“Only a muddled shape.” Joanna’s hands shook as she tried to demonstrate, then dropped to the table as she gave up. “It was too dark to see clearly. The darkness is always evil. God can’t see through the minds of those who have fallen to Satan.”
This was a bit of theology I hadn’t heard before. “Then how will I be hurt?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded desperately unhappy and I decided not to push her any harder. She was already at her limit.
“All right. I’ll go home as soon as I can,” I said. But I couldn’t leave it at that. “Is anyone else in danger? Do I need to warn someone?” I was thinking about Rebecca and Talitha. Maybe Naomi, too.
“You and your son, Kenneth,” said Joanna.
There was almost nothing she could have said that would have made me want to move faster.
Chapter 29
I got back to the main house, but the doorbell rang before I’d had a chance to find Kenneth and talk about the best way to make an exit. I could hear the children in the basement roughhousing, but no adult appeared to answer the door. I was reminded briefly of the fact that it was Sarah who’d invited Kurt and me inside when we’d arrived on Monday, not Rebecca. Answering the door didn’t seem to be a top priority here. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a habit since few people would ever get as far as the door?
I opened it myself and to my surprise saw Dr. Benallie.
“Ah, you’re still here,” she said when she saw me.
Not for much longer, I hoped.
“Can I get someone for you? Rebecca, maybe?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure where Rebecca was.
“I’m here to check on Carolyn. Rebecca texted me that she’d given birth this morning with Naomi’s assistance. I thought she should have a follow-up with a real OB/GYN.”
I was a little suspicious of this since Naomi had been so certain that Dr. Benallie wouldn’t come to help. “I thought there was something wrong with your license,” I said mildly.
She drew herself up to her full height, which was a couple inches taller than me. “I’m a skilled doctor. Do you want Carolyn to have a follow-up or not?”
I considered for a moment the likelihood that Carolyn would go to anyone else, and then sighed. Not that I really had any right to stop Dr. Benallie from going to see her in the first place, but I felt protective of her. I knew what she was going through right now.
“Oh, good, Linda let you in,” said Rebecca, as she came in from the backyard. She looked sweaty and there were leaves in her hair and dirt under her fingernails. I guessed she’d been working in the vegetable garden, and when I turned, I saw she was carrying a cloth sack on her back that bulged with tomatoes. “Do you mind waiting here while I get a drink?” she asked us both.
“Of course not,” said Dr. Benallie.
We waited uncomfortably for Rebecca to go into the kitchen and get her drink, then clean her hands. I tried to think of something polite and innocuous to say to Dr. Benallie, but failed.
Finally, Rebecca came back out. “Thank you so much for waiting,” she said, though her hair was still filled with leaves. Her face, at least, was not as red or sweaty. She must have rinsed it with her hands and dried it off. “If you two will follow me. I’m sure Carolyn will appreciate your support, too, Linda.”
Which made it impossible for me to explain that I was ready to leave. How long would this take?
Rebecca led us back into the yard where the heat was rising. It was going to be the kind of hot day where they tell the elderly to stay indoors for their own safety.
“How are things at the office?” Rebecca asked.
“Fine. We’re figuring out how to shuffle patients around to new doctors now that Stephen is gone,” Dr. Benallie said bluntly.
Rebecca took in a sharp breath and marched ahead, not looking back.
When we were about halfway there, Dr. Benallie reached for my arm and pulled me to the side by a tree. “I have to tell you something,” she said.
“What is it?” I said, curious. I thought Rebecca would notice we weren’t following her, but she didn’t. She went straight into Carolyn’s house while I was watching.
“I know you’re helping Rebecca tie things up here. So there’s something you should know.” The grip on my arm tightened and Dr. Benallie had an expression on her face like a child keeping a secret. She said, “I’ve been looking through Stephen’s birth records for the last couple of years, the ones that are still in his office. Cleaning up.”
“And?” I asked, a little breathless. I’d known I had to be missing something. Ready to leave or not, I had to find out about this.
Dr. Benallie glanced at Carolyn’s house, but Rebecca still hadn’t come out. “About two years ago, one of his patients had a baby with Trisomy 18, a nearly inevitably fatal condition.” She spoke coldly, clinically. “There were several ultrasounds before the birth which all clearly indicated it.”
“That’s tragic,” I murmured, feeling sick at the thought of what it would be like as a mother to know that the child you were carrying would not live past birth. How to measure the grief of mothers, I did not know. Was my grief at Georgia’s unexpected death worse than this mother’s? Or Carolyn’s, whose son’s death had been prophesied?
“But the baby was born and survived. She is miraculously still alive, in fact.” Dr. Benallie made a dramatic sweep of her arms and looked up at heaven, but only for a moment. Then she pinned me with her eyes. “A two-year-old with blonde hair and blue eyes. There’s a recent photo of her in the file.”
Blonde hair and blue eyes were common in Utah. What was she saying?
“Her parents are both dark-haired and dark-eyed,” Dr. Benallie went on.
“Genetics are funny that way,” I said.
“I remembered that Carolyn was due at nearly the same time that same year, in June of 2014. But she had a stillborn daughter, if I recall correctly. Though those records are mysteriously missing from Stephen’s office.”
“Maybe Stephen didn’t keep the records from his own children’s births there.” I had a flash of memory of his basement office. Were they there?
“All of his other children have birth records there, despite the fact that he delivered almost all of them at home,” said Dr. Benallie in a clipped tone.
Suddenly, my mind leaped to the tiny gravestone I’d seen along with the ones for Stephen’s parents and brother. “Jane Carter,” I said aloud. “Born and died 2014.”
“You’ve seen the grave, then?” She showed animation for the first time since she arrived, her eyes wide, her body leaning closer to me.
“Yes, it’s down with the others in the family graveyard.”
“Well, I’m guessing the date on it was June fourth.”
I wasn’t certain, but that sounded correct. “But—” What was she saying? That Stephen had taken Carolyn’s healthy baby away from her and given it to one of his patients? Why would he do that? Just to torture Carolyn? Or was it to make himself look better as a doctor who could deliver a healthy child even when the ultrasound technician had delivered a fatal diagnosis?
Dr. Benallie smiled widely, and it chilled me. “Back when I thought I was going to marry him, Stephen told me that he loved each of his wives dearly, but that he had to make sure that they always knew he was in charge. It bothered me even then, but I thought he was explaining about how he managed a difficult situation. He said that his wives had to know they couldn’t conspire against him, because he would bring the wrath of God down on their heads, and on the heads of their children.”
In the brief silence of the summer morning in this quiet place, I could hear Carolyn’s broken voice in my mind, telling me that Stephen had predicted her son would be stillborn, and that it was a punishment for some misdeed of hers. Had this been the second time he’d done the same thing? I put a hand to my stomach to quell the sour bile rising.
“But h
ow could he know they’d be born on the same day?” I asked.
“Because he was in charge of the induction schedule, and when Carolyn went into labor, Stephen changed the other schedule to match. He told the woman in question that if she delivered a little early there would be a better chance the baby would live,” said Dr. Benallie coldly.
“And then Stephen switched the babies in the hospital?” Hadn’t anyone noticed?
“Doctors can do things in a hospital that no one asks questions about.”
“The parents didn’t wonder about the child’s coloring? And the disappearance of all the problems the ultrasound saw?”
Dr. Benallie shrugged. Clearly, she thought they were idiots, but if someone had given me a baby girl after Georgia had died, wouldn’t I have just thought it was a miracle and taken her home as my own?
“You can’t tell Carolyn,” I said, glancing up at the house. Was that why Dr. Benallie had come? She seemed to be telling me as a dry run. Or maybe she wanted to be talked out of this. Maybe she had some better side of her nature that I hadn’t seen until now.
“Why not?” That cold voice again. “Carolyn should hire a lawyer and get her daughter back. The girl is only two years old. She should be with her mother.”
“Carolyn needs time to recover before she can deal with something like this,” I said, watching the woman carefully to see if she would listen to me. She could have no idea how fragile Carolyn was now.
She frowned at me. “How much time?”
“A month or two at least,” I said, thinking how ridiculous it was to pretend Carolyn would be emotionally healed in only a few months.
“If there’s to be a legal claim on little Jane, I’d need to exhume the body of the stillborn child buried here,” Dr. Benallie was saying. “We can prove that there is no DNA link to Stephen or Carolyn, and from there, we can demand a DNA sample from the other girl. It would go to the courts after that. If Carolyn’s rights were terminated without her knowledge or consent, she should get her daughter back.”
I didn’t know if Dr. Benallie was right about the legalities here or not. I also wasn’t sure it was in Carolyn’s best interest to embark on a long and possibly difficult legal case at this point in her life. I was pretty sure Dr. Benallie wasn’t doing any of this because she felt bad for Carolyn, but because she wanted more vengeance on Stephen Carter.
“You don’t have proof about any of this,” I said.
“No, not yet. Not until I get permission from Rebecca for the exhumation.”
And Dr. Benallie had leverage over Rebecca—she had falsified the death certificate, and that had bound us all to her. But hadn’t it also bound her to us?
I steeled myself to play as ruthlessly as Dr. Benallie was playing. “Do you think this means Carolyn is probably the one who killed Stephen?” I asked.
She stared at me. “What?”
“If Carolyn had somehow found out about what Stephen had done to her daughter, it means she has the strongest motive to kill him of any of the wives. I thought at first she was too physically weak, with the pregnancy, but they say that a mother’s anger can give a woman amazing physical capacity. That knife that was in Stephen’s chest could have been put there by Carolyn.” Bluff, pure bluff.
“I sincerely doubt it,” said Dr. Benallie, glancing toward Carolyn’s house again.
I made sure my voice didn’t waiver. “But if Rebecca decides Carolyn murdered Stephen, she may be angry enough to call the police, after all. And then what will happen to you and that falsified death certificate you wrote up?”
Dr. Benallie’s face went very still, though a slight touch of wind picked up her hair and danced it around her face.
I went on, “You might lose your license to practice forever. Just to put a woman in jail who killed a man who stole her baby and gave it to someone else. Is that really what you want to do?”
She put her arms over her chest. “You’ll say almost anything to get me to stop, won’t you?”
She was right on that point. “If I have to choose between you and the vulnerable women and children here, I will choose them. You got out. They didn’t.” She was stronger than they were, even if she had stayed in Stephen’s circle for reasons I didn’t understand.
Dr. Benallie stared at me for a long moment and I didn’t like the twisted expression. Finally, she said, “I’m beginning to wonder if you had a hand in Stephen’s death yourself. You should think about that before you call the police. Why shouldn’t they see you as a suspect, along with all the rest of us? You hated him, too.”
What? I had hated him, but I hadn’t killed him. No one could think that I had, surely. Except that Kurt hadn’t been in that bunk room with me to give me an alibi. I had been right by Stephen’s bedroom. I could have snuck two doors down and . . .
No, I wasn’t going to let her shake me. I wasn’t doing any of this for myself. And I was doing the right thing.
“These women have suffered enough,” I said, trying to put steel into my voice. “You should leave them be.”
“Fine.” Dr. Benallie shouldered her purse, her annoyance clear. “I’ll be leaving now, then.”
“No,” I said. “Carolyn still needs to see a doctor to make sure everything is all right physically, just as you said was the reason you were coming in the first place.”
So we both walked up to the house, passing Carolyn’s children in the yard. The oldest of Carolyn’s children, Elizabeth, was climbing one of the trees. Jonathan and Noah were wrestling in the shade beneath Elizabeth. Judith was trying to read a book. I looked into the heavens and asked God for some advice about what to do about Carolyn’s missing and supposedly dead daughter.
Was I really supposed to destroy another family to bring another child to this polygamous compound where everything was so disastrous? I just couldn’t stomach it. And I felt no dark cloud over my mind, and assumed that meant God was agreeing with my choice. These children were Carolyn’s without dispute. They would have to be enough for her.
Without any conversation, Dr. Benallie moved past me as we entered the house, and went up to the bedroom, where she got out her equipment. She sent me and Rebecca away so Carolyn could have privacy, but I listened at the door to make sure that was all she was doing.
“Everything all right?” Rebecca asked curiously.
“I’m sure it is,” I said. The conversation sounded perfectly normal.
I looked at Rebecca’s eager expression and wondered if she listened in regularly to the other wives. That was the atmosphere of suspicion here. I hated it. I thought again of Joanna’s warning that I should leave. Maybe it wasn’t physical danger she had been warning me of, but this contamination of suspicion.
When Dr. Benallie invited Rebecca and me back in, she was finishing up her final instructions. “You need to take care of yourself just as you would after any birth, Carolyn. No heavy lifting, no significant physical exercise for six weeks, and plenty of fluids and food. Do you want me to show you how to bind your breasts? The milk should dry up in a week or so.”
I thought I could hear a little compassion in Dr. Benallie’s tone at this and thanked her for that in my heart.
Carolyn said a few words, but I had the sense she wasn’t taking in much. In the end, Rebecca stayed to help with some laundry and dishes while I walked with Dr. Benallie back to the gravel road and her car, to make sure she was truly gone.
Chapter 30
As I approached the main house I heard a commotion coming from the front room.
When I got there to see what was going on, I found Sarah had her purse in one hand, clearly on her way out the door, and her other hand around Talitha’s arm. Talitha was dressed in boyish shorts and a T-shirt, her mouth twisted in a stubborn line.
“You’ll do as I tell you to. I’m your mother!” Sarah said.
“I don’t want to,” Talitha said in
return.
“Well, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to.” Sarah punctuated this by tugging Talitha’s arm hard, jerking her toward the door.
Talitha caught the edge of the door frame. “I don’t want to. I want to stay here.”
Sarah let go of Talitha’s arm and yanked on her hands clamped to the door frame. Talitha, in turn, used her feet to jam herself further.
It was a ridiculous protest. I remembered my sons doing similar things when I’d tried to discipline them without Kurt—they never treated Kurt that way for some reason. He spoke in that low, masculine voice and they jumped to pay attention.
But in this case, my sympathies were entirely with Talitha.
“Let me go!” Talitha cried loudly.
“Sarah,” I said, coming up behind them, “you should really—”
I don’t think Sarah had registered that I was nearby. Tired of pulling on Talitha, she reared back and slapped the girl hard across the face.
“You will do as I say!” she said in a tone so vicious that I was shocked to stillness. All this time, I’d seen Sarah’s anger and her moodiness, but it hadn’t clicked in my head that she was the one who had been abusing Talitha all along.
“You’ve always been disobedient and willful, a wicked spirit!” Sarah shouted, and slapped her daughter again.
Blood spurted down Talitha’s bone-white face and I stared at it like it was one of Sarah’s paintings.
I should have done something to stop that second blow. If Kurt were here, he’d have simply stood between them, and his bulk would have intimidated Sarah into stepping back. But it took me until Sarah raised her arm to strike a third blow before I managed to put myself between Sarah and Talitha, feeling a drop of warm blood fall on my arm from the gash I could see opening on Talitha right cheekbone.
“Sarah, she’s a child. You’re hurting her!” I said in horror.
Sarah looked up at me and her eyes seemed wild. “Of course I’m hurting her,” she said. “And I’ll hurt her some more if she doesn’t obey me.”
For Time and All Eternities Page 24
