Ashes of Another Life (3 page)

Casey thought about it. She understood what Martinez meant by “awful,” but it was a matter of subjectivity in the end. There were citizens of Sweet Springs whose family roots dated back to the very first town meeting, and they would argue that
our
society is “awful” and has become morally corrupt, not theirs, not their quiet little slice of heaven. But absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that’s what was happening in Sweet Springs.

“They’re her
family
,” Casey explained, trying not to let her own irritation with the situation show. “If the court is going to remove Tara Jane from their custody, they need evidence of abuse.”

“Evidence?”

“Evidence. Testimony.” Casey sucked in a sharp breath, let it go. “I’ve been dealing with this for years. My advice? She’s got to open up and tell her story. The ugly parts. It’s the only thing that can save her. Can she do it? Is she ready to talk?”

Another long pause, then Ms. Martinez’s voice came over the line sounding soft and defeated. “She
was
making progress… becoming more comfortable around those she’s been taught are “outsiders.” Absentmindedly, the woman sighed into the receiver. “But lately she’s withdrawing into herself. She’s not taking her medication, and without it, I fear regression… or worse.”

“Have you talked with the foster parents? Do they understand the importance of encouraging her prescriptions?”

Martinez sighed again. “I plan to stop by and talk with them tonight.”

“Good idea.”

“Tell me. Have there been others like Tara Jane? Who have escaped Sweet Springs?”

“A few,” Casey said.

Martinez let out a heavy breath.

If she’s not careful, she’s going to pass out from all this sighing.

“I’m afraid to ask,” the woman said in her faint Latino accent. “These others… Were they sent home?”

Now it was Casey’s turn to sigh. Hell, maybe it was contagious. “The ones who were not willing to come clean about the abuse, who wouldn’t testify against their abusers, yes, they’re back in Sweet Springs.”

For a moment, there was only the sound of breathing and light static on the line, and then the counselor said, “I’ll do everything I can to help.”

“It’s been a pleasure, Ms. Martinez. Please, keep me posted.”

“I will, and thank you for your time.”

Casey hung up, eyes fixed on the photo. It was good to know someone else cared as much about Tara Jane as she did. This was a heavy load to bear alone.

Her jaw tightened. She began to grind her teeth but stopped.

I’m developing too many nervous habits.

There are young lives at stake, and I’m expected to remain calm? Professional? Freedom of religion: the double-edged sword.

She’d been to Sweet Springs only twice in her life. The first time, she was the passenger of a respected elder in the community, discussing the case of a young runaway found sleeping on the streets. She should have known the child was running from something, but it had humbled Casey to see the quaint homes and the well-tended gardens. Boys chopped wood and girls watered crops and plucked chickens. The women sewed dresses and baked bread. The people worked for everything they had. Nothing came easy, and everything was earned.

In those early days of her career in social services, Casey Wendell assumed that’s what the young girl had been running from—an old-fashioned way of life, a physically demanding existence with Easy Street lying just beyond the gates. She knew, now, how wrong her assumption had been.

On her second visit to Sweet Springs, she arrived in her own vehicle. She had noticed a pastry shop on her ride through town with the church elder and decided to sample some home-baked goods. The residents froze at first, watching with leery eyes as her car crept past the front gates. They began to retreat, shooing the children into their homes. They drew their curtains and peered out, suspicious of the unfamiliar vehicle and the outsider behind the wheel. It was then that Casey began to see how things really worked.

The residents couldn’t imagine life outside their community. Sequestered in their tiny patch of isolated desert, everything beyond the red cliff borders seemed a galaxy away. Current news, politics, major world events—everything was filtered through the church, and if any information reached these people at all, it was always tied to scripture and prophecy. All they knew was hard work, faith, and family.

There was no telling what they thought of Casey Wendell as they watched her roll down the street in her flashy yellow car, expecting to find the village bustling with life, but seeing only fearful eyes squinting at her through dark, shrouded windows. She frowned as she remembered the awkward car ride that day, how they’d responded to her like a herd of gazelles discovering a lion in their midst. They were terrified of sin, and outsiders were chock-full of it. On their rare excursions into town, people scoffed at their 1800s-style clothes and pointed at their over-sized families, laughing, and it only served to deepen the wedge between Sweet Springs and the rest of the world.

She pictured Tara Jane’s face the first time they had met—dark hair plastered into a wave against her forehead, eyelids swollen from crying—and she wondered how people could hold their religious faith at a higher esteem than their own children. Maybe it all traced back to the Old Testament moment when God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son. A can of worms had been opened during that suspenseful moment, which perhaps was impossible to close.

Casey had never been particularly religious or Atheistic, choosing instead to ignore the issue altogether. It upset her, the things people were willing to do in the name of God.

Scary shit
.

She used her rolling chair to push away from the desk and glide over to the filing cabinet. She opened the drawer in the middle and retrieved the nearly empty glass bottle she had stashed there yesterday. Its brown contents sloshed around inside, and she had to chuckle to herself. Some people hid pints of vodka around the office. She hid bottles of Starbucks.

She unscrewed the lid, set it down and took a gulp.

Mmmmm. Caffeine.

She savored the rich roasted flavor with hints of vanilla. Her shoulders loosened a little, but the rest of her was still tense, muscles tight. The desk lamp shined on the metallic lid, reminding her of how her father’s police badge used to look when she was a child.

She remembered pacing the hardwood floor of the foyer in her white ruffled nightgown, waiting for him, so excited to hear the sound of his keys jingling against the lock. He always gave a tired smile before turning to the coat rack, the lamps glinting off his badge as he removed his state-issue jacket. To her young eyes it seemed like the most priceless treasure in the world—that badge, the brass symbol of her father’s heroics.

She frowned. Removing the Starbucks lid from her desk, she threw it in the trash and raised the day-old coffee to her lips.

I don’t want to think about this.

She took a gulp and finished the bottle, her trademark lipstick stains coloring the rim, and tossed it into the can.

Her father had been her hero for as long as she could remember. As a child, Casey would beg her mother to let her stay up late so she could hug him goodnight when he got home. On Friday and Saturday nights, her mother would agree, and Casey would watch the big hands of the family room clock slowly tick, plotting the questions she would ask him, for even at a young age she understood that too many questions would irritate him after a long day on patrol.

No matter how tired he was, though, he managed a smile when he saw her there, waiting for him, full of curiosity about his day. He would drop to his knees and welcome her into his arms before walking her down the hall, slowly enough to talk for a while, sending her to bed with a stern warning to, “Stop waiting up” for him, which always went unheeded and likewise unpunished.

One night, Casey’s father didn’t come home. It was a school night, so Casey had been in bed for an hour when her mother rushed in, shook her awake, and told her to get dressed. They rushed to their big, old Ford without so much as another word and went speeding down the highway. Her eyes were filled with tears before her mother could explain. She knew. They both knew. It was bad. It had to be bad for mother to have such a look on her face—a mix between fury and surrender. Deep down, they’d always known something would happen to him, the very reason Casey begged to stay up each night.

She could still picture the tubes poking in and out of her father like a circuit board, the blood blossoming like a rose in fast forward on the white gauze taped to his side. His bruised and swollen face only vaguely resembled her hero, but his big, blue eyes were open wide, which was better than she had feared. His once-handsome features were slack from pain medication, but he filled with joy at the sight of his family. Casey let go of a breath she might have been holding the entire car ride, and cried tears of joy and pain simultaneously.

A vigilante had shot Casey’s father. They tried to make it sound like a failed burglary, but she picked up pieces of the truth from the adult conversations she overheard the following weeks. A crazed vigilante had thought the police department was a failure. He was tired of living in a crime-riddled part of town. He’d written numerous letters, letting the department know that God was watching, and if they would not do God’s work, he would. Neighbors and co-workers admitted hearing him aggressively spout scripture and talk about “cleaning the streets of sin.”

While he was taking justice into his own hands one night, an encounter with law enforcement resulted in his death when he drew a gun, shooting an officer twice in the chest. Not just any officer—Casey’s father. Devoted husband and ten-year veteran of the force, Henry Wendell.

The memory of her father’s slow and painful recovery still troubled her over two decades later. It baffled Casey how her father
forgave
that man. When Casey expressed hostility towards the shooter, her father would say, “Let it go, Casey.” He never spoke ill of the man who nearly took his life. He would lean back, lace his hands over his chest and say, “Forgiveness is the least I can give in return for my life. I’m still here, Casey. Still here.” And he would smile, and she would smile back. But secretly she made a decision to never trust anyone who showed signs of mistaking hatefulness for religion.

She leaned back in her desk chair now and laced her fingers across her chest, just like her father. But it didn’t calm her. What was going on in Sweet Springs was wrong, and it needed to stop. The women were subservient to the men, and the ones who resisted were either punished until their spirits were broken or married off at an early age to an old man with several wives already. The young boys didn’t have it much better. They were always at risk of being cast out of the community, penniless and alone, for the slightest misbehavior.

As Casey’s father always said, “I do not hold the
people
accountable, but each individual person.” There were good people in Sweet Springs, trapped under the control of something they couldn’t fight. The church owned their property. The church provided their jobs. Hell, the church even had the power to break up their families and reassign them to new fathers and husbands. Living under that sort of control, one learned to stay quiet, to blend in and follow along. She couldn’t let her bitterness for blind faith let her lose sight of the real problem: there were children not far from here living in absolute fear.

Her stomach growled. She checked her watch and realized it was time to grab some lunch. Her breakfast had been light. She needed nourishment laced with caffeine… and she needed it soon.

Yet she couldn’t stop thinking about the girl. Tara Jane didn’t stand a chance at freedom if she wasn’t willing to testify. She needed to tell her story, to open up to the outside world. On top of that, the foster parents should be enforcing her prescriptions. What sort of people were they, anyway?

She got the urge to drive by the house at lunch, just to get a feel of where the girl had been living. She knew you couldn’t judge a person by the place where they lived, but for some reason, she couldn’t shake the feeling that this little girl needed her help in some way.

She ripped a post-it note from a yellow stack near her desk calendar and copied the address from the open folder. Her stomach grumbled as she cleared her desk, neatly arranging the file before placing it in her top drawer. She tucked the Post-it note in her jacket pocket, grabbed her purse and headed for the door.

She approached her car just like every other day, trying to decide where to eat. She didn’t notice the way the laundry pile in the back bulged as she slid into her seat. She didn’t notice the garments flying as a man sprang from underneath them. The cold steel of his gun pressed against her skull, catching her completely off guard. Then, close to her ear, an unfamiliar voice growled, “Hello, Casey. You and I need to talk.”

Chapter Four

Tara Jane’s shadow faded in and out as the sun flickered between clouds. Dark brown hair veiled her eyes, but she didn’t bother to tuck it behind her ears. Instead, she let it hang, blowing in the wind, granting her a small taste of privacy.