by R. R. Irvine
When Traveler reached across the counter to grab his father’s hand, Martin pretended to misread the gesture. “Keep your hands off my toast, damn it.” Pushing the plate ahead of him, he scooted over a stool. “We’ve got work to do, like going over your plans for the day so I can back you up.”
Traveler didn’t argue. There was no use. He knew his father.
“You didn’t happen to bring a gun with you, did you, Dad?”
“Hell, no. I thought this was a suicide. They don’t usually shoot back.”
“I’ll tell that to our client. He’s first on my agenda for the day.”
“Besides,” Martin said, “I don’t figure we’ll need a gun. It’s been my experience that someone who kills women doesn’t have the guts to go up against a man.”
“Thinking like that can get you killed.”
Martin snorted. “If I thought there was any real danger I’d tell you about your mother before it’s too late.”
“For Christ’s sake.” For years Traveler had been trying to get the truth out of Martin, including the name of Kary’s lover, Traveler’s father. “Tell me about it so I won’t have to worry for once.”
“Sperm doesn’t think. It just reacts. That’s why upbringing is all that counts.”
Sheriff Nibley opened the cafe’s front door. “You can have your car back if you want it. My advice is for both of you to go home.”
“I thought we were suspects,” Martin said.
“I know where to find you.”
“We’ll be at Ellis Nibley’s,” Martin said. “To start with.”
27
NIBLEY’S GENERAL Store, like just about everything else in Wasatch, was on Main Street. It was a squat, single-story building with a new aluminum facade that failed to hide the original oolite around the edges of the door and along the side walls. A flat, corrugated metal roof projected over the sidewalk. From it hung a rusted Coca-Cola sign.
A nearly vacant lot, its cement island a reminder of a long-gone service station, separated Nibley’s from the town library.
Traveler parked the Jeep—hosed off but still showing stains—across the street, in front of McConkie’s Feed and Seed. His father got out, nodded, and settled against the fender to wait.
The door to the Feed and Seed stood wide open. The lights were on inside, doing their best to fight off a midmorning twilight created by the smoky sky. Even so, the store looked deserted. So did every place else in town.
Traveler crossed the street, his shoes making sucking sounds on the hot, sticky asphalt. He was scraping his soles on the sidewalk when he noticed the faces inside pressed against the front window. Women’s faces, distorted by grimy glass. He nodded at them. They retreated.
A bell tinkled when he opened Nibley’s door. The women had clustered in front of a long counter that ran the length of the store. All were staring at Traveler. Behind them stood Ellis Nibley. He was on tiptoe to see over them, shaking his head at Traveler, a signal of some kind, most likely that he didn’t want to talk in front of witnesses. Traveler had half expected him to be at the fire, despite the bishop wanting the general store to stay open.
At Traveler’s approach, the women filed past him toward the door. The last in line paused to say, “I’m Sarah McConkie. Mrs. Bishop McConkie. I run the Feed and Seed across the street.”
Traveler smiled. He’d lost count of the bishop’s polygamous adherence to God’s word, as translated by Joe Smith. Utah was full of such men. Some said polygamists numbered as many as forty thousand. But then Smith’s revelation had given the faithful no leeway. Either they practiced polygamy or they were denied the kingdom of heaven. The modern-day church had counter-revelations in place, put there to pacify the federal government back in the 1890s. But those steadfast to Joe Smith, Black Bishops like McConkie, chose to ignore such revisionist doctrine.
“The other ladies,” she went on, “have made me their spokeswoman. We want you to know what we think of you and your father being here.”
“My father is not part of my investigation.”
“We never had a killing in Wasatch before you came.”
From the doorway, the other women nodded in unison.
“The dead woman was your friend,” Mrs. McConkie said. “The word is that you lived with her.”
“How do you know that?”
“You were read about in the Salt Lake paper. She took you to court.” Disgust warped her face. “She didn’t belong here and you don’t either.”
“She was born in Moroni,” he said.
“She went away a sinner, we know that much. She came back no different. If you hadn’t come here, she would have died somewhere else and we’d all be free of it.”
She pointed a finger at Nibley. “You share the blame on this, Ellis, as you do with Melba.”
With that, she pushed past Traveler and herded the other women out onto the sidewalk. There they paused, looking back and forth between the mountains and Traveler. No doubt they blamed him for the fire, too.
“She’s right,” Nibley said. “I should never have hired you. First, my son gets his ribs stove in. Now this. You warned me to leave well enough alone. I should have listened.”
“Your sons attacked me, not the other way around.”
“I know that, but it doesn’t change what happened. You’re free to leave if you want.”
“I can’t,” Traveler said. “I think you understand that. There’s something wrong in this town. Whatever it is, it was here before I arrived. Now, let me ask you again. Are you certain your wife killed herself?”
The man’s face, already painful to look at, lost all color. His groping fingers found the cash register stool behind him. He collapsed onto it. “She can’t have been murdered, Mr. Traveler. No one around here would do such a thing.”
“Tell me again what happened.”
His hands grabbed hold of the sides of the stool. “She left a note. In her own handwriting. I must have told you that already.”
Traveler nodded.
“She did it in the bathroom.” Nibley’s voice cracked. “The door was locked. I had to break it down. Sheriff Hickman said there was no doubt at all.”
“Yet you hired me.”
Tears started from Nibley’s eyes. “Like I told you before, I wanted to know why. What I really wanted, I think, was to have you tell me I wasn’t to blame. But I was wrong, like the good book says. ‘Oh, this unbelieving and stiff-necked generation—mine anger is kindled against them.’ I am guilty of being stiff-necked. I know it. Even so, I still want to know the truth, Mr. Traveler. I must know if my sins are to blame, if I’ve broken our seal of eternity together.”
Traveler stared at the front window. The women stared back.
Traveler nodded at them before turning back to Nibley. “Do you have a copy of the note?”
“I have a copy.”
“May I see it?”
He reached behind him to switch on more lights, a row of green-shaded bulbs that ran down the store’s center aisle. Dust-laden light pooled beneath them.
“I can’t help,” Traveler said, “if you keep things back.”
Nibley hung his head and dug out his wallet, the one his son had made for him in shop class, and extracted a tightly folded paper. Carefully and gently, as if his wife’s touch extended to the Xerox, he smoothed the paper out on the countertop. His eyes tracked the lines before he turned the note around so Traveler could read it.
The handwriting was neat and precise. Forgive me, my dearest. I’m sorry. At the bottom of the page in a loose, deteriorating script, as if an afterthought induced by tranquilizers, was written Josiah 13:22.
When Traveler looked up, Nibley sighed and reached beneath the counter for a pocket-size copy of The Book of Mormon. Without a word, he handed it to Traveler, who quickly found the reference and read it out loud. “ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ ”
Traveler stared at his client until the man squirmed.
Nibley grabbed the book,
slapped it down on the counter, placed one hand on it, and raised the other. “May I be damned to hell if I’m lying. As far as I know, my wife was faithful to me. I have no reason to think it wasn’t suicide. I promise you, I had nothing to do with her death.”
“Were there other women in your life?”
“Not even once,” he said, his hand still on the book.
“Unfortunately, your wife can’t speak for herself.”
“She was a God-fearing woman, Mr. Traveler. The pills must have affected her mind. Or maybe she made a mistake about the quotation.”
Over the years, Traveler had heard a lot of husbands say the same thing about infidelity. Some believed what they said, others didn’t.
Nibley looked like one of the believers. It was the believers who killed their wives when they discovered ugly truths.
Traveler said, “Why didn’t you tell me there’d been a second suicide here in town?”
“Joe Sutton. Doctor Joe? It didn’t have anything to do with my wife.”
“But he was your wife’s doctor. You said so in my office.”
“Here in Wasatch he was everybody’s family doctor.”
“Are you certain that he killed himself?”
Nibley blinked. “He had cancer. Everybody knows that. Talk to Mrs. Joe if you don’t believe me. She was his nurse, too.”
28
FOLLOWING NIBLEY’S directions, Traveler headed east on Main, turned left at the first intersection, Brigham Street, and then continued three blocks to Heber Avenue. At Heber, he turned right again, one block to Kimball Street. All the while, his father watched the rearview mirror.
Ashes from the fire were falling from the sky like blackened snow. Traveler rolled down the window and reached out with cupped palm. The ash eluded him.
The Sutton house was on the corner of Heber and Kimball. It was an older home, possibly from the 1880s, set amid Depression-era bungalows half its size. Traveler parked in front.
Martin got out first and stood, hands on hips, admiring the house. “The Gothic Revival style,” he said as soon as Traveler joined him, “unless I’m mistaken. Which I’m not.”
It had a gabled roof with three dormer windows opening onto a balcony that ran the entire length of the house. Beneath the balcony was a long front porch.
The yard was big, with setbacks on both sides, one accommodating a garage, the other an abandoned outhouse. The driveway was cluttered with junk—bicycles, parts of a car, and what looked like a doctor’s examination table, complete with stirrups for female patients.
Seeing it made Traveler shudder. Once, when making love to Claire, with her bucking beneath him like a wild animal, he’d said, “I feel like I need stirrups to stay on.”
Though on the brink of orgasm she’d rolled away from him.
“What’s wrong?”
“A horse ran away with me once with my feet caught in the stirrups,” she answered breathlessly. “I promised myself never to put my foot in a stirrup again.”
Traveler forced his mind away from the memory. “This had to be the finest house in town at one time.”
Martin shook his head. “That’ll be the bishop’s. You can count on it.” With a sigh, he took out his handkerchief and handed it to his son. “Wipe your face. You look like a Catholic on Ash Wednesday.”
Traveler checked his hands. They, too, were sooty. “I keep hearing that phone call from Claire.”
“You missed a spot.”
Traveler gave back the handkerchief and started up the cement walk toward the front door.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Martin called after him.
Traveler came back to say, “You wrote the rules. Two of us might intimidate the woman.”
“I hate that, when you quote me to get your own way.” Martin fought a losing battle against a smile before returning to the car.
A woman wearing a starched white uniform answered the door. She was the same one he’d seen at the Co-op, the one who’d been working silently on the quilt. She’d been introduced to him as Jessie, not Mrs. Joe.
“It took you a long time to get around to me,” she said and invited him in.
They entered a parlor that reminded him of a doctor’s waiting room. Long benches lined opposite walls, facing a coffee table filled with magazines staggered one on top of the other so that their titles showed. A massive fireplace of blue enameled brick, with a matching mantel lined with picture frames, took up the remaining wall.
Mrs. Joe sat on one bench and pointed him to the other.
She looked to be sixty, gray haired, buxom, not yet fat, somewhere in the transition from mother to grandmother. Her trim legs, sheathed in white nylon, rustled when she crossed them. She smiled when she caught him admiring them. A well-practiced smile, he thought. One to reassure the patients while waiting for their appointment with Doctor Joe.
“Mrs. Sutton—”
“Please,” she interrupted, “call me Mrs. Joe. Everybody else does.”
“They called you Jessie at the Co-op.”
Her enigmatic smile reminded him of Claire. “They say you’re named after our Angel Moroni.”
“I was named after my father.”
She nodded as if that was to be expected. “So was my husband. Named for his father who was named for his father. Suttons have been living in this house since 1876. My husband had his first office right here in this room. In those days we couldn’t afford a place downtown. Oh, I know this house is the biggest on the block and looks expensive. But it’s impossible to heat in the winter, and a monstrosity when it comes to plumbing and wiring. If Doctor Joe hadn’t been the only doctor in town, his patients would have gone somewhere else in the wintertime just to keep from getting goose pimples during their physicals.”
He smiled, hoping she’d get around to the subject of her husband’s death without prompting from him.
She smoothed her skirt, which crackled from heavy starch. “ ‘I know we’re working out of our home,’ Doctor Joe used to say, ‘but that’s no reason not to wear a fresh uniform every day.’ Even after he passed, I never got out of the habit. I don’t go into the office these days, but see no reason to waste perfectly good clothing.”
Rather than face her intense stare, he rose and went to the fireplace, intending to look at the photographs. But most of the frames were empty. Those that weren’t showed Jessie Sutton as a young girl.
“Why don’t we go in the kitchen?” she said. “Being in here always makes me feel so formal. My desk was right here in front of that door, guarding the way to my husband’s examination room. I always had to sit up straight and look professional.” She tried to slump but the straight-backed bench prevented her. “See what I mean?”
The kitchen had a white tile floor, matching countertops, and glass-front cabinets showing elegant china alongside jelly glasses and chipped, everyday crockery. It all gleamed.
“Coffee?” she said. When he looked surprised, she added, “It’s not really coffee. It’s coffee-flavored Postum with no caffeine. Do you think it a sin to pretend you’re drinking coffee?”
“Not unless it makes you feel guilty.”
She smiled. “That’s what I think. Cream and sugar?”
“Please.”
To keep from making a face while drinking the Postum, he wandered around the kitchen, coming to a stop in front of a stack of casserole dishes.
“The neighbors brought them in when Doctor Joe passed on,” she explained. “I can’t bring myself to return them yet. It would be . . . I don’t know. An end to things.”
“Tell me about your husband?”
“You don’t fool me,” she said. “But why not? I’ve got to talk about him sometime.”
Momentarily, she busied herself washing their cups. “You have to understand about us, Mr. Traveler. We were married in the temple in Manti. Hands were laid upon us. We were anointed with oil. Our secret names were bestowed.”
She reached under the neck of her uniform and drew
out a delicate gold chain from which hung an inch-long glass phial. “This contains consecrated oil, Mr. Traveler, from that temple. I keep it with me always in case a miracle is needed.”
Traveler’s mother had kept her supply of healing oil in the medicine cabinet, next to the Mercurochrome.
“I’m not a school-trained nurse,” she said. “But I do have a gift. Doctor Joe used to say that I was better even than Cynthia Odell. Of course she and her husband are being shunned these days.” She shook her head. “I can hear Doctor Joe now. ‘You’re my insurance,’ he’d say. ‘My sure cure for cases beyond my university education.’ ”
Her eyes shone. For a moment, Traveler thought she might be putting him on. Then he dismissed the idea.
He’d met few Mormons willing to joke about their faith.
“I wish I could use my power to help Ellis Nibley. I know the poor man hired you. There’s nothing I can do or say to give him comfort, though I want you to know that I’ve done my best. I’ve even gone through Doctor Joe’s files which, strictly speaking, are confidential. Even so, I’ll tell you what I found. Nothing. Nothing in writing to show why Melba would take her own life.”
“And your husband?” Traveler said gently.
“Doctor Joe had cancer. It was just a matter of time. The pain would have gotten worse.”
Had she laid hands upon him too? he wondered. And anointed him with oil?
“Could I see those records?” he said. “Since all concerned are dead.”
“Not even I was allowed to see them when Doctor Joe was alive. I only read them after he passed on.”
“A judge might order you to give me those records.”
“You’re not the first to threaten me. Sheriff Hickman came here asking for them too. I’ll tell you what I told him. Doctor Joe’s records are nothing but ash.”
“You burned them?”
“I had them cremated with him.”
29
MARTIN TOOK one look at his son’s face when he got in the car and started singing a song he’d sometimes used as a defense against his wife’s sharp tongue. He used it still in times of stress. “ ‘You can bring Peg with a wooden leg, but don’t bring Lulu.’ ”
