Obstetrix(47)

“I guess that’s all true.”

“Also, if you do want to give an interview, you should decide who you want to talk to and it can be a nice, calm chat, you don’t want to yell answers out on the steps of the hospital. And you can expect money for it, if you want.”

“What I want,” I said, “is to make absolutely sure that my dad and his friends don’t wind up in any trouble for rescuing me.”



* * *



IT WAS WELL PAST dinnertime by the time we were all done being questioned and I could get an update. Most of the adults on the compound had surrendered, and lots of them were now saying they wanted help escaping and were being held against their will. Some of the questions the FBI had were to try to sort out which of them were actually fellow prisoners. Apparently Natalie, the woman who’d supervised the sewing circle, was one of the people claiming to have been held against her will, which seemed kind of rich to me. I had noted that Holly had a phone that she was using to send “all’s well” texts, but Holly probably still had visible bruises from the beating due to that phone being found, so with a competent defense lawyer I thought she’d avoid jail time.

The body of the other doctor had been exhumed, and the FBI lab was working on her identity. Janet’s body was in the custody of the medical examiner. Pastor John, Ethan, David, Sarah, and Brandon had all been arrested. Jason had disclosed that David had murdered Janet. All the men I’d seen with firearms were being held, including a few of the minor boys, and most of the children had been placed in emergency foster care while the system tried to figure out whether their mothers were victims or perpetrators.

But there hadn’t been any more deaths after we left that day.

And it was over. I was safe.



* * *



MY DAD HAD GOTTEN me a hotel room with a door that adjoined his, because he didn’t want to let me out of his sight but thought maybe I’d like privacy. I hadn’t managed to think about stopping anywhere for food, but one of Dad’s buddies arrived minutes after us with a couple of bags of takeout: waffle fries, hot wings, stuffed mushrooms, and two burgers with Swiss cheese and mushrooms. We spread out the food on the little table by the window in Dad’s room. Everything tasted amazing: the burger was rich and salty and chewy, the toasted bun crisp. There were pickles.

“They didn’t feed you properly,” Dad said. “You’re thin.”

“It was mostly just that the food there was really bad, but yeah, there also was never quite enough of it,” I said.

To my relief, he didn’t ask me any more questions; I’d spent the whole day answering questions and felt talked out. He told me all the family gossip I’d missed: one of my cousins was pregnant. Not the one who’d pulled the disappearing act, her sister. Their mother was finally selling her house, which was too big now that all the kids were grown, and hard to keep up; she’d found a condo, and was pressuring all her kids to take the “heirloom china,” which was actually just 1980s-era wedding china. I could picture it as soon as Dad mentioned it, because I’d eaten Thanksgiving dinners off it on many occasions. It had butterflies on it, and back when I was ten, I had thought it was beautiful.

When I’d eaten all I could hold, I made sure both our hotel rooms were locked with the dead bolt and then left the door between our rooms ajar. I was exhausted—I’d been up most of last night with Joy, and then rescued, and then I’d spent the day talking to law enforcement. I put on the flannel pajamas Dad had brought in my suitcase—PJs instead of a nightgown—and brushed my teeth with my own brand of toothpaste for the first time in months. Finally I got into bed, propped myself with a mound of pillows, turned off all the lights but the one by my bedside, and reached for The Onyx Dagger.

The cold wind brought the smell of snow, and Deirdre, red-faced from the cold, paused in the stable yard, breathing in a deep breath of it. “My lady,” the page said. “Your father said to send you in, directly.” “Oh, I know,” she said, giving him a quick smile. “I promise I won’t delay much.”



You’d probably cough, I thought, if you took a big deep breath of cold air. I wondered if the author had ever thought about that, and then turned the page and kept reading.



* * *



I DREAMED ABOUT THE cult.

I was examining pregnant women, each with some problem that was more horrifying and implausible than the last, like Natalie had placenta accreta that had somehow grown all the way through her abdomen and was protruding outside her body. “One more patient today!” Sarah said in her super cheerful voice, and the patient was Bethany, a very pregnant Bethany, who said in her sweet voice that everything was fine and Ethan was a faithful husband but looked at me with sad eyes that said you let this happen, you let this happen to me.

In my pocket, a phone rang; I pulled it out and answered it, and David’s voice said, “You don’t want to make me do this in front of Bethany, do you?”

I jerked awake, surprised by the silence of the room; the ringing phone had been so vivid I’d thought maybe I was hearing something real. It had been a ring, though, not a ringtone—a ring like phones had back in the landline era.

I got up and went to the bathroom and got a drink of water, trying to shift myself out of the dream space enough that the nightmare wouldn’t pick up where it had left off once I went back to sleep. The bedside clock said it was 3:30 a.m., much too early to get up, but my heart was pounding now, and I switched on my bedside lamp to read some more of The Onyx Dagger.