Josie was too tired to figure out what Chitwood was doing. “I don’t understand, sir.”
He reached forward and curled her fingers over the bracelet. “Someday, I’ll tell you the story of how I got that thing. All you need to know right now is that even if you never prayed a day in your life, when someone you love is dying, you learn to pray pretty damn fast. Someone who believed very deeply in the power of prayer gave that to me, and at the time, it was a great comfort. Maybe it won’t mean shit to you. I don’t know. Regardless, if this is Lisette’s time, nothing’s gonna keep her here, but you? You’re gonna need all the help you can get. You hang onto that until you’re ready to give it back to me, and Quinn, I do want that back.”
“How will I know when I’m ready to give it back?” Josie asked.
Chitwood started walking away. Over his shoulder, he said, “Oh, you’ll know.”
Josie wasn’t ready to give it back. She still didn’t understand how she would know. Chitwood always made her feel like she was playing a game in which she didn’t actually know the rules. She squeezed the beads until the medal dug into her palm. What comfort had Gabriel Watts found in Thatcher Toland’s church? What sins had Eden believed she had to atone for? What had the Watts family been involved in that all three children had more or less stopped having meaningful relationships with their parents? What was the connection to Toland? What about Russell Haven Dam? Where did that fit into all of this? She was certain she wasn’t wrong about it being significant. And those damn numbers! What did they mean?
Josie sat up and threw her legs over the side of the bed. Trout moaned in his sleep and promptly flipped over so that his back was flush with Noah’s side. After tucking them both under the covers, Josie padded downstairs to the kitchen where her laptop waited on the table. She booted it up and started by looking for any connections between Thatcher Toland and Russell Haven Dam. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? But there was nothing. Frustrated, she ran a search just for Thatcher Toland. Hundreds of thousands of results came up. She clicked on one news article whose headline read:
Thatcher Toland Was Never In It For The Money
Now a bona fide televangelist with tens of thousands of congregants and an online following in the millions, Thatcher Toland seems anything but. When he sat down for brunch with me on a sunny Saturday morning in his hometown of Collegeville, he could have been any average guy in his sixties. Dressed casually in jeans and a windbreaker, his hair mussed from the breeze, he couldn’t be pretentious if he tried. That’s part of his charm, I’ve learned. Sure, he’s got a message that he wants to get out to millions of people. Sure, he hopes to change the world through his ministry. Sure, he wants to find the downtrodden, the sinners among us, and give them hope and purpose and maybe even a new lease on life. But when you have a meal with Thatcher Toland, he’s just a man who likes his eggs over easy and his bacon crispy. He asks the waiter his name and inquires as to how his morning has gone—and Toland seems genuinely interested. He hasn’t lived in this town for years. He doesn’t know anyone here anymore.
When he turns his attention fully to me, he also seems genuinely interested. In fact, he asks so many questions about my life and family, I find it hard to keep redirecting the interview toward him. When I point out for the third time that we’re there to discuss him and not me, he laughs and apologizes. “Go ahead,” he tells me. “Ask me anything. I’m an open book.” Sounds fake, right? Like he’s trying to sell me on the Thatcher Toland he wants the world to see. The thing is, though, that when you talk to him, he is entirely sincere. His answers are sometimes brutally honest. When I ask him about the business side of his ministry, he winces and admits, “I wish there was no money. I was never in this for that. You know, I grew up with wealth. My parents owned a freight company, and it was very successful. I never wanted for anything. I could have gone into the family business, but I wanted to do something that would satisfy my soul.”
Except that if you’ve read Toland’s new book, Wake Up To Faith, you know the early days of his career as a pastor at a nondenominational church in Southeastern Pennsylvania were anything but satisfying. “I thought I knew what faith was,” he tells me of those early years. “But I was young and stupid and tempted by all the wrong things. I had relationships I regret. Inappropriate relationships. I thought that I was above all of society’s rules because I was a man of God. I thought I could just do anything I wanted, but I was wrong. I hurt people and I hurt myself.”
When I ask him what he means by “inappropriate relationships,” he gives a pained smile and says that for the privacy of the people involved, he prefers not to say. “That’s not really the point, is it?” he tells me. “I know people speculate online. Was I having an affair with a married person? Was it with someone in the church? A colleague? Did I take advantage of someone? It’s not that I’m reluctant to admit to the world what I’ve done. It’s simply in the interest of protecting the other people involved. I’ve already done enough to harm them. Putting them into the public spotlight without their permission would only make my sins more egregious. What I’m trying to do is rectify the mistakes I’ve made in the past. That’s what my work is about. I believe that if we all choose to wake up from our slumber of self-deceit and take responsibility for our sins, we can live freely and in God’s love. It’s life-changing.”
Josie found nothing of use in the rest of the article, so she clicked out of it and kept looking through the results. There were a few articles about how he met his wife. She was a real estate agent who sold him his first house. It was a long courtship and an even longer engagement, but Thatcher believed God had brought her into his life to help grow his congregation so that more people could learn to wake up to faith and rectify their mistakes.
Josie kept going, reading through the results more quickly, eyes burning with fatigue. She clicked on another site that asked, “What is Thatcher Toland’s Net Worth?” The author of that article estimated it to be in the neighborhood of twenty-five million dollars.
“Holy shit,” she muttered.
Clicking out of that, she logged into a database and pulled up his driver’s license. He was required to list a home address on his license, although with a net worth of twenty-five million dollars and a wife who used to be a realtor, he likely had many properties. It turned up a property in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania in Montgomery County. It was about an hour or so south of Denton. Josie logged into the Montgomery County tax assessor’s office and pulled up the property record. Toland and his wife had bought it ten years earlier for over a million dollars. Josie was about to close out the listing when something caught her eye.