The Blood We Spill: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (The Letty Whittaker 12 Step Mysteries) (28 page)

Cell. Was this a monk’s cell… or prisoner’s cell?
Good question. From a cult point of view, the former would make sense. Enforced
isolation was an integral part of breaking down personal identity. Or of any
good torture program, for that matter. Even badass criminals feared solitary
confinement. It would function as a rite of passage too. A way of creating a
hierarchy within the group.

But something told me Father wasn’t happy with me.
Which begged the question, why would he decide to “advance” me with the Naming
Ceremony before others who had more history with the church? Unless it was for
Moses.

I shuddered. Time to stop thinking again.

I might have fallen asleep on the table once, but
I certainly wasn’t going to repeat that. For one thing, I would probably fall
off and break my neck. Moonlight streamed through the two holes and lit the
room with a soft glow. While I appreciated the light, I felt too exposed. There
was something about night that made me desire a more enclosed space. A
hidey-hole. I pulled the prayer rug underneath the table and curled up on it
like a cat. I couldn’t get comfortable. The rug, only three-by-five feet,
didn’t allow all of me to fit on it at the same time, and it irritated me when
a leg or arm would slide off onto the floor. Even if it was heated, I didn’t
like the difference in texture.

I didn’t like being naked, either. I would never
be a let-it-all-hang-out sleeper. Exposed girl-parts just made me feel… exposed.
And crabby.

But mostly exposed, especially when I heard the
sound of a key sliding into the padlock outside the door. I sat up so fast I
banged my head on the table. The key inserter paused at the thump. I crawled
out from under the table and grabbed the empty ceramic water pitcher. If I
could get behind the door, I might be able to—

The padlock clicked open. I held my breath. The
door, lacking only the eerie, slasher-movie creak, slowly opened.

A hand reached in, dangling a flannel shirt. A
manly hand. I knew that hand.

I bounded across the room, grabbing at the shirt
like it was the last life jacket on the Titanic. I heard the deep rumble of a
chuckle on the other side of the door. My arms got tangled in the sleeves, and
there were far too many buttons for my shaking fingers to cope with, but I
finally managed. My butt hung out the back, but when I pulled the fabric over
it, it rode up in the front. Much worse. Down in front, out in back—I would
just have to keep Eli to the fore. 

He came in carrying a plastic grocery bag.
Oh,
please, let it be food.
And underwear
. He started to hand it to me,
but his eyes locked on my bare legs and he froze.

“Shut the door,” I hissed.

 As it swung shut, his grin spread like a Cheshire
cat’s in the moonlight.

Keeping my priorities straight, I grabbed the bag
and foraged through it. Apples. Grapes. Cheese. And another candle. Riches
beyond measure. And at the bottom… I gasped.
Was it…?
The slick
rectangular object slid away from my grasping fingers, hiding coyly under the
grapes. I finally got it.

I didn’t need any more light to read the silver
block letters practically glowing against the dark brown background. A Hershey
bar. My man brought me chocolate.

By the time Eli had lit the candle and pulled the
prayer rug out from under the table, I had devoured the candy bar and started
on the grapes. We sat on the floor. I appropriated the rug by virtue of having
a bare butt. I had to kneel to keep the shirt from riding up.

Maybe with chocolate in my system I could face
reality. “What time is it?”

“Late. It’s about two-thirty. I would have been
here sooner, but we had a couple of situations.

My feet, tucked decorously under my butt, started
to tingle. I shifted, trying to ignore the fact that my own weight was cutting
off my circulation. My shirt rode a little higher.

“What happened?” I asked.

Eli, eyes busily tracking the journey of the
flannel shirt, didn’t respond.

I snapped my fingers under his nose. “What
happened?”

“Oh. Uh. Well, first of all, Father announced that
Maliah’s marriage to Enoch is dissolved on the basis of abandonment.”

“We’ve been expecting this. Why would it be such a
problem?”

“He’s letting her keep her standing. It’s
apparently unheard of for a single woman to be elevated without being married
to a man. I can’t prove it, but I get the feeling she’s holding something over
Father’s head. Maybe the properties that are in Enoch’s name? I don’t know. But
the church is in an uproar. Plus, I hate to tell you this, but Justus has been
busy making the moves on her. She’s letting him escort her to the dining hall
and the temple. It’s a beautiful thing.”

“You said a couple of situations.”

His air of amusement dissipated. “Rachel tried to
leave. Father heard she was meeting with the cops, and he’s confined her to her
cabin. All hell is breaking loose.”

“That’s all my fault.” I covered my face with my
hands. Every step I took forward turned out to be the wrong path. I was so
tired of thinking. “I told Cozbi that Rachel was flirting with that detective.
She must have told Father. Cozbi had seen them having lunch, so I thought if
she knew they were flirting, she might keep it quiet.”

“It’s not your fault.” Eli tugged my hands down.
His hands were warm and slightly callused. “Cozbi would have told him anyway.
Or, if she told Moses, he definitely would have told him.”

“I don’t think she would have said anything to
Moses. They aren’t close. In fact, I doubt they’re even… intimate.”

Our eyes caught in the flickering candlelight.

Eli leaned over me, and our lips met.
Everything—Maggie, Enoch, Moses—everything fell away. The world narrowed,
channeling all thought into a searing concentration of flesh and friction.

Eli’s fingers danced down the buttons of my shirt,
far more swiftly and skillfully than I had managed moments earlier. I shivered
as it fell away. Chilly air caressed my skin, and then his kiss, warm and
urgent, traveled down my neck, to my collar bone, to my breast.

I sank down. Eli moved over me and I let him. No
more thinking. I just…
let go
. 

With my mind, anyway. My body had a more
imperative mission, and it was not about to go all passive and “fade to black.”
Eli didn’t need any convincing, but we got tangled up trying to pull his jeans
off, and that slowed the pace a bit. Once freed, he rooted around in a pocket
and come up with a little, square packet.

“Well, aren’t you the Boy Scout,” I said.
“Somebody was pretty certain he was going to get lucky tonight.”

I could see his grin in the moonlight. “You’re
alone, naked, and locked in a tiny cabin in the middle of the north woods. I
was pretty confident nothing would go wrong tonight.”

Then he focused on the job at hand. Oh lord, did
he focus.

After waiting so long and after so many
hit-and-miss moments, I had imagined we would get right down to basics, and I
was ready for it.
Eager
for it. Eli, however, had other ideas. Lots of
ideas. Lots and lots and lots.

And apparently, he subscribed to the gentleman’s
motto of “ladies first,” because, using several of those ideas, he had me
moaning and shivering so hard it must have looked like I was seizing. I may
have spoken in tongues near the end.

If Father had put me in this cold, dark shed for a
religious experience, I had it. Several times.

When I finally stopped twitching, our eyes met,
and he flashed a slightly smug, I-got-her-now, smile. He wasn’t wrong, but he’d
had the upper hand—so to speak—long enough.

I rolled till I was on top. My turn now. I had a
few eye-rolling, toe-curling techniques of my own that I put to very good use.
He shut his eyes and groaned.   

At last, I fell back to the rug, limp, breathless,
and remarkably well pleased with myself. Eli lay beside me, just grinning. My
body was still settling back into itself when my gaze wandered to the chink in
the wall. The moonlight poured in like milk, flowing over our sweat-glistened
bodies.

And then it didn’t.
Someone was watching.

Squealing, I fumbled for the flannel shirt lying
discarded somewhere nearby. I couldn’t find it anywhere so I resorted to the
universal female hand-over-boobs and hand-over-crotch cover, which left me with
no hand to point to the chink with.

“
Somebody’s watching
.”

“What?” Apparently, Eli wasn’t nearly as adept at
flipping the switch from passion to panic as I.

But somebody else was. The watcher drew back, and
the moonlight flooded into the room again. Eli finally understood, and he
scrambled into his jeans and ran for the door.

“Stay here.”

No shit. I finally found the shirt, put it on, and
waited.

A
n eon of time
later, Eli returned.

“Did you catch him?” I asked.

Eli gave me a do-you-see-me-dragging-him-by-the
neck? look, but kindly refrained from suggesting that it was a stupid question.
Probably because he just had mind-blowing sex and was feeling generous.

“Whoever he was, he was familiar with the
property. He took off like a rabbit and lost me at the clearing.”

“That’s back where I found the hand,” I said,
shuddering.

Eli pulled me into a hug. We rocked together for a
long time, then his hands slid under the flannel and cupped my butt. He pulled
me in even tighter.

I shoved him away. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Well, he’s gone now, so—”

I slapped at his chest.

He just laughed, then reached out to tug my shirt
collar. “I’ll need this back. I’ve got to get back to Moses’s cabin and catch
him if he comes sneaking back.”

Moses—my first guess too. “What do you think will
happen to us? When he turns us in, I mean.”

He shook his head. “If it was Moses, I think he’ll
hold off on reporting us until after you present yourself to Father again.”

“Why wait?”

“He’s not going to miss that,” Eli said. “It’s
probably one reason why he supported Father fast-tracking you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. What am
I missing?”

Eli frowned. “Cozbi didn’t tell you.” It wasn’t a
question.

“What
?”

“I was wondering why you agreed… Okay, listen. I
hate to tell you this, but you need to be ready. Have you heard about Genesis
2:25? ‘And they were naked and were not ashamed.’ It’s from when Adam and Eve—”

“I’ve heard it,” I interrupted. “The women quoted
that scripture when I had to take a shower in front of them, but they didn’t
say… Are you telling me I have to… In front of…”

“I thought you knew.”

I punched him on the bicep so hard my knuckles
crunched.

“Ow! Does sex always make you this violent?”

“You honestly thought I would agree to stand naked
in front of some dirty, old man?”   

“And don’t forget the bunch of dirty, young men
too.”

My head buzzed. “The Seven?
All
seven?”

“I never thought there would be such a crowd the
first time I saw you naked. With the lights on, I mean.”

I held back—barely—the urge to smack him again.
“And you seriously thought I would be okay with this?”

“Well, I’m not going to say I didn’t have my own
reservations about it. But then, you know, I’d get distracted by thinking about
seeing you naked and all. Besides, I kinda liked the idea you might be kinky
underneath all that repressed, therap—”

Smacking wasn’t nearly enough. And, yes, I enjoyed
the yelp he made when I kicked him in the shin.

Apparently, sex did make me violent.

Chapter Twenty-Six

A
fter Eli
hobbled out, I retreated under the table again. I would have loved to be able
to shut off my brain, but no chance of that. The prospect of standing naked in
front of Father and his merry band of voyeurs, as well as the disturbing
realization that some other voyeuristic asshole had been watching Eli and me,
triggered a series of panic attacks that lasted the entire night. Thinking
about Eli and me and what we had just been doing didn’t help me find my calm center,
either. My body spasmed back and forth between heart-pounding, sweaty panic
attacks and heart-pounding, sweaty lusties when I pictured our recent rug
activities.

Wave after wave flooded my body, leaving me weak
and frustrated. I lost all sense of time, but I believed hours passed as panic
attack followed panic attack. Each time, I would tell myself it was over. But
it wasn’t. And after each wave, a growing disgust at my own self-perceived
weakness sank to new depths.

Not so long ago I would have dealt with the chaos
in my mind with a drink… or five. Not an option anymore, even if I could get
out of the cabin. On the other hand, if I were able to escape and made it to
the local tavern, I would probably be guaranteed as many free drinks as I could
swill down, what with being buck naked and all.

That thought brought me full circle to the
reminder that in less than twenty-four hours I would be similarly unclad and in
front of more people than had ever simultaneously seen me naked since birth.
Unless I counted that after-game party one night in Green Bay when the Packers
trounced the Bears. That was years ago, though.

Eventually I remembered that A.A. had taught me
there were other ways to deal with the chaos in my soul. If ever a situation
called for the Serenity Prayer, it was this one.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things
I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the
difference.