Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

  “It’s not your physical safety I’m worried about. The rope is worn, but it’s nylon and tough, more or less what we used in the FBI for rappelling out of helicopters. But it’s filth and trash down there, that’s it.”

  “I’m going in,” Jacob said. “Liz, no arguments—let me do it.”

  She chewed on her lip, then nodded. Krantz opened his backpack and took out a pair of garbage bags. “Put these over your feet unless you want to throw away your shoes when you get out.”

  Jacob put on the bags, tucking the plastic into the tops of his boots. He grabbed the rope and wrapped it around his forearm and then felt for the knots. He half slid, half climbed to the bottom. His feet slipped on something soft. He reached out to steady himself on the wall and touched something damp and slimy. He disturbed a cloud of flies that soared up toward the opening of the sinkhole.

  The stench at the bottom was like a physical presence. It surrounded him, filled his mouth and lungs. His eyes adjusted to the gloom. The first thing he saw was a deer carcass, the hide stripped back and hunks of meat cut off its haunches. The rest squirmed with maggots. Tin cans were piled high in one corner. A bucket overflowing with human waste sat in another, together with three five-gallon water jugs, one of which held cloudy water. The other two were filled with urine. A rabbit skull, the bones of birds and rodents. There was a black rag that smelled of urine and blood, blankets so filthy that at first he took them for another dead animal.

  He’d been down for only a few seconds, and already he needed out. He grabbed the rope and scrambled to get his feet on the knots. He made it halfway up and then lost his grip and slid back to the bottom, where he landed in the filth and almost lost his balance.

  “You okay down there, buddy?” Krantz asked.

  “Help me out of here.”

  Krantz grabbed the top of the rope and pulled as Jacob scrambled back up. In a few seconds he was out. He staggered several feet away, then sat and kicked off the plastic bags. He peeled off the surgical mask, took the water bottle Eliza offered from her pack, swished his mouth, and spat. He used the rest of the water to rinse his hands. Krantz removed another garbage sack, placed it on his hand, and picked up the filthy ones that had been on Jacob’s feet. He turned the whole thing inside out and tied it off.

  “Pretty nasty,” Krantz said. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. You warned me.” Jacob took a second water bottle his sister offered. He rinsed again and poured water over his face. What he needed was to get home, strip, and take a hot shower.

  “Nobody can live like that,” he said.

  Eliza took back the bottle. “Yes, they can.” She looked unsettled, and he wondered again about her time in the desert outside Las Vegas. Had it been like that?

  “And he went down there willingly,” Jacob said. “I can’t get over that part.”

  “He must have been down there for weeks,” Krantz said. “Ran there after last summer’s attack and stayed there until the search fizzled out.”

  “Longer than a few weeks, I’d say. Did you see the dead deer? Maggots are still going to town. If that had been there a year, it would be gone by now, nothing but bones.”

  “You think he stayed through until spring?” Eliza said. “It was a cold winter.”

  Krantz shook his head. “No way. Too wet, too icy. A man couldn’t survive that.”

  Jacob thought it out. “Let’s say he has this place set aside, just in case. Water, food. After we chase him away from the chapel, he climbs inside and hides. Figures he can wait until the FBI gives up the search.”

  “Makes sense,” Krantz said. “The rock would hide him from infrared from the helicopters.”

  “Except he has to stay down there longer than he thought. He never expected the search to go on so long. They sealed the valley for, what, three months?”

  “Longer. Fayer closed the office around Halloween, remember? Biggest terrorist attack since nine-eleven. They’re still looking for him.”

  “Still, I was surprised. Most of the victims were polygamists. People figure we have it coming.”

  “Go back to the deer,” Eliza said. “How did he get that?”

  “Let’s say he runs out of food,” Jacob said. “It was a wet summer, so he’s okay for water. Maybe he comes out when there are no helicopters and refills his jug from these smaller sinkholes. But after a while he needs to eat. He traps a mule deer and hauls it back into his hiding place. Lives on raw venison until it gets too cold. By then the FBI figures he’s escaped somehow and relaxes its patrol. Winter and the cold spring keep the carcass frozen until a few weeks ago, when the flies find it.” He looked to Krantz. “You’re not going to touch this, right?”

  “Nope. Not so as anyone can tell.”

  “You think he’ll come back?” Eliza asked.

  “Maybe,” Krantz said. “It’s a great hiding place. You can’t see it from below, you can even climb the sandstone hump itself and not see it—not unless you come around that last piece of stone. Almost no way to find it unless you know where it is already.”

  “Except for the smell,” she said.

  “Except for that,” Krantz agreed. “But he probably couldn’t smell his own filth after a while, and it never occurred to him.” He looked thoughtful. “We need more cameras.”

  “There’s been nothing from the ones in town?” Jacob asked. “You’re studying them?”

  “Skimming them, at least. It’s a lot of footage. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more. Maybe we could pay some kids to look through the tapes for us. Set up a few in Witch’s Warts where we think the likely trails are.”

  “What about trip cameras?” Jacob asked.

  “We’d still get a lot of false positives from deer and coyotes,” Eliza said.

  “I can live with that,” Jacob said. “So long as you can send the data back to Blister Creek and we don’t have to trudge out here every time a curious skunk checks out one of your motion detectors.”

  “That can be done,” Krantz said. “Fayer was the computer expert, but maybe Miriam knows something. She used to ask the tech guys lots of questions.”

  “I’ll check,” Eliza said. “Maybe she can teach me.”

  They climbed down from the sandstone hump. Jacob had to look at the sun to figure out the direction to take to return to the temple where they’d left the car. He’d spent hours and hours the previous summer with the search groups, but the geography of Witch’s Warts was still a jumble in his mind.

  “I’m starting to see how Taylor Junior works,” Eliza said. “He likes holes. First the Anasazi cliff dwelling, now this. He even threw Brother Stanley into a sinkhole, remember? And the other Kimball brothers too. Caleb dug a pit at the dump. When Gideon murdered your grandpa, he dumped the body in a sinkhole.”

  “That’s where we’ll find him,” Krantz said. “Hiding underground or in some cave. He’s like the blasted Taliban.”

  It sounded right. It felt right. But Taylor Junior wasn’t alone. His entire cult had disappeared into Dark Canyon Wilderness—maybe thirty people. The manhunt hadn’t just scoured the Blister Creek Valley, it had fanned across eight thousand square miles of southern Utah. A big, wild country, but still…if the government could find al-Qaeda leaders in the mountains of Afghanistan, surely they could find a few dozen people hiding in the mountains of Utah.

  But they hadn’t.

  Jacob found himself thinking about Grandma Cowley’s diary the next day when he saw Daniel and Diego running their sleds over the slushy, muddy slope that led to the raised vegetable gardens. What had she said?

  But a few days later I saw the angel myself. Only it wasn’t a being of light. It was an evil spirit.

  After lunch, Jacob volunteered to help Miriam and his brother David frame their new house on the opposite side of the greenhouses. His son Daniel begged to come, so Jacob cinched up a tool belt on the boy and gave him a hammer to carry. Daniel hummed cheerfully as they entered the job site and beamed proudly whe
n David looked down from the scaffolding and grinned.

  “Can always use more manpower,” David said. “You men want to tackle the half bath off the kitchen? The two-by-fours are already cut and marked.”

  Jacob hooked his nail gun into the compressor and then showed Daniel how to pick out the right boards. The boy chattered away as he held boards in place for his father to nail down. Jacob studied his son. He had the Kimball nose, but his eyes and chin came from Fernie. As tangled as the Blister Creek lines had become over the years, Daniel looked more like his adopted father and his half brothers, Nephi and Jake, than he looked like Diego or Miriam, neither of whom had any Blister Creek blood in their veins. Thank goodness for that—and maybe Krantz would marry Eliza and bring in more fresh blood.

  Jacob was carrying lumber when he came across a side wall, where they’d framed a door that led to nowhere. “What’s this for?”

  “A framed doorway,” David called from the rafters.

  “I know what, I mean why?”

  “Don’t start, Jacob.”

  “It’s a good-size house as is. Could hold a nice family. Four bedrooms, room for another if you finish the space over the garage. Are you going to have so many kids that you need to build a whole new wing? Is there another doorway framed on the other side? I can’t see from here.”

  Miriam came past carrying a bucket of nails, which she passed up the ladder to David. “It’s a contingency. It’s not like we have someone picked out.”

  “Good, because the prophet has to approve any plural marriages.”

  “Stephen Paul took another wife,” she said. “Douglas Potts is engaged.”

  “And I discouraged them too.”

  “Good,” David called down as he disappeared with the nails. “You discourage, and let us make decisions about our own family. Sound good?”

  Miriam said, “I told you, it’s a contingency. That’s all.”

  She’d been acting strange lately. Almost soft, not the FBI agent she had been, quick to draw her gun and almost as quick to shoot it. Maybe it was finalizing Diego’s adoption that had done it, or maybe she and David had started talking about having a baby. But this?

  “Talk to me first,” Jacob said. “Don’t put it in some girl’s head—or, worse, her father’s head—before we chat.”

  David came back to the top of the ladder. He and Miriam exchanged glances, and something there made Jacob relax. They didn’t really want to enter plural marriage, he decided.

  He changed the subject. “You got a roofing crew lined up?”

  “Mostly,” David said. “We’re talking Saturday.”

  “Better make sure. The jet stream is going to bring fresh weather by Sunday. Rain this time, thank goodness, but heavy.”

  “Not sure rain is any better than snow. The creek floods again, we’ll lose the back eighty.” David held out his hands, and Jacob and Miriam fed him sheets of subfloor to lift into the attic.

  “Nothing we can do about that,” Jacob said. “The reservoir can’t hold another drop. Anyway, it’s better than more frost. We lost wheat yesterday. The Miller land got hit especially hard.”

  “Can’t believe all this is from a volcano on the other side of the world,” Miriam said.

  “And it’s spewing more now than it was last fall. We might get another summer of this. Maybe two.”

  “Wonderful,” David said.

  The weather felt fine now though. Under an open sky, with only rafters overhead, the temperature—about sixty-five degrees with sun—couldn’t have been better for this kind of work.

  David leaned over the edge of the plywood on which he was kneeling. “Daniel, grab me that screw gun. Right there. Thanks, buddy.”

  The conversation died and they fell into a comfortable rhythm of work and idle chat, punctuated by the sound of tools—nail gun, compressor, electric screw gun, saw. Jacob studied his son, the cheerful look on the boy’s face. And wondered.

  Last night after the kids had gone to bed, Jacob had helped Fernie into her shower chair. As he scrubbed her back and soaped, scoured, and flexed her rigid legs, he asked about her grandparents. “We’re not second cousins, are we?”

  “Third cousins once removed,” she said. “Brigham Young Junior was my great-great-grandfather and your third great-grandfather.”

  “That’s no big deal. Like any farming village around the world. Pretty soon everyone’s related to everyone else.”

  “I’m not done yet,” she said. “We’re third cousins through the Griggs line too, once removed. Fourth cousins through the Kimballs. Twice over, as a matter of fact.”

  Mention of the Kimballs gave him the opening he was looking for. He nudged the conversation to the pioneers. Did Fernie know anything about Annabelle Kimball?

  “Sure,” Fernie said. “She and your Great-Great-Grandma Cowley were enemies. Blamed Grandma Cowley for not getting a doctor during the scarlet fever epidemic that killed two of her kids. She had eight more that lived. All of the prominent Kimballs came through Annabelle’s line, and not from her sister wives.”

  He tried to dig up more. Did Annabelle suffer from mental illness? How about Grandma Cowley? But Fernie either didn’t understand what he was getting at or didn’t have the information he was looking for.

  And now, pounding nails the next day, buried in his thoughts, he remembered again that chilling phrase from Grandma Cowley’s diary. He’d been so annoyed with the intrusion of more angel nonsense that he’d put down the book and refused to read another line. Only now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  But a few days later I saw the angel myself. Only it wasn’t a being of light. It was an evil spirit.

  Jacob and Daniel spent two more hours helping David and Miriam frame their house, then went home to wash up and help with supper. Fernie had it under control already. She wheeled herself around the kitchen, giving instructions to Leah and to Jacob’s younger sisters while two of Father’s widows set the table and slid trays of biscuits into and out of the oven. Dinner was three chickens, fifteen pounds of potatoes, whole bunches of carrots, and dozens of biscuits. They ate in shifts. By the time the teenage boys finished, there was nothing left.

  Bedtime took two hours. Reading, tucking, scolding kids who were reading with flashlights, helping one of Jacob’s younger sisters with her math, giving drinks, denying drinks, retucking, rescolding the flashlight readers.

  At one point Jacob stopped in the hallway and fought the urge to yell, “Everyone go to bed! Now!”

  No wonder Father had locked himself in his room at night.

  And then, when everyone was in bed, he read the same page of a book again and again as Fernie wrote in her journal, read her scriptures, and fiddled with a book of sudoku puzzles.

  A full year that blasted diary had sat in his nightstand while Sister Rebecca rebuilt the cabin on Yellow Flats. He saw her in town, buying supplies at the hardware store or with a pickup truck full of Mason jars for canning that she’d gotten in Panguitch or Cedar City. She appeared in the back of the chapel on Sunday in a dress with short sleeves and refused to take the sacrament when the deacons offered her the bread and the tray of water cups. Sometimes she sat in the chapel with Eliza, Steve Krantz, and Charity Kimball. Jacob thought of it as the skeptics’ corner and half wished he could join them and whisper sarcastic asides whenever a speaker annoyed him. Instead, he was the one doing the talking, and struggling to give good advice without leading the congregation down imaginary paths into imaginary gardens of belief.

  At last Fernie yawned, pulled the chain on her reading light, and fell asleep. Jacob reached for the nightstand and fished out Grandma Cowley’s diary.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  October 22, 1890

  Peter Kimball—Sister Annabelle’s oldest boy—saw a rider in the Ghost Cliffs yesterday. It was a white man, alone on a fine horse, with a badge pinned to his saddlebags. The man made camp in the hollow of a rock ledge and ate beans from a can while Peter hid in the rocks. When he finished eat
ing, he rolled and smoked a cigarette, then cleaned his rifle. Peter crept back to warn the women and children in the woodcutting party. They abandoned their work and returned to the valley to tell me what Peter had seen.

  A second federal marshal? Was he supposed to meet the first in this area, and will he get suspicious when he can’t find him? I can’t take the risk that he’ll find the body. Not until our husbands come. Where are they?

  The Kimballs didn’t join the communal dinner tonight. When I went to find them, Annabelle was rocking on her chair and sipping a drink made from the broom-like bushes of Mormon tea that grow in scattered clumps across the valley.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “Maude didn’t feel like going. It’s too far to walk in her condition.”

  When I looked at Maude, she found something interesting in the blanket she was knitting. I wondered if Jedediah Kimball had known his wife was in the early stages of pregnancy when he sent her into the wilderness. But still, she couldn’t be more than six months pregnant, and the barn where we eat and hold church services is only a couple hundred yards from the Kimball house.

  “We didn’t have any bread,” I said. “You were supposed to bake it. And dessert too. You said you’d bring the last of the peaches.”

  “Turns out we ate the last two jars already.”

  “What? When?”

  It was a blow. Three weeks since I’ve eaten anything sweet, and that was a single spoonful of raspberry jam on a slice of bread. No fruit until next spring. We won’t have honey this year either. Only one colony survived, and there’s barely enough in the combs to overwinter the hive.

  “I don’t remember. A week, two.”

  I clenched my jaw. “Never mind the peaches. We have a rule. We eat dinner together every night. If you don’t come, you’d better be on your deathbed, and I still want to see the other wives and children.”

  Annabelle glanced east, toward the sandstone maze that we’ve started to call Witch’s Warts. The big fin near our initial camp looks like a witch’s pointed hat, and the knobby red-and-white hump at its base is almost like a face with a nose and lips.