For Time and All Eternities Page 23

  She looked at the door jamb, pressed her finger into a bit of wood hanging out of it, and then held it out to me to see the splinter there. “Of course. But I’m not like other people. I learned that early on in life. I didn’t want friends or relationships. I never cared about feelings or security, whatever it is that makes other people do what they do.”

  She studied the splinter, but didn’t take it out. It must hurt, and it was strange to see her so curious about her own physical pain, without ever reacting to it. “Stephen’s proposition of marriage gave me a chance to live here.” She gestured widely to take in the expanse of the compound. “I’ve been able to have quiet almost all the time. And in addition to that, no one bothers me to go on dates or to spend time doing things I’m not interested in.”

  I stared at her and wondered if she was what a psychologist would call a sociopath. I’d read about them in books and I’d always felt sick at their lack of sympathy for others. But I’d met Jennifer several times now and never guessed this about her. She really seemed to feel nothing, at least not in any normal sense.

  “It went much better with Stephen than I ever imagined. Once I understood him, he was easy to manage. He had his ego, but if I stroked it with a few words, or let him stroke me a few times a month”—she glanced sideways at me at this, but showed no embarrassment—“that was all it took. And he didn’t ask twice about all the money I was investing for him, never looked carefully at my yearly reports. He trusted me, if you can believe it. Me.” She shrugged and smiled again, that cold, wide smile. It reminded me of what Joanna had said about Jennifer having a murderer’s heart.

  My stomach clenched and I wondered if I was in danger. I could see no real reason for Jennifer to want to kill Stephen, since she had so clearly thought she was getting the better end of the bargain between them. But if there was any person on this compound I was truly afraid of now, it was Jennifer. Was it possible she had just decided to kill Stephen to see how it would feel?

  “You knew Stephen was thinking of changing his will,” I said, sure she had. She knew everything. Rebecca might be the mother of the compound, but Jennifer was the queen.

  She shrugged, unashamed. “He was old friends with a lawyer from college. He asked me to make an appointment with him to change the will. As if I was his secretary.”

  The appointment with an old friend that she’d messaged him about, I thought. It was with a lawyer about the will. “Why did he want to change it?”

  “He said he’d decided that he was going to put Aaron in charge of distributing funds if he died, and that each of the children who was verified to be his would get an equal portion.”

  I thought for a moment. “But what about Talitha? What about Grace?”

  “What about me?” She met my eyes and I thought again of how cold she was. She didn’t seem to care about the children’s welfare at all, only her own.

  “Was this to punish Sarah?” I asked. Cutting Talitha out of the will would have been a blow to Sarah, surely.

  “Well, Stephen had discovered the truth about Sarah and Rebecca.” She spoke so casually, though she watched me to see my reaction.

  “What truth?” I asked, trying to hide the lurch in my stomach. Rebecca and Sarah. There had always been something wrong in their relationship, something too fraught, too emotional, and I’d known it. Rebecca had admitted as much to me last night when she’d told me about destroying Sarah’s paintings.

  “You never thought about how they look so much alike?” she asked.

  “They’re sisters. A lot of sisters look alike,” I said, still pushing away what Jennifer was hinting at. It was too much. I’d liked Rebecca and I had done so much to help her cover up Stephen’s murder because I connected to her as a mother, but what kind of mother could allow what Jennifer was suggesting?

  “Did you never think about the age difference between Sarah and Rebecca? Fifteen years,” Jennifer went on.

  “Yes,” I said.

  A gust of wind mussed Jennifer’s hair and she smoothed it back carefully. She was so calm, even amused. “I’ve seen the genealogy. One of the perks of that Mormon obsession with records. They were easy to find. Rebecca’s mother was born in 1930. Rebecca was born in 1970, a surprise child at the end of what looked like a childless marriage. Sarah was born in 1985.” Jennifer looked at me meaningfully.

  I did the math in my head as Jennifer watched me, clearly giving me extra time in case I was very slow. So Rebecca’s mother would have been fifty-five when Sarah was born. That made it pretty much impossible for her to conceive without intervention that would probably not have existed at the time.

  Rebecca was not Sarah’s sister, but her mother. I was rocked to my core. Everything I had thought about the two of them, about Stephen, about Talitha: it was all wrong. Her own daughter had married her husband? Why wasn’t Rebecca disgusted by that? It was practically incest.

  “You told Stephen,” I said, sure she had done it for some reason of her own.

  “I was trying to get him to change the will to my benefit. He came up with the idea about the children and the will on Saturday night, after he had that argument with Joanna. I tried to convince the other wives to talk him out of it, but they wouldn’t listen to me. I tried to talk him out of it on Monday, too, when he came to visit me here with you and your oh-so-righteous husband in tow.”

  I felt a twinge of pain at this reference to Kurt, but it did explain something else I’d been meaning to ask Jennifer. Had I at last caught the tail of the right dog here? This had to have all led to Stephen’s death.

  “You told all the other wives that Stephen was going to change his will?” This was finally the last thing I was looking for, the timeline that made sense for the murder.

  “No. Only Carolyn and Joanna. I didn’t want Rebecca or Sarah to know about it. Sarah doesn’t know the truth yet about Rebecca, and I thought it would upset her and make her unmanageable. She can be very annoying when she is like that.”

  For some reason Stephen had decided to change his will in favor of his own biological children, which certainly would not have benefited Jennifer since she hadn’t given him any. So she had told Stephen about Rebecca and Sarah’s being mother and daughter, hoping to get him to change the will in her favor instead. Why would she kill him before she’d been able to convince him to make the changes she wanted?

  She’d have waited until she succeeded, and she certainly would have believed she could eventually wear him down. Carolyn and Joanna knew about the change to the will, and Joanna had argued with Stephen over it, presumably because her daughter Grace would be cut out. But what about Sarah? Could she have found out that Talitha was going to be cut out? Was her threat to take Talitha away just that, a threat, when really she was planning to stay because that was the only way she could get some of Stephen’s money?

  I still didn’t have the full picture here, but I was close. I just had to poke at a few more things, and I was sure this would break wide open. What would happen after that, I didn’t know, but I would be done with it and could go home to Kurt. I could shake the dust off my feet, as they say in the scriptures, from this evil place.

  Jennifer tugged at the splinter in her finger, licking at the blood that came out. Then she went inside, leaving me outside with what felt like as many questions as she’d given me answers.

  Chapter 28

  I wanted to go back to the main house and get some more sleep to make up for what I’d missed during the night. What I did instead was go directly from Jennifer’s house to Joanna’s. It was only 10 a.m., but it felt much later. I walked inside without knocking, and found Joanna in the kitchen, finishing up dishes by hand.

  “Still no dishwasher?” I spoke softly, trying to avoid startling her.

  She looked over her shoulder at me and did not seem surprised at my presence. Maybe she’d had a premonition I was coming? “Stephen kept saying he
would buy me one, but he never got around to it. Now I’ll probably never get one.”

  She put down the dishrag and braced a hand again her lower back to support it. I felt instant sympathy. When my children were small and I picked them up and carried them around all day long, I had done the same thing. I’d always been in pain, and there had always been more to do after the children were in bed. It’s very physical labor, mothering.

  I sat down and waited until Joanna was finished. I felt guilty for not offering to help, but wasn’t sure she would want my interference. I was also trying to figure out exactly how to put into words my accusation about the will being changed and the argument with Stephen that had followed.

  When Joanna finally came and sat next to me, she was silent, and closed her eyes for long enough that I wondered if she had fallen asleep sitting up. Then she let out a long breath and opened her eyes to look at me.

  “My gift warned me you would come today and why,” she said. “You don’t have to beat around the bush with me.” Her eyes seemed very intense. “You want to know if I killed Stephen.”

  Well, that was blunt. “Did you?” I said, trying to stare into her eyes and discern her motives—as I’d come to believe that was my spiritual gift.

  “No, I did not,” Joanna said. The words were clear and steady. “But even if I didn’t hold the knife, I can see how the others might feel I am to blame.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. She was such a strange woman, never going quite where I expected her to go in conversation.

  She clasped her hands in a prayer pose. “I should have made him listen to me about the danger. Why else did God give me those visions except to share the information with others? To prevent Satan’s evil from blossoming into fruit in this world.”

  She had such colorful turns of phrase, but they were ominous, as well. I reached across the table and patted her shoulder. “I’m sure God won’t hold you accountable for that mistake.” I hoped that was the right thing to say to her. “Maybe you saw the vision to prepare yourself and your children for what would happen afterward.”

  But her expression was closed and unforgiving as she shook her head. “The burden of not getting Stephen to listen to me will always be mine to carry. So if you need to tell the other wives whose fault it was, you can tell them it was me.”

  “I won’t do that, Joanna.” I wanted to take her home with me and mother her, the same impulse I’d felt with Talitha. She was not much older than my own Samuel. She could be my own daughter, if I’d had another one after Georgia’s death.

  “Thank you for saying that. You don’t know how much it means to me.” She sounded choked up and ready to cry.

  “I remember that you had a vision about Sarah, too?” I said. “The night before Stephen died, you said you saw her in a shadow of black and red.” I wasn’t sure I had it right.

  She nodded. “Yes. That shadow is still over her. I see it every time we meet.” She shuddered.

  “Oh. I thought that maybe—it was about her paintings being torn to pieces.” I watched Joanna closely to see if she showed any foreknowledge of the situation. Did she know that Sarah was Rebecca’s daughter? Was there any way she could have guessed that Rebecca would do what she had done? Or precipitated it by returning to talk to Rebecca about Sarah’s paintings?

  “Her paintings? No, the shadow is far more than that. She is filled with darkness because she has no purpose in life. The black and red I saw in her were the cracks in her soul. She is bleeding out her very heart in her anger at the world itself. She cannot see any of the good in her life, and she will throw it all away because of that.”

  This was rather more perceptive about Sarah than I’d have expected from Joanna. There was a sound at the kitchen door and we both turned to see Grace.

  “You’re supposed to be playing with the little girls,” said Joanna, but there was no anger in her tone.

  “I had a vision, Mama, just like you,” Grace said, her expression alight, her eyes wide and her hands splayed dramatically. “You were in danger and I had to help you.”

  “Well, it’s not true right now.” Joanna pulled her chair away from the table and patted her lap. “Where are the others?”

  “They’re in the playpens, taking their naps,” said Grace.

  “All right. Come here and I’ll hold you for a little while,” said Joanna

  “Did your mother have visions, as well?” I asked Joanna, wondering if the gift ran in the family.

  “What? Oh, no. Never.” Joanna was stroking Grace’s hair as the little girl sprawled across her mother’s lap.

  In this awkward position, I could see what Grace was wearing underneath her dress and leggings, and it seemed to be long, white underwear of some kind. But that made no sense. I guessed that Joanna might have worn long underwear as an FLDS woman, and now I wondered if she was still wearing them herself. But why would she make smaller garments for her daughter and force her to wear them every day, even in the summer?

  Joanna drew my attention back to her by saying, “My mother spent most of her time in bed every day. She’d been put out to pasture by then, because I was the youngest. She said she was ill, but I knew she was just lazy.”

  “Put out to pasture” was a cruel way of saying what Joanna had mentioned before, about Rebecca being too old to have children. There was surely more to her mother’s story, but I still had to ask her about the changes to the will she’d heard about from Jennifer.

  “Have you thought about whether or not you’re going to stay here now?” I asked, again trying to ease toward the harder questions.

  “I’ve thought about nothing else,” Joanna said. Another sigh. “You know, what I miss most about the ward in Short Creek is the sense of purpose. Everything you did was part of God’s work. There was nothing that was mindless. Washing dishes, feeding children, changing diapers—it was all God’s work, all glorious.”

  For just a moment, looking at her, I had a glimpse of what she felt she had lost. The same brightness she exuded when she talked about her visions had come back to her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure what I was sorry for.

  “Well, I just have to believe that I’m still part of God’s plan, even if it’s changed a little,” she said sadly.

  “Mama, you said that it’s impossible for us to not be part of God’s plan,” Grace piped up, her head rising out of the relaxed pose she’d been in.

  “Of course, that’s true. God knows all that we will ever do, so how can we ever thwart Him?” said Joanna.

  “And you said that Papa will find us again,” Grace added.

  “In heaven,” said Joanna soothingly. “We will see Stephen again in heaven.”

  Grace settled again, and I couldn’t help but question why Stephen would cut this little girl out of his will. It seemed needlessly cruel and it made me wonder about her biological father. Grace had been just a baby when Joanna left the FLDS. She wouldn’t remember him, whoever he was.

  “I think you did the right thing to leave Short Creek. I’m sure it’s difficult to adjust to life on the outside, but you’re doing well, Joanna,” I said.

  Joanna flinched at that and I wondered how I could have put it better.

  “You did nothing wrong,” I tried again. “They were the ones who treated you badly. You had to leave to protect yourself and Grace.”

  Grace squirmed in her lap and scooted away to entertain herself in her own room.

  “I know that,” Joanna said, when we were alone again. “I know that God had called me to another work.”

  “Did you have a vision that you were supposed to leave?” Maybe you would need something like that to give you the strength to do what Joanna had done.

  “Of course I did. I would never do anything without the knowledge of God’s approval.”

  Which made me ask, �
�How long have you had the gift of visions?”

  “As long as I can remember. Since I was Grace’s age, at least.” She sighed. “But I learned not to talk about it. It made people in Short Creek uncomfortable. They said that I was taking too much to myself.”

  “That must have been so hard,” I said.

  “It was. Until I married. And then—” Joanna’s face reddened as if she had been slapped.

  “What? What happened then? Did your first husband mistreat you?” It seemed like it must have been even worse than most FLDS marriages, none of which sounded ideal to me.

  Joanna hesitated. “No, he—he believed me. I loved him so much for that. So much.”

  “What made you leave?”

  She didn’t answer, but her lips were pressed firmly together, as if against a wave of pain. “I need to tell you that I have a feeling that you should go home,” Joanna said. The words were spoken shyly, as if she was embarrassed to say them, but her body was tense.

  “I will go soon,” I said. As soon as I’d figured this out. I was so close now. Wasn’t I? “I just need to ask you about Stephen’s will. I spoke to Jennifer a few minutes ago and she mentioned telling you Stephen was planning to change it. Instead of Rebecca inheriting everything, he had intended to leave things in trust to each of the children individually.” I meant to keep going, but Joanna had clenched her fists together and was shaking visibly.

  “Linda, listen to me, please. I had a vision. About you. You’re in danger here. You should go home now, as soon as you can.”

  I felt a tingling rush through me. “Danger? What kind of danger? From whom?”

  “I don’t know who wants to hurt you. I only know—” She began choking, then retching, doubled over.

  I patted her back to calm her down. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay,” I said.

  She sagged against me, exhausted, but pulled herself upright a moment later. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “No, I’m glad that you told me. What did you see?”