Creed (14 page)

Joseph handed me the clothes Elijah had set out. I took them and exhaled. I got why he couldn’t leave his sister behind, understood more than he probably realized. And I wasn’t saying that I didn’t want to help. I just wasn’t sure I could.

“Can I ask you some questions?” I asked, and he nodded. “Why is your father keeping such close tabs on Eden? He pretty much said that it was you who would eventually lead this town, so why does he care so much about her?”

“She’s important to my father. Valuable. She’s the only daughter of our … ” He paused only long enough to correct himself. “The only daughter of this town’s prophet. The first girl to be born to the Hawkins family in over three generations.”

I shook my head, not understanding what he was getting at. I was my father’s only daughter. Hell, I was his only child, and that didn’t seem to make a difference to him or his fists.

“My father protects her, spares her from the disciplinary actions most of us receive. He wants to keep her thoughts as pure as her body. Eden has no reason to be afraid of him, no reason to think about leaving.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. Joseph was putting both our lives on the line for his sister, and she didn’t want to leave. “So let me get this straight. You dragged me in here, risking not only my life but Luke’s and Mike’s, and your sister wants to
stay
?”

His face fell. Joseph knew what he was doing, what he was asking of me, and for once I was glad to see a flash of shame. “You don’t understand, Dee. She’s young, barely twelve. She has no idea what he has planned for her or the discipline a husband is expected to exact on his wife. My mother hid it from her. He’ll marry her off in less than two years as a way to secure the most influential of his followers to him. She won’t survive it. She can’t.”

I thought back to when I was twelve and remembered how hard it was to find the strength to get up and leave everything behind. It took me an entire year to do it, to finally admit to a judge what my father had done to me and ask to be taken away from him for good. Those were things no child should ever have to do, and yet I had.

Joseph handed me the skirt Elijah had laid out and motioned for me to get up. “You need to get dressed and start reading.”

I slipped my shoes from my feet and waited for Joseph to head for the door. He caught my look and turned his back, but didn’t leave.

“Can I get a little privacy?” I asked.

“Nope. I’m staying. You’re safer with me in here,” he argued. “Now go on and change.”

My cheeks flushed as I undid the button of my jeans and hastily stripped them off. Tossing my shirt aside, I grasped the cotton shirt and yanked it down over my head then pulled on the skirt.

“You can turn around now,” I said as I twisted my hair into an ugly braid. “And I have more questions for you.”

“I figured you would. Go ahead,” he said.

“These people who are supposed to be my parents—Samuel and Abeline Smith—who are they?”

Joseph shrugged. “I have no idea. There was a couple who died in a house fire about ten years back. Their last name was Smith, but I think the husband’s name was Nathaniel or something. And I don’t think they had any children, but then again, my father could’ve fabricated the whole thing. Knowing him, they never existed.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered. “He makes up entire families? How is that even possible? How has he never been found out?”

“What’s to find out?” Joseph asked as he handed me the pair of clogs I was expected to wear.

I grabbed the clogs from his hand and jammed my feet into them. “Oh, I don’t know, kidnapping? Maybe child abuse? Neglect? Murder? Take your pick.”

“And who would report it?” he asked, unfazed.

His question was so honest, yet so unfathomable. “So you’re saying that no one here, not one person in God knows how many years, ever realized that your father is nuts? That what he’s doing is wrong?”

“I never said that, but you’ve got to go some distance to find a town that he doesn’t control.”

“What does that even mean?” I snapped. Joseph’s tone was serious, but I didn’t have the time or the patience to play twenty questions. I thought back to the last town we’d passed, the one with an abundance of Twinkies and the gas station we
didn’t
use. They’d seemed normal, friendly.

“I’ve been told that my Grandfather wasn’t as strict of a leader as my father, that for generations several of the men were allowed to work outside of Purity Springs. All their money went into Purity Springs’ communal pool, but they worked in neighboring towns, nonetheless.”

I nodded; that would explain how the town survived, financially anyway. “What changed? Why aren’t people allowed to leave anymore?”

“My father happened. When he took over, he called them all back. He said the risk of being exposed to the true evils of the world was too great, and that he needed them close by, where he could protect them.”

“So that was what, like, seventeen years ago? A lot can change in seventeen years.”

“Not in those towns,” Joseph continued, his attention flicking toward the window. “He left two people outside, two people he could trust. His brothers. One is the sheriff in a town about fifty miles north of here called Camden Hills. The other sits on the town council of a tiny farming community to the east. Other than those two towns, there’s no one around here to even notice us.”

That made absolutely no sense. Surely anybody who had the chance to live outside this place would never come back, never mind help Elijah. “I get that they’re his brothers and all, but in their jobs, they must interact with people from outside this town all the time. They know we’re not all evil.”

“They grew up here,” Joseph said matter-of-factly.

What? Was he drinking his own Kool-Aid? You couldn’t tell me that being born and raised here meant you couldn’t see the truth. Couldn’t see the real Elijah. His mom had, and if what Joseph was saying was true, then he had as well.

I threw my hands out, dismissing his answer. “Not buying it.”

“Their families live here, Dee. My aunts … my cousins all live here in Purity Springs.”

I tried to wrap my brain around this, around the notion of two men, intelligent enough to hold decent jobs, leaving their families behind in this town with a madman. I couldn’t.

“Do
they
want to leave?” I asked, wondering if their wives were part of the group Joseph’s mom had planned to come back for. “The families?”

“No.”

His answer left little room for reply, so I let it go and moved on to something more pressing. “So why not go farther, skip those two towns and keep going?”

He didn’t answer immediately, just studied me for a minute as if judging the validity of my question. “Come here,” he said and held out his hand.

I followed him over to the window above the bed. He leaned over and pulled the curtains back, gesturing for me to have a look. “Do any of them look abused to you? Unhealthy? Miserable? From the outside, there’s nothing to report.”

I peered out the window, squinting against the mid-day sun. The street was littered with people, and he was right—not a single one looked beaten down or broken. They looked … content.

Across the street was the bank. An older man was hanging up a
closed
sign while another was on a ladder, changing what appeared to be the bulb in a streetlight. A young girl, probably no older than seven, was sweeping the front steps of the tiny diner, smiling at Elijah as he walked past. Then a car passed by, pulled into the gas station, and actually
got
gas.

“When?” I pressed my face to the glass, wondering when this town had gone from completely abandoned to fully operational. “When did all of this happen? When did they all come back out?”

“About ten minutes after I brought you in.”

Joseph must’ve seen the confused look cross my face, because he eased me down onto the bed and waited for my breathing to slow before he continued. “The alarms that were going off when you came into town—I pulled them.”

I nodded. He’d already told me that.

“They’re our way of alerting people of an emergency. No different from what other small towns have, I suppose.”

“Um hmm,” I mumbled, not bothering to tell him that normal people, people who took advantage of things like phones and TVs, had something called the emergency broadcast system and Weather Bug, but whatever.

“We have one police officer and a volunteer fire department. They all live here. They were all born and raised
here
. We use the sirens to alert them when they’re needed. Works if there’s a bad storm coming or if my father needs to gather his people.”

“Can they hear it in the neighboring towns?” I asked, hoping that somebody with no blood ties to Purity Springs would get curious and come looking.

“No, but it doesn’t matter. If my father needs them, his brothers will come.”

“And?” I said, waving my hands to hurry him along.

“When the sirens go off, everyone gathers in the chapel. It didn’t take my father long to figure out I was missing and that I pulled the alarm. He held everybody there until he could figure out what I was up to.”

“The car,” I muttered.

“Yeah, that’s when he found your car. But once he decided the town was safe, after I brought you in, things went back to normal.”

“And they believe him,” I said, gesturing toward the window. “They actually believe the crap he feeds them?”

“Yes.”

It was one word. Complete and absolute. Brooking no challenge.

I thought of this town, of the one hundred and forty-eight residents worshiping Elijah, and I groaned. “Oh my God. Here I was thinking all along that the only person we needed to beat was your dad. But there’s a whole town out there. Every single one of them thinks I belong to them, that I was born and raised for them!”

“And two towns beyond that,” he added, reminding me how far his father’s hold extended. “It’s possible, though. I don’t know exactly how yet, but it’s possible to get out of here. It’s happened before, and it can happen again.”

TWENTY

His words caught my attention, and I looked up. “Who? When?”

That fact that somebody had managed to escape Elijah Hawkins’s hold was exactly what I needed to hear. Then it hit me. “Mary.”

Joseph grinned, one of the first genuine smiles I’d seen from him. “Yes, my Aunt Mary. My mother’s sister.”

“Where is she now? How did she do it?”

“I don’t know exactly. My mother never talked about it, and it wasn’t my place to ask. But I think something happened, something involving my father.”

I didn’t bother to press for details. I’d spent less than an hour with Elijah Hawkins and that was plenty enough time for my mind to fill in the blanks. And none of those blanks were good.

“She got up in the middle of the night and took off. She knew my uncles controlled the surrounding towns. Everybody does. She drove over three hundred miles until she finally stopped and told the police about Purity Springs, about my father … ”

“And?” I prompted. I didn’t have time for him to get lost in thought. I wanted information. I wanted to know the exact route his aunt had taken, how she’d managed to slip away undetected, and whether Elijah had ever caught up with her.

“The police took her statement, and they
did
come looking. She brought two officers back with her, along with a woman who claimed to work for the some social services agency. They were here for two days. They questioned nearly everyone, including my mother, but found nothing.”

“How is that possible?” I asked, remembering the books we’d found. They were like ledgers, cataloging what punishments were doled out and when. You couldn’t get better proof than that.

“Think about it, Dee. Does my dad look strange to you? Does Purity Springs look at all off?”

I considered his question for half a second, then realized he was right. Sure, the houses were a little outdated, and the town had a weird vibe to it, but they drank milk with dinner. They sold Pringles at the gas station. They had streetlights and a bank. To the outside world, yeah … they looked normal.

“What about the books and shed with all the claw marks? That room you were—” I stopped as the words caught in my throat and the memories came rushing back. The plinking sound. The blood dripping from my arms into the small silver bowl. “The room you bled me in.”

“The isolation room can easily pass as an irrigation shed. Every farming community has one. And
that
room … well, that’s part of an unfinished basement. The floor is tiled for obvious reasons, but to anyone else, it looks like nothing more than a cellar.”

“But what about the kids? I saw the books, Joseph. I know what their parents do to them.”

“Punishment is a form of guidance. Of love. The adults don’t see it as wrong. As for the kids, well, two things. They fear my father’s retribution, and that fear keeps them from telling the truth. Plus, my father isn’t stupid; he always takes the mental route first. He only resorts to physical violence when he can’t get through to them any other way. And trust me, sometimes you’d rather be hit than deal with the stuff he can unload on you.”