Destroying Angel (11 page)

“My father inherited a pair of ATVs when he took over the Kimball house,” she said. “Elder Kimball and his sons used them to get around the ranch. Father preferred a horse for his off-roading. Got to ration gasoline in the apocalypse, you know. But he fired up the ATVs a couple of times a year and changed the oil. They’re under tarps in the shed. I bet Jacob would let us take them for a spin.”

Krantz raised an eyebrow. “Eliza Christianson, you’re playing me. I’m like a dog and you’re holding a strip of bacon over my nose.”

“Are you drooling yet?”

An enigmatic smile played across his lips, that could have meant…well,
anything
. “A little bit, yes.”

“You didn’t join the FBI to wait for the bad guys to show up. And I didn’t sign on as your deputy to catch shoplifters at Kevin’s Kwikstop. I joined up to nail Taylor Junior to the wall.”

“I thought it was the chance to carry a gun.”

“I like handling big guns, yes.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then he looked away, a split second sooner than she would have liked. She was sure he’d been on the verge of saying something else. She blushed as she realized the innuendo in what she’d said. Gosh, that was silly.

“You’re right. I’m calling Fayer about those abandoned bases.”

“Good. I’ll ask Jacob about the ATVs. We can drive them in and then hike the last few miles so nobody hears us coming. What about Sister Miriam?”

“What about her?” he asked.

“We could use the backup.”

Krantz looked hesitant. Eliza knew he still didn’t trust Miriam, even though, ironically, the two of them had something in common, each one having followed an unlikely path from FBI agent to resident of Blister Creek.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said at last, his voice a low rumble. “But you make the call. She’ll make me beg, and I’m not so good at that.”

The warring air masses brought another storm into the desert, this time in the form of torrential rains instead of snow. Jacob sat in
the window seat built by his great-grandfather, reading by an oil lamp his great-great-grandmother had brought into Blister Creek and listening to the rain patter against the stained-glass window built by his great-uncle Joseph. And thinking about his father. Those four were dead, their generations gone or fading. But as he opened Grandma Cowley’s diary, Jacob’s soul felt suddenly old, almost stretched. Son to father, to uncle, to grandmother, to great-grandfather, to great-great-grandmother.

“How much left?” Fernie asked from the bed.

He looked up, surprised. He’d put her through a workout earlier, trying to get muscle tone in the left leg, the one that wasn’t completely paralyzed, and he didn’t realize she was still awake.

“What?”

“How much left to read in the diary?”

“Fifteen, twenty more pages. She took a big break in the middle to write down all her worries about what the men will do when they finally show up at Blister Creek. It’s late October when she’s writing, and she expects they’ll come before winter. Oh, and they saw another federal marshal and they don’t know if he’s looking for the one they killed.”

Jacob said all this in a low voice, to keep from waking Daniel, who snored in a sleeping bag on the floor. And of course Nephi had complained when he heard that his big brother got to sleep with Mom and Dad, so he lay in his own sleeping bag on the opposite side of the bed. With Jake sleeping in the crib, it was almost like being back in their cozy quarters in Zarahemla.

“But what about the first marshal?” she asked. “You know how he died?”

“Not yet. And there’s not much room left. Grandma Cowley wrote all this detail about splitting rails, about fighting wolves and mountain lions, about the medicinal value of desert plants, even how they got tallow for candles. It’s interesting enough, and you’ve got to hand it to her. Grandma Cowley was tough and resourceful.”

“But that’s not why you’re reading it.”

“No, it’s not. Why did she kill the marshal? What happened when their husbands arrived?”

She patted the bed. “Come over here. Bring the lamp and the book.”

He came over and she took the diary, told him to put the lamp by her side and prop her with the pillows. And then she read from the diary in her smooth, calming voice with its trace of a rural Utah twang, like a cream sauce with a hint of cayenne. She read about how Grandma Cowley turned a pair of wagon wheels and some yucca-fiber rope into a pulley to lift sandstone blocks for the foundation of the chapel.

And then Fernie flipped the page and hesitated. When she started reading again, her tone changed.

I should have written this when it happened. But I had blood on my hands, and guilt tormented my soul. I would do it again if I had to, but three months have passed and I still see the man’s dead eyes when I lie awake at night.

The marshal’s name was Frederick van Slooten. He was a strongly built man with a clean-shaven face that would have been
handsome if not for the white scar that ran from his right ear to his chin.

The first thing he did was urinate in the cistern. Then he gathered the women at gunpoint and made us sit shoulder to shoulder in front of the fire, told us who he was and why he’d come, then questioned and threatened. When the women said we had no idea where our men were, he started in on the children. After another hour of bullying, the women began arguing back, but he shouted us into silence.

“Now listen up,” he said at length. He paced back and forth with his rifle cradled in his arms and an unlit cigar chomped in his jaw. “You polygs thought you was real clever hiding out here in the desert, didn’t you? But I ain’t no fool. I can see with my own eyes what’s going on. Now where are they?”

“We told you,” Laura said in her English accent that sounded so proper and civilized next to this brute of a man. “We haven’t seen them in two weeks.”

“Is that so?” Van Slooten tapped her forehead with the muzzle of his rifle, and she shut her eyes and trembled. “And who dug them ditches? Who cut the stones?”

“We did,” I said.

“Was I talking to you?”

“No, but you should be.”

He strolled over, bent down, and pressed his cigar into my face. “Oh, and why is that?”

“Because I’m in charge.”

“You?” His smile turned into a grin. “All these wagons, this camp you’re turning into a town. And you’re giving orders.”

I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to fade into the background. Maybe he’d threaten and bully for a spell and then leave us alone. If
I kept my mouth shut, he wouldn’t single me out for special abuse. But it would get out anyway, when one of the more timid women talked. And maybe I could relieve the pressure from the others. It sounds foolish to write it now, but I wasn’t afraid—not like the others, at least. Every one of them was terrified, I could see. I was angry. This was more of the same persecution that drove us into the wilderness in the first place. This man, stinking of sweat and tobacco, was every man in every mob that had tormented the saints since the days of Joseph Smith. I refused to be intimidated.

And so I gave him my name and told him who my husband was, and about the other leaders, and explained how they had left me in charge.

He sat on the ground while I talked, elbow propped against his saddle. His expression turned smug when I finished, and he lit the end of his cigar in the coals at the edge of the fire. “So you’re married to Brigham Young’s nephew? Why, looks like I hit the mother lode of polyg hideouts here. Where are they now?”

“We told you already. They haven’t come yet.”

“And I told
you
,” he said, voice hard, “that I ain’t no idiot.”

“We did this ourselves. It matters not a whit if you believe me or not. And I know what you’re about. You have no commission to arrest women and children. So I suggest you leave our camp before we take up arms and drive you off like a wild animal.”

He stared. His mouth opened and the cigar dangled at the corner. For a moment I dared hope. He would decide we were more trouble than we were worth, would saddle his horse and ride off to look for our husbands in other parts. But then his expression hardened and he shook his head. “No, I think I’ll stay right here. You say you ladies built all this yourself? This I’d like to see.”

I rose angrily to my feet to demand that he leave. But he lifted his rifle and shook his head. “Sit down or I will put a ball in your g—d—head. Good. Now, you all listen up. I ain’t just the lawman in this camp. I am the judge and I am the executioner. If any of you steps out of line, I will put you in your place. Do you hear?”

For the next hour, he made his demands. We tended his horse. We cleaned his saddle. We did his mending and his wash. We set up his canvas tent and swept it clean. We fixed him supper, and he ate our last piece of beef. When he finished, he pulled out a flask of whiskey. My stomach turned in circles. Sober, van Slooten was a brute of a man. Drunk, what would he do?

But he took two sips, and then he was turning the flask upside down in his mouth. He spent the next few minutes rummaging through his saddlebags, cursing and blaspheming. At last he returned to the center of the camp, where he sank down to stare morosely at the fire. “D—Mormons.” He rubbed the scar on his face.

The rest of us continued about our work. The women were shivering and distracted, their children, fed on stories of polygamist hunters and other nasty gentile types, even more terrified. I did my best to focus their attention on their tasks, not only for their own sake but because I couldn’t waste a single evening.

For the next three days it appeared that van Slooten would let us be. We fixed his meals and cared for his horse, and he sat in the shade of his tent, watching us work. Occasionally he saddled his horse and rode around the valley, searching for the men’s hideout he was certain must exist.

Sister Annabelle turned into a simpering, overly helpful servant. She brought van Slooten corn bread with honey butter and offered
to resole his worn boots. The rest of us called him Mr. van Slooten, but she called him Frederick. At first, this behavior seemed treasonous, but then I noticed van Slooten softening. He stopped yelling at her, and then stopped insulting Annabelle’s sister wives, and at length stopped sneering at the rest of us. Except for one incident where he threw a rock at a child who failed to bring his horse quickly enough, van Slooten became more an irritant than an enemy.

But on the third day van Slooten discovered Annabelle’s medicinal liquor, and we saw the monster.

Fernie stopped reading. She thumbed through the pages with a frown.

“You’re not skipping ahead, are you?” Jacob asked.

“No, that’s all there is.”

“Can’t be all. What happens next?” He reached for the book.

“Nothing happens. Look.”

It was true, he saw. There were more pages, but they didn’t continue the story. Instead, Grandma Cowley had sketched a map of the valley on two pages—remarkably accurate, from the look of it, even though she must have done so without a level, measuring tape, or theodolite. The next two pages were notes about her construction of a flour mill and how she dug a millrace to power the waterwheel. Several pages had sketches of desert flowers or animals—a gopher snake, a desert spiny lizard, a Mormon cricket, a jackrabbit so detailed you could see the veins in its ears. Another page had a profile of a young Indian—perhaps the Paiute she’d seen the first day.