The Blood We Spill: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (The Letty Whittaker 12 Step Mysteries) (4 page)

The saffron-colored handbill was distinctly at odds
with the doom-laden catalog of present day terrors: war, 9/11, tsunamis,
hurricanes, plunging economies, rising crime, the decline of family values. The
dire litany droned on, tapping into the subliminal fears of everyday people,
and then went on to offer a solution.

I snagged the notice off the board and left the
campus. I needed to hurry if I was going to meet Jimmy before tonight’s
meeting.

We met at a coffee shop near the mall. Jimmy looked
different. I had never seen him frightened before. Even last summer, during a
close call with a trespasser intent on breaking into his house, Jimmy had
maintained a calm, collected demeanor.

Sitting across from each other, I watched his jaw
muscles flex and his eyes, wide and dilated, dart from object to object with
the hyperalertness of a man seeking answers. In spite of—or maybe because of—
his anxiety, he started the conversation off in a professional, businesslike
approach. I almost expected him to tap his spoon against his water glass to
call us to order.

“Thanks for coming, Letty. I have to tell you I
was pretty shocked last night when you called looking for Beth. I thought you
were with her.”

“Did she tell you I would be?”

“Beth doesn’t tell me direct lies,” he half grinned.
“At least, not anymore. But she’s a master at lies of omission. Basically, she
let me assume you two were in this together. I would have felt safer if you
were, and she knew that.” His eyes looked a question.

Avoiding his gaze, I picked up a sugar packet and
began to tap the crystals from end to end while I contemplated what to say.
Avoidance—after denial, an alcoholic’s best friend.

“You mentioned she’d gone to a Living Peace
meeting?”

“Three of them,” Jimmy answered.

So Beth had been looking into this well before she
and Reggie had broached the subject with me. More lies of omission.

“What did she say about them?”

“Well, she didn’t see hide nor hair of Maggie, for
one thing. And she said the people smiled too much. Creeped her out. It wasn’t
until the Discussion Suppers that the group started delving into more
controversial topics like dedicating one’s life to the Elect and totally
rejecting the world’s values. By that, they meant leaving jobs or families that
don’t support the Elect’s beliefs.”

I had to backtrack. “What’s a Discussion Supper?” 

Clearly surprised at my ignorance but ever
courteous, Jimmy refrained from commenting. As he explained, I concentrated to
stay focused through the waves of guilt and fear that were building in my
chest.

After the second Peace meeting Beth had attended,
she’d been approached by two group members. Smiling, of course. They offered
tea and muffins and lavished attention on her.

“Beth said that even though she knew they were
phony as hell, she could feel herself wanting to respond,” Jimmy said. “They
ended up inviting her to Corinth House for supper with some of the righteous
ones.” Jimmy’s fingers hooked air quotes over the last two words.

“Corinth House is where the group lives?”

“Only some of them. Just a few, really. I don’t
know where the others stay, and that’s what worries me.” Before clarifying his
concerns, Jimmy methodically returned to the chronological recitation of Beth’s
path.

“She went to a couple Discussion Suppers and at
least one more Living Peace meeting. During this whole time, she kept laying it
on about wanting God’s will in her life and about being frightened of me. She
was building a cover story that I was overly controlling of her—and her
money—and hinting at abuse. It was the money that got their attention. They
offered her a safe refuge. She went to Corinth House two days later. That would
be Sunday afternoon.”

My mind was reeling. The entire time we had sat
together on Saturday evening, she had this planned. Here I had been
congratulating myself on making her see reason, and she had been planning her
packing list. Jimmy wasn’t the only one who had assumed too much.

“What did you mean when you said you were worried
about where the others stay?”

“The Corinth House folks made it clear that they
were just the tip of the iceberg. Before she moved in, they told her she would
be part of a large community of believers dedicated to preparing The Way.
Whatever that is. But they wouldn’t give her any hint where this community was
located or if she would qualify going there.”

“Building a sense of exclusivity,” I said.

“And intrigue,” he agreed. “Before she went in, we
set up a signal. She was supposed to call the bank each morning, ostensibly to
monitor her accounts, but would ring my private line instead. She called Monday
and Tuesday mornings. I haven’t heard from her since.”

He held up a hand to forestall my objections at
his alarm after only two missed phone calls.

“I’m hoping it’s nothing more serious than being
relocated from Corinth House sooner than we expected. Still… Everything she
learned beforehand told us it would be several weeks of proving her commitment
to the group’s ideals. So of course I have to wonder why the sudden departure.
And why hasn’t she called? She has to know I’m worried sick. On the other hand,
if she was taken to the main commune or whatever you call it, then we knew
there would be a period of time where it would be difficult for her to get word
to me. Frankly, we had hoped she would have seen Maggie before having to make
that transition.”

We fell silent while we each pondered the risks my
friend had taken.

After several minutes, Jimmy said softly, “Why
didn’t you go with her, Letty?”

Reaching for my water glass, I swallowed a sip,
but the water tasted like guilt. Now it was my turn to avoid eye contact. The
silence strung out while the question lay between us like a living thing. For a
person who makes her living from insight and communication, I was a pretty
useless.

As we walked to our cars, he stopped me with a
hand on my arm. His eyes pored into mine and searched. Whatever he saw made him
shake his head, frowning.

“Letty, be careful. Don’t go off half-cocked. I
don’t want to be worrying about you too.”

“Don’t worry, Jimmy,” I said. “I’m too careful for
my own good.”

F
ollowing my
talk with Jimmy, I spent the remainder of the afternoon sitting in the public
library, researching and making illicit phone calls from between the racks of
the nonfiction section. A librarian walked up from behind once, startling me
into a yelp, and scaring the hell out of both of us. I tried to catch Tracy
between clients, to no avail. I left a message, but my need wasn’t great enough
to warrant use of the emergency protocol listed in her greeting. I also left a
message for Eli, wanting to fill him in. Regardless of our fight, he would want
to know about Beth.

The pungent scent of designer drinks hit me as soon
as I walked into the coffee shop later that evening. The cafe, divided into
cozy conversational nooks as well as solitary Internet escape hatches, was set
up to attract the college and career-minded crowd. The décor was a studied
attempt at casual funky.

Surveying my surroundings, I noticed a few people
moving to the back. A hand-lettered Living Peace sign on yellow construction
paper had been thumbtacked to the wall, a big cartoon arrow pointing right.

The far less trendy backroom had flecked blue
industrial carpeting and pale blue paint that felt more utilitarian than
soothing. Plastic folding chairs added to the generic meeting room ambiance.
Knots of people stood scattered across the room, and it was easy to pick out
who belonged and who didn’t. Beth was right. Several members skipped “pleasant”
in their expressional repertoire and headed right for “beaming maniacally.”
Definitely creepy.

Also creepy, but less obvious, was the evidence of
a possible power hierarchy at work. The folks with the face-splitting grins
seemed to be doing most of the grunt work of setting up—hauling tables and
chairs, dragging a podium up on the small stage, unpacking food from brown
paper grocery bags, and arranging it on a long banquet table. In contrast,
three or four members whose facial expressions didn’t make them look stoned or
orgasmic concentrated on the organizational end of the class—giving directions
to the Smilers, setting up a name/address roster, arranging a stack of
pamphlets and so on.

I moved in for a closer look at the snack table
laden with homemade breads and muffins. No donuts. No butter or margarine. Not
even any jam. Dreading what I might find, I approached the large coffee urns
and realized the worst: herbal tea or sugar-free lemonade. I toyed with the
idea of going out to the front for real coffee and, regretfully, decided it
would set the wrong tone. A Smiler caught my frown and spread her arms
invitingly across the refreshments.

“Maranatha! Be at home!”

With nerves already raw, I had to stab my
fingernails into my palms to keep from barking out a laugh. She looked like a
bit player in a cut-rate butter commercial. Not everyone shared my cynicism. A
wispy thin woman with a minefield of acne across her cheeks, forehead, and chin
accepted the offering and shyly selected a fibrous-looking muffin. Her jeans
were at least one size too big, and the bulky sweatshirt she wore reduced her
form to a gray wasteland. In contrast to her bland, don’t-see-me demeanor, her
hair was a glorious riot of auburn richness which she had scraped back into a
ponytail.

I watched one of the group’s higher-ups move to
the thin woman and, putting a hand lightly on her shoulder, gently lead her to
the row of chairs lined up before the lectern. They sat next to each other with
the member angled in, nodding and smiling. The Elect woman was dressed in a
simple skirt and blouse, sensible shoes, no makeup. Her long gray hair was
pulled back into a bun, and she didn’t wear any jewelry. A man in a
short-sleeved shirt and tie approached and flanked the thin woman, sitting on
her other side.

Choosing a seat a row back, I watched the scene
play out and thought about Tracy’s description of love bombing. The pair
tag-teamed the newcomer, who appeared pathetically grateful for their
concentrated attention.

For Maggie, after a childhood spent coping with an
alcoholic mother and having just been jilted, the maneuver would have been
irresistible. Attention was the bait; acceptance, the hook.

A woman sat down next to me. She too wore the
no-makeup-and-long-skirted uniform of the group’s females. Smiling gently at
me, she made eye contact for a full count of three seconds and then turned to
face front. Her approach was decidedly more subdued than the one I had just
witnessed, demonstrating a higher level of skill. Accurately assessing my
discomfort with lavish attention, she had adjusted her approach accordingly.

Let the games begin…

For a span of a minute, I pretended to ignore her,
then turned as if to examine her covertly, letting my eyes skitter away when
she glanced in my direction.

A stirring at the front of the room interrupted
our dance of manipulation, drawing everyone’s attention. A short elderly man in
black dress pants and matching black button-down shirt walked in and crossed
over to the lectern. As one, group members bowed their heads in a ceremonial
greeting. Those of us who were as yet unaffiliated cast nervous glances around.
Then, one by one, the uninitiated touched chin to chest, and closed their eyes.
Even I, knowledgeable about group persuasion, felt the pressure. Complying, I
tucked my head down but peeked from side to side noting the almost unanimous
compliance. All but one man, who sat one row back with his arms crossed, joined
in the homage or prayer or whatever it symbolized.

“Maranatha, children.”

As a chorus of voices returned the greeting, I
wondered what maranatha meant. I raised my eyes to the man standing in front of
the group. If Santa Claus were a businessman, he would look like this. A full
head of frosty white hair and matching beard surrounded gently twinkling eyes.
A closer inspection revealed dark brown eyes instead of Kris Kringle blue and
he didn’t sport a jelly belly, either. Altogether, an attractive man.

He introduced himself to us as Dr. Abe. The
professional title without surname gave him an aura of gentle authority. His
voice, soft and tender, carried well, made him even more compelling.

He began the lecture with a gloomy litany of the
world’s problems. He spent time on each issue he raised, reciting statistics,
detailing tragic events and natural disasters in that gentle tone. His speaking
voice had a trained resonance to it, an even, rhythmic cadence that contrasted
sharply with the horrific images his message conjured.

His appeal was frighteningly obvious. To me,
anyway. Dr. Abe appeared to be a master at regulating his speech patterns and
tonalities. While falling just short of hypnotic, his voice soothed and
captivated. He was particularly adept at shifting back and forth between
expressing infinite sadness over the evils of the world and a kind of paternal
pity at the misguided methods most of us used to guard against them.

However, the message itself wasn’t as
sophisticated as the delivery. A portion of time was spent on the effects of
stress, a simplified explanation of our body’s immune system, and modern
medicine’s inadequate methods of dealing with it. He pushed on with more grim
talk about medications with a healthy dose of anti-pharmaceutical rhetoric
thrown in as well. Regardless, he played the issue up well, and a few of the
attendees wanted to comment. One woman raised her hand tentatively. Dr. Abe
made no move to recognize her and, lacking encouragement, she lowered it.

As the Elect leader continued, I noted another
charismatic talent he wielded with ease: the skillful manipulation of the rise
and fall of emotions. Naturally, a person who is drawn to spend an evening in a
dismal back room listening to a lecture on the world’s ills already has the
potential to be a tad negative. Depressed, even. If he wasn’t before he got
here, after a few hours of unrelieved doom and gloom, he was going to be. In
fact, the auburn-haired woman spent most of the talk sobbing into a tissue and
blowing her nose. So it didn’t impress me that Dr. Abe could bring the group
down. That was a given. But his ability to bring them back up was unexpected.
And, I had to admit, impressive.