“Okay, but that would be pretty amazing, right?True Crime with Zeke Rodriguez,” she said.
“Given how much better you are at this than I am, I’m pretty sure it would beTrue Crime with Sybil Bowman and Occasional Interruptions from a Former Mets Player.”
Sybil laughed, but then her face fell. “I really hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Insult yourself, like you’re not valuable.”
“I’m valuable,” Zeke said. “To my team.”
“You’re valuable,” Sybil answered. “To me.”
That thing from before—hope, he realized—bubbled up again, and he was suddenly acutely aware that his breath had gotten heavier. He met Sybil’s gaze, but she broke it just as quickly, then was back on her feet.Fuck.She moved back to the tree, stared up at the bright golden star on top.
“Do you think Betty could have killed someone?” she asked finally.
“I mean, who knows what any of us is capable of,” Zeke said.
“Right, I know.” She faced him. “I’d kill someone for my kids. I just would, no questions asked.”
“Maybe, uh, killing her parents is how she thought she could escape? Like, the cult? Is that weird, to say that Betty was in acult? I feel like that’s…ridiculous. Like, are people actuallyincults?”
“Do you want to hear how many podcasts I’ve listened to about that? Because it’s upward of a hundred.” Sybil shook her head. “Wow, I really have way too much time on my hands.” She reached for her phone. “This is what Wikipedia told me about the Revivalist Church.”
Founded by Samuel Jones, the father of six daughters and one son, Aaron, in 1979, the Revivalist Church was a fringe offshoot of the Worldwide Church of Believers, an already extremist church that had, prior to its shuttering, hundreds of thousands of followers. An estimated several hundred parishioners followed Jones from Tennessee to his new outpost in Georgia, where he implemented even stricter guidelines than the WCB and continued to grow his following.
“Hold on, let me skip ahead, there’s a lot of religious stuff.” Sybil swiped her phone and scrolled. “Oh here, this is what leads me to Betty.”
Women were mandated to be married on their 18th birthdays, and their purpose was to bear children and be their husband’s caretaker. While girls attended public schools so as not to draw attention from local law enforcement, once they were of age, higher education was forbidden, as was marrying outside the sect.
“Betty is twenty-two,” Sybil said.
“And the fire was four and a half years ago,” Zeke replied.
“Does she seem like the type who wanted to be married at eighteen?”
“No,” Zeke said. “She certainly does not. So, I mean, not to sound ridiculous, but that’s a motive.”
“Or maybe that’s justice,” Sybil replied. “Because if it were me, maybe I’d do the exact same thing.”
“Do you think Julian agreed? And was just ensuring that she didn’t get caught?”
“He has a daughter.”
“But he wasFBI, Sybil. Granted, I’ve never had a face-to-face with them, but he doesn’t seem like the type to just…overlook that. And if he just wanted the case to be closed, that had already happened, right?”
“So you think she ran because she’s guilty,” Sybil said.
Zeke detected a very slight twinge of judgment in her voice, the very first of its kind in any of their conversations. He didn’t want to be judged by this woman whose opinion he had come very much to respect. More than respect, to crave. HecravedSybil’s approval. If he were sitting down with the mandatedsports psychologist right now, surely, she would ask him why; she might suggest that Sybil’s approval was simply a replacement for a coach’s approval, for parental approval, for forty thousand screaming Mets fans’ approval. Then he said something that surprised him, something he knew Sybil didn’t want to hear.
“I think she ran,” he said, “because she doesn’t want to be found. And you need to face that maybe it’s okay if we leave it that way.”
Sybil’s head reared back. “We can’t just leave it that way.”
“Why? What if she left for her own reasons?” As soon as he articulated it, he realized that he believed this to be true. Perhaps Betty’s reasons to blow up her life and Zeke’s reasons to blow up his career weren’t all that different. Perhaps they just wantedout. And with no other escape routes, they chose detonation.
“Zeke!” Sybil’s voice was a little higher, a little tighter now. He’d only ever heard her this way when she was speaking to Mark. He didn’t like it one bit, but he didn’t feel like backing down. “Betty is in trouble.She needs us.”
