Only the Guilty Survive: A Thriller

PROLOGUE

Claire

Then

I HEAR THE RELENTLESS chittering of the birds first.

The robins, the chickadees, the blue jays. Their chorus hammers into my head, and I wonder why they’re so loud. Then I realize: it’s because everything else is silent.

But silence shouldn’t exist here, and that’s when I know something is wrong. The cacophony of the birds and the eerie quiet of the defunct nature sanctuary force me to sit up. I’d been savoring the solitude, slipping into a nap like a cat in a sunny alcove of the naturalist’s old cottage. I don’t normally sleep in the cottage, but after Lollie went missing, Dom and the others made room for me.

I peer out the window, but the mature trees obscure my view. Outside, the porch is empty of girls with long ragged hair and dirt-flecked feet. Their names would sound foreign from my mouth even though I’ve lived here for months, so I don’t call out to them. With Lollie gone, I’m alone again. But fifteen other people still live here, and they rarely leave the Bird Haven.

My bare feet sink just slightly into the ground, which is still damp from last night’s rain. We didn’t need it; the lake’s already too high for this time of the season.

They could be bathing in the lake. The shoreline smells of rot and decay and it’s hard to feel clean after wading into the foamy water, but the old cottage’s bathroom doesn’t support so many people.

I don’t hear any shouts or giggles, and Eden is always so loud. Closer to the road is the detached garage. I decide to check for the vans. Maybe they left the grounds without me. It’s easy to imagine when you know you’re easy to forget. I feel the familiar prickle of shame and loneliness in my chest as I approach the steel building.

Weedy, untamed brush tickles my ankles. The roll-up door is down. I jiggle the handle. Locked, just like the side door to the garage.

I follow the path to the lake and check there for the Flock. It’s quiet, and so is the brook and the viewing deck. By late afternoon, I take one cucumber from the vegetable patch, deciding it’s the least likely to be missed when the girls return, hungry and accusatory.

At dusk, I’m sweaty with nerves and the shame of abandonment as I locate the key to the garage in the kitchen. I move quickly and worry about Dom’s uncanny knowingness, wondering if I’ll be punished for questioning a plan I didn’t know he had. I have to know if they took both vans. I need to see how much gas is left in the can, to know how far they can go without me and when they’ll return.

The mosquitoes are out now, swarming my sticky, unwashed legs. Night’s gathering fast in the shady nooks under the trees. I don’t hurry to the garage.

A bony rabbit’s foot dangles from the key ring. I try four keys, and the last one works. Before I push open the door, I notice that the sparrows and the starlings are loudest here. All the birds, it seems, talk over one another, just like the girls in the Flock.

I hear the low hum as I open the door. Both vans, idling inside. The glare from the headlights reflects off the wall. How long have they been here?

I reach for the passenger door nearest me, and it swings open easily. There’s no one in the driver’s seat, so I crawl in and peer into the back.

It’s Eden I see first. Her corkscrew curls are caked with vomit and her eyes are open. I whisper her name, which still feels strange on my lips. She’ll be mad I saw her like this.

Then I see the others. They swell and recede as my vision blurs at the edges. My fingers dig into the seat to steady me.

Lido. Sunny. Helena. Thomas. Morgan. Faith.

Ashy and bloated and foaming at the mouth. Propped up with secured seat belts.

I jolt backward and stumble from the van. My head’s pounding, but I look to the other van. It’s then I see a hose snaked from the exhaust pipe to the window and a strip of tape securing the opening.

They’re huddled together in this van. No seat belts, just a heap of bodies. The twins. Goldie and Hunter, arms entwined. Jock’s eyes are open, but Vinny’s are closed. I recognize Raina’s hair but not much else.

When I stumble from the garage, it’s pitch-black dark and the birds have finally stopped, replaced by crickets and bullfrogs. But now I hear the idling vans too. My head swims.

The Flock is dead.

But where’s Dom?

Part 1

CHAPTER

1

Claire

Now

IT’S THE WAY he walks into the foyer, like the library owes him something, like we all do, that catches my attention. His hair is shorter, his eyes darker, even from a distance. But the uptilt of his chin and that eyebrow raised in appraisal are too familiar.

After all these years. Is it Dom?

If anyone would strut into my workplace after ten years in hiding, it’s him.

But no. I catch his eye by mistake and look down quickly. He spots the opening and approaches the desk. I toy with the computer mouse and click into the last patron’s checkout record, just to look busy.

Point me to your section of content on the Flock, he says without waiting for me to look up.

My head darts to study him, up close this time. He’s taller than Dom, and I can tell he thinks he’s charming too. But he’s too young to be Dom. I place him somewhere in his midtwenties, when Dom would be nearly forty by now.

The Flock?

Yeah, the cult. Mass suicide, big news around here, I’m sure. I take it you’ve heard of them?

I purse my lips and look away. Mmm. We don’t have a section about them. I’m sorry.

"What about articles from the Daily News? There must have been so many at the time. I looked online but couldn’t find digitized copies. Where’s your archive?"

I should point him to Lourdes so she can help him with the clunky microfiche machine, a relic from another century. But I don’t know that I can trust even her, so I paste a smile onto my face in hopes of transforming it into something different from any photos he might find. I step out from behind the counter.

Over here, I say, pointing the man to the machine. I inch away, ready to fade like a shadow.

So, Iola’s got the one paper, but I’ll look at neighboring towns for coverage as well. Starting on September fourteenth, 2012.

I startle. Not the day the Flock died. The day Lollie went missing.

Help me narrow it down? He offers a smile as an afterthought.

I should be getting back to the desk, I murmur.

He laughs, the sound softer than I expected. If someone comes in, by all means, help them. He gestures back to the microfiche and stacks of film.

He’s not wrong. It’s summer, and Iola is a college town. There’s no one in the library today, and I’ll be lucky if one or two elderly townspeople saunter in to beat the heat this afternoon. It’s dead quiet.

I’m Arlo, by the way.

Nice to meet you, I offer as I reach up to unfurl my coiled hair, brushing it—surreptitiously, I hope—over my name tag. I curl my shoulders inward, trying to make myself smaller.

With shaking hands, I demonstrate how to load the film and scroll through the pages. A futile need to conceal my involvement in the Flock drives me to tell him that the magnifying feature is broken and the slides may not be much help. But he clicks through the app, zooms, and scans content with a practiced ease.

Seems to be working fine, he says, still standing. I’m uncomfortably aware he’s using his height to exert dominance over me. My old therapist was always quick to point out just how easily I let myself be manipulated by men’s body language.

How long have you been a librarian here? he asks, distracted. He’s flipping through pages so fast I can’t imagine how he can even see the content.

I’m not a librarian. My dad enrolled me at a backup school after my top-choice college rejected me, but I dropped out after a single semester that showed me how deeply broken I was, even before the deaths. I don’t have a degree. I work part-time at the library’s circulation desk and refer all the questions to Lourdes, who took the job just to get away from her twin toddlers for a few hours.

A few years, I say vaguely, edging further from Arlo.

He stops the reader abruptly and zooms in, eyes darting as he scans the screen. Looking for Lollie.

You must be asked about the suicide all the time. Curious college kids and reporters on the anniversary, I bet. I’m no different, he laughs. But I’m going deeper than them. Think Susan Wade’s book, but ten more years of facts than she had when she wrote about the Flock.

You’re writing a book?

I’ve shelved Susan Wade’s book countless times. It’s one of the only books the library has reordered and replaced because the copy in circulation got too tatty. There’s a black-and-white picture of me, pale haired and rangy, in the center of Susan’s book. The cover is dedicated to Dom, of course.

No, no one reads anymore. No offense, he tosses over his shoulder, sensing the blasphemy of knocking books in a library. I’m a podcaster. It’s the only way to reach an audience with a story. I have a new series coming out. The trailer’s out now, and the first episode drops next week.

My thumb finds its way to my mouth on instinct. A habit from my past.

Oh. So, like a book on tape, I say.

He turns. A hint of an inquisitive smile plays at his lips.

Think of a true-crime writer as a historian. They’re documenting what already happened. A podcaster—a good one—gets his hands dirty to tell the story. The Flock’s suicide and Laurel Tai’s murder, it’s all unsolved. There’s so much opportunity.

Opportunity to what? Solve it?

Arlo’s trendy round glasses slide down his nose, but instead of pushing them up, he tilts his head back to keep my gaze. He drums his fingers near the computer mouse.

Knock on doors, he says. Talk to the teachers of the kids who joined the Flock, to the waitresses at the restaurants where Dominic Bragg might have eaten. Look at the place where Laurel was kidnapped. See how likely it was that the only surviving girl, the one who found them, didn’t hear two running old-model vans in the freestanding garage. He turns back to the microfiche. I’m going to figure out what we don’t know yet, then broadcast it to my followers one episode at a time.

His arrogance is staggering, and that reminds me of Dom too. Who is he to think he can solve Laurel’s murder and excise meaning behind my friends’ deaths? After everything came to light, the investigations were extensive. The probe into Lollie’s death was handled locally, but the FBI descended in Iola to collect evidence. Federal agents examined all twenty-two acres of the Bird Haven. There was a verified manhunt for Dom. His amber eyes lost some of their penetrating power when rendered in grayscale on the printouts that papered windows, storefronts, and lampposts all over town. Arbor State shut down campus for two days when the news broke, but co-eds returned nonplussed, ready to poke fun at their peers who were too weak-minded to know better than to join a cult. I was interviewed, of course, but between my significant memory gaps surrounding the trauma and my overly cautious lawyer, I didn’t offer much information. I did little to unravel the chain of events and bring closure to the grieving families, but they could never make a case against me.

I excuse myself to return to the circulation desk. Without any new visitors, it’s impossible to avoid the bright, questioning eyes of Lourdes as she tries to get my attention.

Across the library, she mouths something. Who?

I force a big-eyed shrug and turn, pretending to busy myself on the computer. I want to search on Arlo Stone, but I don’t dare do it at the library.

When Susan Wade approached me for an interview all those years ago, she said she couldn’t write the book without me. So I dodged her calls and drop-ins with the naïve hope of the nineteen-year-old I was. Hope that she’d drop the book if I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t, of course, and the book was released a few months later. Absent of any firsthand accounts, the book didn’t rocket to popularity. It was a thin paperback with a sensationalist title: Fatal Flock: The Untold Story of Cult Leader Dominic Bragg.

Still, I’ve checked it in and out of the library so often I’m sure most people in Iola have read it once, if not twice. Me? I’ve never read it. The pain of what happened is already razor-sharp without me reading searing descriptions about my friends’ deaths and what role I might have played in the downfall of what’s been called a doomsday cult.

The truth is, I never thought of it as a cult. A commune, a spiritual group, a found family: for years, I used gentler terms, unwilling to admit I’d sacrificed my judgment and freedom in exchange for Dom’s crumbling vision of utopia. It was, of course, a cult, and as the only survivor, I became little more than a campfire tale.

It doesn’t help that I’ve never been able to articulate what happened in the weeks leading up to the Flock’s demise. My memories are disorderly, the gaps substantial. I can’t sequentially recount the events leading up to Lollie’s kidnapping, the discovery of her body, and the Flock’s deaths. For a while, I saw a therapist, and she said all this—the gaps, the jumbled memories, and intrusive flashbacks—was to be expected. But she also said it was dangerous to try to remember, that my mind was protecting me. So I don’t attempt to fill the gaps in my memory or recount what happened. That means I’ve avoided reading Fatal Flock all these years, despite its prevalence in town.

Susan Wade’s book was just a symptom, really. The publicity that came after the Flock’s deaths was a sickness. The attention was relentless, and so was the criticism.

How could I not have known they were planning a mass suicide? they asked. Why didn’t I warn anyone? If Dom was so dangerous and conditions at the Bird Haven were so bad, why did we stay?

They succeeded in heaping guilt on me, but they didn’t ask what I really wanted to know.

Why didn’t they take me too?

After my shift, I circle around the tree-studded campus of the university, past the shuttered cinema and Zink’s Hardware on Main Street. I drive down Depot Street to old 26, a road that follows the spine of an 815-foot-high ridge between Iola and the neighboring town of Lapeer.

It’s notoriously picturesque, but I’m not here for the view. I park at a pullout overlooking the rugged vistas. In the distance, the lake is a deep blue basin.

It’s here that I finally thumb through my phone, hoping for a weak signal as I open my never-used podcast app and search for Arlo Stone.

There: Birds of a Feather. I suck in my breath and tap the play button. Slow, eerie piano music fills the car. Then engineered static as audio clips from the news grow louder:

Fourteen people dead after suspected instruction by charismatic cult leader Dominic Bragg …

Rumors had spread that the community at the abandoned bird sanctuary was no utopia …

Reports of a mysterious illness …

Kidnapping and murder of twenty-year-old Laurel Tai …

The Flock has flown the coop …

I wince. It’s just as humiliating and disrespectful as it was then.

The piano music returns and reaches a frantic crescendo.

It didn’t end with poison-laced drinks or a fiery shootout. It wasn’t a violent death, but it wasn’t pleasant either.

It’s Arlo’s voice, a vaguely southern accent flowing from the speaker.

In 2012, fourteen members of the cult known as the Flock died in a mass suicide in northern Michigan. They died of asphyxiation from carbon monoxide poisoning at a site known as the Bird Haven, a former nature sanctuary where the cult lived in their final days.

The canned sound of birds chirping hammers into my head. I shake it off, remembering.

The Flock’s leader, Dominic Bragg, was never found despite a nationwide manhunt. It’s been ten years, but there are still so many unanswered questions about what led to the Flock’s demise.

Why? A plaintive woman’s wail interrupts. Why did they have to die? Why did he tell them to do this?

It’s something that happened weeks before that could break this case open, Arlo says, returning to the microphone. Three weeks before the mass suicide, longtime Flock member Laurel Tai went missing from her cabin at the Bird Haven.

Police sirens now, tinny and distant, in the background. I glance in the rearview mirror instinctually.

"Laurel, known simply as Lollie by her fellow cult members, was found dead by the river during the town’s annual squirrel count. Autopsy findings pointed to strangulation as the cause of death. Beautiful but troubled, Laurel had recently gained the town’s attention when she was crowned Apple Queen at the annual fall festival.

"This is Birds of a Feather. I’m your host, Arlo Stone, and I’m going to take a new approach to investigating what really happened to the Flock and the Apple Queen. Binge on this new limited series. New episodes will be released weekly."

The piano returns, unnervingly raising the hairs on my arms, then stops abruptly.

And I’m back in the car, not in the space I shared with Lollie at the Bird Haven. I never knew her as Laurel. Lollie, so warm and curious and free-spirited. If she hadn’t been taken from our bed, the others would be still be alive. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t be teetering on the top of the world from my car listening to an intruder pick apart our choices.

My choices, a voice in my head whispers. It’s my old therapist again, trying to break me of groupthink. You’re a my, an I now. Not a we, not an our. You are your own person.

I’m the only one left. It’s me that Arlo will unravel.

CHAPTER

2

Laurel

Then

A RAINSTORM ROLLED IN overnight, driving us all together in the musty cottage. The Bird Haven, absent of clocks, enters into an endless night when the sun goes down. It’s only when the driving wind and rain dampen our shared mattress in the weather-beaten shed that Claire and I emerge, dashing through craters of standing water. The summer’s downpours have turned the Haven into a swampy mosquito breeding ground. While the constant, mania-inducing swarm of bugs leaves me yearning for the sanctuary of the cottage at times, I’m reluctant to spend time here.

Nearly a dozen Flock members are gathered in the living room when we enter. It must be close to two or three in the morning—it’s hard to know, I never sleep anymore—but the room is filled with hushed singing and languid movements. Eden braids Faith’s long hair, Lido strums a guitar, Sunny’s topless, and Hunter’s hand is jammed inside a panting Goldie. I don’t see Thomas, but he spends most nights in the old RV.

Dom is there, of course, sitting on the creaky wooden wheelchair he found in the master bedroom of the cottage. A framed picture told me the ornithologist—Dom’s great-uncle, I think—was confined to the turn-of-century antique later in life. Now, though the cane-backed chair dwarfs Dom’s diminutive frame, he’s somehow more intimidating when he creaks along in the vintage oak wheelchair.

Waving a dog-eared book, he calls Claire to his side when we enter. She settles at his feet, back hunched, wet pale hair dangling in her face, to read to him. I long to brush her hair behind her ear, but I don’t dare interrupt while she’s with Dom.

I settle beside Raina, who’s petting a scruffy dog.

Who’s this? I ask, reaching for its wavy coat. It reeks of more than just wet dog; I recognize the stink of an old, ailing dog from my childhood. It became infected, sick, without my dad around to care for it. I look at the unkempt dog panting in time with Goldie. Right at home, I think.

A stray, can you believe it? Raina burrows her face into its fur. Way out here, and he found us. It’s meant to be.

Everything is meant to be here. It’s not just Raina who does it. We’re all desperate to believe in something, so we assign significance to everything.

Morgan leans over Raina’s scabby, unshaven legs.

Lollie, she drolls. Your aura is gold.

Raina’s eyes open wide, and she nods vigorously. Amber, it’s amber! Like Dom’s eyes, she says dreamily.

Yes, Morgan says. It’s a sign. She starts singing, and the twins join in.

The girls begin swaying and the room heats up. Dom hushes Claire’s monotonous reading and closes his eyes, freeing us from his impenetrable stare for a blissful moment.

From his straight-backed wheelchair, he intones, quietly at first, then gains momentum: Look around. We’re undefined, unrefined. We won’t be confined. Finite and predefined, we’re spinning into infinity in our coffins until the goldfinch sings his finale.

He repeats himself, louder each time. The girls sway, throwing their thin bodies into it. The damp room is pulsing as Dom chants his poetry. A roll of thunder unleashes a feverish intensity upon the Flock.

I sway too, with Dom’s words caught in my mind in an endless loop. I see tiny birds and rain-drenched coffins until the chanting dies and we all fall into a tangled-limb mass of bodies on the floor.

I clock two, maybe three, hours of sleep, waking on the wooden floor with a tangle of Raina’s hair in my face. It’s cloudy today, and I know that will help me.

This week, as summer wanes and August marches toward September, students returned to Arbor State for the fall semester. Their arrival put me back to work.

Others grow vegetables or clean. Chop firewood or cook meals. Claire’s job is to read. Mine is to recruit.

I arrive on campus as sleep deprived as the real college students. Parking myself on a bench outside the registrar’s office, I pull a defunct cell phone from my bag and wait. I wish it were connected to a network, but it has little more functionality than a kid’s toy. I hold the phone in front of my face and write texts to my little sister that’ll go unsent.

I’ve found at least half of the girls currently in the Flock with this method. I wait outside the registrar’s office, looking for the agonizing dejection and disenchantment of a perfect recruit. There are just over two thousand students at Arbor State. In this nondescript little brick building, students find out they’re failing, that they don’t meet graduation requirements, that they can’t afford to stay in college. It’s a place where dreams go to die. A place where I find new members for the Flock.

It’s not long before a girl sits on the other side of the bench with a huff and the sulking shoulders of a potential recruit.

Her hair is well groomed, and she’s showing a little too much cleavage. The girl releases another breathy sigh and gazes at the overcast sky.

Of course I forgot an umbrella today, she mutters, half to herself. She glances my way and offers a self-deprecating smirk. Story of my life.

This will be easy.

Gray days, when rain itches to burst from the sky, amplify everything that’s wrong in life. And I can tell this girl’s aching to tell me—anyone—the injustices plaguing her.

I look for girls who want