by Andrew Hunt
“Would you care for some tea, Detective Oveson?”
“I don’t drink tea,” I said. “But I’ll take a glass of water, please.”
Jared filled a glass with water from the tap and gave it to me, and I gulped it down fast. He refilled it. I polished off the second one faster than the first.
“Want more, boss?”
“Maybe later. Thanks.”
Claudia sat across the table from me, poured a cup of tea, and stirred in a pair of sugar cubes. “Before we begin, I must ask,” she said. “How is Nelpha?”
Her question surprised me. I adjusted the bag of peas, in search of a colder side. “Fine.”
“I understand from Jared that she’s staying with you? Is that so?”
“She’s doing well.” That was the most Claudia was going to get out of me.
“Why did you come here, Detective Oveson?”
“Why don’t you start by telling me what on earth would drive one of those boys to hit me like that?” I asked.
“There’ve been some prowlers in the neighborhood,” said Claudia.
“Wouldn’t you say he overreacted a bit?”
Claudia dodged the question. “What else would you like to know?”
She still appeared slightly blurry in one eye, making me worry about the effect of this blow to my head. “Start by telling me about yourself.”
“Jeppson’s my maiden name,” she said. “I was married for a time.”
“What was your husband’s name?”
“Alma Covington,” she said. “I take it you know him?”
“I’ve met him.” I gave her time to sip tea. “You must not be all that partial to him if you gave up his last name.”
She shrugged. “He forced me to marry him when I was thirteen.”
“Must’ve been awful,” I said.
“It was years ago,” she reflected. “I was only a girl. The night before I was to be sealed to him, I told him I didn’t want to be his wife. He didn’t care. My father pleaded on my behalf to halt the ceremony, but Uncle Grand refused to stop it. Before that, I always used to think Uncle Grand was a kind man with a good heart. I was naive. I know better now. I don’t have any illusions anymore about him.”
“How’d you end up here?” I asked.
“I ran away from Covington’s place,” she said.
“The one here in town, over on Third Avenue?” I asked.
“No. He also owns a homestead down around Dixie City. That’s where I lived. I couldn’t take it anymore. I made my way to St. George, where I jumped a freight heading north. All I had was a bottle of water, and I somehow, miraculously made it here alive. I stayed with Papa the first few months I was here, in one of the back rooms of his flower shop. I knew it was risky. Papa would’ve gotten in a heap of trouble if he was caught sheltering me. Alma owned the house nearby—still does—on Third Avenue. That’s too close for my comfort. Papa found out about this place, on sale for a song. It was run-down back then. Papa knew the fella selling it, and he bought it and let me live here. At some point, I started taking in runaways from the other polygamist families. Kids just like I was. Scared. Confused. Needing a place to stay. Child brides. Banished boys. They help me around the house, in exchange for room and board. By and by, we got it looking pretty nice, I’d say. Don’t you think?” She paused to let me nod. “The older ones eventually get on their feet and fly out of the nest, make room for the younger kids.”
“I imagine a place like this costs a lot of money to run,” I said, looking around the spotless kitchen.
“My father helps me.”
“He sounds generous,” I said.
“He’s the kindest man I’ve ever known.”
I nearly said, I’m sure that ain’t saying much. But I knew to refrain. “What about Nelpha Black?”
“What about her?”
“How do you know her?”
“Runaway. Got here in early June. Can’t speak. Writes notes to communicate.”
“So she can write?” I said, half asking, half declaring.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I tried a few times to get her to write something. She wouldn’t. I figured she didn’t know how.”
“Maybe she had her reasons.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “These notes you mentioned—what did she say in them?”
“She told me she was planning to meet up with Uncle Grand to tell him something. She asked me if I’d help her find him.”
“Did she tell you what she wanted to talk to him about?” I asked.
“No,” said Claudia.
“You didn’t happen to save these notes?”
“I don’t know where they are.”
“That’s a long way to come to talk to Johnston,” I said. “It must’ve been important, whatever it was she wanted to tell him.”
“I guess.”
“You didn’t ask her what it was about?”
“No.”
“Got any guesses?”
“No.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that Nelpha had a hand in killing him?”
“Not at all.”
I nodded slowly and ran my fingers along the table’s pockmarked surface. “Have you ever heard of Boyd Johnston?”
“No,” she said. She said it quickly, almost before I was finished saying his name, which made me wonder if she was telling the truth. “Who is he?”
“He’s one of Uncle Grand’s sons,” I said. “In the Dixie City branch of his family. Boyd went missing in May. He was only twelve or so. He vanished, along with a few other boys. Nelpha got to be quite close to him. I suspect that’s why she wanted to meet with Uncle Grand, to discuss his disappearance. I can’t be sure of that, though.”
I turned the bag of peas around and pushed the frozen coldness into the raw area on my skull. It hurt something fierce. I considered Claudia’s words, although I had a difficult time collecting my thoughts due to the pain.
“Who set up Nelpha’s meeting with Uncle Grand?”
“I asked my father to,” she said.
“Was he at the meeting?”
“No.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know he wasn’t there?”
“I dropped Nelpha off at the Lincoln Street church that night. It’s usually quiet there during the week. Uncle Grand told my father it would be an ideal place to meet.”
“Why didn’t you stay for the meeting?”
“Uncle Grand wanted time to talk alone with her. He promised to telephone me when Nelpha was ready to be picked up. I didn’t have any reason to doubt him. So I went home. I waited a few hours. The telephone call never came. I got nervous. I drove back to Lincoln Street, thinking I’d pick her up.”
“What kind of car do you drive?” I asked.
“A Nash Ajax,” she said. “Nineteen and twenty-six model.”
I recalled the Model T truck I saw the night of the murders, and I thought of the one that I’d just seen inside of her garage. I kept those bits of information to myself. I didn’t want to put her on the defensive. For now, I had to keep the focus on the timeline of the murders. “What time did you go back?”
“I can’t remember. I didn’t look. I got down there and I saw all of those police cars out front. I got nervous. I turned around and came back home. To be honest, I didn’t want the police meddling around here and bothering the children.”
A wristwatch check told me it was quarter after six. I had at least a dozen more questions I wanted to ask Claudia, but all of those teenagers watching me from the hallway made me antsy. I rubbed the sore spot again and groaned. That was the closest thing to a transition that I could offer to bid Claudia Jeppson farewell.
“I’d best be getting home. It’s coming up on suppertime.” I looked at Jared. “Jared?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“I’d like to have a word with you alone.”
“Sure thing.”
“Can I see
her?” Claudia asked.
“Nelpha?”
“Yes. I want to talk to her, Detective. Make sure she’s okay.”
“She’s okay.”
“I need to see for myself.”
I looked at her forlorn eyes and her open mouth, so pleading. “I’ll consider your request,” I said.
Her nod came slowly. “Thank you.”
I stood and walked over to Jared. “You,” I whispered. “Outside.”
Twenty-four
“Start by telling me who you are.”
“What do you mean, boss?”
“You know precisely what I mean,” I said, looking over at him.
We sat in the front seat of my car. The windows were rolled down. Some kids rode past us on bicycles, jingling their handlebar bells. The overcast skies provided sweet relief from our long, dreary heat wave, although we had received next to no rain, just ample amounts of lightning and thunder. I could tell from the way Jared looked away, and the way he rubbed his left forearm incessantly with his right hand, that he was in no mood to talk to me.
“Imagine my surprise when I found Jared Weeks’s gravestone at the cemetery,” I said. “Who does that make you?”
He became momentarily indignant. “Were you following me?”
“I’m asking the questions,” I said. “If that’s Jared Weeks in the cemetery, who are you?”
“I’m Jared’s little brother.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Aaron Malachi Weeks.”
He fiddled nervously with the buckle on his bag. He needed prodding.
“Was your family polygamist?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“You come from Dixie City?”
“I was born near it, grew up in the area, yeah.”
“Were you banished?”
“Yep.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Not much to tell.”
“Try me,” I said. “Or I’ll go have a word with Buddy. Tell him what I know.”
He stared at me in silence, perhaps wondering if I’d really go through with it. I guess he decided not to take that chance, because he began talking.
“Jared and I were close. Real close. We grew up on a ranch my father owned outside of town. We had the same mother. We were born only a year apart. And let me tell you, we did everything together. Ate dinner together. Explored the outdoors together. We drank out of the same tin cup whenever we were thirsty or brushed our teeth. We loved to go swimming in the creek during the summers. We had a favorite spot where the water was deep, but there wasn’t much of a current, so it was safe. We shared a bedroom, and at night, when the lights went out, that’s when the fun started. We’d tell each other stories. He could always tell ’em way better’n I ever could. He had a real way with words. He’d describe what a big, wide world it was out there, beyond this dry old desert full of Gila monsters and coyotes. And I’d shut my eyes and just listen. You know, take it all in.” He fell silent for a moment. I sensed him getting choked up. He drew a deep breath and continued. “Yeah, we were as close as any brothers you’d ever find.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
He looked at me. “You mean why did we get sent off?”
“Yeah.”
“Our mother passed away in the fall of twenty-three. We all saw it coming. She’d been sick for several years. I was twelve at the time. Jared was thirteen. A week after her funeral, we got driven out into the desert. Dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. We were told we were men now, and we had to make it on our own. I had no idea where we were. I got scared and I cried, like I never cried before. But Jared told me that God was looking out for us, and that everything would be okay. He promised me that if I kept up with him, he’d take me to a place that he’d heard about up in Salt Lake City—somewhere we could call home, where we’d be safe.”
“That’s a long ways,” I said. “How’d you make it all the way up here?”
“We walked a long distance, but we made it to the highway, and Jared said we could get a ride by sticking our thumbs up. He said they called it hitchhiking, and he read about it once in a magazine at a general store in Kanab, when our mother was stocking up on supplies. We gave it a try, thumbing for a ride, and sure enough, a big delivery truck stopped for us. The driver said he was going all the way up to Cache Valley to pick up some chickens from a farm up there, and he told us he’d drop us off in Salt Lake City. We were so excited we jumped up and down for joy. I remember Jared telling me, ‘See, I told you so. Didn’t I? God is looking out for us.’”
Jared dipped his head, and he struggled to maintain his composure.
“It turns out that God must’ve been sleeping on the job,” he said bitterly.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“He let my brother die.”
“How?”
Still looking down, Jared said, “We rode all the way up to Salt Lake City in the back of that delivery truck. Wasn’t any covering. No tarps. Nothing. Only the elements. It was cold, rainy—the kind of weather you get in November. We even got some snow part of the way. When the truck driver dropped us off at the railroad depot, he gave us some coins to use a telephone booth to call Mr. Jeppson. He was the man who Jared heard was helping the boys who got kicked out. He was about the nicest man I ever knew. He came down to the station in the middle of the night to pick us up. But by then, my brother had a fever and he developed a bad case of the shivers. His condition was so bad that Mr. Jeppson took him to the hospital right away. Jared came down with pneumonia. The doctors did everything they could. He didn’t make it. After that Claudia took me in. I was pretty broken up over things. Everyone I grew up around was gone—my mother, my father, my brother, my home. But Claudia told me one thing that always stayed with me.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“She said to me—and these are pretty close to her exact words—‘If you give up, your brother died for nothing.’” He bit his lower lip and looked over at me. “I started going by his name because it was my way of keeping part of him alive.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You got a lot of rotten breaks in life, Jared.”
“It’s all about the math,” he whispered.
I reared my head in puzzlement. “The math?”
“Half of the babies being born to polygamist wives are girls and the other half are boys. If you’re looking to build a plural marriage utopia in the desert where one man gets to marry as many wives as he wants, then there are two ways around this problem. Either you recruit lots of new women to come and live at the settlement. And I can tell you right now there ain’t a long line of ’em waiting to get in. Or—”
I interrupted: “Or you can get rid of boys.”
“Polygamists called them surplus,” he said.
“So that’s why you wanted to join this squad,” I said.
“I wanted to do my small part to bring those men down.”
“I see. Not to change the subject too much, but when Nelpha lit out last week, you knew she didn’t go back to Dixie City. Didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You sat in my house, in my living room, and looked me in the eye and told me you thought she was going back to Dixie City,” I said. “All that time you knew she didn’t.”
He was quiet for a while. Finally, he said, “I thought it would help for you to go down there. So you’d finally begin to understand what you were up against.”
“She came here, didn’t she?”
This time he didn’t answer.
“Is Claudia Nelpha’s mother?”
Jared shook his head. “Claudia ran away from Dixie City twenty years ago. Nelpha’s only thirteen.”
“So that must mean Claudia is her aunt?” I asked.
He chuckled. “We’re all kin, all related to one another somehow.”
“What about the Model T delivery truck I saw in front of Jeppson’s store this morning?” I asked. “Su
rely if you’d gone over the motor vehicle records and matched them against the names of polygamists, you would’ve caught that one. Are you covering up for Carl Jeppson, because he helped you?”
He stared at the car floor, not saying a word.
I briefly considered confronting Jared about the Model T truck I found parked in Claudia’s detached garage, but it seemed like the wrong time. Naturally, I wondered how it got there and if it was the truck I had seen speeding away from the Fundamentalist Church of Saints the night of the murders. But I knew Jared was covering up for Claudia, and I felt like I could not trust him.
“Listen, Jared. I know you’re still holding out on me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You lied to me about the check you ran on Model T trucks,” I said. “So far I don’t hear you denying it.”
“There’s a lot of history you don’t know, boss,” he said. “I’m trying to prevent innocent people from getting harmed.”
He went silent on me again, and I was beginning to feel woozy from the blow I had taken inside of Claudia Jeppson’s house.
“Level with me a little more,” I said. “You’ve already helped me with everything you’ve told me. Go the rest of the way.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got to go, boss. I’m all talked out. Sorry.”
I watched him get out of the car, close the door, and cross the street. He headed up the walkway and porch steps, and went inside Claudia’s house. I pitied him. The poor man had endured more suffering in his youth than many people experience in a lifetime. But what could I tell him to give him peace of mind? The last person to assure Jared that everything would be okay had left this world grimly and unceremoniously not long after making that promise.
* * *
“How on earth did you get this?” asked Dr. Henry May.
“It’s a long story,” I said, watching him disinfect the needle with rubbing alcohol.
The gash in my skull required five stitches. To bind up the wound, Dr. May made a house call and brought along his electric clippers, which he used to shave a portion of my head while I sat on a chair in the kitchen. He numbed my flesh with a topical anesthetic and stitched above my right ear. When he was done he passed me a handheld mirror so I could survey the repair job. The bald spot with the fault line running down the center gave me a freakish appearance. Knowing this bizarre new look would draw stares and possibly even ridicule, I asked him to shave the rest of my head, so I was bald everywhere.
