“Sit down, okay?” Blake waited for her to perch beside him on the couch. “Think about it, Em. It’s a solution for both of us.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t think about it.
“You get respectability, and …” He held out his arms in an open shrug. “I assume your parents will want their son-in-law to go to college.”
Emily felt the hairs on the back of her neck go up. Nardo’s father was the banker, but Blake had always been the one who was the most transactional. He kept a running score in his head. I’ll do this for you, but you’re going to do something for me in return.
She asked, “What about me? Do I just stay home and bake cookies?”
“It’s not a bad life.”
Emily laughed. It wasn’t the life she had planned. She was going to live at Foggy Bottom. She was going to intern for a senator. She was going to become a lawyer. If she made cookies for her husband and child, the baking would take place between arguing in a courtroom and preparing a motion for the next day.
“Be reasonable,” Blake said. “I mean, you can go to college. Of course you can go to college. But you can’t really have a career. Not with the kind of future your folks will expect me to have.”
Emily was struck by his cold calculations. “What kind of future is that?”
“Politics, of course.” He shrugged. “Your mom’s going to be tapped for something in the administration. Why not ride her coattails into a better life for both of us?”
Emily looked down at the ground. He had clearly thought about this before. Her pregnancy was nothing but an opportunity. “You’re forgetting my parents are Republicans.”
“Does it matter?” He shrugged again when she looked at him. “Political ideology is nothing more than a fulcrum to pry open the levers of power.”
Emily had to sit back on the couch. She couldn’t take this in. “So I’m one of those fulcrums you’re manipulating?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“Blake, you’re literally talking about marrying me, being a father to my child, as a way to launch your political future.”
“You’re missing the upside,” Blake said. “We’re both in a bad way. We both want better lives for ourselves. And I don’t find you entirely repulsive.”
“That’s romantic.”
“Come on, Emmie.” Blake stroked back her hair. “We can make this work. No one has to get hurt. We can all stay friends.”
The word friends gave her tears permission to fall. What he was offering was actually a solution. They would keep it in the clique. Ricky’s anger would burn out easily against Blake’s logical explanation. Nardo would make a joke about dodging a bullet. Clay would slink off to his new, exciting life far away from all of them. And Emily would be married to a boy she didn’t love. A boy who saw her as nothing but a means to an end.
“Emily.” Blake moved closer. His breath was in her ear. “Come on, would it be so bad?”
Emily closed her eyes. Tears seeped out. She saw the next year, the next few years, open up like a flower. She could go back to being the good girl everyone admired. Blake would get his college and his career and access to a political future. It would be just as Ricky had predicted—the Vaughn family money buying Emily’s way out of a bad spot.
Easy.
“Emmie.” Blake’s lips brushed her ears. He took her hand and placed it on his thing.
Emily was paralyzed. She could feel the hard shape of him.
“That’s good.” He moved her hand. His tongue was in her ear.
“Blake!” She screamed his name as she pulled away. “What are you doing?”
“Jesus.” He sat back on the couch. His legs were wide. The front of his pants stuck up like a tent. “What is wrong with you?”
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “What were you doing?”
“I think it’s pretty clear what I was doing.” He found his cigarettes in his pocket. “Come on, it’s not like you can get pregnant twice.”
She put her hand to her throat. She could feel her heart pounding.
He flicked his lighter open. “Let me be clear about this, my girl. I’ll buy the cow, but I expect to get more than my fair share of milk.”
Emily watched him light the end of his cigarette. She had given him the Zippo lighter for his sixteenth birthday. She had paid extra to have his initials etched into the side so that Ricky wouldn’t steal it.
She said, “You’re a monster.”
“What I am is your second-best option.” He saw her confused expression and coughed out a laugh. “Don’t be obtuse, Emily. Your best option is to flush it down the toilet.”
6
Andrea sat on the edge of the bed in her motel room staring down at the photograph that Star Bonaire had taken. The woman had used her finger to carve a single word in the white flour.
Help.
Andrea had waited until she was alone with Bible to show him the photo. He hadn’t said much beyond telling Andrea to get showered and be ready when he called. That was well over an hour ago. Andrea was showered. She was ready. Bible still had not called.
Help.
How terrified would a woman have to be to do something like that?
Andrea swiped back to the photos of Alice Poulsen. Her throat tightened over the ravages by starvation. Anorexia was about control, but then, to some degree, so was suicide. You were literally taking your own life into your hands. Alice Poulsen had walked into that field and known that she would not turn back. What kind of nerve did that take? What kind of desperation?
The same type of desperation Star Bonaire had probably been feeling when she photographed her cry for help.
Andrea couldn’t look at the photos anymore. She tossed her phone on the desk. She stared all of her helplessness into the black television screen across from her bed. The curtains were drawn. The lights were off. Her left wrist ached where Wexler had grabbed her. Stray memories flashed through her mind—Wexler’s face pressed against the steering wheel; Nardo lighting a cigarette; Star’s ghostly presence as she moved around the kitchen; the two women who’d walked out of the barn. The yellow dresses. The long hair. The bare feet. The attenuated limbs. The matching ankle bracelets.
Victimized. Tagged. Degraded.
Cult. Cult. Cult.
Stilton was right. There was no federal or state law that said you couldn’t be in a cult. Nothing could be done to save those women. Star Bonaire’s mother had already tried the most extreme version of a rescue. She’d ended up arrested and hit with a restraining order barring her from seeing her own child.
Andrea stood up. She started pacing. She felt so fucking powerless. She had all this training and none of it, not one piece, could help Star Bonaire. Or anyone else, for that matter. She looked at her phone, willing Bible to call her. He was probably hitting the same dead ends that she was. Her eyes darted to the notebook and pen she’d placed on the desk. She’d been so filled with purpose when she’d started an internet trawl for all the dirty laundry on Dean’s Magic Beans.
An hour later, the notebook pages were still blank.
She mentally reviewed what little she had learned about the operation. Dean’s Magic Beans had been a registered Delaware corporation since 1983. Andrea had found the original articles of incorporation. Dean Wexler was listed as the president. Bernard Fontaine was vice president. Which was interesting given the fact that Nardo was only nineteen in 1983, around the same time that his father had been arrested for bank fraud, but not interesting in any way that could move an investigation forward.