The Righteous (2 page)

Eliza Christianson woke with a strange warmth spreading through her body. Her hand was on her crotch and she had the horrified suspicion that she had been touching herself down there. Sweat stood out on her forehead and she was breathing hard. A vague memory of a dream. She’d been kissing someone and his hands had been on her body.

She froze, afraid to move. Only gradually did she come to her senses. It was dark. Her sisters still breathed quietly in their beds. She moved her hand to a more chaste location. At least it had been on the outside of her pajamas and not fondling herself next to the skin.

Eliza made her way to the stairs, intending to go downstairs and get a cold drink from the fridge. Something to clear her head. No girl she knew admitted to dreams like that. In fact, most girls her age suffered from a naivete about sexual matters. When they did talk about boys the most their imaginations could muster was a chaste embrace or a close-mouthed kiss.

Eliza’s thoughts were more dangerous. Impure. Lustful.

There was a light on downstairs. Eliza thought at first that it might be her mother, who suffered from insomnia. But something made her hesitate at the top of the stairs.

She heard men’s voices. It was an animated conversation, and Eliza could never resist eavesdropping on the male world, so she crept to the next landing and peered through the bars of the stairs.

Her brother Jacob sat at the dining table with his textbooks scattered around him. It was the only time he had to study without the younger children begging him to tell stories or asking for help with their algebra or piano lessons. Father had picked up one of Jacob’s pencils and tapped it nervously against the table. His other hand stroked his beard.

“I need your support in this,” Father said. “Even the prophet was asking me if we’d chosen a husband yet.”

“But surely Liz can do better than Elder Johnson,” Jacob said.

Eliza hardly dared to breathe. They were talking about her. She had turned seventeen two weeks earlier and the murmurs for her marriage had become a dull roar. But she’d had no idea the matter had progressed this far.

“He’s a good man,” Father said. “Righteous, too.”

“But so old. And she’d be what? His twelfth wife?”

“Thirteenth,” Father corrected.

Thirteenth wife, three hundredth, what did it matter? All she could think was old, old, old. Elder Johnson had to be in his seventies. The thought of lying naked next to that wrinkled, sagging old man, his breath smelling of Ensure and Scope, his hair thin and greasy, made her flesh crawl.

“It’s unhealthy for a girl to wait too long to marry,” her father said. But there was still something in his voice. Hesitation? He wanted Jacob to convince him. “You know an unmarried girl turns to masturbation. Lesbianism. All manner of pernicious sins. Leave a woman unmarried and she’ll either turn lustful or bind her natural urges so tight she’ll be prone to hysteria.”

Jacob snorted. “Pseudo-scientific claptrap.” He was a medical student at the University of Calgary and would know something about the subject, which Eliza found reassuring. “She’s not going to become a lesbian. She won’t grow a mustache or male genitalia. She won’t suffer hysteria. It’s all nonsense and you know it.”

Only Jacob could get away with talking to Father like that. Abraham Christianson was head of the Quorum of the Twelve and second only to the prophet himself. Most people approached him with the proper deference. Eliza certainly did.

“Okay, then,” Father said. “So it’s nonsense. And I’m not dead set on Elder Johnson.”

Eliza breathed a sigh of relief from the stairs. It was just talk. She was about to return to bed when Father continued.

“But you’ll have to admit there’s a danger in waiting. Wait too long and she might start thinking about following her brothers to college. She’s a smart girl. She waits a year or two and she might decide to wait ten or twenty.”

“So what you’re saying is that you want to snuff her ambitions. Knock Liz down before she gets any ideas.” Jacob gave Father a serious look. “Let’s be very clear what you mean.”

Father sighed. “Jacob, don’t be difficult. However you look at it, Eliza can’t stay unmarried forever. Neither, I might add, can you. Only your position is much more tenuous, isn’t it? There are never enough wives to go around. Liz has value, to put it crassly. She’ll never have more value than she does right now. And that can help you find your first wife.”

“Ah, so we want to move the goods before they spoil. Okay, fine. But leave me out of it for the moment. What’s wrong with giving Liz a choice?”

“A choice? It’s not her decision, Jacob.”

“Okay, maybe choice is the wrong word. But we can take her opinion into consideration. There’s no harm in that.”

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “That is, until she fixes on the idea that it’s all up to her.”

“Liz knows better than that,” Jacob said. “Listen, how about this? She comes with me tomorrow to Utah. She can meet the other two men and see how they stack up to Elder Johnson.”

“I don’t know. I can imagine the foolish questions. Not to mention that she’s bound to get in the way of the murder investigation.”

Murder? Eliza was still dealing with the excitement of leaving Canada and going to Utah to meet two potential future husbands when the word murder hit her like a brush with an electric fence.

Jacob shook his head. “You can’t claim both that Liz is mature enough to get married and that she’s a naïve, giggly girl who is going to make a fool of herself.”

“Why not? Why can’t she be both mature and immature? Ready to get married. Not ready to navigate the minefield waiting in Blister Creek.”

“You might have that exactly backwards, Dad. But seriously, don’t underestimate Liz. She won’t get in the way. And she needs a chance to know all three men before we decide.”

Father was silent for a long moment. His hand returned to his beard. At last he nodded. “Okay, Jacob, but be careful. This murder is an ugly business. And I don’t trust the Kimballs. Oh, and could you try not to infect Eliza with your cynicism? It won’t help matters.” He rose to his feet and Jacob reached for his textbooks.

Eliza scrambled upstairs before her father could see her. Lying in her bed, she had no more lustful thoughts. Instead, she thought about leaving Harmony, driving from Alberta and south to Utah. To perhaps meet her future husband.

And a murder, she remembered. She would accompany her brother while he tried to solve the crime. She couldn’t help but be frightened by the prospect. And excited.

#

“God hates women,” Jacob told Eliza. “It’s a pity, because women have always been His most devoted followers.”

Eliza, sitting next to him in the Toyota Corolla sixteen hours into a twenty hour drive between Harmony, Alberta, and Blister Creek, Utah, was dry-eyed and cramped. She’d drifted in and out of sleep all night as they’d passed through Salt Lake City and Provo. They were on I-15, somewhere south of Nephi, where trees gave way to sage brush and puddles of illusory water glimmered on the blacktop as the summer sun lifted in a ball of fire over the desert.

“Are you going somewhere with this?” she asked, gathering her wits. “Or are you trying to goad me?” Always hard to tell with Jacob.

“Every father wants a son. Most mothers, too. A daughter is a disappointment. A boy grows up, he’s stimulated and challenged. A girl, ignored until puberty, then guarded like a bitch in heat.”

Eliza knew Jacob wanted the argument, if only because debating with himself would be boring. Fine, she’d play along. “And what about the boys? What’s our brother up to these days? Still coked out in Las Vegas, living with a transsexual stripper?”

“Wouldn’t be a surprise. They drove Enoch from town like a mad dog.” Jacob was fond of oscillating between crass, almost crude language, and an archaic style. He made one such switch right now. “Alone, he succumbed to the wiles of the adversary. Debauchery is the mistress of temptation.” A shrug. “So, perhaps it’s not easy being one of God’s chosen people. Man or woman.” He stared straight ahead. “But sadly for your sex, it’s not a man lying in a pool of his own blood, but Amanda Kimball.”

Eliza had questioned him about the murder as soon as they’d left Harmony. He’d told her about Amanda Kimball and the whole matter had become suddenly real. Amanda was her cousin.

During that year that Eliza had spent in Blister Creek, Amanda had been like a cool, tomboyish older sister. She’d known the best places to look for arrowheads, and had once taken Eliza to an Anasazi ruin she had discovered in one of the canyons. They’d climbed to the ruin via six-hundred-year-old handholds carved into the sandstone wall. They had found a crumbling two-room house with baskets and a broken pot lying in one corner. The house was perfectly preserved by the desert air; there were still dried corn cobs in one of the baskets.

And now her cousin was dead. Murdered.

“So God really hates women?”

“Of course not, Liz. God loves and cherishes women. You know that.”

They stopped for lunch at a greasy spoon in Cedar City. Polygamists were fairly common through Central and Southern Utah, but they still drew looks. The Mormons—those who followed the fallen prophets in Salt Lake City, that is—dressed like gentiles, while a daughter of God like Eliza wore no makeup, kept her hair waist-length, and wore a dress that fell to her ankles with a high collar and sleeves to her wrists. In Montana, someone had asked if they were Mennonites. Nobody made that mistake in Utah.

“They’re ashamed of us.” Jacob said when they reached the car.

“How do you mean?”

“The Salt Lake Mormons can’t forget that they were once like us. They were the polygamists who fled into the desert. It’s why they’re so eager to appear normal to the world. All the Osmonds, Marriotts, Steve Youngs, and Mitt Romneys were just like we are. It’s why they’ve rushed so fully into the embrace of Babylon and why they look at us like that. They’re ashamed, and they blame us for their embarrassment.”

“You see embarrassment, I see pity,” Eliza replied. “Poor, simple-minded girl, brainwashed into a fundamentalist cult. Bet she can barely write her own name.”

Jacob chuckled at this.

But she’d meant it only half-jokingly. She’d never noticed the stares until a few years ago; now she was conscious of every glance and whisper. The snickers of teenage boys were especially irritating.

They passed the last gentile outpost thirty miles east of Cedar City. The land was stark and beautiful. There were red cliffs streaked black with desert varnish. The road turned gravelly and then became a dirt road. The air conditioning blasted full force; it cut the heat but did not fully filter the road dust.

It had been three years since Eliza had seen Blister Creek and it was fresh to her eyes. The setting was spectacular. The town sat at the base of the Ghost Cliffs, which soared vertically two thousand feet above the Blister Creek Valley. The cliffs glowed in the late afternoon sun. Irrigated green fields made a quilt across the valley floor.

The houses were much like back home: large farm houses with extra wings and outbuildings to hold wives and a multitude of children. The houses, the school, the town office, the mini-mart, and the town store were all made of red brick.

The exception was the temple. A white fortress in the desert, perched on a hill in the center of town. The golden figure of the Angel Moroni crowned the single spire. It was here that the Saints performed their sacred rituals: baptism for the dead, washings and anointings, the endowment, eternal marriage, and the second anointing.

The sight of the temple always sent a chill down her spine. It was here that Christ would reign in the Millennium.

Her great-grandfather, Henry B. Young, had ordered its construction. The Church of the Anointing were those who had fled to the desert after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had renounced polygamy and fallen into apostasy. In the early years Brother Henry had believed that the mainstream Mormons would eventually come around. They hadn’t. Only a remnant had remained true and faithful to the eternal principle of plural marriage.

Two women with waist-length hair, four children in tow, looked at their car as they passed, no doubt noting its Alberta plates. A young man and his son, unloading two-by-fours from a pickup, stopped their work and frowned. Faces appeared in windows.

“Into the belly of the beast,” Jacob murmured. It was a phrase usually reserved for a foray into the towns and cities of the gentiles. They continued down Main Street. He turned to Eliza. “Don’t forget that we’re here to investigate a murder.”

“We?” She felt a mixture of excitement and dread.

“Absolutely, we. That business about checking out potential husbands is Dad’s reason, not mine.” He shrugged. “Okay, so we can’t forget that entirely. But the murder is your top priority. I need eyes and ears among the women. They might tell you things they wouldn’t tell a man.”

“I thought we already knew the identity of the murderers.” According to Jacob, the prophet and Elder Kimball thought that Mexican day laborers had raped and murdered Amanda. Brother Joseph wanted Jacob to figure out which one before deciding how to administer justice.

“Do we?”

#

Elder Kimball resembled a bald, sweating Pillsbury Doughboy, well on his way to baking to a golden, flaky consistency in the brilliant sun. Jacob let himself run with the imagery for a moment. He needed to see Kimball not as an elder of Israel, but as a suspect.

Jacob and Eliza had parked the Corolla next to the temple and stepped from the chilled interior of the car into the suffocatingly hot, dry air of the desert. He had brought his bag from the trunk.

Witch’s Warts stretched in a jagged, bumpy scar from just beyond the temple halfway to the Ghost Cliffs. It was a collection of sandstone fins and hoodoos, interrupted by dry washes, natural arches and sand dunes. A hell of a place to lose a cow, as they said.

Or a body. A boy had found Amanda just inside. Wild animals had uncovered it from a shallow, sandy grave.

Kimball waited at the murder site with his two sons. One was about twenty, the other, Taylor Kimball Junior, a few years older, closer to Jacob’s age. Taylor Junior was one of Eliza’s suitors, although Jacob hadn’t yet told her as much.