56

Piper pulled into the dimly lit parking lot of the CJC, the clock nearing ten. She had called Carol, insisting that she stay by Sophie’s side until Piper arrived. When Carol asked why, there was a long silence on the other end before Piper told her Owen Whittaker had escaped.

She hurried to Sophie’s room, finding Carol sitting on a chair in the hall reading a paperback.

“How did it happen?” she said, looking up from her book.

“He snaked his way through a vent by covering himself in grease. He got out through the laundry and nearly killed another inmate folding clothes. Then he vanished.”

“You really think he’s coming here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

“No, you go home and get some sleep. Detective Holloway is sending down an officer to stand guard. I’ll wait until they arrive.”

Carol told her she would be at home if she needed her to come back. Piper thanked her and then waited until she was alone. Then she put her ear to the door. Silence. Just in case, she cracked the door and peeked inside. Sophie was on the bed, turned away, her hair spread over the pillow. The moonlight illuminated the room enough that Piper could walk through quietly without running into anything. She checked that the window was locked and then went back into the hall and sat down. She left the door open a bit so she could hear.

Carol had left the paperback on the chair, and Piper picked it up. It had a cover of a woman being held captive by a handsome man with his shirt open.

She heard footsteps when she was less than twenty pages in. Lazarus came up the stairs.

“Been here long?” he asked.

“No, barely got here.”

“I got an officer stationed outside. I’ll have him come up.”

“I’m okay for now. I want to stay.”

Lazarus nodded and went to a window at the end of the hallway, looking down at the courtyard.

He said, “All they had to do was watch him.”

He came back and slid down the wall across from Piper, his forearms resting on his knees. He took out his vape pen and inhaled.

“You know they didn’t even catch him on the surveillance cameras? He’s like an insect, crawlin’ around without anyone noticing.”

They sat in silence a moment, the only sound that of their breathing.

“Do you remember your mom very well?” Lazarus asked.

“Some. I tend not to think about it. What about you?”

He nodded as he took a drag from his vape pen, releasing a plume of gray vapor. Piper didn’t like smoke, but Lazarus’s had a distinct aroma, reminiscent of leather rather than cigarette.

“What did she do when she realized the man was already married?”

“Nothing. Her pride wouldn’t let her go back to my father. When you’re in denial, even the unbearable can seem bearable. So I grew up as a desert rat.”

“So you were raised by the polygamists?”

“For a while.”

“What was it like there?”

He shrugged. “Wasn’t all bad. They got me training real young—bows, handguns, rifles, hand-to-hand, horticulture, divining for water ... everything a young boy needs to survive the apocalypse. But my favorite part was that they’d let me out in the deserts. Got to be alone a lot.”

He played with his vape pen, staring out the window.

“Church services were entertaining at first. They’d hold serpents ’cause of a line in Mark that says, ‘They will pick up serpents with their bare hands and the poison will not hurt them.’ They’d hold diamondback rattlesnakes, six or seven of ’em at a time, and sing hymns.”

Lazarus was quiet a moment.

“I saw them lifting snakes and I thought, These people really believe. They have skin in the game. These people know.”

He took a slow drag from the vape. “I found out they defanged the snakes before they brought them to church.”

“That seems like a smart choice.”

He looked at her now and said, “If they really believed it, they would’ve left the fangs in.”

After a long silence, Piper peeked into the room to check on Sophie.

“What about you?” Lazarus said.

“What about me?”

“No one comes to religious fervor in a vacuum.”

“You think I have religious fervor?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t think so. I believe there’s a God watching over us and that we return to him when we die. Why he lets the horrible things happen that happen, and why good people are always suffering, I don’t know.”

“Why do you assume suffering is bad? Maybe it makes us what we are? I wouldn’t blame your God for that.” Lazarus twirled the vape pen in his fingers. The hallway light cast a pallid glow over the ornate rug spread on the wooden floor.

Piper said, “My favorite book when I was a teenager was Frankenstein . Maybe because Mary Shelley was my age when she wrote it, and that blew my mind. But you know what I got from that book? When Victor dies at the end, the Creature chooses to die with him. He gets lost into the frozen arctic. As distant as Victor was from him, when his creator wasn’t there anymore, there was nothing left. Just ...”

“Oblivion.”

Piper watched him a moment. “Yeah.”

He rested his head against the wall, lost in the dance of shadows on the ceiling.

“What finally made them take you away from your mother?” he said without looking at her.

“Um,” she said with a shot of discomfort, “my mother had overdosed and gone unconscious. I called 911 and then went back to watching television on the couch with her unconscious body next to me while I waited. It became so normal I didn’t even think about it. They didn’t let me back with her after that, and she didn’t fight for me.”

“You tried to find her since?”

“No. Have you tried to find your mother or father?”

There was another long silence before he said, “I should’ve given the jail better instructions or—”

“This wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could.”

He shook his head. “If he gets away, Sophie will spend her life looking over her shoulder and thinking he’s right there.”

She went somber as she said, “She’ll be doing that anyway.”