Juniper growled at the door, his torn ears cocked. She was glad she hadn’t used any lights herself, glad Juniper, too, seemed to understand the importance of maintaining quiet. She hoped the trespassers would think the Larkins house was still empty. It was far less sinister to imagine someone conducting business in the middle of the night, in the middle of this isolated place, ignorant of her presence, than someone who didn’t care that she was there. She thought again of the no-trespassing sign washed downstream. This time it was the Larkins Ranch trespassed upon.
Done transferring their cargo, the boat accelerated out, its lights illuminating everything clearly for a moment—several men and horses with bulky packs. Definitely not Nick or his outfitting group. Then the lights went to the river, and she couldn’t see anything but black.
Through the open window, she heard the sounds of horses moving toward the house along with men’s low voices. She could make out only a few snatches of conversation—“ghost guns,” “never too late,” “high-velocity shells,” “they want war, they can have it”—and then suddenly they were right in front of the house. She saw a flashlight’s quick blink, and one of them said, “Won’t know what hit them,” close enough it seemed he was inside the kitchen with her.
She shrank back into the shadows, afraid they would see the open windows and understand her presence, but before she could stop him Juniper started barking with such ferocity she couldn’t quiet him, and it was too late anyway, lights already swinging to the house.
“Who’s there?” a voice outside commanded—deep and sonorous. A voice already a part of Silva’s subconscious. She could feel him there, his presence filling the space in between them.
Lights shone through the windows, illuminating the kitchen’s interior. Braced against the counter, Silva wished she could slip outside, hide herself in the darkness, but no matter how much she called Juniper, he wouldn’t budge from the door, his mouth frothing with the fervor of his barking. Everyone’s warnings taking shape—the river’s dead sheep, the creek’s broken sign and eyeless doll, even the sky that morning shading its own ominous colors of threat.
She knew what men in the dark could do to a woman on her own. What kind of violence Len Dietz was capable of—Nick’s mother and brother gone to an early Almost Paradise grave, Isabelle gone silent and missing. But this wasn’t how her story would end. She stepped into the powerful flashlight beam and stood behind the screen gazing blindly out at them in defiance even though she couldn’t see anything past the light’s glare.
“This is private property. What are you doing here?” she demanded, relieved her voice was steady despite her shaking, the pocketknife with its tiny, useless blade clutched in her palm.
She could sense their surprise. Their sudden assessment. The hair on her neck prickled with electricity. There was no way to hide her aloneness, her vulnerability, no way to take it back. It was a quivering line stretched tight between them all, her hands still suffused with the intimate smell of herself, her body’s soft pliancy.
Next to her, Juniper growled deeply, primed for attack, his body rigid with tension, his tail stiff, his hackles raised high, the rusted screen the only thing in between them and the men.
She reached over and flipped on the porch light. Len Dietz stood a few feet from the porch, the others behind him holding onto a heavily loaded pack string. They were armed—holsters on their hips and what she could only assume was a load of illegal weapons in the packs.
“Silva—” Len said, tilting his head and speaking her name slowly, as though it were a secret hanging in the air between them. A slow drawing out. A savoring. He was only a few feet from her, dressed in a military uniform, his pistol and pendant glinting in the porchlight, his hair loose on his shoulders. An older, long-haired version of his Vietnam picture hanging in the Two Rivers Museum.
She held herself still, a cold wash of fear snaking her spine, her skin prickling in alarm.
He looked at her a moment more before turning to his men. “I’ll catch up, go ahead,” he commanded.
His men mounted, casting backward glances at her as if she were a new creature altogether—one they’d just discovered and wished to further explore.
She expected them to ride to the trail behind the house that led to Almost Paradise—the same trail Nick had taken hours before—but instead they rode to the upriver trail. The visitor center and their occupation site were fifteen miles upcanyon.
Len waited until they were gone before he turned back to her, his eyes deep hollows. “I didn’t know you were our neighbor,” he said, his tone amused, as if she were a child whose antics had entertained him.
“I’m the Larkins’ caretaker,” she said stiffly. She stood still, head up, now angry more than anything. He didn’t belong here. Didn’t have any right. Slinking like a coward in the dark. Trespassing against her, against Nick’s family land. Against Isabelle and Nick’s mother. Against them all. She would not cower in fear, would not allow her body to be overtaken again—no matter what kind of threat Len Dietz might pose, no matter what kind of damage she might incur.
“What do you want here?” she demanded, her heart beating hard, despite her bravado.
He stepped closer, and Juniper lunged into action, barking so ferociously it seemed as if he would barrel through the flimsy screen and latch on to Len’s throat.
Len held up his hands in a posture of surrender, looking at Silva with pity, as though he were trying to calm a child. “Don’t fear,” he said. “It is His voice you hear calling you forth. ‘Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ ” He regarded her through the screen. “Your burdens have not been light, have they, Silva of the fire-hair? But the Lord has chosen His people. Will you find shelter before the coming storm?” He looked at her, his eyes dark with meaning.
“You have no right to be here. This is private property,” she said again, her adrenaline surging. A narrowing of vision, her lungs lifting and falling in fast inhalations. She was afraid her uterus would cramp again, send her to her knees as it had in Build It Best, Becky and all the slain animals witness to her impotence. But this time standing in front of Len Dietz, her limbs felt leaden, as if her flesh had been melted down, poured into a mold, and left to harden into this new, immobilized form—as cold and metallic and lifeless as one of Len’s silver Ascension Pendants.
Speaking quietly, he said, “ ‘Behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from mount Gilead.… Come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey.’ ” He regarded her a moment in silence, then turned, mounted his horse, and trotted away, following the others upriver into the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Date: November 15, 1999
Title: Dowry Ceremony
Subject: The Twelve Maidens
Setting: Almost Paradise Dining Hall
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press
Size: 12×36
Dearest Eamon,
They gather in force now. We have entered the final stretch, three more ceremonies leading up to the New Year’s Wedding of the Maidens. The families have brought all their goods to give Len Dietz for their daughters’ dowries—a kind of Almost Paradise early Thanksgiving. Two of the original maidens were lost to illness or regret, ushered quickly and quietly back to their now-shunned families, but not to worry—they have been swiftly replaced by others even more eager to prove themselves worthy, their families heaping their gifts even higher than the others, trying to outdo each other in demonstrating their devotion to the cause, to Len Dietz, to their god.
This celebration has been reminiscent of an aristocratic Renaissance feast: candlelit tables heaped with roast pheasant; whole suckling pigs, mouths stuffed with apples; quail and endangered sage grouse; platters of roasted vegetables and breads and cheeses; bowls of grapes and plums; every baked good you can imagin
e—all of it either grown, harvested, or made by one of the Almost Paradise faithful, self-sufficiency their creed. All of it only a small part of the dowry offerings, gifts that have filled a large room to overflowing. Every piece of handmade, old-fashioned finery that this place would never usher or use. Heaps and piles of fine goods, as if they all imagine themselves a part of a golden castle instead of this hardscrabble canyonland. I wanted to paint the maidens buried alive in it all—as they are—but as always they have been arranged for me: twelve girls in matching, hand-sewn “modesty veils” and dresses, every part of them covered, their families standing in the background, stacks of their dowry gifts spread all around.
What can they believe is going to happen when this is all over? These girls, their bodies not their own. These families feast to their deaths—their own daughters. To their utter and full destruction. The men, the fathers, toast each other as if they’ve accomplished divinity, as if this is a fantasy fulfilled. They—the girls—are to be kept isolated in their under-construction maiden quarters at all times now, “protected” from outside pestilence. I see them only when I am summoned from my own quarters with my paints. But I don’t need to see their faces, don’t need to see them at all to be haunted forever by their shuttered eyes—a disappearance happening right in front of us. A slow and steady diminishment.
I spend hours staring at my own limbs, the reality of myself, feeling as if I, too, am disappearing, sinking into the dark. I reach for you in my sleep—imagine your body there next to me, solid. Real. Lasting. If only I can make my way through. If only I can find my way out, back to you.
All my love,
Isabelle
PART THREE
They are not without prescience, therefore, of what is to befall them on this, the most dangerous day of all their existence. Absorbed by the cares, the prodigious perils of this mighty adventure, they will have no time now to visit the gardens and meadows; and tomorrow, and after tomorrow, it may happen that rain may fall, or there may be wind; that their wings may be frozen or the flowers refuse to open.
Some succumb to their wounds and are at once borne away to distant cemeteries by two or three of their executioners. Others, whose injuries are less, succeed in sheltering themselves in some corner. For it is evident that these daughters of secluded darkness shrink from the vault of blue, from the infinite loneliness of the light.… Their joy is halting and woven of terror. They cross the threshold and pause; they depart, they return.… They hover aloft in the air, their head persistently turned to home; they describe great soaring circles that suddenly sink beneath the weight of regret… till at last the aerial course of their return shall become as indelibly stamped in their memory as though it were marked in space by two lines of steel.
—THE LIFE OF THE BEE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MAY 2001
Silva tried to replicate Nick’s saddling steps, but everything was tense and bungled, Tiko dancing in circles as she tried to tighten all the various straps. She was sweaty and disheveled by the time she finished, her guts clamped tight, seething as they had been lately—intermittently cramping and gurgling, as if she’d eaten or drunk something tainted.
Juniper watched her from a safe distance with concerned eyes.
“It’s okay, we’re going for a ride, that’s all,” she said, trying to ease all their anxiety, even if it were a lie, nothing okay about any of it.
She’d radioed in immediately to report the trespassing incident, the dispatcher asking her to repeat exactly what she’d heard. She’d said that the men had said something like, “They want war, they can have it,” that they’d picked up arms and ammunition and were headed upriver, probably to further arm their occupation, but she didn’t say the rest of what Len Dietz had said, attempting to woo her, draw her into the fold, just like Isabelle, just like Nick’s mother. Len didn’t know who she was. What kind of woman her experiences had shaped her into. A woman who already knew with great intimacy the face of the monster under her own bed. Len had helped her see that clearly at least.
The dispatcher said they would look into the situation, notify the proper authorities. The same as when she’d reported the shot-up mountain sheep. Len continuing to do what he pleased.
She led Tiko to the corral, climbed the outside rail, and jumped on his back, barely making her landing as he took off. She went sideways, her weight tipping so that she almost lost her balance entirely before she grabbed the saddle horn, recovering enough to yank the reins, trying to force him to stop or at least slow. Instead, he danced sideways and then surged forward, breaking into a punishing trot, every bone in Silva’s body feeling as if it were knocking against the other, her stomach cramping as if Len’s visit had poisoned her body.
As they climbed the trail, Tiko threw his head, threatening to rear up on the steep incline. It was as though he could still smell Nick’s pack-string and was trying to catch up, even though it’d been forty-eight hours since they’d left, their tracks already softened into dust.
Silva used her legs to pogo herself in tandem with the bone-jarring trot, but she’d learned to post in an arena, not climbing a narrow mountainside trail littered with loose rock, sides steep enough that a person would rag doll for hundreds of feet.
She wouldn’t let herself consider beyond her arrival—beyond the point of no return. The bonsai and all her belongings stowed safely in Nick’s cabin, Len and his men heading back to the visitor center occupation with their load of ghost guns, leaving Almost Paradise to the women and children—a group of Lenites that might still include Isabelle. Women who maybe didn’t want to be rescued, gone somewhere Silva couldn’t follow.
Nick thought his mother duped by Len Dietz, but Silva imagined that, by the end, Meg Larkins had understood only too well what she’d gotten herself into. Just how deep and dark those waters were. Silva, too, had needed rescue.
When they reached a plateau, the steep cliffsides safely yards away, Silva reined Tiko in tight circles, forcefully spinning him around and around until they were both dizzy and panting, trying to disorient him enough that he would finally slow down, pay attention to her lead.
It worked. When she let the reins go slack, he stood still, breathing hard through distended nostrils, the smell of warm pine needles drifting up. When they reached the fork, Nick’s pack-string tracks were barely noticeable on the left spur. Silva reined right, entering new territory. She heeled Juniper in close, alert to any sign of movement or habitation as they climbed, coyote scat littering the ground in furry tufts. Another mile and she finally spotted something man-made—a weathered square of wood on a T-post anchored in a heap of basalt. A no-trespassing sign, like the one washed down the creek, this one’s lettered warning complete.
Silva laced her fingers through the reins as if to anchor herself against gale-force winds as movement along a hillside caught her eye. At first it just looked like a clump of bunch grass blowing, but then she made out the tawny form of a coyote, the wheat-grass gold of its fur blending in perfectly with the surroundings. It stood motionless, head tipped; then without warning, it sprang straight up and landed in a forceful, front-footed pounce. It came up shaking its head, a small furry body clutched in its mouth, then trotted into the trees, taking its quarry back to the clan she’d heard every night, its pack living like specters in Almost Paradise territory.
Juniper watched, his torn ears alert, looking like the coyote’s cousin. Silva hadn’t wanted to bring him so close to danger, wanted to leave him locked safely in the house with the bonsai, but she wasn’t sure how long she would be gone, wasn’t sure what might happen—no way for him to escape, no one to check on him for days if she didn’t make it back. She just hoped he had enough survival instincts to know when to run and hide.
They rounded a corner to a three-strand barbwire fence stretched across the trail, each T-post painted orange, a sign declaring, Private Property, Keep Out, a group of whitewashed buildings clustered a quarter-mile ahead. Almost Paradise.
From a distance, the compound looked innocuous. The arch of a Quonset hut sheathed in opaque corrugated plastic, several white bunkhouses spoking out from a large central building, and a scattering of sheds and other outbuildings. Off to the left, tall wire fences encircled dozens of clustered elk grazing placidly on short-cropped pasture grass, orange tags hanging off their ears like price tags. Gray and thin and antlerless, the elk looked more like domesticated cattle than the wild bull elk pictured in the brochure Sherry had given Silva at the grocery store. She pictured hunters like Sherry’s raffle-winning husband crouched in camouflage among the grazing herd, picking out their kill.
Silva had imagined some kind of disturbing, salacious scene: a religious paramilitary compound housing a harem full of women and acolyte-girls surrounded by razor-wire-topped fences and armed guards. Something more alarming, something that fit more closely with Len Dietz’s exploits, but other than the pastured elk, the compound looked like any other isolated western ranch, no one in sight, the pastoral scene at odds with everything Silva knew to be true about it, including Nick’s description of the blueprints of future plans—a self-sustaining, walled-off militia city in the wilderness complete with a gazing pool and a firearms museum.
She loosened the reins and dismounted. She led Tiko through the gate and called Juniper as she stepped on the compound’s grounds. Jittery with nerves, she kept to the perimeter, where she might escape quickly, aiming for the back of the rough buildings, keeping watch for Lenites, waiting for someone to suddenly appear. Everything was quiet and still, as if the place had been abandoned like all the other canyon ranches, a narrow road leading her past a shed full of farming implements and toward the next building, an Office placard in its front window.
Off to the right, tucked along the border of the brush-tangled draw that marked the steep drop into the canyon, rows and rows of wooden crosses sprouted out of the ground, a single towering ponderosa standing sentry. The Almost Paradise cemetery, where Nick’s mother and baby brother were buried. Women and babies unable or unwilling to carry forth. Isabelle, maybe, too.
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