by R. R. Irvine
“Then all you have to do is stay home and wait for someone to call.”
“No can do,” Martin said. “Jolene, my lady friend, is going to show me the ins and outs of writing up family histories.”
Traveler added a C to the heart, then abruptly erased it. “It’s your turn to make breakfast.”
“What do you want to eat?”
The phone rang before Traveler had time to answer. He raised an eyebrow at his father.
“It’s no use looking at me. I don’t do phones when I’m cooking.”
As soon as Martin headed for the kitchen, Traveler picked up the phone expecting Willis Tanner.
“Claire told me to call you.”
He recognized Stacie Breen’s voice instantly.
“ ‘If you ever need help,’ she said to me, ‘call my Angel Moroni. He’ll come to the rescue.’ ”
“Her rescues were always false alarms.”
“Except the one time she really needed you. When she was killed.”
He tightened his grip on the phone.
“We got off on the wrong foot when we met yesterday,” she went on. “You see, it’s not like I’m asking for a handout. I have the money coming to me. I earned it. The plain truth is, I took care of the boy for a couple of months right after Claire gave birth. She promised to pay me back for my time and all the diapers and food I bought, but now there’s only you to pay the debt.”
My God, he thought, the woman sounded just like Claire.
“I don’t have ten thousand dollars,” he said.
“Come on, Moroni. Claire told me all about you. About the important friends you have in the church. You could borrow from them if you had to. I know it.”
Jesus. Not only did she sound like Claire, she had Claire’s timing. Willis Tanner would do handstands right now if Traveler asked for a loan, for anything that might provide additional leverage.
“I have photos of the boy,” the woman said. “Showing him with me and Claire.”
“You said you know where he is.”
“The snapshots might be enough to show an angel the way.”
“Angel or not, I can’t get that kind of money.”
“Now, now, Moroni. Claire told me—”
“You tell him what I said,” someone shouted, probably her boyfriend.
“Now’s not the time, Jon,” she said.
“You tell him, goddammit.”
“I don’t—”
The sound of a slap came down the line. “Jon says to tell you he’ll have a gun the next time we meet.”
“When is that?” Traveler said.
“When you have the money.”
“I told you already. I can’t afford your prices.”
“As much as you can get together, then. I’ll give you some time and then be in touch.”
She hung up before he had time to respond.
13
THE RADIO had been listing road closures for the last ten minutes. Thirteenth South was said to be the worst, white-water all the way to the Jordan River on the west side of town. Derks Field, where Traveler had once played American Legion baseball, was inundated. Schools were closed for the day. The temperature was in the low forties with some chance that it might drop far enough to turn the rain to snow later on. But in the downtown area, Monday morning traffic was pretty much as usual.
As a result, Traveler was creeping along when he turned off West Temple onto Pierpont Avenue. Even at slow speed, a patch of oily asphalt sent him fishtailing toward the curb. He corrected immediately, accelerating just enough to make the four-wheel drive grab hold. He was about to sigh with relief when his rear bumper caught the fender of a parked car.
He eased to a stop. Behind him someone honked. Gritting his teeth, Traveler continued on up Pierpont until he found a parking place in front of the Oregon Shortline Railroad Building, the address listed for the Army of Nauvoo.
The honker fired one last shot and drove on. There were no pedestrians on the street when Traveler got out of the truck. He checked the pickup’s heavy-duty rear bumper. The metal was scratched but unbent.
His breath billowed like one of Barney Chester’s cigars as he made his way back to the parked car.
“Dammit,” he muttered. The front fender was sliced open from the wheel all the way to the headlight.
“Thank you again, Willis Tanner.”
The car was a Mercedes-Benz. Fixing that fender would cost more than Traveler had paid for his Ford Fairmont, which was still among the missing.
He looked around. There were no witnesses.
Groaning, he stuck one of his business cards beneath the windshield wiper. With any luck the church would pay for repairs. No doubt the measure of their benevolence would depend on the outcome of the kidnapping.
Shrugging, he headed for the Shortline building. Over the years it had gone through many transformations. After the Oregon Railroad fled the state, the Union Pacific had taken over for a while. The structure had even housed the Utah National Guard at one time. Now it was the temporary headquarters of the Army of Nauvoo, or so a sign said. Small print added that historical renovation was coming soon.
Traveler paused in front of the door to admire the architecture, a mixture of gabled roofs, Roman bays, sash windows, and arches of corbeled brick. Utah eclectic at its finest.
The inside was a single room, as large and as open as a warehouse. Everything— bricks, concrete, and woodwork—had been whitewashed. The one exception was a bright red, ten-foot-high glyph on the rear wall. The symbol, an upside-down triangle with a slash through it, looked to Traveler like a road sign forbidding some obscure traffic maneuver.
A few feet inside the door a line of wooden picnic tables served as a counter. They were covered with stacks of photocopied sheets and thin pamphlets. Each table had three metal folding chairs behind it. At least a dozen more chairs were banked against one of the side walls.
“Anybody here?” His voice echoed.
“We’ll be right with you,” a woman answered. Until that moment he hadn’t noticed the whitewashed screen in one corner of the room, probably there to hide the toilet.
“Fine,” he called back.
He began scanning the booklets. The titles, in bold black print, included Feminism and the Church, A Woman’s Guide to Mormonism, and LDS Stands for Latter-day Sisters. Like the single sheets, the pamphlets were also photocopied. All had the slashed triangle glyph at the bottom of the cover page along with the printed announcement, PUBLISHED BY THE ARMY OF NAUVOO.
“Those are for sale,” a woman said.
When he looked up, she was smiling at him across the table. She looked to be in her mid-sixties and reminded him of one of the family photographs on the mantel at home: Grandma Dora Traveler to be exact, red-cheeked, plump, and smelling of vanilla and flour. Only this woman had a lacquered bouffant hairdo and smelled of hair spray. She was also wearing blue sweatpants and a white sweatshirt stenciled with the slashed red triangle.
“I’ll take one of each,” he said.
“It would be cheaper to join. You get them free with membership.” She handed him a form that asked for a full page of personal information.
“Maybe after I’ve read them.”
“That’s my advice to the women who come in here.” She gathered up a stack of leaflets. “That will be twenty-two fifty. Membership is twenty dollars, though that’s only a suggested donation, you understand. We don’t turn sisters away for lack of funds.”
He gave her two twenty-dollar bills. “Consider the change a contribution to the cause.” Traveler smiled at the thought of charging Willis Tanner for the feminist research material.
The woman straightened her shoulders and gave him the leaflets. “What is it you really want?”
“My name is Traveler. I’m here at the request of the Woolley family.”
Her eyes widened momentarily. “I know a number of Woolleys.”
He set aside the literature before handing her a business card that h
ad his name and phone number, but omitted his profession.
“The name Woolley doesn’t tell me why you’re here, Mr. . . .” She read his card again. “. . . Traveler.”
“I’m sure you recognize the importance of the name Woolley.”
“My name is Sarah Decker.” Her tone was aggressive. “My official title here is General of the Army of Nauvoo.”
“Miz Decker,” Traveler said, using the old-fashioned Utah dialect for Mrs., which could also pass for Ms. these days, “I’m trying to locate Lael Woolley.”
“Why come to us?”
“I was told that she’s a member of your army.”
“Our membership list,” the woman said, her voice rising, “is confidential.”
“It’s nothing serious,” he added. “It’s just that we haven’t been able to reach her by phone.”
“Men like you have been trying to intimidate me all my life. That’s one of the reasons I’m standing here.”
“Any help you can give us will be appreciated. You can count on that.”
“Are you offering me a bribe?” she said.
“I’m asking for help, that’s all.”
“We’re a real army, Mr. Traveler, fighting for what we believe in. Equal rights for women, but within the confines of an enlightened Mormon Church. We see no reason why we can’t keep our faith and have equality, too.”
“I have no problem with that,” he said.
“A lot of men say that, but it’s lip service only.”
He raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “I have a job to do.”
“So do I.”
Traveler heard movement behind the whitewashed screen. A moment later another woman emerged from behind it. She, too, wore a slashed-triangle sweatshirt.
Decker said, “This is my chief of staff, Jemma Hoyt.”
Hoyt, a good twenty years younger than Decker, had one of those straight-line figures, with no curves and no waist to speak of. She shook hands aggressively, staring him straight in the eye.
“This is Moroni Traveler,” Decker said. “He’s looking for Lael Woolley.”
“I heard.”
“Then maybe you’ll help me,” he said.
“As our name implies,” Hoyt said, “we’re an army here. We have battalions of volunteers, soldiers willing to take up the good fight. Most days the office would be filled and you’d see them for yourself. But this storm has everybody off schedule. If it weren’t for a couple of bunks in back, you wouldn’t have found me or Decker here this morning.”
“Are you turning me down?”
Hoyt glared at him. “When we say no, Mr. Traveler, you’ll know it. Right now, I want to know who I’m dealing with.”
He gave her a business card.
“Forget it. People can print up anything. I want to know where you stand on the last of the ten commandments as set down in The Book of Mormon.”
He shrugged, pleading ignorance.
“Sure,” Hoyt said. “Why should you worry? You’re a man.”
The women looked at one another and nodded. “ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house,’ ” they recited in unison, “ ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.’ ”
The women touched hands briefly.
“To the church,” Hoyt said, “we’re nothing but chattel.”
“No better than oxen or asses,” Decker added.
“Now tell us, Mr. Traveler,” Hoyt said, smiling, “what do you really think about women?”
“That’s a no-win question if I’ve ever heard one.”
Hoyt nodded as if to say he’d confirmed her suspicions about him. “They say big men have less to prove than little ones. Is that true?”
Before he could answer, Decker said, “Are you married, Mr. Traveler?”
“No.”
The women exchanged knowing glances.
“In Mormon country,” Decker said, “that makes you a Gentile for sure.”
“And with a name like Moroni Traveler,” Hoyt added.
“Could we get back to Lael Woolley?” he said.
Hoyt leaned across the picnic table to stare at him at close range. “Okay, so Lael’s one of our soldiers. Does that satisfy you?”
“Only if you can lead me to her.”
“Why do you want to see her?”
“As I said before, it’s a family matter.”
“I don’t think I believe you. So far we only have your word and a business card. You’ll have to do better than that.”
Traveler thought that over for a moment. “Look up the church offices in the phone book. Call the information number and ask for the prophet’s office.”
“I think you’re bluffing.” Hoyt turned to Decker. “What do you say, General?”
“You’ll get Willis Tanner,” Traveler rushed to say. “He’ll vouch for me.”
“I know the name,” Decker said.
The women huddled. When they broke apart it was Hoyt who spoke. “The fact is, Mr. Traveler, our soldiers are strictly volunteers. We have no way of keeping track of them, unless they’re scheduled to do paperwork here in the office, which Lael isn’t.”
Something about the way she said it, about the way both women were holding themselves, made him distrust the answer. “Tell me about her, then. Your impressions. What sticks in your minds? What makes her different from your other members?”
“I take it you haven’t met her,” Decker said.
“That’s right.”
The women reached out until they touched hands again. Decker spoke without taking her eyes from her chief of staff. “I interviewed Lael when she first came to us. I’ll tell you what I thought that day, that she didn’t belong here. In many ways she’s so naive. The fact is, I don’t know how she got through twenty years of life without losing that air of innocence. My chief of staff and I talked about it at the time. Do you remember, Jemma? We worried that we might do something to change her.”
Hoyt nodded warily.
Decker continued. “I remember thinking that Lael had come from another world. Listening to myself here and now, I know that sounds foolish, but it’s what went through my mind nevertheless.”
“What the general’s trying to say,” Hoyt said, “is that Lael is young for her age. She thinks good deeds and prayer will set the world right. We formed the Army of Nauvoo because we know it takes more than that.”
“You’re being too hard on the girl,” Decker said.
Hoyt shook her head. “An army can’t afford to be sentimental. Those are your words, Sarah, not mine.”
Watching them, Traveler wondered if they weren’t Mutt and Jeffing him. Only instead of good cop, bad cop, they were playing good feminist, bad feminist.
Decker tugged at the waistband of her sweatshirt. “Lael really is different than the rest of us. But there’s no use trying to explain it to an outsider. You’d have to meet her for yourself, Mr. Traveler.”
“Yet you accepted her as a member?” he said.
Decker smiled. “Lael Woolley can be very determined.”
“Stubborn is more like it,” Hoyt said, but she, too, smiled. “And very hard to say no to.”
“It was those eyes of hers, I think. She’d stare at you with them and you couldn’t bear to hurt her,” Decker said.
Hoyt pointed a finger at Traveler. “Don’t go thinking there was anything sexual about our relationship, just because we’re feminists. It’s just the way Lael is.”
Traveler remembered Lael’s eyes in the photograph, large, devouring eyes.
“We did talk about turning her down for membership, though,” Hoyt said. “She’s thin, you know. Very thin. I told Decker at the time that we didn’t want to get involved if she turned out to be one of those young women who persist in seeing themselves as fat and end up starving themselves to death on some fad diet or other.”
“Especially since she was related to the p
rophet,” Decker put in. “It was her being related that made some of our members suspicious at first. They figured she’d come to spy on us. But it turned out we didn’t need to worry. About that or Lael’s dieting. It turns out she’s a great one for fasting. She says it gets her closer to God.”
“I’d starve myself, too,” Hoyt said, “if I thought it would get us equality.”
Decker nodded. “My grandmother was a faster. She’d take purges, too, once a month, to clean the evil out of her system. But suffering is out of fashion these days, especially with young people. So you can see why Lael made an impression on us.”
“She didn’t mind the grunt work either,” Hoyt went on. “She always did what was asked. That’s more than we can say for a lot of our members.”
“Did she have any close friends among your membership?” Traveler asked.
The women exchanged questioning looks. Finally Hoyt shrugged. “You have to understand something about us, Mr. Traveler. We’re fighting a war. That’s why we call ourselves an army. It’s also why we organized along military lines. We have battalions, companies, and platoons, and the ranks to go with them. Lael, being relatively new, is still a private. But as soon as we assigned her to Amanda Ware’s platoon, the two became friends.” Hoyt paused, looking at her general.
“If anyone knows Lael,” Decker responded, “it’s Amanda.”
“There must be other friends,” Traveler said.
Decker shook her head. “It’s best to follow the chain of command. You’ll have to talk to Amanda yourself.”
“Where can I find her?”
“She’s in the field right now, on a mission for the army.”
“Could I see her membership form? Lael’s too.”
“That’s confidential information,” Decker said.
Traveler took a deep breath. “You said before that you’d heard of Willis Tanner.”
After a moment’s hesitation Hoyt said, “We know who he is.”
“Are you sure?”
“That sounds like a threat.”
Traveler sighed for their benefit. “There are those who claim that he heads the Danites.” What Traveler failed to mention was that it was mostly Mad Bill who said such things.
The women’s faces betrayed their fear. The original Danites, sometimes called the Sons of Dan, went back to the days of Joseph Smith. He’d used them for blood vengeance against his and the church’s enemies.
