“I was banished from my family for trying to get a doctor for my sister. It’s against the rules to go outside the compound.”
“Compound?” Brandon asks.
“My father’s the prophet,” LeGrand says.
It doesn’t answer Brandon’s questions—raises far more of them—but Mack understands as much as she needs to. LeGrand was a prisoner. He broke the rules to help. That makes sense for the type of person who runs toward the sound when someone is screaming. He’s here because he was trying to save his sister. Mack is here because she didn’t try to save her sister. Because she hid and did nothing while her world was cut apart.
“If you get out,” LeGrand says, looking toward the trees where the fence looms somewhere in the impenetrable, winding green, beyond the ever-present stone pathway walls, “will you help her? I’m from Zion Mountain in southeastern Colorado. Her name is Almera. She can’t talk or walk, but she likes bubbles and the color yellow. They won’t give her the care she needs. You’ll have to kidnap her.” LeGrand nods, as though he’s made up his mind about something. “It’s the only way. I should have done it that way.”
Mack looks at Brandon. Brandon’s eyes are filled with tears, and she can’t imagine him kidnapping anyone. “Give us the details of how to break in and find Almera, just in case. But LeGrand gets to win,” Mack says to Brandon. “If there’s such a thing as winning. And if there’s not, he’s the one who gets out.” She’s afraid Brandon will disagree, that he’ll insist it’s not fair for them to decide on LeGrand without discussing it.
Brandon swallows hard and nods. “Anyone but Jaden.” His voice cracks and Mack can’t help it. She laughs. Anyone but Jaden.
Her laughter breaks the spell of the blood, releasing them. They walk on, like Ava would have wanted, like Mack wants. She has one goal now, one goal only: Get LeGrand out. Let him go save his sister, because he still has one, and he can.
Get LeGrand out, and whatever happens after, she will accept with open arms this time.
* * *
—
It’s almost over. Two more days, and Linda can close her family’s journal and not have to open it again for seven years. Well, six. They do have to plan these things well in advance to make certain everything is in place. And she shouldn’t have to open it again at all, but she will. She knows she will.
She taps her manicured fingers—an abrasive coral that she thinks looks youthful but that makes her skin look dead—against the leather cover of her family’s book. How long has she kept it? How long have the Nicely women kept everything running? And does she really trust Chuck Callas of all people to take over when she’s done?
She prefers to think done rather than dead, teasing herself and others with plans to retire to Florida and leave all this behind. But she knows she won’t. Even if Chuck does take over, nominally, she won’t trust it to him alone. It’s too important, and she likes that. Likes that she’s important, likes the feel of the weight of generations who depend on her, likes that she took up the mantle from her parents and their parents. She likes to think of how proud her grandparents would be, that they might not have been the venerated Callases who started it all, but that it was their daughter, and then their granddaughter who safeguarded their gift.
The thick, heavy journal, far larger than that other book, stolen and lost now, sits on her coffee table next to a stack of Good Housekeeping magazines. No one reads it. After all, Linda knows the stories by heart, the other family representatives know them by reputation, and the rest of the town and everyone it feeds doesn’t know them and doesn’t want to. Linda’s own daughter doesn’t want anything to do with it. That’s what hurts the most—the lack of gratitude, the lack of respect. That her daughter is as selfish as the rest of them. Angry at the very thought, Linda takes her family’s sacred history and puts it in the special hidden shelf of her china hutch.
Her walkie-talkie radio crackles to life. She thinks how her daughter would mock her for using it instead of a smartphone, but sometimes old-school is better. Especially when you still have all the cellphone signals jammed. Which reminds her, she needs to follow up with Leon Frye, make certain he does his job—or rather, his team does his job—with the various competitors’ social media accounts for the next few weeks, keeping them active just in case. She can’t trust that anything will get done, that any just in case is covered, unless she does it herself.