Chapter 5

Twice during the night I woke up and fed the fire and prowled around the house, making sure everything was okay. I was most concerned about the fact that the snow could no longer slump off the roof, but I could find no signs of stress -- the house wasn't creaking or groaning, which I was sure it would do if there was a problem.

Finally, about seven AM, I went out to the garage again and poked my nose outside. In one way, things were better. There had only been an additional foot of snow since I'd been outside the evening before. That was a lot better than five or six times that. Moreover, I could see about a half mile instead of just thirty feet. There wasn't anything to see ... just a broad expanse of white, with occasional low hummocks.

The wind had vanished and all there was, was a steady sifting of small flakes.

The bad news, of course, was that it was still snowing and at some point it would become too much. There was an obvious solution to that -- retreat down to the Lower Temple, but that would open up so many cans of worms that I hoped it wouldn't be needed.

I went back inside and played the emergency radio as softly as I could manage, but it still woke up the detective almost at once. I turned it up then, and we heard that the stream of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico had just about vanished, and the front was now moving east once again.

While there was no way to be certain exactly when it would stop where we were, it was likely to be about ten in the morning. "I need to fetch wood for the fire, Ellie," I told her. "If you're up to it, you can fix your own breakfast."

"Scrambled eggs and bacon?" she asked.

I grimaced. "The scrambled eggs are powdered eggs, the milk to reconstitute them is powdered milk. There is no bacon. I'll just fix myself a bowl of dry cereal and have it plain."

She nodded and went off in the kitchen while I went on through to the garage and into the wood room. It was fair-sized, and consisted of stacks of cordwood that were piled shoulder high. There was a handcart that I loaded up with wood and hauled into the house. The cart held about a day's worth of wood and the wood room had maybe ten cords of split wood. I judged by eye how much time we had wood for and decided it was enough for three or four months. Surely the snow wouldn't last that long!

Ellie called her boss and reported all was well; I was close enough to overhear -- the conversation never seemed to get away from "where are the girls?"

Where I did intervene was when the conversation turned to extracting both of us by helicopter. "First," I told them, "there's no reason for me to leave. Once it stops snowing, I'll be fine. I promised I'd look out for the ranch and I will. Second, you are entirely too premature."

"What do you mean, Mr. Strom?" Sheffield asked.

"I mean, yes, I gave you the GPS coordinates of the ranch. The only problem with that is, there's no longer a readily visible house to find. The landscape is surreal; it is a featureless white blanket without much relief. It would be too easy to actually land on the house, rather than nearby. And just how deep would a helicopter sink into the snow anyway? It's twelve or thirteen feet deep in the thinnest patches. When I tried to go outside yesterday evening, I was sinking to my waist every step. I ended up getting around on an aluminum extension ladder and a wooden stepladder."

"I'll talk to the helicopter pilot," the district attorney said. "I think you should come along, Mr. Strom."

"Absent a better reason than you think I should, I'll stay. Most houses are safe from rain, but I'm not sure how this one will fare with water leaking in laterally, or perhaps even upwards."

"You really need to come out, Mr. Strom."

"Mr. Sheffield, if you send officers to arrest me, officers with a warrant, I'll surrender. But, absent a legal warrant I'll be staying."

"We'll talk about this later, Mr. Strom. You should think long and hard about whether or not you want to be marooned for weeks or even a month."

"I'm willing to take the chance, sir. There's plenty of food and fuel ... and if things go bad, I can still whistle up a helicopter if needed."

Ellie turned off the phone and I contemplated her. "I'm tempted to go back to calling you 'Detective' Ellie."

"David, I know you think you're doing the right thing by staying here, but you really should think about it. For one thing, if you got on that helicopter and it flew non-stop to Amarillo, your defense attorney would have a field day with kidnap, rendition and all sorts of other charges."

I blinked. "You're saying it's a trick?"

"David, it's December. The primary election is a couple of months off, and Sheffield is running unopposed. In November comes the general election. The man has an IQ lower than the temperature of this room. His idea was to harass the Hope in Zion church to get the rest of the county solidly behind him for the general election.

"The problem is, that election is eleven months away. He went onto the ranch too soon ... I imagine that the church members will promptly register to vote in the fall, and a block of six or eight hundred voters is going to make his reelection chances problematical at best."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you saved my life. Because I've known all along that Sheffield is a little worm; that he is more interested in reelection than in anything else.

"I don't like how women are treated in the Hope in Zion faith, I really don't like that young girls have sex with 'Brother Jerome.' I don't care about all of your glib answers, of which I'm sure you have plenty more.

"Just remember one thing: if you ever make a misstep, I'll be there to arrest you and anyone else who breaks the laws of this country or the State of Texas."

"I wish you would do me a favor," I said sadly. "I can't help what you think; in truth, a week ago, I pretty much agreed with you. But that was then and this is now. I've had a chance to talk with them, Detective. Please, after all of this is over and the snow goes away; let me arrange for you to talk to some of the young women of the Faith.

"Listen to what they have to say. Try to understand that they come from a different culture than you do, and you have to give theirs as much credence as you do to, say, Muslims. You do go after Muslim men who become betrothed in arranged marriages with six year olds, and who marry the girls at nine and deflower them at twelve, right? They do that for each of their two or three wives and you pursue them for that, right? You chase down each and everyone who transgresses and arrest them for honor killings, beatings, slavery, failure to allow their daughters and wives to be educated, right? You do all of those things, right?"

She looked away. "It's not possible to right all of the wrongs in the universe."

"No, of course not. So you chase after young women who are happy, who don't do drugs, who don't kite checks, who don't beat on their spouses, and who take good care of their kids -- and you walk away from the second class status that Islam imposes on women -- if not outright slavery. You'll pardon me, but I do think you're a little schizo."

"So, we're back to my being brain-damaged."

"We're back to me wondering how you can sit there and look me in the eye, having just said what you said. I never once said or thought that -- it was Dr. Cooper whose idea that was. Dr. Jimenez didn't agree and I didn't offer an opinion -- but I did offer an alternative. Hallucinations aren't the same thing as brain damage. I imagine you can cause brain damage if you hallucinate long enough, but I never thought that was what happened."

"Okay, so we're only back to my flawed perceptions."

"And that's where I'm comfortable," I riposted. "You don't see things in the world in what I would call a rational pattern. You think because it's not something you do, it's wrong. Islam, evidently, gets some sort of weird, PC pass that none of the rest of us can understand.

"You need to get out more, Detective."

"And you need to understand that I don't approve of adults screwing twelve year olds. I don't care if it's voluntary or not. I don't approve of someone like 'Brother Jerome' fathering hundreds of children on girls barely above the age of consent, if they are in fact above the age of consent."

"That's what, sixteen and up?" David asked.

"Yes, although it depends on the age difference as well."

"I take it you're not Catholic?"

"What has that got to do with anything?"

"They think Mary, the mother of Jesus was maybe fourteen or fifteen years old when Jesus was born; some religions believe she might have been as young as thirteen. God, you see, told her that her child was specially blessed, that he would do great things. When Joseph, her husband, objected to God impregnating his wife, God convinced Joseph that it was a great thing and that he should come to terms with it."

"Brother Jerome isn't God."

"And he doesn't claim to be. He does claim that his children are specially blessed. Men who would marry one of the young women who carried one of his children have to swear an oath that they will treat the child no differently than a child of their blood. Most do so willingly ... the rest stay single."

"That's a crock, so he can slip it to all the girls he wants."

"I saw an old TV clip of Oral Roberts once, healing the sick. They would come up to him, he'd lay a blessing on them, and the blind could see again, the deaf hear, the halt and lame could walk again. Diseases were cured, so was arthritis and all sorts of things."

"It was all fakery."

"Sure, of course. Which is why those he laid blessings on would give him in gratitude enough money to build a university. You might not believe it; I know I don't. But I do know that there's no percentage in telling people that something they think they experienced wasn't real."

She jerked. "Back to that. You're a bastard, you know?"

"I know. My father's name on all of the Faith's genealogy charts is a question mark. My mother certainly never married him."

"You could sell snake oil to a den of rattlesnakes!"

"You'd arrest your own mother for walking on the grass."

"David ... did I mention that I really appreciate having my life saved?"

"Once or twice." I decided to leave it there, deferring another barbed retort until later. "And you did tell me what Sheffield is planning. Thank you for that."

"David, I don't want to start the fight back up, but how can you believe in all of that?"

I ground my teeth in frustration. "You need to listen, Ellie. You're not listening. I'm agnostic, okay? I don't know what to believe. That said, I have eyes, ears and a brain. I can see things and learn from them, even if they conflict with other things that I hold to be true.

"What religion treats women worse? Islam or the Faith?"

"I know what you want me to say; they are both abominable."

"Ellie, if you and I were to stand next to each other, so we could ask a third party to judge which one of us was taller -- we'd likely get the right answer. We could ask someone which one of us our judge thought weighed more than the other. We could run a race and measure which of us is faster.

"Neither of us is exceptionally tall or exceptionally short. We're average. But still, one of us is taller than the other. Neither of us is scrawny and neither of us is fat. Yet one of us weighs more than the other. We're not speed demons, but we can beat a lot of people in any kind of race. So forth and so on, Ellie. I'm not asking where the two religions stand in relation to the universe -- just to each other."

"You want me to say Islam is worse. I don't know as there is much of a difference."

"Yeah, right. Which is why Muslim women flock to the US and freedom, and the only way you can get a woman out of the Hope in Zion church is to arrest her and drag her away."

She looked down and away. "It's for their own good."

"Oh yeah, like you'd react well if someone dragged you away from your family, your friends -- your children -- telling you 'It's for your own good.' Whereas if you went to a fundamentalist Muslim country and asked if any women wanted to go to the US, you'd have to beat them off with a stick."

"Why is it you always have an answer?"

"Ask yourself 'Why do I always have such simple questions?'"

"It's wrong what the church does."

"Ellie, you have to ask yourself: is it out of line with what you permit other cultures to do? If it isn't that different, why are you so intent on persecuting the Hope in Zion Faith and not prosecuting other groups who practice the same things, only far more barbarously?"

"I'd like to think we'd go after anyone who did those things."

"Except of course, no one does, anywhere in the country. And if you tried it, you'd receive death threats, have fatwahs issued against you and the like. And your boss would promptly fold. Actually of course, you know all of that or you'd never have opened the betting. Instead, you chase after an unorthodox Christian group -- a cult if you will -- that doesn't bomb and murder people. Where people can come and go as they please, are free to follow the dictates of the consciences. And you are safe and smug and patting yourself on the back for a job well done -- but letting the real monsters run loose."

"Are you finished preaching?"

"I said before we should let the matter drop. You just keep scratching the wound."

"The worst part," she said, looking at the ground, "is that in my heart I know you're right. Still, I'm a woman and horrified by what I hear..."

"By what you hear? Have you ever talked to anyone of the Faith?"

"No. But the stories we've heard..."

"Are told by people who've found that the more lurid the stories they tell, the more attention they get, and the more attention they get, the more TV shows will pay to get them on. The more they are on TV, the more they can get for their wild, sensationalist books -- and those books lead to more TV and radio appearances.

"What kind of a detective are you, when you never talk to anyone actually involved with a case on a personal basis, relying entirely on hearsay evidence from people who stand to make considerable financial gain based on the drama involved in what they tell you? It's like having a murder case, and the only witness you hear from is Geraldo Rivera."

She looked up at that. "That hurts, you know? It hurts. I can't say you're not right, because you are."

"I swear to you, Detective, that when we're both out of here, if you give guarantees, I'll arrange interviews for you with some of the young women of the Faith. Maybe if you listen to them and bring an open mind, you might understand better."

"They've been brainwashed."

I was ready to scream with frustration. "I told you, they are brought up to question everything they see around them. That isn't something that works on someone who's been brainwashed. They are brainwashed in the same sense that ninety percent of Americans have the same religion as their parents -- they are educated in the tradition and that's what they choose. It's not evil -- it is just tradition."

"I want to rest," she declared, stood up and went into the bedroom. She didn't close the door though, and I could see her stretch out across the bed, face down without undressing.

I heaved myself up from my chair and went out to the garage. I lifted the garage door once again and looked outside. I sighed in relief. There had been less than another inch of snow, and it had, to all intents and purposes, stopped snowing. The sky was the odd, sickly yellow the sky gets before and after a major snow storm; I hoped it wasn't going to come roaring back.