She flinched. “When you say they keep each other’s secrets,” Scarlett went on, “do you mean like what was done to the natives?” She paused. “That was so long ago, though. Those men are dead and gone.”
“Those ones are, yes. But that’s where Lilith House comes in.”
She stared at him, unblinking.
“I lived at Lilith House all my life, Scarlett. You already know that. I . . . saw things.” Shame filled him for his inability to stop the evil he’d witnessed, his failure in preventing other people’s pain. Yes, he’d tried, but in the end, did it matter? Was that a solace to Georgia? To Mason? It was certainly no solace to the girls of Lilith House.
“What kind of things?” she asked warily. She had a right to be wary. He hated having to tell her the truth.
“The guild, they took advantage of those girls. With approval from the headmistress and a blind eye from the staff, the men drugged them and used them regularly.”
She did blink then, her pretty mouth falling open as a disbelieving horror took over her expression. “They . . . raped them?”
He nodded, swallowed. And yes, it was the word he should have used outright. To mitigate what they’d done with softened language made him culpable, even now. “Yes. Yes, they raped them.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “No one . . . no one ever went to the police?”
“No. And if any of the women suspected, they had no proof.” He paused. “Except one. Kandace Thompson.”
Scarlett blinked again. “You did know Kandace.” She sat back, her shoulders slumping. “And she . . . she was . . . raped?” The last word emerged as barely a whisper.
He nodded, his gaze locked with hers, a fresh bout of shame washing through him. The look on Scarlett’s face was killing him. “Yes. I knew Kandace. We were banned from interacting with the students but”—he smiled a sad smile—“Kandace was not a rule follower. She discovered me, us, and she became intent on finding the truth. She found out who our mothers were. She had proof.” He shook his head. “She took some files or . . . I don’t know. She didn’t tell me what she had, only that she was going to bring help. She was going to take that place down.”
“Oh my God,” she repeated, looking shell-shocked. “Did she really run away, Camden? Or . . . did they do something to her?”
“I don’t know that either. All I know was that she planned to leave, to escape. As far as I know, she did, but she never came back. A week later, the fire happened.” His mind traveled back to the day she ran, how he’d picked the fresh mushrooms for her and left them at the top of the crawlspace where she could access them. How nervous he’d been, how relieved when he’d listened through the walls to them shouting about how she’d gotten away . . . and how she hadn’t come back . . . not a day later, not five days later . . . never as far as he knew. And he had no idea if that was because something more terrible had happened to Kandace, or because she’d changed her mind about rescuing him.
He’d been abandoned before. He was used to it.
Scarlett sat forward, gripping the couch cushion. “Camden, we have to go to the authorities. We have to—” She shook her head. “Wait, you are the police.”
“Yes. Like I told you, the woman who tutored us took me with her to San Diego. She gave me her name. I kept in close touch with Georgia and Mason, who’d been taken in by members of the guild. Of course, we call Mason’s father his father, but we have no clue. Nor who my father might be. We had a plan. We were going to save our money, buy Lilith House. We were going to find that proof Kandace hid, whether in the walls or in the woods, or maybe somewhere buried in the sheriff’s office for all we knew, and then we were going to take down the people responsible for what happened there.” He eyed her, saw her mind racing to keep up with all the information he was dumping on her. “Mason already worked at the hardware store owned by the family who took him in after Lilith House, and I applied to be deputy sheriff.”
“They trusted you?” she asked. “After what they’d done to you?”
He gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. It might be part of the reason they brought me on, to keep an eye on me. I know things about them. I saw it firsthand. It’s a reason to keep me close, keep me in the fold so to speak. As a son of Farrow, they’re considering me to join the Guild.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “And Mason?”
“Mason hasn’t inquired. For our purposes, only one of us needs to join.”
She pressed her lips together momentarily. “And Georgia?”
Camden shook his head. “The Women’s Guild? No. Women, especially women like Georgia, are not . . . thought well of in Farrow, Scarlett.” He felt a pang to his heart. They had made Georgia the “type of woman” she was and then castigated her for it. That alone had fed his hatred for years.
He worried his lip for a moment. “That flyer? The one you said you found on the street in Los Angeles? The one with the Lilith House sale information?”
She tilted her head. “Yes?”
“I think I was the one who dropped it.”
Her eyes widened. “You? How do you know?”
“Because people from Farrow rarely leave, much less guild members. But . . . I was in LA a few months ago. I’d . . . needed to get away.” He looked away, recalling that day. “I’d requested to become a guild member, and attended an informal meeting. They didn’t divulge anything useful, just questioned me a lot about my time away from Farrow, but on my way out, I was handed a flyer that held basic guild information. I stuck it in my pocket as I left.” He paused. He’d felt trapped, edgy. “I got in my car and just started driving, following the signs to Los Angeles.” He shook his head as a sigh emerged. “That restlessness we talked about . . .” He looked up, met her eyes. “It led me here, Scarlett. To you.”
Her throat moved as she swallowed. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it, looking away for a moment. She was quiet for several minutes and he left her to gather her thoughts. Finally, she asked, “How do you even have birth certificates? Paperwork?”
“There are ways to apply for that if you were home birthed and there was no record created at the time. It happens somewhat often in religious communities. But in any case, the guild is in charge of—”
“Farrow public records,” Scarlett finished. She brought her hand to her forehead and left it there for a few moments as if she had to physically hold in the information her brain was processing. “The whole school, it was a racket?”
Camden considered that. “I guess you could call it that, but, Scarlett, like I said, these people believe in the righteousness of what they were doing, just as the original guild did. I don’t know if that makes it better or far worse, but it’s just the way it is. Even Jill—Ms. West—justified some of it until the end.” His brow dipped momentarily, the complex feelings he still had for her coming to the surface. She’d participated in the heinous things that went on at Lilith House, but then she’d rescued him from it, refusing to speak of it after that, though she always seemed to be a basket of nerves. Sometimes he wondered if it had eaten away at her to such an extent that she’d literally made herself sick. He knew now she worried needlessly. No one was coming after her. Farrow was where their power lie. And neither he nor she were valuable enough to them anyway.