Obstetrix(35)

He was talking about the miscarriage. You piece of shit, I thought.

“It’s time to drive out the demon. I’m placing you in the hands of the Elders.”

“No,” she sobbed, as three of the men picked her up off the floor and dragged her into the room where we changed for our fitness classes. The door slammed shut behind them.

“Joy,” Pastor John said, and she rose to lead a hymn.

We heard the swish-crack of a blow with something like a cane, and a scream.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” Joy sang, and around me, everyone shakily joined in.

“In the name of Christ Jesus I cast out the demon of fear,” I heard a man’s voice intone, through the door. Another swish-crack. “In the name of Christ Jesus I cast out the demon of disobedience.” Holly was screaming, but it wasn’t words, anymore, just screams of pain.

Next to me, I could see tears trickling down Bethany’s cheeks.

Natalie was looking at me again, and this time, I thought, she was weighing whether or not I was going to confess anything that would get her into trouble. I tried to beam I’m not going to narc on you, Natalie straight into her brain.

“Oh God, have mercy—” I heard Holly’s voice cut off in another guttural scream as whoever was wielding the cane hit her four or five times in a row.

She is my patient. She miscarried less than a week ago. I have to do something.

I didn’t think it would do any good for me to intervene. I told myself that if I thought it would help, I would have to, but it wouldn’t. I thought about how later, if I had the chance to talk to Holly, I would tell her that I once delivered a healthy full-term baby for a woman with a Baphomet tattoo on her left thigh, which ought to prove that miscarriages are not the result of a lack of faith in God. All me intervening was going to do was draw Pastor John’s attention to me.

I was pretty sure, anyway.

So I stood, unprotesting, with everyone else, humming along with all seven verses of “Amazing Grace,” until the song ended. Holly was allowed out of the room, and her husband was ordered into it, but we didn’t have to stay and listen to his punishment.

Pastor John said, “I expect there are other secret phones here. Secret books here. I am declaring a period of grace and forgiveness for anyone who voluntarily turns over forbidden objects. You have until sundown tomorrow. You are dismissed.”

Back in the relative safety of my house, I crawled under my blankets. I kept remembering the sound of the beating, the sound of Holly’s screams, and nothing was pushing that memory out of my mind.

Dad, I need you to hurry, I thought.

Please hurry.





CHAPTER 7




I WANTED TO WEEP with frustration when I saw two cell phones turned in Saturday morning at breakfast, along with a dozen books. Instead of being showily destroyed, these books were all set aside in the locked storage room that turned out to be filled with books. The phones were turned on in order to do a factory reset and then locked up in Pastor John’s office, and that made me think about the fact that the phone I’d used was smashed, possibly without being turned on again, making it impossible for anyone to get a fix on me. Also, I’d sent that message on Wednesday night, and now it was Saturday. On Monday, Jason and Emma were going to take the minivan to Walmart, so maybe—maybe—the fact that I’d included the license plate number would help the authorities track them back to me?

Or maybe this wasn’t going to work.

Maybe I was going to have to sneak out on foot, come spring. But I wanted to get out before Bethany was given to Ethan as a “wife,” and March weather was incredibly unpredictable. It could be spring or even summer weather one day, snowing the next. Weather forecasts were one more thing I didn’t have access to here.

Between the gossip I heard from the women and the gossip I heard from the children, I was able to piece together what had happened: Holly’s oldest son, a ten-year-old named Peter, had found the romance novel. He’d clogged the toilet and plunged it, but apparently took off the lid because he was worried it would overflow if he flushed it to see if the plunging had worked. He’d found the book, and had not confessed to Pastor John but had told his best friend, another ten-year-old boy, who had told his brother, a fourteen-year-old boy, who had told Pastor John.

Sitting in Sunday school, looking at the dark circles under Joy’s eyes as she told everyone about Joseph’s coat of many colors, I thought about how one of the ongoing themes in The Onyx Dagger was figuring out who you could trust. Deirdre herself had that +10 Charisma advantage of the protagonist in this sort of book; she could get people to trust her just by saying, “trust me,” while looking deeply into their eyes. But that didn’t mean she could necessarily trust them in return. She knew she could trust Isabelle, her lifelong friend (except when Isabelle was being mind-controlled) but as they gathered followers she realized she couldn’t delegate everything to Isabelle, and she needed both to figure out who she could trust not to betray her, and who she could trust to be competent.

No one here trusts anyone else here, I thought.

That seemed a little hard to believe, so I examined it.

Not only was I routinely supervised, very few people here were allowed to spend time in pairs, except for married couples, and married couples were usually accompanied by their children. Except for Jason and Emma when they went out shopping, when their children were kept behind at the ranch.