Page 8 of Torment

I was a hero, the agents said. It was because of my dedication that all those women and kids were saved. I asked them to keep my name out of it, though, because once I discovered the whole truth, I wanted the world to leave me the fuck alone.

Up until that point, I’d gotten a distinct feeling the agents were holding back information. They kept shifting nervously and exchanging glances every time I asked them why my family hadn’t come to visit, and they gave me a different answer every time. It turned out I was right. They were hiding something more terrible than I could’ve ever imagined.

My family had been dead for weeks. Brutally murdered.

On the same day my car was blown up, my mom, dad, sister and two brothers were gathered at my parents’ place in St. Charles Parish, where they’d retired after leaving their company to me and my siblings. It was my second oldest brother’s birthday, and my parents had arranged a little family party. Years later, I recalled that I’d actually been invited to the celebration, but at the time I’d been knee-deep in my cult mission. I’d declined to attend, figuring there would always be another birthday. Or Christmas. Easter. Plenty of time and occasion to see my family.

I was so fucking wrong.

Jacob Chastain hadn’t just gone after me. He must’ve hired a hit squad to target my family as well, because their deaths clearly weren’t the result of a random home invasion. All five of them had been strung up on wooden crosses on the back of the estate and set alight.

Because of my determination to expose the cult, my whole family had been burned alive.

After learning that soul-crushing fact, I didn’t want my name anywhere near the New Eden Ranch rescue story. I even had some geeky kid on speed dial who was capable of scrubbing my name off the internet whenever anyone tried to associate my name with the story. He was only nineteen, but he was able to do some genius thing with search algorithms to make sure my name never came up in association with ‘New Eden’ no matter how hard a person looked online.

That was exactly what I wanted: to be left the fuck out of the narrative. I might be responsible for saving all those people back then, but it happened at the expense of my family. I would never forgive myself for that.

I would never forgive those responsible for hurting them, either, and I didn’t buy the story about their plane crashing for one second. Sure, a plane crashed, but I sincerely doubted every man from the cult was on that flight. The leaders wouldn’t be that fucking stupid that they’d register a flight plan with a full passenger manifest when they intended on escaping the country. No way.

I was willing to bet anything that the corpses found in or around the edges of the Sabine were less important cult members the leaders had decided to sacrifice in a sabotaged plane in order to fake the deaths of the entire membership. It worked, too. Everyone thought they were all dead.

Except me.

I had no idea where they were now, but I was certain they were still out there somewhere, and I was going to get them back if it was the last thing I ever did.

As such, the last several years of my life had been dedicated to the two Rs: rehab and revenge.

After all the months of skin grafts, operations, and other such treatments for my burns, I had to learn to walk again through physical therapy. The damage to my nerves had been so severe that I couldn’t even do something that simple; something I’d always taken for granted.

The first few months involved me simply trying to hang my legs off the side of the bed for a few minutes. It progressed from that to sitting in a chair for fifteen minutes or so. Then I was finally able to stand, months later, and a few weeks after that I was able to awkwardly shuffle around a room with a frame.

It took six months to walk again, although it took a further three years and several operations to walk properly without a limp in my left leg.

While this was going on, I was also working on trying to recover my lost memories. I still couldn’t remember a single fucking thing from the period of my life I spent at New Eden Ranch, or anything from the few months beforehand either.

My friend Thad was somewhat helpful. He told me I’d gone there as part of some stupid bet between us, but I’d eventually decided to stay at the place and try to expose the shocking things I uncovered. He also mentioned something about a girl helping me with my fact-finding mission down in the underground shelter. Unfortunately, he’d either been drunk or high on coke and molly during half our conversations about the place, so that was all he could remember. That and the fact that the girl’s name started with J.

I read through everything I’d ever sent the FBI (they gave me copies of my emails) and I discovered that I’d never mentioned this helper of mine by name. I figured I must’ve done that to protect her identity in case any of the male cult members found out about me and went through all my shit before I managed to get the evidence to the FBI. Whatever the case, it was a dead end.

My old secretary Vlada was slightly more helpful. She told me I’d roped her into the scheme to get me accepted into the cult in the first place, and I’d told her a few details back then. She said I obviously had a thing for the daughter of the cult Prophet, and that she was sure her name was something like Julie or Julia.

That made sense. Jacob Chastain had a daughter named Jolie. I met her when I was a teenager, the first time I ever went to the ranch. One of the FBI agents had also told a nurse that someone named Jolie tried to contact me a while ago when I was still in the first hospital, and that bit of information had eventually been passed on to me when I was awake and capable of speaking again. At the time, I ignored all the messages despite the desperate pleas within them, begging me to return the calls. I thought it was some sort of journalist sniffing around for information.

Now I realized it must’ve been Jolie Chastain.

I wanted to get in contact with her, especially since she’d apparently tried to contact me too. I wasn’t sure why, because her messages had been lost by this point. Did she simply want to thank me for what I’d done for her and her fellow cult victims? Did she want to stay in touch? Or had she somehow heard what happened to me and my family, courtesy of her sadistic father, and wanted to commiserate? I didn’t see how the last option was possible, given that the police had suppressed all the details of the case as it was still an open investigation, but I suppose there were leaks everywhere. She might know.

She was easy to find online. Photos and videos of her, anyway. She was the stunning face of the New Eden rescue story, since a video I shot of her outlining her life underground had gone viral on the internet. I had no recollection of filming it or uploading it to YouTube, but the FBI agents told me I must’ve done so, and it made sense. None of the women in that godforsaken place had a video camera.

That meant Jolie had to be my mysterious helper.

Unfortunately, as easy as it was to find photos and videos of her online, tracking her down in person proved almost impossible. Unlike most people who liked to splash the minutiae of their lives across the internet, Jolie didn’t even have so much as an email address, let alone any kind of social media profile.

I hired a private investigator to try and track her down, and he told me she’d gone to Baton Rouge for a while after her rescue from the cult. After that, she vanished. Jolie Chastain no longer existed.

According to records the PI found, she must’ve changed her name in early 2013, probably after being harassed so much by the media and general public. All records of the new name were sealed by the state, however. There was no way to find out what it was, even with all my money and influence.

I was able to get in contact with a few cult survivors who were still in Baton Rouge, but they said they didn’t know where Jolie was. I got the impression from their tones that they wouldn’t tell me even if they did know. That was understandable. After what they’d gone through, followed by the media furor over their horrible upbringing, they probably valued their privacy above all else. However, as understandable as it was, it was also frustrating. The trail was cold, and Jolie was nowhere to be found.

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