Tandy said, “No one will use you, Nell, not any more than we use each other. It’s what a team does: borrows on one another’s strengths, holds one another up through our weaknesses.”
The empath had been reading me again. “What are you? My confessor? My psychologist?” I stood up, transferring my weight to my bare feet on the floor, feeling the restless forest outside and the massed emotions inside, agitated and tense, the sensations mixed up and tangled through the old wood of the floor and up inside me. I leaned toward Tandy. “I told you to get outta my head.”
“You belong with PsyLED,” he said, “with this team on our first gig.” He smiled uncertainly, showing slightly yellowed teeth, the enamel cracked in fine lines, like the Lichtenberg lines on his skin, but paler. “You will bloom working with us.”
Bloom. I couldn’t help but love that word and, despite myself, some small, tight place inside me warmed and stretched, like a bud trying to open. “I’m not a plant,” I said, stubborn.
Rick said, “You said you wanted to be a consultant.”
“You should a told me things had changed, before I signed the papers.”
“You might not have signed them, then.” It had been intended to be humor, but when I sent him a look, Rick added, “Fine. I’ll tear them up right now—no harm, no foul. And you can walk away from a girl in peril, simply because there is a remote—very remote—chance that she is on the church grounds.”
Silently I turned and walked out onto the front porch again, feeling like I was running away, and maybe I was—maybe that was what I did, run away. The swing hung on chains, on the south side of the porch, facing north, into the drive and the hills and also angled toward the front door, which meant I couldn’t turn my back on the house and show with my body language that I wanted to be left alone, but I sat on it anyway, pushing off with a toe. When I took a breath, the air chilled my throat all the way down, and my lungs ached with the cold. Come morning, the trees would have started to turn. In a week, if the weather held, we’d have fall colors. If it turned out that the church was involved, and if I went against them, in a week, I might be in the new punishment house. I might never see my trees again. I might be dead.
Any excitement I had felt at having a real job, working with a team to a good end, like crime fighters did on a few shows I had watched, shriveled up and died at the thought. But then I thought about a young girl, kidnapped and possibly treated like God’s Cloud did. Culture shock—the words Tandy had used. What a girl would go through if she refused to do whatever her kidnappers wanted would be so much worse than just culture shock.
The door opened and Paka walked out, closing it behind her. She curled into the swing beside me and put her head on my shoulder in a gesture that felt all wrong. No one had put her head on my shoulder since my sisters and half sisters had when I was a child. I didn’t want Paka here, but I also didn’t want her to go away. I wanted to hit her. And I wanted to put an arm around her shoulders. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but it felt awful. I frowned into the night and crossed my arms tight across my chest.
“He’s worried,” she said, her odd, catty voice raspy and deeper than I expected each time she spoke, her African accent liquid and melting.
“He could put me in danger. Put my people—my sisters and brother, my mama and my maw-maw—in danger.” If she noticed that I didn’t mention my daddy, she didn’t say.
“He will keep you safe. He will keep them safe. He is no longer the police officer he once was. Now he is different. He stands in both worlds—in the cat world, with me, and in the human world. As a PsyLED special agent, he has much freedom in interpreting laws that affect us nonhumans, the laws that he must enforce. If you became in danger from the church again, if they took you, he would take a gun and go into the compound to save you, no matter what those in authority over him decried.”
I had been surrounded by men with agendas my whole life, and Rick having an agenda that was more important to him than the rule of law sounded a lot like the churchmen. Even John had had an agenda, and had used me to accomplish it: the honest and good and faithful goal of helping his wife to die with some kind of dignity. After she’d passed and we’d both mourned, he’d married me, and even then there had been an agenda, partially to protect me, partially to have a woman in his bed, but mostly to flip off the church, though he’d never made the obscene gesture used so easily by the PsyLED team.
John had loved me there, near the end, I knew, but it was difficult to love an old man who was dying, awkward to do my wifely duties, even though I wanted to show him how much I appreciated his keeping me free and safe from the church, how much I appreciated his plans to leave me his family land once he was gone. It was hard. Loving a man was nothing like the shows and films and books that talked about romantic love. Fiction. That’s all love was.
But the other thing I’d always thought was fiction was that women could have equal power in the world, working alongside men without being abused or punished. That supposed fiction had been proven reality tonight, proved by the way the team acted together, men and women on equal footing, with equal power. I wanted more of it. Foolish, foolish me. I wanted more of it. And it might be my undoing.
I said, “If I had to go in . . . or if I was taken into the compound against my will, other people, innocent people in my family, would get hurt. And more people would get hurt if Rick went into the compound to save me. And the consequences for after, after he’s long gone and can’t protect or save the people left behind, those consequences could be disastrous.”
“And the consequences for a girl taken by evil men?”
I dropped my head down, my hair covering my face and sliding against Paka’s in a silken shimmer. “That’s not fair.”
“No. I am a cat. I was born a cat and found a human form long after I was weaned. Cats are not fair.”
“No. They’re sneaky.”
“Be sneaky with us. Help us find the girl.”
“And if I have to go inside to do that? If my sisters are placed in even more danger because of something I do?”
“He will go to the cult grounds only if there is no other way. As to your family, if they decide to leave the cult, Rick will provide them a safe house until they can settle permanently elsewhere.”
Hope, flagging through the conversation, leaped like flame to dry wood. I sighed and felt the trees move in a cold wind, leaves stirring, sliding together, and slipping apart. Whispering in a language even I couldn’t understand. The tight bud of something inside me, something I had no name for, shivered with the leaves, straining toward . . . something else I didn’t know. From unknown to unknown. But there was one certainty. My sisters wouldn’t leave God’s Cloud until there was no other choice. And by then it might be too late. At that time, I could be their only hope.
“I have . . .” I stopped and started again. “There’s another woman I can ask about the Human Speakers of Truth, the wife of Elder TJ Aden, the elder who acts as judge in disputes. His second wife helps run the vegetable stand where I sell my farm produce and herbal mixtures. If anyone has heard or seen anything, she and her sister-wife would know.” I thought about what I was saying and what I was offering, and went ahead anyway. “Some of the local women will be there, not just churchwomen. I’ll . . . I’ll see what I can do. What answers I can find.”
Paka batted my side with her hand, and I felt the prick of claws—cat claws, not human claws. It was cat talk for approval. I looked down at her hand in the dark, expecting to see . . . I didn’t know what I was expecting, but the cat claws extending from the tips of her fingers were shockers. So was the black cat fur on the back of her hands. Paka could become part cat, which was surreal and so out of my understanding that my skin pebbled into chills. I forced myself to be still and think it through. Her catty approval meant that working with a law enforcement agency was a good thing. According to the churchmen, that meant
I was going to hell. My lips moved into a smile in the dark, and I patted her hand, feeling the soft cat hair and the sharp prick of claws. Cat claws, explaining why Rick was scratched up, but not why Paka wasn’t. Very strange, these nonhumans.
I stood from the swing, Paka at my side, moving with cat-fast reflexes, the swing corkscrewing. Paka behind me, I walked back inside, the warmth of the Waterford Stanley stove hitting me in the face. I glared at Rick. “You got an odd combination of honesty and deceit in you, like what the churchmen warned me about from the time I was able to understand English.” Rick lifted his eyebrows in amusement and what might have been condescension. I scowled at him, feeling heat rise to my face. “I’m accustomed to men taking what they want, and you charm people into doing what you want. I’m not sure if that’s any better, but I reckon it’s easier to live with.” I looked from him to the others in the room, hearing the depth of the silence after I spoke. “And you others got your hearts in the right place. So I’ll help.” I took a breath and said the words that needed to be said. “Even if it means going onto the church grounds.”
Tandy started, “It’s not like—”
I held up a hand to stop the words. “I know it’s not likely. But it had to be said.” I explained what I would be doing at the vegetable stand at dawn. To Rick I said, “So, turn in those papers. And leave me anything I need to read so I can ask the right questions. And now that you got what you wanted, you’uns get out of here. I’m tired of company, especially company that came to make me like them and manipulate me into doing what they wanted.” Tandy had the grace to shift his eyes to the floor. The rest of them were just staring. “Git! I need to sleep, and I’m sure you got a lot of Internet stuff and texts and e-mails to deal with.”
My guests looked from one to the other and slowly stood, dropping house cats and gathering up books and useless phones and tablets and laptops. They all headed to the door. Silent and subdued. I knew I’d been rude, but the noise was too much. The people were too much. It was too much like the life I’d lived as a child, noisy and . . . and happy. Happiness grated across my skin like a rasp, abrading and painful.
Yes. I had been happy as a child in the compound, happy until the day the colonel told my father he wanted me, the day all my illusions about the possibility of a good grown-up life came crashing down. “Please,” I said in a softer tone, my eyes on the floor, not meeting theirs. “I need some time alone. I’m not used to”—being happy—“so many people around me. Anymore.”
* * *
When my house was empty and the dark blue van was long out of sight, I stoked the stove and turned off the lights. I carried a blanket outside to the edge of the trees, my bare feet picking up the chilled dew from the grass. This was where I used to sit when Leah was napping, and I needed to get away from the smell of sickness. It had been far enough from the house to feel free, yet still close enough to hear Leah if she called. It also offered the best view, down the hill toward the lights of Oliver Springs, Oak Ridge, and Knoxville. In my loneliness as a teenaged girl, I used to put my hands into the soil and touch the tree roots, taking solace from them.
I still took solace from the trees. Unfolding the blanket just enough to keep my backside dry, I sat and put my hands and feet in the dew-wet grass and on the bare earth, my fingers finding a root and resting over it. It was a large root from a huge poplar tree. The same one I used to cling to when I was tired or distraught. A sycamore’s roots ran along beside it, intertwining, and I pushed my fingers into the meeting place of the two roots, the marriage between one kind of tree and another.
Instantly I felt a sense of peace and contentment flow into me; I felt the hum of the earth, the soughing of its breath, the slow movement of its tides, and the pull of the moon that was rising over the skyline. It was a waxing gibbous moon, big and bright, the color of a yellow gourd, hanging on the horizon. The feelings were more than merely peaceful and wonderful. Taken all together, they were life and goodness; they were all that was noble and beneficial and fecund and lovely about this Earth. This moon. These two roots. This grass beneath my feet. I caught a glimpse of an owl flying past, most silent of predators. Saw bats’ wings flickering in the moonlight. Heard a night bird call, a whippoorwill. My woods had a lot of whippoorwills, though the birds preferred open fields, planted with grasses.
“Did I do the right thing?” I asked the night. “Have I made the right choice?”
Nothing answered. The earth never did. Neither did God, so far as I’d ever heard. But I felt good about it, about the choice I had just made. And maybe that was enough.
A splotched shadow moved across the ground, four legs in dappled shades of moonlight, looking like a headless cat. “Torquil, You coming to give me an answer to my question?”
The cat, her black head invisible in the dark, walked up to me, and leaped across the blanket into my lap, where she curled and relaxed, her breath a soft purr. And that was an answer. Torquil had been wild, a loner, a people hater who’d hung around just for the rats and voles that came to my garden and for access under the front porch when it rained. And then Paka and Occam and the others came, and suddenly she was curious and accepting. She bumped my hand with her head, asking for attention.
Torquil was tamed.
Was that what the people who visited tonight wanted to do to me? Tame me?
Maybe my life as a loner and a hermit and an independent woman was over. Maybe it had been about to be over for a long time and I just hadn’t noticed.
In the distance, gunshots rang out, staccato and overlapping, echoing through the night. Creatures moved uneasily, not liking the sound of gunfire resounding over the ridge separating the church grounds from mine. This was night target practice, not hunting, and far more firepower than usual.
Through my hands and both soles, I felt someone walking along, outside the boundary of my land and my full awareness, even as extended as those boundaries had become following the death of Brother Ephraim. It was as if the watcher knew where they were and stepped just beyond where I could sense him. He walked to the broken deer stand and stopped, unmoving, for a long time. Then he slipped away, off my land, and was gone.
Belowground, something dark raced around and around the boundaries of Soulwood, as if learning the limits of its prison or searching for weaknesses in the wood’s walls. It felt frantic, and to my knowledge, this hadn’t happened the only other time I’d fed the woods. But it would settle. Surely it would.
I went inside to sleep, in the tiny bed I had claimed so long ago, upstairs in the nook that was mine, had always been mine, even when living with John. Even when I’d had wifely duties to accept. When we were done with marital relations, I’d always left and come upstairs under the eaves, uneasy in Leah’s bed and unable to rest with John’s snoring.
I brought a stack of books to bed, fearing I wouldn’t fall asleep tonight, with all my questions, with the house somehow continuing to ring with the noise of people. And with three cats on my bed. That was foreign, especially with Torquil being so demanding. She chose to curl up under my chin, purring. I just hoped she didn’t have fleas. I perused the books by a single lantern (the solar batteries having been mostly drained by the guests and all the lights we’d used), trying to clear my mind, but it raced, uneasy, excited, fearful.
Sleeping alone in my house had never been challenging, not with my early warning system in place. Soulwood Advance Security System. I made an acronym of the name and thought that SASS worked well. It was funny, and I wished I had someone to share it with. I rolled to my side and closed my eyes, but they popped back open. I picked up a novel to read when sleep fled from me. Long after I usually was asleep, I finished the romance book and threw it across the room. It made me feel weird and uncomfortable and not myself. And more lonely than ever. People in the real world and the fictional world were baffling. Purely mystifying. Moments later the lantern flame sputtered and died, taking the last of the l
ight and leaving me in the dark, alone but for the cats.
* * *
Thursday morning came with the cold, though not quite cold enough to coat the grass with ice, not yet cold enough to sparkle frosty white in the dark of early morning. In the predawn, still in my nightgown with thick socks on my feet, I lit a lantern and stumbled around the house, washing up, stoking the stove, putting on the percolator. I prepared a breakfast of the last of my eggs, the last of a loaf from yesterday’s bread, and honey, fully waking up only when the coffee hit my system. I ate and studied the material Rick had left me, paying close attention to the photographs of the girl. I memorized the new list of questions Rick wanted me to answer.
When I was satisfied that I knew what he knew and also what he didn’t, I dressed for the day. Missing my dogs. I still so missed my dogs, and never more than in the morning, when I’d usually turn them outside to guard the premises and sleep in the sun. But I wasn’t going to risk getting another dog, not while I could be still be in danger from the church. The cats were sneaky. They’d survive anything except a sharpshooter’s long-range, carefully placed hit. Cats wouldn’t come when called. They were half-wild, still, or had been until Paka showed up. They wouldn’t wag their tails hoping for treats while someone targeted them from inches away.
I let the cats out into the garden with the admonition, “Watch out for hawks.” Cello and Jezzie raced to the patch of catnip and rolled in it, vocalizing loudly. Torquil started digging instantly, chasing a vole. “Get it and eat it, Torq.” A second later she had the vole in her teeth and another second later it was dead. She looked to me and I said, “That’s a good girl. I’ll bring you some fresh cream for dinner.” She sat and started eating her raw breakfast.
Satisfied that they would be okay for the day, I loaded my truck up with late-season veggies, a variety of dried herbal teas and spicy meat rubs in plastic baggies, some natural flea collars I’d sewn, each containing my herbal flea repellent, and some jars of honey I had traded for. I folded the last bit of cash money into a pocket. It wasn’t my day at the stand, but it would be handy to sell some stuff today to buy groceries. Feeding six extra mouths was pricey. Next time they’d have to bring the food and feed me.