He reread his notes from the scene.
Pastor Aaron Jones presumed dead—last seen on-site. Recovery of his wife’s body confirmed. Explosion from unknown source started in the boiler room near the kitchen and raced out of control (*Accelerant? Arson? Electrical issue?), taking down the chapel, then half of the main building, within minutes. Several unidentifiable bodies at morgue. Too charred, waiting on dentals. Youngest daughter, Elizabeth, has not been located.
He reviewed the asterisks. They’d never pinpointed what started it. The church wasn’t up to code and hadn’t been subjected to an inspection in years. There weren’t any obvious signs of arson, but then the executive board of the ministry wasn’t particularly interested in answers to begin with. Richard argued that a dead Aaron Jones was honestly better than an alive Aaron Jones.
“Seriously, come on, man, you know that,” Richard had said, running his foot through the soot by the coroner’s van. “These doomsday cultists, I mean, one fewer of them in the world isn’t the worst thing.”
“Right,” Julian had said, nodding. “But that doesn’t mean that murder isn’t murder. Arson isn’t arson. We still do have jobs to do.”
“You know that they basically marry women into enslavement, right?”
“I do, but does that mean that we just condone murder?”
Richard shrugged. He’d always been a little less by the bookthan Julian, which was actually what made them a great team. “Maybe it was. I don’t think I’d blame someone. From what I’ve gleaned, they were about one step away from that Nike cult who all took a permanent nap. You know, Heaven’s Gate.” He cleared his throat and spit on the dirt. “Or Waco. Take your pick. Good riddance.”
Regardless, no one was talking, and within a week, there were three dead bodies in the Hudson River, and Julian and Richard were told to focus their energies there since it was a suspected mob hit, and they’d been shadowing the ringleader for the better part of a year. Their report on the church fire cited electrical issues, and Julian pretended to make peace with the loose ends. But Julian had never been someone who made peace with loose ends.
He flipped to another photo.
Aaron Jones with his wife and five children.
They found his watch, his wedding band, matching DNA at the scene. It wasn’t unreasonable that he was burned to ash and dust like 60 percent of the building; they’d seen that before in fireballs. But it also wasn’t unreasonable to think that he hadn’t been. And Julian believed in his bones that he hadn’t been.
He held his thumb and pointer finger in a loop, moving from face to face to face.
He stayed there for a long time, his fingers circling Aaron Jones’s youngest, who was unsmiling, discontent.
He couldn’t believe his luck when he tracked her down a few months back, so close to him. At a diner on the Upper West Side. Elizabeth. Betty.
What had she been thinking about when this photo was taken? What was she thinking about now? And more important, when should he tell her what he knew?
30
Night Eleven
Betty
Betty still hadn’theard back from Levi despite leaving him another message after Thanksgiving. She’d tried emailing him, but it had gotten bounced back. In the past, whenever he had dumped an email address, he’d always let her know the new one. That he still had the same phone number was a miracle. The old phone they used to communicate was dead on her end; she’d lost the charger in the move to Zeke’s, hadn’t had time to track one down at some outdated electronics store somewhere in the outer boroughs since she didn’t trust ordering from the internet. So she had to keep hopinghoping hopingthat he would answer her calls from her cell.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, so she wiped her hands on a dish towel after bussing a table and grabbed it. Every time it vibrated these days, her cortisol skyrocketed. She had to find a way to calm down. She had to find a way to calm down even if she didn’t hear back from Levi. She just didn’t know how to do that. Maybe this was what your body just didwhen it hadn’t gotten the rest it demanded; maybe it just stopped differentiating between the red flags and the white ones. Levi had been the first of them to get out, and when she fled two years later, when she was given that very small window of time to run in the backdrop of the chaos of the fire, she’d always felt protected because he’d been able to do it too. Now? Everything felt unsteady. Everything was a bright blood-red flag.
The text was from Natalie. False alarm for panic. A link to the cut of her laundry detergent commercial. Betty pressed play and watched a different version of herself bike down a Manhattan street and get splashed with fake mud. She wondered if anyone who knew her before would recognize her now. Maybe not. Maybe she could pull this off unscathed.
Looks amazing!!Natalie had said.
Then:Next Wednesday at 3:30pm. Tampon commercial audition.She’d included the address.Pay will be 25k+.
Betty’s heart nearly stopped right there by the diner’s dishwasher. She knew that she couldn’t keep risking exposure, but twenty-five grand meant that she could disappear forever. To a nice little island in the Caribbean where she could subsist off mango and coconut and work at a fish shack. It was beside the point that she didn’t know how to swim, or that she had never boarded a plane before. Permanent freedom was so close she could feel it at her fingertips. She was well aware that she was growing increasingly attached to Zeke, to Sybil, to Julian and even to Caleb. She thought that would just be sex, inexperienced as she was, but it turned out that she actually really liked him. But the really-liking-him part was the problem. Really liking all of them was the problem, the problem that Levi had always warned her about.If you’re going to do this, he’d written over email a few days after she’d thrown a few necessities into her backpack, grabbed the secret stash of money from theirpantry and raced through the woods on her bike to the next town over,everything but staying undetected needs to be disposable.
For the past two months, she admittedly had grown used to her setup with Zeke. She liked his apartment for obvious reasons—its thermostat set at a very pleasant seventy-two, the way the fridge was always restocked seemingly by a genie, the cotton percale sheets that felt like she was at a five-star resort. If she’d ever been to a five-star resort, which she had not.
Her parents had once hosted a retreat at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. She hadn’t been invited, though Patience, her husband, and her oldest brothers, Noah and Jacob, went along because they were adults by then and part of the whole thing. Patience’s husband, Matthew, had wormed his way into her father’s inner circle, possibly the heir apparent, despite Noah and Jacob being the obvious picks. Betty thought her dad liked the sick thrill of the three of them fighting harder and harder for his approval. But anyway, the Greenbrier. For a long time, Betty thought maybe she imagined the memory of her mother packing her father’s suitcase while he read her the agenda of the retreat—something about loyalty tests, charitable donations, baptisms and blood oaths, which Betty thought she must have misunderstood. But in the ensuing years, she’d digest that she heard everything exactly correctly. She’d just been taught to question herself so often that she doubted her memory in so many ways. Once she got to New York, a coworker at the Bloomingdale’s perfume counter went on and on about a boy she’d been dating who was a “total gaslighter,” and Betty, in her naïveté, had thought this meant that he, like, blew things up. Which set her hair on end for obvious reasons. When she asked her coworker if that was okay, someone who was into arson, her coworker had giggled and explained what she actually meant.Oh dear, Betty remembered thinking,that was my entire childhood.
Tonight, she sighed and put the audition into her calendar.Twenty-five thousand dollars.Even Levi would agree that some risks were worth taking.
Awesome, thank you for thinking of me!she typed back to Natalie.I won’t let you down!
The bell clanged from the front door, and she hastily tucked her phone into her apron, grabbed some menus that weren’t too sticky and pushed out to the front.
