Harvestman Lodge (80 page)

Eli was in his office, looking over the July 5 edition with its huge spread of photographs from the parade. As usual, Lundy’s photo of the winning float was the one that made the front page, though Eli’s shots from the rooftop received plenty of ink, too, because of the inclusive perspective they provided.

Eli had just realized the Asian man was visible, though mostly hidden, in one of his own photos. He was examining the image with a magnifying glass when Melinda appeared at his open office door.

“Eli, you’re not looking down some poor woman’s blouse, are you?”

“No such luck. It’s our Harvestman Lodge Korean man. Well, he looks Korean to me, anyway.”

“I saw him too.” Melinda came over and looked over Eli’s shoulder. “Yeah. That’s him.”

“And he has to be the one Meggy saw watching your house.”

“Yep.”

“Chills me to the bone.”

“Original phrase there, Captain Cliche.”

“Ha ha.”

“Well, you gotta admit it was lame.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eli paused. “Melinda, listen: I’ve been doing some thinking. Hard thinking. About this Asian dude, about the film clip from my grandfather’s cellar, about the little girl, about the whole Harvestman Lodge business. This thing is big, Melinda. Real big. And the truth is, it’s too big for me to … to … ”

Melinda spoke. “To make sense of. To know what to do with. I think we might have been coming to the same conclusion, Eli. The conclusion for me is that we need help. Some wisdom. Guidance.”

“Feely.”

“Exactly.”

“Eli, I think we should sit down with Reverend Feely, and show him everything, tell him everything we know now. This isn’t something we can sit on. Somehow or other, this has to come out. But in the right way. And I don’t know what that way is.”

“I agree. Let’s call him. Right now. And if he can do it, we’ll go see him tomorrow.”

“Listen, Eli: something you don’t know yet. Len Cosner was in town for the parade, shooting for his Crosswaite documentary. He came over to say hi, and told me the Harvestman piece he’d been working on, the one that got stalled … well, it’s back in progress again. It’s a go. So even if Mr. Carl and David and the Sadlers and the Brechts and everybody want that subject to stay dead, it’s not going to go that way. Which to me makes it all the more urgent that the full truth come out. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what Len’s documentary will say.”

“Yeah, we’ve got to move on this. I’m calling Kyle Feely right now. Is tomorrow good for you?”

“I’ll be there.”

Eli made the call, and when he had Feely on the line, gave him a cursory preview of what they would be discussing, and why. Even without all the details, Feely said he already had some clear thoughts on the matter, then asked Eli if there would be objection to him inviting a couple of other “relevant individuals” to hear the discussion and see the film clip.

No problem from Eli’s point of view, though he wondered who would be those invited, and why.

THE MEETING PLACE WAS FEELY’S CHURCH office, and when Eli and Melinda arrived, several cars were parked in the lot. Inside, waiting with Feely, was Donald New from the rescue mission, as well as Rev. Larry Cavness, who seemed older, somehow. Probably the still-fresh stress of having had a man whom he had just counseled put a pistol to his head and pull the trigger.

The sound of a motorcyle pulling into the lot caused Eli and Melinda to glance at one another in puzzlement. Things grew even more startling when Benton Sadler himself strode into the church with a big politician smile spread across his handsome face. His big Honda Aspencade was parked outside beside the cars.

Introductions were made as needed, hands were clasped and shaken, and Feely explained what was going on. As best he could, he summarized in general terms, what they would be seeing. He managed to bring in the delicate subject of Harvestman Lodge, and to warn that some of what they would see might cut close to the heart for some of them there. As he said this he was looking at Donald New.

Melinda had made sure to glance at Sadler’s face when the words “Harvestman Lodge” were first mentioned. She was sure she noticed the tiniest flinch. Nothing extreme, though. She wondered what the reaction would be when he saw the image of his younger self, standing in the rear of the Lodge room along with Eli’s grandfather.

“Melinda, if you would, please tell us how you came to possess the film you have transferred onto videotape for us.”

Realizing she was about to confess to a technically illegal breaking-and-entering, she took the plunge and told how she and Eli had explored the empty home of his late grandparents, and in the cellar found the film, later learning (here she was sketchy on details) that what was on the film was a slice of history from Harvestman Lodge … an episode that would have probably been only of minor interest if not for the surprise appearance of a certain young face in the background of the scene. Melinda chose to maintain the suspense by declining to say whose face it was, curious as to whether they would recognize Broken Flower on their own.

“And there are other faces you will know, too,” Melinda said. “Including your own, Mr. Sadler.”

Now the well-known man’s flinch was not so subtle. He looked authentically concerned.

“Melinda, the VCR is there and ready to go,” said Feely. “But give us fair warning here: is what we’re going to see going to be utterly inappropriate for a house of God?”

“Slightly ribald, but that’s about all.”

“Dancing girls,” Sadler muttered almost too softly to hear. “That’s what it’ll be, I’m betting.”

“You’re right, sir,” Melinda said, and pushed the play button on the VCR.

WHEN THE TAPE WAS FINISHED, FEELY asked to see it again, though Sadler didn’t look happy at the prospect of sitting through it a second time. But he didn’t rise and flee, so Melinda rewound and showed it again. This time, when it was done, Feely had tears in his eyes, and to Melinda and Eli’s surprise, so did Sadler.

“You recognized her, I think,” Eli said, and both men nodded.

“Who are you talking about?” asked New, his voice quaking.

Feely provided the answer by rising, going to his office closet, and opening the door. On the inside of the door hung a poster about the dangers of child abduction. It’s main graphic was the famous image of Broken Flower.

Without a word, Melinda ran the tape back to the relevant place, and silently pointed out the face of the little girl being carried out the rear of the building.

New came to his feet, a man distraught. “So many times I’ve seen that picture of that poor unknown child … and never had any hint I was seeing the face of my own granddaughter!”

“Granddaughter?
What
?” Sadler’s voice revealed his perplexity.

The image on the screen was still frozen. New went to Melinda and plucked the VCR remote from her hand. “May I?”

Without awaiting an answer, he ran the tape back only a slight bit further, and pointed, in tears, to the briefly visible face of one of the dancing girls.

“My poor Emmie! My own daughter, dancing her life away, just to keep body and soul together, while wicked men carried off her child into a hell of their own making! It killed my daughter, my friends, to know she had put her child in a situation to be stolen away. It put my Emmie into such despair she ended her own life. Dear God! Forgive me for abandoning my own family and leaving them to this!”

It was wrenching to see the man suffering. Cavness reached over and put his arm around the shoulders of his partner in ministry, speaking softly to him what comfort he could. There was little to be given.

Eli spoke to Sadler, who was dead silent at this moment. “Sir, the man you were speaking with in the back of the room … ”

“Will Keller. A man I remember well.”

“He was my grandfather. It was in his house that Melinda – that Melinda and I, I mean – found the film of what we just watched.”

Sadler thought hard for nearly a minute, brow furrowed. Then he laughed and pounded his brow with the heel of his hand. “I knew that sneaky scoundrel was up to something! Will Keller was very concerned by the direction we Harvestmen were moving … the ‘moral decline,’ as he usually put it. Bad elements had slipped in, you see, mostly in the person of some Parvins who managed to get into the group, Lukey Parvin most of all, plus some others. What had started out as a civic-minded, faith-oriented group was turning into the kind of organization that would, well, bring in dancing girls to entertain men who’d had too much to drink. It looks like mild stuff these days, but when you compare it to what the Lodge had been at its outset, and especially if you were there to see it first-hand, as I was, you understand how quickly the group was degrading. You could just feel it in the very atmosphere of the place. But, merciful God, to think that something far worse was going on right under our noses, to think that a child was snatched away and turned into a toy for the vilest kind of exploiters and human traffickers ... Jesus forgive us. Jesus forgive us for our blindness.”

Donald New was silently sobbing into his hands, having listened to this. For the moment, he was Donnie Moody again, a man who had left his own family to crumble. He’d left his daughter to fall into a declining lifestyle, and that in turn had made her careless of the safety of a daughter to whom she’d given birth, out of wedlock, at sixteen.

Emmie couldn’t have known, of course, that such an evil entity as the Flower Garden abduction and trafficking network had reached its tendrils as far as humble Kincheloe County, Tennessee, a place most in the nation didn’t even know existed. In those days, the Flower Garden had not even been exposed to the light of day. Law enforcement investigators were only beginning to nibble at the edges of the organization at that time, to learn that it was there at all.

Sadler spoke again. “Gentleman – and lady – we now face a question that is long overdue, and for me even to ask it aloud will show you how much of a turn I’ve made in my thoughts about this. Here’s my question: Is this community of ours, here on the verge of celebrating two centuries of life, going to continue to bury this secret, or be courageous enough to admit the failures and evils of the past and wrest some meaning out of the suffering of the little girl we saw kidnapped just now? I say it is time to put aside that familiar human tendency to try to hide everything we don’t want to see, everything we think makes us, ourselves, look bad and ugly. I say forget all that. Let’s bite that particular bullet and purge our iniquities, if I may borrow a bit of biblical lingo. Call me a fool – plenty of others have, so why not? – but I think Eli Scudder might have been sent to this county for a purpose. Because it was time ... time to dig out what we’ve spent too many years trying to bury. And I was the one shoveling dirt into the hole faster than anybody else. I was wrong. Sheriff Hawes was wrong, going along with it. And Mr. Carl, too. We all got off the right road, this whole community.”

“Amen, Benton,” said Feely. “Amen.” He paused as others nodded. “Are we in agreement?”

There was a soft chorus of murmured assent.

“Then be prepared to gather, all of us, at the office of the
Clarion
on Monday morning. Eli, your morning staff meeting is going to be crashed by a rather dignified group of intruders, and Mr. Carl and company are going to have the biggest story of the year placed on the table before them, virtually on a silver platter. And Melinda, I strongly suggest that, between now and then, you convince your news director to make an early Monday morning drive to Tylerville and be there as well. Both you and Eli have been involved in bringing these buried old facts to life, and both of your news organizations should benefit from your enterprise. The story nobody has wanted to talk about for years – except around the office water cooler or on the factory line – is about to be broken at the same time by our local paper and our nearest television news operation. A ‘simultaneous scoop,’ if you will, each news outlet openly and honestly giving due credit to the other.”

“News partners,” Melinda said.

“A good phrase, that, and exactly what I’m trying to get at,” Feely replied. “Will your station go for it?”

“I think so. Especially when I tell them they are about to miss the chance to be involved in breaking a local/national news story if they don’t cooperate.”

Sadler said, “My friends, good has been done here today. A hidden sin is about to be revealed. Truth is about to be laid before the world. I for one am ready to see it happen. This community does not need to celebrate two centuries of life still burying secrets.”

“I agree, Benton,” Cavness said. “Don, my friend, what do you think?”

Donald New wiped his face free of tears and said, “Friends, out across this nation there are, I’m sure, people who have had children stolen from them in infancy, and have seen the picture of the child called Broken Flower and wondered if she is their own child. We have the unique opportunity to answer that question and ease their minds from wondering if it was their child who wound up in a trash dumpster in LA after being abused for the entertainment of sick, evil men.”

“He’s right,” said Feely. “That’s an aspect of this I hadn’t thought of.”

“It was my fault, you know,” New said. “If I had been the man I should have been, Emmie’s life would have been better. She wouldn’t have been forced to do the things she did, like becoming a mother when she was still a child herself. She would have found a husband and had a family, and my granddaughter would have never been put into the situation that allowed her to be taken. My fault ... my own fault.”