The Righteous (17 page)

She nodded, but without conviction. He could almost read her mind. She was thinking about running. Other girls had done it. She could escape where they had not. He wanted to order her to put it out of her mind, but he didn’t want to plant that seed if he’d misread her. If the time came to run, he could help; on her own, she’d never make it. He tried to mentally drill it into her as she turned and went inside.

Don’t run.

#

Jacob didn’t find Fernie in the tomato garden the next morning, or among the squash. Instead, she worked in a far corner of the greenhouse, alone. The greenhouse lay empty but for flats of withered squash starts that had never taken, drip irrigation systems rolled up and waiting for next year, plastic flats stacked in corners with wheelbarrows, trowels, and rusting garden rakes. The air was stifling. Fernie swept the floor, an unnecessary and suspiciously solitary task.

She looked up when he opened the door and motioned him over with an urgent gesture. He didn’t like the look on her face. Terrified, almost.

“They can’t see me talking to you.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” She looked to the door on the far end of the greenhouse, as if worried someone would come inside suddenly. “I’ve got children, you know. I have to think of them. I didn’t want to get mixed up in this. I don’t know why she told me. Why not Charity? How about calling her own mother or telling one of her brothers?”

He drew closer. “Fernie, what are you talking about? Tell me.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Calm down. It’s okay.”

She breathed out slowly. “I’m scared. I never thought…” She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I found this in Amanda’s Book of Mormon.”

Jacob took the paper. It was a half-written letter in a woman’s cursive. The writing was shaky, as if the writer had been under stress.

Fernie,

If you read this, then I’m already dead. My blood has atoned for my sins.

Dear God, why am I so alone? I don’t know where to turn. I will tell the prophet, but maybe he already knows. That is what they say. You are my cousin, my sister wife, and my friend. And you are a good woman. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someday we’ll laugh about this together. But if you discover this letter in your dresser and something has happened to me, you will know why I died and by whose hand.

First, go to my room and get the manila envelope under my mattress. It will help you understand the rest of this letter.

That was all. Jacob turned it over, but the other side was blank.

“I don’t understand either,” Fernie said. “Amanda didn’t finish, and the letter wasn’t in my drawer. Something made me open her Book of Mormon. Well, I know what it was. Amanda would sometimes jot notes or journal entries and stow them in her scriptures to look at later. I thought I might find some clue as to what she was thinking before she died.”

“Good thinking.” It occurred to Jacob that Amanda had guessed Fernie would check her Book of Mormon. “And the manila envelope? Was it under her mattress?”

“I haven’t looked, Jacob. I’m afraid. What if someone sees me?”

“In a house as full as yours,” Jacob said, “they’ll appropriate that space soon enough. We have to get that envelope before someone moves the bed and sees it.”

“I know, I just couldn’t do it,” Fernie said. “I kept telling myself that you were chasing your own tail, Jacob. I couldn’t believe it was one of us. It had to be one of the Mexicans, and the sooner you figured that out, the better. I was safe in my own house.”

“Fernie, they cut Amanda’s throat and tore her tongue out by the roots.” She looked blank, so he added, “Think about the temple.”

Light dawned in her eyes. “Oh, no. Jacob…”

He took her in his arms. She lay against his chest, trembling, and he thought of that day almost ten years ago when he had last held her. She had found him in the west fields, shoveling hay. The cold had brought color to her cheeks and her breath came out in puffs.

He’d smiled to see her, but that smile had faded when he saw the look on her face. Taylor Kimball had sent for her. Fernie had never met the man, but he had several wives already, and a dozen children. She would leave that afternoon. They had shared one last embrace, and Jacob had wept when she’d torn herself away.

Theirs had been a chaste love, for all its flavor of forbidden fruit. They had shared gentle caresses and a few kisses. Jacob had never touched another woman. He had never wanted to.

He’d been a fool. He should have gone to his father, confessed his feelings for Fernie, begged Father not to send Fernie away. He’d been too young to marry, but she would have waited for him, he was sure.

But it was “the will of the Lord.” That’s what they always said. God had chosen her husband and the prophet had relayed His will. Right. Jacob was no longer so naïve. The so-called “will of the Lord” was the wishful thinking of a bunch of old men to justify treating their daughters and wives like chattel.

And now, angry with himself for being such a fool, angry with Elder Kimball for taking Fernie from him, he was tempted. She was weak now, vulnerable. And lonely. What polygamist wife wouldn’t be consumed with loneliness? Now was his chance to break the bonds that tied her to her husband.

Yes, and tear her from her family.

Jacob pushed her away with some effort. “Fernie, whoever did this will kill anyone who threatens to expose his secret.” He didn’t say that this someone was most likely her own husband and his sons. “We have to get that envelope.”

“But how? There are people in the house. Two of the boys are painting the hallway in that wing. I’ve seen Taylor Junior coming and going, and my husband is supposed to be back within the hour.”

“The prophet sent me to investigate Amanda’s death. I don’t need permission to inspect the dead woman’s room.”

“Sounds great, Jacob. I’m sure they’ll be happy to see you waltz into Amanda’s room and dig around. And when they see you with that envelope they’ll be sure to give you a pat on the back for a job well-done.”

“I’ll be careful.”

#

“You don’t have the baby.” It was not a question, but a statement of fact. It dangled in the air, like the axe of an executioner over the neck of the condemned.

Enoch swallowed hard. He held the phone to his ear and wondered how Elder Kimball would look on the other end. Angry? Disappointed? Vengeful?

“How did you know?”

“The angel told me, Brother Christianson.”

Maybe true. Maybe a lie.

Enoch had stood at the doorway of the Gold house, fully intending to follow through with the plan. And then Jennifer Gold had answered the door. A young woman with curly hair and glasses and pregnant. He had tied the hands of the terrified woman with her own shoelaces, then returned from the car with the filleting knife. He’d forced her to the ground and stood over her with knife in hand.

Enoch had been a pre-med student, too, like his older brother, and knew how to sever the unborn child from its mother’s living uterus. It would be a butcher’s job, but the child would survive. Ten minutes to do the job, ten more to leave evidence to throw the police off the trail.

A baby. A girl. The daughter of scientists. She would be brought to Blister Creek and raised in the Church of the Anointing.

Jennifer Gold gasped for mercy when she could get words out through her terror. Self-loathing washed over Enoch. Only a monster could do what he’d intended.

And so instead, he had kept his promise to Jennifer Gold, meant as a lie, and robbed the house. It was a half-hearted attempt, and he’d ditched the watches, costume jewelry, and petty cash as he fled east. He’d left the pregnant woman unharmed.

Enoch entered Nevada via Reno. He would call Jacob, then return to Blister Creek. He had to unburden himself, no matter what punishment awaited. He was driving east on I-80 when the call came from Elder Kimball.

“I’m sorry, Elder Kimball,” Enoch spoke into the phone. “I couldn’t do it. Nobody told me that Jennifer Gold hadn’t yet—”

Elder Kimball cut him off. “No details. I don’t know and I don’t care. If you have questions, talk to my son. You know that. Enoch, what’s important is that you covenanted to obey my counsel. By rights, your life is forfeit.”

Your counsel, old man? Or Gideon’s?

And if Elder Kimball refused to involve himself in the details of his plans, how could he expect Enoch to follow them blindly?

“However, the Lord is merciful, is he not?” Elder Kimball continued. “You are young, you succumbed to cowardice. We all make mistakes, and with righteous contrition, the Lord has promised that He will forgive us. I will plead with Him on your behalf.”

The only mistake he had made, Enoch decided, was to listen to Elder Kimball in the first place. Whatever return to glory awaited him in this life or the next, it would not erase the memory of Jennifer Gold lying on the floor, begging for her life.

And yet he had covenanted. Elder Kimball had taken him through the endowment where he had covenanted to obey the Law of Sacrifice. To sacrifice all that he possessed, even his own life, if necessary, to defend the Kingdom of God. To obey Elder Kimball as the emissary of the Lord.

A man could lose more than his life by breaking a covenant. His soul could be cast into Outer Darkness. There was only one way to undo this, and that was to return to the temple where he had made his covenants, and that meant buying time.

“What should I do?”

“Your botched attempt means the police will be watching the Gold house. Probably the woman’s work as well. But what about her shopping habits? Does she visit her parents on weekends? What other habits does she have? Gideon will know. Go back to Oakland and wait. I’ll have more information by morning.”

“Thou sayest.”

He hung up but did not get off the freeway to turn around. Instead of returning to California, he continued east, toward Utah. At Winnemucca, Enoch stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch. He picked up the phone and dialed Jacob’s number.

Eliza had remained at the Stephen Paul Young house on Thursday morning and happened to be looking out the window when Manuel and Eduardo pulled up in their Ford F-150.

The house sat on a swelling of sandstone in the midst of the wilderness, and she could see for miles from her second story room. A furnace-red landscape stretched beyond, with buttes rising above the desert floor, framed by a blue sky without a single cloud.

The entirety of the Colorado Plateau, an area roughly the size of Maine, had a population of about thirty thousand people, and the bulk of them clustered in towns on the region’s periphery. There was no better place for God’s chosen people to gather and build His kingdom than its desolate center.

Eliza had not been happy to remain at the Young house. She wrestled with an unexpected feeling of humiliation. Stephen Paul had rejected her. Affection, or lack thereof aside, he had been her salvation from the other two suitors. Make that one, now that Elder Johnson was out of the picture.

It was Eliza’s duty to pitch in with the chores, but she otherwise avoided Carol and Sarah. Instead she retreated to the guest room on the top floor to stare out the window. If her goal had been to gain the Young women as allies, she had no doubt failed.

The truck looked like a dust devil approaching across the desert floor as it followed the road snaking its way toward the house. The road followed dry washes and skirted eroded sandstone bluffs. She only recognized the truck when it was within a hundred yards of the house.

What would draw the Mexicans so far from town? A little side work for the Youngs?

A spur led from the road to the house, and then to a poured concrete slab of a driveway just below Eliza’s window. The truck pulled up and stopped. A haze of dust hung in the air around the truck and all the way down the road for miles. The doors opened. Two men stepped out.

Eduardo and Manuel. They were dressed like Mexican laborers, in long sleeves now to protect against the sun, and with hats to shield their faces. Shovels, toolboxes, and other tools sat in the back of the truck and the two men had gloves tucked into their front breast pockets.

And yet there was something about the way that they held themselves that wasn’t right. They had a certain confidence and certainty of purpose. They did not carry themselves like illegal aliens.

They spoke to each other as they approached the door, which was right under her window. She flipped the latch on the window. She eased it open, wincing at the squeak.

To her further surprise, Eduardo and Manuel spoke in English, even though they were by themselves. “So this guy is good?” Eduardo asked.

“Depends on what you mean by good. I wouldn’t trust any of them. However, given the circumstances—”

The front door opened and Manuel stopped mid-sentence. She couldn’t see Stephen Paul, standing as he was inside the threshold, but heard him say, “Good morning.”

“Have you got it?” Manuel asked.

“I do, but let’s be clear. My participation is contingent upon the conditions we agreed upon earlier. Contingent and limited in scope.”

“Understood,” Manuel said. He took something from Stephen Paul, then passed it along to Eduardo, who returned to the truck. Eduardo’s body shielded whatever it was that Stephen Paul had given them. Eliza shrank back from the window as Eduardo tossed the object into the truck’s cab and turned around.

“That’s all we need,” Manuel said. “But we’ll have to kick around here for a few hours so the others will think we’ve been working. We’re supposedly up here on a side job.”

“I’ve got a guest,” Stephen Paul said, apparently not knowing that his wives had put said guest right above where he now stood. “So it might be better if you were actually seen working rather than sipping lemonade on the porch. You up for that?”

“Yeah, I guess.” No enthusiasm in the voice. “What have you got?”

Stephen Paul said something about a fence in need of repair, and the three men walked around the side of the house.

Eliza watched them leave with some confusion. At first glance of Eduardo she had felt an aftershock of the desire that had gripped her the other night. But there was no question now. He was involved in something underhanded.