have time to answer before a voice came over his radio. Jade heard the words, but the static and the pounding of her pulse in her ears made everything difficult to understand.
“What was that?” she asked when Ben put the radio down. “Is it Elder Keith?”
This time, it was Ben’s turn to sigh loudly. “Yeah, they found his car down the side of the bluff. Major wreck.”
Jade held her breath. “Was Dez in there with him?”
“No, and it’s a good thing too. The car’s completely destroyed. Nobody could have survived.”
“Does that mean ...” Jade had a hard time finishing her thought.
Ben nodded. “Yeah. Keith Richardson is dead.”