It seemed like a paradise. There was land, and the people of the community farmed it. They did so much themselves.
Then Sam and Jessie agreed to go to their first service in the valley, and they met Brother William for the first time. He was the head of the community, and he seemed so warm and jovial. His teachings felt right. Sam believed that a man’s time on earth was short; eternity was—well, eternity. On earth, man was to care for his brother—and leave behind a legacy of love for his children.
Sam was twenty-three when they were set up on their little spit of land, and for a time, it seemed life was beautiful. Every word Brother William preached was good; the community worked together, built structures, grew their own food, cared for the land. They tended to the elderly and cared for the sick.
The sick, Sam thought. Sickness—that was when he first discovered he didn’t agree with every word out of Brother William’s mouth.
He’d been working to repair the roof of the church when he’d overheard a conversation between Brother William and Sister Alma—a woman who was one of the man’s cousins.
She wanted to leave. Brother William had wanted her to marry one of his deacons, an older man, and Alma did not want to marry him. She argued with William, telling him the man was too old for her, that she was restless, that she didn’t want to farm.
William told her no one left the community.
Alma told him no one else might leave, but she intended to. And he was lying to her; others had left. They’d left, and never come back.
Alma might have been planning to go, but she didn’t get the chance. By the next week, she was sick, burning up with a fever that wouldn’t go away.
Sam thought Alma needed to get to a hospital. Her illness seemed beyond what they could handle in the community. Brother William told the group that if Alma was pure of heart, God would heal her. He was afraid sin weighed heavy on Alma’s heart. But by enduring her illness before falling into the arms of the great Higher Power, she could earn back an entrance into heaven.
Somehow, Sam managed not to tell Brother William his words were a crock.
Alma died.
And Sam began to wonder if Alma had been right—if others had left, disappeared, moved away not just from the community but from the county and the state.
Had they really managed to leave?
By then, Jessie had taken the indoctrination to heart, and she couldn’t believe anything bad of Brother William. He was a chosen leader of God, and their duty was to pray for him, and obey him in all things. He was the Word of God in the flesh.
It wasn’t until Brother William turned his eyes on Jessie in a different way that she began to see the light.
They hadn’t realized that, even living there as they did, Brother William considered the men to be the Servants of God—and the women to be servants of Brother William. He called all the single women in the community his wives; there were several, and it appeared they were wives in that Brother William cared for them.
But they’d been blind to so much as the first years passed. Sam knew Jessie had so desperately wanted to believe in a world where people always helped each other, where all were equal—where a man with her father’s wealth didn’t ignore another who was down and out and starving on the streets.
Sam had started to notice the strange whispering that went on, plans that didn’t include all the commune’s members, and the way that hard work was fine for some while others were part of the whispered plans. He’d liked sharing, and he didn’t mind working, and he loved that the people around him seemed to be good and giving. But he’d felt himself questioning the way that women were brought to the compound, some of them young—too young.
While hauling farm equipment one day, he’d also noted a stockpile of arms in one of the warehouses.
Almost as if they were preparing to go to war.
He could remember the day Jessie had walked back into their kitchen, white as parchment. “He told me to come to him tonight. It’s my time to serve,” Jessie said shakily.
There was enough of himself left in Sam that the very thought instantly infuriated him.
“Don’t go.”
“He said—”
“And I say you’re a married woman. A mother, a wife already. My wife.”
Jessie didn’t go. And for a while, the matter lapsed.
Brother William had a new wife—a young woman he had recently met and charmed into joining their community.
Her name was Alana. She was bright and cheerful, giving and beautiful. Everyone liked her, and little Cameron had loved her dearly. She wasn’t much more than a child herself. She played games, and she helped with every manner of task; she sang and danced joyously at their gatherings.
She also had a brother. Her brother sent police out to the compound. It was wrong that families couldn’t communicate with their loved ones.
That day, they discovered that Brother William’s deacons were not all about God’s scripture; Sam knew they had weapons, and they were ready to use them if things went badly.
Brother William took the police around the compound. He showed them hardworking people who loved what they were doing.
The police might not have liked it, but it didn’t appear Brother William and his deacons were doing anything wrong or illegal. People had the right to live the way they chose, even if it meant living so...strangely.
They didn’t find the stockpile of weapons.
It was the next week that Cameron had stumbled upon Alana. Dead.
Brother William made another alarming demand of Jessie: she would have a week of sleeping alone in the “cleansing” chamber. She and Sam were no more; she would now honor, obey and sleep with Brother William when he chose.
Miraculously, it was Alana’s brother—worried when she broke ties with her family—who convinced the FBI that something was very wrong. And an undercover agent from the FBI had come in. They’d already heard rumors about illegal arms being amassed. He and Sam had connected. And they had made their plan to flee, Sam swearing he would tell the courts everything he knew. And there were others, Sam could swear, who would tell the truth about things that happened at the compound.
There were others like him. Disenchanted with the cult, furious with Brother William’s Divine Right demands—and yet so terrified for a wife or a child they did nothing.
The plan had been made.
They had run in the deep darkness of the night, ready to meet with their saviors as dawn broke over the hills.
A sob escaped Jessie now. Sam clamped his hand over her mouth, whispering a soft warning.
There was movement before them in the trees.
He prayed then, as he had never prayed before.