For Time and All Eternities Page 18

  Kenneth took a deep breath. “Boys, this is men’s work and you should be proud to do it, no matter how hard it is,” he said.

  The two boys said nothing, just following Kenneth down the stairs, grunting with effort.

  I didn’t know if Rebecca had asked the older girls to keep the younger children occupied in the basement for this, but none of them was watching during the twenty minutes it took to maneuver the body outside. I watched until I couldn’t see them out the back door anymore, then sat down on the couch in the living room and prayed that I hadn’t just done the worst thing a mother could do to her son, leading him to sin—or possibly to jail.

  When the three came back, Kenneth ushered Lehi and Brigham to the bathroom to wash up.

  Then Rebecca rang the cowbell and the children streamed up from downstairs with the older girls. We all sat down in the dining room for a rather grim, cold dinner of ham sandwiches and deviled eggs.

  “Tonight is your father’s funeral,” Rebecca said after the too-quiet dinner. “We’re going to wait in the backyard until everyone is ready to go down together.”

  The children trooped silently out to the backyard with Rebecca and then waited there for the other wives and children to gather. When Jennifer, Joanna, and Carolyn had arrived, along with their children, we all began the descent together. I noticed that Sarah wasn’t here, and that Naomi and Talitha weren’t, either. Good, I thought. Naomi could make sure that Talitha didn’t get taken away while Rebecca and the rest of the family were busy with the funeral.

  In the dimming light, I watched as several of the younger girls, Judith and Martha and Madeleine and Hannah, held and released one another’s hands, making snaking patterns with their arms. It looked like a game they had been playing for a long time together, and I was relieved to see them act like children, at least for a little while.

  I noticed that Joanna’s children remained at her side, the least integrated of them all even when we reached the gravestones around the open grave. Not far from her, I noticed a man who looked like he could have been Stephen’s brother, and I gave a start.

  A much younger brother, I chided myself when I looked more carefully. He was standing next to another young man who looked very much like Stephen, although not as strikingly as the first. They must be the two oldest sons, Joseph and Aaron, who were at the U. Presumably Rebecca had informed them of the death of their father and they had arrived just in time for the funeral. Did they know anything about the proposed will change? Did either of them have any idea which of the wives might have wanted Stephen dead? That would have to wait until after the funeral.

  Away from the city here in the mountains, the air smelled clean and fresh. We were high enough that the exhaust of cars and trains and the industrial plants to the north were below us.

  As we stood looking out over the valley, I wondered for a moment what it had been like in 1847, when Brigham Young had famously said, “This is the place.” The desert landscape then must have seemed extreme—sagebrush and tumbleweed, no buildings in sight. The canal system that kept the pioneers alive hadn’t been cut into the land yet. Desert colors of red and gray and brown would have been all that met the eye.

  I could imagine women weeping when they were assigned a piece of land to cultivate to keep their family alive. How long until they managed to harvest food from the ground? How many hours a day did they work in hopes that the next year would bring them more than this one had? And when they were asked to share their husbands in polygamous marriages, not to mention their food, their land, their hopes and dreams—how had they borne it?

  As soon as everyone had collected around the grave, Carolyn led everyone in singing the famous Mormon hymn “Come, Come, Ye Saints.”

  Come, come ye saints, no toil nor labor fear;

  But with joy wend your way.

  Though hard to you this journey may appear,

  Grace shall be as your day.

  ‘Tis better far for us to strive

  Our useless cares from us to drive;

  Do this, and joy your hearts will swell—

  All is well! All is well!

  The hymn had been written on the plains, as the Mormon pioneers walked day after day, often twenty miles a day, through unsettled territory. They slept at night with the sounds of wolves in their ears, and the fear of Indians in their hearts. For protection, the wagons were circled—quite literally—and the people slept underneath the wide wooden slats to escape bad weather.

  When the weather was good, fires were lit in the center of the circle, and the meager food cooked over them. Mostly, the pioneers ate fried cakes made of flour and water. When they were desperate, they tried to eat what plants they found on the trail, and those experiments often ended with vomiting or worse.

  The penultimate verse of “Come, Come Ye Saints” was about dying on the plains and how it wouldn’t be so bad, since God would reward His chosen people and they wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. Grim stuff, but it was part of our history.

  When I taught in the Primary, I was astonished at some of the horrible stories that were told in the children’s manuals. Women who died in childbirth on the trail, whose husbands and other children left the body behind, then came back later to reclaim it only to find no trace of the bones. Small children who froze to death in the middle of the night and whose parents woke next to corpses. Older children set to walk last behind the rest of the train to gather oxen droppings to dry for fuel, who disappeared by day’s end and were never found again. Taken by Indians? By wolves? Lost and calling out for help somewhere?

  Mormons are extraordinarily proud of their heritage, and they tend to see persecution of any kind as proof of their righteousness. Maybe being excommunicated had made Stephen Carter feel himself even more justified in his lifestyle, as a descendant of these people who had been chased away from every place they had tried to settle.

  As I scanned the group, I noticed two other people I had never met, an older, Hispanic-looking man and a beautiful, dark-haired and dark-eyed young woman whom I guessed to be in her late teens. These must be the Perezes. Had they come up through the break in the fence I’d noticed earlier, or the long way around on the road? I wondered if they knew that Stephen had been murdered and if either of them was likely to go to the police. I sincerely hoped not, now that Kenneth and I were too far involved in this to get out easily. But I would need to talk to them about Stephen, too.

  After the song there was a long silence until Rebecca Carter came to stand in front of the mounded grave that Kenneth had filled in over the body. She took charge, silhouetted by the falling sun. Light glowed around her head and shoulders as though she’d been marked as an angel.

  She thanked everyone for coming, but she did not eulogize her husband. She did not tell us the story of Stephen’s early years or their marriage. She said simply that she honored Stephen, her husband, the father of her children, in death as she had honored him in life, with the best of herself. She held up her hands and asked God to take Stephen’s soul to Himself. And then she moved aside, as if to encourage anyone else to speak.

  None of the other wives stepped forward.

  I noticed Carolyn was holding her belly and looking at the ground. I couldn’t imagine being pregnant and attending my husband’s funeral, knowing that I would have to face the labor and delivery on my own. I hoped the other wives would be there for her when she delivered in a few months.

  Jennifer was dressed in a somber black gown that looked out of place at this ad-hoc and informal outdoor funeral. But she looked less like a grieving widow than like a friend of the family who had attended to be supportive. I could read no emotion on her face, except perhaps an occasional flicker of stifled boredom.

  Joanna seemed more worn than tearful, her children clinging to her except for Grace, who stood like a soldier at attention in her overly adult clothing.

  After a
few minutes, one of Rebecca’s older sons—Aaron, as he announced himself—stood up and said, through tears, that his father was the “best man I’ve ever known.” He didn’t seem able to get anything else out. His brother Joseph was standing by his side with his lips tightly clenched together, as if he didn’t trust himself to say anything.

  I couldn’t help but think about what Kurt’s funeral might be like, what I hoped was a long way off. Would our sons speak at it? What would Samuel and Kenneth say? What would I?

  We stood around for a while in the silence, and then people decided to disperse, mothers herding the children home for bed. I had a choice to make, between the two sons and the Perezes. Which ones should I talk to first? Surely, in Mormonism, it was always family first.

  Chapter 22

  I hurried to overtake Joseph and Aaron, who were walking away together. “Excuse me, but I don’t think we’ve met,” I said, planting myself directly in the path to the house. I stuck out my hand. “Linda Wallheim. I’m to be Naomi’s mother-in-law and your father had invited me over to visit the family when this tragedy occurred.”

  “You already know I’m Aaron,” said the son who had spoken at the funeral. He was shorter and thinner than his father or his brother. “And this is Joseph,” he said, nodding to his brother.

  Now that I looked at Joseph up close, he no longer looked as much like his father. For one thing, I could see that his nose was different; it had been broken and not set properly. His face wasn’t as sharp as Stephen’s had been, either. And Aaron’s was even more softly shaped.

  They both shook my hand, though Joseph seemed slightly uncomfortable about it.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, hoping they didn’t notice how perfunctory my tone sounded. “My sincere sympathies. I know so much is going to fall to you now as oldest sons.”

  Joseph stared at me with suspicion.

  “Of course we are sad that our father has gone from this life,” said Aaron. “But none of us can ever know when God will choose to bring us home, and we who remain must be comforted by the knowledge that we will all be together in the glorious celestial kingdom.”

  “Glorious,” murmured Joseph, and I had the first glimpse into his eyes as they met mine. He looked as bored as Jennifer had at the funeral, and as disconnected.

  “I hope your mother and the other . . . children can depend on you for your support,” I said blandly. It felt too awkward somehow to mention the other wives, as well.

  I had addressed both of them, but Aaron replied as if I had spoken to him alone. “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I’m very busy right now with summer courses. I’m sure you can guess how demanding the pre-med program is. And I assume that my father’s insurance policy will take care of the family.”

  “You assume?” I said, because this was what I’d been meaning to ask from the beginning. “Your father never talked to you about the provisions in his will?” While I was thinking about this, I realized both of them must have their own keys to the gate, and although I’d originally thought of the wives as the only suspects, either of them could have snuck in and killed their father and snuck out again. It might even explain why Rebecca wanted to prevent a police investigation, if she suspected her beloved older sons of the murder.

  “My father didn’t consider either of us to be adults worth talking to about anything of importance,” Joseph said loudly. So it wasn’t grief that had kept his jaw clenched throughout the funeral. He must have spent the whole time trying to keep his anger in, and now it was exploding out of him.

  “He loved us and made sure we had everything we needed,” Aaron said, facing his brother. His hands were in fists; he was geared up for a confrontation. “You know that he was a fine father and a fine man.”

  “Well, that is certainly what he would have said of himself,” Joseph said, with dark humor. “It’s nice to know that you still agree with him about everything.”

  “He was a good father,” Aaron repeated, turning to me. He was even more defensive sounding now. “He paid for our college tuition and room and board. He made our lives very easy, with no strings attached.”

  Joseph rolled his eyes. “No strings. You’re right there. They were nets, not strings, big enough to pull whole planets in. We were never children, not to him. We were the manifestation of his future power in the world. He molded us and punished us and manipulated us so that we would be what he wanted us to be, and even now, I can’t see a way to escape his plan for me.”

  He couldn’t just drop out of school and do something else? I found I didn’t like either of the sons, who seemed to see everything in the world only as it related to themselves. Though Joseph hated his father, he was like him in many ways, including his tendency to speechify normal conversation.

  “So you didn’t know about the will?” I asked, trying to get them back to my original point.

  “I assume—didn’t he leave everything to Mom?” said Aaron, turning back to me.

  “There’s some question about whether he changed his will recently.” I was watching them both closely, but saw no flicker of guilt on either of their faces.

  “Why would he do that?” said Aaron, who seemed genuinely confused now.

  I didn’t know. That was why I was asking. “Did he speak to either of you about it?” I looked at Joseph.

  “He said something about changing our monthly allowances the last time I talked to him.”

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “A couple of days ago,” Joseph admitted, squinting in concentration, trying to remember. “But I thought it was just his usual threats that we had to get perfect grades and so on.”

  “What did he say?” I asked, since this sounded like it was on the same timeline as the will and the argument between Stephen and Joanna.

  Joseph shrugged. “That there were changes coming. I figured he meant another wife and kids. Maybe he was changing his will to include her, whoever she was.” He made an ugly face.

  Another wife? I hadn’t heard anything about that from anyone else, and I was inclined to dismiss it from Joseph, who so clearly had a chip on his shoulder about his father.

  I took a deep breath and asked, “Did your mother tell you anything about your father’s death?”

  “A heart attack,” Aaron said.

  Ah, so she had lied to them, as well. I had assumed she had lied to the small children, but not to the grown ones.

  “Did you know if there was a specific new woman your father was, uh, dating?” I asked, picking up on the thread of what Joseph had said.

  “He said something about her being a neighbor. I thought maybe it was the girl who was here.” He glanced around, but the Perezes appeared to have gone back to their house.

  “Isn’t she a little young for a man your father’s age?” I asked.

  “You don’t know my father if you think that,” Joseph said, shaking his head.

  Aaron gave his brother a disgusted look. “He’s talking about our neighbor Maria. She’s only sixteen—the same as Esther.”

  Joseph shrugged, apparently unaffected by the idea of his father marrying someone the same age as one of his little sisters. “The younger the better for our father. They were easier for him to con.”

  “He wasn’t conning them!” Aaron interjected. “They just had fewer set ideas about what marriage should be. He said they were more flexible.”

  “More flexible, yeah, I’ll say.” Joseph guffawed at this and even I blushed at the unintended innuendo.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Aaron had reddened a little.

  “Do you mind if I ask you where you were last night and this morning?” I asked.

  Joseph looked at me long and hard. “I was at a party,” he said finally. “Why?”

  Did he know that his father hadn’t died of a heart attack? I wouldn’t be able to tell if he w
as lying to me. “What about this morning?”

  “The party went all night,” he said. Aaron shot him a reproving look. “Not that it’s any of your business. Why do you want to know?”

  “I was wondering if you’d had a chance to talk to your father before he died,” I said carefully. “What about you, Aaron?”

  “I didn’t talk to him,” Aaron said, and he seemed genuinely bereft. “I thought about coming home for dinner, too, but instead I just studied all night.”

  I didn’t think he had killed his father, but I asked anyway, “What about this morning?”

  “I didn’t wake up until Naomi called with the news,” he said. “And then it was too late.”

  I said goodnight and let them walk away. I wasn’t certain they were telling the truth, but I wasn’t going to get any closer without having to explain why I was asking. And besides, I had no way of confirming their alibis, anyway. Too bad I couldn’t ask for witness phone numbers like the police could

  I considered just going straight to bed. It was nearly nine, and I was exhausted from not sleeping well the night before and all the events of today. But the longer I put off talking to the Perezes, the longer it would be until I could go home. I hoped they had more to offer than the two older sons had, though. It felt like I was circling around the truth and then always finding myself back at the beginning with nothing to show for all my time and effort. Not to mention my frustration.

  Chapter 23

  I made my way slowly in the dark back to the fence perimeter, and had to take two tries at what I thought was the break before I found the right opening in the fence. I had to duck to get through it.

  I could see a figure in the backyard, apparently digging in the flower beds that ran along the house. Evening gardening made sense; I knew the heat of the summer sun could be brutal. At first I assumed it was Mr. Perez, but as I got closer, I could see he was too tall and too young to be the man I’d seen at the funeral just an hour ago. Who was he?