She took a breath. “That’s what I’m here to talk about.” She stared straight ahead, put her hands around her face, and steadied herself. Then she spoke again.

“You’re not safe,” she said. “I’m not safe. None of us are.”

“What happened?”

She took another breath. “Okay. That night at the restaurant. I left because I was mad at you, and mad at them. So I left and called Willa.”

“Suzanne, I didn’t…”

“Shut up,” she said. “None of that matters now. Just shut up and listen, okay?”

I nodded.

“I called Willa to give me a ride, and she did. She gave me a ride back to my apartment. Jess was home—my roommate, remember?”

I nodded. I’d met her roommate a handful of times. She was part of the community. Gardener or something.

“She could tell I was upset, and she asked me what was wrong, but I didn’t want to talk so I just went in my room. I smoked some weed and went to bed. That was it till later. I was just upset, you know?”

Her eyes were the same, but the skin around them was dark, almost bruised. Her tiny frame was engulfed by the blanket; she’d lost more weight than she could afford to lose.

She told me the story. Usually measured in her words, they spilled out of her now, less flowery and more layman than ever before. A scared girl telling her story.

It was in the middle of the night when it all went down. She woke up in the darkness to men pulling her out of bed. She was on the floor in her evening gown before she knew what was happening. Her first thought was rape. One put his foot in her back and tied her hands together. Then they forced her to move.

“I saw Jess in the living room. She was standing in the corner watching, scared—she was definitely scared—but she didn’t say anything. I yelled at her, asked what the fuck was going on, but she still didn’t say anything. That’s when I knew. When she watched and didn’t do anything, didn’t even say anything.”

They drug her outside, kicking and flailing, and threw her in the back of a car. She was still in her evening gown, hands tied behind her. She asked where they were going and they hit her. She tried to sit up and they hit her. She asked about Vince and they hit her harder. Every time she moved or spoke, they hit her, so she stopped moving and speaking.

They drove and her mind raced. They drove for a long time. She felt the car turn off the paved highway on to a smaller dirt road. Her hands were sweaty. It was cold outside but her hands were bathed in sweat, and the tie-job on her wrists was loose and sloppy. Her mind slowed enough to realize the opportunity. She lay in the back seat, listening to car tires roll across the gravel, and started wiggling. The rope loosened, slowly at first. Her hands moved back and forth, the sweat lubricating like oil between pistons, and the rope loosened slightly. She could feel a tiny gap between her wrists. The car continued, making a right turn, and the rope loosened more. Soon the gap widened, and she could feel cool air around her wrist.

“Finally, I got one free. I could feel the car slowing down. I got my hand free and swung the door open. It wasn’t even locked, thank God, because I wasn’t thinking of that. I was just thinking of getting out. So the door swings open and the guy in the passenger seat is hitting me and trying to grab me. And I can feel the cold air from outside, rushing past, and I just feel how fast it’s going, you know? So I don’t want to jump. We were still going too fast. But then he grabbed a handful of my hair and jerked me toward him, and started to suffocate me. I don’t know if he was trying, but he put his other hand over my mouth and nose, and held them there. And he was strong—strong—so I couldn’t move. He just sat there and pushed harder.”

His hand was covering her mouth, and she was able to bite it. She got her teeth around a finger and bit hard.

“I bit down so hard, Julian. As hard as I could. And then he let go with his other hand, and then I jumped out of the car.”

She ran into the woods, she said. It was dark and branches smacked her legs, arms, and face, but she didn’t trip. The woods were dense. She heard them follow after her, but she had a sizeable lead, so after a few minutes she found a pile of brush and lay down next to it. She heard their voices—yelling, blaming each other, cursing her—and periodically saw the beams of their flashlights. Once, they came close enough to hear the crackling of twigs beneath their feet. And in that time, she told me, she heard one distinct sentence.

Vince is going to be so pissed.

“They said it; I know they said it,” Suzanne said.

“You’re sure they said, ‘Vince?’”

“Positive. That’s when it made sense. Of course it was him.”

“So, because you stormed out of dinner, he had you kidnapped?”

She shook her head. “It’s more than that. He knew I wasn’t happy for a while. He’d been threatening me, saying, ‘bad things can happen’ if I didn’t shut up and get in line. He doesn’t like differing opinions.”

I thought about it and looked her in the eye. She’d stopped shivering.

“People have disappeared before,” she said.

“Like Damon?”

She nodded.

“And what do you think happened?” I asked.

“Dammit Julian,” she said, standing up and throwing off the blanket, “they killed him.”

42

“I need to go,” she said, walking toward the door. “I’ve already stayed too long.”

“Where?” I asked.

“I can’t be here.”

They killed Damon. She was sure of it. She told me this and the two of us cobbled together what we knew about his disappearance. Before Suzanne went away, I’d been careful about what I said to her. She was one of them, so I had to be careful. It was different now. It was different when she walked in to my apartment with white skin and blue lips and black hair.

She knew about Damon’s arrest, and I told her about Vince’s explanation to me. This cemented her opinion. They paid off the police, got him out of jail, drove him somewhere and killed him. There was no new life in Arizona. They just killed him, to get rid of the problem. The killed him and stopped talking about him, so we’d stop thinking about him. They killed him, just as they had probably done to others, they were going to do to her, and they would do to anyone else who caused problems.

“Still,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense for them to kill you over something so small.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know how they are. They’re crazy about little things. Vince takes things very personally.” She looked down. “I’d been thinking about leaving the community for a while. I just didn’t know how to do it. I was afraid. You haven’t seen his violent side.”

I nodded. “I have, actually.”

“When?”

I told her the whole thing. How I found out about the drugs. About the meeting with Vince. About what he told me when I threatened to go to the police.

You’d be dead before you reached the station.

She massaged her temples. “Drugs. Of course.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Not specifically,” she said. “I knew something strange was going on, something that probably wasn’t right. Something they wanted more people for. But they’re very careful to keep specifics from us. Adeline; when she started being his…leading woman or whatever. She started being very discreet about the things that went on. She never told me any specifics about the operation. I was always curious, but she never told me anything.”

“Where have you been living?” I asked.

“I need to go,” she said again. She looked at the door, then looked at me, and reached over and touched my hand. Her fingers were ice cold.