6
Andrea sat on the edge of the bed in her motel room staring down at the photograph that Star Bonaire had taken. The woman had used her finger to carve a single word in the white flour.
Help.
Andrea had waited until she was alone with Bible to show him the photo. He hadn’t said much beyond telling Andrea to get showered and be ready when he called. That was well over an hour ago. Andrea was showered. She was ready. Bible still had not called.
Help.
How terrified would a woman have to be to do something like that?
Andrea swiped back to the photos of Alice Poulsen. Her throat tightened over the ravages by starvation. Anorexia was about control, but then, to some degree, so was suicide. You were literally taking your own life into your hands. Alice Poulsen had walked into that field and known that she would not turn back. What kind of nerve did that take? What kind of desperation?
The same type of desperation Star Bonaire had probably been feeling when she photographed her cry for help.
Andrea couldn’t look at the photos anymore. She tossed her phone on the desk. She stared all of her helplessness into the black television screen across from her bed. The curtains were drawn. The lights were off. Her left wrist ached where Wexler had grabbed her. Stray memories flashed through her mind—Wexler’s face pressed against the steering wheel; Nardo lighting a cigarette; Star’s ghostly presence as she moved around the kitchen; the two women who’d walked out of the barn. The yellow dresses. The long hair. The bare feet. The attenuated limbs. The matching ankle bracelets.
Victimized. Tagged. Degraded.
Cult. Cult. Cult.
Stilton was right. There was no federal or state law that said you couldn’t be in a cult. Nothing could be done to save those women. Star Bonaire’s mother had already tried the most extreme version of a rescue. She’d ended up arrested and hit with a restraining order barring her from seeing her own child.
Andrea stood up. She started pacing. She felt so fucking powerless. She had all this training and none of it, not one piece, could help Star Bonaire. Or anyone else, for that matter. She looked at her phone, willing Bible to call her. He was probably hitting the same dead ends that she was. Her eyes darted to the notebook and pen she’d placed on the desk. She’d been so filled with purpose when she’d started an internet trawl for all the dirty laundry on Dean’s Magic Beans.
An hour later, the notebook pages were still blank.
She mentally reviewed what little she had learned about the operation. Dean’s Magic Beans had been a registered Delaware corporation since 1983. Andrea had found the original articles of incorporation. Dean Wexler was listed as the president. Bernard Fontaine was vice president. Which was interesting given the fact that Nardo was only nineteen in 1983, around the same time that his father had been arrested for bank fraud, but not interesting in any way that could move an investigation forward.
Also interesting but ultimately useless was that Bernard Fontaine was listed as secretary of BFL Trust, a charitable organization established in Delaware in the fall of 2003. The IRS listed the non-profit as a 501(c)3 in good standing, though Charity Navigator, a ratings agency that collected information about how donated dollars were used, had no information on the organization.
Googling “Dean’s Magic Beans+cult” had brought back an avalanche of fan pages curated by health nuts and fava bean lovers but nothing, not one site, mentioned the fact that the women who processed the beans were literally starving. The intern sites, the college board postings, the Facebook pages dedicated to finding fun summer work, all talked about Dean’s in glowing terms. Even the one-star reviews on Amazon had been overshadowed by glowing recommendations.
Not one post or page mentioned Dean Wexler by name.
Nor did they mention Nardo Fontaine.
Stilton had said Wexler had a lot of lawyers on speed dial. It made sense that an overly litigious cult would be very good at keeping negative shit at the low end of the search results. Barring that, Dean had up to twenty volunteers who could sit at their respective laptops all day scrubbing the internet.
It’s not like the women were stopping for lunch breaks.
One of the few sites that you couldn’t scrub or buy your way out of was PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which provided a searchable database of legal filings, motions and transcripts. Fortunately, she had Gordon’s log-in credentials. Desperation hadn’t led Andrea to the webpage. She’d had a hunch. Back at the farm, she had flagged it as unusual that Wexler kept referring to the women as volunteers instead of interns. A court case from twenty years ago had provided an explanation.
In 2002, the Department of Justice had sued Dean’s Magic Beans under the Fair Labor Standards Act for failing what was called the Primary Beneficiary Test. There were seven criteria for judging the legality of an unpaid internship, most of them having to do with furthering academic coursework, offering college credits and following the academic calendar. In other words, the internship had to benefit the intern, not just the sponsor.
If they were going to be exploited, they had to volunteer for that.
Everything had gone downhill after the PACER hit. Andrea had forced herself to take a break when the motel room had started to feel like a prison cell. She’d ended up buying an egg salad sandwich from the vending machine, then gone back to her room where she’d wasted half an hour scrolling through the Sussex County register for marriages, divorces and deaths.
She had found records of Ricky and Nardo’s marriage and divorce, but nothing returned on Eric Blakely when she searched death certificates. If Bible took much longer, she’d probably end up scrolling through rabies tag registrations for domestic household animals.
Her phone pinged. She reluctantly dragged it off the desk. Mike had texted her again. She recognized the animal in the photo this time. The dik-dik was a tiny antelope that stood about a foot high.
Andrea didn’t have it in her to find a clever response to the dik-pic.
Instead, she let her thumb hover over the call button. Mike could be an incredibly good listener once you cut through the bullshit. But he’d also been an adult when she had ghosted him exactly one year and eight months ago. The least Andrea could do now was be an adult and stand by her decision. No matter how much she wanted to hear his voice.
She was swiping away his info when her phone rang.