have to blame myself as well, because I hadn’t stopped, either. Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it’s human.
So human.
• • •
“I hadn’t been there at all,” I told Dr. Braithwaite. “That’s what I decided, and there was only one person who could testify that I had been.”
“The nurse,” Ed said. “Jenny Knowlton.”
“I thought she’d have no choice but to help me. We had to help each other, and the way to do it would be to say we’d left Goat Mountain together, when Jacobs started raving about turning off Mary Fay’s life support. I was sure Jenny would go along with that, if only to make certain I kept quiet about her part in it. I didn’t have her cell number, but I knew Jacobs would. His address book was in the Cooper Suite, and sure enough, her number was in it. I called and got voicemail. I told her to call me back. Astrid’s number was also in his book, so I tried her next.”
“And also got voicemail.”
“Yes.” I put my hands over my face. Astrid’s days of answering her phone had been all over by then. “Yes, that’s right.”
• • •
Here’s what happened. Jenny drove her golf cart back to the resort; Jenny got into her Subaru; Jenny drove to Mount Desert Island without stopping. All she wanted was the comfort of home. That meant Astrid, and sure enough, Astrid was waiting for her. Their bodies were found just inside the front door. Astrid must have plunged the butcher knife into her partner’s throat as soon as Jenny walked in. Then she used it to cut her wrists. She did it crosswise, not the recommended technique . . . but she cut all the way to the bone. I imagine them lying there in pools of drying blood while first Jenny’s phone rang in her purse, then Astrid’s on the kitchen counter below the knife rack. I don’t want to imagine that, but I am helpless to stop it.
• • •
Not all of Jacobs’s cures killed themselves, but over the next two years, a great many did. Not all of them took loved ones with them, but over fifty did; this I know from my research, which I shared with Ed Braithwaite. He would like to write it off as coincidence. He can’t quite do it, although he is happy to dispute my own conclusion from this parade of madness, suicide, and murder: Mother demands sacrifices.
Patricia Farmingdale, the lady who poured salt in her eyes, recovered enough of her vision to smother her elderly father in his bed before blowing her brains out with her husband’s Ruger. Emil Klein, the dirt-eater, shot his wife and son, then went out to his garage, poured lawnmower gas over himself, and struck a match. Alice Adams—cured of cancer at a Cleveland revival—went into a convenience store with her boyfriend’s AR-15 and unloaded, killing three random people. When the clip was empty, she pulled a snub-nose .38 from her pocket and fired it into the roof of her mouth. Margaret Tremayne, one of Pastor Danny’s San Diego cures (Crohn’s disease), threw her infant son from the balcony of her ninth-story apartment, then followed him down. Witnesses said she uttered not a sound as she fell.
Then there was Al Stamper. You probably know about him; how could you have missed the screaming headlines on the supermarket tabloids? He invited both of his ex-wives to dinner, but one of them—the second, I believe—got caught in traffic and showed up late, which was lucky for her. When she walked in the open door of Stamper’s Westchester home, she discovered Wife Number One roped to a chair at the dining room table with the top of her head caved in. The ex–lead singer of the Vo-Lites emerged from the kitchen, brandishing a baseball bat slimed with blood and hair. Wife Number Two fled the house, screaming, with Stamper chasing after her. Halfway down the residential street, he fell to the pavement, dead of a heart attack. No surprise there; he was a heavyweight.
I’m sure I didn’t find all the cases, scattered across the country as they were, and buried in the outbreaks of senseless violence that seem more and more to be a part of daily life in America. Bree could have found others, but she wouldn’t have helped me even if she had still been single and living in Colorado. Bree Donlin-Hughes wants nothing to do with me these days, and I totally get