by Cate Quinn
“Hey,” I tell her. “It’s okay.”
“I’ve been having these awful thoughts about that room,” Rachel is saying, holding her forehead. “Like dirty thoughts about Blake. He was in a bed with all these young girls. Just, you know, having a time of it.”
Rachel’s neck flushes red.
“Like a three-way?” I ask.
“A what?”
“Two girls, one guy.”
“Um, I guess so,” says Rachel. She sighs out, kinda blows her cheeks. “Only with about seven women. Girls, in actual fact. Some of them were likely underage. I thought I was losing my mind,” she says quietly. “Truly. I just had these pictures.” She blinks like she’s trying to send ’em away. “Like a porno film I couldn’t shut off.”
I very much doubt Rachel has ever seen a porno, but I’m not about to interrupt.
“One of the girls in the bed was my half sister,” she says. “And Aunt Meg—I saw her there too.” This part seems to gross her out especially. “All, you know. Doing it. With Blake.” She rolls the tequila glass around in her hand. “Only it wasn’t Blake. I had it wrong.”
She sorta shakes her head like she’s still not real clear on things.
I frown. “What do you mean? You had it wrong?”
“I just… I don’t know. Like I dreamed it or remembered it differently. I saw Blake in that bedroom, when it wasn’t him.”
“Who was it?”
“The Prophet.” She pauses. “I remember it now.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know how it happened, but I ended up in that white bedroom watching one of his heavenly comfort sessions.”
“Heavenly comfort? Is that what he called it?”
She nods slowly. “It’s…disgusting. The Prophet would get a group of his wives in the white bedroom, and they’d all get naked and…get down to it. He’d tell them all it was God’s will.”
“You saw this? Wait… Wasn’t this man, like, your father?”
“Yes, but like I said, he wasn’t a dad like regular people have.”
“You’re speaking to the wrong person.”
“I just mean I likely met him maybe three times in my whole life.”
She looks thoughtful. Like she’s remembered something even the tequila can’t get her to admit to.
“Rachel.” I put my hand on her arm. “He didn’t do anything with you, did he? You can tell me.”
Rachel shakes her head real quick.
“No, that was about the only thing he wasn’t guilty of. Relations with his daughters. He had his pick of young girls, so I guess he figured it wasn’t necessary.”
There’s a pause.
“So what…” I ask her. “You just walked in on them, all at it?”
She scrunches her face like she’s tryin’ to dredge a memory.
“Kind of. I think I wanted to get somewhere else. I don’t remember that part so well. But Aunt Meg was there, and she saw me and told the Prophet I had to leave.”
She breathes out.
“It’s such a relief to know it wasn’t Blake with those girls. You can’t imagine how it’s been eating me up. Like I couldn’t trust my own mind.”
She frowns down at the table, and it hits me just how little Rachel shares with anyone.
“If it wasn’t Blake,” says Rachel, “it means Aunt Meg stayed loyal to the Prophet. She was one of the wives who became radicalized. Those people are still out there,” she adds. “In Waynard’s Creek, in safe houses…”
Rachel lifts her eyes to mine, the image of a fanatical wife blazing through both our minds. I switch my thoughts back to Blake, what he might have done. What if he tracked down Aunt Meg? Maybe said the wrong thing and got her worked up.
“So this Aunt Meg,” I say, thinking aloud. “If she’s the Prophet’s first wife, really believes her husband is some kind of Jesus on earth… Would she kill for him, do you think?”
“That all depends,” says Rachel.
“On what?”
“On whether or not he asked her to.”
Chapter Seventy-One
Rachel, First Wife
The tequila is dredging things up so fast I can’t keep pace. Parts are fitting together. The white bedroom. The clinic. But in the middle of it all is…a box. Like a great void where the memory should be. Only this box, this box, is different. It’s got a color. Form.
It’s a blue shoebox, the kind the Homestead got bulk orders of cheap school pumps delivered in. And it’s standing right in the middle of what I need to remember.
“I’m so confused by everything,” I tell Tina. “It’s like I can’t tell what’s a memory and what’s a dream.” I rub my face. “I think I was in a clinic,” I tell her. “On the Homestead. I’ve kind of blanked it out. I don’t know. A sort of home-built medical facility. It had a hospital feel, but things hadn’t been done properly. I just… I remember being in this bed, just feeling trapped. Like I would never get out.”
I look up at Tina. I guess that memory of fear must show in my eyes, ’cause she reaches out and takes my hand.
“It’s okay,” she says, mouth grim. “You’re safe.” She swallows. “They kept you in a hospital?”
“Aunt Meg was there,” I whisper. “I think she did things… I don’t remember it.” I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to force something concrete. “I was hot,” I say, eyes still closed. “Like, so hot I thought I was in hell. I remember, she told me… Aunt Meg said I had an infection.”
I can’t tell Tina the next part.
“You’ve got an infection,” Aunt Meg told me. She held some sharp-looking tongs in her green latex gloves. “That’s why you smell so nasty down there.” She moved to the base of the bed, and there was an excruciating pain like a needle in my groin.
“Was it only you in the hospital?” asks Tina.
I shake my head. “There was a girl next to me. Melissa. I knew her a little. We used to play together as kids. I think some other girls, too, but I didn’t see them up close.” I stop talking.
The clinic had a basement. Girls went down into the basement. They never came back.
The image comes to me just like that. The staircase. Steep and clinical. A smell of bleach and something worse underneath it. That’s where she makes them disappear. They go to her basement and don’t return.
“You okay?” Tina puts a hand on my shoulder.
I take a breath. “I just don’t know if I’m remembering something real or a dream.”
“You think you could have dreamt this?”
“That’s what my therapist thought. I mean, it sounds pretty unreal, right?”
“I don’t know,” says Tina. She lifts her eyes to mine. “Your whole childhood sounds kinda unreal to me.”
Memories are lifting up, threatening to overwhelm me. My therapist’s voice.
What was in that basement, Rayne? Why were you so frightened?
Reflexively, I flip through more pictures. There’s the familiar panic again. Almost like I can’t catch my breath.
“Hey!” shouts the bartender. “If she’s gonna puke, take her out!”
“Check your tip jar, lady!” yells Tina, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Twenty bucks is code for leave us the hell alone!”
The bartender goes back to polishing glasses, muttering.
“Thanks,” I say. Something about Tina’s rudeness is oddly reassuring. Like she doesn’t care about anything, and it rubs off.
I take a breath.
“It’s all jumbled up in my mind,” I say. “Because before all that. Before the celestial bed. There’s this…basement. With something really, really bad inside.”
I close my eyes because I don’t want it to be real.
The box is there again with its lid clamped tightly shut. Blue cardboard, rectangular-sided, planted right in the space between the cl
inic and the celestial bedchamber.
“I think Aunt Meg took girls down there,” I say. “I think maybe I went down there. Only I don’t remember.” I shake my head. “It’s like there’s a big piece missing. And if I remember, I’m scared I’ll fall apart or go crazy or something.”
Or go to prison or get killed.
I’m remembering what the Prophet said to me when I visited him in prison.
“If anyone finds out, they’ll toss you in jail just like they did to me.”
Leave it alone, Rayne, says a voice in my head. You don’t want anyone to know what you’ve done.
Chapter Seventy-Two
Emily, Sister-Wife
They’ve got me back with the therapist lady again. Refilled the bowl of candy. I more or less make straight for it.
“Would you be able to tell me a little bit about your living arrangements?” she says, “prior to your husband’s death?”
“Okay.” I’m slightly disappointed she’s not asking about me, but I give her a rundown.
“What the courts are interested in,” she explains, making notes, “is your state of mind. Whether you were coerced into those arrangements. Whether anyone in that household was domineering or controlling.”
“Well, yeah,” I breathe. “Rachel.”
“Rachel Nelson?”
“Uh-huh.” I roll my eyes to emphasize. “She says, like, what color the sheets are, how you fold your clothes, what you eat for dinner, everything.”
She makes more notes. I carry on talking, all the mean things Rachel did.
“It’s very interesting to hear you talk about Rachel,” says Miss Truman. “Have you ever heard of institutionalized sociopathy?”
“Is it maybe a medical thing?” I suggest.
She smiles. “In a way. It happens in young or second-generation cult members. People who are still laying down formative emotions. The human mind will adapt to most any situation. If it has to, it will learn not to register so much empathy. We see that in young men raised in bad neighborhoods, where gangs or the mob are prevalent. It’s survival. You simply have to shut some things down.”
I nod, but if I’m honest, I don’t really understand what she’s talking about.
“In cults, like the one Rachel was in, we see mothers shutting down their natural instincts to protect their young. Instead, they see them as an extension of themselves. They lose their boundaries and can’t distinguish.”
I scrunch up my face, trying to understand. For some reason, my momma’s face pops into my mind.
Do you want people to think you’re a whore?
“It becomes normal, then, to force children to obey their will,” continues Miss Truman. “In their heads, they’re only exercising personal willpower. Same as a long-distance runner telling the burning lungs and aching legs to quiet down for the final sprint.”
“You’re saying this happened to Rachel?”
“Well now, you’d be in a better place to answer that. Did you get the sense, living in a household with her, that she didn’t view you as a distinct person with your own needs?”
“Oh absolutely. Sure.”
“How about your mother? Was she like that too?”
She says it a little too quickly for my liking.
“I had the best mother there was,” I tell her. “She gave up everything to raise me.”
She smiles.
“What’s funny?” I demand.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Would you like some more candy?”
I take some, pacified by noticing how it leaves bright red and blue food dye on my hands. Guess my palms must be sweaty.
“You mentioned to the police that Rachel told you about some bad dreams she had?” tries Miss Truman.
“Not told me exactly. She used to walk around the house at night sometimes. It was pretty creepy. She’d come out with all kinds of stuff about boxes. Um”—I look up to the ceiling—“a white bed, she talked about.”
Miss Truman leans back as if considering whether to tell me something. She taps her pen against her red lips.
“I followed the trial of the Homestead’s so-called Prophet,” she says. “It was in the newspapers. They ran pictures of a white bed used as evidence. Documents were found showing the Prophet ordered this bed to be constructed for his marriage ceremonies. He asked for raised sides and plastic sheets. To clean up what he did to those poor girls.”
I glare at her. The most horrible feeling is swirling around my insides.
“I think I’d like to go back to my room now.”
“Emily,” says the therapist. “If you’re not telling the truth, if you didn’t kill Blake, that means one of your sister-wives did. That’s important. We could help her. Rachel.”
“Help her how?”
She’s about to answer when the door opens. Brewer stands there, looking a little out of breath, like she’s run here.
“Can I help you?” Miss Truman says it all sugary, but you can see she’s annoyed.
Brewer walks into the room, holding a printed list.
“Miss Martinelli, could I trouble you for a detail?”
I don’t know how to answer that.
“You’re a good detective right?” says Brewer. “Top of your head, might there be a place where your husband kept private documents away from your property?”
I guess that means they searched and found nothing.
“Blake had a second job,” I tell Brewer, feeling a little pleased that she wants me to help with her inquiries. “He took work as a janitor at the Salt Lake Temple, on account of money being tight.”
What I don’t tell her is how Blake kept documents there. Real estate things. Rachel’s birth certificate was mixed in, but I didn’t get a good look at them all. They would be in his locker in the temple.
Instead, I say, “The police can’t look in the temple, can they? You’re only allowed in with a handwritten recommend from the bishop.”
“We could obtain a warrant with reasonable cause.”
“Do you have reasonable cause?”
“I thought you could help me with that too.” She waves the papers in her hand. I’m getting a little suspicious now, wondering if this is all a trick.
“When we searched the ranch,” she says, “everything was cataloged. Nothing incriminating was found. But your husband had a lot of…equipment in his barn.”
I get the impression she just stopped herself from saying “junk.”
“Took a long time to get that all logged,” she says. “Now the report is in.” She waves the paper. “Something caught my eye. Your husband looks to have gotten hold of a set of some pretty fancy electronically operated padlocks.”
I remember Blake bringing those locks back from an office that had gone bankrupt. He told us all how technology was the start of the apocalypse. When the end came, Blake said, those men would be trying to sell us their godforsaken technology as scrap metal, and it wouldn’t even be worth one sack of our dried peas.
Brewer is still talking. “We found three of ’em in a box that once held four. Any idea where that other padlock could be?”
Things are coming together in my head. This must be how Cagney feels when she realizes how the criminal did it.
Fingerprint access.
Blake talked about that when he brought the locks home. How the government had a plan to control all the doors and only let in people who agreed with what they thought. Which was some religion where you believed in aliens. So Blake was going to keep us safe by figuring out how they worked. Then we could override them.
Those electric locks were fingerprint access.
It hits me like a freight train, how it all connects.
Blake’s fingers. Blake’s fingers were missing.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Tina, Sister-Wife
All this time, I had been mad with Rachel for not being open. Now I kinda wish she’d close back up.
It sorta hits me then. She’s been protecting us from it. Like a mom would do. Well, not like my mom, but you know what I mean.
So Rachel is talkin’ ’bout this clinic, and she thinks maybe she was kept there. This freaky nurse lady did stuff to girls there. Like took ’em down to a basement and maybe vanished ’em or something. I can’t take it all in.
Rachel looks up at me. “And it’s like someone has taught me not to think of it. Like this same phrase pops up. ‘By the power of Jesus Christ,’” she adds, more to herself than me, “‘I command you to leave me alone.’”
I get the impression somethin’ profound has occurred to her, but she doesn’t share it.
“You been carryin’ all this stuff around on your own?” I say. “I’m sorry. For real. I’ve been a shitty wife. Guess I was so buried in my own things, and you seemed so in control…”
She doesn’t answer, rolling the tequila glass between her small hands with a far-off look.
“Okay, so a clinic,” I say. “And this lady with the claw hair. The one they think has information about the cemetery. She’s a nurse. Something there all fits together, right?”
Rachel doesn’t reply. I figure maybe the alcohol is botherin’ her insides.
I lift my shot of tequila and down it.
“Is that why you were so freaked when the cops wanted to show me your therapy notes?” I ask. “You thought I’d think you were a nut?”
She waits so long to answer, I figure the tequila might be fuzzing up her brain. Finally, she speaks.
“I told the therapist…” She takes a breath, like she’s fighting an overwhelming sense of betrayal. “I told her I was…assaulted,” she says. “When I was fifteen.”
