Hicks threw her a considering look before turning his attention back to the road.
“You have to understand something,” he said, the gruffness back in the slow drawl. “To them it’s bigger than that. To them it’s a modern-day holy war.”
“They’re feeling defensive,” Lucy said. It was part of her job to understand people whose mind-set she could never agree with. Hell, it was part of her job to understand people who killed because they liked the way blood felt on their hands. It still wasn’t easy to do, though. Her world, her life, her belief system were so at odds with what this Church preached that she struggled to grasp it. “Like their way of life is being attacked.”
He nodded once, his jaw tight.
“What would happen if the shield laws were overturned?” Lucy asked. “Would anything really change?”
Hicks was quiet for a stretch as if he hadn’t thought about that before; then he rolled his shoulders in a bit of a shrug. “Maybe not on the surface level, not by much,” he said. “An arrest or two would be made, but . . .”
When he trailed off, she prompted. “But?”
“It’s starting to feel like the Church’s future is tied to this battle,” Hicks said, his words hesitant. “It’s starting to feel like if they lose this fight, they lose it all.”
Lucy bit her nail as she considered that. She wasn’t a stranger to places like Knox Hollow, wasn’t a stranger to modern frontiers, these places people fled to escape a life they didn’t want. It wasn’t just a cultlike community hunkering down. It was . . . It was people like her parents, like the friends she grew up with. Like Brenda from the bar, who’d nagged at Hicks about getting into other people’s business. Like Annie, who gossiped freely but still clearly felt for the hurts suffered by her neighbors. “It’s symbolic, these laws.”
And shit, didn’t that make things complicated. Most people could be persuaded to listen to reason if they didn’t actually feel that strongly about a topic. But once their opinion became entangled with their sense of self, logic went straight out the window. “So it’s not so much a war over medical care as it is about . . .”
Hicks lifted a shoulder. “Freedom, I guess. Not being told what to do by people who think they’re smarter than Church folk, who think they’re better.”
“You sound like you sympathize with that sentiment,” Lucy poked at him.
“Just because I recognize the humanity in my opponent’s argument doesn’t mean I agree with the thinking.”
It was a rap on the knuckles, one she didn’t actually need but found interesting anyway. He was defensive of the True Believers Church even as he warred against it. Contradictions and sore spots—they were both so interesting. But were any of the sheriff’s relevant to Lucy’s case?
Josiah Cook. He was one of Hicks’s sore spots. That much was clear from just this conversation alone.
And the man was Eliza’s guardian. So there was that link. What did that mean about Hicks’s involvement in the case?
“Where did this start?” Lucy asked, trying to come at it from the side. “Your crusade. Josiah’s.”
“It’s been going on for decades.”
“No.” Lucy shook her head at the nonanswer. “This current wave of it. You mentioned something about a hearing for a new bill? Who introduced it?”
Hicks slid her a glance. “Peggy Anderson, the social worker I mentioned, has been the driving force behind the legislation. She—”
He broke off, tilted his head to one side. As if he’d just realized something.
“She wouldn’t tell me why she started up again this year,” he said, a little more guarded. “We’ve been working together, pushing for a change on and off for years now. Ever since—”
This time he didn’t continue, so she pushed. “Since?”
His fingers tapped the steering wheel. “Cora. She was a local woman who died giving birth. Her baby died, too.”
Lucy sucked in a surprised breath. “Eliza Cook’s mother.” It didn’t need to be a question. Lucy had just seen the pictures. The woman could have been Eliza’s twin, instead.
That actually got him to look over fully, a startled jerk of the head. He must not have expected her to know the name.
After a tense pause, the truck hit a pothole and Hicks relaxed, his eyes turning back to the road.
“Peggy had been friends with Cora,” he said. “Actually, Peggy was friends with Josiah, too. She took Cora’s and the baby’s deaths hard.”
“She was part of the community?” Lucy asked.
“Peggy had already left the Church by then,” Hicks said. “She was . . . angry, to say the least. That’s when she started trying to get the laws overturned. This last bill was the furthest she’s gotten.”
“And the Church thinks if it passes, everything will fall apart,” Lucy summed up.
Hicks lifted a shoulder once again in what seemed like passive agreement.
“What do you think?” she pressed.
There was another one of those silences; then he nodded once. “These days, the younger folks aren’t as . . .”
“Brainwashed?” Lucy guessed.
He sent her a look at that. “Well . . . right. You look at it now and you might think it’s a cult, but it was even worse when some of the adults were kids.”
“Worse than a fifteen-year-old dying from food poisoning?” Lucy said, though she was trying to keep the snark to a minimum.
Hicks huffed out a breath. “The stories I’ve heard . . .”
“Like what?”
This was the longest pause yet. “Look at the Cooks.”
“Rachel and Josiah?”
“The model of a good Church marriage,” Hicks said with a bitterness that made her wonder if this grudge against Josiah extended to Rachel as well. Or was because of her. “Josiah has this favorite story that everyone in town’s heard. It’s when he supposedly fell in love with Rachel.”
“Something tells me it’s not as romantic as he thinks it is,” Lucy murmured, and the corner of Hicks’s mouth ticked up.
“Exactly,” he said. “When he was eleven, he’d broken his ankle. The elders prayed over it, rubbed some olive oil on the injury, and then made him run three miles on it.”
Lucy swallowed hard. “Did he manage it?”
Hicks shook his head. “He kept passing out from the pain. They threw cold water on him every time to wake him up and then forced him to keep running. To prove the strength of his conviction to the Church.”
“He tells it like this?”
“A little rosier, but, essentially, yeah,” Hicks said. “They . . . It’s not strange to them. This was how they were raised—it’s what the norm is.”
“Jeez,” Lucy breathed out.
“So, anyway, it’s the fifth or sixth time he’s passed out, and Rachel pushes through the watching crowd and rips the water bucket away from the elder,” Hicks continued. “She let Josiah hold on to her, and they finished running together.”
“Well . . .” Lucy wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. She could see why Josiah told the story: it painted Rachel in a lovely, flattering light. Lucy could picture that broad-shouldered woman as a little girl, her chin up, defying the world.