For Time and All Eternities Page 20

  I took in the space itself. The one overhead light was rather harsh. The shed was divided into different sections. I saw there was a small refrigerator and a portable cook top, along with a cabinet that had a couple of dirty pans and dishes on top of it and a sink under the window. I could see a tiny door that was probably a bathroom. Sarah could really retreat here for days on end if she wanted to.

  On the other side of the room, there were several large, blank canvases, as well as cans of paint neatly ordered on shelves. But there were also piles of ruined canvases heaped together, scraps floating in the flow of air from the space heater. Sarah was carefully keeping away from the pile of ruined things, as if touching them would hurt her all over again. I felt sympathy for her then, dealing with this invasion and cruelty, whoever it had come from.

  “Did any of your work survive?” I asked Sarah, investing my voice with all my compassion. “I’d love to see something.”

  “All my favorites, the new things, are gone, but I’ll see what I can find,” Sarah said in a muted tone. She was so different here, vulnerable and hurt. Who had done this to her? Stephen, as she thought? Did that lead me back to her as the best suspect for the murder? Not if she hadn’t found the destruction until today, as she said she had.

  Sarah picked through some paintings and I felt sorrow on her behalf as more scraps of ruined canvases fell to the cement floor. They had been cut by a knife, I thought. Repeatedly, and with some viciousness.

  “Were you an artist before you married Stephen?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  Sarah’s tone was distant as she picked through the stack of canvases. “I dabbled a bit. I never finished college.”

  “Oh? Why was that?” I asked.

  She stiffened at my question and let go of the canvases. “I got pregnant when I was a sophomore and dropped out of school.”

  I had guessed as much—Talitha didn’t look much like Stephen, whose genes were too obvious on all the other children’s faces, and I’d wondered if an out-of-wedlock pregnancy had been part of how Sarah had ended up here on the Carter compound. “What about the father?” I asked nosily.

  Sarah made a sound of disgust, apparently at her past, youthful self. “Same old story. I fell in love with another student. I thought he loved me, too. But I was an idiot, didn’t know anything about birth control because my Mormon parents hadn’t bothered to tell me about it. And I got pregnant.”

  “You didn’t consider an . . .” I trailed off, finding it hard to say the word “abortion” out loud after years of avoiding the word in Mormon settings. It wasn’t against Mormon doctrine to use birth control, at least not anymore, but Mormons were certainly still encouraged to have large families and to start at a young age. As for abortion, the Mormon church allowed it only in cases of rape, incest, and risk to the mother’s life. Even then, you had to get clearance from your bishop if you wanted to keep a temple recommend and avoid discipline.

  “No. I don’t know why. I fell in love with my baby before she was even born. I thought her father would feel the same way about her, which was idiotic of me, I know.” She made a derisive sound. “The day after I told him, he disappeared. Talitha and I have never heard from him again.”

  She paused a moment and I wanted to say that I was sorry, but surely that would sound condescending to her so instead I said, “What about your parents?” Why hadn’t they been a backup for her?

  “My parents only wanted to offer me a place to stay if I repented of my sins and gave the baby up for adoption.” She was staring at her hands. I knew the Mormon church encouraged adoption for unmarried mothers, but it shouldn’t have been forced. I was suddenly so angry at those parents from so many years ago. What might Sarah’s life have been like if they hadn’t been so judgmental? “I was sure I’d never have my own life again after that,” Sarah said. “So I . . .”

  She paused, and I filled the silence. “So you married Stephen.”

  Sarah nodded and the worn defeat in her eyes startled me. It might have been the look of a woman twice her age. “Yes, I married Stephen. I was so naïve.”

  If her parents had been here, I would have given them a piece of my mind. No young woman should have to go through so much in such a short period of time—getting pregnant, getting dumped, losing her family and their financial support, having to abandon her education, feeling backed into a drastically different lifestyle and nearly new religion, all at once.

  After a moment, she added, “I will give him this much, Stephen never shamed me about the pregnancy. He said that all children are welcomed by God. I think that was part of the attraction. My parents could barely look at me or my stomach. But Stephen thought it was beautiful.”

  Because it was proof she could bear him more children, proof she would stay bound to him, I thought furiously. He had taken advantage of a vulnerable young woman and shackled her to a life of isolation and servitude. If she had killed him, did she really deserve punishment?

  “And you haven’t seen your parents since then?” I asked, wondering if she was planning to take Talitha and live with them now.

  She shook her head. “They cut Rebecca off when Stephen began practicing polygamy. It’s been the same for me. The only grandchildren who’ve ever met them are the older ones, and that was years ago.” She had a tight hold on one of the paintings and I was worried that she might rip it with her own grip.

  Judge your children and if they don’t come up to your standard, cut them off? That was what Jesus said, wasn’t it?

  “Were you never happy with Stephen?” I asked.

  “Not for a moment,” Sarah said, finding a ripped piece of canvas on the floor and tearing it in a vicious gesture, then flinging it at the pile nearby. “It was better at first. Then Stephen acted like all his rules were just suggestions. But after Talitha was born, he became very rigid. Punitive.”

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked.

  Sarah rubbed at a visibly twitching muscle in her neck. “Oh, he never harmed me physically. He didn’t have to. He had a thousand other ways to make my life miserable. When he said the word, the other wives would refuse to speak to me, actually turn their backs on me. Car privileges would be suspended for months on end, and he would take away my key so that I couldn’t get out of the compound at all. I’d be put on constant laundry and kitchen duty, never even allowed to go outside and breathe fresh air, my hands getting so dried that my skin would crack and bleed. He wouldn’t even let me put any cream on them.”

  And this was the man whose home I had decided to stay in, while Kurt left in protest. I quailed at the idea that anyone might think that I approved of him.

  “Sometimes, if I had done something truly heinous, like speak back to Stephen, they would send Talitha away to one of the other houses and I wouldn’t see her for weeks at a time. My milk dried up when she was only a few weeks old because I kept speaking back to him. I just couldn’t keep my damned mouth shut.” She looked down at her chest, pressing gently against her left breast as if she remembered how it had felt bursting with milk that no child would drink.

  My God, if even half of what she said was true, this was a true horror story. And I’d let Stephen Carter blather on to me about “the Principle.” I’d thought of Sarah as cold and unpleasant, as bitter. I’d thought of Rebecca as the “good” sister. But how could she have allowed this?

  “Did you ever try to leave?” I asked. I knew that abused women sometimes had been so messed up mentally they couldn’t see a way out. And this young woman had been betrayed by everyone around her.

  “Well, by the time my milk had dried up, I was pregnant again.”

  “So soon?” I asked. It wasn’t impossible, but it was unusual.

  She shrugged. “Then I was in an even worse situation than before. Stephen was on Talitha’s birth certificate as the father and he told me he would seek custody of both children if I left, and that the stat
e would give it to him because I had no means of support for them. And that I was crazy. He said that enough that I started to believe him.” She spoke flatly, as if she had become separated from her own feelings.

  “You’re not crazy,” I said then. Just angry, I thought. With good cause.

  “My art was the one indulgence he allowed me. Maybe because he knew that without that, I’d have killed myself.” Her mouth twisted with a weird half-smile. “He would tell me how lucky I was that he was willing to pay for the expensive canvases and the oil paints. He’d tell me how unlikely it was that I’d ever get a job that could pay for such a hobby, considering I didn’t even have a college degree.”

  “Had he ruined your paintings before?” I asked.

  Sarah hesitated. “No,” she said, as if surprised at her own words. “He actually let me keep a lock on the door, though he must have had a key. I’d locked it last night before I went to bed, and it was locked when I came in again this morning, so whoever did this had a key. If it wasn’t Stephen, it was someone who had a spare I didn’t know existed until now.”

  “Did he like your paintings?” I asked.

  “He said I was gifted, but that I needed more discipline.” She laughed harshly. “I do need more discipline. I need more time, too. But I’ve done what I could and I am proud of myself. The only thing I’m truly proud of, I think. You don’t give birth to paintings whether you want to or not. You have to try to grow them.”

  I felt such sympathy for her. I wanted to reach out and console her, but I didn’t think she would welcome a comforting gesture.

  “Anyway, I stayed here for eight years, and it was always just when I thought about leaving that I got pregnant again. It wasn’t until three years ago I started refusing Stephen in bed. I used a knife the first time to make sure he got the message.”

  I wondered what kind of knife it had been. A kitchen knife, by any chance?

  She made a sharp motion with one hand. “But it didn’t matter. I was just as stuck as before. God, I hated him. I wished him dead a thousand times, but figured God didn’t listen to a woman like me. I guess I was wrong again, wasn’t I?” That odd half-smile, again, as she stared at me and waited for a response.

  She had just told me she wanted Stephen dead. Did that count as a confession?

  “I don’t think Stephen’s death was an answer to prayer,” I said.

  Sarah let out a brittle laugh. “No, I suppose not. God doesn’t use kitchen knives, does He? Too lowly for His tastes. He’d create a hurricane to destroy the whole compound while He was at it, wouldn’t He?”

  Sarah hadn’t really confessed to anything other than wishing Stephen was dead, which wasn’t criminal. I thought about Maria and about Stephen’s tendency to prey on young, vulnerable women.

  “Did you hear anything about a change in Stephen’s will?” I asked.

  “What? Did he not leave everything to Rebecca?” Sarah asked. She smiled. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry for her.”

  So she didn’t know anything about it. If she had, she’d have known the will hadn’t been changed, and that Rebecca got everything, after all.

  “I heard you and Joanna talking the night before Stephen was murdered,” I said after a moment, trying to cover all the bases.

  “So?” Sarah seemed to think back for a moment. “Joanna’s stupid premonition came true that time, I guess.”

  “It didn’t come true at other times?” I asked.

  Sarah waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, she always claimed that it did. She’d twist whatever she said into being whatever happened in the end.”

  So she didn’t believe the gift was real, but that wasn’t a surprise.

  “Did you go to bed right after Joanna left?” I asked.

  Sarah shook her head. She wasn’t stupid. She knew what I was getting at. “I didn’t wait around the bedroom for five hours until I could sneak in and stab him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Who do you think did it, then?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” she said. And then, moving on to something that actually interested her, she took out two paintings and showed them to me. One was about the size of a chest of drawers; the other big enough to cover nearly the entire wall of a shed. Both were splattered with rich shades of color, thick enough with paint I could see waves of it.

  I was so stunned that I couldn’t say anything for a long moment. The paintings were far better than I had thought they would be. I’d expected something more pedestrian, but Sarah’s use of color was astonishing. It stirred a wildfire of emotion in me that I hadn’t known paint and canvas alone could evoke.

  “These are both amazing. You are very talented.”

  I tried to remember the few art classes I’d had in college. These paintings were definitely abstracts, but I wasn’t sure “modern” would be the right word to describe them. Maybe “primitive”? The larger painting had only shades of red, but the gradations were such that I felt like the paint was every shade of rage captured in one canvas.

  The smaller painting, meanwhile, was full of blues and made me think of the sea. I felt touched with calm when I looked at it, and I thought for a moment I could hear the rhythm of waves hitting the shore.

  I pointed to the blue one. “The ocean?” I asked quietly, not wanting to let go of the feeling it evoked in me. Kurt and I had gone to a beach in California for our honeymoon, and this reminded me vividly of the physical pleasure of those few days and the heady sense of being special and loved above anyone else in the world.

  Sarah seemed to soften, which was the first time I’d seen anything like that in her. I thought for that moment how young she still was. She said, “Yes. I’m from California. My parents used to take me to the beach nearly every day. I miss it in ways I never thought I would.”

  The enveloping love I felt in that painting made me think better of her parents, at least a little. “Have you ever had a gallery show your paintings?” I asked. It seemed a crime that the rest of the world would never see these, or experience the feelings I had just felt on seeing them—both good and bad. Kurt would love these, and I was sad again for a moment that he wasn’t here with me to enjoy them.

  “No, of course not. Stephen said my work was private and besides, he didn’t want to spend money arranging it.” That bitterness in Sarah’s voice again.

  Stephen had made so much money in his investments that that shouldn’t have been an issue. Did she know that, too?

  Stephen had been a terrible husband to Sarah. But she was also now in dire financial straits, with no more skills to make a living than she’d had in high school and with a lot more responsibilities. That didn’t mean she hadn’t killed Stephen, but it meant I didn’t believe she had planned it. But she was the wife with the strongest motive, and she certainly had the personality to kill someone in the heat of the moment. I felt I had to ask her again.

  “Sarah, did you take that knife out of the kitchen? Did you use it to kill Stephen?”

  Sarah put down her paintings then. Ignoring my question, she turned away and began to clean the bristles of some brushes that were soaking in a bucket. The smell of turpentine was strong.

  “Sarah, did you kill Stephen with that kitchen knife?” I asked again, insistent.

  She whirled at me. “Did I kill him? I wish to God I had,” she said. She was on the verge of tears. “If I had, I might have some self-respect left. But no, I didn’t do it.” Her voice cracked.

  And still I pressed, God forgive me. I gripped her hands and forced her to look me in the eye. “Are you sure? Would you remember it if you had? Would you admit it?” Could she have had some kind of mental break after she’d found her paintings ruined?

  “Are you joking? If I’d killed Stephen, I’d trumpet it from the rooftops,” she said. “I wouldn’t care if I went to prison, either. Better that than here.”

/>   I let out a breath and found I believed her. Which meant I could let her go. Though it left me with more work to do, I was relieved that she wasn’t the culprit, since she had been so much a victim. At least she might find peace once she was gone from here.

  I asked her one more question before I left her alone. “Do you know who did kill him?”

  She shook her head. “If it wasn’t God Himself, giving us all justice at last, you mean?”

  In my experience, God’s justice was not so swift or clear as that.

  Chapter 25

  I left her in the shed, continuing to clean brushes, and walked back to the house. At last, I headed up to bed myself and wondered what I had accomplished today.

  I’d found Stephen’s will and a letter saying he’d planned to change it. I’d learned that Joanna thought Jennifer had the best motive for murder. I’d met Dr. Benallie, Stephen’s business partner and former fiancée, who hated him, but claimed innocence of the murder. I’d talked to Joseph and Aaron, who told me about Stephen’s interest in Maria Perez. From Hector Perez, I’d found out that Stephen had been planning to be polygamous long before he told Rebecca about it. And from Sarah, I’d found out that Stephen had been a controlling and manipulative husband whom I wished I had never met.

  As I stared up at the bunk bed above me, I thought about my own husband, whose sins had shrunk in comparison to Stephen’s. Was he still angry at me? He hadn’t sent a text or tried to call me since he left. It was hard to believe it had only been about thirty hours since then. It felt like weeks had gone by in my life without him. This was my second night away from home and I had no idea what he must be thinking of me. I missed the physicality of his presence in the bed next to me, his smell, and the pattern of his breathing.

  Just as I was drifting off, Rebecca cracked the bedroom door open and poked her head in, her expression cautious. “I’m so sorry to bother you when you’re trying to sleep, but I’m wondering if I can talk to you for a moment? It’s important.”

  “All right,” I said, wishing she hadn’t asked. I’d been so sympathetic to her at first, but that feeling had changed, especially after my conversation with Sarah. There were too many problems here for her to ignore them and still talk about the holiness of the Principle.