Joan had been afraid of that.
The sheriff faced her. “Do you have any idea where he might be? Are there any… secret hiding places or… I don’t know, escape tunnels?”
“I have no idea,” she admitted, but she motioned toward Mark, who stood with Rebekah off to her right in an ill-defined no-man’s-land between the sheriff’s car and the restrained Residents. “Mark might be able to help you, though. He and his wife are the ones who planned everything with me. He lived here a lot longer than I did, and he’s been here the entire time. He’ll know what to look for.”
She convinced the sheriff that Mark could be trusted, and, after talking to him, Stewart allowed Mark to lead him and a team of four men into the Home so they could systematically search each room, closet and corridor for Residents or Penitents who might be hiding.
Kara was in one of the groups that had been brought out, although she had not eaten breakfast and was considerably less groggy than the men and women to whom she was shackled. With Deputy Hubbard’s permission, and under the watchful eye of another officer, Joan was allowed to go over to speak to her roommate—although the conversation was more than a little one-sided. Kara not only refused to respond to her questions; she wouldn’t even look at Joan. She kept her eyes on the ground, and after several minutes of this, Joan gave up and walked back to where Gary was standing by the car. She still wanted to know why her roommate was here, what had happened, how she had ended up with Father, but those questions weren’t going to be answered today.
One of the Children with mental problems began howling and a couple of others responded in kind. Using a loud, authoritarian voice, a Teacher ordered them to stop, and they did.
Time passed. Ten minutes. Twenty. A half hour.
Gary tried to speak to her a couple of times, tried to ask her questions, but Joan waved him off. She wasn’t in the mood to talk right now; at the moment she was content to just stand here and wait.
The day was warm, and they were in the direct sunlight. The metal of the car was hot against her back. But she didn’t care. She was grateful to be outside, and even standing here doing nothing, she felt freer than she ever had inside the Home.
Mark emerged, leading the sheriff and his men out of the building through the same door they’d gone in, but no one else was with them. Their search had uncovered nothing. A moment later, the sheriff told them what they’d already guessed.
Father was nowhere to be found.
He had escaped.
Joan sucked in a deep breath, turning around, away from the Home and the Residents and Penitents lined up against it. She saw her reflection in the window of the car, a ghostlike image superimposed over the solid reality of the backseat. She hardly recognized herself, and she realized that she had not seen her own reflection in many days.
“Are you all right?” Gary asked softly, putting a hand on her back.
Joan nodded, but in her mind she saw the look on Absalom’s face when they’d led him out, and she shivered.
This was not over.
PART III
Twenty-five
Sitting in the sheriff’s office, Gary could not stop shaking. He’d been fine when it all was happening. Adrenaline had taken over. Even afterward, waiting outside, watching the Home being raided and everyone rounded up, he had been able to maintain his cool. But he’d started shaking the moment they’d returned to town. His emotions had caught up with the knowledge in his brain, and he realized not only the scope of what they’d come up against but how close they had come to death. Even thinking about that army of deformed people—
The Children
—made his blood run cold.
He had no idea where the Children were right now or, indeed, where most of the men and women from the Home were being held. A handful of them were in cells here in the building, and he assumed those were the ringleaders, the ones in charge, though the sheriff, understandably, had not had time to explain exactly what was going on.
He only hoped they would not be arrested themselves. In an effort to head off trouble and get everything out in the open, Reyn had volunteered the information that Brian and Gary had been carrying knives. For self-defense, he’d emphasized. In all of the chaos, that fact might never have come out, so Gary wasn’t sure that offering it up was such a wise strategy. Brian was pissed. Nothing had been said about his taking Isaac hostage, but it was bound to come out eventually, and he was already blaming Reyn for that.
Gary was sitting next to Joan on the couch in Sheriff Stewart’s office. His arm was around her, had been ever since they’d arrived, but the two of them had not had time to talk. Well, they’d had the time but not enough privacy. He felt awkward saying what he wanted to say in front of the others, and he was waiting until they were alone.
A deputy Gary did not know brought them soft drinks and potato chips from the vending machines—it was after lunch and they were starving—and they set upon the food greedily. The Fritos bag Gary picked up crackled noisily as his hands shook, and he noticed when Brian popped open his can of Dr Pepper and spilled it all over his pants that his friend’s hands were shaking even worse than his. They were all nervous wrecks, and only Stacy, who had not come into the Home, retained any measure of composure.
“How did you find me?” Joan asked Gary. She opened up a package of Doritos. “How did you ever figure out that I was here in Texas?”
It was a long story, but he wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it right now and he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell it. “They sent someone after me. Two people, actually. They were caught and gave us the address of the Home. I think they thought we’d be captured if we came here. I don’t think they were doing us a favor.”
“You almost were captured,” Stacy said.
He nodded. “That’s true.”
Joan was eating her Doritos. She no longer seemed to be paying attention to him.
“I went to your parents’ house,” he told her. “In Cayucos.”
“They’re dead,” she said simply.
“What?”
“My parents are dead.”
He had no idea how to respond to that. The only thing he could think of to say was, “How do you know?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did you tell the sheriff?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Gary shared a glance with Stacy, hoping she could indicate to him how he should react, what he should do, what he should say, but she shrugged her shoulders helplessly, raising her eyebrows in an expression of cluelessness.
“I got their address from Teri,” Gary continued lamely. He suddenly realized she did not know that Teri Lim was dead. He shut up. There was a minefield in every explanation, and he doubted that she could take much more bad news.
Her parents were dead?
Had the Homesteaders killed them? That would be his first guess, and he thought about the dead dog and the blood on the linoleum floor of their kitchen. If Joan hadn’t told the sheriff yet, Gary would. Drugging and kidnapping were bad enough, but murder would put those bastards away for life.
Where was Kara? he wondered. Had she been placed in a cell? She might be able to shed some light on this.
From outside came the sound of a helicopter. No. Helicopters. Plural. At first he thought they were from other law enforcement agencies, but seconds later, Stewart came into the room, frowning. “The press has arrived. I’ll try to keep them away from you—”