Her Final Prayer: A totally gripping and heart-stopping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 2)

by Kathryn Casey

  “I know what you’re saying. Bad things do happen everywhere. That’s true. But it’s so sad to think someone would do that to Anna and Laurel, those two innocent children,” a slightly built woman sitting on the couch said. “What will happen to Jacob now, and that poor little baby?”

  “I heard that Naomi Jefferies found the bodies. Folks in town are saying that she’s been hanging around at the hospital with the family ever since it happened,” another woman said, her voice laced with just a bit of sarcasm. There was a titter among the group, and then the woman said, “I think she has eyes for Jacob.”

  “Oh, no!” the first woman protested. “She’s years older than he is, and she has a bunch of kids. Why would he—”

  “You watch and see,” a third woman answered. “You know, even before this happened, Naomi was interested in Jacob. I saw them whispering together at worship services a couple of weeks ago, and Naomi wasn’t looking at him like a neighbor, more like a woman intent on becoming his third wife.”

  “Well, now she’d be his first, since Anna and Laurel are out of the way,” the woman on the couch said. “How convenient is that?”

  “Very convenient,” someone answered with a short laugh.

  “Oh, you don’t think—” yet another woman said.

  “All I know is that I’m sure Naomi wouldn’t mind being first wife to a man with property and status,” the woman on the couch insisted. “If Jacob survives, that is. I hear he’s in bad shape. If she’s got marriage on her mind, Naomi might be wasting her time courting the Johansson family. He might not live long enough for a wedding.”

  I considered walking into the parlor and defending Naomi, telling the women that she was only concerned with his welfare. But I thought about her at the hospital, twice on this one day, and that moment when I thought Jacob was awake and talking to her. I wondered yet again what was going on inside Naomi. And I considered what the one woman had said, that even before the murders, Naomi might have been interested in Jacob. As a child, I’d seen Naomi through the eyes of a daughter; she’d always appeared virtuous in the extreme. But she was also a woman, and since Father’s death one without a husband. Could it be true that even before the killings Naomi had her cap set for Jacob Johansson?

  “I’m getting pretty sick of this,” the woman on the couch complained. The others murmured, and she said, “There’s a lot of violence in this town, bad things that happen that no one talks about.”

  “That’s true,” someone said. “Way too much that gets swept under the rug.”

  “Lots of the women here have had bad stuff happen,” the first woman continued. “Now Laurel and Anna, those two little kids are dead. You think that police chief, that woman from Dallas, cares? You think she’s going to find the killer? She left here. She’s an apostate. A lot of the people in town shun her, won’t even talk to her, like the prophet decreed.”

  “She’s not one of us,” someone hissed.

  “That’s true,” another agreed. “I’ve heard people say they don’t want her here, and I’ve heard some of them say that they’d like to force her out.”

  “You know Ardeth Jefferies is her mother,” someone said. “I hear she told this Clara woman to leave. Even her own family doesn’t want anything to do with her.”

  At that, one of the women shushed the others. “She’s a friend of Hannah’s. She lives here, you know.”

  “I don’t care,” the woman who’d made the charge said. “I’m thinking some woman shows up from Dallas, someone who ran off and deserted her family, and suddenly she’s in charge. And then two of us get murdered, two little children, and what’s she doing? Out digging for bodies this morning, I heard, like some kind of a loon. All the while a maniac is running around killing folks.”

  In my room, I thought about what was said, how I was an outsider, not to be trusted, and one who hadn’t proven herself. They were right. I was rejected by many in town, even my own family. Why should they trust me?

  I took a deep breath, a few more, while I tried to calm down. Yes, I’d run away, but I’d had no choice. No one cared about what had pushed me to leave. Instead, they blindly followed the prophet’s orders and turned their backs on me. As much as that hurt, and it did, I reminded myself that none of what they’d said mattered. They might never want me here. But all that truly counted was that four people were dead, murdered, one gravely injured. Again, I thought about the two survivors. For all I knew, while I wasted time nursing my bruised feelings, little Jeremy and Jacob were in danger.

  I pulled on a pair of old gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt, then sat on the bed and took out the copies of the letters Mueller’s men found at the log cabin. I’d noticed when Mueller showed me the envelopes that they weren’t addressed and had no postmarks. They’d been hand-delivered, somehow. I wondered if Laurel had an intermediary who passed the letters to Myles. Or, did she give them to him herself, when they spent time together? Maybe Laurel had a place where she left the letters for Myles to claim.

  Each letter had a date in the upper right-hand corner, and I arranged them with the most recent letter on top. They were written precisely one week apart, each Sunday. The final one was dated eight days before the murders. It started: “My Dearest Myles,” just like the inscription on the envelope.

  Laurel’s handwriting was flowing and really quite beautiful, and she wrote passionately about her concern for Jeremy and that he had barely regained his birth weight in the two months since his birth:

  He’s such a sweet child. I hold him on my lap, and he smiles up at me. But I worry. Will he be healthy? Anna helps me. She’s wonderful with children. We sit together in the afternoons, our housework done, dinner filling the air with the scent of the bison roast in the oven, and she helps me nurse, trying to get the baby to latch on and feed the way he should. But the child seems disinterested. Perhaps it is too hard for him. Perhaps I am not a good mother, as much as I pray to be.

  Here at home, things are not good between Jacob and me. He seems disinterested in me and does not want to be bothered with his newest son. Perhaps I am a disappointment to him. He dotes on Anna and plays with Benjamin and Sybille, and I wonder if when Jeremy is older Jacob will be as drawn to our child. Some men aren’t as good with babies as they are with children who can run and play, throw a ball. It’s possible that my husband is such a man. I must admit that despite this year of marriage, I don’t know him well. He is a mystery to me in many ways. Those years in Mexico, I think, haunt him. He told me once of the violence he saw in the sect in El Pueblo de Elijah, the thirst for retribution.

  My love, I wonder how different my life would be if the prophet hadn’t ordered me to marry Jacob but allowed us to be together as we planned, as we should be. I think of you each day. I feel Jacob’s arms around me, and I wish they were yours. His lips against mine are familiar but not the ones I crave.

  If my parents had not commanded me to consent to the prophet’s orders, I would be your wife and Jeremy your son.

  I put the letter down on my lap and recalled again how Laurel looked on her deathbed, and my anger built. I thought of those I knew who used religion to control the lives of others and the unfairness of a world where so many have no power and no voice.

  Since the letters were written on Sundays, I wondered if perhaps she’d composed them during her afternoon prayer times, when she’d be alone. Once a week, she wrote of her life, brought Myles up to date, and professed her love for him. On page after page, she grieved for the loss of the life they’d planned. Looking down at the pile of letters, something occurred to me. I picked up my cell and called Mueller, still at the log cabin. “Did you go through all of Laurel’s possessions at the ranch?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “What are you looking for?”

  “We have Laurel’s letters to Myles. He kept them,” I said. “I’m thinking that somewhere she must have his letters to her. She’d probably have them hidden to make sure that Jacob never found them, but I don’t beli
eve she would have thrown them away.”

  The phone quiet, I assumed Mueller was thinking that through, wondering if they might have missed something. “Chief, we’ll head back over there first thing in the morning, once we have daylight, and take another look,” Mueller said. “Now that we know what we’re looking for, maybe we’ll have ideas about where she could have them.”

  “How much longer will you be there?” I looked at my watch—it was well after midnight.

  “Finishing up,” he said.

  I thanked him, hung up and went back to my reading.

  A few months before Jeremy’s birth, Laurel wrote of her pregnancy, the feeling of the baby moving within her. “Life, a life I am bringing into the world. I want my child to have a happy one. Happier than I’ve been given. One with more freedom, so he or she can pick a future, chart a course.”

  Twice, Laurel mentioned meeting Myles, but she never said where that took place. I thought of the spot on the river, wondered if that might be their special place, as it had once been mine with Max. “We never have more than minutes together,” she wrote. “Stolen seconds, and then we have to part. I know we can’t risk more, yet I want so much more time with you. I know it is sinful of me to think this way, but I want days, weeks, and years. I want a lifetime.”

  I continued to read, trailing further back in time as the letters grew older. Their correspondence, it seemed, started about the time that Laurel was ordered to marry Jacob. Perhaps it was then that their ability to openly see each other ended, and they had little opportunity to communicate in person.

  My father forces me to marry Jacob, even though I object. I have refused to eat for days now, but to no avail. Mother, too, has told me that I have no choice. I get thinner and weaker, and I woke up this morning feeling faint. But they ignore my plight. Each morning, one of my mothers fixes a plate for me and puts it before me at the breakfast table. I sit, hands crossed, surrounded by my brothers and sisters. Across the table, my father eats his bacon and eggs, all the while staring at me, daring me to eat again. When I don’t, he shouts and orders me back to my room.

  I thought of Laurel’s father, of my own father, so determined that they rule the household, so unwilling to listen to their children, so intent on having us obey. I felt my resentment build, until I had to remind myself that the father Laurel spoke of was one of my detectives, Jeff Mullins, and that despite what I read, I knew he was a decent man who was following his religion’s dictates. But then, my father was a good person, as well, and that didn’t stop him from standing idly by, refusing to interfere when he had to know the hell my life had become.

  Gradually, I nodded off, the copies of Laurel’s letters stacked beside me, one open on my lap. My dreams took me back to my own past. I was so young, only seventeen. Max had been forced out of Alber the year before, banished by the town elders as one of the lost boys, and I plotted to find him. But then, in that fateful meeting with my parents, I was told that the prophet had a vision, and that I should be honored, because it involved me. I was to be married in three days to a man not of my choosing, a man I didn’t want. I cried. I begged. I refused. My father forced me to obey, as Mullins did Laurel. I, too, felt as if my life were ending. In a way, that day, it did.

  In my slumber I traveled back in time.

  Mother fussed, straightening the folds in the pure white dress she’d sewn for me, the skirt billowing around me. Her dark hair twisted in the back and anchored in curls, she hummed as she took a stitch at the neckline to tighten the thick lace. My hair and face covered by a sheet of netting, I should have felt like a princess. Instead, a fist of fear and anger opened and closed in my chest and I worried that it might rip out my insides.

  “Ardeth, is she ready?” Father asked, as he poked his head into the bedroom I shared with my sisters. “We don’t have much time, you know.”

  “She will be in just a moment, Abe,” Mother answered. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

  Father walked into the room. “Clara, you are a vision, one any father would be proud of, any husband would cherish,” he said. “Daughter, today is an important day, but what is more important is the future, that as a wife you strive for perfect obedience, to be in harmony with the desires and needs of your husband. One day soon you will become a mother whose children will give your husband honor.”

  “Yes, Father,” I said. “But, Father, I don’t want to—”

  “Be sweet, daughter,” Mother said. “Don’t trouble your father this way. The prophet has had a revelation from God that told him you must have your future sealed to this man.”

  “Mother, please. Father, I… don’t… please don’t… don’t make me—” I didn’t trust my voice to continue. Tears flooded my eyes, beginning to stream onto my cheeks.

  “Stop that, girl. You’ll smear your makeup,” Mother reached over with a tissue and soaked up my tears while she tsk-tsked and then said, “We have been through this, Clara. There is no more to discuss. You will obey. This man will be your husband. You should be honored to have such a prominent, such a righteous man as your husband. All of Alber knows how the prophet relies on him.”

  The sobs came, the heavy weight of emotion crushing against my chest, my heart aching as if it would surely split into two and I would die. I thought of Max. I wondered if he knew of the troubles that had befallen me.

  “Come now, girl,” Father ordered. “We must go for the ceremony.”

  My bedroom dissolved, and I stood in a room surrounded by family, all adults, those in the hierarchy of our community. My father’s chest expanded inside his suitcoat with pride, and my mother glowed with excitement. A daughter becoming one of the wives of a man so high up in Elijah’s People would give my parents great standing. This was a momentous occasion.

  On the walls, two mirrors hung directly across from each other multiplied their reflections endlessly, identical images inside of images, each successively smaller, until it seemed that they echoed into eternity. The mirrors were symbols of the bond that would be forged during the ceremony as we became husband and wife. Father had explained that our sealing would bind us not just during our lifetimes but after death into the hereafter.

  Candles flickered and the room swam with light and color. Mother’s heavy perfume surrounded me. I tried not to look at the gray-haired man, older than my father by more than a decade, who stood across the altar from me. I didn’t want to see the excitement in his rheumy eyes. When I could avoid him no longer and he took my hand in his, my body recoiled. A lifetime, I thought. An eternity, I’d been told. His smile grew, my pulse quickened, and I wished I had somewhere, anywhere to run.

  Twenty-One

  I had a restless night, the nightmare of my wedding running through my mind, keeping me from fully giving myself over to sleep. Years ago, those images had come often, but not recently, and I thought about how Laurel’s story was becoming interwoven with my own, and how it was bringing back pain I’d fought to bury. I woke early, foraged around in the refrigerator and found a plate of biscuits and gravy. Hannah had left a note on top: Clara, please, eat before you leave. You’re getting thinner than a walking stick.

  I popped the plate in the microwave, warming the gravy so that it went from a solid to a liquid. While I munched on a biscuit, I put in a call to Max, still thinking about the dream. It seemed to haunt me. I heard his voice, and it comforted me. “Did you find anything else I should know about at Myles’s cabin?” I asked.

  “We found his cell in a drawer,” Max said. “Seems odd that he’d leave it there when he was going out to the woods. Mueller has the phone at his office. His IT guy is trying to open it. I wrote a subpoena for the records and sent it to Judge Crockett last night. He’ll sign it this morning.”

  “Good,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing important. The only real pieces of evidence are the boots and those letters. Although we did take the photograph of Laurel with us, too. And Mueller took the computer, so the IT guys can search it,”
he said. “Did you read the letters? Did Laurel write anything that might help us?”

  “No help there either, except that they confirm the relationship. They’re love letters to Myles from Laurel, passionate, but they say nothing about feeling threatened or give any clue that she was afraid of Myles, Carl or anyone else.”

  “That’s disappointing. Lieutenant Mueller is going back to the ranch today to try to find Myles’s letters to Laurel as you asked,” Max said. “I’ll check on the evidence as soon as I get to the office, make sure it’s being expedited at the labs, try to light a fire under the state guys and push it through faster. Have you got a plan?”

  “I’m going over to see Doc Wiley, check on the autopsies. Then I’m heading into the office,” I said. “Mullins texted me this morning saying he’ll be there about nine and wants to talk to me.”

  “What do you think he has on his mind?” Max said.

  “He probably wants a heads-up on how the investigation is going,” I speculated.

  “Sure, well, don’t blame him. If Laurel were my daughter…” Max didn’t finish that sentence. “I’ll check in when I have news.”

  “Same here,” I said.

  The morgue was on the ground floor of Smith County Memorial, hidden behind an unmarked door far at the back. I’d called ahead and made sure that Doc Wiley would be there, and he was in the autopsy room working on Anna when I arrived. I glanced at the six coolers in the wall, and felt a surge of sadness when I saw Benjamin’s and Sybille’s names written on tape on two of the stainless-steel doors. At the far end, a woman’s body lay on a second autopsy table covered by an evidence sheet. I walked over and checked the name on the toe tag: Laurel Johansson.

  “Looks like you haven’t gotten to Laurel yet,” I commented.