Destroying Angel (5 page)

Bedtime took two hours. Reading, tucking, scolding kids who were reading with flashlights, helping one of Jacob’s younger sisters with her math, giving drinks, denying drinks, retucking, rescolding the flashlight readers.

At one point Jacob stopped in the hallway and fought the urge to yell, “
Everyone go to bed! Now!
”

No wonder Father had locked himself in his room at night.

And then, when everyone was in bed, he read the same page of a book again and again as Fernie wrote in her journal, read her scriptures, and fiddled with a book of sudoku puzzles.

A full year that blasted diary had sat in his nightstand while Sister Rebecca rebuilt the cabin on Yellow Flats. He saw her in town, buying supplies at the hardware store or with a pickup truck full of Mason jars for canning that she’d gotten in Panguitch or Cedar City. She appeared in the back of the chapel on Sunday in a dress with short sleeves and refused to take the sacrament when the deacons offered her the bread and the tray of water cups. Sometimes she sat in the chapel with Eliza, Steve Krantz, and Charity Kimball. Jacob thought of it as the skeptics’ corner and half wished he could join them and whisper sarcastic asides
whenever a speaker annoyed him. Instead,
he
was the one doing the talking, and struggling to give good advice without leading the congregation down imaginary paths into imaginary gardens of belief.

At last Fernie yawned, pulled the chain on her reading light, and fell asleep. Jacob reached for the nightstand and fished out Grandma Cowley’s diary.

October 22, 1890

Peter Kimball—Sister Annabelle’s oldest boy—saw a rider in the Ghost Cliffs yesterday. It was a white man, alone on a fine horse, with a badge pinned to his saddlebags. The man made camp in the hollow of a rock ledge and ate beans from a can while Peter hid in the rocks. When he finished eating, he rolled and smoked a cigarette, then cleaned his rifle. Peter crept back to warn the women and children in the woodcutting party. They abandoned their work and returned to the valley to tell me what Peter had seen.

A second federal marshal? Was he supposed to meet the first in this area, and will he get suspicious when he can’t find him? I can’t take the risk that he’ll find the body. Not until our husbands come. Where are they?

The Kimballs didn’t join the communal dinner tonight. When I went to find them, Annabelle was rocking on her chair and sipping a drink made from the broom-like bushes of Mormon tea that grow in scattered clumps across the valley.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Maude didn’t feel like going. It’s too far to walk in her condition.”

When I looked at Maude, she found something interesting in the blanket she was knitting. I wondered if Jedediah Kimball had known his wife was in the early stages of pregnancy when he sent her into the wilderness. But still, she couldn’t be more than six months pregnant, and the barn where we eat and hold church services is only a couple hundred yards from the Kimball house.

“We didn’t have any bread,” I said. “You were supposed to bake it. And dessert too. You said you’d bring the last of the peaches.”

“Turns out we ate the last two jars already.”

“What? When?”

It was a blow. Three weeks since I’ve eaten anything sweet, and that was a single spoonful of raspberry jam on a slice of bread. No fruit until next spring. We won’t have honey this year either. Only one colony survived, and there’s barely enough in the combs to overwinter the hive.

“I don’t remember. A week, two.”

I clenched my jaw. “Never mind the peaches. We have a rule. We eat dinner together every night. If you don’t come, you’d better be on your deathbed, and I still want to see the other wives and children.”

Annabelle glanced east, toward the sandstone maze that we’ve started to call Witch’s Warts. The big fin near our initial camp looks like a witch’s pointed hat, and the knobby red-and-white hump at its base is almost like a face with a nose and lips.

I followed her gaze. “What is it? What do you see?” When she didn’t answer, I pressed. “You haven’t been going inside again, have you?”

“What? Oh, no. Of course not.”

But I think she is. I think Annabelle Kimball has been talking to the angel again.

Back in July, our sixth day in the valley, I think, Annabelle got lost in Witch’s Warts. It was maybe an hour after lunch when Sister Nannie came running, crying something in a Swedish accent so thick I couldn’t understand a word. I grabbed her and told her to slow down.

“You must come. Is Sister Annabelle. A man take her, yes! You hurry.”

By that time we’d built a primitive stockade 120 feet on a side and had taken apart all but one of the wagons, combining them with wood hauled from the cliffs to build the first of four cabins we planned to construct over the summer. We’d completed the first dugout, where I’d ordered the supplies moved, and it took me a few minutes to find my gun and fetch Maude and Laura from the creek, where they were washing clothing.

“Who is he?” I asked Nannie as the three of us followed her from camp, trotting along with our skirts gathered up and without bonnets to protect us from the sun. “The Lamanite?”

“No Lamanite, no. Not he.”

My pulse quickened. “A white man?”

“No white man, no.”

“Slow down, wait!” I looked back to see Maude and Laura struggling to keep up.

When we reached the sandstone fins, I grabbed Nannie and spun her around. She blubbered something in Swedish.

“Calm down.”

“This is where it is! This is where it happens!”

She said something else in Swedish. I slapped her. Nannie grabbed her cheek, eyes wide. She stopped talking.

“I don’t have time for this, so listen up. Either you answer my questions or I’ll send you in there alone. Do you understand?”

Nannie nodded. Her lower lip trembled.

“Good,” I said. I spoke more gently. “Now tell me what you were doing in there.”

“I follow her. I hear her talk to someone. I follow her in, and then I see him take her.”

“What do you mean? Where did he bring her?”

“He not bring her, he
take
her.”

Laura let out her breath, and Maude gasped. They’d caught up, and Maude was wheezing with the effort. She grabbed Nannie’s wrist and said, “You mean a man is making an attempt on her virtue?” When Nannie nodded, Maude turned to me and said, “Shoot him! Find him and put a bullet in his—”

A scream from inside the maze cut her short. The four of us started. I gripped my gun, my heart pounding. I’d forgotten to check to make sure a shell was loaded into the chamber. I did that now.

When I’d satisfied myself that I was armed, I found Annabelle’s footprints in the sand, and then Nannie’s smaller set of prints,
going and then returning with a longer stride, as if she’d been running. No boot prints from a man. He must have been waiting inside, then. But why? And how had he known Annabelle would wander in? Not many people dared to go inside alone. Already a young boy had followed a lizard into the labyrinth and been lost for two hours.

We tracked Annabelle into the labyrinth and then stopped in a sandy clearing where the footprints disappeared. I looked around, confused, but then heard Annabelle cry again. The sound came from a giant hump of stone that rose from the ground like the back of a giant beast. We scrambled up the stone, a little like lizards ourselves, but when we got to the top Annabelle was still nowhere in sight. The cries came from beyond the top of the hump. Holes pitted the surface, eroded by water, their bottoms dry and sandy. The crying came from a deeper, narrower pit on the far side.

We found Sister Annabelle in the pit. She was not alone.

Jacob let the diary fall on his lap. A hump of sandstone. Sinkholes pockmarked its surface. A deeper, narrower sinkhole. It sounded like Taylor Junior’s secret hideout. In fact, it had to be the same place.

An evil spirit. It had trapped Sister Annabelle inside and now, generations later, led Taylor Junior to the same spot, where he hid from law enforcement and the vengeance-seeking saints of Blister Creek, who would have killed him on the spot. The spirit had helped Taylor Junior, had—

No, Jacob decided. He could explain the correlation. Sister Annabelle had stumbled into a sinkhole while exploring Witch’s Warts. More than a century later, Taylor Kimball Junior had found the same sinkhole. But it wasn’t a coincidence. Taylor Junior had spent weeks scouting out the labyrinth, looking for just such a hiding place.

Even among the thousands of sandstone fins, ridges, and columns, there would be few places as perfect as that one, hidden where people would never walk. Deep and narrow enough to hide Taylor Junior from anyone searching by air. Far enough into the maze that he could creep out on rare occasions without being spotted. He’d stashed water jugs and cans of food, a rathole to hide in if something went wrong with the attack on Blister Creek. In fact, for all Jacob knew, the hiding spot might have been scouted and stocked by Taylor Junior and his brother Gideon years earlier, when the Lost Boys infiltrated the temple via Witch’s Warts.

Besides, with the debilitating filth at the bottom of the pit, it was obvious Taylor Junior hadn’t enjoyed supernatural assistance.

Satisfied with the rational explanation, Jacob opened the diary again and found his place. The letters, which had marched across the page with the precision of finely set type, now grew sloppy, the words too close together, the margins improperly aligned. The fearful hand of a woman relating a terrifying memory.

He read on.

I looked into the pit, and what I saw filled me with a dread that seized my vitals in its grasp. All the strength went out of me and
I nearly swooned, as if I had been fasting and stood too rapidly. Even now a dark aura settles on my shoulders as I think about these events, and I can scarcely record what I saw.

Sister Annabelle lay on her back at the bottom of the sinkhole, more than a dozen feet below us. Her dress was up and…

Forgive me. It is a perversion even to put these words to paper. But whoever you are—my future judge and executioner, I would suppose—you must know what I saw. It explains so much of what happened later. Why it became necessary to kill a man while he slept. And so my pen records these events in all of their ugly details.

Sister Annabelle lay on her back with her dress around her face. Her legs were spread and her undergarments were around her ankles. A shadow lay over her. It was a man, but it was dark at the bottom of the pit and he seemed wrapped in a black cloak. I saw him as one sees a figure through a windowpane at night, when the light is greater inside than out. He was thrusting at her, not like a man but like an animal, like a dog worrying at a bitch. Annabelle moaned and tried to push the figure away.

Maude screamed. She stumbled and would have fallen into the hole, but I dropped the gun and grabbed her with both hands. We fell backward from the pit, and somehow Laura and Nannie ended up falling too, all four of us tangled in a heap. I fought free of the other women and struggled to my feet. I grabbed for the gun and rushed back to the edge of the pit. I had to put a bullet in that man’s head. It was close range, but I didn’t care. Annabelle would have told me to shoot to save her virtue.

I lifted the gun to fire. One shot. It had to be on the mark.

But then I blinked in surprise. There was no man with her. How had I thought otherwise?

What I thought was a figure now appeared clearly as a dark wool blanket. The desert air is so thin that mornings are chill, even in the middle of summer, and I remembered seeing Annabelle at breakfast that morning with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She must have taken it when she walked into Witch’s Warts in search of privacy—to pray, or maybe to clear her head. And then she’d suffered a fit.

And now the blasted thing tangled around her neck. Annabelle couldn’t get it off, seemed to be strangling herself.

“There’s no one there,” I called down to her. “Annabelle, do you hear me? It’s only a blanket. Wake up—what’s the matter with you? Annabelle!”

She arched her back and moaned. Her fingernails gouged at the sandstone walls, and her eyes rolled back in their sockets to show the whites.