Free Black Water: A Jane Yellowrock Collection by Faith Hunter Page B

maps of the area showed ridges of hills running through Knox County vaguely north and south and making a long curve, like a fishhook. It looked like a fault line, but nothing in the maps said so. The rivers ran between the folds of hills with large flatlands between. Tax records indicated that some areas of the hills were affluent, some much less so. I pored over the topo maps, water table maps, survey maps, and photocopied maps from the nineteen fifties and sixties that still revealed logging roads, farm roads, and other access points not on current maps. The satellite maps of the church lands showed buildings, outbuildings, barns, places where large earth-moving projects had been initiated and later finished, and foundations where new buildings were being started. But the most recent sat maps were six months old and there was no telling what was happening there now.
    While Beast slept in the back of my mind, bored, I sent texts to Eli, Alex’s former Army Ranger brother, the tactics and strategy part of our three-person-team. I needed him to give me an opinion on the best way into the compound, the most likely location of the missing vamp—anything that looked like a prison or holding cell—and then the best way out.
    I got back a single sentence from Eli.
This intel sucks
.
    “Yeah,” I muttered to the empty, quiet room. “It does.”
    Still with no plan, I started in on the current legal charges filed by the state of Tennessee. That part of the research was mind-numbing, and meant more extra-strong tea. Lots more. The charges were scary, and if true, meant that the so-called Christians treated their womenfolk no better than the Taliban treated theirs.
    Close to dawn, I spotted two names that could mean assistance in my quest. John Ingram and his wife, Nell, had left the church and moved to the other side of the ridge some years past. Outcast or reformed, I didn’t know, but people who had former ties with cults could provide helpful suggestions. So could access to their property, one hundred fifty acres that shared a narrow border with God’s Cloud’s church property. “Oh yeah,” I said to the silent room. “Oooooh yeah.” I sent the couple’s names to Alex for a full workup, and a text to Eli to look at the boundary of the two properties as possible access points.
    I was back at the clan home half an hour before dawn, made my report, and then rode Fang into the rising sun and back to the hotel, where I sacked out for four hours of desperately needed sleep.
    ***
    Unfortunately, when I woke, it was to learn that John Ingram had died several years before, and that his young widow had no high school diploma, no GED, no telephone, no cell phone recorded under her name, no computer, and a dozen guns registered to her. She used wood, solar, and wind to power her meager needs, and her house had a well and a septic tank. She had a driver’s license, and paid insurance on an old Chevy truck. Nell lived off the grid. In other words, Nell was a recluse. The only thing she did have was a very active library card. She might be a hermit, but Nell was an eclectically self-educated hermit who had library books checked out on varied subjects, and the books were checked out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Every week. For the last five years.
    Nell studied herbs, plants, farming, carpentry, electric wiring, remodeling, world and U.S. history, business mathematics, banking, religious history, and philosophy. Currently she had five books checked out:
Philosophy for Beginners
, written by Osborne and illustrated by Edney,
Solar Power for Your Home
, by David Findley;
A History of the Church in the Middle Ages
,
by Donald Logan;
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers
, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English; and a trilogy of contemporary romances by Nora Roberts. There were a dozen different music CDs and two DVDs checked out, one a chick flick and the other a techno-disaster thriller. Yeah. Eclectic.