Righteous04 - The Blessed and the Damned

by Michael Wallace

  Briefly, he told her what had happened on the road outside Blister Creek. She listened with a worried expression that eased when he told her the baby was okay, then deepened again when she heard about Fernie’s spinal injury.

  “That explains why Taylor Junior’s gang was in a huff,” she said. “Whatever happened in Blister Creek, it wasn’t entirely expected. Maybe they figured you were coming after them and took off.” She started to lift the binoculars, then stopped. “Wait, where’s Eliza? You should have brought her along to deal with your dad, if nothing else.”

  “I left her with Fernie.”

  Miriam fixed him with a frown. “I don’t like the way you hesitated just now.”

  He decided to come clean. “Eliza doesn’t agree with me. She’s afraid I’ll do something crazy.”

  “Jacob, when you’re throwing in your lot with the likes of Abraham Christianson, while ignoring Eliza’s advice, it makes me worried.”

  “You can bow out if you’d like.”

  “I’m not bowing out of anything. And I’m not afraid of brutal methods, either. But I want to be sure you’re following the Lord and not Satan.”

  “Oh come on, Satan?”

  “You know what I mean. Both your wife and your sister would agree with me, and so would you, if you were thinking clearly. You can call it Satan or you can call it your own selfish desires. Are you doing this for the right reason?”

  “The right reason? Those bastards tried to kill my wife. She’s never going to walk again. If I don’t stop them, they’ll come back. That’s a good enough reason.” His father and Stephen Paul stopped their conversation to look at him, and he lowered his voice again. “I’ll do this without you if I have to, and without David, too, but my chances are a lot better if you come along. So I want to know, can I count on you?”

  Miriam hesitated, then nodded. “You can count on me.”

  “Good. Let’s get our gear and go down there. What’s the quickest way?”

  “The trail branches midway. One side curves east into the box canyon, and the other goes into their camp.”

  “Good. We’ll look at their camp first. Then I want to check out this box canyon, see if I can figure out how Taylor Junior disappeared.”

  * * *

  Charity pointed into a deep canyon that gouged the plateau. “It’s down there.”

  Eliza and Agent Fayer stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked across the narrow valley. This end formed a box canyon, surrounded by sheer walls on three sides. Farther north, the depths turned into what looked like a slot canyon that opened up again after about a mile. The opposite side in that direction wasn’t as steep—there might be access over there—but Eliza could see no way down from the top of the box canyon.

  “You’re making me nervous,” Krantz said.

  “Come here,” Fayer said. “You’d better have a look.”

  “And throw myself off the cliff?” He shook his head. “No thanks.”

  “Come on, you big baby. We’re not base jumping. Nobody is going to push you.”

  He obeyed, slowly, reluctantly. When he finally got near the edge, the wobbly look disappeared, but he remained gray-faced. “We’re not as close as we thought,” he said. “It’ll take hours to get there from here.”

  “This is Taylor Junior’s secret,” Charity said. “A quicker way down. But it’s dangerous. In more ways than one.”

  She explained. After she and her husband—recently released from prison—had joined Taylor Junior’s camp, she heard some of the other women talking about how Taylor Junior would disappear. Taken up by an angel to converse with the Lord, some claimed.

  “I didn’t believe it,” Charity said. “He’s not a prophet, for one. I don’t know who to follow. Maybe my husband, maybe Abraham or Jacob. But the leader of the church isn’t one of my husband’s sons. They’ve caused too much death and destruction for me to ever believe that.”

  Charity had been unable to sleep the night before the men had disappeared on their way to attack Fernie. She was suffering a urinary tract infection and her kidneys were aching. She got up to stand in the cold night air and eventually steel herself to urinate, when she’d spotted Taylor Junior slipping out of camp.

  “Something possessed me, and I grabbed a penlight and followed him up the slot canyon.”

  The moon had slid out from behind a cloud as Charity entered the box canyon, and she was astonished to see Taylor Junior scaling the side of the cliff, as agile and gravity-defying as a fence lizard. Alarmed, she’d fled to the camp but later decided that she hadn’t seen anything supernatural. There must be a secret staircase with hand- and footholds cut into the rock by human hands.

  Charity said, “Taylor Junior sent the rest of us into the wilderness while he took Eric Froud, Aaron Young, and my husband up the slot canyon. Some sort of initiation, the others said. Why would they waste time when the rest of us had to flee for our lives? I thought about the secret staircase. It must have gone all the way to the top of the cliff, and the other three must have known about it—or learned about it, too.

  “My husband came to me before he left with Taylor Junior. He seemed calmer than he had been, and he said, ‘I’ll come look for you in the second refuge unless the Lord has other plans. If so, I’ll see you on the other side. Stay faithful.’

  “I asked him what he meant,” Charity continued. “He wouldn’t say anything except for implying they were going to attack Blister Creek. He thought Jacob and Abraham would be coming after us here and would leave the town unguarded. I asked him what we’d do if Abraham and Jacob caught us before we reached the second refuge. He told me not to worry, that Taylor Junior would prepare snares for our enemies, and if they came after us here, they would be destroyed.”

  “I wonder what that means,” Fayer said. “Land mines, maybe?”

  “Maybe punji traps, like the Vietcong used,” Krantz offered.

  “Any idea how to find this staircase?” Eliza asked.

  “It’s somewhere along here,” she said. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you any more than that.”

  Eliza felt a sense of vertigo as she approached the edge of the cliff. The wall was sheer, vertical sandstone, at least three hundred feet from top to bottom. Trees and boulders studded the canyon floor like props on a child’s railroad set. A wind howled over the lip of the canyon wall, making her sway. The thought of finding hand- and footholds in that rock made her almost dizzy.

  Krantz looked over her shoulder and flinched. “Whew, that scares the—come on, Eliza, you’re freaking me out. Get back from the edge.”

  “We have to get down there somehow,” Fayer said. She gave him a look. “You’ve rappelled out of helicopters. Think of it like that.”

  “That’s different. There’s a harness around your crotch. And a rope.” He gestured at the cliff. “There’s nothing there but air all the way to the bottom. I get queasy just looking at it. Even if we find the handholds, it’s going to take some kind of nerve. I’m not sure I can do it.”

  “It scares me, too,” Eliza said, “but I’ve got to find it. I have to warn Jacob about the trap.”

  “Yeah, but how do we find the damn things?” he asked. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  They looked to Charity, but she shook her head. “It looks so different from up here and it was dark, and I—well, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Agent Fayer said, “We’re not going to find it flapping our gums. Come on.” She paced along the edge of the cliff, peering over the edge.

  Krantz grimaced. “Jeez, Fayer, get back from there.”

  “Pretend it’s a sidewalk,” Fayer said, “and you’re looking into the gutter for something. You’re not going to fall off the sidewalk, are you?”

  She continued along the lip of rock, apparently immune to the dizzying effects of the drop. Once, she even grabbed a sapling pine, tested it to make sure its roots had a good grip on the cliff, and then leaned over the side to get a better look along the inte
rior wall of the cliff. Eliza took a deep breath, thought about her brother, and then joined Fayer near the edge.

  “Krantz?” Fayer said.

  “Give me a second, I’m fighting with my breakfast. We have a disagreement about whether or not it’s going to stay down.” He came over.

  Eliza’s vertigo eventually passed, even if she couldn’t quite shake the terror that she would suddenly, inexplicably stagger forward and go over the edge, arms windmilling at the air all the way to the bottom. However, there was no way to see the handholds carved into the rock. Maybe they didn’t exist.

  Maybe Charity had seen Taylor Junior in a vision or dream. Maybe she was lying. But when Eliza glanced back, the older woman was chewing on her lips, brow furrowed in worry. No, not lying.

  So where were they?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  One thing was clear—the Kimballs had abandoned camp in a hurry. They’d left half their tents. Shirts and women’s skirts flapped on a clothesline. An ax lay embedded in a log. Dishes soaked in a tub of soapy water. A teddy bear sat in front of one tent, staring through beaded eyes across the camp.

  Jacob tore open tent flaps while his father and Stephen Paul stood by with rifles at the ready. But they found nobody. “Where did they go in such a hurry?”

  “I think they split up,” David said. “The men were fighting about what to do next. My guess is that once they settled that, they sent the wives and children on to some other place to hide while the men circled back around to continue whatever they were up to before.”

  “That’s your guess?” Abraham said with a scowl at his son. “No, it didn’t happen like that. They’ve got a secret society of apostates. Men like that thrive only until their deeds are brought into the light. When that happened they acted like the Gadiantons in the Book of Mormon. Righteous judgment was descending, and so they took their wives and children and fled deeper into the wilderness where they can continue their iniquity in secret.”

  David snorted. “This isn’t the Book of Mormon, Dad. And this isn’t about iniquity or judgment or whatever you said. It’s a power play, pure and simple.”

  “You’re spiritually blind,” Abraham said. “Might be your drug addiction or maybe you’re too hard-hearted to see it, but—”

  “That’s enough,” Jacob interrupted. He turned to Stephen Paul. “What do you think?”

  “David might be right,” Stephen Paul said quietly. “They took off in a hurry.”

  “That’s not the part I object to,” Abraham said. “It’s the conclusion about what they did when they left.”

  “So they’ve escaped,” David said. “It doesn’t matter why or where, we’ve lost them. What now?”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Jacob said. “With all those children, there’s no way they’ll stay ahead of us. Not on this terrain, not weighed down with whatever gear they ran off with.”

  “Unless they split up like David said,” Miriam said. “The men might be sending their women ahead, while they go off to do something else.”

  “Even better,” Jacob said. “The women and children can come back with us to the real world. And they’ll tell us where the men are hiding.”

  “Will they?” she asked. “Or will they stand by their leaders? Think about Zarahemla and Brother Timothy. Those people would have died before abandoning their prophet.”

  Jacob shook his head. “Taylor Junior is no Brother Timothy. Whatever else he was and however zealous his followers, Timothy was sincere. He was no fraud. But it doesn’t matter if Taylor Junior’s followers believe him or not. I guarantee there’s someone in that group who is sick of living in the wilderness and hearing about the end of the world. Whoever she is, she’ll tell us what we need to know.”

  “There’s nothing more to learn here,” Abraham said. “Let’s find their trail and see if we can catch them before dark.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “First I want to check out the box canyon and see if we can find this secret hiding place Miriam was talking about.”

  “We’re wasting valuable time,” his father said.

  “We could waste a lot more time stumbling around looking for a trail,” Jacob said. “We know at least two ways into the canyon. Are we going to split up? What if there’s a third trail? We might miss them altogether.”

  “I’ll pray to the Lord for guidance,” his father said. “Once I get an answer, we’ll know what to do.”

  “Talk about wasting time,” David said in an exasperated tone. “Let’s do what Jacob says, okay?”

  Jacob lifted a hand to calm his brother. “Dad, you can pray while we check out that canyon. David, Miriam, you come with me.”

  But his father didn’t want to be left alone, so he and Stephen Paul came along behind. To get into the box canyon they had to enter a slit in the rock just wide enough at the bottom to walk single file and just wide enough overhead to let in a sliver of light that cast the frozen waves of sandstone in orange and red. He checked the sky before leading them inside. A sudden cloudburst and the slot canyon would fill with water.

  Boot prints marked the sand ahead of them. Miriam and David came to his side. Miriam said, “Bunch of different men came this way, but I don’t see the prints of any children. How about women?”

  “That one looks like a woman’s prints,” Jacob said, pointing to one smaller print that separated from the others for a moment, before rejoining. “Looks like she came in last. See how it presses into the tops of the others? Wonder if they knew she was following.”

  “Good eye.”

  Jacob picked up the pace. It was cold in the slot canyon, and he wanted to get back into the sunlight.

  Father had lingered behind, perhaps saying his prayer after all, but now he caught up with the others. “I now agree that they broke into two groups.”

  David snorted. “Did the Lord tell you that, or did you notice the men’s boot prints in the sand?”

  As they emerged at the top of the slot canyon, Miriam drew Jacob’s attention to the sandy bowl before they climbed onto stone and gravel again. The boot prints mingled here with other, older prints, but it was clear that the prints led in but not out.

  His father squatted next to the prints. “They’re still up here.” Excitement colored his voice. “We’ve got them.”

  “Unless there’s another way out,” Jacob said.

  “There isn’t another way,” Miriam said. “I looked, remember. Maybe a hiding place, but we’re surrounded by cliffs.”

  “Draw your weapons,” Jacob told them. “Don’t be caught unawares.”

  They continued into the narrow box canyon he’d seen from above. High cliffs rose on either side, and the canyon ended in a third cliff. There were no caves or clumps of trees in which to hide. The canyon was empty. The tension twisting at his gut unraveled, replaced by confusion.

  “No way in and out of here, that’s for sure,” Abraham said when they’d climbed to the end and stood looking back down the canyon. “I wouldn’t discount the Satanic influence just yet.”

  Jacob studied the other five as they looked around with bewildered expressions. Miriam and David searched the ground as Stephen Paul checked trees and looked behind boulders. Abraham stood with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, as if trying to use his spiritual eyes to figure out what had happened to Taylor Junior.

  David made his way to Jacob’s side. “Do you remember that time we found the trapdoor in the cabin at Yellow Flats?”

  Jacob looked at his brother, surprised. He’d been thinking the same thing. Remembering the book he’d found in Grandma Cowley’s cellar had brought her strange disappearing act into his mind.

  “You think Taylor Junior dug a hole?” Jacob asked. “The ground is awfully hard. Rocky too.”

  “It’s either that or he just disappeared.”

  “Grandma Cowley’s cellar was already there and so was the trapdoor.”

  “I don’t follow,” David said.

  “A few days after we stumbled into thos
e yellow jackets, I rode back to Yellow Flats to cover up the floor again. I don’t know why, maybe I didn’t want anyone else to know her secret. I took a closer look at the cellar. There was a good-sized crawl space under the entire floor. More than you usually see in the old desert cabins. The hiding place was dug at the same time the cabin was built.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Who knows,” Jacob said. “Maybe a place for men to hide during polygamist raids. Or maybe in case of Paiute attacks. Or maybe there was just a crawl space for hiding, and it was so useful that Grandma Cowley expanded it later, after she was widowed for the second time.”

  “By herself?” David looked skeptical.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. By the time she was an old woman, there was no one left who remembered her secret.”

  “So what are you saying?” David asked. “That there was already a hiding place up here before Taylor Junior came? Like a cave or a sinkhole? Wouldn’t we have found it already?”

  “Who said anything about a natural hiding place?”

  “I’m still not getting it. Nobody lives up here. How could it be man-made?”

  “Nobody lives up here now. Here, give me the binoculars.”

  Jacob raised them to his eyes. He turned his attention to the steeper north wall of the box canyon. From the plateau to the bottom was at least three hundred feet. And sheer. Only a professional rock climber could climb that cliff, although there were a couple of places midway up where fissures had eroded and brush and scrubby trees clung to the wall. He focused on the larger of these two spots. A moment later, he lowered the binoculars in surprise.

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  The others hurried over. “What are you talking about?” David asked. “Give me those.”

  “One second.” Jacob looked one more time. It was still there. He turned the binoculars over to his brother, told him where to look. David let out a low whistle.

  Abraham unslung his rifle and looked through the scope. “What is it? What do you see?” He stopped. “Well, I’ll be…”