The Quiet Ones Page 4

  “Of course, he’s flesh and blood like you and me, but so wise, so compassionate.” Tabitha grinned. “I wouldn’t be here meeting you if Father hadn’t allowed it. He knows it is the right thing to do, although it means me going out into the sinful world for a short while.”

  Mallory’s stomach twisted. It was clear: Tabitha and Liz were enmeshed in a cult, a sect of some kind. Mallory didn’t have first-hand experience with such things, but she had read her share of news articles and watched documentaries and knew enough to be worried. Almost always, the cults were structured under a patriarchy; a charismatic man setting the restrictive rules, and it had nothing to do with the Bible or any other sacred texts, and was actually based on his whims and illicit desires.

  Who was this “Father” person, really? Her biological father? Or someone else?

  Liz was only fifteen when she gave birth to twins. Was this same “father” responsible for that, too? Taking advantage of a teenager? To be blunt—raping a child?

  Mallory had eaten little that day, but she felt a burning sensation in her chest as severe as the worst case of heartburn she’d ever had. Her sweet, loving sister, so eager to please, so understanding. No, she couldn’t stand the thought of such things happening to her. Goddammit, no.

  The restraint she’d been struggling to maintain fell away from her like shattered shackles. She shoved aside the basket of tortilla chips, knocking over the dish of salsa, the sauce spilling like fresh blood across the table. Tabitha reared back in her seat, startled.

  “Who is this person you call father?” Mallory asked. “What’s his name? His full name. Tell me!”

  “What?” Tabitha’s lips trembled. “Are you questioning Father’s authority?”

  “I want to talk to Liz, dammit,” Mallory said. Her tongue had been unloosed, years of repressed emotion blowing through her like a hurricane. “I need to see her. Tell me where she is, exactly—and don’t you dare give me some crap about how your so-called father doesn’t allow it!”

  Tabitha glared at her, and that was when it hit Mallory—this girl had been playing her like a violin. Acting. Maybe some of what she’d said was true. She was Liz’s daughter, there was no doubt about that. There probably was an authoritative figure calling the shots from the background.

  But Mallory wasn’t sure about anything else the girl had told her. It was her gut instinct talking then, intuition honed from over a decade of interviewing people from all walks of life, from the penthouse to the gutter. Tabitha was hiding something important to Mallory’s understanding of her sister’s situation, and Mallory was going to wrangle the truth out of her right there and then.

  “This was a mistake, clearly.” Tabitha grabbed her purse.

  “No, please,” Mallory said. “Wait. Don’t go. I’m sorry, but this is so much for me to understand, to process.”

  “Father warned this might happen, too.” Rising from the seat, Tabitha laughed, a hollow sound. “He said our worlds are too different, that you wouldn’t understand our ways. He was right—again.”

  Tabitha spun on her heel, dress swishing around her, and hurried to the door. She was through the exit before Mallory could get to her feet and fumble out an explanation to the alarmed waitress, stammering out a promise that she was coming right back and wasn’t trying to dine and dash. When Mallory finally shoved through the glass doors and stumbled into the bright afternoon sun, she spotted Tabitha climbing into the back seat of a black Jeep Grand Cherokee with a Georgia license tag. A “Lyft” sticker decorated the right corner of the rear windshield.

  “Tabitha, come back!” Mallory said.

  But Tabitha slammed the door without a backward glance. The vehicle roared into downtown traffic. Mallory stood on the sunbaked pavement watching the Jeep dwindle away into the afternoon, feeling as shell-shocked as she’d ever been in her life.

  7

  The following week, on Friday, August 16, Mallory and Ben traveled to Ratliff, Georgia.

  They took Ben’s Ford Expedition, leaving Atlanta early in the morning, around seven o’clock. Since they were heading south on Interstate 75, departing from the heart of the city, they avoided the gridlock that typically paralyzed the metro area on weekdays. It would take over three hours to reach Ratliff according to Google Maps, but Mallory knew Ben; along the way, he would insist on stopping somewhere to eat.

  Sitting in the passenger seat, Mallory sipped her vanilla latte and reviewed her notes, alternating between text she had scribbled in longhand on her notepad, and documents and web resources she had saved on her phone. She had taken the day off from her job, yet this still felt like work, but of a far more important order.

  I’m on my way, Liz, she thought. Ready or not.

  Would Liz be happy to see her? Did her sister even want to see her? According to Tabitha, Liz had said she was proud of her, and Mallory wanted to believe that comment was true. But what was Liz’s actual state of mind?

  Mallory had spent the past week diving deep into the study of cult psychology, neglecting her work at the paper in the meantime. It was fascinating, scary stuff, and educational, too. Prior to her research, her ideas about cults revolved around notorious doomsday figures such as Jim Jones and David Koresh, false messiahs who had led their misguided followers to tragic ends. The reality of modern cults was more prosaic: most people who joined cults were young women seeking approval; they tended to have low self-esteem and often came from abusive households; they joined because they craved the absolute answers that the charismatic male leaders of such sects provided in their authoritative rhetoric. There was only black and white in their worldview, no shades of gray. No compromise, no surrender. The end goal wasn’t to exit the world in a fiery crescendo, but to live in a state of peaceful, utter obedience.

  She could understand why Liz would drift toward that kind of environment. Her sister, like her, lived with the nightmare of seeing her mother murdered, all because some asshole was mad because she didn’t want to screw him anymore. Mallory doubted that Liz had ever processed what she had witnessed, that she’d learned how to put it in perspective. Mallory understood that if her adoptive parents, Robin and Everett Steele, hadn’t taken her in, gotten her therapy, and immersed her in unconditional love, her life might have turned out differently, too. She was thankful every day for the blessings she had received.

  But if Liz had been steeped in that warped world for several years, it would be a serious challenge for her to ever live in conventional modern society. The loving girl Mallory remembered, the spirited kid who created wonderful, imaginative art, might well be gone forever.

  But she had to try.

  “Waffle House?” Ben asked.

  “What?” Mallory said. The highway ahead was clear, bordered by trees. She’d been so immersed in her thoughts she hadn’t realized how far they had driven.

  “For breakfast,” Ben said. “How about Waffle House?”

  She saw a roadside sign announcing Macon was nine miles distant, checked her phone. They were making good time and if they stopped then, would still arrive in Ratliff by lunchtime.

  “If that’s what you want, fine,” she said.

  “There’s one at the next exit.”

  “It seems like there’s one at every exit.”

  “Hey, no knocking my Waffle House,” he said. “The only time I go is when I take a road trip.”

  “Do your thing, boo,” she said.

  At the restaurant, Ben ordered a pile of hash browns—scattered, smothered, and covered—a rasher of bacon, and scrambled eggs, while Mallory struggled to find a menu item that wouldn’t require triple bypass surgery afterward. She settled on a cheese omelet and gave Ben the hash browns included with her meal.

  “Any breakthroughs?” He dug into his food. “On Sanctuary, I mean, since we last talked about it?”

  “Since the editor of the local paper hung up on me? No.”

  Sanctuary. Mallory believed getting to the meaning of that name was the key to finding Liz onc
e they arrived in Ratliff.

  She had secretly recorded her conversation with Tabitha at the restaurant. Typically, she never would have done such a thing, but she’d been so nervous about the meeting that she had fallen back on her reporter’s instructs. Since that day, she had listened to a snippet from her chat with Tabitha over and over.

  “Where’s home for you and your family?” Mallory asked.

  “Sanctuary,” Tabitha said.

  “Is that the name of the city? Sanctuary?”

  “Ah, oh no,” Tabitha stammered. “Only our place . . .”

  It might have been meant nothing special, might have been a slang term that Tabitha’s family used to refer to “home,” like some people said, “the crib” when referencing where they lived. But a hunch told Mallory that it meant everything. She had made a career out of following such hunches.

  She had researched churches and religious organizations in Ratliff and the greater metro Valdosta region. None of them used the word “sanctuary” in their names, but that wasn’t surprising. If Liz’s family were members of a sect, they could have been living off the grid in a private compound.

  Which was why Mallory had called The Ratliff Clarion, the town’s newspaper. Reporters trafficked in gossip, heard things because others spoke to them, trusted them. She thought she’d call in advance and get a jump on her research, maybe even bust things wide open before she arrived in town.

  The paper’s editor, Thelma May, answered the phone herself, which told Mallory everything she needed to know about the publication’s reach. Hoping to trade on professional courtesy, Mallory identified herself as a reporter working on a story, said she was following up on a lead about a reclusive family that lived in Ratliff, in a place called “Sanctuary.” Thelma’s answer was terse.

  I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that—and I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout you, miss. Have yourself a nice day.

  Click.

  She knows something, all right, Mallory had realized. The editor’s rudeness spoke volumes. What was she hiding? Why?

  “The newspaper will be our first stop when we get to town,” Mallory said to Ben. She sipped ice water; she’d already drunk enough coffee to be wired the rest of the day. “People are rarely as impolite face-to-face as they are on the phone or online.”

  “You are.” He smiled, took a bite of hash browns.

  “I prefer the word, ‘assertive.’ Anyway, we’ll see how this woman behaves when I come in for a face-to-face chat.”

  “You’ll charm her, of that I’ve no doubt.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, babe.” She chuckled. “Why is a woman always expected to be charming? If a woman’s assertive, just like a guy, you’re called bossy or bitchy.”

  “How’s that saying go? You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? I think that applies to everyone.”

  “Sounds good, but not really true.” She wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and checked the time on her phone. “Okay, are you done? I’m ready to get out of here.”

  They got back on the highway. About two hours later, they passed a sign announcing Ratliff was three miles ahead, which matched the information in Google Maps.

  Mallory had found some basic information on the town itself; Ratliff had a brief Wikipedia entry. Located in Lowndes County, it was founded in the 1830s originally as a riverboat landing, since it sat at the confluence of the Withlacoochee River and the Little River. With that prime location, the town enjoyed a thriving economy until the late 1850s.

  Then, the construction of the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad through southern Lowndes County signaled the end of the good times, as many businesses relocated to nearby Valdosta to be closer to the rail lines. Ratliff still had several large cotton plantations that limped along for a while, but by the early 1900s, those enterprises were on life support, too.

  Currently, the town enjoyed a population of less than two thousand souls, the demographic almost entirely African American. Since the town had minimal commerce, she assumed everyone who lived there commuted to Valdosta for work. Mallory had perused probably every page of The Ratliff Clarion that was archived online, going back to 2005. She found obituaries, notices of petty crimes like men stealing air conditioners, and announcements of weddings and high school football season schedules—simple, small town news.

  She could appreciate such a publication, having cut her teeth for a year or so on a small-circulation paper in Gray after she graduated college. But she found nothing of Sanctuary, and she was convinced that was by design: small towns kept secrets.

  The Google Maps assistant informed them to take the next exit, State Route 133. Ben took the exit, and they made a left at the intersection. They passed a BP gas station, a Waffle House, a Dollar General.

  “Make the next left, onto Ratliff Road,” Mallory said before the navigation app could tell them. “That’ll take us into downtown Ratliff.”

  “Not much to see so far, huh?”

  “Classic small Southern town,” she said.

  He made the turn. They soon found themselves traveling through a community that looked as if it hadn’t changed in decades. They drove by a sad-looking trailer park fronted by a dilapidated sign bristling with weeds: Oak Ridge Mobile Home Community. A laundromat stood nearby, sharing a retail spot with a Title Max store. A Church’s Chicken next door. A little farther ahead, they entered the main business district.

  Faded brick buildings lined the main drag, standing shoulder to shoulder like tired old men in tattered suits. Mallory saw a barbershop, the red, white, and blue pole out front. A police station next to a city hall building. A small grocery store. A motel with a crooked Vacancy sign.

  There were only a handful of residents out and about. All of them were Black, walking along the warped sidewalks or getting in and out of cars. None of the vehicles looked new.

  “How the heck did Liz wind up here?” Mallory asked, not really expecting Ben to answer. “So far from home.”

  “Right, I feel like I got here out of a time machine.” Ben shrugged his broad shoulders. “You know my family is from Goodwater, Alabama, right? It reminds me of going back to the old family homeplace, where nothing’s changed in fifty, sixty-something years.”

  “That’s our destination.” Mallory pointed at another brick building coming up at the intersection. “The newspaper’s there.”

  Ben nosed his SUV into a diagonal parking slot in front of the office. A faded green awning stretched above the doorway. A sign above the door declared:

  The Ratliff Clarion: Our Paper. Our News.

  Ben shifted in his seat to face her. Behind his lenses, his soft brown eyes glinted with a grave solemnity that caught her off guard.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “How’re you going to play this?” He cracked his knuckles. “Because I have some ideas.”

  “We didn’t drive this far for me to play games.”

  “Listen, Mal, this is a small town. There’s a slower pace of life here, softer edges, if you will.”

  “Softer edges? The editor already hung up on me once.”

  “Try changing up your approach, that’s my suggestion. I know you’re eager to get answers, but please don’t blast out of the gates at a hundred miles an hour as soon as we walk in.”

  “Hmph.” She gave him a tight smile. “Duly noted. But no promises.”

  “If that’s the best I can get, I’ll take it.” He cut the engine and opened his door.

  8

  A bell chimed when Ben pushed open the door to the newspaper’s headquarters.

  Mallory stepped inside past him and looked around. The office resembled nothing less than the stereotypical small-town paper—if you had seen such a place twenty years ago. A cramped space with squeaky ceiling fans issuing weak white light, their dusty blades barely stirring the dry, smoky air. Dark wood paneling on the walls, much of the wall space covered with yellowed news clippings, framed photos, and awards from obscure organizations. Three b
attered oak desks that looked as if they’d come from a second-hand furniture store, each of them littered with stacks of papers clustered around old computers. A handful of chairs scattered about. She even spotted a Remington typewriter on a side table, like a relic in the Smithsonian, and just as nuts, a black rotary telephone.

  This definitely isn’t The Atlanta Times, she thought. Have I slipped into the Twilight Zone?

  She noticed only one person inside: a sixty-something, sable-skinned man with a face like a hound dog sat beside the table bearing the typewriter, tilted backward in his desk chair as if drifting toward a siesta. He wore a wrinkled white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to show his gangly forearms, and a loosely knotted tie. He had a sprinkle of gray hair but was mostly bald.

  Puffing on a cigarette, he squinted at them from behind a veil of smoke.

  She’d been hoping to meet the woman who had hung up on her, Thelma May. But it might prove better to speak to this guy, whoever he turned out to be.

  “Hey folks,” he said. He had a Southern drawl as thick as cane syrup. “Can I help y’all with somethin’?”

  Ben cleared his throat to speak, but Mallory stepped forward. “I’m Mallory Steele. I’m a senior investigative reporter for The Atlanta Times.” She flashed her press credentials badge, briefly. “And you are, sir?”

  “Well, now.” He coughed into his hand, an explosive hacking sound that made Mallory wince. Stubbing out his cigarette in a tin ashtray, he rose from the chair. “I’m Cecil Roberts. I publish this little paper of ours.”

  Jackpot, Mallory thought. Even better than talking to the editor of the newspaper was talking to the publisher of the newspaper.

  “Ben Whitfield,” Ben said. “It’s good to meet you, sir.”

  Cecil wiped his hand on a handkerchief and ambled around the desk to greet them. He was nearly as tall as Ben, but hunched over slightly, with a frail build; his shirt and gray wool slacks seemed to hang on him as if they had once belonged to a bigger man. But his handshake was dry and firm. His eyes, though flecked with red, met hers forthrightly.