“What do you think?” Reyn asked, pulling up to the curb.
“I think they bailed,” Brian said.
Gary unfastened his seat belt. “Let’s check it out.” They knocked on the front door, rang the bell, but when no one answered, they walked into the open garage, calling out, “Mr. Smith? Mrs. Smith?” The garage was dark, but illumination from a nearby streetlamp allowed them to see that it was empty.
There was no house next door, and the only one on the opposite side of the street that had been finished was dark and had a Realtor’s sign hanging from a post on the front lawn. Yellow light seeped around the edges of a door in the wall that separated the garage from the house, and, knowing there was no one watching, Gary tried the door’s handle. It turned, the door swung outward and, after calling out, “Mr. Smith? Mrs. Smith?” again, he walked inside.
His friends followed.
Stacy closed the door behind them as they moved quickly through the house together. Once they’d determined that it was empty, they split up, Gary staying in the living room, Brian going into one bedroom, Reyn into another one and Stacy heading into the kitchen. Breaking into houses was getting to be a habit, and Gary wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible.
The residents had left in a hurry, taking nothing with them. Or very little. Calling out to each other from their respective rooms, Gary and his friends found that nothing seemingly was out of place. All of the furniture was carefully arranged; kitchen cupboards, refrigerator and freezer were well stocked with food; toothbrushes and combs were on the counter in the bathroom. Bedroom dresser drawers were shut and filled with clothes.
Gary found no address book this time, and, after searching through the living room, he walked into the kitchen, passing by the adjacent laundry alcove where Stacy was opening up the doors of the washer and dryer. Stepping up to the back door, he looked carefully around for any signs of a struggle—
Blood
—but there was nothing obviously amiss. No dead animals. No wet red spots. He opened the door and passed into a covered patio that overlooked what appeared in the darkness to be a lush lawn.
“Holy shit!” Brian shouted from somewhere inside. “I found something!”
It took only seconds to reach the master bedroom where Brian was standing inside an open walk-in closet lit by recessed fluorescent ceiling lights. They all reached the bedroom at once, and before anyone could ask what Brian had found, he pointed to a dark wood cabinet about five feet high that was sitting against the back wall of the closet. The cabinet, Gary saw, was divided into rows of small compartments, and little rolled-up scrolls had been placed in each. Extra scrolls sat atop the case, and Gary picked up the closest of these, unspooling it. Like the one they’d found in Joan’s room, it, too, was a prayer of some sort, and it, too, referenced the Outsiders. Only this prayer involved the acquisition of wealth. He read it aloud:
“O Lord our God! Thank You for all You have provided us. You are great and good and generous. Continue to bring to us money and land and earthly possessions. Allow us all of the riches we desire in order that we may use them to praise the glory of You. Protect all that we have and all that we will ever have from the greed of The Outsiders. Amen.”
“Sounds familiar,” Reyn said, eyebrows raised.
Brian was grinning. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Protect us from those greedy Outsiders. Oh, and by the way, give us lots of money, land and possessions. In fact, give us everything we ask for. Jesus!”
Gary rolled up the scroll and put it back on top of the cabinet. On impulse, he grabbed another, this from one of the small cubbyholes that made up the body of the wooden case. He unrolled it and read:
“O Lord our Father! Smite The Outsiders. Suffer them not to live but dispatch of them bodily. Rend their clothing and skin. Spill their blood. Send their vile souls to hell and leave their stinking carcasses to rot. Remove The Outsiders from Your glorious sight forever and ever. Amen.”
Reyn shook his head. “Well, that’s cheerful.”
“Are the Outsiders the good guys or the bad guys here?” Stacy wondered aloud.
Brian grinned. “It’s hard to tell the players without a scorecard.”
The idea that Joan was involved with the people behind these prayers made Gary uneasy. He knew from what little she’d said that her parents were ultrareligious and very strict, that she’d had a difficult childhood, but the more he learned, the less sense he could make of everything. If she’d broken away from that, why did she have that prayer scroll? And her parents’ home didn’t look like the house of religious fanatics. In fact, all of the displayed photos of a happy teenage Joan made them seem like loving, devoted parents. None of it added up.
And the prayers themselves freaked him out. He didn’t know what about them disturbed him so, but the fact that they were printed on little scrolls, that they each seemed to reference these mysterious Outsiders, that the stilted language sounded so alien, that even the typestyle of the words on those tiny rolled parchments appeared unfamiliar, all conspired to produce within him a feeling of dread.
The others had picked up scrolls and started reading the prayers on them.
It was Stacy who spoke first. “What do we do about this?” she asked, rolling a scroll back up and carefully putting it back where she had found it.
They were all looking at him, and Gary shook his head. He had no idea. They couldn’t go to the police with anything they found here, because it would have been obtained illegally. They would be implicating themselves by telling what they knew. He glanced down at the scroll in his hand. What did it mean, anyway? These people and Joan were connected, but how deeply and whether or not it had any bearing on her disappearance was anyone’s guess.
Although the fact that the Smiths had taken off in the night, leaving their belongings behind, simply because he had called them and mentioned Joan’s name, led him to believe that they knew a hell of a lot more than he did about what was going on.
“I have an idea,” Brian said. “We’ll report the family missing—anonymously, of course—and the police will come and investigate.”
Reyn shook his head. “And how will they connect this to Joan, especially when these people left of their own volition, and Joan was drugged and abducted, and the only thing linking the two are some prayer scrolls?”
“That detective has her scroll. He could make the connection.”
“But how would the Lancaster police know to contact him?”
“We tell them,” Brian said. “Again, anonymously.”
Reyn rolled his eyes. “Sure. That’s a great idea.”
The closet was starting to feel stuffy, although whether that was an actual physical sensation or just a mental projection, Gary didn’t know. He put the scroll he was holding back in the cabinet space from which he’d taken it and walked back into the bedroom.
“Are you all right?” Stacy asked.
He nodded, not wanting to speak, though he felt as far from all right as he could possibly be. Brian and Reyn were still sorting through scrolls; Stacy was pulling back the clothes hanging in the closet, trying to see if there was anything behind them. They needed to get out of here soon. As remote as this house might seem, they still could get caught, and he started thinking up excuses, reasons to explain why they were here. If anyone asked, he’d probably say that they’d been invited, that they were simply visiting their friends, the Smiths, who, fortunately for them, were not around to contradict that story.