hour wigged me out.
Delphine once told me that nothing good happens after two a.m. She’d been referring to booty-call texts and online shopping. But I was willing to bet her concept extended to insane, antisupernatural cultists as well. There was no way they were in there having a predawn bake sale.
“What do you want to do?” Wilder turned his laser focus onto me. It made me nervous, like being the only student to show up to my final exam and I was naked and speaking the wrong language.
I had to think fast. My first plan had been my best, but there had to be a way we could still find out some information. I didn’t want to turn tail and run just yet. “Let’s go around the back. I think we’re looking at the lobby right now. There’s a chance we might be able to actually see inside from the back, get a better idea of what’s going on.” I was proud of coming up with a decent Plan B under pressure.
He nodded, and without waiting for me, marched ahead into the tall grass skirting the parking lot. The dry leaves rustled lightly as we moved through them, but nothing so loud I thought it would arouse suspicion. We made our way slowly but with purpose around the perimeter of the building. It took a surprisingly long time thanks to how big the place was, but we eventually found ourselves looking in through the big back windows of the church. We were situated on an angle, well outside the reach of the light, so no one glancing out would be able to spot us.
Here the glass wasn’t reflective, so we could see right inside. It was like watching a boring Sunday-morning sermon on mute. A giant gold cross was mounted in front of the window, and even from our angle I was able to see a huge metallic sun behind it.
“They really downplay the symbolism, don’t they?” I whispered as I adjusted my position, and my foot slipped into a muddy divot, my shoe suddenly wet and stuck in the ground. I grabbed Wilder and used his arm as support to pull my foot free, and the loud sucking noise the mud made was deafening in all the silence.
He shot me a meaningful glare, and I tried to apologize, but he placed a finger against my lips to quiet me.
Wilder pointed back towards the window, and I looked past the gaudy cross that was probably worth more than my house, to the gathering of people seated in pews.
They appeared like every small-town church get-together I’d ever been dragged to in my youth. I hadn’t been exposed to much religion—it wasn’t a big part of the McQueen upbringing—but there’d been a time when Callum cared about how the community perceived us. Not coming to Sunday mass made us seem strange, so we’d started to go together. As a family. Callum, Ben and myself, often accompanied by Amelia and Magnolia. This arrangement led to more confusion than benefit, and after a year we stopped going altogether.
I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Callum not wanting the single women in St. Francisville to think he and Amelia were an item.
The twenty or so people inside the Franklinton church were dressed in a variety of Sunday bests. A couple men wore short-sleeved button-down white shirts, stained slightly yellow over the years. Not one of them had a shirt that looked younger than me. Two of the men wore plaid flannel, and one had on a cowboy hat. The women were mostly dressed in plain dresses with drab colors, their hair blonde or mousy brown.
Redneck Stepford wives.
Only one woman seemed to deviate. She had blonde hair but wore a loose sweater and jeans. She sat a few rows back from the rest, and her attention was all for someone at the front of the room.
At first I couldn’t see who they were watching, but then a man came into view. I only saw the back of him, but his blond hair and lean build gave him away. Timothy Deerling. His posture exuded the same easy confidence I remembered from the video.
Wilder must have made the connection too because he stiffened next to me like he might bolt towards the church at any moment.
I placed my hand on his forearm and squeezed, just as I had when we first watched the video together. I don’t know if it gave him any comfort, but it