Baptism for the Dead

by R. R. Irvine

  He was about to give up and continue on to Lydel Springs when someone suggested he try the cemetery. There was a man living out there, he was told, who knew ancestors, not to mention every name on every grave.

  Hurricane’s cemetery, like so many early burial grounds, sat high on a hill overlooking the townsite. The nearest structure, a flimsy shack fronted by a disintegrating picket fence, looked old enough to have survived from pioneer times. Only the flower garden out front made the place look lived in.

  Traveler waited for the dust to settle around the Jeep before getting out. He’d been expecting an old-timer with whiskers. What he got was a young man with a blond crewcut who could have been this year’s college freshman.

  “I’m Dave Reynolds,” he said, smiling, obviously delighted to have company. “You must be looking for your ancestors.”

  “Close.”

  “Or maybe you’re a researcher like myself.” He thoughtfully rubbed a hand over the spines of his crewcut. “If you’d come next week, I’d have been long gone. My job here is done.”

  “What’s that exactly?”

  “I’m surveying the graves as a part of my senior thesis at B.Y.U.”

  “You don’t look that old.”

  “I’m twenty-one. I leave on my two-year mission right after graduation in June.”

  “You’re the man to see, then. I’m trying to locate a family named Varney.”

  “They’re here all right. Generations of them.”

  So far so good, Traveler thought. “What about Martha Ann Snow? I’ve been told she moved here from somewhere in Arizona.”

  “You’re in luck. She’s buried here, too.”

  Traveler blinked in surprise. “That’s one grave I’d better see for myself.”

  “I’ve got the whole place charted. Just let me get my map.”

  Reynolds ducked back inside the shack and was out again in seconds, holding a paper the size of an architect’s blueprint. Eagerly he spread it out on the Jeep’s hood. After a moment, his finger stabbed a spot that looked to be in the northeast corner of the cemetery.

  “I’ll lead the way,” he said. “Just watch where you step. Some of the markers are very fragile.”

  The dates for Martha Snow were 1901 to 1956.

  “That’s the right name,” Traveler said, “but the wrong woman. It’s probably the mother of the woman I’m looking for.”

  “How old is your subject?”

  “About forty. The information I have is that she came to Hurricane to be married. She must have moved to Salt Lake soon after. I’m not sure of the dates, though it has to be at least twenty years ago.”

  “You aren’t LDS, are you?”

  Here we go again, Traveler thought, and showed the man his license. Dave Reynolds looked thrilled; he had never met a private detective before.

  “I’ll bet there’s a crime involved.”

  “Murder.” Traveler stretched the point somewhat despite the killing in Bountiful.

  “Jeez. Maybe I can help. I know someone who goes back a long time in this part of the country. His name is Jess Dunphy. He’s in his nineties now and can’t get around much. But he’s still sharp as a tack. I’ll take you to see him.”

  Dunphy lived in a tiny aluminum-sided house at the edge of town. He looked the part of an old-timer, right down to the whiskers. At first he said he didn’t remember a thing, but when Reynolds brought out a pint of bourbon, possession of which would have gotten him thrown out of B.Y.U., the man became talkative.

  “Young Martha came from over near Lydel Springs all right, came here to get married. Right then I knew there’d be trouble.”

  He paused to take a pull at the pint, his eyes bright. Traveler knew the look; the man wanted to be coaxed.

  “What kind of trouble?” Traveler obliged.

  After swallowing more bourbon Dunphy smacked his lips. “Folks from that part of the country are cursed. It goes back a long way, to the late eighteen sixties. In those days there was a tribe of Indians living where Lydel Springs is today. But us white men wanted the water and decided to get rid of them. Some say it was Brigham Young’s Danites who did the job. Others claim it was local vigilantes.”

  The old man grinned at Dave Reynolds, who’d gone wide-eyed at the mention of his prophet. But the young man didn’t say anything.

  “Some of the Indians escaped the first ambush and took refuge on a mesa out in the desert. The place was impossible to climb and fight at the same time, so the white men just hunkered down to wait, intending to starve the heathens to death. When the braves realized they were beaten, they said their prayers and threw their women and children off the mountaintop to stop their suffering. After that they jumped, too. Those who saw it say the mountain turned red with blood. That place has been known as Blood Butte ever since. Those who live around Lydel Springs have never been the same, either.”

  Traveler dragged his chair closer to Dunphy. “Are you saying that Martha was cursed, too?”

  “She’s dead, ain’t she?”

  “Not in my cemetery,” Reynolds said.

  “You don’t know everything, Davie.” The old man wet his whistle one more time. “She’s out there, all right, next to her mother.”

  “There should be a marker,” Reynolds complained.

  “There wasn’t money for that. Besides, folks wanted to keep it quiet.”

  “There’s nothing on my chart,” Reynolds persisted.

  “They just came in one day, dug a hole, and put her to rest.”

  “Who did?” Traveler said.

  “I was there myself,” Dunphy said. “But then, I’m the last of the Zion Reborners left in these parts. The others cleared out after the burial.”

  “And you?” Traveler prompted.

  “I’m too old to move and too old to give a damn about what I say, either. Let the chips fall where they may. That’s my motto.”

  With that, he handed the bottle to Traveler, who took a small pull at it before returning it.

  “I hope nobody minds if I kill this.” Dunphy held up the pint to the light. He smiled at what he saw and drank. When he finished he sighed and closed his eyes.

  For a moment Traveler thought the old man had nodded off. But his eyes popped open again and he went on with his tale. “The story they gave out was that Martha was killed in a fall from Blood Butte. But I ask you, why the hell would a woman her age be climbing up there? The answer’s pretty damned obvious. She wouldn’t. But nobody around here listens to me.”

  “I do,” Traveler said.

  The old man leaned forward until he was only inches from Traveler’s face. There was a smell of dust about him, overshadowing the whiskey. “You wouldn’t happen to have another bottle, would you?”

  “I can go out and get you one.”

  “Do an old man a favor instead, will you? Leave a couple of dollars with Dave here. He’ll take care of me.”

  The B.Y.U. scholar flushed with guilt.

  Traveler handed the young man a twenty.

  Dunphy grinned and continued. “Martha’s husband was a man named Earl Jordan, a mean bastard at the best of times. When drinking he was even meaner. After she died there were whispers that Earl beat her to death and then repented to Brother Jacob. He was our leader, the First Prophet of the Church of Zion Reborn.”

  “You don’t look like a believer.”

  “When a man gets to be my age, he believes in three squares a day. They fed me. I got down on my knees.”

  “What about Jacob?” Reynolds asked, a look of horrified fascination on his face, as if blasphemy were as titillating as forbidden sex.

  “What I heard was that he helped Earl carry Martha’s body up Blood Butte. They threw her off to make her injuries look like an accident. I can’t prove that, you understand. But I believe it. Why the hell else do you think I stayed behind when the others left, just for my three squares?”

  “The church takes care of you,” Reynolds said.

  Dunphy winked at Tra
veler. “Like I said, I go down on my knees when it suits me.”

  “Was there any kind of investigation?” Traveler asked.

  “They called the sheriff out from Lydel Springs. But what the hell could he do? There was Martha lying at the foot of Blood Butte and nobody to say it wasn’t an accident. Right after that Jacob got his revelation from God. The only way to beat the Mormons, God told him, was to join them. Suffering out in the desert was a waste of time.”

  Dunphy paused to chuckle, which soon turned into a cough. He spit phlegm into a tin can next to his chair. “ „We’ll move back to Salt Lake,’ Jacob told us. „We’ll go into business and make money and be legitimate.’ That was his word, legitimate.”

  The old-timer shook his head. “If you ask me, Brother Jacob finally figured out he couldn’t get enough good-looking women to live out in the desert with him. Hellsakes, I could have told him that and saved God the trouble. The heat around here sucks a woman dry and shrivels her like a mummy. Take Martha. She didn’t weigh much more than a mummy when they tossed her over the edge. If she had, they’d never have been able to carry her to the top, the bastards. Someone ought to make them pay.”

  “Jordan’s dead,” Traveler said. “Somebody killed him.”

  “Good riddance,” Dunphy said and spit into his tin can for emphasis. “You being here wouldn’t have anything to do with the woman who came to see me last week, would it?”

  Traveler looked at Reynolds, who shrugged ignorance of such a visitor.

  “Was she young?”

  “Younger than I.”

  “Blond hair?”

  “No such luck.”

  “Where can I find the Church of Zion Reborn now?”

  Dunphy snorted. “That’s just it. You can’t. Brother Jacob said they were going underground, joining the church, pretending to pay full tithe, and all the while waiting for the day when they were strong enough to take over.”

  “Impossible,” Reynolds said. “That’s just whiskey talking.”

  “Maybe so, but then, you never did meet Brother Jacob.”

  “I’d like to,” Traveler said.

  “That ought to be easy enough. He’s a dentist.” The old man pulled out his dentures and held them up for inspection. “He made these for me.”

  18

  A HALF hour later Traveler crossed the border into Arizona, where the long arm of the Mormon Church wasn’t quite so effective. Neither was law and order.

  By the time he reached Lydel Springs he was beginning to think that Hurricane had been a metropolis. A road sign said the population of the Arizona town was 1,200 but, judging by the number of houses visible, he figured the count at half that.

  There was a single filling station, one bar, one market, an auto parts store, a sheriff’s office, plus half a dozen forlorn-looking businesses on their way to bankruptcy.

  The station, selling a brand of gasoline he’d never heard of, looked as if it might close at any moment. So he decided to fill the Jeep’s tank, including the extra five-gallon can strapped on the back.

  The grease-stained attendant, yawning constantly while he worked, made Traveler feel sleepy.

  “I’m looking for Blood Butte,” Traveler said.

  “Shit,” said the attendant, trying to spit but failing in the desert air. “If you’re looking for the polygamists, they’re long gone.”

  “I’m a tourist,” Traveler said, wondering if he wasn’t making the trip more out of morbid curiosity than anything else.

  “Sure you are.” The attendant squinted at him. “Just keep heading out the highway. You can’t miss it. There’s a junk car near the old dirt turnoff. You might still be able to smell the women for all I know.”

  “This turnoff, does it go all the way to the butte?”

  “Yeah,” the man said with an elaborate yawn. “But it’s rough country out there. You might want to let the sheriff know you’re making the trip. It’ll save him trouble later on if you turn up missing.”

  About twenty miles outside of town, Traveler saw the marker, a rusting truck carcass that looked as if scavengers had picked it clean years ago. He swung the Jeep off the highway and onto what had once been a gravel road.

  Immediately a tail of dust kicked up behind him like an exclamation point announcing his arrival. He slowed to five miles an hour but the dust didn’t settle. At that speed, according to the directions he’d been given, it would take him an hour to reach the base of the butte. He pushed the Jeep to fifteen miles an hour and then held on as it bounced from one pothole to another.

  He was heading almost directly east now, toward a thousand-foot slab of jagged sandstone that rose from the barren landscape like a prehistoric tomb. Closer around him, the desert floor was spotted with stunted shrubs and cactus, all eking out an existence in a rocky soil that looked as though it would eventually erode into pure sand. It was the kind of place, he thought, that only an angry God would create.

  In the distance dust devils were sucking up enough sand to make them look like moving pillars of salt.

  The sunlight faded abruptly and for the first time he noticed thunderheads gathering behind the stone monolith. The temperature dropped suddenly. The air smelled of ozone, as if lightning were about to strike.

  He slowed the vehicle to a stop, eyeing the sinkhole ahead. From a distance it looked completely bleached of life, like an alkali flat.

  Leaving the engine idling, he stepped outside to study the thunderheads. They were rolling toward him at breakneck speed, as if he were watching time-lapse photography.

  He quickly climbed back inside, tightened his seat belt and shoulder harness, switched to four-wheel drive, and punched the accelerator. Flash floods were common in the desert and he sure as hell didn’t want to be caught in a sinkhole.

  The abandoned headquarters of the Church of Zion Reborn came into sight a few minutes later. Church was hardly an apt description. What he saw was a half-dozen shacks that looked as though they’d disintegrate if anyone made the mistake of leaning against them. One building in particular, an old barn, reminded him of a pile of bleached bones. All of the structures looked small, dwarfed as they were by Blood Butte.

  The road ran out. There was no sign of life. Even so, he had the feeling that he was being watched, a sensation so strong he had to fight down an impulse to turn around and drive away.

  In the end he ignored his instincts and stepped out of the Jeep. Even so, caution got the better of him; he carefully searched each of the buildings but found nothing except a few pieces of forsaken furniture.

  As soon as he was outside again, lightning crackled. Thunder rolled over him a couple of seconds later. The sandstone butte creaked.

  He stared up at the mountain. The sides were practically sheer, with no sign of footholds. A sheriff, even a small-town sheriff, should have realized that a middle-aged woman would have trouble with such a climb. Then again, how the hell could two men carry a body up that mountain?

  He began walking along the base, looking for some kind of vertical access. Not more than a hundred yards from the barn he found a rock chimney of sorts, camouflaged by a fallen slab of rock. The opening angled up steeply. In places, steps had been cut in the sandstone, probably by nineteenth-century Indians judging by the amount of erosion on the treads.

  Lightning, this time much closer, triggered thunder enough to bring a shower of red pebbles down on Traveler’s head. He looked straight up. Directly overhead the sky was still blue. He decided to risk a short climb just to see if the old man’s claims about Brother Jacob and Earl Jordan were possible.

  The moment he touched the rock, he knew he had to be back down before it rained. Water would make the sandstone slippery and dangerous.

  From the ground, he couldn’t see more than twenty feet of chimney before it twisted out of sight. That twist was the turning point. After that, the climb was much easier. Two strong men would have no trouble carrying a woman’s body. Whether they could make it all the way to the top was sti
ll to be proved. But they actually didn’t have to get that far. A drop of a hundred feet or so, with the body bouncing from outcrop to outcrop, might do enough damage to hide the marks left by a man’s fists.

  At about that height Traveler reached a shallow cave that formed enough of a platform so that he could sit down. He took a deep breath. More than ever the desert air smelled like rain.

  He was about to start down when an outcropping of sandstone exploded near his head. Shards of rock ripped open his cheek. An instant later the sound of the rifle shot arrived, a more deadly kind of thunder.

  He rolled to the back of the cave. Even there he was only a few feet from the edge of the butte. He felt helpless. The .45 in his hand was good only for close-in work.

  Another shot dug sandstone from the red wall above him. A persistent sniper with enough ammunition could probably undermine the entire ledge if he were a good enough marksman.

  Thunder shook the mountain. With it came the rain, a sheet of water that sluiced down the mountainside, forming a curtain between Traveler and the sniper.

  Traveler eased forward until he could cover the chimney approach, just in case the sniper might be foolish enough to try finishing the job in person. The movement started him sliding headfirst on the wet sandstone. He caught himself just in time. With such treacherous footing no one would be coming after him. He wasn’t going anywhere either.

  A short time later, the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The sun came out. Steam rose from the drying rock. But Traveler waited for darkness before climbing down. By then he was angry enough to hope the sniper was still waiting. But the descent was uneventful. The Jeep was right where he left it, untouched except for a coating of mud that looked like dried blood.