At night he would put his arms around her and hold her for hours, the way animals huddle together for warmth in winter. There were things in his past he glossed over. Did he have any cousins? A favorite uncle? It was clear he was running from something, and yet he was also running toward something—a career, adulthood, love. Her boyfriend was no man-child. He seemed obsessed with grown-up things. Savings accounts. Car insurance. On the weekends, he’d help her balance her checkbook. He taught her how to change a tire, where to pour windshield wiper fluid.
The last time Story had been home in New York was for Thanksgiving. Must be two years ago now. She doesn’t know for sure, because she doesn’t like to think about it, and her family definitely doesn’t talk about it. They don’t talk about it because just as every family has its myths and legends, so too do families have their taboos, the subjects they won’t discuss, the fights they don’t revisit. A mother walks in on a child masturbating. A daughter who spent her adolescence trying to eat as little as possible, who was hospitalized, a feeding tube inserted, who went to four residential treatment programs in five years, comes home for Thanksgiving with arms like sticks and eats a sum total of two forkfuls of cranberry sauce, and then—when her mother confronts her about it—proceeds to scream that she is an adult now and doesn’t have to listen to this shit and can make her own decisions, then gets in her car and drives too fast over the yellow line and skids sideways into a set of highway exit barrels, because the truth is she’s been dizzy for weeks, light-headed, trapped in what her doctor calls starvation brain.
This was between college and law school. What she calls her lost year, before she met Felix. She spent the night in the hospital. When the nurse asked if there was anyone they could call, she said her mother’s name, because she was scared, because she was sorry, because back there in the car as it slid toward the off-ramp she thought she was going to die. When her mother arrived, she stood looking down at Story in her short-sleeved hospital gown, her arms like sticks.
“Oh, Story,” she said, and the two cried together under the harsh fluorescents in a room that smelled like industrial cleaning products.
They have been camping outside town for three weeks now, Story and Felix, surveying the terrain, tracking the comings and goings from E. L. Mobley’s compound. Mobley himself flies in and out of a private airfield just south of town. In his absence security seems to increase, deterring them from making any kind of move to rescue Bathsheba. Felix worries that in the current crisis his sister will kill herself before they can save her. She’s always been a dreamer, prone to charmers and snake oil salesmen. Felix can imagine how Mobley hooked her—money, power, the promise to make all her artistic dreams come true.
The Mobley compound is north of town, hidden in the foothills near the McDonald Observatory. From Farm Road 118 there is an unmarked blind driveway leading to an iron gate. Cameras mounted on the adjacent walls monitor your approach. At the Radio Shack in Fort Jackson, Felix bought a drone and a laptop, paying cash. At a rest stop overlooking the state park, he unboxed it while Story found a spot in the shade where she could watch the laptop screen. It took some practice, but over the next hour Felix learned how to fly it well enough to begin. He had the GPS coordinates for the compound, and with Story’s help he flew the drone out over the foothills, its camera sending back footage, which Story recorded for later review.
Back at the campsite they cooked beans and tortillas on a cast-iron skillet over the fire and looked at what they’d filmed. It quickly became clear that the blind driveway was the only way in. The house itself—a six-bedroom Spanish-style hacienda with a three-story tower on the south corner—was nestled in a rocky depression. Behind the house were an infinity pool and thirty feet of impossibly green grass, leading to a cliff. From there it was a steep drop to the valley below.
That night Felix dreamed of his sister, locked in that tower, staring out at the rolling emptiness. What else had his father trained him for if not her rescue? All he needed was a plan. And so, the surveillance began.
Three weeks later, Felix sits next to Story, sipping his coffee. They are waiting for the black Suburban. Every morning, an envoy from the compound drives to the Hotel St. George to pick up bagels and pastries. This is the riddle of Marfa, that in the 1970s, a minimalist artist fled New York City and moved to this small West Texas town. He bought an old army base and began filling it with art. Over the next thirty years, the town transformed into an avant-garde performance of a cowboy’s retreat. Now vegans shop at the local grocery. Art galleries pepper the one-stoplight town. The tallest building is a four-story minimalist rectangle that sits across the street, directly behind them. The Hotel St. George—Saint George who fought a dragon in the city of Silene in what is now Libya. This was in the third Century AD. The dragon had arrived the previous fall and stayed through winter. Villagers had been offering it two sheep a day to placate the mighty beast. But sheep were not enough. A human sacrifice was demanded. A sacrifice to be chosen by the townspeople. The first, an unpopular young girl, was selected by consensus, then a brutish and stupid boy. A pattern emerged of children fed to the inevitable to save their parents. First the poor, then the gentry. This was the function of children back then, to toss to the wolves so their parents could survive and make more children. But that spring, when all the local children had been consumed, the king’s daughter was selected. His only child. So the king sent for George, a Roman soldier of some renown. The rich, you see, have always used wealth to buy solutions to their problems.