Nineteen

“Let’s go get them now,” I said. Luke could help; he would help. “If it makes you feel better, I promise we’ll come back for Eden. You have my word.”

“We can’t. Not yet. We need to give my father some time to let his guard down.”

“How long?” I asked again. In my mind, right now was the perfect time. I couldn’t shake the vision of Luke and Mike locked in that shed, screaming with no one around to hear them. Freezing as the temperature dropped with nightfall, huddled into each other, hungry and tired but unwilling to sleep. The image was terrifying, but like staring at the wreckage of a deadly crash, I couldn’t seem to pull away.

“Dee,” Joseph said, shaking me. I hadn’t realized he was trying to get my attention. I was too lost in my living nightmare to even hear him speak.

I looked up and met his stare, pleading with him to take my side and go get them now. “They don’t have any food or water. It’s freezing out. They’ll—”

“No they won’t,” Joseph interrupted. “I’ve survived out there a lot longer.”

He took my hand and led me over to the chair, then picked up the papers outlining my new life and laid them on the dresser for me to see.

I stared down at the papers, the words blurring into one giant black spot. I went to say something, to argue my case for leaving right now, when he put his fingers to my lips, stopping me.

“Trust me, Dee, please. Play along for a little while. Like I said, once he lets his guard down, we can take Eden and slip out.”

Somewhere in this messed-up conversation, I’d come to the terrifying conclusion that I might have to give up control. Maybe Joseph was right—sometimes you had to place your faith in the untrustworthy to survive.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Memorize this,” he said. “If you don’t, none of us have a chance.”

I glanced at the papers, scanning for the information that seemed to be the most important. If I’d had a month, maybe I could’ve memorized it all. But less than a few hours wasn’t nearly enough time.

Joseph handed me the clothes Elijah had set out. I took them and exhaled. I got why he couldn’t leave his sister behind, understood more than he probably realized. And I wasn’t saying that I didn’t want to help. I just wasn’t sure I could.

“Can I ask you some questions?” I asked, and he nodded. “Why is your father keeping such close tabs on Eden? He pretty much said that it was you who would eventually lead this town, so why does he care so much about her?”

“She’s important to my father. Valuable. She’s the only daughter of our … ” He paused only long enough to correct himself. “The only daughter of this town’s prophet. The first girl to be born to the Hawkins family in over three generations.”

I shook my head, not understanding what he was getting at. I was my father’s only daughter. Hell, I was his only child, and that didn’t seem to make a difference to him or his fists.

“My father protects her, spares her from the disciplinary actions most of us receive. He wants to keep her thoughts as pure as her body. Eden has no reason to be afraid of him, no reason to think about leaving.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Joseph was putting both our lives on the line for his sister, and she didn’t want to leave. “So let me get this straight. You dragged me in here, risking not only my life but Luke’s and Mike’s, and your sister wants to stay ?”

His face fell. Joseph knew what he was doing, what he was asking of me, and for once I was glad to see a flash of shame. “You don’t understand, Dee. She’s young, barely twelve. She has no idea what he has planned for her or the discipline a husband is expected to exact on his wife. My mother hid it from her. He’ll marry her off in less than two years as a way to secure the most influential of his followers to him. She won’t survive it. She can’t.”

I thought back to when I was twelve and remembered how hard it was to find the strength to get up and leave everything behind. It took me an entire year to do it, to finally admit to a judge what my father had done to me and ask to be taken away from him for good. Those were things no child should ever have to do, and yet I had.

Joseph handed me the skirt Elijah had laid out and motioned for me to get up. “You need to get dressed and start reading.”

I slipped my shoes from my feet and waited for Joseph to head for the door. He caught my look and turned his back, but didn’t leave.

“Can I get a little privacy?” I asked.

“Nope. I’m staying. You’re safer with me in here,” he argued. “Now go on and change.”

My cheeks flushed as I undid the button of my jeans and hastily stripped them off. Tossing my shirt aside, I grasped the cotton shirt and yanked it down over my head then pulled on the skirt.

“You can turn around now,” I said as I twisted my hair into an ugly braid. “And I have more questions for you.”

“I figured you would. Go ahead,” he said.

“These people who are supposed to be my parents—Samuel and Abeline Smith—who are they?”

Joseph shrugged. “I have no idea. There was a couple who died in a house fire about ten years back. Their last name was Smith, but I think the husband’s name was Nathaniel or something. And I don’t think they had any children, but then again, my father could’ve fabricated the whole thing. Knowing him, they never existed.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered. “He makes up entire families? How is that even possible? How has he never been found out?”

“What’s to find out?” Joseph asked as he handed me the pair of clogs I was expected to wear.

I grabbed the clogs from his hand and jammed my feet into them. “Oh, I don’t know, kidnapping? Maybe child abuse? Neglect? Murder? Take your pick.”

“And who would report it?” he asked, unfazed.

His question was so honest, yet so unfathomable. “So you’re saying that no one here, not one person in God knows how many years, ever realized that your father is nuts? That what he’s doing is wrong?”

“I never said that, but you’ve got to go some distance to find a town that he doesn’t control.”

“What does that even mean?” I snapped. Joseph’s tone was serious, but I didn’t have the time or the patience to play twenty questions. I thought back to the last town we’d passed, the one with an abundance of Twinkies and the gas station we didn’t use. They’d seemed normal, friendly.

“I’ve been told that my Grandfather wasn’t as strict of a leader as my father, that for generations several of the men were allowed to work outside of Purity Springs. All their money went into Purity Springs’ communal pool, but they worked in neighboring towns, nonetheless.”

I nodded; that would explain how the town survived, financially anyway. “What changed? Why aren’t people allowed to leave anymore?”

“My father happened. When he took over, he called them all back. He said the risk of being exposed to the true evils of the world was too great, and that he needed them close by, where he could protect them.”

“So that was what, like, seventeen years ago? A lot can change in seventeen years.”

“Not in those towns,” Joseph continued, his attention flicking toward the window. “He left two people outside, two people he could trust. His brothers. One is the sheriff in a town about fifty miles north of here called Camden Hills. The other sits on the town council of a tiny farming community to the east. Other than those two towns, there’s no one around here to even notice us.”

That made absolutely no sense. Surely anybody who had the chance to live outside this place would never come back, never mind help Elijah. “I get that they’re his brothers and all, but in their jobs, they must interact with people from outside this town all the time. They know we’re not all evil.”

“They grew up here,” Joseph said matter-of-factly.

What? Was he drinking his own Kool-Aid? You couldn’t tell me that being born and raised here meant you couldn’t see the truth. Couldn’t see the real Elijah. His mom had, and if what Joseph was saying was true, then he had as well.

I threw my hands out, dismissing his answer. “Not buying it.”

“Their families live here, Dee. My aunts … my cousins all live here in Purity Springs.”

I tried to wrap my brain around this, around the notion of two men, intelligent enough to hold decent jobs, leaving their families behind in this town with a madman. I couldn’t.

“Do they want to leave?” I asked, wondering if their wives were part of the group Joseph’s mom had planned to come back for. “The families?”

“No.”

His answer left little room for reply, so I let it go and moved on to something more pressing. “So why not go farther, skip those two towns and keep going?”

He didn’t answer immediately, just studied me for a minute as if judging the validity of my question. “Come here,” he said and held out his hand.

I followed him over to the window above the bed. He leaned over and pulled the curtains back, gesturing for me to have a look. “Do any of them look abused to you? Unhealthy? Miserable? From the outside, there’s nothing to report.”

I peered out the window, squinting against the mid-day sun. The street was littered with people, and he was right—not a single one looked beaten down or broken. They looked … content.

Across the street was the bank. An older man was hanging up a closed sign while another was on a ladder, changing what appeared to be the bulb in a streetlight. A young girl, probably no older than seven, was sweeping the front steps of the tiny diner, smiling at Elijah as he walked past. Then a car passed by, pulled into the gas station, and actually got gas.

“When?” I pressed my face to the glass, wondering when this town had gone from completely abandoned to fully operational. “When did all of this happen? When did they all come back out?”

“About ten minutes after I brought you in.”

Joseph must’ve seen the confused look cross my face, because he eased me down onto the bed and waited for my breathing to slow before he continued. “The alarms that were going off when you came into town—I pulled them.”

I nodded. He’d already told me that.

“They’re our way of alerting people of an emergency. No different from what other small towns have, I suppose.”

“Um hmm,” I mumbled, not bothering to tell him that normal people, people who took advantage of things like phones and TVs, had something called the emergency broadcast system and Weather Bug, but whatever.

“We have one police officer and a volunteer fire department. They all live here. They were all born and raised here. We use the sirens to alert them when they’re needed. Works if there’s a bad storm coming or if my father needs to gather his people.”

“Can they hear it in the neighboring towns?” I asked, hoping that somebody with no blood ties to Purity Springs would get curious and come looking.

“No, but it doesn’t matter. If my father needs them, his brothers will come.”

“And?” I said, waving my hands to hurry him along.

“When the sirens go off, everyone gathers in the chapel. It didn’t take my father long to figure out I was missing and that I pulled the alarm. He held everybody there until he could figure out what I was up to.”

“The car,” I muttered.

“Yeah, that’s when he found your car. But once he decided the town was safe, after I brought you in, things went back to normal.”

“And they believe him,” I said, gesturing toward the window. “They actually believe the crap he feeds them?”

“Yes.”

It was one word. Complete and absolute. Brooking no challenge.

I thought of this town, of the one hundred and forty-eight residents worshiping Elijah, and I groaned. “Oh my God. Here I was thinking all along that the only person we needed to beat was your dad. But there’s a whole town out there. Every single one of them thinks I belong to them, that I was born and raised for them!”

“And two towns beyond that,” he added, reminding me how far his father’s hold extended. “It’s possible, though. I don’t know exactly how yet, but it’s possible to get out of here. It’s happened before, and it can happen again.”