Betty walked back to their house from the church. The sun was starting to set, the summer humidity that would choke the region by August only beginning to take hold. She kicked rocks, thinking of all the ways she could hold this against Patience at the Sabbath dinner, but if she did, if even a hint of unruliness crossed her face, her father would see it. Whatever he decided next, for her punishment, wasn’t worth it. She was almost eighteennow, and she’d overheard Matthew and her father discussing Matthew’s younger brother, how he would be a suitable match. Then, of course, the formal official introduction, where her dad squeezed her arm hard enough to leave a bruise, as if he didn’t want to let her go and also didn’t want to let her run. From him. From Silas. What was the difference at that point? Betty thought Matthew’s brother was a beady-eyed idiot, who laughed too loud at her father’s jokes and seemed to take seriously only the Bible verses that suited his needs. Not that Betty took any of the verses seriously, but she’d heard enough of the women in church murmuring about the way that Silas ogled them, how he drank too much wine at the congregants’ dinners, how Matthew had hired him to do construction work for the new building her dad had commissioned, but he mostly just bossed other people around.
Betty wanted to tell Patience to convey that she wasn’t interested, that she refused to be courted by this man. But Patience, the Patience whose spine straightened and tone turned chilly when her dad or Matthew entered the room, didn’t feel like the same sister who spent their childhood whispering in the dark to her, teaching her how to protect herself. Their father had gotten even more ardent, more controlling as Betty approached eighteen; she could see it in how he leered at her, hear it in how he called her into his office whenever she was at the church to ensure that Betty was being a good girl, that she was fastidious in her prayers, mostly that she was fastidious in abiding whatever new rule he had invented of late. By then, though, Levi was gone, and Patience was gone. She was the only person who could protect herself now.
She tossed the jeans and green sweater on her closet floor, pulled out a dress that had been her sister’s, so she knew Patience would approve. She brushed her hair, applied Vaseline toher lips, and was happy to see that the June sun had given her cheeks a bit of a glow. She was running late by then, and her dad punished people in front of the entire church for being late—she knew he would happily make an example of her, so she grabbed Levi’s old bike, pedaled down the same rocky road she’d come from.
Now it was dark, and dinner had definitely begun.
She pedaled harder, but she couldn’t make up for time that had already been lost.
She turned the corner onto the paved street of the church, and she wasn’t sure if she saw the fire first or felt it. The rush of heat against her face, the way that the flames rose up and danced, like it was a celebration. There were people huddled in small pockets, some screaming, some running around like they didn’t know what else to do. She saw Patience on the outskirts, kneeling in the grass, an arm around each child, a hand covering their eyes.
Her hands clenched the bike’s handlebars.
She thought of Levi and his advice. When you get your chance to go,take it.
She spun the bike in the other direction.
And that was when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him. Unmistakable. He had a runner’s gait because he’d run cross-country in high school, and a ramrod spine because his father used to spank him when he slouched. She watched her dad disappear into the woods behind the church, and before she lost her nerve, she biked like hell in the other direction.
67
Morning
Betty
Betty had sixweeks to prepare for this morning. Six weeks of planning to confront her father, tell him that she was calling the FBI—she had memorized Richard’s name and title from theWashington Postarticle—and planned to use it as a threat.Leave me alone forever. I am not your daughter forever. You will never tame me forever.
Levi had made the mistake about a year ago, just before she got the job at the diner, when he sent that postcard from Las Vegas, and Betty had inadvertently thought he was in Paris. She’d missed him so urgently that she’d used the flip phone to call him, ask if maybe she could join him. His voice turned stony, and he said no, absolutely not, not in Vegas. She’d assumed for a while it was because Vegas was so, at least from what she could glean from the internet andOcean’s Eleven, sinfully outrageous, and Levi simply didn’t think she could handle it. She was googling where else she could go in Nevada, just to be close to Levi, when a message board about Reno mentioned the three-year-old church that was becoming a phenomenon.
She skimmed the post, then reread it twice in case her brain was malfunctioning. To be sure, there were plenty of megachurches popping up all over the United States, and Betty probably could have stuck a thumbtack on a map and been in the vicinity of one. But the poster mentioned a new charismatic pastor named Aaron, no last name—“like Cher!” the poster had said—who claimed that he was one of Jesus’s disciples. There were other men who pulled off this sort of fraud, certainly, but almost no one did it as well as her dad. She clicked on the user’s profile, found their full name, searched them on Facebook, and there, buried in a sea of posts with Bible quotes, was a picture of her father with his arm slung around two parishioners.
Betty had to run to the bathroom to throw up.
She’d been willing to let the repression of her childhood go, to live in a world where her dad occupied his corner of the earth, and she occupied hers. As far as she knew, he hadn’t tracked her down yet. Levi had always warned her, though, at least before he left, that as the youngest, their dad would never willingly relinquish his grip on her, like she was his vessel built from his rib. Like he owned her, really. She thought of how he looked at her as she approached adulthood, how he squeezed her arm until it bruised when he introduced her to Silas, how he lectured her from the pulpit in front of his entire flock. And Betty knew that Levi was right.
She’d obviously been careful, but careful was exhausting, and she stared at the picture of the man who for eighteen years of her life made all decisions on her behalf—how she dressed, how she learned, what she read, whom she befriended, and worst, whom she was set to marry—and she seethed until rage practically radiated off her. Mallory knocked on her door and said, “Betty, are you okay?” and then opened it and said, “Youjust screamed, and I’m trying to sleep, so do you mind keeping it down?”
She never told Levi, and she knew he was only trying to shield her, so she didn’t blame him either. She dyed her hair another color and got a job at the diner instead of Bloomingdale’s, and one day, three insomniacs wandered into her shift, and then everything was different. She met Caleb and did a commercial, and maybe, yes, she was getting sloppy, or maybe she was just tired of being so wary and wanted this all to be over. Because as long as he was still out there, as long as the threat of him forcing her back under his wing still loomed, nothing about her could ever be normal.
This morning, with dew still coating the acreage surrounding her father’s church, what she wanted most was to just be normal.
She’d hitchhiked from the bus station in Reno and was now sitting under a tree staring at the compound, which looked like a renovated farmhouse with adjoining quarters. She would threaten him first, and if that didn’t work, she would dial Richard Watkins and say that she’d found her father, the man who started the fire that killed her mother, and if that still didn’t work, well, then she was prepared to…she didn’t know what exactly. Then she remembered that her dad somehow discovered that Julian was looking out for her, protecting her, on standby to alert her if her dad or one of his goons got too close, close enough to grab her, bring her back to him. And that the pious pastor then sent someone to hurt him for doing so.
Betty stood. She would do whatever she had to this morning to buy her freedom. But also, to deliver payback for Julian.
She was halfway down the hill when there was an explosion and a burst of fire, then smoke erupted from the back part of the building. She jolted and ran back toward the protection ofthe tree, and when she turned, she saw Levi slip out the front door. But Levi wasn’t alone. A woman, somewhere in the middle of her pregnancy, trailed him.
And even from her perch under the tree, she recognized her sister’s voice, yelling, “Run!”
68
Morning
Sybil
When they gota little closer, Zeke stopped the car, and they walked until the smoke congested their lungs, and the air alone felt flammable. They stood in the middle of the road, their hands on their hips, gaping until finally Sybil said, “Shit. Betty. Shit!”
Then she broke out into a sprint.
