Nun But The Brave (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 3) (18 page)

Thirty-Nine

If the community hadn’t been technology-free, Giulia’s first time milking goats would’ve become a YouTube “best of” video. Demon-possessed goat udder squirting warm milk up her nose? Check. Pointy goat horns stuck in her jeans? Check. Little goat hooves tripping her so she landed on her butt to the delight of her new friends? Check.

But none of those were reason number five why she’d never make it as a Prepper. Dinner prep was. Manipulating squishy hunks of venison wrapped in soggy brown paper gave her a new appreciation of meat in Styrofoam and plastic wrap in neat rows at the grocery store.

On top of that, the Fair Folk—an Irish tradition taught to her by Frank’s grandmother—did not oblige her at supper. Joanne was not present. Instead, Giulia tested her ability to remember and match names to faces.

At the tables sat the accordion player and the clothes mender, Wild-Eyed Alex, Cheryl and her twins Tim and Jim, the goat milker and his wife the cheesemaker, plus two new couples, both in their early twenties. The first dressed and walked like seasoned outdoors enthusiasts. The second could have dropped into the compound from a 1969 wormhole. Tie-dye shirts, bell-bottom jeans, long hair. All of it perfumed with weed.

The outdoorsman possessed the community’s whetstone. Supper conversation began with knife sharpening. It shifted to issues with a different water purifier. Giulia remembered this same discussion from her last visit. If the new world community had a weak link, their giant water treatment gizmos had been cast in the role of chief suspect. Tim and Jim talked technical machine jargon with the male half of the hippie couple. Alex presided over both tables, but didn’t sit at the head of either. Everyone asked his advice or opinion about their topic of discussion. They queried him with deference but not reverence. Giulia chewed a piece of flat bread and wondered if this bolstered her theory of Alex’s unseen twin being the real group leader.

No mead tonight, for which Giulia offered a silent prayer of gratitude. She didn’t have the “driving home” excuse to avoid alcohol consumption. At least her admiration of the Celtic designs on the drinking horns from which they quaffed water was sincere. After supper, Cheryl and the hippie brought out coffee with the honey cakes. The twins passed around honey and goat milk for the coffee.

In the spirit of trying anything once, Giulia added both to the coffee and took her first sip with several pairs of eyes watching her.

It was vile.

She swallowed it anyway.

“Interesting,” she said to the eyes.

Tim laughed. “Ma, that’s exactly what you said.”

“Exactly how you said it, too,” Jim said.

Cheryl said, “It’s an acquired taste. Once you get used to the goat milk, you’ll be spoiled for cow’s milk forever. Goat milk tastes so much richer.”

“It’s the mouth feel,” said the hippie husband. “I work in advertising for now,” he said when Giulia raised an eyebrow at the jargon.

She gave an honest compliment to the honey cakes and seized the opening. “I know this wonderful cake baker from a local discussion group about post-cataclysm cooking. She’s an absolute magician with frosting. She once made a cake look like a swimming pool complete with a tiny person on a float.” Giulia sipped more coffee to appreciate the next bite of honey cake. “I haven’t heard from her in a couple of months.”

Jim said, “You have to be talking about Phoebe. Ma, you remember Phoebe. She tried to show Alex a better way to make firecracker pickles, right Alex?”

Alex’s smile seemed a little forced. “Phoebe knew her strengths. She wasn’t always tactful in expressing them.”

“I’m waiting until the bad weather hits so we can have a pickle competition,” Tim said.

Cheryl kicked both her sons under the table. As a unit, they said, “We apologize, Alex.”

Alex’s forced smile became forgiving.

Two ideas fought for Giulia’s attention. First, she rolled “Phoebe” around in her teacher’s head until her memory pulled up Greek and Roman mythology. Joanne à Diane à Diana à Artemis à Too conspicuous a name for someone starting a new life à Scroll down the list of major gods and goddesses à Scroll down the list of minor ones à So much information squirreled away in her head à Try the Titans à Ah. Phoebe. So Joanne did drop out and start a new life. Sorry, Diane.

Alex said, “Phoebe’s pistol skills were not up to the standards of the community. However, her rifle accuracy and genius for cooking more than made up for that lack.”

Thus cementing the second idea: Alex wasn’t simply their equivalent of an office manager. He was their priest. No wonder he’d asked Giulia about her religious affiliation. Casual observers, like she’d pretended to be, could be ripe for his cool new religion—Alex-worship.

Giulia sipped more goat and raw honey flavored coffee-like substance. She didn’t want to push for the exact date Joanne left the community. Tomorrow for that, over breakfast. Food and Joanne were natural conversation companions.

If only Alex’s use of past tense meant Joanne left here on her own and not in pieces for the coyotes to eat.

Supper dragged on until twilight when everyone gathered up their dishes. Giulia relinquished the rest of her beverage without a qualm. Jim winked at her. As Giulia carried and washed and stacked alongside everyone else, she tried to predict what test Alex would throw at her next. Knife sharpening? Sheep herding? No one had yet handed her a shovel for her turn at manure collecting.

Speaking of Alex…She looked around, but he apparently bailed on the dish drying portion of cleanup, and no one had called him on it.

George Orwell was right: All Preppers are equal, but some Preppers are more equal than others.

Cheryl jogged between houses, whistling and calling “Rana! Lassie! Boris! Pepin!”

Pepin the moose led the galloping herd to Cheryl’s feet. Cheryl lured them into the houses with bone-shaped goodies.

Giulia followed the rest of the gathering to the central fire pit. The outdoorsy couple lit the flame and nursed it with twigs.

Cheryl returned. “All the dogs are in for the night.”

Everyone seated themselves around the fire, not too close since the night was warm. Someone passed around long pipes with bowls carved in the shape of a humanoid head with six-point buck antlers.

Giulia’s first thought was: They’re all
Lord of the Rings
cosplayers.

Her second: Smoking’s bad for the baby.

Her third:
Lord of the Rings
didn’t mention antlers. Pan, then? No, Pan had nubs of horns. Come on, mental storehouse of fiction and mythology, cooperate.

The goat milker opened a drawstring bag and stuffed loose herbs into the bowl of his pipe. He passed the bag to the accordion player, who did the same and passed it to his wife. Tim packed his own and his brother’s bowls and passed the pouch to Cheryl.

Giulia cursed her inability to take incriminating pictures.

Cheryl handed the pouch to Giulia, who said with perfect truth, “I’ve never smoked.”

“Don’t worry. This is mild as can be. We grow it in the herb garden out front. I’ll show you how this works.” She stuffed herbs into Giulia’s bowl with a practiced thumb. Giulia passed the pouch. The mixture didn’t smell like weed, thank Heaven.

The cheesemaker took enough spills from the fire for everyone to light their own pipe. Cheryl got hers going, then turned to Giulia. “Suck in now, while the flame is on the herbs. Again. Once more.”

Giulia got a nose full of smoke and coughed. Her nose was not having a good time at this overnight stay. She closed her throat and inhaled, holding all the smoke in her mouth.

“That’s right,” Cheryl said.

The instant Cheryl turned away, Giulia opened her lips a millimeter and let all the smoke stream out. Lavender and something bitter coated the inside of her mouth.

The fire puffed and shot sparks. Pine, cedar, and juniper mingled with the lavender in her nostrils. Something else too, something her students used to use when they thought the nuns didn’t know about the school’s unofficial weed-smoking areas.

The accordion player began to chant. The twins picked it up followed by all the men except the outdoorsman. All four women added harmony. Last, the outdoorsman came in with a bass drone.

The smoke from the pipes, the smoke from the fire, and the smoke from the incense enclosed the group in an undulating gray cloud. A fitful breeze swirled the mingled smoke among them for a chorus and Giulia could see only Cheryl and the red hair of the clothes mender. Where were Alex and the twins? The breeze shifted and she glimpsed Tim and Jim. She blinked. Her contacts clamored for eye drops.

The eyelids of every single person around the fire drooped. The twins began to sway, the others following their lead. Giulia too, even though she was freaking out inside. Little Zlatan was still in his first trimester and his mother was inhaling a concoction of who knew what kind of drugs. For the first time in her life, she wished she knew what opium smelled like.

She fought the encroaching mellowness and listened to the chant:

“By the circle and the flame

O Horned One

By the smoke and the oil

O Horned One

Come to us, live in us

Show us your power

Horned One, Great Horned One.”

Standard invocation language. Simple call and response. Designed on purpose for mellow drugged worshippers, Giulia had no doubt.

Cradle Catholicism came to her rescue. Almost thirty years of daily Mass attendance made her an expert at worship planned for non-singers. She picked up the melody of the response and swayed in time with Cheryl.

Across the circle from her, the hippies took drags from each other’s pipes. Tim and Jim’s voices started to slur. The smoke slithered between them all, slipped away, and blew over their heads. The chant continued, not louder but more intense: Worshippers invoking their god.

Giulia stifled a yawn and saw him. A man with antlers. She didn’t see where he appeared from, only between one “O Horned One” repetition and the next there he was within the circle. The flames picked out red and gold highlights in his long black hair. The polished antlers gleamed in the light. His skin, good Heavens so much skin, glistened when he moved. Oil of some kind. Giulia thanked God for the favor of the cosplayer’s fringed loincloth.

He danced behind his worshippers. No lighthearted “let’s have a good time after a hard day” frolic; a stately dance conveying power and authority. The triple layers of smoke gathered around him like a mantle. It made him grow larger in Giulia’s eyes; stern yet protective; a leader to follow into the wild, uncertain future. He was their future.

Giulia reached out to the stones surrounding the fire pit and clamped her hand on a rough edge. Her head cleared. Her eyes stung. She remembered to keep singing along with the rest.

The cosplayer’s voice began a counter-chant with the men. The women’s harmony clashed against it, but in an odd way the accidentals were pleasant to the ear.

Or it was the drugged smoke. Giulia had to breathe clean air, but Maria Martin wouldn’t leave this special event for any reason including nuclear war.

The cosplayer stopped dancing and walked around the circle, placing his left hand on each person’s left shoulder in turn.

A ring of adults playing duck-duck-goose. Welcome to the future. Giulia bit both lips closed—
don’t laugh don’t laugh don’t laugh
—before opening them again and picking up the women’s part of the chant.

The antlers stopped behind the hippie’s wife. His left hand rested on her shoulder. His right hand tilted up her chin. He slid his right thumb across his stomach and drew a four-pronged antler symbol on her forehead. It shone in the firelight. He helped her to her feet and they walked through a hole in the smoke into the woods.

The chant wound down after one more verse. Tim and Jim curled up next to each other on the ground and started snoring. The outdoorsy couple staggered to their house, undressing each other on the way. The hippie’s husband imitated the twins.

Cheryl touched Giulia’s arm, a loopy grin on her face. Giulia stood, her stagger not all put on for the community’s benefit. Cheryl led Giulia to the absent Audrey’s house. Giulia unrolled her sleeping bag but her fingers couldn’t manage the zipper. Maybe it was warm enough tonight to sleep on top of it.

Forty

Giulia woke with a clear head and a throat dry enough to light matches on. A three-quarter moon shone on her legs. That window wasn’t her bedroom window. Her nose was all stuffed. Weird. She had no allergies. She squeezed her nose between her finger and thumb and smelled lavender.

The Horned One ritual.

Her body jackknifed off her sleeping bag. She fumbled open her backpack and with her phone still inside it to hide the light, pressed the home button. Seventeen minutes after two. Panic surged into her Sahara-like throat. What had she inhaled? What would it do to the baby?

Stop.

She took a long, deep breath.

Think.

Panicking was a waste of energy. She needed the residue from her pipe and ashes from the fire and a gallon of water. First the water. She unlaced her boots and padded to the kitchen. From his bed on a throw rug in the living room, Pepin opened one eye and thumped his tail. Giulia patted his head and he was snoring a minute later.

The absent Audrey got a thank you from Giulia, because a clear stream of room-temperature water flowed into Giulia’s cup when she held it under the gigantic water purifier contraption’s spigot.

Giulia filled and drained the cup over and over and over, stopping only when her bladder threatened to go on strike. The toilet took up ninety-eight percent of the minuscule bathroom, but Giulia didn’t care about her knees knocking against a wall.

Now that the emergency needs were handled, Giulia returned to the bedroom and tucked her phone into her jeans. She would’ve preferred writing a bullet list to help her snoop more efficiently, but the smart PI left no physical evidence.

She turned the back door handle without making a noise and squeezed through minimal openings in the house and screen doors. The moon shone on the entire compound. Fortunate for her. If she’d needed her phone flashlight, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the dogs had been trained to raise an alarm around technology.

The hippie’s husband and the twins were still asleep on the ground next to the fire pit. The twins’ positions proved there was such a thing as womb memory. Before she stepped away from the space between the houses, she stretched her neck to see as much of the central area as she could. No lights shone anywhere. Hurricane lamps would be bright enough for her to see them through a window. She hoped. If someone was spying on the newbie, she could claim a need for fresh air after the smoke without adding it to her confession list for Father Carlos.

All the pipes lay on the ground in a ragged circle around the fire pit. She crept to her spot and dug out a quarter of the herbs from her pipe and Cheryl’s. More than that might be noticed. Next, the ashes.

Maybe not. The heart of the embers still glowed red. Right, everyone had gone to sleep or to bed after the cosplayer and the hippie headed for the woods. Everyone…Giulia closed her eyes and pictured the group around the circle. Everyone except Alex. How convenient.

She poked the outside edge of the fire pit. The ashes weren’t an option. The plastic baggie would melt if she scooped some in.

One eye on the twins and the hippie, she eased herself vertical while the idea coalesced in her mind. Alex disappeared before the pipe ceremony. Alex might have been the same height and weight as the glistening Horned One, as well as she could recall from behind the smoke and its effects.

Giulia whacked her own knuckles with an imaginary ruler. The experienced PI doesn’t allow her pet theories to block the facts. She’d taken Joanne’s twin obsession and run with it. Amateur.

After this evening, she’d suggest to Olivier the possibility of cults recruiting for inherent worshipper tendencies. An analysis of the incense and whatever they smoked might yield substances designed to make the cultists mellow and receptive. An ideal combination for the leader/god: With regular use, a content group of followers would approve anything he did. Three examples snored at her feet.

She rubbed her hand in circles over her stomach. Tomorrow she’d pay for a rush analysis of this herb mixture and make an appointment with her OB/GYN. Her doctor scheduled patients exactly like an acting cattle call, so Giulia wouldn’t get squeezed in sooner than the return of the analysis results.

No panicking. She would not panic. Worry achieved nothing but elevated blood pressure and heart rate. Little Zlatan wouldn’t benefit from mama pulling a Sister Frumentius the Freakout on him. Living with that woman at one of her school posts had been a daily trial.

She flipped a mental coin: Heads for house, tails for woods. Tails it was: Alex and the hippie in the ultimate back to nature experience. It wasn’t really a fifty-fifty chance. Alex and his consort communing with nature via sex
al fresco
made perfect sense.

A nightingale warbled in the woods. She followed its song as she tiptoed past the beehives. Not a twig cracked beneath her feet as she looked down to keep her progress silent. Did these people vacuum the ground? No, silly her. Vacuums required electricity. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir of crickets helped her as well. It was a wonder roasted crickets hadn’t been served as an appetizer tonight. Thank God for unexpected favors.

She seldom took her home for granted after her years in the convent, but after this immersion it would be difficult not to kiss the threshold when she returned.

A discarded daisy marred the obsessive cleanliness of the dirt path. It lay at the edge of the woods about a hundred feet from the clearing.

Giulia left the path to follow the beginning of a trail of unintentional breadcrumbs. The trees blocked some of the moonlight but she could still see her way clearly enough to avoid twigs and holes. Another hundred or so feet in, the trees opened to reveal a small clearing.

The couple lay asleep on a brown blanket. Giulia crouched behind a cluster of juniper bushes and squinted. Not a blanket; deer skins. At least four had been sewn together to accommodate Alex’s height plus the width needed for his consort of choice. A daisy chain crowned said consort’s disheveled blonde hair. Giulia took a moment to reconcile herself to the task of examining two stark-naked strangers for evidence of her theory. She opened the camera on her phone, turned off the flash, and centered it on the antlers. Then she zoomed it two hundred percent.

The antlers appeared real but the hair colored like shining autumn leaves was definitely a wig. At least the wig hadn’t been a drug hallucination. The trailing end of a tattoo curled around his neck. The tip of a horn, it looked like. No surprise there. She’d never seen Alex’s neck.

On to his chest with a quick left swing over to his arm before an inadvertent eyeful of his naughty bits.

And there it was. Her phone’s extreme close-up showed her the puckered scar at the base of his thumb. The scar Alex had gotten when he worked at a metal stamping plant in high school. Alex, you dog. So your wild-eyed preaching of the Gospel of Doomsday survival was merely an excuse to gather hard-working, willing women to use in every sense of the word.

Giulia snapped several pictures in the hope one would be clear in this low light. Alex here asleep in the woods meant Alex’s house was hers to explore. She retraced her steps to the fire pit and over to Alex’s back door.

She checked her phone: 3:03. A good Prepper would know what time sunrise began. Reason number…whatever. She’d make sure to be back in her sleeping bag by four at the latest.

Alex’s non-tech community was a masterpiece of organization. He avoided smartphones, therefore he had to keep paper lists and records and she had less than an hour to find them.

Taking a cue from her successful search of Joanne’s bookshelf, Giulia tried Alex’s books first. Dust and pollen covered most of them.
Bulfinch’s Mythology
and
The Golden Bough
were clean and heavily creased, but no handwritten notes fell out of either. Same for manuals on beekeeping and organic farming.

All right then, where else? She climbed the ladder to the loft. A narrow night table didn’t even have a drawer. A low wooden frame kept the mattress off the floor. He might have built the extra-long frame himself to accommodate his height. She risked the flashlight, hooding it with her free hand.

More horns were carved into the sides of the frame. Alternating with them, the classic Greek key design like on his beehives. Horns twined with antlers. A row of key design, more horns and antlers, and so on around the bed.

No. Not quite around. Beneath the pillow, a vertical bar of the key design was a centimeter off-kilter. Giulia held her breath and pulled at the section of the frame. A shallow drawer slid into her hands.

Whatever she’d expected, this wasn’t it. A couple of dozen black squares with white frames, three sides identical and the fourth wider. She touched one and her fingers remembered the feel from her childhood. Polaroids. Who still used old-fashioned instant cameras? Stupid question: As technology went, instant cameras were about as Luddite as it got.

She turned over the nearest photo and flipped it back so fast she created a breeze.

No. Personal morals must be set aside to find Joanne.

She turned over the photo again. The background was the same bower in the woods where she’d left Alex and his choice
du jour
. The consort in the photo, a brunette with a similar crown of daisies, lay spread-eagled on the deer skin blanket. Her closed eyes and slack mouth could have indicated deep sleep.

Giulia held the photograph at arm’s length. The angle indicated the photographer had squatted or knelt between the brunette’s legs to take the most explicit shot possible. She may have been deep enough under a version of the smoke and incense combination not to stir when the photographer arranged her in such an exposed position.

But there was the LSA cocktail in the teenagers’ and Anne’s systems.

It didn’t make sense that Alex needed his women under euphoric and relaxing drugs to bed them. Everyone here looked up to Alex, took his advice as canon, deferred to him in all things. So why the explicit photos?

Simple answer: Alex was a pervert.

Nothing was simple.

She turned over photos one by one. Three blondes. Two brunettes. Cheryl. The cheesemaker.

Joanne.

She checked her phone: 3:42. No time to retrace the path to the clearing and look for Alex’s hidden camera.

She turned over more photos as fast as her fingers could grasp their edges. Using Alex’s blanket as a shroud, she activated her phone’s flash and closed her eyes against the brief light. Shooting single pictures was taking too long. She held down the center button to take a burst. She moved the camera to the four corners of the drawer and took more bursts.

After returning the blanket to its former place on the bed, she turned the photos face down as close to their original positions as possible. A partly hidden one of a brunette with short, straight hair made her pause. She took another look at the thin face.

A curse almost formed on her lips. One of these days she wanted to be wrong when she crafted a deduction from a jigsaw puzzle of clues.

She finished putting the pictures back the way they’d been when she discovered the drawer. With great care, she slid the drawer closed so the design didn’t match in the exact same way.

She got one step down the ladder. She had to get out of here. Every second she expected to hear Alex opening the back door. Time to leave. Another step down.

She pressed her lips together. Another step.

Go big or go home.

She climbed back up the steps. Opened the drawer. Removed the photo of the thin-faced brunette. Slid it into her hiking boot. Adjusted the other photos so there was no visible gap. Returned the drawer to its same position. Climbed all the way down the ladder. Listened for noise other than the birds. Slipped out the back door and through the back gardens into Audrey’s house. She positioned herself on top of her sleeping bag as though she were still conked out from last night’s ceremony.

She didn’t know herself anymore.