Darkness at the Edge of Town Read online

  “After taxes and Miranda’s cut, it’ll probably only come out to about half a mil. But CBNN seemed very interested in offering me a contract when we met early this morning. Investigation Mystery too.”

  “Well, God knows you’ve earned it,” Grandpa said as we reached the front door. “I read what that rat bastard did to those women. To you.” He opened the door. The aroma of cookies and Pine-Sol assailed my nose. Another smell of home. “I’m glad you shot the fucker.”

  I learned to swear from him too.

  “Iris?” Grandma called from the kitchenette.

  Edie Ballard stood in her domain, the red linoleum-floored kitchenette, with a wide smile on her beautiful face. Age had done precious little to wipe away her beauty. The former homecoming queen with huge brown eyes, petite yet pert figure, and cute nose remained just as gorgeous with silver hair and a few wrinkles. Mom inherited her beauty. Billy too. My brother was the prettiest guy in town. I, sadly, took after my sperm donor.

  “Hi, Grandma!”

  She was as quick as Grandpa. I barely blinked and found myself in her arms. “Oh, Petal. You’re here. You’re really here! Let me get a good look at you!” She released me. “Oh, you’re still too skinny!”

  “I’m sure you’ll help me remedy that,” I said with a smile. “My mouth’s salivating from the smell of the cookies already.”

  “You and that sweet tooth of yours,” she chided. “Lunch first. It’s almost ready.”

  “You’re in your old room,” Grandpa said. “There’s time to freshen up, right, Edie?”

  “Oh, yes. It won’t be ready for ten more minutes.”

  “Good. Because I’ve had to pee since the train.”

  I kissed Grandma’s cheek before grabbing my suitcases and wheeling them through the small living room into the hallway and down to the last door on the left. My old bedroom. It no longer resembled the sky-blue, book-covered space from my youth. Grandma had turned it into her craft room, with a pottery wheel in the corner and decoupage on the desk. There was barely room for the roll-out bed. I could endure the claustrophobic space for a few days. If not, there was always my mom’s offer of her spare room next door. For whatever reason it just didn’t feel right staying with her, probably because I barely knew my stepfather. Mom began seeing Khairo after I’d left town. I’d met him only five times before, but he never set off my creep radar and seemed nice enough. After the Meriwether attack, he even came to D.C. to help me move to North Carolina. I was stuck in a hospital for a month, so completing the move already in progress was the last thing on my mind. No, I knew Khairo was a good guy and Mom loved him. That was all that mattered.

  I unpacked a few essentials and freshened up in the bathroom next door before returning to the living room just in time for our late lunch. We all sat at the circular dining room table among Grandma’s paintings of flowers and family photos as Grandma served the potpie. “Smells delicious, Grandma. Thanks.”

  “It’s nothing fancy,” my grandmother, who was always modest, said. “Especially for our TV star granddaughter.”

  “She met with people at CBNN today,” Grandpa said with pride.

  “Just about becoming a correspondent on crime stories. It’ll be like once a month for five minutes, if that.”

  “Well, we recorded all your appearances if you want to watch them again. You were wonderful on Shelly Monroe yesterday,” Grandma said.

  “Thank you.” I shoveled the chicken potpie into my mouth. It was delicious. I’d missed genuine home-cooked meals, especially Grandma’s. I couldn’t even make rice. “But that’s pretty much all over, thank God. I have to write a damn book like yesterday, and now this Billy madness…” I shook my head. “What can you tell me?”

  My grandparents exchanged a worried look. “All we know is we haven’t seen him in weeks, and even before that he wasn’t his usual sweet self,” Grandma said. “When Gia lost the baby—”

  “Wait, what?” I cut in. “Billy’s fiancée was pregnant?”

  “Nobody told you?” Grandma asked. “Petal, Gia was pregnant but lost it at four months. Something about a blood clot disorder, I think. Poor girl. It devastated them both. You really didn’t know?”

  “No,” I said, “I had no idea.”

  My only brother was going to be a father and nobody bothered to inform me. Not that I’d been terribly communicative with anyone the previous two years, what with being locked away in my dark house with Stoli as my only constant company. Still. The fact that I was about to become an aunt should have warranted at least an email.

  “Maybe they wanted to wait to tell you,” Grandma offered. “It was a high-risk pregnancy. She had that blood clot problem. And after the miscarriage, there was no point in telling you, I suppose.”

  “It gutted Billy, Iris,” Grandpa added. “Absolutely gutted him.”

  “We-We’ve never seen him that…sad before. He’s always been thoughtful and sensitive, but…it was as if that’s all he was. There was nothing in him but the sadness. A lot like—” She shut her mouth.

  “Like me?” I offered.

  “Yeah,” Grandpa said before looking at his wife. “But he did seem to come out of it.”

  “The few times we saw him,” Grandma said. “He used to come over every other Sunday for dinner with Gia, but in the past four months, he’s only come once or twice.”

  “And he was always eager to get back to The Temple for some function or another,” Grandpa said.

  “At least he asked us to go with him to The Temple,” Grandma said to Grandpa.

  “The Temple?” I asked.

  “That’s what he called it. The New Morning Temple. I drove by it once. It’s over in Dunlop. Just looked like a regular two-story house,” Grandpa said. “Billy said the house sat on a powerful…line or something. A crack in the universe that made people strong or at peace, or some shit like that.”

  “He did say that every time he walked into The Temple he instantly felt better. Like magic,” Grandma added. “He even said one of the women there healed his migraines just by touching him. He wanted me to see her for my hip.”

  “Look, I know it all sounds nuts,” Grandpa said, “but it made him happy. It helped him. That was all we cared about. We’d rather he got obsessed with this new-age, touchy-feely crap than turn to drugs and alcohol, then…” Grandpa’s mouth snapped shut.

  “Then lock himself in his house and barely return phone calls?” I finished for him. I wasn’t offended. “No, I agree. His way is definitely healthier. But what’s changed? If he’s been going to this place for months, why raise the alarm now? Mom mentioned something about him moving?”

  “We heard about it the same time Faye did,” Grandma said. “Yesterday morning Gia called her in tears. While she was away, Billy drained their accounts, packed up his clothes, quit his job, and just left her a note telling her he’d finally been chosen to live at The Apex, whatever the heck that is, to continue his spiritual journey, and he wished her well.”

  I fell back in my chair with a sigh. Yeah, none of that sounded very good. I was by no means an expert on cults, but I’d learned enough in college and with the FBI to recognize the red flags. Of course, not all cults were evil or even nefarious. Christianity started as a cult. I wasn’t that religious, or religious at all, but I didn’t think religion in and of itself was a bad concept. Hell, without religion a lot more people would be killing each other left, right, and center. You don’t go to heaven if you’re a murderer. The problem becomes when others twist the doctrine to suit their own agenda. Then cue a crusade.

  “Do you know how much money he’s given them?” I asked.

  “No. Like we said, we’ve barely seen him,” Grandpa said. “Gia’s the person you should be talking to.”

  “I will. I’m gonna need her number and the address of this temple in Dunlop you drove by.”

  “Iris, I am sure there’s nothing to worry about,” Grandma said, patting my hand. “Your mother…I love her to bits, but she does
tend to overreact when it comes to things, especially where Billy’s concerned. Ever since he was born with that heart condition…she didn’t leave the hospital for weeks. Not to shower, not to take care of you. She coddles him. Even now.”

  My poor brother was born with his heart outside his chest. Just a freak thing. Nobody’s fault. He had immediate surgery and has been fine since, but Mom always kept an extra-close eye on him. Me, I could climb onto the roof and leap to a tree, and she’d roll her eyes. If Billy tried to swim to the deep end of the pool she’d have to swim beside him the whole way. Mom loved me in her own way, I knew that, but it did sting when I realized she didn’t love me as much as she did Billy. Luckily I had my grandparents to make up for the neglect. Okay, neglect is a strong word. If I needed Mom she was always there to talk, and she worked like a dog to put food in our mouths. I was just aware that she loved me 1 percent less than my brother. But to be fair, I loved her 1 percent less than I did my grandparents. Okay, 10 percent less.

  In my lesser moments, I used to blame Billy for my “neglect.” Why did he have to be so weak? So easily hurt mentally and physically? Why couldn’t he solve his own problems like I always did? Why was I the one who had to beat up our bullies? Why did he have to cry when they called us names? They won when he did that. His metaphorical heart was still outside his body, and the smallest slight bruised it no matter how many times I told him their opinions meant less than jack shit. That they were just vampires feeding off our strength, and we had to shove a crucifix in their faces or just stake the fuckers. He just couldn’t. He wasn’t built that way. He was all sugar and spice, whereas I got all the piss and vinegar. For years I thought that made me not exactly better than him, just…stronger. But when it came time for the challenge of a lifetime, I turned to the bottle and he to a potentially predatory religion. In the end we were exactly the same. But that meant if I pulled myself out of my self-imposed insanity, he could too.

  “I’m not leaving until I check this place out. Just to set Mom’s mind at ease.” As if that would ever be possible.

  Two days. Just two days. Yeah, not even I believed that anymore.

  Chapter 3

  Gia had to work and couldn’t meet me until the next morning, so I began as all good investigators do, by firing up my Web browser. When I heard war stories from veteran FBI agents about wading through thousands of fingerprint cards and file folders on the off chance of finding a link, I grimaced. The FBI had just begun utilizing the Internet when I joined, but we still saved weeks on investigations with that modern marvel. Of course if I still had access to all of the FBI’s resources I would have been logging onto them instead of Google first, but I did usually find myself on a Web browser at some point during my investigations.

  My first instinct was to call Luke, but I’d quickly quashed it. I’d left him a message the night before cancelling our…whatever, just saying something had come up in Grey Mills. He hadn’t called me back. After twelve hours with no answer, not even a text, my brain revved into overdrive. Was he mad at me? Did he think I didn’t want to see him? Did he think I thought he wasn’t important enough to cancel another event for him? I considered telling him why I was in my hometown, but until I knew more about the situation I didn’t want him to worry. And Luke would probably want to do something. Come up or risk his job by performing illegal searches in the FBI’s systems. I didn’t want to drag him into my bullshit again. The last time he’d ridden to my rescue he took three to the chest. Not that I believed the situation with Billy had the potential to become that dire, but Luke still didn’t need to leap on his white horse. No matter how much, deep down, I wanted him to.

  So all that Luke madness was racing through my mind as I began my investigation into New Morningism after lunch. Before I went to The Temple to nose around, I needed to know my “enemy.” It was one of the first things they taught us at the FBI: never go into a situation blind. It was right up there with never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.

  Research proved harder than I’d anticipated with New Morningism. There was a website with a picture of the galaxy with a human form superimposed on it and the words “Click here to begin unlocking your journey. All are welcome.” So I clicked. That led me to a brief overview of the New Morning philosophy. According to its founder, Grand Journeyman Mathias Morning, the trappings of modern society and a bombardment of ideologies have overwhelmed all levels of human consciousness, and this overload kept humanity from enlightenment and from unlocking our true potential for happiness. He claimed that through encouragement from a community of like-minded individuals, meditation, and seminars about the true nature of the universe, enlightenment and happiness were attainable. A new morning could dawn. I rolled my eyes when I read that last line, though as sales pitches went it wasn’t bad.

  The next page was just pictures. One was of the “Temple” in Dunlop, just a two-story gray turn-of-the-century Victorian with a tricycle on the lawn and a group of about twenty people standing on or around the porch. A little over half were young women, most looking to be in their early twenties, with three small children in front of them. The men were more varied in age, ranging from twenties to sixties, including the man with snow-white hair and beard standing dead center. A trim, hip Santa Claus was my first thought. It was the photo below, where Santa sat in a rocking chair, glasses perched on his sharp nose, with a child in his lap and two at his feet as he read to them, that told me this was the guru Mathias Morning. The action shots were of the members volunteering at a homeless shelter, meditating at a lake, and having dinner at one large table as everyone smiled and conversed. Like the Brady Bunch on steroids.

  That was all there really was about the group beyond an ad in The Dunlop Weekly once a month for nine months offering seminars, and one article mentioning a fundraising barbeque the previous month at The Temple. Mathias Morning proved to be another dead end. It obviously wasn’t his real name, but the guru didn’t even have a Facebook page. That was all the Google gods could provide me.

  I studied the photos closer the second time around. To the untrained eye, nothing seemed off. This was a pleasant group of lower-middle-class mostly white just plain folk. But considering the new-age slant the dogma presented, there wasn’t any indication of that philosophy in the pictures. Everyone wore jeans or short cotton skirts and there was no iconography anywhere in sight like totems, crystals, or even peace signs. As I said, just plain folks. Red flag number two was a little more disconcerting. In the soup kitchen and meditation photos, three of the prettiest girls I’d seen outside of Vogue were featured prominently, all wearing shorts or miniskirts. It wasn’t overt sexualization, but the fact that those three dominated almost half the sample size was telling. As was the choice of the dinner scene and reading to the children. Stability, loving relationships, a strong nurturing parental figure, and gorgeous babes all in one convenient location. Come for the family, stay to screw the nubile ladies.

  I’d been told on more than one occasion that I often read too much into things. The thought that this was one such occasion crossed my mind. Of course they’d put their sales pitch on the website, and sexy women were a leading sales tool. Using them didn’t mean the organization was evil, just business savvy.

  Next, I concentrated on the three images of Mathias Morning. In the photos, he presented himself as someone who had it all together. There wasn’t anything remarkable about him beyond the stark white hair. He kept his beard trim, his clothes—jeans or khakis with plaid shirts—tidy, and he smiled in each photo. He was as far from a hippie guru as one could get. I placed him around early sixties, but the photos weren’t high resolution, so he could have gone gray early and be in his forties for all I knew. The only thing off about him was the slight tension in his eyes, as if he were scrutinizing everything at all times, working every angle, even as he sat with the children. Or he could have just been tired.

  Shutting down my computer, I was 90 percent sure that if I went to this “temple,” I�
�d leave with my limbs intact and brain as dirty as when I walked in. I still wished I had a gun with me. They frowned on packing heat in news studios and at interviews. Not that I had access to Old Faithful anyway. She was in an FBI evidence locker with the other Woodsman evidence. I’d get her back eventually, but that did me no good as I planned to infiltrate an alleged cult. I considered borrowing one of Grandpa’s guns, but I didn’t have a permit to carry in Pennsylvania. No, I would be going in with nothing but my wits and self-defense training courtesy of the FBI. I always felt naked going into the field without a gun. An FBI agent had to carry at all times, not to mention almost dying at the hands of two separate serial killers tended to have an unnerving effect on a gal. Yet I steeled my resolve, kissed my grandparents goodbye, and went anyway.

  Twenty minutes later, I parked my rental car on Damascus Lane in what was once the upper-class section of Dunlop. The once opulent neighborhood had become just another row of houses in need of repainting, with dead lawns and boards on broken windows. Suburban decay as far as the eye could see, save for one oasis. The Temple was the only house with any signs of life. A man and woman worked on the roof as another young woman sat on the porch with a mug of something, watching a little boy roll around in a toy car. It was how things used to be. How they should still be.

  I said a silent prayer that they wouldn’t recognize me as I climbed out of the car. It would be a minor miracle if they didn’t. I’d traded my anonymity for cash these past six weeks. All the people, even the boy, stopped to look at me. There wasn’t malice or concern; there was only curiosity and welcome as I slowly approached the house. The man on the roof even waved. Friendly bunch, I thought as I smiled nervously back at them.

  “Hello,” the pretty young thing called from the porch. I recognized her from the website.