Jude Devine Mystery Series (31 page)

“Why did you throw him out?” Adeline asked, plainly fascinated by this radical concept.

“He was an arrogant, cheating maggot and he hit me.”

Chastity figured she’d just described what passed for acceptable behavior in her niece’s world, so it was little wonder that Adeline processed this information with a confused frown. The very idea of a woman holding a man accountable had to be a novelty.

“You threw him out of his own house?”

“The house is mine.”

Barely a day passed that she didn’t thank her parents for this blessing, and the sizeable nest egg they’d left behind for their two daughters. Vonda’s share had gone straight to her husband and the coffers of the FLDS. But for Chastity, financial independence and the absence of children had made ending her marriage a relatively painless process.

“Where did he go?” Adeline asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t care.” Chastity still marveled that she had married Orrin Young at all. What had she been thinking?

Lately she’d been working on forgiving herself for that decision, able to see how skewed her judgment had been at the time. Orrin had shown up when she was feeling increasingly guilty about being a dreaded single adult. A woman unmarried at twenty-five was almost unheard of in Salt Lake City. To compound matters, her parents had been in a serious road accident, leaving her father in a wheelchair and her mother in poor health. Unable to return to the activities and joys of their normal life, and with nothing to do all day but worry, they obsessed over finding a prospective husband for Chastity.

She could understand their anxiety, even if she didn’t share it. They lived in fear that some accident would befall her and, without a husband to assure her admission to the highest levels of heaven, she would be lost to them for eternity. Chastity had always had trouble buying official Mormon doctrine on that subject. The idea that a wise and loving God would admit any nitwit who married at eighteen, yet would turn away an unmarried woman like Mother Teresa, simply didn’t hold water. All the same, she’d found the relentless pressure hard to cope with.

She had not fallen in love with Orrin; rather, she had succumbed to the imperatives of her upbringing and the stress of trying to deal with her parents’ situation alone. Chastity remembered feeling a weird sense of resignation the day she’d agreed to Orrin’s proposal. It was as if in that moment she had folded her true self away, understanding she might never feel whole again. Even before the wedding ceremony, she’d known she was making a huge mistake, but she was determined to go through with it, to prove herself worthy of her parents’ love.

They deserved that much. They had been good and generous and kind their whole lives, and she could not bear to disappoint them. She wanted to give them a reason to live and something to look forward to. A wedding to plan. The promise of grandchildren they would see grow up. Vonda had caused them great anguish by isolating herself and her children from them when she and Tucker moved south. Chastity could never forgive her for that. She could not understand how her sister could have shut them out after the childhood they had given her.

She and Vonda had never wanted for anything. Chastity was aware that many people on the outside thought Mormons were narrow, humorless, and authoritarian. Her father had been the opposite. He was an erudite, sweet-natured man with an insatiable curiosity about the world and a great sense of fun. At the same time, he was immensely faithful and proud to belong to what he called “the one truly American religion.” He had married Chastity’s mother after returning from a mission overseas, and they were made for each other. Like him, she was good hearted, hardworking, and gentle. She adored her children and had made their family’s home life as close to perfect as Chastity could imagine.

A great deal had changed since then, but looking back, Chastity could not honestly say she would have wanted it any different. She felt extremely fortunate. And bereft. She had many aunts, uncles, and cousins, but not a day passed that she didn’t feel the loss of her parents keenly. They’d been so thrilled by her marriage they’d put her name on the title of their house as a wedding present. Ten months later they were both dead and she was living with a man she loathed.

In retrospect, she could see she’d made Orrin just as miserable as he’d made her. Just like her, he had struggled to do what was expected of him. She couldn’t stand him in her bed, and had been relieved when he started secretly drinking alcohol and cheating on her. The trouble was, he had still expected his matrimonial “rights” and seemed hell bent on getting her pregnant.

She had tried to be understanding about this obsession, aware that the status of Mormon men, on earth and in heaven, depended on the number of children they fathered. Her uncooperative womb cast Orrin into a deep depression which alternated with rages in which he would shove her to her knees, ordering her to recite her sins and ask the Heavenly Father’s forgiveness. When she could think of little to admit to, he would seem almost mad with frustration, insisting that God was punishing her and she needed to make herself white and delightsome once more.

After tolerating a year of this, Chastity had finally lost her temper one evening and suggested he could be the infertile half of the equation. Orrin had lashed out at her, an act for which he’d since apologized profusely. But that was the day she’d ended their marriage.

“Let me tell you something, Adeline,” she said. “In life there are choices. My husband thought I would put up with his bad behavior because a wife is supposed to obey and accept. But I chose not to be with someone who did not love or respect me. Do you understand?”

Adeline nodded. “I chose too. Daddy told me I was going to marry Uncle Loudell but I said no.”

“Good. You did the right thing.”

“Daddy says he doesn’t want a daughter that’s Satan’s whore.”

Disgusted, Chastity didn’t comment on Tucker Fleming’s moral compass. Instead, as she combed and blow-dried Adeline’s long hair, she said, “In this house we don’t use the word “whore.” It’s disrespectful. Okay?”

“Okay, Aunt Chastity.” Adeline indicated a photograph on the dressing table. “Is that you?”

Chastity smiled and handed her the framed picture for a better look. “Yes, that’s me climbing in the Himalayas. The mountain behind me is Annapurna.”

“Is that in Canada?”

“No, Nepal.” At Adeline’s blank expression, Chastity crossed to her bookcase and took an atlas from the shelf. She opened it at a map of the world and invited, “Come see. It’s just a little country but it’s famous because it has the highest mountain in the world. Mount Everest.”

Adeline pored over the map. After a moment, she said, “One day, I’d like to go to a faraway place like that.”

“Then one day you will. It’s your life and you can do anything you want with it.”

Like her, Adeline had a sense of adventure, and over the next two years they’d made the most of it. Every time Chastity could take a few days’ vacation from her job in geriatric nursing, they’d gone to the countryside. Recently, she’d moved into private care, starting up her own agency. It was hard work but she had more flexibility as her own boss. She’d been planning their first overseas trip when Vonda and Tucker arrived unannounced, demanding that Adeline accompany them and telling Chastity that their daughter’s celestial marriage had been arranged by the prophet.

In the few moments they’d had to hug before Tucker dragged her away, Adeline had whispered, “I won’t do it. I’d rather die.”

“I’ll find you. Don’t worry,” Chastity murmured in her ear. “Don’t give up.”

“Everest,” Adeline called as Tucker bundled her toward the waiting SUV.

Chastity blew her a kiss, then went around to the passenger widow and told her sister, “You don’t have to do this, Vonda. Get out of the car now. You and Adeline can stay with me. Please.”

Vonda would not look at her. She seemed even more shrunken, and this time there was no flicker of rebellion. She had given up, Chastity thought. She had accepted the unacceptable and had traded her spirit in doing so.

One last time, Chastity tried to get through to her. “Please Vonda. Don’t allow your husband to pimp your child.”

Tucker got into the car and started the motor. He looked past Vonda with ill-concealed glee and informed Chastity, “Pray for direction from God. Your salvation is at stake, Sister.”

Each day since had dragged by with no word from her niece and a frustrating series of calls to the authorities who said they needed proof of a crime before they could investigate. After making a fruitless trip to Hildale, she’d started looking into hiring a private detective or one of those cult rescue guys. It hadn’t crossed her mind that Tucker would inadvertently end up giving her exactly what she needed--hope and new direction. What now? With so much adrenaline in her system, Chastity knew she would never get back to sleep. Mind working overtime, she strode down the hallway to the kitchen and made a cup of strong coffee, thankful as she often was that she no longer abstained from caffeine. Hildale was a five-hour drive. If she got on the road now, she could be there around eight in the morning. Someone had to know about a missing girl. Tucker and his buddies must be organizing the search. All she had to do was take a drive near her sister’s house and look for the action. She carried her coffee upstairs, got dressed, threw some clothes together for Adeline, then stared at herself in the mirror.

A woman in jeans and a T-shirt would attract way too much attention where she was headed. She went to her closet and rifled through her most conservative outfits. By contrast with the pioneer chic seen on the Arizona Strip, the mid-calf length skirts and twinsets she’d kept from her church-going days looked like the trappings of a scarlet woman. She closed the closet door despondently, then pulled it open again, struck by a brainwave. She hauled an old suitcase down from one of the storage shelves. Inside it were the drab garments Adeline had been wearing the day she arrived.

Thrilled, Chastity peeled off her clothing and buttoned herself into the shapeless gray dress. It was only slightly too small for her, having been far too big for eleven-year-old Adeline, but no one was going to notice the extra few inches of leg and the slight tug across her chest. Hastily she French plaited her hair, pinned it up at the back, and tied a headscarf on. No one would know she didn’t have the long, tight braids every woman in Southern Utah seemed to wear. At a glance she looked just like any other young plyg wife.

She drained her coffee, wrote a note with her cell phone number on it and stuck it on the fridge just in case Adeline made it to the house before she got back. Then she put a spare key inside the carved-out rock a few feet from the main entrance, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and opened the garage doors. It was almost four and the air was at its coolest. Heady with relief that she could finally
do
something, she opened the back of her minivan, threw her overnight bag in, and checked that her new off-road Honda CRF450X was tightly secured.

This time she would not come back without Adeline. She didn’t care what the lawyers said. She should never have let Tucker and Vonda drive off with her niece. That had been her biggest mistake since her marriage. With a shock, she realized that she had been an idiot and a coward. She was always worrying that she would never find a man she could truly love, and never have the kind of partnership her parents had, yet she had placed at terrible risk the one relationship really mattered to her. She had allowed the most important person in her life to be taken away as if neither she nor Chastity had any rights in the matter.

The fact that, legally, they didn’t was beside the point. By any moral standard, and according to the Declaration of Independence, Adeline was endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That the law failed to reflect this in her case was a failure of the law. As such, was there any obligation to respect it?

Feeling resolved about what she was about to do, Chastity got into the van and backed out of her driveway. As she accelerated down the quiet suburban street, she made a solemn promise to herself. Whatever it took, she would find Adeline and keep her safe.

The six-man Mohave County Tactical Ops Unit staking out the Epperson place had been joined in the middle of the night by an FBI crisis management team from Denver, comprising hostage negotiators, SWAT and SOR teams, and various support staff. They hadn’t brought in the Bradley fighting vehicles yet, but they were on the way. This was now a Bureau-led operation, the objective to negotiate, watch, and contain. The shift that came on at six a.m. was commanded by a quietly spoken man with duck down blond hair and gray eyes too flinty for his closely shaved baby face. Special Agent in Charge Trent Farrell from the Phoenix division treated Jude and Sergeant Gossett with the patient disdain his breed reserved for small-town law enforcement.