A Deadly Influence (Abby Mullen Thrillers, #1)

by Mike Omer

She forced the fear away, focusing on the man who sat at the far end of the scaffolding, dangling his legs over the abyss. She took a step closer. He glanced at her, unblinking, his lips trembling. His cheek was scratched twice, two angry red lines, jagged and raw. Another step. She was three yards away from him.

“I’m Abby Mullen,” she said, keeping her voice calm and carefree. As if they were two strangers who had randomly bumped into each other while taking a stroll on the scaffolding, hundreds of feet above the street. He ignored her, lost somewhere in his own mind.

The words I’m cold hovered on her lips. It was basic human interaction. If you were cold, you mentioned it, because it was something to say and it was a way to create a connection, to start a conversation. But even such a simple comment hid a trap within. Because I’m cold was about her. And the worst thing she could do right now was make it seem like she wanted to talk about herself. “It’s cold,” she said instead. “You’re probably freezing.” His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. “It seems like you’re in a lot of pain,” she said. “What happened?”

Once she got them talking, her main role was to keep them talking, and to listen. Good negotiators didn’t talk much at all. They mainly listened, prodding their subject to keep on going. Buying time. Gathering information. Looking for the things that would help influence the subject. “The way you wanted?” she repeated his words. It was the number one tool in any negotiator’s arsenal—mirroring. Repeat the subject’s words, demonstrate that you were listening, and make them elaborate more.

He stomped to the adjacent room. A boy’s bed stood in the corner, with Star Wars bedsheets. A small desk and a dark-blue chair. A Harry Potter poster by the window. A nightstand with some plastic toys and a bed lamp. And a corkboard with a few crayon drawings pinned to it. He tapped the screen of his phone and compared the image there to the room he stood in. There was the bed. Same bedsheets. Same poster. The nightstand was identical as well; it had taken him weeks to find all those toys. The corkboard was almost the same. The one on the screen had seven drawings pinned to it. This one had six.

He’d had a terrible nightmare about spiders. Which in itself wasn’t unusual—a lot of kids had nightmares about spiders. Abby herself had had a few when she was young. However, Ben’s nightmare was that Jeepers, his pet tarantula, had died. Sometimes your children’s nightmares were your own shameful fantasies.

Maybe there was no getting over it. Maybe, like the small red patch on her neck, it was a scar that would never entirely heal.

Maybe the computer had it right. She could try to sleep whenever no one talked to her for five minutes and only wake up if someone moved her cursor. It almost sounded like weird sexual innuendo. How was the date last night? Did he move your cursor? Nudge, nudge. Not that she’d gone on a date last night. She had no interest in anyone moving her cursor at the moment. She just wanted a good night’s sleep.

Her interest was piqued. Checking it now She opened the browser, then logged into the support forum. She and Isaac had both been members for years. She checked it daily, rarely participating herself. She wasn’t there for the support. She was there for information.

Finally, after two years, the woman had gathered the courage to quit the group. It wasn’t a cult, she explained again, as if trying to convince herself. After all, they didn’t commit any crimes, and they weren’t even some sort of fanatic religion. It was a diet group. “Then why are you here?” Abby muttered. Because obviously, the woman knew the truth. It had been a cult. A cult didn’t necessarily follow a religion. And often, it wasn’t illegal. All a cult needed was a very devout following centered on one thing. Sometimes it was a religious belief. Sometimes it was a person. And yes, sometimes it could even be a diet. Some cults caused no damage. But often, they became destructive. And usually, all it took was that the leader would become, as the woman in the forum put it, difficult.

It took Nathan, with his short eight-year-old legs and his dreamy pace, two minutes to walk the remainder of the way. That was the only window of opportunity. Originally, he’d figured he would park nearby and wait. But he quickly saw the problem. In this suburban neighborhood, an unknown car parked at the curb would be noticed. People might take a minute to glance inside, maybe get a look at the driver. He couldn’t let that happen.

He thought of Nathan riding the school bus. His emotions about the kid were complicated. In some ways, Nathan was part of his own family. One day he would be. But of course, Gabrielle had mentioned more than once that Nathan was by far her favorite man in the universe. And that was . . . well. It was complicated, that’s what it was.

He practiced his greeting. “Hey, Nathan,” he said to himself. Getting the words just right, with a tone of familiarity. A greeting to someone you’ve seen a few times in the past. He had to convince the boy that he was a friend of the family. Not a stranger to be wary of. And really, in this day and age of social media, was anyone a stranger? Everyone was a friend of a friend, or a follower, or someone who liked your TikTok clip.

“Hey, Nathan.” The voice startled him. He turned to face the street. A man had pulled up in a white car, the passenger window open. He smiled, his expression friendly. Nathan squinted at him, trying to figure out who he was. One of their neighbors, maybe? “Hello,” he said politely. The man laughed. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asked. “I’m Gabi’s friend.” Now that he said it, maybe Nathan had seen this guy with Gabi one time. Gabi had lots of friends, and she worked with a lot of people, especially in the past year. This was probably one of them. Yeah, he was definitely one of them. “Oh right, I remember you now.”

“Gabi is already there. She asked me to pick you up. We’re eating McDonald’s.” He raised a McDonald’s takeout bag to the window. “Your favorite, right? Gabi said to get you a Happy Meal with a burger and absolutely no vegetables.” Nathan relaxed. His favorite meal. And right now, thinking of the burger inside, he felt his mouth watering. “Thanks! I just want to go home for a minute, I have to use the bathroom.” “If your mom sees you, it’ll ruin the surprise,” the man said, opening the passenger door. “Get in, we’ll stop at a gas station, use their restroom.”

“Abby,” he answered almost instantly. The way her ex-husband said her name when she called him was unique. He started with a very quick “A,” and as if to compensate, the “bby” stretched forever. So it was actually “Abbyyyyyyy.” His intonation always sounded like the godfather welcoming a beloved son who had just made an unfortunate mistake. Adoring, patronizing, and sorrowful. It never failed to enrage her to the point of homicidal urges.

This conversation was a recurring moment of irony in her life. As a negotiator, Abby could face deranged criminals armed to the teeth, holding numerous hostages, while her voice remained measured, each word de-escalating the situation. But when she talked to the guy she was married to for twelve years, her voice automatically adopted the style of nails dragged on a blackboard, and she couldn’t think of a single word to utter aside from expletives.

She hung up, her fingers tightening on the phone. Before Ben had taken an all-consuming interest in invertebrates and Squamata, he’d been obsessed with superheroes. He’d had superhero toys, posters, clothes, and bedsheets. To Abby they all seemed boring and interchangeable, except for She-Hulk. Now that was a superhero she could identify with. These phone calls always left her with the urge to morph into a seven-foot green giant and growl, “Abby Smash.”

Abby shut the door behind her, shaking her head. They should insist all prospective negotiators have kids. Nothing prepared you better for crisis management.

She made her tea with a spoonful of honey, which she normally didn’t like, but this time it hit the spot. As she took the second sip, she noticed with some surprise that there was no plate in the sink. Nathan usually made himself a sandwich when he got home, and he always placed the plate in the sink afterward. It was possible he’d washed the plate and dried it, then put it back in the cupboard, but it was also possible that she was a long-lost princess. As she took her tea back to the living room, a second discrepancy caught her eye—Nathan’s schoolbag wasn’t discarded by the door. She went to his room and scrutinized it. It was a mess, as usual, but the schoolbag wasn’t there either. And neither was Nathan. The door to Gabrielle’s room was shut. Eden knocked on it tentatively. “Gabi?” “What?” Gabi asked from beyond the door.

She hung up and tried Nathan’s other friends. She had a total of four phone numbers. As she ticked them off, her breathing became shorter, erratic. Her lungs wouldn’t compress all the way anymore because fear had settled inside them.

“Ms. Fletcher,” Abby said. “I’m not sure—” “Abihail? Don’t you recognize me?” The name, emerging from the ancient past, shocked Abby to the core. She leaned on the desk as if to steady herself. A memory flashed in her mind. A girl standing in a beautiful flower field, her arms folded, her cold blue eyes fixed on Abby. “This is my garden, and you’re not welcome.”

She was obviously frightened Abby would walk away. Eden seemed to really think Abby was her son’s best hope. It wasn’t surprising. Eden probably still had a built-in suspicion of law authorities. In her mind, the police were your enemy, not your friend. And when you needed something, you turned to your family. “How did you find me?” Abby asked, suddenly realizing she had no idea. “You were on the news a few months ago,” Edie said, her voice faint. “I saw you. You haven’t changed.”

So Eden had seen her back then and recognized her. Amazing, after all this time. She would never have identified Eden. Time had not been kind to the girl . . . no, the woman in front of her. Only the blue eyes, which had seemed so familiar when Abby first saw her, remained the same. “So how did you get my number?” Abby asked. “I don’t remember. I probably found it online.” She hadn’t. The number wasn’t listed anywhere. Abby had a feeling she knew how she had gotten it. She waited, letting the silence between them stretch.

The rain was even worse when they left. Eden insisted that Gabrielle join them, terrified to leave her daughter alone in the house. Eden’s umbrella flipped on the way to the car, and she was drenched as she bundled into the passenger seat. Abby looked at the woman, strands of wet hair sticking to her cheeks, her face wet with rain, or tears, or a mix of both. And those eyes, peering from more than thirty years before. Abby started the car, praying Eden wasn’t bringing their shared past hurtling into the present.

There was no window. How had he not noticed it before? The small window above his desk was just . . . gone. His drawings were still all there, the only thing that could not be replaced. Except they weren’t his. In this drawing, Mom’s eyes were too small. The stars were wrong in the spaceship sketch, and it was flying the wrong way. And there was the drawing of his imaginary dog. He hadn’t drawn this. His drawing of the dog was cute. This dog leered at him, his teeth too sharp, his tongue too long, a bad dog. A dog that ate children.

“And where does the bus usually drop them?” Carver asked. “Two blocks down. It’s a quick walk home. I don’t like him walking alone, but I’m working, and the school wouldn’t add another stop by our house. I asked a few times, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough . . .” Abby had seen this before, parents finding the little things they could have done. Small decisions morphing into lifelong regrets.

It was impossible for Abby not to compare Eden’s children with her own, not to imagine herself in the same spot as Eden. Human beings always searched for connections even when there were none. She and Eden had come from the same place. Now, decades later, each had a teenage daughter and a younger son. Each of them apparently a single mother. And when Gabrielle asked her if she’d bring Nathan back home, she could almost see another reality in which Samantha asked the same question about Ben. It sent chills up her spine.

The occasional fake pumpkins and spiders that decorated the front yards and fences in the street struck Carver as oddly inappropriate. The local residents didn’t need to furbish their neighborhood with fake spookiness. Not when true fear had seeped into their lives. Just hours ago, Nathan had paced this very sidewalk like he’d done dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. Following life’s motions. And then something had swept in and taken him. The illusion of safety shattered. Trick-or-treating would be tense on the block this year, with the parent chaperones sticking very close to their children.

“I didn’t see him too well. I’m pretty sure he was a white guy.” “Could you tell his age? Anything about him?” “No. It was pretty far away. I could barely see anything from the kitchen window. And Nathan smiled when he talked to this guy; it seemed like he maybe knew him.” Carver jotted the details, using the time to think it through. He would show the man a few car model images later, see if he could get an actual make. If Nathan knew the man, it tightened the circle of suspects significantly. A relative? A teacher? A parent of a friend?

To see the mentioned tree he had to lean to the left. Doyle hadn’t just glanced out the window like he’d claimed. He’d had to have leaned uncomfortably against the kitchen counter to see the exchange between Nathan and the driver. Something must have felt wrong to him. If he’d only called Eden Fletcher that moment . . .

Eden wasn’t even sure why she was lying in bed. Was she just going through the motions? Or setting an example for Gabrielle? Sleep was completely unthinkable. No matter how late it was, she couldn’t stop her churning mind. She couldn’t even slow it down. Nathan had to be terrified, trapped in a strange place with these awful men. Her sweet Nathan, who’d had nightmares for three days in a row after seeing Disney’s The Lion King, was in a basement, or a dark room, or a cage somewhere, crying for his mom.

Abby turned to face her, and blood rushed to Eden’s cheeks as if Abby could hear her thoughts. “I’m sorry,” she said clumsily. “I wanted a glass of water.” “You don’t need to apologize,” Abby said gently. “It’s your own home.” She kept talking in this placid, soft voice. Had she been like that as a child? Eden remembered Abihail differently, shouting a lot and prattling endlessly.

“A guy I met a while ago. It didn’t work.” Eden was desperate to change the subject. “What happened after . . . after we left the Wilcox Family?” Abby froze for a moment. Had Eden gone too far? The woman clearly didn’t want to reopen that part of her life. Her jaw clenched tightly, eyes glazing as if the question brought back dark memories. “They put me in a foster home,” Abby finally said. “They ended up adopting me.”

“I didn’t want to stay in touch at first. Just wanted to leave it all behind me. But he sent me letter after letter, and eventually I succumbed.” “He was right to insist,” Eden said. “Family’s the most important thing.” “It wasn’t a family,” Abby said. “You know that.”

“And Moses Wilcox was never Father. It was a cult. And Moses Wilcox was the bastard who created it. And in the end, he was the one who took everyone with him to hell.”

After Eden went back to bed, Abby opened her computer and sat motionless in her chair, gazing at her laptop’s screen. Long-lost memories were floating to the surface of her consciousness. She could feel them emerging, lone fragments—a bowl of soup in the mess hall, the laughter of her biological parents when she said something funny, her Sunday dress stretched on her bed, so white and clean. But behind those glimpses, she knew that other memories lurked. Not the ones she’d forgotten but the ones she’d repressed, pushing them into a dark corner in her mind. Now that the dam was cracking, they’d gush out as well. It was talking about the Garden of Eden that had done it. Just mentioning it brought back the scents. The sweet smells of the flowers Eden tended to. What were they? Abby recalled purple flowers . . . lavender? And underneath that scent, something else. A stench that didn’t belong. Chicken feed. The sudden realization knocked her breath away. The Wilcox community had been nearby a poultry feed mill, and on some days, depending on the wind, everything smelled like fermented grain.

Bees hummed around them. A bee had stung her several weeks before, and Abihail had refused to enter the fields afterward—until Father Wilcox told her she had to. He explained that like them, bees did God’s work, spreading beauty in the world. And if a bee had stung her, it was only doing God’s work, and it was probably a small punishment for Abihail’s impure thoughts.

What had happened to that bullet? And to her box of treasures? She now recalled the box, hidden under her bed, full of stuff she’d found—a funny-looking rock, a feather, a metal spring. Real childhood treasures.

“Your body is not yours to desecrate!” Father roared. “You are to be the mother of the Messiah’s children. Do you want your children to be corrupt with germs and filth?” “I’ll wash them,” Abihail blubbered. “I’ll wash them right now.” “You do that.” Father knelt in front of her, his piercing gaze unwavering. “And you apologize while you do it. Apologize to God. Apologize to me. Apologize to your future children. Apologize to every—” Abby exhaled sharply, her fingernails digging into her palms. She was not ready for those memories to return. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

The line went dead. Gabrielle let out a shuddering breath and slumped on the couch. Abby watched the mother and daughter crying, feeling sick to her stomach. This call had made things worse.

He was breathing fast, as if he’d gone on a five-mile run. How could he have forgotten to turn off the phone? The police could easily track a cell phone. And if Eden Fletcher had called the police . . . Maybe she hadn’t. He hoped she hadn’t. But he couldn’t take that risk. He glanced furtively around him but saw no cops rushing into the street. No sounds of multiple sirens. He was in the clear.

It was weird seeing Isaac refer to Eden. In all the years they’d stayed in touch, Abby and Isaac had done their best to avoid discussing anything from their shared past. Aside from their involvement in the cult survivor forum, they tried to focus on their everyday lives. Now, in a way, the three of them had been brought together again. The Moses Wilcox survivor group.

Abby could read body language and facial expressions like open books. Know someone long enough, and that book became one of your favorites. The kind of book in which the pages were worn, and the spine was falling apart because you read it so many times. Will’s demeanor—the parting of the lips, the narrow eyes, the tenseness in his shoulders—was so achingly familiar and touching she had to glance aside and blink a tear away. “No one knows yet, but they’ll figure it out,” she said. “They might,” Will agreed.

He had nowhere to wash his hands. His mom repeatedly told him that he had to wash his hands after peeing, that there were tiny germs in pee, germs he couldn’t even see, and those germs could crawl all over him if he didn’t wash his hands. But there was no sink there. His palms itched. Were those the germs? He imagined them as tiny worms. Were they crawling all over his fingers? His wrists? His arms?

The sudden click behind him sent his heart racing. He whirled around just as the man opened the door. He held a pizza box in his hand. “How are you doing today? Feeling at home, I see.” The smile on the man’s face made Nathan’s skin crawl. He acted as if they were friends, but he kept him locked here in this strange room that was both his and not his.

Nathan stared at him. Did the man really expect him to say thank you? He opened his mouth, then shut it, not sure if he should thank the man or yell at him. The man took two fast steps forward and slammed the pizza box on the desk. “Say thank you!” he roared, his eyes bulging from his flushed face. “Th . . . thank you,” Nathan whimpered.

A sudden thought occurred to him. Back home, he’d discovered he could detach the bed’s headpost by rotating it. He’d used it as an imaginary light saber and almost hit the TV. His mom was furious and told him he wasn’t allowed to do it again. The metal bar was dangerous; he could break something—or accidentally hurt someone. But now, he wanted to hurt someone. And if this was the same kind of bed . . .

A great plan, since the hot shower and the nap came first, and plans that started with hot showers and naps were great plans. In fact, you could call them master plans. When she opened the door and saw Steve sitting in the living room, it threw a big wrench in her master plan. Steve was supposed to come after the shower and the nap; that was the plan. The plan was now upside down. It was a nalp.

She turned to face her son, bracing herself for the difficult talk. He gazed at her with his typical Ben expression, somehow mixing hope and sorrow together. This always stirred that guilt she carried with her. Because if she’d been able to stomach Steve’s infidelities and stay married to him, Ben would have had both parents at home instead of just his often-absent mother. He would have had a normal childhood and . . . and . . . Damn it.