The Father
When morning prayer circle concluded Wednesday morning, he proceeded to his office at the church to look over the paperwork Jeb had left for him. He took a seat at his desk and ran his eyes over the bank statement and the records from their sales at the farmer’s market and the country store down the road. They’d taken in two thousand dollars less this quarter, and the preceding one had been down a grand from the one before that.
That whore’s sins have cost me.
Sister Juliette’s pregnancy had not been an easy one. After the third time she hadn’t made it to the door and heaved her half-digested breakfast in the dining hall garbage can, he’d ordered her to take her meals alone in the sisters’ quarters. Her headaches and exhaustion had slowed her down, too. She’d produced only a fraction of her usual output of quilts and it was reflected in the bank balance. Those bluebonnet blankets were her specialty, and they always sold quickly. Hell, if he’d thought about it, he should have kept the one she’d made for her baby. They could’ve gotten a hundred bucks for it.
It wasn’t just her labor he’d lost, either. Having the men keep watch in the deer blinds kept them away from their woodworking and the metal forge.
Bitch cops and their bitch dog. The blanket of deception he’d so carefully weaved all these years now had a loose thread, and could unravel if he didn’t handle things the right way. There was nothing illegal about dropping a baby at a fire station. So why did they keep driving by? Were they still looking for that girl in the photo? He’d looked online but hadn’t found anything about a missing girl. Of course the police department treated runaways differently than kids who’d been abducted. They didn’t issue alerts and put their photos on the news.
Maybe he was overreacting. He wasn’t slipping, was he?
He sat up straight. Of course not.
He turned back to the numbers on the page before him. That whore had cost him enough. It was time to get her out of the silo and put her back to work.