by R. R. Irvine
Mrs. Joe wrapped her arms around her thighs, hugging them together so tightly she trembled. “He couldn’t stop, of course. He was too far gone. When it was over, I closed the door. Not hard, you understand. Just enough to let Doctor know I’d been there, watching him.”
She glanced toward the open door as if expecting to see the doctor again. When she didn’t, she slipped off the bench to kneel in front of the dying fire, feeding it more files to bring it back to life.
“When I confronted him later,” she said, looking into the flames, “he told me I was to blame because I couldn’t have children. He said I was inadequate as a woman.” She shook her head from side to side as if denying the words. “All those nights I’d waited for him. But he never came. He never touched me. Not in years.”
She hurled folders into the fire, keeping it up until the flames leapt into the chimney, until she’d exhausted her supply of fuel. The heat finally drove her back to the bench, bringing with her a smell of singed hair.
“It’s all over now,” she said quietly.
“Not yet,” he said.
“There’s nothing left but ashes.”
Traveler closed his eyes; his mind went back to Sunday school in the basement of the ward house. He saw the chairs in a semicircle around the teacher, heard her read from The Book of Mormon. He followed along with her, out loud for Mrs. Joe’s benefit. “ ‘And those who would not confess their sins and repent of their iniquity, the same were not numbered among the people of the church, and their names were blotted out.’ ”
“I know what you want from me, but nothing—not even confession—will bring Claire back to you.”
She peered into his eyes.
“I spoke with her kidnapper on the phone,” he said. “It was a woman’s voice. You.”
“I testified before the Bishop’s Court. I damned my own husband to hell. The day before he died they excommunicated him.”
“Are you telling me that’s why he killed himself?”
“Looking at you, Mr. Traveler, I don’t think you’re a Gentile at all. Your eyes have a burning in them, like the faithful, like I used to see in myself in the morning mirror.” She sighed. “Have you been sent here to forgive me?”
Not trusting his voice, he nodded once, stiffly.
“To help me atone for my sins?”
Another nod, so rigid his neck muscles creaked.
“You know the answers already, Mr. Traveler. That’s what I think.”
He bowed his head to keep his doubting eyes away from her.
“Doctor Joe drank coffee, you know. He said he needed the boost it gave him to start the day. The devil’s boost,’ I used to say to him. I said it again when he drank his last cup, the one I put the tranquilizers in. Enough capsules to be sure he wouldn’t have the strength to fight back. But not so many that he’d lose consciousness.”
She paused, craning her neck to stare at the ceiling. He followed her gaze to the heavy wooden crossbeams that supported the steeply pitched roof. Scrape marks showed where something, possibly a rope, had scoured away the paint.
“I fetched a ladder from the garage and rigged a block and tackle up there. Doctor was lying right here on the hearth rug. I raised his head and wrapped a towel around his neck so the rope wouldn’t cut into him, so no blood would spill. So there’d be no atonement for his sins. So that he could never be raised from the dead.”
Traveler swallowed sharply. His imagination felt the rope drag him off his feet, haul him up slowly, cut off his air for a long time dying. “Claire,” he said. “I want to know about her.”
“Her blood was spilled. Her sins are washed away.”
She glanced at the door, but he wouldn’t be distracted.
“You could never have handled a woman like Claire on your own,” he said. “Not unless you drugged her too.”
“We . . . I didn’t want to hurt her.”
Traveler stood up, casting his shadow on her instead of striking out as he longed to do. “Who?” he repeated, clenching his fists in her face.
“Go ahead and kill me,” she said. “It would be a blessing. Send me to hell with Doctor Joe.”
Looking at the woman, Traveler knew there was nothing he could do to her. Nothing worse than what she was doing to herself. His hands dropped to his sides. He turned his back on her to seek the open door. That’s when he saw Shirley Colton standing there on the threshold, a folded quilt in her arms. She looked frightened.
“I . . . I brought the quilt for Mrs. Joe. She said she wanted to work on it.”
She hurried past him and began spreading the quilt over the rack in the corner of the living room. It was the same quilt he’d seen at the Co-op, with its hand-stitched map of Wasatch, street by street and building by building.
Mrs. Joe brushed Traveler aside to get her sewing box from the mantel. She rummaged inside it for a moment before handing a needle and spool to Shirley Colton.
“Will you thread it for me, dear? I can’t seem to focus my eyes for close-up work just now.”
Mrs. Colton wet the end of the thread several times before succeeding. When she handed over the needle and thread, Mrs. Joe began sewing on the quilt immediately.
Traveler moved close enough to see the subject of her needlework. It was Odell’s Drug Store.
“Just about every woman in town has worked on this quilt at one time or another,” Mrs. Colton said. “Everything is there to see if you know what to look for.”
Mrs. Joe’s needle moved in and out of the material rapidly, outlining what looked like a half-circle.
“What else has to be done?” Traveler asked.
“This is the finishing touch,” she said. “As far as the quilt is concerned.”
Traveler watched silently as the half-circle evolved into a skull. Finally, Mrs. Joe sighed and stepped back to admire her work.
“Do you think it should be a plain skull, Shirley, or a skull and crossbones?”
“Whatever you want, dear.”
Mrs. Joe went back to work, adding bones. “Enos Odell came to me,” she said, her head inches from the quilt. “Everybody in town was blaming him, he said, because he’d filled Doctor Joe’s tranquilizer prescriptions. I felt sorry for Enos. I was a fool.”
Traveler studied the quilt. A great many details had been added since he’d first seen Norma Beasley working on it at the motel. He wondered how complete a history it was, if it might even contain an image of himself. The angel he’d seen at the Co-op, the one of his namesake, Moroni, now looked like the Angel of Death.
“Enos said we had to run you out of town,” Mrs. Joe said. “Otherwise things would never be right again. He showed me a newspaper clipping from a Salt Lake paper. It was about you and your girlfriend, Claire Bennion. It said you did crazy things to protect her. So all we had to do, Enos figured, was pretend to kidnap her and you’d do whatever we wanted. Even then I told him no. But he said if I didn’t help him, he’d make sure Doctor Joe’s story got in the newspapers too.”
“You killed her,” he said.
Mrs. Joe reached out to Shirley Colton for support, but the woman sidestepped out of the way.
Mrs. Joe held on to the quilt rack. “I should have remembered about Enos. But I didn’t. I followed his instructions and drove over to Moroni to see Claire. She didn’t remember me at first. Of course a lot of years had passed since she was a patient, and I wasn’t wearing my uniform either that night. People see the uniform, you know, not the person. Anyway, when she heard what we had planned for you—threatening you on the phone and telling you we’d kidnapped her—she came along with me just like Enos said she would. It was a big joke to her. She was laughing and telling stories about you on the ride back here.”
She looked at Mrs. Colton, who’d begun to cry.
“But when I turned into my driveway, Claire saw the old examination table in the headlights. She saw the stirrups. That’s when she remembered me and started shouting at me. I tried to calm her down. All she had to do, I
said, was call you like she’d done so many times before. That we’d let her go then. God knows, I thought it was the truth.”
Feeling weak in the knees, Traveler sat on the nearest bench.
“That’s when everything went wrong. Enos came out of the house and grabbed her. She smelled him, his druggist’s smell, and went crazy. He hit her to shut her up. When I tried to stop him, he hit me too.”
Mrs. Joe touched her breast to show where Odell’s blows had fallen. “There’s a back door to my husband’s office, with an outside stairway leading up to it. That door opened during her first pelvic all those years ago, Claire told me while we were tying her up. She’d felt the draft and smelled Enos. ‘You’re nothing but a pervert,’ she screamed at him. ‘A peeper who’s good for nothing except watching other people do it.’ ”
Traveler swallowed, remembering the man’s smell, how unforgettable it was.
“The moment I heard her, I knew it was true. I knew he’d been watching with every woman in town.” Mrs. Joe sighed. “You see, he’d been caught playing Peeping Tom before. Not in Doctor Joe’s office, but in his own neighborhood. He came to the church then and asked for forgiveness. We prayed with him, and took him at his word when he said he was saved.”
She looked at Shirley Colton, who nodded confirmation.
“When Sheriff Mahonri caught him at it a second time,” Mrs. Joe went on, “we shunned him. He and Cynthia both, since it’s a wife’s duty to stay with her husband for better or worse.”
She shuddered. Mrs. Colton went to her then, hugging her, trying to comfort her.
“Anyway, when your Claire called Enos a Peeping Tom,” Mrs. Joe continued, “I saw the devil come into his eyes. He hit her again, so hard I panicked and ran out of the house. I haven’t seen him since, except to talk to on the phone. He called the next day to gloat about killing her. To tell me how he’d done it in the old Mormon way. People would blame the Nibley brothers, he said, because they’d had trouble with you already. Because everybody knew the Nibleys were hunters who liked to kill. Who tied their trophies to the fenders of their trucks and paraded through town.”
“The Nibleys have an alibi,” Traveler said.
“ ‘They’re bullies,’ Enos kept saying. ‘Nobody likes them.’ ”
She nodded at the memory. “ ‘Bullies are cowards at heart,’ I told him. The sheriff knows that. Your plan won’t work.’ But he wouldn’t listen. He was crazy. He laughed and said I had to keep quiet because I was his accomplice. He said he’d kill me too if need be. ‘Go ahead,’ I told him. ‘I’m in hell already.’ ”
“There, there,” Mrs. Colton crooned. “We’ll go to the Co-op and alert the others. They’ll know what has to be done.”
Mrs. Joe shook her head. “First we’ve got to bring Cynthia Odell back into the fold.”
“Of course we do. A wife’s loyalty goes only so far. If she joins us, her shunning’s over.”
41
THE DOOR to Odell’s Drug Store stood open. Traveler pressed his face against the front window. Enos Odell was behind the soda fountain setting out bandages and medicine on the marble countertop. He didn’t look up, didn’t see Traveler staring at him.
Traveler stepped back onto the curb to study the Wasatch Mountains. The fire line looked smaller to him. The smoke was definitely thinning.
He drew a deep breath of relatively fresh air and went inside, closing the door behind him and throwing the dead bolt.
Odell jumped at the sound. “I’m sorry,” he said as soon as he saw who it was. “We’re not open for anything but emergencies.”
Traveler walked slowly along the counter, spinning the stools as he went, and examining the array of medical supplies. In addition to sterile pads, bandages, and tape, there were jars of salve and bottles of painkillers. Even a brand-name tranquilizer.
Traveler swung onto a stool and stared the druggist in the eye.
After a few seconds of silence, Odell began rearranging the clutter on the countertop, lining up bottles and bandages, busywork to escape Traveler’s scowl.
“The bishop sent me here,” Odell said in a rush, as if compelled to fill the silence. “Off the fire line to get things ready in case someone’s hurt and needs first aid.”
Traveler didn’t answer, didn’t blink.
“I’ve just about got everything ready, so if there’s something you need, tell me. Maybe something cold to drink, a phosphate? Better yet, a malt?”
He didn’t wait for a response, but began scooping ice cream into a metal container. “Vanilla? Chocolate? Let’s make it chocolate. That’s my favorite.”
He added syrup, a teaspoon of malt, and milk to the ice cream. “Maybe a little more malt. What do you think?” He nodded at his own suggestion, added another spoonful, and attached the metal container to the mixer.
While it whirred, he cleared counter space in front of Traveler, removing the tranquilizers along with several other tablet-filled jars. All went out of sight beneath the counter.
When the malt was ready, he poured it into a tall glass and placed it in front of Traveler. “You won’t get anything like this in Salt Lake.”
“Those tranquilizers,” Traveler said. “Were those the ones Doctor Joe prescribed?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The bishop didn’t send you here to get ready for emergencies. He sent you away.”
“What do you mean?”
Traveler looked at his watch. “The word has spread by now. They know about you. What you did to Claire.”
Odell shuddered.
“I know the feeling,” Traveler said. “Like somebody stepped on your grave.”
“I never touched any of them.”
“You touched Claire.”
Odell tried to back up, but the ice cream freezer stopped him.
“How many tranquilizers would it take to kill a man?” Traveler asked.
The druggist shook his head. “You can’t make me do it.”
“Do you think I’m just going to walk away?”
“She . . . she laughed at me.”
“You butchered her like an animal.”
“I’m a Temple Mormon. I know my scripture. I follow it to the letter. I killed her in the Mormon way. It’s my only hope of salvation.”
Traveler caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He sought its source in the mirror behind the counter. Shirley Colton was at the door, her face distorted against the glass. One hand held an axe, new by the look of it, the same kind he’d seen at her hardware store. She rattled the door handle. The lock held.
Odell glanced toward the back door.
“Mrs. Joe called the Relief Society,” Traveler said. “She told them everything.”
Another woman arrived out front. She, too, carried an axe.
Odell began edging toward the rear of the store. Traveler was about to cut him off, when someone began pounding on the back door. The druggist stopped, swung around, and went wide-eyed.
Traveler followed his terrified gaze. Women’s faces filled the front window. Louise Dority. The five Mrs. McConkies. Norma Beasley. Even Hope Doyle, the town Catholic. Plus at least a dozen he didn’t recognize. All carried tools, apparently from Colton’s Hardware. Axes, hoes, rakes, weeders. They began tapping on the glass in a persistent cadence, not hard enough to break it, but getting louder and louder just the same.
“Please,” Odell said.
Traveler nodded at the front door, where the druggist’s wife now stood. She was fitting a key into the lock with one hand and holding a baseball bat in the other.
Traveler slid off the stool and started toward the back door. “I think you’re about to be called home.”
42
TRAVELER STOOD at his office window looking out at the temple. The weather had changed. The Angel Moroni was hidden in a low rain cloud, part of a storm front that had come boiling across the Great Salt Lake the day after Traveler returned from Wasatch. An inch of rain had fallen so far, unusual so
early in the fall. God’s intervention, some called it, because the downpour had extinguished the forest fires burning in the mountains above Salt Lake.
The phone rang. He sat down before answering it.
“This is Stacie Breen,” a woman said. She sounded young, Claire’s age. “My boyfriend said you called while I was at work.”
He’d gotten the name from Dora Neff, who’d found it in one of Claire’s letters. She’s a good friend, Claire had written, her only mention of another woman. You can trust her.
“I was calling about Claire Bennion,” he said.
“I know. She told me about you. She said you’d come for her one day.” Her voice caught. “It’s too late now, isn’t it?”
“I’m looking for her little boy.”
“You know what she called you, don’t you? Her Angel Moroni.”
“She did have a child, didn’t she?”
“I could deny it,” the woman said.
“Are you?”
“With Claire gone, there’s no reason to. She can’t get into any more trouble.”
“Where is he?” Traveler asked.
“She named him after you, you know.”
“She told me.”
“It’s not my fault what happened.”
Traveler swung around to face the window, looking for the real Angel Moroni, but the statue was still hidden in cloud.
“I couldn’t help the boy myself. I have my own life to worry about.”
“Are you trying to tell me he’s dead?”
“Nothing like that. She gave him away.”
“Adoption?”
“No papers were signed, if that’s what you mean.”
“What then?”
“She got money, though she wouldn’t tell me how much.”
“Tell me where he is. Please.”