Outside the cabin Elijah paused to pick up Mjolnir, his holy hammer, and strapped the AR-15 behind him. His eyes were bloodshot, his breath hanging around him in a cloud. He didn’t look angry to me, more like a man burdened. I wondered if the role he played in Maura’s disappearance ate at him, or regret about what he’d learned about me. Snow drifted past, a few fat lazy flakes that caught in my eyelashes.
“Are you planning to shoot me?” I said.
“I didn’t think you would come back. I wish you hadn’t.”
“There are people who know where I went,” I said, in a quiet voice that I didn’t want Roland to hear. “Who know everything, I suspect. You kill me, it will be the Weaver raid all over again. Or worse, Waco.”
It was a weak threat, but I had to get it out there. I didn’t mention Officer Sheehan. Not yet.
“Just shut up and start walking,” Elijah said, gesturing to the ridge above us. Behind us, I heard a trailer door slam open followed by the jubilant shouts of children celebrating the day’s freedom. “And be quick about it,” he added, shoving me ahead of him.
I took my time, numb inside as he marched me past the shooting range and away from the cabins and trailers. I was both frightened and relieved at the same time. This was coming to an end. All would be made known. Whatever happened here I would not be the same person when it was done, if I lived through it. I once read an article that explored what happened to guillotine victims during the Terror, the worst part of the French Revolution, when the streets of Paris ran with so much blood that the very water supply was poisoned by rotting corpses. The revolutionaries eating their own, a wheel of paranoia and death. Most of the victims went to their deaths silently, resignation weighing on them as they shuffled up the stairs of the poteau. I understood that now, the kind of torpor a sleepwalker must feel. And yet, I was more scared than I had ever been.
I slipped once coming up the steep slope and fell hard, only getting my hands out at the last moment. Ice scraped my palms and the fall took my breath. I scrabbled up before Elijah could prod me with the barrel of his rifle.
“Keep going,” Elijah said. “We’re not there yet.”
I pushed on slowly as we climbed the ridge in silence, snow from my fall seeping into my clothing. Chilled, I held myself as we trudged ahead in silence until we reached the top of the ridge.
At the summit we stood before the foundation of an old-fashioned log cabin, boulders and stones mortared in, the bare bones of timber set on top of it, the logs above my head, thick daub calked between them. The entire place had been torched, timbers charred and blackened, but the walls held fast. Even snow-covered it reeked of smoke and failure. A space had been left for a door and a couple of windows cut into the frame. Only the logs and foundation remained, the flooring dirt, the sky the only ceiling. Elijah motioned for me to step inside ahead of him.
Within the cabin a hardwood pew from a church was pushed up against one wall. A table and chairs made from hewn logs sat amid the burned remains. Gray ashes and grime coated everything. I coughed from the chalky dust our footsteps stirred up. Even if there were no floors or ceiling, the charred timber frame largely shut us off from the outer world.
I gazed out of one empty window frame. Far below us the trees thinned and I could see down into another valley awash with gold as the sun set beyond the trees. There a meadow spread out, leading to a barn and small white-clapboard farmhouse, chimney puffing in the cold. A pastoral scene. Cattle milled behind fences, steam rising from their flanks, and a person, no more than a tiny speck from here, hauled up the driveway on a snowmobile. They were faraway, but I could hear the whine of the engine.
Elijah paced behind me. “It’s a lovely view, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Maura chose this spot,” he went on in a subdued voice. “And Mother Sophie agreed to let us build here after I got out of prison. Our own place away from the others. I’ve been working on this cabin for the last year. I wanted it to be a home out of a storybook.” I didn’t know what to make of this. Maura had mentioned her worry that Elijah was obsessed with bringing them back to The Land, but why hadn’t she talked about this place if it was true that she had planned to live here? Elijah gestured with his rifle at stones tumbled against one blackened wall. “The fireplace was going to be made from river rock I hauled up myself. The loft where the children slept would be right above us. A cabin just like Little House on the Prairie. Maura loved that show. I thought this was her dream anyhow.”
“She hated this place,” I said. “She didn’t want to come back here.”
“Speak again without my asking and you won’t like what happens,” Elijah growled.
He hadn’t raised the rifle, not yet. Instead, he pulled off the shoulder strap and leaned the rifle against one charred wall. He squared his shoulders and cracked his knuckles, a sharp sound in the cold. “My plan was to have this finished before the end of the year. Before Y2K. If the world was ending, I wanted us to be on top of it all. A home where no flood could touch us. Solid ground for Maura and Sarah. One day we would build a church alongside it, a new Rose of Sharon. I imagined her singing there, her hymn rising to the rafters.” His voice broke and he trailed off. “It wrecked me when she went away. Not a few days later this place burned. If I didn’t know better I might start to think God hates me.”
Wet and shivering, I wanted to get this over with. “Why have you brought me here?”
Elijah stared at his clenched fists. “Why do you think? This right here. This cabin was our dream. It would have been ours, but someone came between us.”
I opened my mouth to say something when he swept in and punched me square in the solar plexus, a blow that dropped me to my knees. I could sense him circling above, a dark wolfish shape. When I got my breath back I climbed to my feet.
“Hurts, don’t it?” he said. “It doesn’t compare to what I’ve been feeling these last few months. I need to remind you of the ground rules. You don’t speak unless I ask you a direct question. You will not offer your opinions otherwise.”
I took in a trembling breath and watched him, wary.
“You did this. You shat all over my dream.” He sniffed, as if drawing strength from my pain. “How long were you sleeping with her?”
I started to say, “It wasn’t supposed to . . .” when he hit me again, a blow that caught me in the ribs. I felt sinew tearing freshly inside me. I scrabbled again in the snow and ashes of the dirt floor. I didn’t think he’d broken them, not yet, but another strike like that and my fragile ribs would snap like spongy twigs. Yet I would not stay down. I inched closer to the wall and hauled myself up.
“You will not make excuses,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it. She was a married woman. She had a child.”
What he said was true. Had I ever really given her marriage much thought? Elijah had been a villain in her stories, a dangerous and controlling person she needed to break away from. But the man before me was a man speaking from a place of deep pain. For a short while, I had even come to think of him as an older brother. “How long was it going on? How many times?”
“The last six months,” I said in a thin, nasal voice. “Almost half a year.”
I saw the surprise register in his eyes. He cocked his fist. I didn’t flinch before it. “I need you to tell me everything. No shitty rationalizations. How it happened. All of it.”
So I did. I told him about closing late at night, about the stories she had told me and how those stories drew us closer. The songs she sang and how I idealized her as a musician and a mother. How our relationship started as a friendship that deepened into something else, all emotion at first. How I romanticized her with every fiber of my being. How she had turned me away, gently at first. I didn’t go into intimate details. That story belonged to Maura and I alone. I wouldn’t give it up or change a damn thing about what happened. Or so I thought then, hurting and defiant.
Elijah continued to pace as I talked, circling. We were so far from anything in this wrecked cabin. No one would hear me scream. And yet I felt for him. I could imagine that loft taking shape, Sarah’s delighted squeal as she climbed the ladder into her own space. Maura hanging wash on the line, the wind whipping her hand-sewn dresses, billowy as sails, her belly swelling with another happy pregnancy as Elijah came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her and they looked out on a view that stretched into forever. That was his dream for her. I had ruined all that. I didn’t see his next punch coming. He clocked me in the side of the head, his ring finger ripping my earlobe as his fist lashed past.
This time I went down and didn’t get up right away. My ears rang. Blood poured down my neck into my collar. “So you thought to replace me,” he said, his breathing ragged. “Because I wasn’t worthy.”
When I touched my ear my hand came away drenched with blood. I stood, wavering, and held it out before me, remembering the last time I’d seen Maura alive. Lucien, you are going to have to take me to the hospital. Her voice, shaking. “She was afraid,” I said. Blood seeped from my fingers to the ashes below. “That’s why she ran. That’s why I’m better than you.”
“That what she told you, huh?” He stepped closer. “I knew her from the time she was sixteen years old. You didn’t know her. She had already had experiences then I couldn’t imagine. She was my first and only love, but already there was something hard in her. She liked it rough. Liked to get me worked up. Oh, she could be mean.”
Elijah didn’t punch me, instead jabbing his finger into my chest, forcing me to step back. Until I was up against the rear wall. “Like that, but with words. Her complaints. Her refusal to be happy with anything I did. A couple of times she even slapped me. What man would take that without responding?”
I thought of Maura, holding herself. Married people fight, she’d said. “Not you,” I said.
“Not any real man. So I would grab her hand, bend her wrist back.” He did the same to me as he spoke. He shoved me against the wall, his hands on my chest, his face right in mine, his breath hot against my cheek. Like he might kiss or bite me. I was too dizzied by pain to fight him, but a new panic entered me. I had steeled myself for pain, had expected the punches, but not this strange, brutal intimacy. “Hard,” he said in a low voice. “She would get this gleam in her eye. She liked it. Sometimes she fought back, slapping and clawing. Then we would be tearing at each other’s clothing and I would take her standing up. That how it was for you?”
I didn’t dare try to defend myself or even speak. His voice was filled with such animal desperation that when his hands gripped my shirt, I thought he might tear it away. His face so close to mine I smelled his stale breath. “No, of course it wasn’t. Maura knew how to read people, how to become what she thought they wanted. In the early days of the movement, both of us in it together, she was a warrior like me. My feathercut skinbyrd. But she changed. Motherhood changed her and time. And prison changed me. Both of us changing so much that a gap grew between us until we were like strangers to one another.”
“Is that why you killed her?”
Elijah whipped his forehead forward so it cracked against the crown of my skull. I slumped against the wall, but he held me up, his hands closing around my throat. “That what you think? That I murdered my own wife? The mother of my daughter? I’ve done a lot of bad things. I’ve hurt people. Far worse than I’ve hurt you so far. I’ve done things I will answer for in the afterlife. But I didn’t kill her,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I have as many questions as you. Tell me again about the last night you saw her.”
Dizzied by blood loss and pain, I did my best. I told him about how she had been feeling sick. Her gums bleeding. How she knew something was wrong inside of her. How she came out of the staff bathroom with blood on her hands and asked me to take her to the hospital. How I didn’t know she’d stolen the money. How I didn’t know it would be the last time I ever saw her.
This whole time he stayed pressed up against me, as if leaning on me. “You don’t understand what’s happening here, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Here,” he said, and he unbuttoned the side of his quilted coverall, untucking the flannel shirt beneath it. He took hold of my right hand, squeezing tighter when I tried to pull away, squeezing so hard I thought I heard bones pop. He forced my hand up under his shirt. I felt cold, clammy skin. The tautness of his abdomen and just above it something hard and metallic. Taped against his belly. A few wires trailing away. He shoved my hand away and tucked his shirt back in. “You know what it is?”
I nodded. I only wanted to lie down, press my aching head and face into the snow. I had come here for answers about Maura, not this. Elijah’s voice faded in and out. “I started wearing it about a month before Maura left. You’re right about her being scared. But not of me. Roland and others have something big in the works. They want to make sure we have enough of a stockpile so they plan on hitting a few banks over in Wisconsin—Superior, most likely—maybe farther south all the way down to Eau Claire. They think they’ll get away with it because of the chaos Y2K will bring. No one will care about a few bank robbers when there are riots in the streets and cities burning. So they started asking Maura questions about bank procedures. Operational stuff. Maura freaked.”
He stepped away from me as he said this.
“Any bank robbery involves the Feds,” I told him. “They’ll catch all of you, eventually.”
“No shit. That’s why I went to the Feds first. Maura pulled away from me. At the time I thought she was afraid of what was going to happen. I suspected something was wrong. She’d been cold to me for so long. But I didn’t think she would try to leave me. I didn’t want to add to her fears. I didn’t know about you.”
My world was suffused with light, pouring in through the cracks in my brain. Yet the migraines had not returned despite the beating I’d taken. Slumped against the wall, bleeding and cold, I only wanted to lie down and sleep. The falling dark cast his face in shifting shadows.
“Why couldn’t she just wait?” he went on. “Hold on for a few months until I could gather what the Feds wanted. I need you to believe me. In the beginning I thought your coming here was a good thing. A distraction. All that nonsense about prophecy. They stopped worrying about the ways I had become different. They stopped trying to change me back into the man I was before prison. But I just don’t understand how she could leave me and Sarah. How could she and not send some kind of word?”
“Maybe she didn’t,” I said.
Elijah stiffened suddenly, twisting his head around.
“What?” I said, my voice rasping.
He held a finger over his mouth as he reached behind for Mjolnir. “Who’s out there?” he called a second later.
“Eli,” Roland’s voice sounded just beyond the door. “Why don’t you come on out of there? Bring that boy with you. We need to talk.”
Elijah didn’t move. “How long you been out there, Roland?”
“Long enough,” he said, his voice coming from a different spot outside. He was moving around, perhaps trying to throw Elijah off, his steps whispery in the snow.
Elijah leaned in close to me. “These people are worse than you know. Can you run?”
“I think so,” I whispered. My head pulsed with pain, but I could see and move. I wanted to ask him why he was helping me, but the words caught inside me. Elijah gestured to the window, toward the farm I’d seen in the valley below. Run, he mouthed.
“Come on out of there, Eli,” Roland called again. “Caroline has Sarah down at the trailers. They’re waiting for us. Sarah wants to see her daddy again. You’d like that, too.”
Elijah took hold of me and shoved me over to the window.
Then his arms were under me and I scrambled for the windowsill, feeling charcoaled timbers crumble under my grip, and Elijah gave a heave from under me, propelling me up and out. I landed awkwardly on the other side, my boots crunching into a snowbank. I didn’t run though. I couldn’t.