“Because I feel that it must be true, that God meant for it to be me. I was at the Weavers’ before church, but it might have been one of the children at the school. It might have been one of the little ones who came back from town with this awful information. But it fell to me, to know, because I was the one who could keep them from it, to keep them in grace.”
He pulls away from me, looks urgently into my eyes. “You understand that we don’t drive automobiles because they might bring us closer to sin. No cars, no computers, no phones. Distractions from the faith! But this thing—this thing that comes across the sky. It would have happened like that.” He snaps his fingers. “We would have fallen into grief, and from grief into sin. All of us. All of them.”
He shakes his pitchfork back toward the farmhouse, his family, his charge.
“The danger to this world is not what matters, do you see that? Do you see? This world is temporary—it has always been temporary.” He is reaching some sort of pitch, shaking with righteousness and pain. “God meant for me to protect them. For all the sin to be my sin. Don’t you see that He meant it for me?” Again, with fervor: “Don’t you think that’s what He meant?”
He is not speaking rhetorically, he needs an answer, and I bite back my first impulse, which is to say I have no idea what God meant, any more than you do, and then to go on, to point out the narcissism skulking in the shadows of his revelation, in this performance of humility: I did what I did because I am burdened with understanding the intentions of the unseen hand.
I don’t say any of this. There would be no reason to do so, from the perspective of my ongoing investigation, no reason to upset the apple cart of this man’s intricate belief system, to pull away at the world that he has built. I step closer and pat him on the back, sort of, feeling nothing through my bandaged hand and the rough thickness of his broadcloth coat. I wait for my galloping mind to find the smart thing to say. We’ve come now to the bend in the road, and it is the old man’s intention now that I continue on, and if I do I leave behind my last chance of finding her, of laying eyes on Nico before the end.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” he says. “I am sorry.” His affect has changed again, he is chastened now, becalmed, tilting his head down toward the dirt. “You would not go, you wouldn’t leave, and I felt I had no other choice.”
“It’s all right.” I take his hands. I hold them between my own. “I was safe all along. I was not in danger.”
Miller wipes his eyes with his big knuckles, pulls himself up to full height. “What do you mean?”
I feel, deep down beneath my injuries and exhaustion, a quicksilver glinting of joy. I’ve got him. I push it. I keep going. “I was meant to escape from that barn. God wanted me to have your help in finding my sister. I have traveled the country cloaked in his protection. I was never in danger.”
He looks down for a moment, closes his eyes and murmurs. More prayer. So much prayer. Then he looks up at me. “Do you have a picture of her?”
*
She was there. In Rotary, at the police station. This was four days ago. Wednesday, September 26; Wednesday, the day before Cortez and I arrived. My stomach tightens. I need to know he’s sure of the date, and he is, Mr. Miller has been keeping careful track of the time—careful track of each of his odd-job employments and the goods he receives for them—careful track of everything. He remembers the work at the Rotary PD, and he recognizes Nico’s face right away.
I ask him to slow down. I ask him to start at the beginning. I take out my notebook and I tell him I need the whole day—would he mind going slowly and giving me the entire day?
Atlee had gone out that morning as he goes out every day, leaving his people with their usual strict admonitions to remain on the property. In Pike, between here and Rotary, he met a young man with a long face and a nervous expression, who gave his name simply as “Tick.” The man promised him a crate of packaged meals in exchange for a small job of work at the Rotary police station.
“What do you mean, packaged meals?”
“Army food,” says Atlee. “He called it something.”
“MREs?” I say.
He nods. “That sounds right. Yes, MREs.”
I write it down, army surplus rations … Army?… long-faced man, “Tick”?… and motion for him to go on. Atlee agreed to take the job and he and Tick traveled together to the Rotary station, arriving at approximately 2:30. He went alone because it was a simple job that Tick described: sealing a stairhead with a slab of concrete that had been custom-built for the purpose.