Black Widows

by Cate Quinn

  The first time I actually went inside was to be sealed for my wedding. It was a scary and wonderful day.

  It feels like everywhere I look, I’m reminded of Blake. Like I’m being tortured with memories of him. Because we were happy, back then. Realizing it makes me see how unhappy we were by the end. Or how unhappy he was, I guess. He’d lost a lot of his lightness in the grip of his need to keep us all safe.

  Inside, the temple is the most beautiful place you can imagine. It’s all pristine white marble. Mahogany-wood banisters leading these incredible stairwells up and all around. Great sweeping chandeliers. It never fails to take my breath away.

  “Hey! Excuse me!”

  Oh no.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  I swallow and turn to see a young orderly walking toward us.

  I see Tina’s expression. I assume she’ll be mentally cursing, but she is taking this in stride. Wide smile on her face.

  “If you’re here for the wedding party, you’re headed the wrong way,” he explains.

  “Thanks,” says Tina, “but as a matter of fact, my husband works here as a custodian. He forgot his sandwiches this mornin’, and since I headed on into town with my sister here, I thought I’d come by and put them in his locker.”

  She holds up her purse as evidence.

  “Ah, Okay.” He smiles. “That way, down the hall, ladies. There are some big doors at the end. You can’t miss ’em. Heaven bless ya,” he adds.

  Tina beams her thanks.

  “Candy from a baby,” she mutters as we walk away. “If Mormons ran things in Vegas, I’d be a billionaire by now.”

  We arrive at two discreet white doors labeled “Staff Only.” Tina pushes them open without hesitation. I’m half in awe of her bravery, half terrified by it.

  Once inside, we’re faced with a row of battered lockers. None of them have the missing lock that Brewer was asking about.

  “No fingerprint lock,” says Tina quietly. “Maybe Carlson was right. Wild-goose chase.”

  My eyes glide across the names and settle on a nameplate.

  BLAKE NELSON.

  Even this small evidence of Blake’s world fills me with grief. It’s the first time I’ve realized the box in my mind with his death inside won’t hold forever. Now that I’m here, I can’t trap it shut. My eyes fill with tears.

  Tina follows the alphabet to where my eyes are already resting. “Blake Nelson.”

  The rush goes out of her then. Like a balloon sagging.

  “Here he is,” she says in a quiet voice, her fingertips resting on the metal.

  We’re silent for a second, both in our own thoughts.

  “Do you really think we’re gonna find anything?” I say.

  Tina thinks about this. “Maybe,” she admits. “But we all know Blake took things he didn’t want us to see into the temple with him, right?”

  “That was just…accounting things.”

  Tina just arches an eyebrow and shakes her head. “Well, if you say so. We still don’t know who he had that lunch date with, though, do we? The blond lady that got all those tongues wagging. Maybe the answer is in here.” She taps the locker.

  I don’t answer outright. Instead, I say, “In any case, how are we gonna open it?” Ridiculously, this never occurred to me.

  The question snaps Tina out of her temporary funk.

  “A locker.” She smiles. “Rachel, we just hustled the holiest building in Salt Lake City. A locker ain’t gonna give us no problems.”

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Emily, Sister-Wife

  The police-station clock seems to have a deliberately loud tick. Like it’s counting down my minutes left in custody and making it hard to concentrate. I’m sitting in front of the piñata cake picture, waiting for my internet time to be up.

  I’ve had a little time to process things. Maybe Carlson was trying to trick me after all, putting me under pressure to answer real quick. I try to keep calm. Think what Cagney would do.

  Since I’m in front of a computer, I decide I should find out more about Aunt Meg.

  I start pushing the keys, typing Margaret Ambrosine, Homestead. Just like Carlson said, the book comes up with her name in the acknowledgments.

  Story checks out.

  I blow a little hair out of my face, deciding what this means. I start clicking through pages. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Then a result flashes up.

  Whoaa! Go, Cagney!

  Aunt Meg’s name appears on some comments site. Someone has posted about a rumor of a sadistic midwife on the Homestead who made women in labor sit with their legs crossed and let babies die. But not a soul has replied to the thread, and it was written way back by someone with a weird, anonymous cyber name.

  There’s a lot of writing, and it’s hurting my eyes, so I click back and sorta scroll down and down. I figure the police must have read this, too, and ruled it out. No leads.

  I look up at the clock and realize I’ve only got ten minutes left. Must have spent longer than I thought on the typing. I don’t want to give up just yet.

  I slowly type in Aunt Margaret Ambrosine.

  A few results come up, with the same information I know already. I pout a little, trying a few more variations.

  Aunt Meg. Aunt Ambrosine. Meg Ambrosine.

  Nothing.

  I let my finger sit on the cursor, watching the pages fly by until they get into nonsense.

  Five minutes on the clock. Guess that’s that then. Least I tried.

  I’m about to go back to cake pictures when I remember Rachel’s nightmares. How she’d talk about graves and digging. Keeping it all secret.

  Then what I remember Rachel saying when she spoke to me in her sleep. What were her exact words?

  I need to bury her in the red graveyard. Or they’ll find out what I’ve done.

  Carefully, I type red graveyard and homestead, then press Enter.

  There it is. Right at the top. A quote, picked out in the header.

  “No such place as the red graveyard. The REAL truth behind lies I was involved in the disappearance of Homestead sinners. By First Wife Ambrosine.”

  There’s a picture too. My finger freezes over the mouse.

  Holy moly.

  Looks like Aunt Meg has a blog. I click frantically, but I’m so panicky it’s hard to read things right.

  From what I can make of the blog, it’s pages and pages of her refuting a lotta accusations, in misspelt English even worse than mine. Aunt Meg denies she was ordered to do away with folk who wanted to leave the Homestead. She also says she never tried to intimidate ex-members who wanted to spill secrets and testify against the Prophet.

  I glance up at the clock, and my heart sinks. The police lady is already headed toward me, dangling a pair of handcuffs. I’m out of time.

  Chapter Eighty

  Tina, Sister-Wife

  “I thought you said a locker wouldn’t give you any problems,” Rachel hisses.

  “Well, these Mormon lockers are more secure than you might imagine. ’Specially for a place where no one steals.” I push back a strand of hair that’s escaped my headband and jimmy the unfolded paper clip I keep in my change purse for picking locks.

  I glare at the little keyhole, twisting at it.

  “These cheap locks usually pop real easy,” I say, frustrated, tugging at the door. “I never had this much trouble before.”

  The locker makes a loud rattling. Rachel glances around, terrified.

  “Tina.” She’s almost sobbing. “They’re going to find us.”

  “So?” I give the metal another jerk. “What’s the worst they can do? Have us arrested?”

  “They can have us excommunicated.”

  Rachel is a shade of green.

  “So go watch the hall. Tell me if any
one’s comin’.”

  Rachel looks as though she’s going to disagree, then silently pads to the door.

  “All clear,” she says, sounding calmer.

  In desperation, I give the locker one last loud wrench. The catch bends, and all of a sudden, the paper clip sinks deeper, clicking the tumblers open.

  “Here we go,” I say. A rush of emotion hits me. Like I’ve been masking all this stuff. Do I really want to see what’s inside?

  To my great relief, there’s nothing of Blake’s. No clothes or familiar things. It doesn’t even smell like him. I think for a moment I’ve got the wrong locker. There are some papers crammed at the back. I pull them out.

  Xerox maps. Plats. Legal papers.

  My hand shakes a little. “Holy smokes,” I say, shaking my head. “Looks like he did it. Blake actually went ahead and bought that Homestead land.” I look up at Rachel. “A big down payment had gone through.”

  “What down payment?” demands Rachel. “We didn’t have any money.”

  “Looks like he brokered a different arrangement with Vegas Real Estate. A fifty-fifty land split. In return, they loaned him the deposit. That’s a bad deal,” I add. “I’ll bet those Realtors would have fronted the money.”

  “That sounds a lot like Blake,” says Rachel quietly. “Too proud to take a payout from anyone outside the Church. How do you think he planned on paying back the loan?”

  “Knowing our Blakey, I’m guessing he thought God would provide.” I flip papers. A bunch of low-quality pamphlets fall free. Advertisements for backyard mining equipment. The kind hillbillies buy on credit in the hope of striking gold or oil.

  “Oh wait, here ya go. I think we have our answer.” I shake my head. “Blakey, Blakey, Blakey.”

  Rachel lifts a few brochures for cheap mining equipment, mini-diggers, and mechanical sorters. The text advertises 50 percent discounts and offers for unsecured credit in loud yellow type. At the back are case studies of ordinary men who have struck it rich using the homespun power tools.

  “Copper,” says Rachel flatly, waving a stapled set of Xerox pages titled “Backyard Copper Mining.” “He wanted to get copper out of the ground.”

  “Lotta that in Utah,” I say. “Half the state must have a little in their backyard. But it’s no get-rich-quick plan. He woulda had us all pickin’ rocks in the blazing sun, right? While he drove some big digger around.”

  “Right,” says Rachel bitterly. “Knowing Blake, it was more a plan to buy a yard full of dangerous machinery he could barely operate without thinking it through. Leave me to work out whatever subsistence could be dragged out of a backyard copper mine.”

  She has it exactly right, and to be honest, this is a lot like how the whole marriage operated. Rachel quietly making things work while Blake moved from one crazy scheme to the next, in between bouts of black paralysis.

  “Rules out one motive, though, huh?” I point out. “Blake wasn’t blocking any casino plans. Vegas Real Estate would have gotten the Nevada half.”

  “Mining copper would mean digging into the land,” Rachel points out. “If there were a cemetery near the deposits, it would likely be unearthed in the process. If so, wouldn’t someone want to cover it up? I mean, that’s a motive, right? Ensuring a crime stays hidden.”

  “I guess so.”

  I read some more. “The agreed-upon sale was for a little over $100,000. That’s a good price for so much land.” I hold up the letter you get right before you exchange. “He woulda been days away from getting the deeds to his half.”

  I’m good at actin’ casual, but truth is this really burns that I had no idea. Guess I didn’t know my husband well at all.

  Besides the exchange papers, there’s a thick file of other documents. There are some more pictures of the Homestead, which strikes me as a little off. A bunch of pictures of an abandoned hospital. It looks creepy. A pair of blood-stained green gloves have been snapped separate from the rest. I’m just puttin’ two and two together, the clinic Rachel talked about…when I feel the picture wrenched from my hand.

  “What are you doing with that?” demands Rachel.

  “Hey, take it easy,” I say. “Jesus, are you okay?”

  She looks like she’s having a heart attack.

  “That’s it,” she whispers. Her hand reaches out very slowly. “That’s where I was. In that clinic.”

  She starts to cry.

  “It was real,” she says. “It really happened.”

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Rachel, First Wife

  All I can see is those bloodied green gloves. They fill me with a terror that is hardly real. Like I’m back there and I can never get out.

  Yellow sand underfoot. Men carrying me. Blood dripping from between my legs.

  We came to a part of the Homestead I’d never been to before. A building. Unlike the other wooden dwellings, this was cinder block, clad in corrugated steel. Automatically, I felt a pulse of fear. I knew this was bad.

  I’d heard about hospitals on the outside. It was generally frowned upon to visit one unless you were about to die.

  The doors opened, and there she was. Aunt Meg.

  “Bring her in,” she told them, shaking her head.

  Inside was like nothing I’d ever seen. All smooth vinyl floors and rows of metal-legged beds. Everything looked very clean and crisp. Almost the exact opposite of the ramshackle log buildings we lived in.

  I silently counted ten beds. Beds always gave me a funny feeling. All us girls had been raised with mixed ideas of what happened in them.

  The men dropped me to my feet and half dragged me to a bed, blood drawing a slippery skid under my feet.

  That was when I saw the plastic garbage can. The lid was half-off, and it smelled something awful. Inside was filled with blood-soaked paper towels.

  I was so afraid I wanted to go to the bathroom, but I knew I couldn’t ask. Aunt Meg drew up alongside me, the blood spot on her dress inches from my eyes. She snapped on a pair of green gloves.

  Aunt Meg looked at me. “You’ve been a bad girl,” she said.

  The familiarity of this picture is jogging things free. The clinic basement. A place I shouldn’t have been.

  Tina puts her hand on my arm.

  “She did bad things,” I whisper. “Aunt Meg.”

  Aunt Meg, walking away toward the basement. She’s carrying a blue shoebox.

  “It’s okay,” Tina says. “She can’t hurt you now. Fucking psycho,” she adds venomously, prodding the image.

  Tina’s anger makes me feel better. Safer. All us girls were so afraid of Aunt Meg.

  Tina flips the photo over. A little square of paper is glued to the back. Written on it in jerky typewriter letters is “The medical facility.”

  Just the sight of it brings a wave of strange memories. The women on the old typewriters at the Homestead who handled the labeling and filing. I can almost see a stern claw-haired lady, gumming this paper to the photo.

  I’m outside, yellow earth under my bare feet. I’m holding the box and I’m scared. The Prophet is hunting me. I stole something very valuable. He wants the shoebox.

  Aunt Meg is…helping me. She’s helping me hide it. She hands me a shovel, raises her finger to her lips.

  “I won’t tell him. It’ll be our secret,” she whispers.

  I start to dig.

  That’s when the door of the janitors’ office flies open.

  “There you are.” The orderly from reception points to us. “The hall man tells me you were trying to find the janitors’ office, when you told me you were going to a wedding.”

  He glares at us accusingly.

  “So which is it?”

  I turn to Tina, desperate for her to get us out of this.

  Tina can save us. I know she can. She has to.

  The implicat
ions if she doesn’t are unthinkable.

  “We’re widows,” says Tina, her voice getting choked up. “Plural married. We know the Church doesn’t approve, but we just wanted our dead husband’s things. Is there anything so wrong with that?”

  There are tears in her eyes, and she is trembling. It’s such a convincing performance, it occurs to me uneasily, she could make a person believe anything.

  The orderly’s lips tighten. “Your recommending bishop is on the premises today. Let’s see what he has to say.”

  The connotations of that are so unthinkable I find myself balling my hands in prayer.

  Please no, please no. Don’t let Bishop Young find out.

  The orderly leans out into the hallway and shouts to an unseen person.

  “They’re in here!” he calls. “I’d be obliged if you can straighten this out, sir.”

  No, no, no.

  But it’s too late for prayer. Bishop Young appears in the doorway. The disappointment on his face just plain floors me. I want to curl up in a ball and die.

  “We were getting Blake’s things,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

  “Fortunately, I was in my office,” he says. “So I was able to come in person. Because naturally, I knew they were mistaken. Rachel Nelson would never, never break the sacred covenants of the Holy Temple.”

  He throws a little look in Tina’s direction.

  “Thanks for your faith in me,” she says cheerily.

  It’s not funny anymore. I feel sick now. Like the party’s over. I’ve let Tina lead me all over, stirring up old hurtful memories. And all that’s come of it is I’ve shamed myself.

  Bishop Young is shaking his head.