Chapter 45
The man looked a little puzzled by the blatant shock on my face. “Yeah, I guess it does look bad that I have a truck if I'm supposed to be aiming to be Amish.”
“Does . . . does anyone know you . . . you have this?” I studied the Pennsylvania license tags, wishing I'd been able to see the ones on the truck that man had driven.
But I had no question that this was the same one. The dent, the peeling paint were telling.
“It's not public knowledge, if that's what you mean. I rarely use it.” He walked to the side of the barn where several steel red cans of gasoline were stored.
Several rifles hung along the wall.
“Oh, I hunt sometimes.” He chuckled as he followed my eyes to the wall. “You city folk always seem to get nervous around hunting rifles.”
“Why did you leave the Cleveland area?” I asked, more out of nervousness than curiosity. I wanted to keep walking, keep talking. Get out of there.
“I'm embarrassed to say.” He shrugged. “But I guess confession is good for the soul. I got caught up with some foolishness of my older brother. We weren't Amish, but my family comes from a strong religious tradition. My brother, Ezekiel, kind of went a whole different way with it. He started his own church, made up his own doctrine, and a bunch of us followed along. I guess you could say he, well, started a cult. He had us sell all we had and come out here to live simple lives among the Amish. We weren't Amish, though. I don't know what we were. I think, in retrospect, he just moved us out here to keep us in isolation. We gave all the money we made from selling our possessions to him, for the benefit of his church, no questions asked.” The man picked up one of the gas containers and started walking back toward my car. I followed.
“Ezekiel seemed like a good man and we trusted him,” the man continued, “and then the rumors started and that was the end of that. I hope unleaded is okay.” He uncapped the gas tank, poured a couple of gallons in. “That should hold you until you get to the next town where a full service gas station is.”
“Thanks, um . . .” I looked back at the service station sign, “Mr. Saul?” I smiled, trying to absorb his story and figure out where I was supposed to go next all at the same time.
“Oh, Saul was the name of the man who owned this place years ago. My name is Mordecai. Mordecai Bennett.”
Bennett.
A chill went through me as the man recapped the tank. “Do you need anything else, miss? I sell maps of the area if you're having problems with your GPS. Losing signals is easy around here.”
“Yes, I will take a map.” I followed him toward the shack, trying to figure out what questions I was supposed to ask, what information I needed to know. “Rumors. You said something about rumors and your brother?”
“Yeah.” The man shook his head. “When his wife Judith died about fifteen years ago, things started falling apart. That's when the rumors started, if I had to pinpoint everything. Turns out my brother was just taking our money and using it for himself. While we were here using oil lamps and horses and plows, he was investing our money and building a beach house for himself in the Caribbean. Even his wife wasn't exempt. She died from cancer. He claimed not to have enough money for her to have treatment. It hurts to know that she probably didn't even have to die, you know?”
“Wow, that is . . .”
“Terrible. Unholy. Embarrassing that we were all duped like that.” Mordecai opened the door of the shack. Despite its rugged exterior, the inside was clean and tidy with a small store area up front. A door toward the rear was open, exposing what looked like a small living space in the back. I thought of RiChard living in the back of the church basement library. He'd spent a lifetime deceiving others and was more or less forced to live out his days in a self-made prison. This man, Mordecai, had been on the receiving end of deceit, and found himself equally imprisoned by a shame and confusion that kept him stuck in that shack.
The fact that he was “straddling on the fence” about who he wanted to be spoke to the chokehold his brother's deceit had on him, had on his life. He knew his brother was wrong, but he wasn't sure what or who was right.
“What happened to your brother?”
Mordecai shook his head, grabbed a stack of maps off of a counter. “He up and disappeared about nine or ten years ago. Nobody knows what happened or where he went.”
“And you don't know what happened with all the money either, huh?”
“Oh, we know. His son took it. Made a life for himself. Picked up where his father left off and made millions.” The man looked off into space and tapped the stack of maps on the counter.
“So, you and the rest of the congregation went after him, right?”
“There is no congregation anymore. Most of us either absorbed into the Amish communities up here or went back to the lives we'd come from. We were a peaceful community. Whether it was due to forgiveness or just moving on, nobody has ever gone after Ezekiel's son, Bartholomew. He got married to a pretty girl whose parents, Johnnie and Beverly Taylor, had followed us here from Ohio. Bart and Madison left about a month after Ezekiel disappeared, and the two of them have never looked back.”
Bart and Madison?
Why did those names sound familiar?
“You wouldn't believe it if I told you,” the man continued, now looking me straight in the eyes, “but you know that terrorist attack that just happened down at the airport in Baltimore? Bart and Madison and their little boy . . .” He shook his head. “Tragic. Wrong place, wrong time, the randomness of it all.”
Or was it random? The thought chilled me even more. What if the terror attack was a smokescreen to hide a premeditated murder? If Bart or his wife were active on social media, a determined killer could have easily been tracing their steps, staying up with their whereabouts.
Anything felt possible right now.
“And you are certain that all the members of the church moved on? Nobody seemed particularly bent on vengeance?”
“Naw, none of us were that kind of people. I've kept in touch with everyone over the years. We've all moved on in our own peaceful ways.”
Bennett.
The name perplexed me.
“Did, um, you have any other family members beside your brother, his wife, and their son?”
“No. Well, my brother Ezekiel did have another son, a younger son, but he's been out of the picture for years.”
“How so?” I cocked my head, every sense in me heightened.
“Like I said, after Judith died, unnecessarily if you ask me, that's when all the rumors started. And most of the rumors seemed to originate from the little brother. He was going around telling everybody what Ezekiel had done with our money. Ezekiel was furious, and we didn't know about his deception yet. He kicked my little nephew out of the church. Excommunicated him. Isn't that the word? We weren't allowed to say his name, talk about him, or even acknowledge that he'd ever been born. Funny, that was ingrained so deeply in us, I haven't thought about him in years or even wondered how he's doing.
Nicht existierend,
” he whispered, looking down. “That's what Ezekiel renamed his youngest son, Bart's little brother.
Nicht existierend.
It's German for ânonexistent.'”
The Non
-
Exister.
I could hear his voice. See those dull blue eyes.
“What was this nephew's name?”
“Jebidiah. Jebidiah Bennett.” The man looked me in the eyes. “Funny, he tried to tell us the truth about his father. He sounded the alarm about his mother's needless death, warned us about the misuse of our money, and yet he was the only one who was punished. Jebidiah, in retrospect, was the hero, but we all made him out to be the bad guy.”
I thought my heart would beat right out of my chest. “Where is he now?”
The man shook his head. “I haven't seen J.B. since he was excommunicated over a decade ago. That was a year or two after Judith died; then my brother disappeared a year later. My nephew Bartholomew moved on not long after that. The house where they all lived is in ruins now. Vacant, rotting. Nobody goes near there.”
“Where is it?”
“Oh, that old house? It's on the other side of the trees behind my barn, in the middle of the old cornfields. Some members of the community used to keep up those fields for a while, but nobody harvested the fields last fall. Those old stalks are now sitting there rotting away. It will be just a matter of time before those fields are nothing but dust.” The man stopped talking for a moment. “I'm sorry. I'm holding you up. You didn't stop here for all of this. Thanks for listening, though. It's good to get my story out. Freeing.” He turned toward the door and I followed him.
I wondered at his sudden rush to end the conversation, but the clip-clop and squeal of an approaching horse and buggy explained.
“Mordecai, dear friend, there you are.” A man with a long beard and straw hat came out of the carriage. “I came by earlier this week and you weren't here.” He spoke with an accent I did not recognize.
“I was gone for a couple of days. I had business to take care of a few towns over. It was a long walk.” Mordecai suddenly spoke with the same accent.
I smiled and waved them both good-bye before getting into Yvette's car and starting the engine.
If Mordecai had been away earlier that week, as I'd just heard him say, he probably had no idea that his pickup truck had gone missing.
Chapter 46
Jebidiah Bennett.
I had a name and the makings of a possible motive. Murder by way of terrorist attack. He'd been cast out by his community, by his own father, betrayed by his brother, and had spent years in silent isolation with nothing more than his twisted thoughts. He was looking to do more than prove his misdirected points about heroism and theology; he was on a mission of revenge.
There was only one major question that remained:
Where is he?
That was not a question I needed to answer, I decided, finally taking out Yvette's phone from my purse. I wanted to call Laz. Tell him where I was. Get him to mediate a conversation between me and Camille so that I could clear everything up.
No signal.
I looked back at Mordecai, who was engrossed in conversation with the man from the buggy. I didn't want to interrupt, especially if, as I'd noted on my way there, I could pick up a signal just by driving around.
I pulled off the lot and turned back onto the road. Trees surrounded me for a bit and then I reached a clearing. I pulled to the side of the road next to a cluster of tall grasses and shrubbery. Just beyond were acres of dried and dying cornstalks, for as far as my eye could see.
I had a signal.
Laz's voice mail came on immediately. “Laz! His name is Jebidiah Bennett and I am one hundred percent certain he is the actual bomber. One of the victims is his brother. There is a personal edge to this story that brings it all together. I'm currently in L . . .” The call dropped. “No!” I groaned. I got out of my car and started walking around it, holding the phone in various positions, trying in vain to get another signal.
I walked farther away from the car, stood next to the line of stalks that towered over my head. Surprisingly, my efforts paid off.
A signal came through.
And so did a phone call.
It was Darci's extension at the office. She probably had been trying to reach me for a while, I realized, wondering why I was not at the clinic seeing clients. I had not left any kind of message that I wouldn't be in.
But how did she get Yvette's prepaid cell phone number?
“I am so sorry, Darci.” I couldn't waste words, not even with a hello. I didn't know how long my signal would last.
“Sienna!” Yvette's voice caught me off-guard. What was she doing at Darci's desk? I wanted to ask her but she had her own questions. “Where are you and what are you doing?”
“Iâ”
“Your receptionist's mother called
my
job looking for you,” Yvette interrupted, “because she's looking for her. Apparently your worker is not answering any of her calls, and the mom is concerned because she's watching her kids for her and she says her daughter always answers when she has them. Then she went to your office and saw that nobody was there, but your worker's car was parked out front. Now, I don't understand why you have my work number as an emergency contact for you, because I don't have time to get involved in your employee's affairs. I have my own employees to manage.”
“So, nobody knows where Darci is?” My mind tried to catch up with what I'd just heard.
“Do you really need me to start over?”
“No. Wait, how did you get in my office?” She'd called from Darci's extension, I remembered.
“Police was here, girl.”
“Looking for me?”
“Did you hear a word I said? They're looking for your girl, Darci. Everything is not always about you! But just so you know, I didn't tell them you have my car or a box cutter. I didn't ask any questions, and I don't want to know.”
“Wait, are you suggesting that I have something to do with Darci's disappearance?”
“Of course not, but if I told the police that you came to my job early this morning asking to use my car and borrow a box cutter, it don't take a fool to figure out that they would start looking at you differently, especially since her car is parked out in front of your office and she ain't nowhere to be found.”
“This isn't good,” I mumbled.
“You think?”
The call dropped.
“Oh, God, help me.” I realized I was pulling my hair out from underneath my baseball cap. No. I was not going to fall apart.
Darci.
Where could she have gone?
Jebidiah Bennett had been stalking her online. I remembered her bump-in with him at the library. Somehow, some kind of way, he was involved in her disappearance.
But why?
And what could I do about it? I turned toward my car, the fields behind me; then I checked my phone. Still no signal.
“Jesus!” I threw my head back toward the heavens, saw the fringes of dried, decaying cornstalks instead.
Old cornfields.
Mordecai had said something about the home of his brother and nephews being vacant, rotting in old cornfields in the trees behind his barn. I ran to my car, stood on the hood, looked out over the cornstalks that towered like skimpy dried giants for what looked like hundreds of acres. In the distance, I saw it.
A house. Dilapidated. Some windows boarded.
Mordecai had a cell phone in his pocket, a satellite signal he depended on. I could go back and get his help to call the authorities.
Then tell them what?
I needed more answers. That house, as old as it was, had to have some.
I ran to the car and jumped in and started the motor all in one motion. The tires skidded as I got back on the road. I zoomed down the two-lane highway looking for a path, a driveway, a clearing, something, anything that would take me to that house.
Three minutes down the road I found it. An old, long driveway. I nearly missed it from the street as it was overgrown with weeds. Thick, tangled grasses hid the decaying mailbox and towering, rotting cornstalks surrounded the dirt driveway on either side. The house looked to be about a mile away up the drive, barely viewable in the midst of the overgrowth.
“Let's go.” I narrowed my eyes and slammed my foot on the accelerator as I turned onto the neglected driveway. The dirt and weeds were bumpy under my wheels and I jostled about in the seat, my head and elbows getting bruised in the process.
This driveway is going to kill Yvette's car.
The car must have heard my thoughts because after going over two more hard bumps, the engine stalled. I shut it off, turned it back on again. It cooperated.
For four more feet.
Then it died completely.
“Forget it.” I jumped out and started running toward the house, grateful that I had on my tennis shoes and that I had been working on getting my body back in shape. I was only slightly out of breath when I reached the vacant home.
It was a two-story farmhouse, made of white-painted wood and decaying into black rot. The front door had a large piece of untreated lumber nailed over it; the wraparound porch had planks missing in key spots.
The front entrance was not an option.
I ran around to the back. The back door was up high, as if there had been steps that once led up to it. Indeed, I could see crumbling concrete where the steps had once stood. I jumped up and down a couple of times, but there was no reaching the door. The one solid step disintegrated when I put one foot atop of it. I ran to the side of the house.
Windows and more windows. All boarded shut.
I ran to the other side of the house and stopped.
There was one window open.
I walked up to it slowly, preparing myself for what I knew I would see.
Striped curtains hung just inside of it. The curtains billowed in the afternoon breeze. A porcelain cat sat guard on the sill. My heart raced as the open window beckoned me.
I came out of my frozen state and grabbed three cinderblocks that were scattered on the ground around me.
What am I doing?
I didn't stop to answer my own question as I piled the cinderblocks on top of each other and used them to hoist myself up to the wide open window frame. I sat down on the sill and brought my legs inside.
I was in the kitchen of the home.
Everything was dusty. Cobwebs covered the kitchen table and chairs and rodents scurried underneath the floorboards.
What am I doing? What am I doing?
Now, I was out of breath, and I knew the lack of oxygen was affecting my common sense.
I need to get out of here!
But then do what?
I looked around the kitchen that had been finished in all white. White walls, white chair, white dishes arranged perfectly in white wooden cupboards with frosted glass doors.
The white made the ink stand out. A large stain of black ink was on the floorboards of the kitchen on the way to the home's formal dining room. I stepped slowly across the floor to study the ink, but my eyes caught notice of something else instead.
The dining room had a large table and a large, unusual contraption next to it. I scrunched up my face, trying to make sense of the tiny metal letters that were spread across the table, the large white paddle-looking things that had black ink smeared all over them. I looked back at the wooden contraption that was about half the size of the dining table it stood next to.
An antique printing press. I remembered the explanation given by the rare bookstore owner about the printing process, and was convinced that was what I was looking at.
And then I saw the book.
A blue bound hardcover lay on the floor. I didn't need to see the title to know what it was.
I would have studied the contents of the dining room some more, but the living room got my attention.
The walls of the front room were covered with crosses, crescents, stars of David, ankhs, every kind of religious symbol the world over. I was staring at the mind of someone in spiritual confusion, and it made sense. The spiritual leader in his life had been deceptive. Spiritual deception was all Jebidiah knew.
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Jesus' words were simple, plain, and straightforward, and yet most of the world didn't hear them, receive them. How much more difficult would it be to hear if you purposely covered your ears, deliberately closed your heart?
Jebidiah was lost, but didn't want to be found.
I turned back toward the kitchen, but stopped in the dining room to pick up the book.
This was all I'd have to give to authorities. I stared at the title:
The Secrets to Deconstructing Heroism and a Critique of the Philosophical and Theological Views of Moral Evolution in the Finite Universe.
I flipped through the first few pages and immediately understood why the bookstore owner wouldn't want to keep it in his possession. Though presented as a philosophical argument, it was clear that each chapter detailed specific plots of death and destruction. There were more than just plans to bomb an airport. I shivered as I flipped through the pages, seeing the terrifying thoughts and illustrations of a madman, the ruminations of someone preparing to commit unimaginable horrors.
Though his name was nowhere on the cover or the title page, he'd made notes throughout the pages, specifying dates, places, and concrete steps of action, including a detailed outline to carry out a bombing at BWI.
This was his personal copy.
I turned back toward the kitchen and retraced my steps to the open window
to get out of there!
But a sound caught my ear.
It was slight, but enough to make me turn back around.
Was that door cracked open before?
The kitchen pantry door was ajar. I didn't recall it being open. I heard the sound again and wondered if I was just seeing things, imagining things, and mistaking the loud thuds of my heartbeat as a sound outside my body.
But I heard it again.
A muffled whimper.
Was an animal in there? My feet were stuck to the floor as fear suddenly consumed me. I couldn't move. I forgot how to breathe. I couldn't think, scream, or even tremble.
I heard the muffled whimper again, and this time the pantry door slowly creaked open.
Darci.
She sat tied to a chair, her mouth gagged with a rag. She wriggled her head against the back of the chair, her eyes wide, her whimpers louder.
“Darci!” I came back to life and ran to her, first undoing the rag from her mouth.
“Sienna, run!” she yelled immediately.
“What?”
The pantry door slammed shut behind me and the small room fell into darkness, enclosing me and her in its bowels. I could hear my own heavy breathing and Darci's whimpers.
And, I realized in horror, a third set of inhalations, exhalations sounded right over my shoulder.
He was in the closet with us.