Destroying Angel (13 page)

“Except she married him anyway.”

“She came around to it,” he said helplessly.

“Sure she did.”

“Fine, then. You’re out here by yourself, alone and unexplained. People notice. I’ve stood up for you. You refuse to say who you are or what you want, but I’m letting you squat on my land.”

“I get your physical support. Great. Now I want you to support me spiritually.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come over here. I want to show you something.”

Rebecca stripped back the rug in the corner to reveal the floorboards Jacob had torn up all those years ago when he discovered Grandma Cowley’s hiding place. Rebecca had put in a brass ring to make for easier access, and now he expected her to lift it up and show him some new thing she’d done in the basement.

“Do you know why she dug the cellar?” Rebecca asked. “Not later, when she disappeared, but early on?”

“It’s not the only hidden cellar or false wall in Blister Creek. They built these all over so they could hide polygamist men from federal marshals.”

“No, not this one. To hide polygamist women from their husbands.”

He frowned and met her gaze.

“The Women’s Presidency,” Rebecca said. “Great-Great-Grandma Cowley and her counselors. A shadow organization to the patriarchal structure leading the church. She was a prophetess.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s all in the diaries. A group of women fighting male domination. And now I want it back.”

“You want to form a shadow government of women?”

“Only it won’t be in the shadows.” She let the rug fall to the floor. The cellar door disappeared.

Jacob’s mind was in turmoil as he stepped back outside. Rebecca followed him without speaking, but he caught her watching with sideways glances. They stopped above the swimming hole. The boys were out of the water, back in their clothes, and skipping stones across the surface.

A prophetess? Say that word aloud and blood pressure would shoot through the roof from one end of the valley to the other.

And could it even work? A woman and three counselors, a counterweight against men like Brother Higgs and Brother Johnson. Let them make binding decisions—or rather, what Jacob would call recommendations—about how women and their children would be treated within the community.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said at last.

“I think I do.”

“I can barely keep the unruly members of my quorum in line as it is.”

“I’m sure you can manage.”

“Are you?” he said. “I’m not. Elder Smoot complains that my
father
was too liberal, if you can believe it. He’s pressuring me to chart a course that would make the 1950s look downright liberal.”

“I haven’t heard anything about it.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

Because it was all under control at the moment. Jacob had won Smoot’s support only by promising the next vacant spot to the man’s son, Abel, but the younger Smoot was, if anything, more conservative than the father. Stephen Paul acted as a moderating force, respected by all and taking Jacob’s side in arguments. But in private he expressed frustration that Jacob was taking too long to step into the sturdy boots of Abraham Christianson.

Sturdy boots, hah. More like a well-worn wagon trail. Try as he might, Jacob couldn’t get the damn wheels out of the ruts and onto a new path. This could be just the thing, as much an opportunity as a risk.

“Say I form a first presidency of women,” he said at last. “How about Miriam for a start? Maybe my wife. Fernie is organized and conscientious. We’ll toss in Charity Kimball, so it doesn’t look like I’m packing the council with Christiansons. And are you volunteering? Let’s say for the sake of argument that you are. You’ve got your four. What now?”

“No, Jacob. You don’t get to decide who.”

He laughed. “You trust me enough to ask, but you don’t trust me enough to make the appointments. Lovely.”

“This is a women’s organization. If men assign and dismiss, men hold all the power. No, we’ll stock it like you stock the men’s quorum.”

“Oh, so you want an entire quorum now. Of course. That’s going to go over well. Forget the men—you think you’ll talk all those women into obeying you? They’re the most hardheaded of the bunch. Did you know Sister Sariah hasn’t set foot outside the valley since 1982? She rules eight sister wives and runs her house like Mussolini in a prairie dress. Good luck with her.”

“You sounded like your father just now.”

He crossed his arms. “Who is your female prophet?”

She gave him a steady look. “You know that already.”

“No, I don’t.”

“A prophet is the one who goes alone into the desert. She eats locusts and speaks to the Lord. When He is ready, He extends his call.” She waved a hand at the sagebrush- and rock-strewn plain
that began a few dozen yards from the house and extended for miles in every direction. “I have entered the wilderness and communed with the Lord.”

“You? You’re the prophetess?”

She pointed to the diary in Jacob’s hands. “Read the second half. Then you’ll know. And with any luck, you’ll figure out how to help your son.”

Sister Lillian was the first of the three women to recover when Taylor Junior dropped from the ventilation shaft. She’d been sitting on a couch, reading some trashy novel with faded, yellowing pages, but sprang to her feet when she saw him. He almost didn’t recognize her at first—her face had filled out from soft living, and her blue eyes sparkled instead of looking demurely to the ground when he fixed her with his gaze. The months underground had turned her pale skin almost translucent, and her blonde pigtails looked white in the harsh fluorescent lighting.

“Brother Taylor,” she said, voice flat. “You came back.”

“Who is in charge?” He looked at the woman standing in her undergarments. “Get dressed. I don’t want to look at you.”

She obeyed, pale and jerky. The third woman continued to change the toddler’s diaper. Her trembling fingers pricked the
child with the pin as she fastened it, and the child squalled in protest.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Nobody is in charge, not really,” Lillian said.

“I gave the signal. Three short knocks, three long. You knew it was me. Someone made the decision not to open up when I knocked, and I want to know who.”

“Phillip Cobb—” she began.

“Phillip Cobb is dead.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, that he never came back.”

“I know that, you idiot.”

“Did you bring my husband?”

“Brother Aaron died a martyr in the service of the Lord. You can see him on the other side of the veil.”

“Oh. How did he die?”

“Jacob Christianson murdered him in cold blood.”

“Did he?” She sounded neither upset nor particularly outraged at the news.

Taylor Junior took a closer look, amazed at the defiance in her tone. Her cheeks weren’t the only thing that had had filled out since last summer—her body was pudgier around the waist, her breasts so large and full they looked almost obscene. The thought of Lillian Young down in this warm, safe place, fattening herself on their stores while he starved in a filthy pit in Witch’s Warts, filled him with rage.

He might have let it go if she’d stopped there, but she added, “Didn’t you attack them first? So if Brother Jacob shot Aaron, wouldn’t it have been in self-defense?”

He took out his gun and pistol-whipped her across the face. She went down without a cry. She stayed down for several seconds
and then climbed unsteadily to her feet, wiping at her watering eyes. A gash had opened on her cheek, and blood oozed to the surface.

Taylor Junior glared at the other women, who cringed. “Good. Now I’m going to repeat my question. If you don’t answer, I will shoot one of you and then ask again. Who is in charge?”

“Levi Cobb,” Lillian said at once.

“Thank you. That wasn’t so hard.” He put away his gun. “Why did Phillip leave the sanctuary?”

“Levi sent him to look for you.” Lillian’s answer was perfectly correct, delivered promptly, but again, that note of defiance. “He has been gone for weeks.”

“He didn’t make it far. His body is rotting in a pond half a mile from here.” He picked up the canteen where it had fallen when he crashed through the metal grating. He unscrewed the lid and let the pond water drain onto the carpet. “That’s all that’s left of Phillip Cobb.”

Perhaps Phillip had been on his way back from searching and stopped to fill his canteen one last time when the toxic gases bubbled up and overwhelmed him, although Taylor Junior supposed it didn’t really matter. The man was dead, and Taylor Junior didn’t think much of the remaining men.

“Let’s find Levi,” he said. “I want to hear his explanation as to why the three of you are alone, watching television, when I gave clear instructions—”

“He said it was okay,” one of the other women said. It was the woman he’d caught in her undergarments, and Lillian now helped her button her dress at the neck. “He said we could have our own space down here, that it didn’t matter what we did, so long as—”

“Shut your ugly mouth before I lose my temper.”

She stopped, gaping. He looked at her closely for the first time and was surprised to recognize his own wife—his ugly second wife, Mary Ellen. Buckteeth and big, manly hands. She gave him a feeble, hopeful smile, like a puppy that has piddled on the carpet and knows it deserves a beating.

“So the men don’t know you’re watching television. Then that’s another problem. Take me to Brother Levi. I have questions to put to him.”

Mary Ellen and Lillian led him down the hall from the lounge, while the third woman trailed behind. They reached the first silo and edged around the catwalk that encircled the empty chamber where the military had once stored a nuclear missile. Faded orange and yellow tubing lay discarded at the bottom, some thirty feet below, looking like the intestines of a giant beast.

The entire base had three such silos, and tunnels that snaked here and there like tubing in a child’s hamster cage. Abandoned years earlier, the electrical systems still worked with a little diesel for the generators. The counters and appliances in the communal kitchen were lime green, and the walls were painted a pale white that looked sickly beneath the fluorescent bulbs.

The facility had housing for dozens, and Taylor Junior suspected that it had been more than a secret nuclear facility, that the government had maintained a fully contained command-and-control structure. When the Cold War came to an end, some sharp-eyed accountant apparently decided it was better to seal and abandon the facility than to haul the outdated equipment out of the desert.

They met other startled women and children in the hallways. Whatever they were doing when they caught their first glimpse,
each of them stopped to stare. Most looked terrified. Taylor Junior wondered if his sunburn and gaunt appearance made him look like a creature risen from the grave among all of these freshly scrubbed, overfed people. He ordered them to follow. One girl tried to run, but he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her along with the others.

They passed a room filled with massive, ancient computers. Soldiers or technicians had taped comic strips to the server-room door, together with a Polaroid of a Vietnamese potbellied pig wearing glasses, labeled “Colonel Parkin.” Next to it was a faded sign printed with a dot-matrix printer: “IBM Mainframe for Sale—Was $195,000, Now FIFTY BUCKS!!!”

The first man he found was Elmo Griggs, who sprawled on a couch in the lounge, eating dried apples directly from a twenty-five-pound canister that squatted on the floor next to his head. A boxy old TV rested on a metal stand on the far side of the room, images flickering, the sound an annoying buzz. Elmo didn’t immediately look over from his show, and the sight of his indolence and gluttony made Taylor Junior’s eyes bug out.

“Elmo Griggs!”

Elmo sent a fistful of dried apples flying as he shot up from the couch. He knocked over the canister, which in turn tipped over a can of tomato juice. It bled onto the white carpet, but nobody moved to pick it up.

“Brother Taylor,” he said, his voice stammering. “You came. You’re alive. I didn’t know.” His eyes darted around the group, now grown to more than a dozen.

“Why didn’t you answer when I banged?”

“You banged? I never heard anything.”

“Who was at the door waiting?”

“They said we shouldn’t run the elevator. It wastes electricity.”

“They said? What do you mean,
they
said? Who is they? And there’s a ladder to the surface, and a guard room with a telephone to call down for instructions when the sentinels hear something, and…why weren’t you there?” His pulse pounded in his ears.

Elmo tried to back away and fell onto the couch. Taylor Junior stepped forward. He took out his gun and pressed it against the man’s forehead. A woman gasped at his rear. Elmo turned pale and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Elmo Griggs. In the name of Jesus Christ—”

“No,” Elmo whispered.

Taylor Junior’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Thou slothful servant. Thou—”

“Don’t kill him!” one of the women said.

He turned, surprised, to see Lillian standing in front of the others. She wore a confident expression out of place among all these terrified people. Why? Because her husband was dead? Had that turned her defiant in the face of the Lord’s anointed?