The Macon Telegraph
June 12th, 2021
By Annabeth Collins
Firefighters were called to the scene of the Revivalist Church last night shortly after 8 p.m. to find the building in flames. It appears, however, that the trucks arrived too late to salvage the church and its outposts, as both floors were smoldering when the trucks pulled up. According to eyewitnesses, the fire may have started in the kitchen or utility room but spread so quickly that many parishioners, who were having a Friday Sabbath meal, had no choice but to run, leaving behind their personal effects. By the time the firefighters were able to contain the fire, the entirety of the church had burned to little more than smolder. This morning, on-site, the air was still choked with smoke, and locals gathered to mourn not just the dead but also the house of worship, which had more than its share of scandal surrounding it. Local police have made several visits to the church to speak with Pastor Aaron Jones, who as yet is unaccounted for after the fire. While the sheriff refuses to comment on what prompted those visits and whether or not Pastor Jones willingly spoke with his officers, there has been years-long speculation that the church is less religious in nature and instead is a front for what some in the area describe as a cult. There have been rumored reports of abuse and forced marriage, among other allegations. Among the confirmed dead is Pastor Jones’s wife, who ran the afterschool program for girls. Her body was recovered earlier this morning.
“Please leave us alone,” Patience Morrow said, when interviewed on-site. Her husband, Matthew Morrow, sits on the church board, and if Pastor Jones is found deceased, is presumed to assume the leadership role. “My family is grieving the loss of our mother, along with several other church members. We are searching for my father and my sister. Have you no regard for our pain?”
Nearly twenty-four hours after the fire, Pastor Jones is still missing, and there remain multiple hot spots within the fire site that cannot yet be accessed. One firefighter was hurt on scene, treated at a local hospital and is in stable condition. This remains a developing story.
39
Night Fifteen
Sybil
December 17th
Sybil had questions.She had so many questions. Because try searching for a Levi Jones online, and you’ll get basically nowhere. Sybil took it as a personal affront that other than Betty’s sister, Patience, all of her siblings had such roundly generic names that she’d have better luck searching the haystack for a needle than googling them. Patience, it seemed, still lived near Macon, near the once-charred church, which had been rebuilt with both insurance money and congregation donations, according to the Revivalist Newsletter, which she found on Reddit. Patience’s husband, Matthew, was indeed now the lead pastor, though information about the church beyond that was murky at best. A follow-up article inThe Macon Telegraphtried to unpack the rumors about a doomsday cult, but few of the members were willing to speak on the record, and the quote that most haunted Sybil was the anonymous one in the last paragraph that stated, “Pastor Aaron always told us that we were just passing through this ground on our way to a better place, so the way I see it, this was God’s way of fulfillingthat promise, taking those souls. I wish it could have been me. I wish it could have been all of us.”
Yesterday, Sybil and Zeke had spent a few fruitless hours trying to discern what was fiction and what was truth in Betty’s stories, but the more they talked, the less they realized what they actuallyknewabout her. It had been Georgia, not North Carolina, as Betty had told them, though after tracking down her old apartment, she had indeed once lived with a woman named Mallory. Sybil had gone to Bloomingdale’s and shown the sole picture she had of Betty—taken at Thanksgiving, a lifetime ago, when Betty was petting Pluto and oblivious to the rest of them—and one very nice lady at the perfume counter confirmed Betty had worked there for six months or so. “Sweet girl,” the woman said. “But kept to herself. I always figured she was saving for college or something. She seemed like she knew she wanted something else and was here temporarily.” Sybil had bought an extremely expensive bottle of French perfume as a thank-you. When she opened it in the cab on the way back to Zeke’s, she realized it reminded her of the anesthesiologist. But only momentarily because Sybil had done an excellent job not thinking about Mark at all since Thanksgiving.
“Is it possible,” she said to Zeke when she returned and was unwinding her scarf, unzipping her parka, “that we’re misremembering? Maybe she had said Georgia, not North Carolina?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied, and headed into the kitchen to make her some tea. They’d found this rhythm of domesticity in the past week, and Sybil didn’t mind it one bit.
“But are you sure?” She trailed him with Pluto at her feet.
“She told Caleb ‘Colorado,’ which isn’t anything even close to North Carolina,” Zeke had sighed. “I don’t think deciphering the minutiae of Betty’s lies is going to help us find her.”
Sybil did her fruitless shoulder stretches and stared at theirevidence wall, which hadn’t gotten much more detailed than when she first started it. Other than theMacon Telegrapharticle, Julian’s handwritten notes, some pictures of the scene after the fire, and the photograph of the family from when Betty was ten, it was pretty much empty white space at the moment and not nearly as gratifying as Sybil had envisioned. On cop shows, the detectives stare at the boards with their hands on their hips until they’re struck by genius. Mostly, in the past few days, Sybil had stared at the nakedness of the wall and felt her frustration grow at the utter lack of clues, at the complete mystery of how Betty had simply vanished.
“I’m just, I guess, genuinely shocked that she didn’t think she could trust us,” Sybil said.
“It seems to me, if she really was raised with a crazy father and an enabling mother, trusting us is probably the last thing on her mind.” Zeke passed her the tea and sat beside her, neither of them at all clear on what to do next.
Tonight Sybil was back home in the suburbs because Eloise had been deposited by a college friend a few hours earlier. She’d walked into the house, rubbed Pluto behind his ears and said, “No Christmas tree? We’re not doing Christmas?” and then marched up the stairs and slammed the door.
So Sybil ordered a tree online from a local pop-up store. It was delivered with rapid speed and she texted Eloise up in her room to tell her. What she actually wanted to say was:Hey, nice to see you! How have you been, Mom? You look exhausted, is everything okay?But she didn’t say any of that to her daughter, of course. Sybil felt desperate to be something other than their mother, someone whom Eloise would find fascinating, someone whom Sybil herself would find fascinating, but she wasn’t yet there. Maybe never would be there.
She opened Julian’s folder again. In the days since Simonehad shown up at Zeke’s with the folder, Simone had been in touch to say that she was having her dad cremated, so there hadn’t yet been a service or funeral. Sybil didn’t think she was in a position to demand anything from Simone, as much as she wanted to have a proper goodbye. The truth was that they’d known Julian for two months, more or less. Even though both she and Zeke were plagued with fits of grief—one of them involuntarily tearing up with no notice—they weren’t old friends, they weren’t all that close. They were brought together by circumstance—insomnia—and evidently a manipulated opportunity for Julian to either bring Betty to justice or protect her from someone else who needed to be. Sybil still wasn’t sure which one it was. But the best that Sybil figured, the way that she could honor Julian, grieve him actually, was to find Betty, to help Betty. Even if Betty had been the one to light the match that led to the fire, the more Sybil delved into her father’s church, the more she thought he had it coming.
“This guy was a lunatic,” she had said to Zeke last night.
“Not a lunatic,” Zeke said. “That lets him off the hook like he couldn’t help it.”
“So you think he was of sound mind?”
“I think I’ve met a lot of people who use other people to give themselves power.”
Zeke had stood and started to pace, then ran his dominant hand through his hair, more progress toward his recovery that he seemed not particularly interested in. He rarely talked about his physical therapy and usually returned home with a scowl, but Sybil was used to teenagers and didn’t mind. She liked their quiet, if pretend, homemaking; they watched the sun rise from his floor-to-ceiling windows, then tried to rest in whatever way they could, her in his second guest bedroom, him in the primary, before he rose to go repair his body with the teamtrainers and the private therapists, who stopped coming to him when his routine grew more rigorous and required a full gym. She spent the early afternoon hours walking Pluto and losing herself to the pulse of Manhattan; it wasn’t how she envisioned herself living here, of course, separated from her husband, her children off at college, the first half of her life behind her, but it brought her peace all the same.
“Mom,” Eloise said behind her, breaking Sybil’s chain of thought and startling her. She flipped the folder closed quickly. “Jesus,” her daughter said. “Calm down.”
“Sorry,” Sybil said, though she wasn’t quite sure what she was apologizing for. “I’m not used to having company.”
“If I want to go into the city and sleep at Dad’s, how mad would you be?”
