She continued her touch down Eliza’s body through the open sides of the sheet. “Your back, that there may be marrow in the bones and in the spine; your breast, that it may be the receptacle of pure and virtuous principles; your vitals and bowels, that they may be healthy and strong and perform their proper functions; your arms and hands, that they may be strong and wield the sword of justice in defense of truth and virtue.”
And here, and most strangely, Fernie reached beneath the sheet to below her navel. If it had been anyone but her sister she’d have been seriously creeped out. “Your loins, that you may be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, that you might have joy in your posterity.” Fernie touched her legs. “Your legs and feet, that you might run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.”
Fernie helped her to her feet and led her to a sliding door in the wall, opposite of where she had entered. Charity Kimball waited on the other side. Fernie’s sister wife gave Eliza a comforting smile.
The second paper-walled room was much like the first, and, as Fernie retreated, Charity helped Eliza take a seat. Charity put her hands on Eliza’s head.
“Sister Eliza, having authority, I lay my hands upon your head and confirm upon you this anointing, wherewith you have been anointed in the temple of our God, preparatory to becoming a queen and a priestess unto the Most High God, hereafter to rule and reign in the House of Israel forever; and seal upon you all the blessings hereunto appertaining, through your faithfulness, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Charity helped her up and slid open a doorway to a third room, also identical to the first, except that there was a pair of new, neatly folded temple garments on the shelf next to the anointing oil. Fernie had come around to this third room and waited for her. Charity retreated into the second room.
Fernie now removed the sheet from Eliza’s shoulders and helped her into the temple garments.
“Sister Eliza, the garment placed upon you is to be worn throughout your life. It represents the garment given to Adam when he was found naked in the Garden of Eden, and is called the Garment of the Holy Priesthood. Inasmuch as you do not defile it, but are true and faithful to your covenants, it will be a shield and a protection to you against the power of the destroyer until you have finished your work on the earth.”
Fernie instructed Eliza to return to her locker and put on the white dress that she would find there. She was to collect the packet of robes and sashes from the locker, then return to this spot.
Eliza did as she was told, walking back to the locker in her underwear, having left the final paper-walled room through another sliding door. She felt as though she were sleep-walking. The most interesting thing was having women anoint and bless her. Only men gave blessings outside the temple; that was the province of the priesthood.
She looked through her clothes, saw that they were undisturbed, then put on the white dress and returned carrying the robes and sashes. Fernie gave her a new name, which she was instructed to only repeat at a certain point in the endowment, that point to be shown her later. The new name was Eve.
“And now,” Fernie said. Charity stood with her. “You are ready to receive your endowment. The others will meet us in the Creation Room.”
And at that moment Eliza remembered the horrid black thing Jacob had pulled from Amanda’s mouth, and how he wouldn’t tell her what he knew. Something from the endowment.
At last she would know why they had cut out Amanda’s tongue and slit her throat.
Chapter Twenty:
Enoch Christianson was a hunted man. Gideon would have his men watching every approach to Blister Creek. Lost Boys would watch in St. George and Cedar City. Enoch knew what would happen if they caught him.
So he dressed like a gentile. He wore a cap to cover his red hair. He changed vehicles in Wendover and again in Beaver, Utah. He took back roads from Cedar City.
Enoch had arrived late Thursday night and left the car two miles east of Blister Creek, next to the rusted out hulk of a station wagon, and the derelict wreck of a school bus, among other assorted car parts. It was one of the ad-hoc junkyards that dotted the West and he added his own heap to the mix. The 82 Chrysler K had been on its last legs anyway, with body and bumper damage, but he added to the effect. He positioned the car behind the bus, then jacked it up and removed the tires, which he tossed into the trunk. Then he rolled down the windows. The car looked as though it had been abandoned years earlier.
From there he had walked to the temple. Carefully, very carefully. The best approach was through Witch’s Warts. It was dark in the shadow of the sandstone fins, traveling, as he was, only by moonlight, and the wind made moaning sounds as it found its way through cracks and fissures in the stone. The moans became voices.
“Enoch. Where are you, Enoch?”
He pushed his hands to his ears, but the voices burrowed deeper.
“Why are you hiding?
“You know what we’ve come for.”
On and on. God, why hadn’t he thrown himself in front of the train that day in Boise? Better than to go mad, to be tormented by angels or demons.
“You’re not real,” he whispered. “None of you.”
And then the wind died and with it the voices. He opened his eyes to discover that he was squatting on the ground with his hands clamped over his ears. Aftershocks, he told himself. Not insanity. Triggered by what he had seen in the Holy of Holies. There was something about the wine, and the lights. Something that lingered in the system and came back at vulnerable moments. He rose to his feet, took a few deep breaths and continued.
The temple was a sentinel on the edge of the desert. A fortress. A sanctuary.
He had known where Gideon hid the spare key. For all that the temple was the most expensive, opulent building in Zion, it sat empty most of the time. Normal church meetings took place in the chapel. Only marriages and the higher ordinances took place in the temple.
It would be a simple thing to hide himself until the time came to meet his brother in the Celestial Room. He would tell Jacob everything.
#
Gideon Kimball had never killed an old man before. Elder Griggs of the Quorum of the Twelve would be the first.
Killing was tricky business. He chose his accomplice carefully. There were several outcasts to choose from: Eric Froud, sprung from a group home for troubled teens, Jeremy Pratt, who’d been a friend of Enoch’s as a boy. Jeremy’s brother Will, who was loyal to Gideon, but dumb as a post. Phillip Cobb, Ernest Anders.
No, it would be Israel Young. Gideon didn’t trust him, exactly, but he’d known the man since they were boys. They’d explored Witch’s Warts together and later rode bikes around town, harassing younger children, stealing candy from the store, and looking into people’s windows late at night. Israel had been with him that night with Amanda Kimball; Gideon had used the pliers, but Israel had cut her throat.
Gideon and Israel waited in a van in the chapel parking lot. The van had darkened windows which allowed them to watch the people waiting outside the church building without being seen. First, Jacob Christianson had come through the front door. He had said something to Eliza, and the girl had run away, soon to be followed by Jacob and Fernie. Gideon had resisted the urge to follow them in the van.
Soon, the members of the Quorum of the Twelve came out of the building, together with the prophet. A bunch of tired old men. His quarry was Elder Griggs. And here came the man. Griggs walked with the slump of a man who had relied on a cane for many years. Two boys, aged about nine or ten, joined the old man as he walked toward the parking lot. The three of them climbed into a late model Lincoln Town Car, which Griggs pulled out of the lot and onto the road. To Gideon’s surprise, he headed out of town toward the Ghost Cliffs.
“Follow him,” he told Israel.
Elder Griggs didn’t stop until he reached Blister Creek reservoir. There was a picnic spot and a place for fishing. Gideon and Israel pulled in behind the car and turned off the van’s engine. The doors
opened on the Lincoln.
Gideon’s heart pounded. Watching Elder Griggs climb out of his car was like watching a mouse approach a trap. If the mouse could smell the steel spring, he could run away. Elder Griggs’s Lincoln would quickly outclass the van should he flee.
Gideon thought about Enoch Christianson, still out there, alive. He had searched in Las Vegas. Others had watched the safe houses in St. George and Salt Lake. Nobody had seen him. Thinking perhaps that Enoch would try to meet Jacob in Blister Creek, he had watched every approach to the town.
Nothing.
Enoch had disappeared. That particular mouse had sensed the trap.
The two boys got out first, retrieving a pair of fishing poles and a tackle box from the trunk. Probably grandsons; Elder Griggs didn’t look to be fathering children these days. The old man himself got out and leaned against the side of the car when he saw Gideon and Israel get out of the van and approach.
“Hello, there,” Elder Griggs said. “Coming up for some fishing?” His voice trembled with age. “They tell me the bass are biting.”
“I came to look for you, Elder Griggs.”
“Excuse me. My eyesight is not so good these days. You are…?”
“I’m Elder Kimball’s son.”
Elder Griggs squinted. “Ah, Taylor Junior. I didn’t recognize you. It’s been awhile. And who is this other young man?”
“I’m not Taylor Junior. I’m Gideon Kimball.”
Elder Griggs glanced toward his boys, already down by the lake, fiddling with tackle in their eagerness to get their lines into the water as soon as possible. “What do you want?” Voice tense.
“It was I who killed Amanda Kimball. Her blood spilled at my feet.” He could see Amanda’s face in his mind, frozen in terror and pain.
“You? But why?” An extra tremble in his voice. His face grayed.
“Never mind my motives, Elder Griggs. I’m telling you so that you’ll know how ruthless I can be.”
“What are you saying?”
He changed his voice. “Elder Griggs, thy time has come. Today, thou shalt meet thy maker.” Gideon looked deliberately at the man’s grandsons. One cast his line into the water, while the other threaded a worm onto a hook. “Will thou stand at the judgment bar alone or with these two boys?”
He used the executioner’s voice to render helpless those who heard it. But to Gideon’s surprise, Elder Griggs straightened his back and looked him in the eyes. “I will come quietly, then, if that is what it will take to spare my grandsons. But know you this, that my blood will cry for vengeance.”
Gideon put a hand on the old man’s arm to steady him as he followed them back to the van. Israel opened the door of the van and stood aside.
Elder Griggs reached his hand into the pocket of his suit coat. It was an innocent, absent-minded gesture and Gideon almost missed it. He reached around and grabbed the man’s wrist. The man winced in pain and his bones creaked as Gideon pulled his hand out. There was a cell phone, and a number half-dialed. Gideon pried loose the phone and turned it off.
And when Israel and Gideon pushed Elder Griggs into the van, he suddenly stopped cooperating. He struggled against the duct tape that Israel produced and bit the man on the hand. He was still struggling when Gideon climbed into the driver’s side and started the van.
Israel punched the old man in the face. Elder Griggs let out a moan and fell back, but his legs kept kicking as the man duct-taped them together. Israel hit him again with a look of pleasure, almost like the carnal look of a man about to sate his lust with a woman.
“Stop,” Gideon said. “Don’t hit the old man. He’s not a traitor and doesn’t deserve a traitor’s death.”
Israel subdued the man’s legs and then his wrists. Taped his mouth. Elder Griggs moaned and lay on the floor of the van.
They took a ranch road until they reached Witch’s Warts. The land here had once been a sandstone plateau. Over tens of thousands of years, wind and water had eroded the landscape into fins and pillars and natural arches.
Gideon and Israel had discovered Elder Grigg’s grave almost fifteen years earlier. You had to climb along a fissure that opened between two sandstone fins, then push past a juniper tree that had grown up in the sand-filled space where the water would run down and pool. Beyond that was the sinkhole. Eroded into a rotten place in the sandstone, it sank some dozen feet straight down along the fissure between the two fins, like a cavity between two molars. Sandstone bowled around the sinkhole, keeping it hidden from view.
“This would be a good place to put a body,” Israel had remarked casually, as if he regularly watched for such things. Gideon had dismissed the comment from his mind, only to have it resurface many years later.
Age had sapped the weight from Elder Gibbs’ bones and muscles and the two had no problem carrying him from the road and toward the sinkhole. Water from the recent rains had poured off the sandstone fins and filled the sinkhole. The water would grow murky and thick with mosquito larvae as it evaporated but for now it was clear enough to see to the bottom.
They placed Elder Griggs in a sitting position and then Israel and Eric lifted a flat piece of sandstone and set it against the man’s chest. Eric wrapped duct tape around the stone and Elder Grigg’s chest to hold it in place.
Gideon removed the tape from around the old man’s mouth. To his credit, the old man didn’t scream for help or beg for mercy.
“You probably wonder why we are going to kill you.”
The old man stared at Gideon without blinking. “No, not really. Some evil purpose or other. The Lord will judge you in due time.”
The answer surprised him. “You’re not afraid to die?”
Elder Griggs shook his head. “I’ve lived a good life. I have faith in the Lord. He will give me my inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom. This is not how I would choose to go, but I don’t fear death.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” It was an interesting attitude. So many of these old men, those who proclaimed absolute faith in God, left the world clinging by their fingernails. How could they actually believe what they taught? If they were so certain of their reward, why not leave their frail, battered bodies and embrace death?
“It does seem pointless to kill me, Gideon. I’m a used-up vessel of no use to anyone but my grandchildren.”
“That, and whispering in the ear of the prophet,” Gideon corrected. “He listens to you like he listens to no other man. And your son-in-law, Abraham Christianson, too. If you tell them to oppose me, they will. And you said yourself you have little to lose.” He smiled. “Not everyone who remains will step into line, of course, but most aren’t so brave as you, Elder Griggs. Brother Joseph will come face to face with the desperate need to hold Zion together. And that’s why you must die.”
Elder Griggs chuckled in a way Gideon would not have thought possible for a man about to die. “You’re a fool if you think my son-in-law will follow you. A Son of Perdition, that’s what you are. An excommunicate. I have never prophesied before, boy, but I feel a prophesy coming. You will be dead before the end of the week, Gideon Kimball.” He glanced at Israel. “And your henchman, too. They will be ugly deaths, I think. Your name will become a hiss and a byword among the people of Zion. No, you won’t be leading anyone, Gideon Kimball.”
“Tape his mouth,” Israel Young urged. “Make him stop talking.”
Gideon saw the uneasiness on his companion’s face. Yes, Israel was right. He re-taped the old man’s mouth.
Gideon raised his hands above his head and lifted his voice. “Elder Griggs, we now seal thee unto death. May the Lord have mercy upon thy soul.”
And now, the old liar gave one last twitch. Real fear in those watery eyes. Griggs struggled and kicked. Israel looked pleased.
They pushed. Elder Griggs tumbled forward. A single plop and the man sank to the bottom. And there, visibly, he thrashed. A single bubble rose to the surface. The ripples stilled. The movement stopped.
It was hard busin
ess, this killing. Some couldn’t stomach it. Enoch, for one. He had stood in front of Jennifer Gold, having been commanded to sever the woman’s unborn child from her body. He had balked.
Enoch’s violation of his covenants called for a blood atonement. It would be a mercy, really. Enoch’s own blood would allow forgiveness from the Lord.
They left Witch’s Warts by a circuitous route. In the desert, protected by the sandstone fins, some of these footprints might last for weeks. Better not to leave a direct path to where they had dumped Elder Griggs’ body.
It was because he was thinking about such things that Gideon noticed the extra set of footprints. A pair of tennis shoes tracked through the sandstone maze, pressing hard into the sand and lighter in the gravelly places. Kids often came into Witch’s Warts, but rarely adults. And almost never this far in.
“What do you make of this?” he asked. “How old?”
Israel bent and poked at one of the footprints. “The footprints are fresh, but they’ve formed a crust from the dew. Maybe last night.”
A good observation. Gideon followed the footprints for a stretch. They came from the South and headed Northwest toward town. Enoch wore tennis shoes. Gideon tried to think of the pattern on the man’s shoes, but couldn’t. They could easily have been someone else’s.
Except that they weren’t.
He looked toward Blister Creek. The temple spire lifted above the sandstone fins that otherwise blocked view of the town. Continue in that direction and one would emerge from the desert practically in the back lot of the temple. He used Witch’s Warts himself to come and go from the temple without being seen.
Gideon had taken a call a couple of hours ago, alerting him that Jacob and Eliza would be doing an endowment in the temple that afternoon. It was another sign that Eliza would soon marry. It was useful information, and he’d set it aside for later consideration. But now it occurred to him that maybe this was more than a simple endowment. And maybe there would be another participant.
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