She knew it was a real threat, despite his delivering it in an equally teasing voice. She returned to her own easel, back to back with his. She’d started a portrait. She didn’t normally do portraits, but at the moment, his face was all she could see. Literally. Because he was standing in her field of vision, his head bowed, his handsome face set in a scowl as he concentrated. But when she closed her eyes, it was also his face she saw and that brought her comfort. Earlier in the evening it had been Carrie’s face she’d seen when she closed her eyes, and that hurt. So goddamn much.
She’d been waiting for him to begin his explanation of Eden, but he’d been so silent she worried he was never going to. “So,” she prompted quietly. “Eden.”
He cleaned his brush, then started with a new color. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“I gathered that.”
One side of his mouth lifted, but only briefly, and then he was scowling again. “My mom . . . She thought she was raising us right.” He painted furiously for a full minute before his arm went still. “She was a single mother with two kids and no husband. Her family had shamed her, told her to leave. So she did.” His throat worked. “She didn’t have a high school diploma and ended up hooking, but she had a few friends. Other hookers she’d met. They shared an apartment and would watch each other’s kids while they worked.”
Two kids. Gideon had a sibling somewhere. She thought of the dark-haired girl with green eyes that he was painting so soberly. A sister? “Co-op daycare,” Daisy murmured.
He nodded. “Everything changed when a social worker visited one evening. Someone in the building had called, worried that we were being neglected. But we were clean and fed. My mom hadn’t gone far from home, still in the same city, so she still had a library card. She checked out children’s books for all of us and was teaching us to read.”
“She loved you.”
His swallow was audible in the quiet of her apartment. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely, then cleared his throat. “My mom was on duty the day the social worker came. She was so scared the woman would take us. It was close. She didn’t, but she did report my mother for operating a daycare without a license. She had too many kids. The social worker threatened to take us if my mother didn’t get a better job.”
“Could she have?”
“I don’t know. Neither did my mother. But she was scared, so when the other moms came back the next morning, my mom took us and ran. She had enough money saved to get two bus tickets, so she held my sister on her lap for two and a half days.”
Daisy wanted to ask more about his sister, but held her tongue and let him continue.
“We started out in Houston. Ended up in San Francisco because that’s where she thought my father was, but he’d given her a fake address. Maybe a fake name, too. So she was alone in the city at nineteen with two kids and no one to help her. No resources.”
“How old were you?”
“Five.”
“Wow,” she whispered. “Your mom was a very young mother.”
“She was only fourteen when I was born. She told me that my father was a salesman who passed through, that she’d told him she was eighteen.” He shook his head. “I saw photos of her when she was fourteen. No man on earth would have believed she was eighteen. The fucker was a pedophile, plain and simple.” He cleaned his brush again and changed colors. “We lived with her parents until she told them she was pregnant again.”
“With your sister.”
“Yes. By the same man. She kept sleeping with him, every time he blew into town. He’d bring me a cheap toy and leave her some cash. I think she really loved him. Or thought she did. I mean, she was a child. My grandparents made sure we got food and took me to church. We were always going to church. They hoped to stamp me with family values so that I wouldn’t ‘turn out like her.’ Their words. Not mine.”
“They gave up any right to family values when they threw out their daughter and her two babies,” Daisy said, trying to keep the anger from her voice.
Gideon’s eyes lifted and met hers over their easels. “I agree. But my mother was a churchgoing girl and so she sought out a church for help and for a while things were okay. The people there were nice. I remember that. They fed us and gave her some clothes to keep us warm because it was San Francisco in July. She hadn’t thought to bring jackets.”
“But things changed?”
“One of the men in the church gave my mom a job cleaning his house.”
Daisy’s brows went up. “Just his house?”
A nod. “He told her that he was renting, but I think he was a squatter. Anyway, he told her that he had a farm with a nice house, that he’d take her there and she could find work. That there would be fresh air and vegetables for us. That she could make a life there.”
“Which must have sounded like her prayers being answered.”
“It did. My mother was smart, but trusting. The kind you’d say, ‘Oh, honey,’ to.”
“Was there a farm?”
“Yes. The whole community was a farm. It was a commune of sorts. Really it was a cult, built around the personality of Pastor.”
“Pastor what?”
“That was his name. That’s what everyone called him. Pastor. My mother was accustomed to that. That’s what all the members of her parents’ church had called their minister. The man who brought us there was gone after the first night. He’d come back from time to time with new families. Sometimes single moms like mine, sometimes whole ‘nuclear’ families. They were given housing until they could build their own. Sometimes they were just young women with no family. Never a young man alone. If a male entered the community, he was older. He either had a family or a skill.”
He dropped his brush in the cleaner and stepped back from the canvas. She watched him go into the kitchen, where he searched the drawers, returning with the deck of cards she’d found there when she’d moved in. Cards he must have left there.
He sat on the sofa, shuffling cards and laying out a game of solitaire. Mindlessly he began playing. Finally, she turned her back to him and continued working on the portrait.
Behind her, he shuffled again. “We were only there for one day when Pastor came to meet us. He was . . . unassuming. Like a regular person. He smiled and joked, then sent me outside to play. I remember thinking how pretty it was. You could see Mt. Shasta in the distance. A little girl came over to me, offered me a cookie.”
Daisy wanted to turn around and look at him, but she didn’t dare, fearing that he’d stop talking. “Eileen.”
“Yes. She was the first person my own age who I met there. We ended up the best of friends. But eventually I was called back inside. My mother was pale. Trembling. She told me she was getting married.”
“To the guy who’d brought you there?”
“No. To a stranger. She said that Pastor had informed her that single women weren’t permitted in Eden. Too much temptation to the men.”
Daisy couldn’t stifle the sound coming out of her throat. She jabbed her brush at the canvas a little too hard. “Sorry. Go on.”
“My mother had been raised with similar values. Don’t wear this, don’t do that, don’t be a harlot, all those things. She didn’t fight it. She was given to Amos.”
She turned around at that. “Given to?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look up from the cards. “He wasn’t a bad man. Strict, but not . . . evil.”
Evil. Like Ephraim. Who’d beaten him until he’d nearly died. “Were you happy?”
He shrugged. “I was five years old. I got a toy, a bed of my own, hot food, and a dog.”
“What was his name? The dog?”
He looked up. “Boy. I wasn’t an original child.”
She smiled at him. “I think it’s nice.”
He nodded, not smiling back. “He was a good dog.”
Her smile faltered. “What happened to him?”
His gaze dropped back to the cards. “I don’t know. He . . . stayed behind.”
“When you escaped.”
“Yes.” He drew a deep breath and released it on a shudder. “I loved that dog. I don’t know how much longer he lived. He was old when I was thirteen. White muzzle. He was a golden.” He sighed. “My mom got her locket the next day. It was her wedding day.”
“She got married two days after arriving?”
His broad shoulders shrugged. “A day and a half, technically. We moved into Amos’s house. Men couldn’t marry until they’d built a house, and then it was a lottery of sorts. They put their names in a hat and Pastor picked one whenever a new woman arrived or a girl came of age. Older men were allowed to put more slips with names on them than the younger men, so the deck was stacked against the younger men. Amos had been waiting for quite some time for his name to be chosen from the hat.”
It was . . . barbaric. But Daisy bit the words back. “Tell me about the locket.”
“Every female was given one on her wedding day. But the chain was different than the one you yanked off your attacker last night.”
Last night? Had it only been last night? Daisy felt like she’d lived a month of Fridays. “How was it different?” she asked when he didn’t elaborate.
“Stronger. You never would have been able to pull one of those chains off. The Hulk wouldn’t have been able to, not without strangling the woman. They had to be cut off. The locket sat in the hollow of the wearer’s throat. The chains were forged right there in Eden.” He chuckled bitterly. “Metaphorically and literally.”
“So it was more like a mark of ownership.”
“That’s exactly what it was. A photo of the happy couple was placed inside.”