Page 73 of Three to Fall

“Please, Joan,” I begged her. “I need to know what my sister was involved with before her death. Anything you can tell me helps.”

Her voice dropped until it was barely more than a whisper. “We just do needlework…”

“No, you don’t.”

“He’ll kill me if he finds out.”

I let out a long, shaky breath. “He might kill you anyway. Look at what happened to Alice.”

I could see Joan’s face in my head, long brown hair always tied neatly off her face. Warm brown eyes, the same as Kyle’s. She was a tall, slender woman, one who blended into the background, just how the men of Ethereal Eden expected theirwomen to be. I understood what I was asking of her. It went against everything she’d been brainwashed to believe.

But Joan was strong enough to fight it. “The women’s center is filled with computers. We type all day, every day, except for Sundays. Hours and hours of typing.”

That fit with what we knew from Alice’s messages. “Typing what?”

“Josiah calls it spreading the word. We use chat and dating apps to create relationships with people on the outside.”

I squinted, mulling that over in my head until it made sense. “So you’re like the people who come to your front door to talk about God?” I’d had some conversations with people like that when I’d first left Ethereal Eden. Two women had knocked on my door and wanted to speak about the Lord. They’d handed me brochures and told me I should read them. I’d quickly thrown them in the bin and hadn’t answered the door the next time they’d come calling.

“I wish that’s all it was. I could get on board with that.” Joan’s voice shook.

“Mom, please. Tell us. We need to know what Alice was involved with. If this is something to do with what got Alice killed, then you and all the other women are in danger too. I have friends out here. We can help you. Get you out.”

His mom’s breaths increased. “You can’t do that, Kyle. He’ll kill you. He’ll kill all of us. He gives us scripts. We form relationships with men or women, it doesn’t matter. We lie, make them think we’re people we aren’t. I’ve been an older man, a younger woman, whatever character I need to play in order to gain the other person’s trust.”

“For what purpose?” I interjected with a sinking stomach.

“Money, mostly. We trick them into sending us cash. Often this is how new members find Ethereal Eden. If the conversation starts seeming like the person might be open to joining, we pushin that direction, filling their heads with ideas of how accepted they’d be within our community. How women would be looked after and men would be powerful. Everything depends on the target and what they might be lacking in their lives.”

“It’s a honeypot scheme,” Hayden muttered. “Fucking hell.”

I didn’t know what that was exactly, but it couldn’t be anything good. From what Joan had described, what Josiah was making them do was fraud at the very minimum.

There was a noise on the other end of the line, Kyle’s dad calling for his wife.

Joan whispered into the phone, “I have to go. But Kara, are you still there?”

My stomach swirled with a sick feeling. “Yes.”

“Your sister is involved.”

It didn’t surprise me. “Which one? Naomi or Samantha?” They were both such good, Ethereal Eden women who worshipped the ground Josiah walked on. It didn’t even surprise me they were involved with this. If Josiah had told them it was the Lord’s will, then they would have offered themselves up in a heartbeat.

“No, not them. They were both wed in a marriage ceremony a few weeks ago and are in their honeymoon seclusion period.”

The three-month period where a wife was not permitted to leave her home for any reason other than church. It was where she was expected to get pregnant with her husband’s child, and was therefore expected to be ready to receive his seed every day until that baby was conceived.

I shuddered at the memory of my own. Though unlike the other women, who mostly got pregnant during that time and could then live a more normal life, I’d been basically living five years of honeymoon seclusion hell.

Joan’s voice whispered down the line. “Jacqueline.”

My youngest sister’s name cut through my dark memories.

“What about her?” I asked, not making the connection, my brain triggering dark images through my head and making it hard to remember what was right here in front of me now.

Kyle’s dad shouted for her again.

“I’m worried for her safety. Something is going on. I see the way Josiah and his circle stare at her, and there’s nothing holy or respectful about it. They’re planning something, and she’s at the center of it…”

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