Nell said, “Straight up, just imagine how you’d feel if you were Ruth Wild.”
“That’s why I’m here. I thought I would try to talk to Ruth.”
“Yikes, Reeno, I don’t envy you,” Nell said, all banter aside.
“Probably not on Sunday,” my mom said. “I think they’re in church all morning.”
“But not all day,” I said. It was after two in the afternoon by then.
“I’m sure they get to talk on Sundays if not plow the fields or sew on buttons,” my father said. He was confusing charismatic Christians (which Ruth was, as her husband was the founder of the megachurch Starbright Ministry not far from our house).
“Would you come with me? I’m still the kid she knew from high school, at least to her. I’ve never had to question someone who’s a friend about something so awful.”
My father said, “I’m sure it’s fine, Irene. I’m sure it’s not violating some holy order.” My dad was an atheist evangelist, if there could even be such a thing. All religion was a scam. He disliked Felicity’s stepfather, Roman, on principle. Rev. Wild, a fundamentalist preacher, was the founder of the Starbright Ministry, which started as a country church and grew into an empire on the dime of the faithful. It now boasted its own school, ice rink, gyms, swimming pools, a missionary training center, even a TV studio.
“Ruth couldn’t have known what Felicity was getting up to,” my mom said. “But yes, back in the day, I used to hate facing people I was scared of but not as much as the ones I was sorry for. Sure, I’ll go with you. I could use the exercise.” She walked and ran on a treadmill for two miles five days a week. Her fitness was a witness to me. “You brought boots, right?” I had not, of course. But Miranda produced some that “still had a lot of life left in them.”
Nell said, “I only go out in snow if there’s a ski lodge involved.”
So Miranda and I stomped our way through the new powder—for Nell was correct, there was a ton of snow, and what dreamworld had I witnessed from my window?—until we got to the campus of Starbright Ministry.
The place was usually a hive. On Sundays, there were at least three off-duty police directing traffic. And even on days when there weren’t any church services, there were always classes and study groups and athletic events for the students of the Starbright Academy.
There wasn’t a single car in the parking lot.
We kicked a path through the snow down to the lakefront chapel where summer revivals were conducted in a lighted white tent that extended from the open doors. There was not a soul, pardon me, in sight.
“Let’s go over to the rectory,” Miranda said, and we did, the heavy fall of snow under the evergreens on the way to Ruth’s house needing some real thigh burn to push through.
My mom was curious. She had never seen it up close. Even I had only been inside the rectory once, a memorable unplanned visit. The house was a gorgeous big pile of a Georgian made from lemony brick with dark blue shutters and trim tall casement windows side by side on both levels and a curved pillared porch roofed by a walk-out balcony above. I could hear my dad grumbling.
The walk had not been shoveled. There was no car in the driveway, no snow disturbed by the attached garage. I took pictures with my phone, of the front of the house and a shot down a short rise to the massive, also deserted, tabernacle.
“Come on,” I urged my mother. “Let’s knock.” We used the door knocker, in the shape of a fish. We rang the doorbell. If this had been a ghost story, or a different kind of crime story, the sound would have echoed within, and we would have caught a glimpse of a wraith through the windows flanking the front door.
Instead, no response. No movement. But then, I recalled, it always looked that way: pristine, like a movie set for the home of a good pastor reaping the rewards of the prosperity gospel he preached—for the faithful, rewards on earth, rewards in heaven.
It was so different from the slightly shabby house the Wilds lived in when they were our neighbors on Pine Street. Felicity and I sometimes did our homework at her kitchen table, Felicity helping me with chemistry over her mom’s teasing objections. Four or five times a month, we had a sleepover, but now that I really thought of it, I was never invited to sleep over at Felicity’s. In fact, I’d only once seen her room, nudging the door open when I went to use the upstairs bathroom. What I glimpsed didn’t look as though it belonged to an ordinary girl. There were no posters or piles of clothes or pyramids of cosmetic bottles. Everything was white. On the walls were a few line drawings of birds. The one I remember was of the horrifying cruel face of a shoebill stork, a bird, Felicity later told me, that grows as tall as a small adult human being, that eats baby crocodiles, and is so ferocious that, as a nestling, it kills its siblings to achieve dominance.
“Maybe we should call the police?” Miranda asked me now.
“Wait.” I scrambled up on the railing and peered over the café curtains through the clean upper panes of a window. Sun abruptly broke through then, sending a shaft of light into an empty livingroom. The single piece of furniture was an old ladder-back chair stacked with what looked like a month’s worth of mail. I jumped down. “There’s no one in there,” I told Miranda, and then asked her, “Do you know anybody who goes to church here?”
“To say hi to in the grocery store maybe but I wouldn’t have their numbers.”
Just then, as if in answer to a... whatever, a man and woman in a Jeep with a snowplow scraped into the driveway. We waved. They waved. They made no attempt to get out of the car. I waved again and called, “We need some help here!” Their glacial slowness as they climbed out of the car proclaimed reluctance as eloquently as a sign. As they approached, I called, “I’m Irene Bigelow and this is Miranda, my mom. We’re friends of the Wilds. It seems like they’re not here. Did something happen?”
After a stretched-out moment, the woman, stern, with chopped gray hair said, “You might say that.”
“What happened? Are they hurt?” I thought,Somebody’s done for.
“Not in the way you mean,” she said.
“What then? I need to find them. It’s about their daughter, Felicity.”
“We know about Felicity. We are praying for her,” the woman said, as the man pulled a snow shovel out of the Jeep.
“Are the younger kids okay?”
