Back at my place the next day, I tried to way up the goods and the bads in my life. It didn’t take long, but I couldn’t decide if I was happy with the results or not. The bads were in the form of bills, and not being able to pay them, and not getting as much work as I should like to help pay them, and getting older and slower. On the good side there wasn’t much other than Martha, and the fact that I wasn’t wearing cold wet clothes or shoes any longer. But I figured it probably wouldn’t be long before I was.
This unprofitable line of thought was interrupted by a staccato rap on the door of my office. In truth, my office wasn’t much bigger than the broom cupboard which Martha had to call a changing room, but it didn’t cause my budget too much unbearable pain. Once, years ago, I’d had a much bigger office, and a partner, and between us we’d had a secretary, but that had been years ago. Nowadays, I had a desk, two uncomfortable chairs and a couple of filing cabinets, and a dusty plant that didn’t grow much. It was ample for my needs, though I couldn’t help dreaming of my faded glory. Still, at least I wasn’t dead, which put me one ahead of both the secretary and my ex-partner.
I had given up trying to maintain some sort of dignity. When people who are going about business that makes them uncomfortable, as most people who knock on my door usually are, they are most likely to go on their way if the door isn’t opened to them. So I heaved myself out of my seat, shoving the newspaper into a drawer. I crossed the tiny office floor and walked down the corridor to the door. I could see the silhouette of the person who had knocked, just starting to turn away. I opened the door.
It was a man, Built broad, rather than tall, clean shaven, with a ruddy complexion. He didn’t look the nervous type, the way he held himself suggested someone who was used to getting his own way, and who liked to be in control of things. Even so, he looked disappointed to see me, like he’d rather have knocked on the door and then gone away without seeing anyone. I didn’t blame him for that. Not many people enjoy hiring someone to rake about in their private lives and secret shames.
“Hullo,” I said, which I found usually was enough to get things going.
He didn’t reply immediately, just looked me up and down, taking me in, getting the measure of me. Like I said, a man used to getting his own way, and if he was going to cede on inch of his authority to me, he was going to make sure he wasn’t going to be wasting his time. He seemed to nodd into himself.
“I would like to speak to Mr. Jim Callaghan, in private. Are you he?” his voice was clipped and business like. This bird didn’t like to waste anything.
“I am Jim Callaghan.”
“My name is Aaron Ryan. I would like to hire your services.”
“Uh-huh. Please, come into my office.”
We moved down the narrow corridor, Indian file. I sat down at my uncomfortable chair behind the desk, and he sat in his. I grabbed a pencil and a pad. “Okay, Mr. Ryan, how can I help you?” I figured someone who liked to waste so little of his own breath would appreciate the direct approach.
He reached into his pocket for his wallet, and pulled out a photograph. He passed it over to me. It was a picture of a young girl with long blonde hair. About sixteen perhaps.
“This is my daughter, Naomi. She has been absent for three days.”
The photograph was a bit blurry, but even then her huge eyes leapt out at you. She was a pale, pinched little thing. She didn’t look too happy.
“Have you told the police?”
“I have not.”
I passed the photograph back to him. “You should speak to them. A missing girl is a serious matter.”
“Mr. Callaghan, for personal reasons, I would sooner deal with this matter privately.”
I raised an eyebrow and said nothing. He stared me out, I have to admit.
“Well,” I said, “I guess you can tell me more about it.”
He smiled coldly. “There is little to tell. Naomi has not been home for two nights. I am, of course, concerned for her safety. It is possible she is associating with people who are not likely to be a good influence on her. I would like you to locate her, so we can persuade her to return home.”
“She has not contacted home since she vanished.”
“We do not have a telephone, but I think it unlikely she would have been trying to contact us in any event.”
“Tell me about the evening she disappeared.”
“That would have been Thursday evening. It was in most ways a typical day. When I returned home from my employment, we had a family meal. Afterwards Naomi behaved very quietly and submissively. She retired at nine o’clock. We rise early, but the next morning Naomi did not come down for breakfast. We found her room empty. Her bed had not been slept in. Her room is on the ground floor, and the window was open.”
“The sequence of events seems clear,” I said, thinking, I’m starting to talk like him now.
He nodded, curtly.
I asked, “You have a dog?”
“Yes. There was no disturbance.”
“Like in the story.” He looked at me blankly. I let it pass.
“Does your daughter have any close friends she might be with?”
“I have already accounted for that. She has no girlfriends that she is likely to have run off with.”
“School friends as well?”
“We operate a small school of our own, Mr. Callaghan. She does not attend the public schools.”
I leant back in my chair. A picture was starting to form in my mind.
“Mr. Ryan, I need to you be frank with me.”
“I will be open in my answers,” he said, coolly.
“You are a religious man?”
“I would not deny my faith. To do so would be a sin.”
“You follow a strict interpretation of the faith?”
The coolness became glacial. “There is no interpretation of the faith. We follow the laws laid down by the Lord. There can be no other way.”
“This is why you have chosen not to contact the police?”
“As a part of a system of government that is at best atheistic, we can have no dealing with them.”
I sighed. “You should contact them, Mr. Ryan. Your daughter’s life may be in danger.”
He did the cold staring thing again, not wasting any words on what had already been said. I fiddled with the pencil a bit, looked at the words I had written in the pad. Naomi. Thursday. Quiet and Submissive. Dog. I gnawed on the pencil a bit. Quiet and submissive. This was a man that did not waste words.
“You said she was quiet and submissive the evening of the night she ran away. You mentioned this specifically. She was not always so?”
“Naomi has been troubled of late.”
“Why?”
The cold look again. Any more of this, and frost would start forming on the desk top.
“Naomi is sixteen. She was betrothed to be married. She had not accepted this blessing with grace.”
“Who was she going to marry?”
“Her union had been arranged to a senior member of the Church. This was a fortuitous match. Naomi, filled with sinful pride and refusing to accord me the respect due her father, had questioned this.”
“She did not want to marry this man?”
“She did not see how it was a reason for celebration.”
“Who was to be her husband?”
“She was to have married Joshua Palmer. He is a good and faithful man.”
“How old is he?” The frost appeared on the desk top, right on cue.
“Mr. Callaghan, we have a way of life that may seem odd to you. I ask you not to judge us. That is the prerogative of the Lord, and no other.”
“You said you would be frank.”
“Mr. Palmer is in his fiftieth year.”
I twiddled with the pen some more. Ryan spoke, his voice like an Alaskan winter. “Mr. Callaghan, I appreciate the time you have given me. I fear that it has been a loss for both of us. I would not waste any further time if you are not willing to assist us.”
I sighed. “I haven’t made up my mind to take the case, Mr. Ryan. It isn’t for me to judge my clients. I need to know more before I can say if I can help you.”
He had been about to rise, but settled back into his seat after that.
“Please, think. Has Naomi been in contact with any one who is not … ah … of your faith?”
“We try to avoid contact with such.” If the irony of him saying that to me occurred to him, he did not show it. I managed to keep my face impassive, but inside I was rolling about on the office floor, laughing like a hyena.
“Unless your girl has simply run off into the night with no idea where to go, she must have had a goal in mind. Runaways usually run away because they think there is somewhere better they can be.”
“We try to avoid contact with sinners and the world of Mammon. In particular, we try to keep our women folk away from sin and temptation, and the lustful eyes of the ungodly.”
“She has no friends that you know of, outside your community?”
“I am not aware of any, and I think it is unlikely she would have formed any friendship strong enough to tempt her, without me being aware of it.”
“I will need to speak to other people in your community.”
Icy silence.
“Mr. Ryan, you have asked me to withhold judgment. That I can do, but I can’t trace your daughter if I’m to be blindfolded and gagged from the start. I’ll need to speak to people, other wise I can’t help you.”
“It would be possible to arrange this, under certain conditions.”
“Thank you. Now, tell me about your community, its day to day life.”
“What purpose would that serve?”
“Humour me. I’m trying to form a picture of who your daughter would be in contact with, opportunities for her to contact outsiders. That sort of thing.”
He described, briefly, their way of life. The group lived in a commune up in the hills – not so far away from town as to make it impossible for a young girl to strike out on foot, but far enough for it to be unfeasible. The lives of the men were comparatively normal – some even lived separately from their wives and families during the week, earning their living in Mammon. Mr. Ryan was not one. Every day, he would leave the compound and drive into the city, where he had a perfectly normal job as a real estate broker. Back at the compound, the women folk and children rarely ventured out, and were never supposed to go forth without a chaperone. The children were schooled at the compound – mostly bible and indoctrination, by the sound of it. There was, as Mr. Ryan had suggested, no telephone. Such frivolous, possibly sinful, signs of modernity were frowned on.
Mr. Ryan agreed to meet me at the compound later that afternoon and departed. Spent a few moments looking at the scribbles on my notepad.
Later that afternoon, I took a drive out of town, toward the compound where the Brotherhood of the Saved was located. I’d done a bit of background reading in the interim, and made a few phone calls. The group was made up of about a dozen families, though only five lived on the compound full-time – the Ryans and the Palmers being amongst those. I had entertained the idea they might be polygamists, but this had proved not to be the case – Mr. Palmer’s wife had died the year before, he had even advised the appropriate authorities. By and large, however, the Brotherhood kept contact with Mammon to a minimum, though not to the point that they shunned the chance to make money – all the men, it seemed, had enjoyed successful and rewarding careers. It was a grave sin to waste God’s time and the opportunities God afforded you.
The Brotherhood compound was really just a collection of plain little bungalows. I had been expecting something grim and fenced, more like a prison. Naomi, after scrambling out of her bedroom window, had only to walk down the dirt track to the road.
I halted my Packard some distance from the first bungalow. Somewhere out of sight a couple of dogs started making them selves heard. I sat in my car and waited, as Ryan had instructed me to do. A few moments later, I saw him emerge from another bungalow. He strode towards me. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Callaghan,” he said. By his standards, I figured, this was a gushing welcome.
“May I see Naomi’s room?”
“Come this way,” he said, and led me back to the bungalow he had just come out of. As we crossed the dusty street, I looked around. No other human beings to be seen. The men-folk, I figured, were still doing their good work in the heart of Mammon, and the woman folk huddled demurely out of sight lest the lustful eyes of the stranger fall upon them.
The bungalow was plain outside, painted white, with small windows. A veranda ran along the front. Nothing as frivolous as a flower pot or a even a door mat. Mr. Ryan removed his shoes at the entrance, and so did I, lining them up beside a half dozen pairs of plain brogues. Barefoot, we entered the house.
It was as plain and simple inside as it was outside. The walls were plain, no pictures hanging on them. The rooms were small. There was not much furniture, and what there was had been picked for function not comfort.
Naomi’s room could have been a cell or a room in a barracks. There was nothing to hint that it belonged to the young woman with sad eyes in the photograph. There was a single bed – none too soft, I guessed, a desk and a small book shelf that was empty of books apart from two Bibles. A small cupboard contained a few items of clothing – skirts and blouses, in gray and brown and white. A chest of drawers contained nothing unusual, unless you can count the absence of anything feminine unusual.
I looked out of the window, the window Naomi had scrambled out of. It was small, but she was a small girl.
We went back into the main room. A tall woman stood by the plain table. She was dressed in garb similar to the simple gray clothing I had just seen hanging in Naomi’s cupboard. Her hair was drawn up in a tight bun, but it was the same colour as the girl in the picture’s had been. She was, I judged, at least fifteen years younger than her husband.
She dropped her eyes to the floor and turned on her heel, walking out to stand on the veranda.
“My wife, Ruth” said Mr. Ryan. “She would prefer not to be present while we discuss this business.”
“Might I speak to your wife, Mr. Ryan? In private.”
“It is not fitting for you to speak to her alone.”
I demurred. “Can we speak to Mr. Palmer?”
Joshua Palmer was fifty, according to what Mr. Ryan had told me, but he looked older. He was a dried out, harsh looking stick of a man, with out an ounce of humour or gentleness in him. His house was identical in almost every respect to the Ryan’s bungalow, plain and simple and laid out on the same pattern: a main room, with a corridor which bedrooms opened off. At the far end, a slightly larger room, where the pater familias took repose. Mr. Joshua Palmer sat opposite me across the table. I sat in a hard chair facing him. Compared to Palmer, Ryan was garrulous.
“On Thursday night, the night that Naomi disappeared, did you see her?”
“No.”
“Where were you?”
“Here.”
“You stayed at home all evening?”
“Yes.”
“You do so every night?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do that evening?”
“I read the Bible. Then I retired at nine o’clock.” I had succeeded in wringing something more than a mono-syllable out of him. It felt like a victory. Beyond that, I got nothing from Mr. Palmer. Every sally was beaten back, every question glanced off him with out so much as a spark. He answered questions about his forthcoming marriage without any embarrassment or doubt that he was fulfilling a God given right. After half-an-hour of futile probing, I gave up. The man was invulnerable.
I drove back into town, feeling disgusted by my contact with the righteous. I stopped at the first bar I saw to wash away the taint of sanctity with cheap whisky.
The next day, I drove out in the direction of the compound once more. It was ten o’clock. I drove two hundred yards past the turn off that lead to the compound, until I found another dirt road, which I turned up. I parked the car amid some trees, so it was not likely to be seen from the road or the compound. I cut across a field, keeping to the hedge line until I was forced to break cover to cross the last few yards to the Ryan’s bungalow. The lunatic idea of scrambling through a window occurred to me, but was quickly rejected. I was twice the size of Naomi Ryan. She had not gone through the window. It was a certainty I could not.
The door to the Ryan’s house was open. I walked into the main room without knocking. I could hear a woman singing quietly to herself, a high pitched, not unpleasant voice, reciting a hymn. The baby was still crying to itself, though less angrily that before. I made a quick search of the room, but could not find what I wanted.
“I knew you would return” said a soft voice behind me.
I spun on my heel. Mrs. Ryan stood in the passage way, watching me calmly. I cursed myself as a fool. I was getting old and slow and stupid, and a girl had managed to sneak up on me like I was some blundering amateur. I managed a smile to cover my fright.
“You should not be here,” she said, quietly. “If you are caught here, it will be the worse for me. The rules are clear.”
I found my voice again. “I would like to speak to you about your daughter.”
“Of course. I am no fool.”
“You helped her to escape?”
“Obviously, you are no full either.”
“The window was a bit too much for me to buy. Why would she risk climbing out of it, when it is easier to walk out the door? Your bedroom is at the end of the corridor. She wouldn’t even have to walk past your door.”
She smiled. “I was not born into the brotherhood. When I was a girl I used to read books where girls were always climbing out of windows for one reason or another. Perhaps you are right.”
“I was looking for the receipts. For the clothes.”
“I did not bring them back with me. The risk of my husband finding them was too great.”
“Smart move. But you should have removed some of her clothes. Some clothes had been removed from the cupboard, but no underwear was taken.”
She sighed. “Yes. I didn’t think of the underwear until I saw my husband return with you yesterday. I knew he would be too prudish to poke around in her drawers.”
I grinned. “And you can see I’m the sort of person who does little else than rummage amongst ladies intimate garments.”
She flushed. “If you look now, you’ll find the underwear gone.”
“You married into the Brotherhood?”
“I was young, and Aaron was handsome and charming then.”
“You didn’t want your daughter to marry Mr. Palmer?”
“You met him yesterday, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“Then you ask if I wanted Naomi to marry him?”
“You married an older man, yourself.”
“And that was a mistake I wouldn’t let my daughter repeat. I have six children. Every moment I am with Aaron, I am watched and expected to submit to his authority. I am not allowed to speak to strange men. I amm not allowed to be in a room with another man unless it is a blood relative or I am accompanied by a blood relative.”
“Talk me through how you helped her run away. I have the general outline, but I’m not one hundred per cent on some of the detail. Like, how did you get clothes for her?”
“That was easy. There is a farmer who has a house near here. His wife is a sensible woman. Her husband drives to town once a week, with her. Some of us go into town. Last week, I went into town with them and bought some clothes for Naomi.”
“And on Thursday night?”
“I made arrangements with a friend. When I joined the Brotherhood, I did not lose all my old friends. One or two I still have.”
“Is she with them now?”
“No.”
“Where is she?”
“I will not say.”
We paused.
“I will have to tell your husband what you have told me. He is my client.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll leave out a few details. Like how you get into town. You’ll have to think of an alternative story for that. That way, others will still be able to use it.”
“Thank you.”
“What is likely to happen to you?”
“Violations of our rules are punished strictly. I will be beaten. That is my hsbnd’s right. I will be vilified. I will be forced to do penance.”
“Why do you tolerate it? You are no fool.”
“I joined the Brotherhood because I became convinced of certain things. I do not believe that my husband is my infallible master, not any longer. But I do believe in the sanctity of the vows we took. His weakness and sin will not be lessened if I add my own to it.”
“What will happen to your daughter.”
“Forgive me, that is not something I will tell you. Now I ask you to leave, before I scream. Perhaps, my husband will believe you returned here for purposes other than locating his daughter.”
“Make sure you have your story straight.”
“Thank you. Now you must go.”
I paused at the door, looking at her, tanding ramrod straight and absolutely calm.
“Goodbye,” I said.
“Good bye,” she replied.
I left, but did not go back to my car immediately. Instead I went to the farm house at the end of the dirt road I had parked on. The farmer’s wife was there, and proved ready to talk about her strange neighbours. After that, I drove back into town.
I went back into my office and sat at my desk for a time. I had the same feeling of contamination that I had detected last night. Then I went back into the hallway to make a telephone call. I spoke to Ned Tornquist. I arranged to meet him at a restaurant.
Ned was a big muscular man, with intense eyes and something of the torpedo or bullet about him. He had an unassailable sense of purpose, like he could not be diverted or stopped. This made him a damn good detective. He also had a judicious take on the rules, which made him a good person for a private dick to know, as well.
He got to the restaurant before me – he was as punctual as he was indefatigable, and he had already ordered himself a stake almost an inch thick. He needed every ounce of it. Unlike me, who was getting soft and flabby at the edges, Ned seemed to get harder as he got older.
“Jimmy! I ordered you a steak as well.”
“Thanks. I’m starving. I ain’t tasted anything but holier than thou hypocrisy since yesterday morning’s coffee.”
“You mean that Brotherhood cabal you asked me to look up?”
“The same.”
“Here.” He shoved a manila folder across the table to me, leaving a greasy thump print on the corner. “That stuff that you were talking about. Might make interesting reading. I don’t know. I didn’t work the case.”
He wolfed down his steak as I flicked through the file, a collection of typed sheets and some scribbled hand-written notes. In spite of what he had said, these were not just some notes scribbled down while no-one was looking. Ned had lifted the whole file for me. That was friendship.
Ned eating steak was a sight to behold. He severed a large chunk with crude knife work that made his plate screech and pushed it inches away from its starting point. The impact of the fork on the plate, as it was punched through the steak, was audible at the next table. I knew this because the scrawny old dame sitting there, talking to a much younger man who was trying to look interested, kept looking up in irritation whenever Ned skewered himself another hunk of dripping, bloody meat. The salad wilted, mercifully ignored – if Ned treated the lettuce like he ate the thick pad of meat, he’d drive the fork into the table.
I read the typed sheets with interest. They described a police investigation into some irregular behaviour out at the compound of the Brotherhood. It confirmed pretty much what I had been told by the farmer’s wife.
Ned finished his steak about the time mine arrived. For a short while he looked plaintively at my plate, perhaps wondering at my restraint as I nibbled at tiny morsels of meat. Then he scratched his head with a greasy paw and slapped his stomach, which gave a solid thud, as if the steak had been immediately incorporated into the solid lining of muscle that shielded his belly.
“So what’s the story with your reverend friends, Jimmy?”
“Well, there is a missing girl.”
This sobered Ned up immediately. He’s got a little girl of his own, six years old. He takes things like that very seriously.
“Should I be paying them a visit?”
“I think she’ll be okay. I had some worries earlier, given some of the characters involved, and if she were still there this” - I waved the manila folder at him – “Would make me very frightened for her. But she’s better of where she is.”
Ned relaxed. “I think I remember the story you’ve just been reading” he said, his brow crinkling. “A dame picked up by a motorist, wandering along the road, in her nightie? About two years back?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yeah, I recall now. Her husband had to come down and pick her up. He treated us like we were vermin, likely to bite him. Didn’t see him myself, but that’s what the boys who were dealing with it said.”
“That’s their way of dealing with the likes of us.”
“How did you get mixed up with the righteous and the saved?”
I filled him in on Mr. Ryan, in a few words. Even Mr. Ryan might have been impressed with my reticence. I liked Ned, but he was liable to go off in random directions, especially, like I said, if his paternal instincts were aroused.
Ned stretched back and waved his muscley arms like something out of Africa. “Yeah, well, you let me know if you think these bastards need sorted out. I’m your man for that.”
I didn’t hold any doubt of that.
“Hey, you still seeing Martha?”
“Yeah. She’s singing at Sammy’s till the end of the month.”
“I heard. I might swing by and check it out. Ain’t many dames got a voice like hers.”
Ned and Martha went back further than Martha and I, or Ned and I, as far as I knew and had cared to ask. There weren’t many people in this city Ned didn’t know in one way or another. He was well known, though not always popular in the places he was best known. He liked walking into joints like Sammy’s every now and again, just to see people scurry for the dark shadowy corners.
“Let me now when that’ll happen and I’ll join you. It’s been a while since we three met up.”
“I will.”
Soon after that, we left the restaurant and the old dame and her younger, bored companion, and all the rest of them. Ned took his purloined file back to the station with him, and I headed back to my office. I had a phone call to make.
I called Mr. Ryan at his office. I told him that his daughter had fled with the connivance of her mother. I explained how I knew this. He went very silent, Even more so than usual.
“You are disappointed, Mr. Ryan?”
Silence.
“Perhaps you wished you had a faithful, obedient wife, like Mr. Palmer?”
Silence.
“Mr. Palmer is strict in his views of a wife’s rights. Mrs. Palmer, I believe, was often unhappy.”
Silence.
“Even her sense of duty broke down , occasionally, though.”
Again, silence.
“You remember that a year ago, she was taken to hospital by a neighbour, because her husband had thrown her out of the house at night. With a broken arm.”
Silence.
“It is wrong of a woman to seek refuge like that. It shows a lack of dutiful submission.”
Silence.
“Then there was the matter of Gabriel Palmer.”
I think I could hear Mr. Ryan breathing, but I wasn’t sure.
“You’re daughter was engaged to him, wasn’t she, first of all. From birth.”
Quietly: “That is correct.”
“But then Mrs. Palmer died. And suddenly Mr. Palmer, senior, has a revelation. Gabriel was packed off to New York on a mission. Then Mr. Palmer announces that Naomi should marry him, as he is the oldest unmarried member of the family. What an honour for you.” I paused, but he didn’t say anything to that. “How did you feel when you heard your daughter was going to marry that old lech?”
“It was God’s will.”
“Fiddlesticks. It was the will of a depraved old bully, who had beaten and cowed one woman into her grave, and now wanted to eke what pleasure he could out of his last few years. With your daughter.”
I thought I detected a low moan.
“Your wife is a strong woman, Mr. Ryan, and you are not a bad man as far as I can judge. Mrs. Palmer must have been a strong woman as well, to survive as long as she did with that brute. How long do you think Naomi would have been able to endure it?”
“He is a good man.” Quietly, weakly.
“He’s a bully, and a fanatic, and violent. You daughter is weak. Would she have survived a year with him?”
He put the telephone receiver down.
In my line of work you don’t get many satisfying outcomes, and this wasn’t one that broke the mould. Most of the time, you make things a little better, for a while. Quite a lot of the time, you make things a whole lot worse. I pictured Mrs. Ryan, her unnaturally calm face as she contemplated God only knew what the Brotherhood would demand of her as penance, what might still happen to her when her husband found she wasn’t eager to tell him where his daughter was, and the murky future that girl with the wild, sad eyes had, and the future she’d only just avoided because of her mother’s stubborn courage didn’t extend to including her daughter in her own personal tragedy, and all the past that she’d already lived. The case was closed, but that didn’t mean that I was feeling a whole lot of happiness about myself or my fellow creatures.
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