Page 72 of Three to Fall

Mr. Baker let out a large breath of air that sounded a whole lot like relief. “Kyle! Really, it’s you?” His voice cracked with emotion. “Son, your mother and I have been so worried about you. Where are you? Are you safe?”

Kyle ran his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, I’m safe. I’m staying with some friends.”

Like the initial, guttural response to his child making contact had passed, or maybe it was the reminder there was a whole other world outside of Ethereal Eden, Mr. Baker suddenly wentcold. “You need to come home. Immediately. Josiah wants to speak with you urgently.”

Hawk rolled his eyes, but Kyle remained composed, keeping his focus on Grayson, who nodded at him, encouraging him to agree to whatever his dad wanted.

“I will, Dad. Soon. I promise. Can I talk to Mom, please?”

Mr. Baker paused, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. That it was a sin for women to make contact with the outside world without Josiah’s permission. Some of the women were allowed into town once a week to sell vegetables and homemade baked goods at the local market. Josiah always made a big show out of bringing them up to the altar on Sunday mornings during church and giving them special blessings to protect them while they were outside the Ethereal Eden gates.

“John! Is that Kyle?”

The woman’s voice came down the line, screechy and panicked.

I held my breath, hoping Kyle’s dad wasn’t as brainwashed as all the others and he would have enough heart to let a mother speak to her child.

“He’s fine. He’s—”

“Kyle?”

Kyle’s face crumpled at the sound of his mother’s voice. Despite the fact he might have just lost his virginity, he suddenly looked like a kid who’d had a lot of bad things happen and his mother was the one person who could make them better. But just as quickly, he glanced at the guys all staring at him, and Kiki watching on from the couch, and he pulled himself together, straightening his shoulders. “Mom.” His voice only held the barest of cracks. “I need to talk to you, but I need Dad not to hear it. Can you get away from him?”

There was a pause. Then she said to his dad, “The line is crackly. I need to go outside, I think, where the reception is better.”

“I’ll go with you.”

We all winced.

But his mom had it handled. “I have dinner on the stove. I don’t want it to burn, someone needs to stay here and stir the sauce. I’ll only be a minute and I’ll make sure nobody sees me with the phone. I promise.”

That would have never flown with Josiah. He would have backhanded me in an instant for so much as thinking about asking him to do a menial job like stirring a sauce.

But Kyle and his parents hadn’t been a part of the cult as long as some others had been. His dad had risen through the ranks quickly, as a lot of men his age did, but maybe there was still some part of him that remembered his life pre-Josiah and he wasn’t mortally offended by cooking.

Or maybe he actually loved his wife enough to give her something she desperately needed.

Josiah didn’t love anyone but himself, so he would never.

Mr. Baker sighed. “Just for a few minutes. I need to leave for the council meeting soon.”

We didn’t hear a response, but a moment later there was the sound of a door closing and then his mother’s hushed voice came down the line. “I’m alone. What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“Mom, I’m good. I swear, I’m safe, and I’m with friends. But we need to know something. What happens at the women’s center?”

She paused. “What? The women’s center? Why do you want to know that?”

“Kara and I found—”

“You’re still with Kara?”

He grimaced at me apologetically. But there was no point worrying about it now.

I racked my brain, trying to think of her name, and eventually it jostled free in my head. “Joan, hi. Kyle is good. He’s safe. But we really need to know what happens in that center. My sister said her hands were sore from whatever goes on there, and Kyle says yours are too.”

Joan breathed heavily into the phone. “We’re forbidden from telling anyone. Even our husbands.”

I eyed the others, realizing we might have stumbled onto something big. Maybe even something that could help us get Josiah locked up. At this point in the game, I didn’t even care what he went to jail for. If he wasn’t the one responsible for Alice’s death, he still deserved to be locked away for life for the abuse he’d inflicted on me, and for the countless other crimes I was sure he was committing within the cult. His hands weren’t clean in any capacity. It was just finding the proof and taking concrete evidence to the police so he couldn’t charm his way out of it.

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