When a woman moves into the sleepy town, it rouses everyone's tongues to start wagging. She is strange and distant in her manner. Tia Frost is blissfully unaware of the townsfolk's discomfort with her. With Burt at her side, she wonders about the wo...
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One where she was carrying a deer and was laughing. In another, she was holding a baby. In the last, she was angry pointing at the man in the wedding photograph. I looked at Roland. "All these were taken by the same person?"
"It's not a sure thing but yes. I believe that it's the same person that took the photos."
I picked up the last and asked. "Why would someone photograph an argument?" I looked up when he didn't reply. He was holding another photograph, eyes wide and mouth open. He looked up at me and held the picture closer to his chest. "What's that one?"
"You don't want to see this?" His voice was small and pained.
"I'm got going to get angry about something that happened in her past." He offered me the photograph and I looked at it.
Tia was lying on the floor blood covering her body. She looked unconscious. Her husband's face was curled into a snarl and he was part way through smashing a chair over her. The book he had opened had more of the violent photographs in it. "She would pick a horror book to hold these." Roland sounded immensely sad.
"Yes. It explains why someone took a photograph of her arguing."
I sat there and looked over the whole group of them. I grabbed my notebook and pen. Roland helped me match up the timeline of the photographs and then made notes about what pages we found them on. Roland moved off and brought out my easel and aboard. He blue-tacked the photographs and other bits on the board.
I started reading the book on cultists. Roland sat down in one of the other chairs sipping his tea and staring at the board. I looked up from the book. "What's the point of showing you these pictures?" Roland sounded frustrated.
"Listen to this. So I asked her why did you stay if you were so badly beaten. And she gave me the only answer she had. My children were there, I couldn't leave them. When she felt able to leave the cult without children she spent years in fear of being found. Every moment of her life she watched for those black cars to pull into her driveway. She was a member of one of these cults. Maybe the one called the church of sky. She might even be the woman that this author spoke to."
Roland shook his head. "She's a little young to have fully grown children."
"Are you so sure? She has changed her name so do we know how old she is?"
He sighed. "I still don't think it's possible she would have children older than ten."
"What if she couldn't take them? Listen to this one." I scanned the pages for the section I wanted.
"This poor soul spoke to me in a flat tone throughout the interview. She looked dead behind her eyes. It seemed that by leaving her children behind in that place she had lost herself. Could it be the knowledge of what they face there? It's one of the most difficult decisions these people face. They are often told if they leave their children in the cult they will be left alone. This is a lie, of course, they never truly give up on them. This particular woman almost didn't talk with me for fear they would find her. As it was she insisted she would only meet me in her car. It looked like one of the cars the church itself uses."
