Black Widows

by Cate Quinn

  He gave me this long, deep look, right into my eyes, then took a step back. I felt as if I’d been severed. Honest to God, my body flushed cold like all the light had gone out of the world. And I got to thinking. This is it. This is what a sign feels like. Because this sure as hell wasn’t normal, the way I felt about this man. It was like being high without the drugs. My fingertips were tingling.

  Now that he’s gone, I’m just empty. Like I have to kick at something to feel anything at all.

  I reach the car and pull the spare set of keys from my purse. That’s when I hear a little voice singin’ out behind me.

  “Hey!”

  I turn to see Emily running toward me. I never saw her run before. She’s fast. By the time I’ve started to unlock the car, she’s next to me, her hand on the handle.

  “Wait.” She’s panting. “Wait.”

  “I’m takin’ a drive around,” I say, sliding back into my convincing junkie lying as easy as breathing. “Clear my head. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Emily just shakes her head. Liars know liars, I guess. ’Cause I know Rachel woulda believed me. Blake too.

  In that moment, I think if Emily had said anything about my habit or talking me around or anything like that, I woulda shoved her aside and got in the car. But she doesn’t. She blows some wispy hair out of her face and keeps her hand right on the battered Chevy door.

  “It won’t feel like you think,” she says.

  She looks up at the sky.

  “It won’t help you feel better.”

  I swallow.

  “How would you know?” I say it all sarcastic, but Emily takes it all earnest, like a real question.

  “I hurt myself too,” she says simply. “It changes how I feel for a little while. Then I feel worse.”

  In all my time of counseling and the programs the cops make you do, I never heard it put that way.

  I hurt myself.

  I always thought of the drugs as something I was giving myself. Like a little treat, a reward, a release. Something to make me feel better.

  “What do you mean, you hurt yourself?” I ask Emily.

  “I do it with a pair of scissors.”

  I sniff. Take my hand from the car. “You still do it now?”

  She shrugs as if it doesn’t matter.

  “Good days and bad days,” she says.

  The need to get downtown is draining away. If it gets too bad later on, I promise myself, I’ll go. I mean, if you can’t relapse when your husband’s been murdered, when can ya?

  Just put one foot in front of the other.

  “We need to go see Rachel,” I say. “Get her a lawyer. She has no clue how cops operate. I’ll bet she’s sitting there like she’s at a coffee mornin’, tellin’ ’em all about herself, without the faintest notion they’re mining her for incriminating dirt.”

  Emily’s mouth twists. “I’ve got a better idea,” she says.

  “You do?” It’s still a novelty to hear Emily express any opinion about anything.

  “You know,” says Emily, “Blake went out to Waynard’s Creek without telling Rachel.”

  “What’s at Waynard’s Creek?”

  She kinda rolls her big bug eyes. “Rachel’s relatives live there, dummy, the ones she’s not allowed to visit.”

  I’m not catching her point. “I don’t get it. Why would Blake go there?”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Rachel, First Wife

  The police station feels uncomfortably hot. Brewer is looking at me, waiting for an answer.

  I rub my forehead. “I had an idea,” I agree. “I thought…” I sigh. “I thought Blake might have been looking for a wife. Down at Waynard’s Creek.”

  Malone’s face registers shock. Brewer’s expression doesn’t change.

  “Okay. So. Let me check I’m clear on this. You believe your husband was dating another woman, with a view to marriage.”

  “Yes.”

  Brewer rubs her forehead. “And that wasn’t okay with you? I mean to say, he’d already done it twice before, right?”

  I don’t like her tone one little bit. I can feel a headache starting, pulsing in the side of my temples.

  “It’s hard for folk outside our faith to understand,” I say tightly. “Religious polygamy is a respectful arrangement. All the parties are honored for their different positions. I would expect to be consulted before Blake began courting another wife.”

  “Gotcha. So…your husband.” Brewer leans back. “He ever ask Emily about getting hitched to Tina?”

  I hate her a little now. “That’s not the same. I’m the first wife. The first wife is always consulted.”

  “Forgive me. I thought you were all equals.”

  I shake my head wearily, wondering how she can’t understand something so basic. “No, we’re not equals.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I told you already. We’re wives.”

  Brewer sits back in her chair, absorbing this. “So. Your husband didn’t consult you about courting another wife. That was against the rules. And this had been going on for, how long?”

  “A few weeks, maybe.”

  Malone raises his eyebrows. “Not long to be fixing to marry.”

  “Plural marriage courtships are short, Officer,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “Out of respect for the existing wives and the newcomer. If relations aren’t sanctified promptly, a woman could risk being seen to be behaving inappropriately with a married man, which could damage her standing in the community.”

  “So she would be thought of as a hussy, unless the husband legitimizes her real quick?”

  “Yes.”

  Malone shakes his head as if failing to take it all in.

  “Did that make you mad, Mrs. Nelson?” asks Brewer.

  “Yes,” I say. “It did. I told him so.”

  “How about the other women in your marriage, Mrs. Nelson? Did Blake ask you if he could marry Miss Martinelli?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Keidis?”

  I hesitate and see Brewer take it in.

  “I think so,” I admit. “I’m not entirely sure. It’s always tricky in the early stages. There are legal considerations.”

  I rub my temples, feeling suddenly exhausted. In the early days, Blake and I had been a partnership. How did it change?

  “Okay.” Brewer leans forward and leafs through a few papers. “You’re telling us plural marriage is illegal, so you have to keep things hush-hush, right? And that’s why no one knew about your ranch.”

  I nod.

  “Absolutely no one?” Brewer spreads her hands. “Help us out here, Mrs. Nelson. If there’s something you’re holding back, now would be the time to share.”

  “No one else knew,” I whisper, tears welling up. “That was the whole, entire point. It was a place where we didn’t need to fear persecution.” I wipe away the falling tears. “The only visitor we ever had was the Realtor, when he gave Blake the final paperwork.”

  “We’ve already checked out the Realtor,” says Brewer. “He moved to Sacramento three years ago, but he also confirmed what you’re telling me. There’d be no reason for your little love nest to be known to anyone but yourselves.”

  She looks at me, like she’s waiting to be corrected.

  This would be the time to lie, I tell myself. Tell them you threw a wild party a few months back.

  But I just wasn’t raised that way.

  Brewer sighs. The churning unease grows.

  “Here’s what I think,” says Brewer. “You’re a clever woman. You bottle things up. Perhaps you put two and two together. Realized Blake was on the hunt for wife number four. It made you angry.”

  I spread my hands out.

  “I won’t deny I was…put out,” I say. “A
new wife is always a hard issue, no matter how much you pray for an open heart. But it was a minor issue. My husband had already married two other women. I was the one who persuaded him to convert to the fundamentalist branch of the faith. I was the one who suggested he take other wives.”

  “That so?” She looks like she doesn’t really believe it. “You went right on in and talked your husband into abandoning the faith he’d grown up with?” She raises an eyebrow like this doesn’t fit with what she knows of me.

  “It was…a dream I had,” I say. “A revelation. Blake and I with other wives. Happy. Harmonious.”

  Brewer’s eyebrow stays raised. “Was it your husband who deemed this dream of yours a revelation by any chance?”

  My palms feel itchy, remembering how Blake had seized on the dream like he was so proud of me. “You had a revelation, honey! The Holy Spirit was with you!” Blake’s bad opinion of my upbringing had changed too. Slowly, so I barely noticed, like beans filling a sack, he’d decided my upbringing hadn’t been all wrong.

  “Did you think your husband had been lying to you about his movements?” asks Brewer.

  I feel my fists curl into balls. “I don’t believe so.”

  “Do you recall telling us you had nightmares, Mrs. Nelson?”

  “Vivid dreams, yes.”

  “Your sister-wife mentioned you have bad dreams about a clinic,” presses Brewer.

  My eyes pop wide open.

  “I don’t see… Um. There was a place on the Homestead. The older kids used to make up stories to scare us.”

  A blood spot. On a pastel prairie dress, at waist height. I’m lying down on a bed. The blood spot moves closer and closer. It’s her. The blond lady. Only this time, her hair is styled up in a quiff, braided down the back. She snaps on green hospital gloves. Fear lurches through me.

  “You’ve been a bad girl,” she says.

  “What kind of stories?” Brewer is saying.

  “Uh. Just dumb stuff. You know how boys are. They said it was where bad girls got sent.”

  Brewer leaves a long pause.

  “It seems to me, your husband picked vulnerable women.”

  “What makes you say that?” My palms feel prickly.

  “Mrs. Nelson, do you have any family you can contact?”

  “Not at this time, no.”

  “That’s what I thought. Did you know we tried to call Emily Martinelli’s mother? An officer explained her husband had been murdered. You know what she said?”

  I shake my head again.

  “She said, ‘I don’t know anyone called Emily.’”

  Brewer pauses to let this sink in.

  “Pretty unusual, don’t you think, for a mother? To deny she has a daughter?”

  “Um. I guess so.” The truth is, I have no idea what normal is.

  “Tina Keidis, Blake’s third wife.” For some reason, the way she phrases this makes me wince. Brewer flips papers. “Brought up in a halfway home, irregular contact with mother, father unknown, a bunch of half siblings scattered across seven states. Can you see the picture I’m building, Mrs. Nelson?”

  “You’re implying my husband deliberately chose women without families?”

  “It’s a very common practice in cults, sects, places where people are brainwashed.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Emily, Sister-Wife

  Tina doesn’t seem to be understanding me.

  “Blake went out to Waynard’s Creek,” I say patiently. “Like went out there. In his car.”

  “So he thought Rachel should build bridges?” suggests Tina in her gravelly low voice.

  I roll my eyes, Honestly, sometimes Tina is kinda stupid.

  “It was a girl relative.” I study her to make sure this has sunk in. “One of the cousins or whatever who live out near Waynard’s Creak. Rachel’s folks are all fundamentalists.”

  I look at her again. She still hasn’t got it. “Polygamists, right?”

  Tina shakes her head slowly.

  I open my hands up, stare in disbelief. I’m just going to have to spell it out for her.

  “If Blake was going out alone to visit one of Rachel’s relatives,” I explain patiently, “it means that was where he was courting the new wife.”

  Tina sorta blinks into the distance for a while, like she’s taking this in.

  “So…Blake was visitin’ with religious girls?” she says finally.

  I nod emphatically.

  “Blake must have been looking for someone real submissive,” I say. “Those folk believe the husband is God on earth, and you have to do everything he says without question. Prayers every hour. Hair down to their butts so they can anoint their husband’s feet with oil, scraped up in that weird claw-shape thing they have.”

  I gesture the sweep, folding my hand up at the forehead. You see those girls sometimes in Salt Lake City, the real devout ones. Mostly they’re homeschooled, so you never see them in regular places. But you might catch a glimpse in a truck or on the way to the store or whatever.

  They braid their long hair in all kinds of plaits and brush up the front into the oval, pillowy quiff thing above their forehead. As a girl, I used to think they looked like angels. The mean girls at school used to call them claw-heads, on account of the quiff looking like a giant claw. Rachel told me once she was brought up to think the higher the hair, the more devout the woman, since it took forty minutes each and every morning to get all those plaits and quiffs right.

  Tina has a weird look on her face.

  “You think he thought I wasn’t devout enough?” she says. Her voice sounds all wobbly and weird.

  I shrug. “Doesn’t matter now,” I point out. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Tina’s mouth sorta flickers, like she can’t tell whether I’m being funny. Finally, she settles on a halfway smile.

  “Guess so,” she says, real thoughtful.

  I decide this is a good moment to tell her my theory.

  “What if Blake was out there courting, and something went wrong?” I say. “Like maybe Blake changed his mind… Or, or picked someone different, and the Waynard’s Creek girl got mad? Maybe even mad enough to kill Blake.”

  “How’s that even likely if those girls are raised to be submissive?”

  “A relative then.” I pout. “Like an angry father or brother or something.”

  “Emily…” Tina looks pained. “There’s a million reasons why that could never have happened. How would they even know where the ranch was?”

  “Did you ever watch Cagney & Lacey?” I ask.

  “Couple of times maybe. The old cop show, right?”

  I nod. “Which would you be?”

  “What?”

  “Which one?” I say patiently. “Cagney or Lacey?”

  Tina is making the strangest face.

  “I dunno, Cagney, I guess. She’s the blond one, right? Why in the hell does it matter?”

  I pout a little.

  “We can’t both be Cagney,” I say.

  “Emily, are you plain nuts?” She digs long, pink fingernails through her long, black hair, exasperated.

  “I’m saying we need to be detectives,” I explain, a little upset she’s not understanding me right. “I mean, if that show has taught me anything, it’s the killer is never who you expect.”

  Tina doesn’t answer.

  “No one at Waynard’s Creek are gonna speak with the police, right?” I press. “But they might speak to us. Don’t you want to know who Blake was checking out?”

  Tina’s lips come apart very slightly. I guess she’s thinking, maybe she’d like to know who Blake was fixing to marry.

  “I say we go find out who Blake was courting,” I explain. “It’s the part that doesn’t fit, right? In a plural marriage, the husband is supposed to ask the first wife’s
permission. But Rachel didn’t even know.”

  “No one told me Blake needed Rachel’s permission.” Tina sounds like she’s not really following my point.

  “There could be more to the whole thing,” I press. “Maybe we’ll find the murder weapon or something that proves this fourth-wife person killed Blake.”

  Tina’s mouth twists, and for a moment, I think she’s going to do what Rachel always did. Tell me to calm down and not get overexcited and talk like a crazy person. But instead, she nods.

  “Okay then,” she says. “Let’s go check it out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rachel, First Wife

  “We searched your property in the desert. The ranch,” Brewer explains. “Found some interesting things.” She looks at the desk, eyebrows raised, as though her definition of interesting is “bad.”

  “For starters, this Bible. You recognize this?”

  She holds up a navy-blue leather-bound book, with Book of Mormon in gold writing.

  I feel strangely uncomfortable that she’s holding it. Like she’s disrespecting God’s word.

  “It looks maybe like Blake’s,” I say, wishing she’d put it back down. “I couldn’t be sure.”

  “You can’t be sure about a holy book, Mrs. Nelson?”

  “Well, we’re part of the same ward, the same LDS congregation,” I explain, “so all our copies look kinda the same.”

  “They’re the same the world over?” she clarifies.

  “The contents are the same. But not the cover. And our ward includes some extras in the appendix. Discourses direct from Brigham Young.”

  She taps the cover. “Could this one be yours?”

  “I always keep mine with me.” I pat my faux-leather purse. “Force of habit after missionary service.”

  “And they couldn’t have been switched around? On account of the books looking similar?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “Reason I ask is this copy has some parts underlined.” She lets it flop open. “Fairly disturbing passages, given the recent turn of events. Here, I’ll read ’em.”