your story, so just tell us what you know about it.”

She looked at the two men and colored a bit, then said, “It’s embarrassing.”

“This has pretty much gone past embarrassing,” Virgil said. “There are four dead, including a young girl.”

She nodded, and said, “I was twenty-six when I met Roland. I worked for a few years after I got out of high school, at the HyVee, but I could see that wasn’t going anywhere, so I went to school up in Mankato, studying business systems. That’s where I met Roland. . . .”

She said that she never felt that she was pretty; that Roland had wooed her, and said she was. She never particularly wanted to marry a farmer, but Roland seemed nice enough. “Basically, I thought he might be my last chance, if I didn’t want to wind up being an old maid somewhere. Which I probably will, now. In Omaha.”

They married, moved to a farmstead down the highway from his parents’ farm, and worked for Roland’s parents, as well as some land he leased from a real estate company in Minneapolis. Everything went fine, she said, for about six months.

“We had these friends, the Bosches, and the Waldts. Dick and Mary, Dick and Sandy. We’d go out with them, to the movies, or whatever, two or three times a week, sometimes. They had taco night at this bar, and we’d go there. Anyway, after about six months, Roland asked me what I thought about Dick Bosche, you know, whether I liked him. . . .”

The conversation widened. She liked him, but how much did she like him? After a couple of weeks, the question arose, would she be interested in sleeping with Dick Bosche? Dick had mentioned that he found her really powerfully attractive, and Roland thought Mary looked pretty good, and Mary was willing. . . .

“So, we tried it. I have to say, Dick was more interesting than Roland, when it came to sex,” Mackey said. “I wasn’t that experienced, and he . . . liked to do things. Anyway, we went like this for a few weeks, trading off.”

Then the question came up, wouldn’t it be fun for the friends to get together. Like, all in the same place. They tried that.

“Then, they all said, wouldn’t it be fun to bring in Dick and Sandy. By this time, I was really shaky about the whole thing. It was fun, but in sort of a sick-making way. I’d lie awake and think about it, and afterwards, when it was done . . .”

She shook her head.

“We don’t really need all the details,” Virgil said, trying to be kind. “How did it end up? Were you all together? All six of you?”

“Yes. Eventually. And the guys wanted, you know, to do things together, so there’d be like two of them with one of us women, or two women with one of the guys, and they wanted us women to do things with each other so they could watch. . . .”

“How long did this go on?” Virgil asked.

“A year and a half. We got married in May, and then about the time it started snowing, we first got with Dick and Mary, and then, a few weeks later, Dick and Sandy. And that went on for a year. Then, they told me about the church. How the World of Spirit involved a merger of the spirit and the flesh between people . . . and I started figuring out that they had this whole group of people and that they passed each other around and they wanted to pass me around. To a lot of people. All the time.”

“That’s when you left?”

“I didn’t leave right away. I argued about it, and Roland got really crazy, and he started slapping me. I mean, hard. I finally decided, this was no good, and I told him I was going to leave. He said if I left, the church would kill me, because I knew what they were doing, and the World of Law would wreck the church if they knew about it. I told him that I wouldn’t tell anybody, but then Emmett Einstadt came over—he’s like the big guru—and told me that once I was in, I couldn’t get out. And I was in. After that, I had the feeling that they were watching me, all the time.”

“And . . .”

She said, “So I got passed around for a while.”

“If it was against your will, it was rape,”