Black Widows

by Cate Quinn

  Right away, I know when Rachel says “assaulted” she’s talkin’ a whole lot more than wanderin’ hands. Her eyes meet mine, hesitant, like she thinks I won’t believe her.

  “Hey, me too,” I say sympathetically. “Sucks, huh? My dear old mom used to have all kinds of trash in the house. Dealers, pimps. They’d all get high together, and she’d pass out. Only a matter of time before somethin’ happened. I was lucky it only happened once,” I add. “I went to the cops, and they didn’t believe me.” I blow hair from my face. “They thought I was trying to trick them into giving me free state accommodations.”

  “Mine was my cousin,” she says. “His mom said it was my fault and slapped me until my nose bled. Said if I told anyone, she’d kill my sisters.”

  I whistle. Poor Rachel.

  “Makes you feel dirty, don’t it,” I say with feeling, looking at Rachel. “Makes you feel dirty that it happened to you and stupid for not being believed.”

  She nods, her expression lighter. I reach across, take her hands, and hold them. We’re silent for a moment.

  “The weird thing is, it wasn’t all bad at the Homestead,” says Rachel. “We were family, working together for the same thing. A lot of the time, I remember being surrounded by love. The hardships brought us closer in prayer. It was uplifting. I miss it.”

  I squeeze Rachel’s fingers tight.

  “I know how you feel,” I tell her. “You get that same thing when you get high with the same crew. When you’re all on the skids together. Just you and your buddies against the world, right?”

  Rachel smiles. I had kinda been expecting her to get offended. The old Blake-Rachel would have.

  “It wasn’t your fault, you know,” she says. “When Blake went into his black moods. It wasn’t you. It was just…a part of who he was.”

  We’re both silent for a while, lost in our memories of Blake.

  “So what do we do now?” asks Rachel. “I mean, aren’t we fugitives or something?”

  “Nah.” I’m playin’ this down, because if those three cop cars were for us, someone thinks we’re kind of a big deal. “We’ll avoid the interstate, just in case,” I add.

  Rachel gives me this real warm smile.

  “I’m glad I came with you,” she says. “I’m glad I…saw all this.”

  “That’s the tequila talkin’. You’ll be tryin’ to make out with me next.”

  She grins. “You should be so lucky.”

  “So what about this lady? Aunt Meg, I mean. She could be part of this, right? Something…sinister. Should we try to find her?”

  Rachel’s smile vanishes away. I get the sense she’s choosin’ her words real carefully.

  “Anyone from the Homestead is a ghost so far as regular society is concerned,” she says. “Especially the women. No job, no social security number, no nothing.”

  “Well then, what about we pay a visit to the Homestead? Maybe it would jog your memory. It’s the big abandoned place off the main highway, right? You might even be able to find this cemetery everyone’s looking for.”

  Something happens to Rachel’s features. Like a micro expression. Just for a moment, I feel like there’s this…rage. Then it’s gone so fast I wonder if I saw it at all.

  I’m struck by the thought that Rachel knows something she’s not sayin’. It’s real intuitive, like in my gut.

  She doesn’t want anyone to find that graveyard.

  “I’ve got bad memories of that place,” she says coldly. “I’m not going back.” Her tone tells me to drop it.

  I feel abandoned. Like I’ve found her and she’s left me. The bar feels cold and deserted. Just me all alone here.

  “You okay?” I say, trying to pull her back. “You look pale.”

  “I think the coffee wasn’t a good idea.” She puts a hand to her forehead. “I’ve got a real bad headache.”

  An’ then she isn’t there at all. Rachel has slipped into that strange void she goes into sometimes. Demons in the closet, Blake used to say. Rachel has a lotta demons in the closet.

  “Come on,” I say, knowing it’s best to let her be when she’s in this kind of mood. “Let’s get back to the car.”

  I’m getting to my feet when I realize something.

  “Hey,” I say, “pass me back that file, wouldya?”

  Rachel slides it over.

  I leaf through. “So we know parts are missing,” I tell her. “Maps and things. Stuff you’d expect to find in a complete file.” I tap a stack of photographs on my mouth, something pretty huge dawnin’ on me. “Do you remember,” I ask Rachel, “that lately Blake had taken to keeping paperwork in his locker in the temple?”

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Rachel, First Wife

  I do remember Blake getting real antsy with Emily poking around in his things, right before he started taking papers into work with him. Then he got all animated about the government and federal men infiltrating the Church, which meant we were due for one of Blake’s catatonic couch episodes shortly after.

  But Tina is just saying crazy things. Trying to persuade me to burglarize the most holy building on the planet.

  “Tina, it’s the temple,” I tell her, exasperated. “Holiest place on earth. Shoot, we can’t go in and start poking around. I can’t get it right in my mind you would even suggest it.” I’m furious with her. Not to mention exhausted. I just want to go home and lick my wounds. I feel as though I can’t walk another step.

  “Those papers in Blake’s locker are most likely regular household stuff,” I tell Tina.

  “Then why not keep ’em in the regular household? Why put them somewhere you need a recommend to get in?”

  “Because he didn’t want us getting in a hot panic about the debt we were in?” I suggest.

  “So you think it’s just a coincidence,” presses Tina. “Our husband took some papers to his workplace in the temple. Then shows up dead.”

  “We’re already in enough trouble. The police know we’ve skipped bail,” I point out.

  “We haven’t skipped bail,” scoffs Tina, rolling her eyes at my idiocy. “That’s when you don’t show up in court, dummy. We just”—she waves pink fingernails—“misunderstood the boundaries.”

  “We need to leave these things to the police,” I say stubbornly.

  “The cops can’t get inside the temple without a lotta red tape,” Tina presses. “You need to be a member of the Church, with a recommend. No cop is gonna take time from his doughnut break to get that done when he’s got a passable confession sittin’ in his cells. Not to mention”—she scoops a fistful of black hair behind her ear—“if this is some kind of, like, cover-up, then someone could get to Blake’s locker before the cops.”

  “To get in the temple without a recommend, the cops would need an official warrant. But we don’t.”

  I think of my temple recommend—a handwritten docket with a pleasing likeness to an old-fashioned library ticket. The kind you got slipped into the front of college books. A Latter-day Saint recommend is like a badge of purity, letting you go into the temple where regular folk aren’t allowed. It lasts a lifetime, except in exceptional circumstances too awful to even contemplate.

  I’d been so proud the day I got my recommend. It had been after my formal baptism after leaving the Homestead. I had truly felt washed clean. Like God was giving me a fresh start.

  Tina doesn’t understand. I can’t risk losing my recommend.

  “It’s the temple,” I say. “You have no notion at all…”

  “Yeah? An’ you always pull this shit. Like obey the man instead of defending your sisters. You’re really gonna let Emily go to prison without even raising your voice? Pretty little liars don’t do so good in state prisons, Rachel, believe me. An’ as soon as she’s processed, there’s no way out. You get that, right?”

  Emily found me s
leepwalking. Heard me talking in my dreams.

  Tina glares at me. I glare back, fists balled, seething. I want to slap her face, pull her hair.

  “So what now?” she says. “You gonna push me down some stairs?”

  The bartender is staring at us.

  “Nothing to see here,” Tina tells her. “Just a little Mormon stuff we’re workin’ through.”

  The bartender shrugs and begins arranging bottles.

  I sag. “I can’t do any more of this, Tina. We just need to grieve, okay? Like properly go through the process. I need to go home. Be alone with my thoughts. Pray.”

  “Please.” Tina’s eyes are large. “Please, Rachel. I’ll just… I’d go crazy not knowing, okay? What if we don’t go look, and then whatever those documents were just vanish someplace?”

  “Just to be clear,” I say. “You think Blake got caught up in something over that land. Something he was killed for. And there’s evidence in his locker at work?”

  I’m hoping she’ll be struck by how silly this sounds, but it doesn’t work that way.

  “If the mob are involved in building a casino,” Tina says, “offing some guy who’s problematizing their plans is nothing to them. It’s, like, something they do before their cornflakes. What if Blake agreed to take their money and then refused to have a casino there?”

  I’m silent, because it sounds plausible.

  “Then there’s this Aunt Meg person,” continues Tina. “We know Blake was looking for her. Maybe he found her. Got her all freaked out that he was goin’ to uncover some freaky dark secret at the Homestead. Something about the secret cemetery. She talks to the Prophet, and he tells her to take Blake out. We know she’ll do whatever it takes to help the Prophet, right? You said yourself this Aunt Meg person vanished away girls in her basement.”

  I close my eyes and instantly regret it. The blue shoebox is still there. Only now, inside the cardboard walls is the yellow sand graveyard.

  Burial mounds, lots of them.

  I scrunch my eyelids tight, pushing it away.

  “If we don’t look, we’ll never know,” presses Tina. “It will haunt me. And if Emily is convicted, she could get the death penalty.”

  The horror of this image sits cold on my heart.

  “If there was even a chance she didn’t do it… Please. I’m beggin’ you. I got so much bad shit in here.” Tina taps her head. “Things I did. There’s no room for any more frickin’ guilt.”

  I cradle my temples, trying to think straight.

  “If I help you,” I say, “will you leave all this alone? Will you accept that Emily has confessed, that there’s no…crazy conspiracy here?”

  Tina nods firmly. “Shake on it.” She spits on her hand, holds it out. “I didn’t really spit,” she adds, seeing my expression.

  I shake her hand.

  “Swear,” I say, looking her in the eye. “Right hand to God?”

  “Right hand to God,” says Tina, solemnly raising her hand. “If you help me bust into Blake’s locker and we don’t find nothing, I will leave all this shit alone. Okay?”

  I breathe out.

  “Okay.”

  “You really think there’s something in the temple that could lead the police to Blake’s killer?” I ask.

  “Well, we’ll never know unless we look. There’s no need even to lie to anyone,” adds Tina with a wink. “We’ll do your thing, you know. We just won’t tell them the truth.”

  I put my hand on my forehead. I can still feel the headache.

  “If we’re gonna do this,” I decide, “we have to do it properly.”

  Tina’s face lights up. “Damn…dang straight!”

  “We need you in some different clothes.”

  “What?”

  “We’re planning on getting inside without anyone noticing us, right?” I explain. “Well, you’re…somewhat noticeable.”

  “What?”

  It hits me that Tina regards herself as dressing incognito. I guess, compared to the six-inch heels and shorts skirts of Vegas, maybe she is.

  “What’s wrong with this?” she demands, tugging at a low-cut pink sweater that draws full attention to her C-cup chest. “You can’t see garments, right? Isn’t that what the modesty is for? If some guy checks out my hooties, that’s on him.”

  “That’s true,” I say patiently. “But a lotta folk are more old-fashioned. How ’bout we get you something a little more muted. Higher cut here.” I gesture. “Braid your hair for the temple like the others do.”

  “You’re freakin’ kidding me. You expect me to dress like you?”

  “If you don’t wanna stand out. Sure. It’s a classic look. Cap-sleeve tee, with spaghetti-string tank vest on the top. All the girls wear it.”

  “Yeah, I never got that.”

  “It’s modest, for one thing. But, you know, a little sexy too.” I give a little shimmy of my shoulders.

  “What?”

  “I’m risking my immortal soul,” I tell her. “You’re wearing the cap-sleeve tee. It’s nonnegotiable.”

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Tina, Sister-Wife

  Carlson picks up right away.

  “Shit. Tina. Don’t you know there are cops out looking for you? You went out of state, for chrissakes! They’re gonna lock you up when they get hold of you. Both of you.”

  “Come on, Carlson. You think there’s something in it,” I say. “Doncha? Like there might be something more to this?”

  There’s a pause.

  “You got the information I sent, right?”

  “A midwife named Aunt Meg?” he says. “I’m looking into it, but you’ve not given me a whole lot to go on. You got a full name?”

  “Not yet.”

  He sighs. “Tina, I’m gonna take a wild guess. You didn’t find any fourth wife out there.”

  “Not exactly. But we know Blake met with someone right before he died, right, a woman? Well, turns out this Homestead place has a lotta skeletons in the closet. I mean literally. There’s some secret cemetery down there that all the real estate people are tryin’ to find so they can buy the land. And Rachel is rememberin’ stuff. Like there was a clinic where they did things to women.”

  “Rachel told you that?”

  His flat tone makes me feel helpless.

  “Yeah, but listen. Doesn’t this sound like something someone might wanna cover up? Like kill for?”

  “You think someone out there with a secret to hide doesn’t want the Homestead bought? Killed Blake so no one would go snooping around?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “It makes about as much sense as Brewer’s fingerprint padlock theory,” says Carlson.

  “What?”

  I hear Carlson make a muffled curse. “Forget I said that.”

  But I’m already two steps ahead.

  The set of fingerprint locks Blake brought home, hoping to crack the biometrics.

  I’d forgotten all about them. Assumed Blake had too. But his fingers were missing, weren’t they? What if he took one of those locks into his workplace in the temple? Fixed it to his locker…?

  “You still there?” asks Carlson.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t go running away with anything,” repeats Carlson. “Lotta wild geese. Like I told Brewer, you can’t use dead fingers to open locks.” I can almost hear Carlson shaking his head. “Not outside the movies. It all sounds like a good story,” he continues. “When I hear a good story, I ask myself, who’s got a reason to be tellin’ it? ’Specially when I’m not hearing any actual evidence this happened.”

  “Blake was meetin’ with a Realtor who knew about a secret cemetery,” I say. “That’s proof. You can ask ’em.”

  There’s a long pause. I grab ahold of it.

  “You raided the H
omestead, right?” I press. “There were unexplained death certificates, weren’t there?” I’m remembering what Dakota said about records.

  I can almost hear Carlson cycling through what he’s allowed to tell me. What he probably shouldn’t.

  “Well, we found a good deal of paperwork,” he says. “Mainly because the menfolk were stupid enough to run straight to it and try to destroy the records. As you might imagine, we found proof of underage marriage. A lot of it. And a whole bunch of other things. Births and deaths.”

  “Deaths that didn’t match up?” I’m gripping the receiver tight.

  “My buddy found a list of names. Around about fifty people were given a special baptism. Recorded as buried in a different graveyard from the rest. He was pretty damn sure these were folk who tried to leave and were caught. Executed maybe.”

  “That’s a reason to cover up the cemetery, right?” I say, all excited now. “Someone could be jailed for murder. Maybe Blake got killed for what he knew.”

  Carlson sighs. “Tina, I appreciate that a hidden cemetery sounds freaky. But it’s actually not uncommon in self-contained communities. They start thinkin’ they’re all above society, they don’t need what we got. Then a few people die of natural causes, and it takes ’em a year or two to figure out they’re gonna need a proper burial ground. That’s when they realize you need all kinds of permissions and so forth to make a graveyard and they’ve been breakin’ the law. So the first plot gets covered up, ’cause they don’t want to get busted. They form another one, this time with state permission. The result is a secret graveyard, but the reality is there’s nothing more sinister than people’s idiocy.”

  I’m silent, thinking this through. Much as I hate to admit, it sounds more likely than a murderous conspiracy.

  “Tina, if you disregard everything that Rachel says, I think you’ll find a pretty boring story. Wife gets jealous, kills husband. I see it all the time. But my main concern now is you’re runnin’ around with a psycho. A psycho who might be planning to murder you and skip state. Am I to understand that Rachel Nelson has changed her appearance?”

  “That was my idea,” I say.