Free Crazy Lady by James Hawkins Page A

boxes against a brick outhouse and senses a presence.
    â€œShh…” she whispers, pulls Janet’s crucifix from her bag, and gingerly advances like a vampire hunter. “Janet?” she coos. “Janet?” A brown head scarf appears.
    The chase is short. Janet is too weak to struggle, and as Trina escorts her towards the car she says soothingly, “Don’t worry. We won’t tell the police where you are.”
    Behind her, playing backstop, Rick mutters under his breath, “You could get us five years for this.”
    Rick Button’s warning seems likely to come to fruition the moment they take Janet into their house and Kylie sings out, “Mum, Dad, police on the phone.”
    â€œLet me,” says Trina, grabbing it from her husband, but she instantly relaxes. “It’s only Mike Phillips,” she says with her hand over the mouthpiece as the inspector explains that he’s been in touch with an officer who specializes in cults and sects.
    â€œYou know the sort of thing,” he elucidates. “Twenty-year-old heiress runs off and gives everything to God, who turns out to be some freaky-haired junkie with a Bible.”
    â€œI don’t think Janet has anything —” Trina begins, but he cuts her off.
    â€œNot now she doesn’t. That’s my point. But she may have done. Anyway, Officer Zelke wants to talk to you.”
    â€œHey,” shouts Rob from the basement as he turns up the volume on the television. “It sounds like the stick insect.”
    â€œThe RCMP and Vancouver police are searching for a woman wanted in the death of one of their own…”
    â€œTurn it off,” shouts Rick, but Janet seems oblivious as she caresses her crucifix and rocks herself comfortingly on a kitchen chair.
    â€œWhat makes you think she’s from a cult?” Trina questions Paul Zelke from the quiet of her bedroom a few minutes later.
    â€œDaena,” he asks succinctly. “Is that what she calls herself?”
    â€œYeah. Daena XV.”
    â€œThought so. There’s a whole bunch of women in a joint they call Beautiful and they all reckon they’re Daena. It’s a religious freak show, usual stuff: polygamy, incest, child abuse. All ordained from on high, all in the Bible. But so is stoning gays and adulteresses to death, though we kinda frown on that today.”
    â€œWhy do you think Janet is from there?”
    â€œWe got a call a couple of days ago from the jerk who runs the place. His name’s Wayne Browning, though he calls himself The Saviour. Anyway, he gave a false ID, but we know it was him, and he seemed pretty keen to find her.”
    Wayne Browning isn’t keen on finding Janet, he’s desperate, and so is Janet’s husband, the man who originally sent her there.
    â€œI pay you,” shouts Joseph Creston into the phone. “Keep her there, keep her quiet. Is that such a problem?”
    â€œForty years,” Browning shoots back. “Yes. And what I’ve paid you would keep her for another forty. I’ve funded that place.”
    â€œYeah, but you’ve not done so badly out of it.”
    â€œThat’s not the point. Find her. Get her back.”
    â€œIt may not be that easy,” Browning admits before revealing that Creston is not the only one who wants his wife. “She’s supposed to have killed a cop.”
    The international line goes dead as Creston analyzes the new data and crunches the numbers.
    â€œAll right. This may not be bad,” he is saying as he thinks of the very last time that he saw her: a snivelling wretch on the edge of life following the death of her third child. “I love you. I’ll always do the best for you,” he said before she was whisked away to be put aboard the company jet. “You’ll get help where you are going.”
    â€œMaybe she needs more than you can give her,” he tells Browning. “Maybe