The Remnant (19 page)

"He seemed a little... overly protective." he
said. "He your new body guard?"

She frowned. "He has a crush on me."

"He acted more like he owned you."

The frown hardened. "He helped me once...
saved my life really. But there’s nothing between us."

"You kept the picture," he whispered.

She nodded.

"I searched for you for so long," he said.
"When the Federales gave up I hiked the river. I hired a
professional tracker. He found evidence that some of the Brethren
might have escaped into the hills, but he couldn’t tell if you were
one of them. Then I found a couple of private detectives who
promised they could find whoever survived." He shook his head,
choking back the pain. "They never found anything."

"Between Stan and Paulie we had a lot of
talent for disappearing," whispered Ashley. "Paulie owns this
valley, but Stan helped him hide it behind so many corporations and
trusts you’d never have tracked us here."

"But now it’s all coming to a head
again."

She sighed. "Regardless of what’s been said,
Trace, no one really blames you for the Angels. What’s coming has
always been coming."

"I know it wouldn’t have made any difference
if I
had
found you alive. I understood that you didn’t want
us to be together... because of my lack of faith. It was still
killing me not knowing if there was any feeble hope that you might
have escaped. But after five years and no word-"

"I read your books," she said.

He shook his head and made a little snort.
She smiled ruefully in reply.

"Not my best stuff."

"No."

"There’s a lot of nuts out there, and I think
I managed to meet most of them in the course of my research. I was
looking for some kind of answers outside the box, to
why
things like Mexachuli happen," he said, surprising himself. "But
all I found were more questions, and a lot of half baked mysteries
that are mostly nothing but hallucinations or old wives tales."

"The world’s full of mysteries," muttered
Ashley. "I’ve come to believe that a lot of times we’re better off
not finding answers to them."

She moved over to sit on the bed beside him,
closer this time, so close he could feel her warmth, so close it
hurt his heart. Her eyes were darker than he remembered. But they
were sadder, too.

"We found some answers we never expected,"
she said, bitterly.

He blinked. "I don’t understand."

She shook her head. "It was all a myth, a
legend... Lies. Everything."

He grimaced at the pain he saw in her
face.

"Tell me," he said.

She shrugged. "When we came here we knew that
eventually the Angels would find us again. And our numbers were
shrinking. So we all voted to open the Platinum Casket-"

"The what?"

"You’re really not going to believe
this."

"You’d be surprised what I might believe,"
muttered Trace.

She studied his face, but when he offered
nothing more she continued.

"You know why I ran away from California City
the first time-"

"The first time? You don’t mean you went
back?"

"That’s another story. Let me tell this
one."

Trace shrugged his assent.

She turned to stare at the window. "As a kid
in California City I’d heard rumors about Mexachuli. But while the
elders always muttered about it as some godless, hell on earth, the
more I heard, the more I understood that we were the ones living in
hell, and I decided that if I was going to run away, Mexachuli was
my only hope for sanctuary. After all,
they
were Mormons,
too. And they had a reputation for taking in some of the outcasts
from California City. What I didn’t know at the time was the reason
the NLDS hated the Brethren so much."

"I know Paulie is Jeffords’ half-brother,"
said Trace. "Jefford couldn’t stand an apostate in his own family,
especially one who denied Jeffords’ own visions and his demands for
plural marriage as a sacrament. They split up at the same time they
both left the LDS. But the Brethren never had the following that
Jeffords did. Polygamy is a heck of a draw for a lot of men."

She shook her head, sighing.

"That’s what you were told by Brethen and
followers of Jeffords alike because neither group would chance an
outsider learning the secret."

"So? What is this deep dark mystery?"

"You know the story of how Jeffords
originally broke away from the LDS."

"Yeah. He and Paulie both had visions-like
all good Mormons eventually seem to-and Jeffords preached that the
LDS was run by Satan and that it had given up on the true way that
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had led, and that Mormons were
commanded by God to take plural wives, among other things."

"Right. Paulie and Jeffords basically broke
over the issue of Polygamy. But that wasn’t enough of an issue for
them to choose different countries to live in. I don’t think Paulie
ever realized how much his brother hated him for breaking away
until it was too late. After the killing did you learn anything odd
regarding the LDS and the NLDS ?"

Trace frowned, shrugging. "What about the two
isn’t
odd? I did find it strange that the LDS would shield
the NLDS from so much bad press and even litigation. I kept
discovering evidence that the original church used its pull to
protect Jeffords, which seemed irrational since Jeffords can only
make the Mormons look bad."

"Right," said Ashley again, waiting.

"What is it the Brethren had on the LDS and
NLDS that finally caused the Angels to be sent against you?"

She sighed. "Paulie swears that they were
going to attack us in any case, but there was one thing I believe
had to incite them to an even more atrocious killing frenzy."

"What?"

"Jeffords was next in line to become the
Prophet of the LDS when he and Paulie had their visions. But before
Jeffords gathered up his followers and wandered off into the
wilderness Nehi Rendt, Frederick’s father, stole something from
beneath the Temple in Salt Lake City, something only a handful of
people in the entire world have ever seen or knew existed. The
Platinum Casket."

"I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve been
investigating the Mormons for years."

"That doesn’t surprise me. There is nothing
written about it. The only pictures ever taken of it or its
contents were made by Paulie, and they are hidden safely away. And
no one other than the current LDS Prophet or his successor was ever
told of it, until Nehi stole it and carried it away to California
City."

Trace nibbled his lip. "So? What’s the
Casket, and why’s it so important Mormons will kill for it?"

"It holds a couple of the original
plates."

Trace’s eyebrows rose. "Not the Golden
Plates? Smith claimed that the Angel Moroni took those back. I
always thought that was pretty convenient, by the way. Sorry. Can’t
show you those. The Angel has them..."

Ashley nodded. "Only several people actually
saw them-"

"Claimed they did. Some of those later
recanted."

"They saw them. Or they saw
something
.
Part of that something is in the Casket."

"You’ve seen these plates?"

"I have."

Trace tried to hide his shock, but he knew
his face was giving him away. The very idea that any of the
original plates might have survived was staggering.

On September 21
^st
, 1823 Joseph
Smith, a resident of upstate New York, claimed to have been visited
by an angel who informed him of golden plates buried on a nearby
hill called Cumorah and that he would eventually be allowed to
retrieve them. Four years later Smith claimed he excavated the
plates containing "an account of the former inhabitants of this
continent, and the source from whence they sprang." But of more
importance they also held "the fullness of the everlasting Gospel"
a work Mormon leaders would come to believe was far superior to the
Bible because it contained the
pure
words of Christ. It also
made Mormons the only
Christian
church in the world that did
not rely on the Holy Bible for its organization and government.

The plates were not in English, however, but
in what Smith claimed was a specialized form of Egyptian
hieroglyphics developed by the lost tribe of Israel which had
immigrated thousands of years before to the Americas. He was able
to translate the plates by the use of two magic stones called the
Urim and Thummim which he placed into his hat. He would then look
into the hat—which did not contain any of the plates—while an
accomplice wrote down the translation which Smith said appeared in
front of him. Thus was written the Book of Mormon.

If any of the plates had survived and could
be tested for authenticity...

"Why did the Mormons in Salt Lake let Nehi
Rendt get away with the theft to begin with? Why not call the
police, or pull in huge media coverage?"

"You’re not thinking."

Trace sighed. He had to admit his normally
analytical brain was befogged by the very idea that the Brethren
might be sitting on the last remains of the foundation of the
entire Mormon faith.

"The LDS has said all along that there were
no plates anymore," he mused. "They’d have had to have admitted
that they lied."

"One point you need to know in order to fully
understand is that no one in Salt Lake City ever opened the
Casket," Ashley continued, nodding at Trace’s look of disbelief.
"It was supposedly locked by Brigham Young and protected by God
Almighty with a terrible curse on any who violated its seal. But
after the attack on Mexachuli Paulie had a dream in which he was
told to open the Casket, that he would find a weapon there to smite
our enemies. He did. And we did."

Her last words seemed to drain from her,
leaving her deflated, but still she continued.

"Supposedly no one had seen the plates for
over a hundred-and-fifty years. Brigham Young sealed them in the
Platinum Casket and secured that within the vault under the Temple.
The later Prophets were allowed into the vault-after all they had
the key-but they could not open the Casket because of the curse.
That must have been terribly tempting. They probably dreamed of
taking a crowbar to the thing, but their faith stopped them."

"Okay. So Paulie opened the Casket. And?"

She frowned. "The case that Brigham Young had
made of pure platinum is a lot more impressive than the
plates."

"What’s on them?" asked Trace.

"Gobbledeegook. Even to me it didn’t look
much like hieroglyphics. I mean there were some symbols that might
be Egyptian, but most just looked like markings a child trying to
imitate Egyptian writing might make."

"According to Smith it wasn’t Egyptian
hieroglyphics, exactly," said Trace, "but something he called
Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics
, which was very convenient
for Smith. He knew that if he was the only man living who
understood
Reformed Egyptian his authority could never be
denied. Experts know that no Hebrew in his right mind would ever
write in Egyptian, anyway. That a lost tribe of Israel somehow made
it to America and wrote Egyptian is beyond belief."

"Even so, the plates themselves give away the
fraud."

"How so?"

"They’re copper, not gold or brass as the
varying accounts state. Paulie managed to mail a small sample to an
assayer. When he got back the actual makeup of the metal he did
some more research. It turns out that formulation matches perfectly
with an alloy that was used a lot at the time in New York and
Pennsylvania for shingles and flashing. And the plates are just the
right size. Joseph Smith simply polished up some copper shingles
then engraved them with weird symbols he claimed to be able to
translate by staring into his hat."

"Only, if what you’re translating is a
fraud-"

"Then the translation is a fraud."

"That must have hit the Brethren pretty
hard... opening that case, learning that the plates were
false."

"You have no idea, but it wasn’t just the
plates."

Trace frowned. "What do you mean?"

She sighed, turning to face him again at
last. Her lost look tore at Trace’s heart.

"Brigham Young placed an affidavit inside the
casket, swearing to what Joseph Smith had revealed about the plates
and about all his
revelations
. Remember that Young was not
Smith’s chosen successor at the time of Smith’s death. He
politicked his way into the position after Smith’s assassination.
But before he died Smith left a document for his son attesting that
the entire Mormon faith was based on his own lies-a document that
Young read. Young finished his own affidavit by stating that he
believed in his heart that plural marriage and the rest of the
Mormon teachings were still valid no matter what the Prophet had
said before his death, but he locked away the evidence the Prophet
had given him. He could not bring himself to destroy it anymore
than he could bring himself to reveal it. He closed his statement
with a prayer that God should decide."

"Then he hid it away beneath the Temple and
placed a curse upon it? Doesn’t sound like he wanted God to decide
against him or the Mormons."

"No."

"I want to see the plates."

She grimaced. "They’re hidden. Only Paulie
knows where they are, and you’re kind of on probation right now,
anyway. The Brethren don’t know what to do with you. They don’t
trust you because you aren’t one of us, but they don’t want to send
you out to your death, either."

"That’s thoughtful of them."

"Except for Cole, maybe," she muttered.

"What’s his problem, other than the fact that
he’s in love with you?"

"He isn’t in love. He’s in lust. And you
can’t really blame him. There isn’t another eligible girl in the
Brethren since the Massacre. Marie is too young. But eventually, if
we survive long enough, I assume she and Cole will be
together."