Page 49 of Tusk's Fury

Zen glances up, a lopsided grin jumping onto his face. “You were already crazy. Clearly, waiting just makes you crazier.”

Tusk leans forward and states in a flat tone, “I know you think you’re funny. But you’re not. Now, tell us what you’ve found so far.”

Zen goes back to looking at his screen, still amused, but then his expression sobers. “I did what you asked—I looked into Silas Harper.”

Jerking his chin at me, he says, “Your father was a dumbass for getting involved with Harper. He isn’t just some ambitious dude trying to crawl his way up the church hierarchy.”

I hold our sleeping baby tighter to my chest as a cold chill runs up my spine. “What do you mean?”

“The Harper family is heavily involved in fundamentalist religion, just not in the way you might think. Harper, his father, and his grandfather are the equivalent of hard-money lenders for televangelists.”

“What? Silas is a bishop, not a money lender,” I say, shocked. “Our church never had anything to do with televangelists. We were taught that preachers on television weren’t to be trusted and that our tithing was supposed to be reserved for our local church.”

“Well, Harper’s family has been in the business of lending money to all sorts of preachers to start their churches for three generations. Maybe they only recently got around to approaching Mormon fundamentalist churches.”

“No,” I tell him. “You’ve got it all wrong. The deal my father made with Silas Harper was that if I married him, he would cast the deciding vote to make my father a deacon. He had tried before but always missed it by one vote.”

Zen looks annoyed. “Look, I think the leaders of your church and your family lied to you about a lot of things. For example, there is no vote to appoint deacons in the Mormon fundamentalist church. The bishop appoints them.”

Shock rolls through my mind. “Then I guess he tried to leverage me into marrying Silas so he could appoint him as a deacon. I’m not sure what the difference is, honestly.”

Zen’s annoyed expression clears. “I don’t think there is a difference. That’s what makes the lie so weird. Why tell totally unnecessary lies to your own daughter? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe my father thought it sounded better.”

“Possibly. We’ll get to the bottom of this one way or another. Siege told me your big fear was that now that Harper is a bishop, he could call up large numbers of devout followers willing to do whatever he asked. Unfortunately, you’ve got way bigger problems than a bunch of brain-dead religious zealots.”

I freeze, and Tusk’s hand tightens on my shoulder. “What did you find?” Tusk asks.

“Harper and his family are very well connected in the religious community. They lend out money and take a cut of whatever the church makes.”

“What money?” I ask. “There was never any money to be taken in our church. We were made up of about thirty families, and we each gave ten percent of what we earned, but that wasn’t much. Our bishop taught that money and greed were the root of all evil.”

“Your old church is now a megachurch. Harper is the bishop, and your father is one of twenty deacons. Trust me, there’s money to be made off a congregation that size.”

Tusk says, “It sounds like someone infiltrated a small country church and turned it into a money-making powerhouse.”

Victoria begins stirring, so I rock her as Zen continues to explain.

“I hate to say it, Tusk, but that sounds exactly like what happened. Some people see church as a business, and if you know how to market it to the right people, I guess there are big bucks to be made.”

“I still don’t understand how this involves me,” I say. “I think those young guys were using church memos to get the inside track on advancement, and it was a coincidence that they ran across me in Alaska. They saw finding me for Harper as a way to score brownie points with an important person. They said the flyers were over five years old—from when I first ran from him. From what you said, it sounds like Silas has moved on to bigger and better things. Chances are, he wouldn’t want me, even if I just popped up out of nowhere and wanted him.”

“Now, hold up,” Tusk says. “I think he probably would want to seal you to him as an extra wife or publicly shame you for running off and getting pregnant out of wedlock—by some random biker, at that.”

Zen leans forward. “Here’s where it gets interesting. Harper filed a missing person’s report on you five years ago. He even held a press conference in front of the church, asking for leads and telling everyone that you were a lost sheep who might have been taken advantage of by human traffickers. He had people searching the county for you and even started an online fundraiser to ‘keep the search alive’ as he put it.”

“Fucking hell,” Tusk growls. “Are you saying he used Brittany’s disappearance as an opportunity to grift for money and build his megachurch?”

“It seems like it,” Zen replies. “From what I’ve read in old news articles, Brittany’s disappearance was the talk of her small town for a while. There were tons of sightings, but none led them to her.”

“I can’t imagine the disappearance of one teen would’ve been that newsworthy,” I insist.

Tusk squats down beside me and explains quietly, “It would, if Harper kept giving interviews about his lovely, wide-eyed, innocent young fiancée going missing.”

Realizing what he’s implying, I add, “I ran from him, and he used that to solicit money and lure people to his church. That makes me feel awful—knowing that he manipulated so many people by using me. I don’t even know how to begin to make that right.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Zen says. “People make their own decisions. No one is forcing them to be part of his megachurch.”

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