So far, this story was a familiar one.
“Your mama came in here two or three times those first couple of weeks, with you in tow. She was young. Skittish, though she did a good job hiding it.” Ree paused. “I offered her a job.”
“Waitressing?” I asked. I’d worked as a waitress at a diner before Briggs had recruited me to the Naturals program. I wondered if some part of me had remembered my mother doing the same thing.
Ree pursed her lips. “I have a bad habit of hiring waitresses who’ve seen the ugly side of life. Most of them are running from something. I never knew what that something was for Lorelai—she didn’t volunteer the information, and I didn’t ask. She took the job. I gave her a good deal on rent.”
“The blue house with the big oak tree,” I said softly.
Ree nodded. “My daughter had recently vacated the premises. I had Melody and Shane with me, so it seemed a shame to let the house go to waste.”
Vacated the premises. I translated those words based on the way that Ree had said them: As in, took off and dumped her kids with you.
It was easy to understand why Ree might have had a soft spot for a young single mother struggling to support her daughter.
Home isn’t a place, Cassie. My mom’s litany had stayed with me for years, but now I heard it differently, knowing that—however briefly—we’d had a home once.
“Was my mother close with anyone?” I asked Ree, memories swirling just out of reach. “Involved with anyone?”
“Your mama always did have an eye for good-looking men.” This was Ree, trying to be diplomatic. “Then again, she also had an eye for trouble.”
Not that diplomatic.
Ree narrowed her eyes at Dean. “You trouble?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
She turned to Michael. “You?”
He offered her his most charming smile. “One hundred percent.”
Ree snorted. “That’s what I thought.”
The door to the restaurant opened then, and Widow’s Peak from the apothecary museum walked in. Ree smiled when she saw him, the way she had when Dean had ordered biscuits and gravy.
“You remember Shane?” Ree asked me. “My grandson.”
Shane. I could feel a memory hovering just out of reach. Ree started to stand.
“Did my mother know a man named Mason Kyle?” I asked before she could leave.
Ree stared at me. “Mason Kyle?” She shook her head, as if trying to clear it of memories. “I haven’t heard that name in twenty-five years. He left Gaither when he was, what? Seventeen or so? Long before your mama came to town, Cassie.”
As Ree made her way toward the counter—and her grandson—one of the older women at the table behind us clucked her tongue. “Shame what happened to the Kyle family,” she said. “Downright tragic.”
“What happened?” Sloane asked, twisting in her seat.
The old man playing chess on the other side of us turned to look at her. “Got killed,” he grunted. “By one of those people.”
What people?
“Poor little Mason wasn’t more than nine or so,” the tongue-clucking woman said. “Most people hereabouts think he saw the whole thing.”
I pictured the little boy from the photograph, then thought of the monstrous killer he’d become.
“Enough.” It was clear from the tone in Ree’s voice and the immediate reactions of those around us that her word was law. With a nod, she turned back to her grandson. “Shane, what can I get y—”
Before the question was out of her mouth, Shane saw something out the window. His whole body tensed, and he slammed out of the diner and charged into the street.
I looked out the window in time to see him striding toward a group of a dozen or so people. They walked in lines of four. Various ages. Various ethnicities. Every single one of them was dressed entirely in white.
Shane attempted to approach a girl standing behind the others, but a man with thick hair—ink-black and shot through with gray—stepped in front of him.
“Going to go out on a limb,” Lia said, her eyes locked on the oncoming confrontation, “and guess that those people are emissaries from the friendly neighborhood cult.”
Those people. That was the phrase the man playing chess had used to describe the murder of Mason Kyle’s family, thirty-some-odd years before.
Michael tossed three twenties on the table, and all five of us made our way out the door.
“Mel.” Shane tried to sidestep the man with the graying hair. “Melody.”
“It’s all right, Echo,” the man told the girl Shane had addressed as Melody. “Speak your truth.”
A girl I almost recognized—the way I’d almost recognized Shane—stepped forward. Her eyes were on the ground. “I’m not Melody anymore,” she said, her voice light and wispy, barely more than a whisper. “I don’t want to be Melody. My second name—my true name—is Echo.” She lifted her eyes to her brother’s. “I’m happy now. Can’t you be happy for me?”
“Happy for you?” Shane repeated, his voice catching in his throat. “Mel, you can’t even talk to me without glancing at him to make sure what you’re saying is okay. You gave up college—college, Melody—to join the soul-sucking cult that stole our mother away from us when we were kids.” Shane’s fingers curled into fists. “So, no, I can’t be happy for you.”
“Your mother was lost.” The man in charge addressed those words to Shane, his manner almost gentle. “We attempted to provide solace, offer her a simpler way of life. I was as grieved as you were when she chose a different path.”
“You’re the reason she left town!” Shane exploded.
His opponent’s demeanor never wavered. “Serenity Ranch is not for everyone. We cannot help everyone, but those we can help, we do.” He glanced at Melody, so subtly that if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed.
“I’ve found my Serenity,” Melody recited, her voice expressionless, her eyes glassy. “In Serenity, I’ve found balance. In Serenity, I’ve found peace.”
“Are you on something?” Shane demanded before whipping back around to the man he’d confronted. “What did you give her? What have you been giving her?”