When Olivia arrived in the mountain city, she was not surprised to see the number of women with their faces covered and the familiar garb adorning their bodies from head to toe. She remembered the numerous religious sects that were commonplace during the days of her childhood, some seeming to have sprouted up overnight and just as quickly disintegrated. The hippie lifestyle had been popular back then, and the men whose charisma and persuasiveness proved to be ineffective among the wild and free youth seemed to eventually find their way to Utah.
For the most part, the self-proclaimed leaders of their own religions, or cults, wanted little more than easy access to willing young sexual partners, but some had managed to cultivate a true following, and as their number of followers grew, so did their deluded sense of importance. Those were the men who were dangerous and wreaked havoc on sleepy little towns like Horseshoe Hills.
Everyone knew about the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a constant thorn in the side of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, but very few knew about the other sects. Olivia knew. She knew all about the men who hung out in towns like hers, on college campuses, and anywhere else they thought they would be successful in their quest to get laid. Olivia wondered if the men had unmet relationship issues or perhaps they had felt like outcasts in high school, but whatever the reason they had conjured up in their twisted minds, it had worked more often than not.
Olivia’s best friend, Beth, had fallen for a much older man who was vivacious, charismatic, handsome, and the devil incarnate, but she was still with him. He had convinced her that being with him and bearing his children was her ticket into the kingdom of Heaven. Olivia didn’t even recognize her any longer. She looked twice her age and was never without several screaming children hanging onto her skirt that was so long it dragged the ground.
Olivia had decided long ago that as soon as she graduated from high school in her little town not far from Salt Lake City that she would move to New York. Her parents wanted their only daughter to have a much different life than they knew existed in the mountain cities of Utah, and from the first summer that Olivia could remember, she and her parents had spent a month every summer in Los Angeles, New York City, Milan, London, just about anywhere they could think of so Olivia would know there was life outside of Utah.
It was during the summer following her junior year that she had been in Milan at a fashion show when a modeling agency had spotted her and signed her to begin immediately upon her graduation. After that, it was only two years later that another agency had signed her, and after five years, she was sought by numerous agencies around the world. She traveled extensively and dated some of the wealthiest men in the world. That was the life that Olivia couldn’t wait to return to, but first she had to tie up some loose ends in Horseshoe Hills.