For Time and All Eternities Read online

  Stephen punished her by not going to her bed? That was interesting.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” Joanna said. “But this isn’t about that, anyway. He has a dark shadow over him.” Her eyes closed and she swayed a little. “You have to tell him.”

  “That a dark shadow is over him? I don’t think I’m going to wake him up for that. I’m not going to be punished for one of your stupid prophecies,” Sarah said sourly.

  Another reference to punishment. I’d seen Stephen with each of the wives and I’d seen no sign of physical abuse, but there were other ways to abuse and Stephen was smart enough to have found unique ones for each wife.

  “Then get Rebecca,” Joanna begged. “She understands me.”

  So Rebecca wasn’t just the mother of the children here. She acted like the mother of the wives, too. Or at least Joanna thought of her that way.

  But Sarah refused. “I’m not waking her up, and you aren’t, either. That would be the same as waking up Stephen, and he doesn’t care about your stupid little superstitions.” She was mocking Joanna, just as Stephen had done.

  “He loves me,” Joanna said in reaction. “He loves his children. Even Grace. I know he loves them.” She sounded like she was talking from a distance, tinny and unclear.

  “You can have his love, then,” Sarah said, with a wave of her hands. “But not tonight.” She put a hand on Joanna’s shoulder and tried to push her toward the door.

  Joanna resisted, whirling on Sarah. “My prophecies are true. You know they are. I told you when you were going to be sick last month.”

  “Phht,” Sarah said. “Everyone else had already gotten sick that week. It didn’t take a prophecy to see that I would, too.”

  “But now there’s a dark shadow around you, too,” Joanna said, a hand to her throat. “It’s red and black and splattered, like paint.”

  “You’re crazy, that’s what you are,” Sarah said. “Stephen might feel sorry for you. He might even see you as a way to have more children. But he isn’t stupid. He doesn’t believe in your so-called prophecies.”

  Joanna shook her head slowly, sadly. She turned away from Sarah, her shoulders bowed, defeated. Sarah didn’t have to ask her to leave again. She slunk out the back door, and Sarah had to pull it closed behind her.

  “Idiot,” said Sarah, her lips twisted.

  Before she could look up and see me, I scuttled away as quietly as I could manage. Back in bed, I thought about prophecies and women’s history of healing blessings in the Mormon church, which had been common in the nineteenth century, but now were outright forbidden.

  I thought about charts and menstruation cycles and Joanna’s two children with Stephen in a short, two-year marriage. And then I thought of Stephen, who had only five wives, and seven nights in a week, leaving two nights untaken. I fell asleep before I could get beyond that, however.

  The next morning, I awoke suddenly to the sound of a feminine voice calling, “Dad, we finally managed to get here! Dad? Where are you?”

  I checked my phone then and saw Naomi and Kenneth had both sent me text messages about an hour ago, but I’d slept through them.

  There was nothing from Kurt, however.

  I got up, quickly threw on the fresh clothes from my overnight bag, and went downstairs.

  In the front room, Kenneth looked wonderful, freshly shaved, his hair still wet from the shower. Naomi was holding tightly to Kenneth. She looked like she hadn’t slept, dark circles under bloodshot eyes.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Kenneth. He offered me a hug, which I accepted gratefully. I felt so dislocated here, and now with Kurt gone, Kenneth’s touch was an anchor to the present, to reality, to my family.

  Naomi fidgeted anxiously beside him. “Where’s Dad?” Kenneth asked.

  This was not easy. “He went home.”

  “And left you here alone? Was there some kind of bishop emergency?”

  I’d never been one to lie to my children to keep them happy, but in this case, I filed it under “none of my grown son’s business,” and said, “Something like that.”

  “How was Talitha last night?” Naomi asked.

  I explained about the dead cat and burying it, and also about my visit to Talitha’s room with dinner. “She really wanted to see you.”

  “You’re saying you think she was drugged?” asked Naomi, looking furious.

  “Maybe,” I said, though I wasn’t a doctor, or even one in training, as she was.

  “I need to talk to my father right now. Have you seen him this morning?” she asked urgently.

  “Not yet.” I was surprised she wasn’t going to see the little girl first.

  “He has to be down here somewhere,” Naomi said, her tone scalding. “He’s always up at the crack of dawn to pray and read scriptures. Mom?” she called.

  Rebecca came out of the kitchen. She hadn’t come out when Naomi and Kenneth first appeared at the door. Had she just been too caught up in cooking breakfast? Or had she not wanted to talk to her daughter for some reason?

  “Naomi, sweetheart!” Rebecca said, stepping forward for a hug.

  Naomi ignored the motion and the hug was uncompleted. “Where’s Dad?”

  “I guess he might be down in his office,” Rebecca said. “Although I didn’t hear him come down while I was in the kitchen. He doesn’t usually sleep in, but I’ll go upstairs just to make sure.”

  Naomi went downstairs while Rebecca went up.

  It was only a few moments before I heard a piercing shriek from upstairs that made my heart go cold in my chest. I clutched Kenneth’s arm as Naomi came running up from the basement.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked Kenneth.

  “I don’t know. That’s your mother, isn’t it?” he said.

  Naomi went rushing upstairs. “Mom?” she called in a panicked tone.

  Kenneth loped after her, and I tried to keep up, failing miserably.

  By the time I reached the third floor hallway, I could hear Rebecca’s loud weeping coming from one of the bedrooms, then Naomi’s voice rising over her cries, “Mom, Mom, you’ve got to—”

  I had terrible visions of Talitha, gone cold and white in her bed, and me having to face another dead child’s funeral. How could I have left her alone last night? Why hadn’t I checked on her before I went to bed? Or when I’d been up and heard the conversation between Sarah and Joanna?

  But when I followed Kenneth through the half-open door, where he came to a sudden stop, I saw it wasn’t Talitha at all. It wasn’t her room, which I’d seen last night. This was obviously the master bedroom. And it was Stephen who was causing the cries.

  Rebecca was crouched over her husband, who was lying face up on the floor of the bedroom at the foot of the queen-size bed. Just above the bed was a photo of Stephen surrounded by his loving wives and children, which must have been taken fairly recently.

  I smelled something strange, fetid, and the awareness settled in that I was looking at a dead body. Stephen Carter’s dead body.

  Rebecca, her hands covered in shining red blood, was struggling with something that I realized was a butcher knife lodged in Stephen’s chest. She seemed to be trying to pull it out, but her hands kept slipping on it.

  “Stephen, Stephen, come back to me,” she sobbed as she rocked back and forth.

  She really shouldn’t have been touching the body, I thought, feeling distant and cold from the horror of the scene. My hands were tingling and I was dizzy and nauseated. I reached out and gripped the side of the door to make sure I didn’t fall down.

  All of my conflicting feelings for Stephen Carter rose to the surface. He was charming, but also controlling and manipulative. He was a scholar of Mormon history, but had his own reasons for it. He was a father to twenty-one children, and a husband to five wives. He was a doctor, and a good one, from what I’d gathered. He was a
child of God, and now he had gone home to God for whatever judgment was just.

  Chapter 14

  I stared at the bulk of the body on the floor. Stephen seemed very large in his death. His muscles were lax, but still, his limbs filled the small space of the room. His eyes were open, and it seemed to me that there was an expression of anger on his face.

  I averted my eyes from his dead gaze, eager to look at anything else in the room. I noticed that the rug he was lying on was a handmade rope braid rug, a handicraft that I had never learned, but Rebecca must have. The yellow and green summer colors had been splattered with very dark red blood. That sight made me queasy, but it was less unpleasant than looking directly at Stephen’s face.

  Naomi was standing in the middle of the room, one hand out, but still as a statue, staring down at her father. Kenneth was at her side.

  “Naomi?” He got out.

  She turned to him and said with a voice of steel, “Mom. We have to make sure she’s all right.”

  Kenneth stared at his fiancée for one more moment, then moved around her to Rebecca. He crouched down and was about to put a hand to her back, then thought better of it, considering the fact that she had her hand on a knife. “Rebecca, are you all right?” he asked.

  I was still trying to figure out what exactly had happened. Her hand was on the bloody knife. Was it possible she had killed Stephen? But surely there hadn’t been time between when she’d come up here and when she had shrieked, and I hadn’t seen her with a knife going up the stairs. Which meant what? Could she have killed him before she went down calmly to prepare breakfast? She seemed so sincere in her distress.

  Still, I could imagine the police coming to take statements and immediately focusing on Rebecca as the prime suspect. It was a damning scene. Why had she put her hands on that knife if she hadn’t done it? Wouldn’t the natural instinct be away from the evidence of death, not toward it?

  The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that Rebecca couldn’t kill the man she’d looked at with such admiration yesterday, the father of her children. And everyone here in this house, the children as well as the other wives, needed her here, not in jail somewhere. Even if she was eventually acquitted, if the police took Rebecca away for any period of time, what would happen to those left behind on the compound? The whole family would disintegrate; I was sure of it. None of the other wives would be able to take Rebecca’s place.

  If Rebecca was gone, I could just imagine what would happen with the rest of the wives, and it wasn’t good. Jennifer wouldn’t care; she’d stay locked up in her house working on her computer. I couldn’t see Joanna, so young and volatile, making the situation any better; she would convince herself she had foreseen divine wrath and would either cause havoc for the other wives or leave entirely. Carolyn would weep and cower some more. And Sarah? Bitter, angry Sarah, trapped caring for all the children, would just tell them the worst stories about their father that she could remember.

  This family needed Rebecca to fill the void Stephen’s death would create. Rebecca was the one who would think of their needs first and not her own, who would fight to keep them together here. She was the wife I thought was strongest. And maybe that was because she was also the one who was most like me.

  Rebecca let go of the knife with a gasp and stared at her now bloodstained hands. “Oh God,” she said as if in prayer.

  Maybe I was the answer to her prayer. I felt a burning need to help her, even if it meant postponing calling the police. I took a breath and waited for the Holy Spirit to tell me I was wrong, that I had to follow the proper procedure, as Kurt would have done, as he had done when he and I had found a dead body together in the church. He’d coached me through calling the police, not touching the body, dealing with notifying the loved ones.

  He wasn’t here now and I knew someone should call the police soon, but a little time to figure out what had really happened wouldn’t change that much, would it? If I was here to steer the police in the right direction, then Rebecca wouldn’t be taken away from the children who needed her so much. And surely if God wanted me to call the police immediately, I’d have felt or heard something. But there was nothing, no spiritual feeling except the need to help Rebecca.

  Now Naomi was pulling her mother away from the body, trying to get her to accept a knitted wrap because she was shaking so badly, asking her if she wanted to go downstairs to the kitchen and “wash up.” Kenneth had moved to block her view of her husband, good man that he was.

  Rebecca wouldn’t let herself be moved away, however. “It’s all my fault. I did this to him. I failed him,” she was saying.

  It wasn’t really a confession, I was sure. When someone dies, you always feel guilty. When Georgia had died, I blamed myself in every conceivable way, for not going to the hospital sooner, for not eating all the spinach I should have, for the medicine I’d taken for a cold before I knew I was pregnant.

  “It should be me dead,” Rebecca was moaning. She slapped her own chest and her voice sounded hoarse and raw.

  “Mom, maybe you should drink some water,” said Naomi. She waved at Kenneth to go get some. He moved around the body and went into the bathroom, but came out with his hands empty. No water cup there, apparently. He hustled downstairs.

  My top priority at the moment was to figure out a way to keep Rebecca from being wrongly arrested. On the other hand, I needed to make sure that whoever had committed this crime wasn’t still a danger to the rest of the family. So I tried to think about when the murder had to have happened. After Rebecca went down to start breakfast, or she’d have seen the body when she got up, but before Naomi arrived. That had to be a short time window, maybe an hour or less. What else did I know?

  Someone had known where to find Stephen, and that he would be alone. There’d been no noise of an argument. Could it be anyone outside the compound? How many people had keys to that gate? I didn’t think one of the boys would have been up with a key to the gate so early in the day. So that meant it was most likely someone from the inside, a member of the family.

  I heard Kenneth’s heavy, hurried footsteps on the stairs and then he reappeared with the promised glass of water.

  Rebecca took one sip and then put a hand to her mouth and shook her head adamantly. No more. We didn’t want her to throw up on the body.

  “Oh, God,” she said again. “He deserved better than this. He deserved so much better.”

  Naomi sighed and patted Rebecca’s back, as though the mother had become the child.

  I had to figure this out, and quickly. The kitchen knife meant something. It had to have been brought up to the bedroom deliberately, so this wasn’t a crime of passion. A knife had been chosen for a reason. It was very personal.

  I took a tentative step around Naomi and Rebecca, leaned down and touched Stephen’s hand, hoping that I wasn’t destroying too much evidence as I did it.

  I checked my watch. It was 7:24 now. I remembered reading in one of my mystery books that a body cools about one degree per hour. Stephen felt cool, but not cold. There was no rigor mortis, either. Both of those observations confirmed my guess that this had happened in the early morning.

  As much as I wanted to look away, I made myself study Stephen. His hair was dry. He wasn’t wearing pajamas, nor was he wearing the clothes he’d had on the day before. The khaki pants looked clean, except for the blood on them, and the light-colored button-down shirt still had fresh ironing creases on the cuffs. Was he just getting ready for his day or had he been expecting someone?

  Naomi tried to coax Rebecca out of the room, but Rebecca reached for Stephen again, flinging herself on him and his blood. Naomi and Kenneth worked together to bundle Rebecca into a chair in the corner. I noticed that Sarah hadn’t come into the room at the sound of Rebecca’s cry, nor had any curious children poked their heads in. It confirmed what I had thought yesterday about the children being used to ignoring a
dult arguments.

  Conscious that the police might frown on this behavior, I nonetheless looked around for Stephen’s phone and spotted it on the night table. There was no password locking it, so I easily scrolled through the record of his calls from the last few days.

  Mostly they were from the wives, Rebecca from yesterday afternoon asking when he’d be home, Carolyn asking for someone to come lift a box for her, Jennifer reminding him to deposit $300 into his retirement account and something about an appointment Saturday night with an old friend, Joanna telling him she’d be home late last Friday. Sarah hadn’t sent him a text in the last week or so, and the only text that had come this morning was from Naomi, telling him she’d be arriving soon, just as she’d told me.

  Just before I closed the phone, I saw there was a missed call from “Hector Perez,” and it took me a moment to place the name. The neighbors in whose garden Joanna used to work. I would have to follow up on that later.

  Rebecca had quieted down at last, no longer sobbing, and her eyes seemed to have glazed over, not really seeing Stephen anymore.

  “You should take your mother out of here,” I said to Naomi. “You help,” I directed Kenneth, because it looked as if Rebecca wasn’t going to be able to walk and I didn’t think Naomi could carry her alone.

  Kenneth hesitated and I said, “Go on.”

  He seemed surprised that I was taking charge, but it was only until Rebecca was ready to take her rightful place back.

  Kenneth hoisted Rebecca out of the chair and in one swift motion got her into his arms, holding her like a baby. Naomi held her mother’s hand and whispered calming things to her, making sure her nightgown didn’t trip Kenneth up.

  And then I was alone in the room, with quiet to think. This was a murder. Someone had planned it out and committed it in cold blood. Which of the other four wives did I think had done it?

  Sarah had clearly hated Stephen; for now, she seemed the most likely suspect. I had seen her act angry, cold, unloving, and bitter to different members of her family. But could those difficult emotions blossom into murder?