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“Good place to get a dog,” she replied. “Certainly good for her, anyway, I imagine.”

Dix waited. There was something very vaguely familiar about this person, a face seen maybe once, from a distance, in an unfamiliar context.

“You Dix?” she said.

It was more a statement than a question. He didn’t respond. She didn’t seem to need affirmation.

“Not quite what I expected, from what Miranda told me,” she continued, crossing her arms over her chest.

Dix stiffened.

“Relax,” the woman in front of him said. “I’m Sally. And I’m on your side. I’m on her side.”

Dix was suddenly displaced from his own yard. He was back in a tree, binoculars to his face, watching as this woman flicked a cigarette into Darius’s face. He tried to stop a smile that was forcing its way to the corner of his lips. Sally noticed.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

The woman in his driveway stood silently, watching him, waiting for him. It was not an unpleasant experience. He knew, instinctively, that her judgment would be as fair as it would be accurate.

“I saw you once,” he finally said. “From a distance. You flicked a cigarette in the face of someone I don’t like much.”

She squinted at him. “Well, I don’t like him much, either.”

“That was apparent.”

“Where were you?”

“Up a tree.”

“Of course you were. Tree stand?”

“None available in that particular tree. For the view I was seeking.”

Sally scuffed her toe in the drive. Then she lifted her face and looked around. Dix followed her gaze as it skimmed over the property and house, lingered on the garden beds with the bamboo teepee trellises filling with pea vines and the heat-retaining cages around his tomato plants, passed his mud-spattered truck, moved through the open doors of the garage and barn where his tools and equipment were neatly arranged, and then over to the cat emerging from the shrubs under the tree line. She looked at his mutt dog again, and then her eyes settled back on him. “No offense, but Miranda didn’t really get you, did she?” she said.

The question stung, not because she asked it, but because it was true in a way he had never considered before.

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose she did.”

“We have something to discuss,” Sally said.

“I have no plans for today that can’t wait,” Dix said, gesturing toward the house.

“You may be adjusting an awful lot of plans by the time we’re done,” Sally said as she walked toward him.

By the time the coffee had dripped through and Dix had filled their mugs for a second time, Sally had given him a quick accounting of herself and sketched in a summary of how she came to be involved with Darius and The Source.

“Miranda mentioned you once, I think,” he said. “Told me that Darius said you were his cousin. Renting a room out there.”

Sally gave him a dramatic eye roll. “Yeah, that makes sense,” she said. “At least around here where cousins sleep together often enough, too. Makes for more intimate family gatherings.”

Dix was too agitated, waiting for what was to come, to laugh at her joke. He gave her a quick, polite grin of acknowledgment. It was the best he could do. He was preoccupied with a dark foreboding. He wondered what ax this woman had to grind, what she wanted from him. Maybe she needed his help getting the guy and his followers off her property. As much as he hated Darius, he wasn’t sure he’d want to get involved. He had his own mess—well, Miranda’s mess, yet another Miranda mess—to clean up. Maybe for once he’d say no to fixing someone else’s problem. Why this woman would have put up with Darius’s bullshit for as long as she had, he did not understand. But then again, he didn’t understand much of what people did, why they complicated their lives in ways that seemed so obviously unnecessary and avoidable to him. He never could figure out why smart people did such stupid things. And the woman in front of him was obviously smart. Sharp and street-savvy, too, no doubt. She’d have to be to survive as a social worker around here. Just didn’t apply the same logic to her own life as she did to others’, apparently.

Sally took a sip of the hot coffee. “How much do you know of what went on out there, Dix?” she asked.

“Miranda was always pretty vague,” he said. “Protective of the place. Said everything was secret because it was sacred. Silly stuff like that. I was out there a few times. But just briefly. Didn’t see much. Pretty rag-tag for a supposed slice of heaven.”

Sally stared at him. Hard. As though she were trying to figure out how to tell him what she had come to say. He shifted in his seat. There was something he wanted to know.

“Look,” Dix said, “I don’t know why you’re here or what you have to tell me. But can I ask you something first? How the hell did Miranda die? Darius said something about a fever. Not that you can trust anything that asshole says. Did something go wrong with the pregnancy? I’ve always wondered. But there was never anyone to ask.”

Sally’s face darkened. “I don’t know for sure,” she said carefully. “But I’ll tell you everything I can.”

The previous winter had been long and brutal. Sally was cranky and frustrated with the weather, The Source, her job, her own inability to find a change she wanted to make. But she kept coming back because she had nowhere else to go. One frigid night, as she drove up to the farmhouse, her headlights illuminated what appeared to be the entire community gathered in the yard. This was something she’d never seen before. She parked the truck and cut her lights. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the sudden darkness. First she became aware of the women as ghostly shapes in the dim illumination from the porch light and the full moon, high in the sky, and then the scene in front of her came into focus. The women appeared to be speeding up, hurrying their movements. Scrambling to finish. Because she was there, watching? Four or five of them moved in a strange circular motion around something she couldn’t see. They darted in and out of the group. In between the moving bodies, Sally caught glimpses of a chair. Then, a person sitting in a chair. The other women’s hands moved in circles. They were rubbing the seated person with something. Darius stood off to the side. His head was bent and his mouth was moving. He started waving his arms, encouraging the women to move faster.

What the hell?

A woman bent over and picked up a bucket. The others stepped back. She tossed its contents over the seated woman. The wave of water as it moved through the air glistened in the light from the porch and the moon.

“What the fuck?” Sally said out loud to herself.

Other women, one by one, picked up buckets or bowls or whatever they had filled with water and threw the contents at the seated woman. White rivulets cascaded from her hair and down her body. Just outside the group, Darius began to clap, slowly, methodically applauding their work.

This is insane,
Sally thought as she opened the door to her truck.

A blast of freezing air clutched at her face. She threw the door closed behind her and moved toward the group. They twitched their heads toward her and went quickly back to throwing water on the seated person.

This is killing cold,
Sally thought.
And whoever is in that chair is now soaking wet. This has to stop.

She trotted into the scene, cursing at the women, shoving them aside and sending them slipping and sprawling on the ice rink they’d created. Her boots held, she stayed upright, and got to the woman at the center of the group. Phoenix. Tied to a chair. Blindfolded. Covered in soap foam. Dripping wet. Shivering and chattering her teeth.

“You people are fucking crazy,” Sally hollered as she grappled with the strips of sheet that held Phoenix by the ankles, wrists, and chest to the chair. Her hands shook, but she managed to unbind the knots. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

No one answered and no one intervened. They disentangled themselves from the frozen ground and stepped back. Darius lifted his chin and then raised his arm over his head.

“The cleanse is complete,” he announced. “Sally may assist Phoenix with her recovery. Our work here is done.”

Sally shouldered Phoenix to her feet, guided her into the house, and got her into a hot bath. Neither woman spoke for some time. They were both trembling from shock and the cold. Sally listened as the other women returned to the house and went to their shared bedroom. When her shivering subsided, Phoenix told Sally, in brief and whispered fits and starts, about the cell phone Darius had found, the mocking texts, how he had descended upon her at what had started out as a normal evening gathering, blindfolded and bound her, and exhorted the other women to participate in the cleanse. She said they were hesitant at first. Then he read the texts. They became eager.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” Sally told her. Phoenix gave her a number to call. Sally went to the phone in the kitchen, tapped in the numbers, and gave the person who answered directions to the bottom of the drive.

“You need to get out of here, too,” Phoenix said as she dressed in the layers of warm clothing Sally handed her from her own closet.

“I know, I know,” Sally said. “I will. I will. I’ll get out of here.”

She clamped a hat on Phoenix’s head, wrapped a scarf around her neck, and sent her out the back door.

I do need to leave,
she thought as Phoenix’s departing figure made its careful way across the yard, turned down the drive, and disappeared into the dark. But the image of Miranda, swollen with child, sleeping soundly in the other room, thankfully missing out on the evening’s escapade, came to mind. Sally knew she wouldn’t leave. Couldn’t leave. Not yet.

Dix listened closely to Sally’s story about the cleanse. Even after all he knew about the place, this behavior shocked him into a strange stillness. Dix thought about telling Sally what he’d found on Miranda’s bank statements. But he held back. He wasn’t ready. He shifted his weight and looked at this stranger at his table, wishing she’d get on with it. Explain what the bizarre ritual she’d described had to do with Miranda.

Sally sighed deeply. “Dix,” she finally said, her face filled with weary regret, “Miranda got it into her head that she wanted a cleanse, too.”

“What?” Dix said, appalled. “A cleanse? Like that? Why?”

“She had some crazy idea that she needed it, needed to be cleansed of the past before the baby came. So the baby could come into the world ‘pure and unburdened,’ she said.” Sally shook her head. “She wasn’t well. It was like that baby was sucking the life out of her. She wouldn’t go to a regular doctor, just relied on the advice of a woman there who claimed she’d been a midwife. I tried and tried and tried to get her to go to a doctor. Then I tried and tried to talk her out of the cleanse.” Sally’s voice pled for forgiveness. “I warned Darius over and over not to do it. I threatened the other women if they participated.” Sally dropped her face into her hands. When she looked up, her eyes were red but dry. “I thought it was over. I thought she gave it up. She told me she wasn’t going to do it. I was wrong. They all just placated me and did the cleanse when I was out of town at a conference. They were afraid I’d call the cops or an ambulance. Which I would have. I don’t even know how they knew I’d be gone. I had no idea how they were spying and snooping on me. On each other. I was gone ten days. That’s all it took to go from cleanse to sepsis to . . . Oh, Dix. I’m so sorry, Dix. I’m so sorry.”