The headline summed it up: CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
Eliza Jones, a prophet. Morgans first thoughtwell, his first coherent thought, after concussive astonishment had given way to the first of many waves of mirthhad been to get business cards printed for her, leave them somewhere for her to find. Eliza Jones, prophet. And of course he couldnt leave out the best part. Oh boy. The thing that elevated this story to its special pinnacle of Crazytown. No, really. It was the mansion on the hill overlooking Crazytown. It was my crazy can beat up your crazy kind of crazy. Blindfolded. With one hand tied behind its back.
Or one wing .
Oh god. Morgan had actually fallen out of his chair, laughing. His elbow still smarted as a reminder. Eliza Joness charming family cult? These were no run-of-the-mill chosen ones, not they. Their spectacular difference?
They claimed to be descended from an angel.
DESCENDED FROM AN ANGEL.
It was the best thing Morgan Toth had ever heard.
Eliza Jones, Prophet
1/512th Angel (give or take)
Thats what the business cards were going to say. But then hed seen what shed e-mailed to herself from Morocco and gotten a better idea. It was playing out now.
We all prayed for her seven years ago, said the highest-paid news anchor in the world. Known to us then only as Elazael, she was believed by her church to be the incarnation of an angel of that same name who fell to Earth a thousand years ago. Its quite a story, and its not over. In an unexpected turn of events, ladies and gentlemen, the young lady is not only alive and living under an assumed name, she is a scientist in the nations capital, on track to earn her doctorate.
And Morgan didnt hear the rest, because someone gasped, Its Eliza! and then the others erupted in a frenzy.
And that was all right. Frenzy all you want, my fine idiots. Frenzy away , thought Morgan Toth, strolling back to his lab. Its good to be king.
45
CATS OUT OF BAGS
The next fluttering of commotion to sweep through the kasbah had a different feel from the start. No InshAllah s or gazing skyward this time. There was disbelief, rancor, and they appeared to be looking at Eliza .
Eliza had had a problem with paranoia all her life. Well, for a good chunk of her life, it hadnt even been paranoia, but the foregone expectation of rote persecution: simple and nasty and certain.
People were looking at her, and they were judging her. Back home in Florida, in a small town in Apalachicola National Forest, everyone had known who she was. And after she ran away, well. Then it was the chill at the nape of her neck, the dread of being found or recognized, the always looking over her shoulder.
That had gradually fadednever completelybut when you lived with a secret, the paranoia was never far beneath the surface. Even if youd done nothing wrong (which in her case was debatable), you were guilty of having the secret, and any searching glance cast your way took on this ominous meaning.
They know. They know who I am. Do they know?
But they didnt. They never knew. At least, they never had before, and for that, Eliza had a particular perversity of the church to thank. They shunned graven imagesnot just of God and their foremother, but of the prophets as well, and after Elizas first vision, no more pictures of her were taken. Not that there were many before that. Her family wasnt exactly preserve-memories-for-posterity kind of people. They were more like prepare-for-Armageddon, guns-in-a-bunker kind of people. The photo used on the news had been taken by a tourist passing through Sopchoppythat was the actual name of the town near which their church compound stoodwho, alerted by a local, had snapped a picture of those angel-cult freaks when they came in for supplies.
Those angel-cult freaks had been a local story for decades, but had only exploded nationally when Eliza disappeared. Her motherthe high priestessonly reported her missing weeks after the fact, desperate enough for help finding her lost prophet to go to the officials she scorned as idolaters and heathens. Of course, it had looked fishy, and society is not predisposed to give cults the benefit of the doubt. The headline had snagged the national imagination like a briar: CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
Thatll do it.
Eliza could have cleared them at any time. She could have come forwardshe was in North Carolina by thenand said, Here I am, alive. But she hadnt. There was no pity in her for them. None. Not then, not now, not ever. And, as a body was never foundthough it was looked for, assiduously, for monthseventually the law had had to leave them alone. Lack of evidence, theyd cited, though this had swayed neither public opinion nor the minds of the investigators. It was a sordid affair, and you had only to look into the eyes of the mother, they said, to know the worst. One of the detectives had gone so far as to state, on camera, that he had interrogated the Gainesville Ripper in his career, and he had interrogated Marion Skillingher name, it was not lost on the tabloids, contracted to Marions killing and they gave you the same sense in your soul of pitching headlong into a dark hole.