23
Bringing the hospital administrator around to Sister Anselm’s way of thinking wasn’t exactly a slam dunk. While Sister Anselm worked on that, Ali ordered a pizza and then went down to the lobby to wait for it to be delivered.
She had called Leland earlier to say she wouldn’t be home for dinner, but now she called again, told him that she was downstairs waiting for a pizza, and gave him a heads-up about her probably not being home for the remainder of the night.
“I wanted to make sure someone would look after Bella.”
“Of course,” he said. “No problem there at all, but it sounds as though there’s something seriously amiss. Can I be of assistance?”
Ali laughed. She and Leland had been through too much together for her to try lying to him about it. “Yes,” she said. “There is something amiss.”
She explained the situation in an abbreviated Reader’s Digest fashion.
“I see,” Leland said when she finished. “It sounds to me as though you and Sister Anselm have served notice to some potentially bad people that the young woman they’re after—someone with possibly incriminating evidence—will be moved elsewhere, presumably out of the bad guys’ reach, tomorrow morning. Is that correct?”
“Pretty much.”
“Which means you’ve given them a deadline. If you’ll pardon my saying so, this seems especially foolhardy, even for the two of you. What about the other patients and employees at the hospital? What are the chances your actions might endanger them? And if there’s some kind of criminal activity occurring in that place where the young woman is from, then you need to let the proper authorities know about it and let them handle it.”
She hadn’t mentioned to Leland that Deputy Sellers, the man she had just spoken to and who had blatantly lied to her, was someone who should have been considered a “proper authority.” Not in this case. And there was no way to begin explaining to Leland what happened at Short Creek, now known as Colorado City, all those years earlier.
“We’ll be careful, especially when it comes to other patients,” she said. “Sister Anselm is in the process of emptying the floor, even as we speak. Chances are no one will show up. If they do, they won’t be expecting to find two women who can rightly be considered armed and dangerous.”
“No,” Leland agreed. “I suppose not.”
After ending the call, Ali sat for a time in silent contemplation. What if she was right? What if there was some kind of criminal activity going on within The Family? If she and Sister Anselm did somehow bring it to light, would anyone be willing to do something about it? And what about all those women and children? She remembered how Edith Tower had ducked out of the way of Gordon Tower’s fist. Edith might have some control over what went on inside the home, but Gordon would always be the final arbiter of what happened and what didn’t.
In the world of The Family, women apparently didn’t count for much. But if the guys in charge went to jail for something illegal, what happened to the families once they were gone? If the women had literally been kept down on the farm in something close to involuntary servitude, what would become of them and their children if they were turned loose in the world? As single mothers, would they have any marketable skills? Would they even be able to read and write?
Cami had said The Family was made up of twenty-five to thirty separate households. If every husband had more than one wife and only the first one of those was a licensed driver, that meant there might be around a hundred women with young kids who wouldn’t have cars or be able to drive. They’d be turned out of the only homes they had ever known and driven out into a world about which they knew next to nothing. If most of the men or even some of them were held accountable for some wrongdoing and went to prison, the cult might be dismantled. What happened to the women and children then? For the first time, Ali understood the magnitude of the problem and the real reason officialdom had turned a blind eye. Taking The Family down would mean turning the women and children who lived there into refugees—or perhaps into something worse.
Short Creek had been bad enough—an instance of law enforcement overreach where everyone, children included, had been taken into custody and families torn apart forever. Ali remembered seeing more recent coverage of unaccompanied migrant children being warehoused in inadequate facilities where they, too, were treated like little more than prisoners.
Even worse, Ali had distant but still vivid memories of what might prove to be a hauntingly similar situation—Waco. She had been sitting on the news-anchor desk in L.A. when the siege at Waco came to its horrific end. She had watched the awful videos as flames had engulfed the place. The fire, allegedly started by some nut job who refused to surrender, had burned the compound to the ground, killing seventy-six people in the process.
Up to now, the fact that The Family held women and children in what amounted to bondage hadn’t seemed to register with law enforcement agencies or merited any official response, but what if all that changed? What if Ali’s involvement unearthed evidence of criminal wrongdoing? What if the menfolk who appeared to be running the show were held to account and put in jail? In that case, Ali might be responsible for divesting those same women of everything familiar and driving them homeless into the world. What would become of them then? Who would help them?
Suddenly Ali Reynolds found herself in the same spot Governor Pyle had been in all those years earlier, dealing with a situation no one else had been willing to tackle ever since. Did she keep poking her nose into the problem or did she let it go? Do something about it or turn away? And was she prepared to deal with the consequences of both taking action and not taking action?
She picked up her phone and scrolled through her contacts list until she found the numbers belonging to Andrea Rogers, the executive director of Irene’s Place. It was late enough in the day that Ali didn’t bother with the work number. She called Andrea’s cell instead.
“Sorry to bother you at home,” Ali said.
“What makes you think I’m at home? You should know that running a shelter has never been a nine-to-five job. What’s up?”
“Have you ever heard of The Family from up near Colorado City?”
There was a long pause. “It sounds vaguely familiar,” Andrea said at last. “Wait, yes. Now I remember. Irene mentioned it, but obviously that was years ago.”
“Were there clients who came from there?”
“There may have been. At least that’s the context in which it was mentioned. I don’t remember any names or details, though. It’s too long ago.”
“Do you have records going back that far?”
“I’m not sure. Now everything is computerized,” Andrea said. “We haven’t had the time or money to go back and digitize those earlier records—the ones from when Irene was in charge. They’re downstairs in the archives.”
“Can you see if you can find anything?” Ali asked.
“I’ll try,” Andrea said, “but those old files are a mess, so don’t expect miracles. Anything else?”
“Well, yes,” Ali said. “There is one other question. What would happen if The Family got broken up and the women and children who lived there were left homeless. Would you be able to help them?”
“How many people are we talking about?”
“That’s not clear. We estimate there are twenty-five to thirty families involved, but each of those families most likely includes more than one wife and probably several minor children as well.”
“So seventy-five to a hundred women and maybe twice again that for the children?”
“That would be my guess.”
Andrea took a deep breath. “Well, obviously we couldn’t handle them all here, but we do have contingency plans with other shelters and agencies. What do you know of these folks’ situations?”