“Jacob and I rode around the valley this afternoon to survey the silos and check the grain levels.”
“I was wondering what you meant by surveying,” Miriam said.
“I would have told you if you’d asked. I needed to tell someone.”
“I had other worries on my mind.” She nodded at the notebook. “I take it you found something.”
“It’s what we didn’t find.” He flipped it open. “We’re missing several hundred tons of beans, wheat, and milled flour from communal food stores. Jacob thinks someone has been stealing it and giving it to the squatters.”
“What?” Smoot said. “Who?”
“The missing food came from your silos, Elder Smoot. The ones at the back of your ranch.”
“Are you kidding?” Elder Smoot exploded, springing from his chair. “Let’s go. Get your guns, we’ll put an end to it.”
Ezekiel grabbed his father’s sleeve. “Sit down, we’re not going to ride out right now. We don’t even know who.”
“I don’t care. I’ll put an end to it, whoever it is.”
“Let Brother Stephen Paul explain, Father.” Ezekiel pulled on the older man’s arm until Smoot finally sat down again, grumbling.
“Why didn’t you say so right away?” Smoot asked Stephen Paul. “Instead, you let us go around with all this chitchat.”
“Because it was on your land,” Stephen Paul said, “and I needed to think it over. Make sure you weren’t stealing it to undermine Jacob.”
“Of course not! I’d never do that. Anyway, the fence was intact last time I was out there, and the chain and padlock in place. I don’t even have a key.”
“Neither did we, because someone had replaced the lock. We had to cut the chain to get in.”
“Did you see any tracks?” Miriam asked.
“Like a truck, you mean?” Stephen Paul asked. “No, nothing. The road would take you right past the Smoot house, though. So someone in the house would see if a grain truck pulled up.”
“There haven’t been any trucks,” Smoot said. “Or any wagons, for that matter. We’ve got thirty people living in the house. One of us would have heard something.”
“Seems like we’d be the most likely suspects, Father,” Ezekiel said. “Someone in the Smoot house, I mean.”
“That’s stupid,” Smoot said. “We’d never do anything like that, and these people know it.”
“Someone stole that food,” Miriam said. “It would either take a couple of big, noisy trucks to move the supplies, or a whole bunch of people coming and going. Either one of those things make the Smoots look suspicious.”
“I refuse to defend myself,” Smoot said. “It’s ridiculous on the surface.”
“What I want to know,” Rebecca said, speaking up for the first time in several minutes, “is what Jacob intends to do about it.”
“He’s going to put Steve and Eliza to investigating,” Stephen Paul said. “We talked about Miriam, but . . .” He shrugged. “That seemed to concern him too.”
“What does that mean?” she demanded.
“That if you found a suspect, you’d administer frontier justice.”
Miriam let out a bitter laugh. “And he wouldn’t? He’d shake his finger and scold?”
“He doesn’t know what he’d do,” Stephen Paul said. “Jacob is deliberate. He doesn’t lash out based on emotion.”
“So he’ll do nothing, really,” Rebecca said. “Unless he can catch them in the act.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” Stephen Paul said. “He gets things done in the end.”
“The problem with Brother Jacob,” Ezekiel said, and his voice was heavy, as if this pained him to say it, “is that we need him to act like a prophet, and he won’t do it.”
“And I suppose you think you could do a better job,” Miriam said.
“Of course not.” Ezekiel sounded shocked. “What I want is for Jacob to go into the Holy of Holies and recover the breastplate and sword of Laban.”
“Don’t speak of that!” Smoot said.
“Why? It’s no secret. We all know he must put on the breastplate and wield the sword. This is the perfect time.”
Smoot stood up again and paced to the end of the porch. “Yes, but we don’t talk about it.”
Maybe Smoot didn’t, but Miriam had heard it whispered or hinted at by others several times in the past two months alone. This sword and breastplate business was meant to guard against some looming, unstated threat. Miriam didn’t know what to make of it, if the objects even existed.
“For all we know, Jacob has taken them out already and is ready to use them as soon as the Lord tells him to,” Rebecca said. “That would mean the Second Coming is at hand.”
“What, so he can save ten minutes by grabbing them from under his bed?” Miriam scoffed. “Or maybe he wears the breastplate under his shirt and leaves the sword hanging on a hook in the coat closet.”
Nobody said anything for several seconds. The bugs were swarming so badly around the kerosene lantern that Rebecca moved it away from her.
Smoot returned from the far end of the porch and fixed Stephen Paul with a significant look. “Maybe you know about it.”
“About the sword and breastplate?” Stephen Paul said. “If he’s taken them out of the box, he’s never told me.”
“How about your husband?” Smoot asked Miriam. “Did David say anything?”
“Not to me, no. I doubt he knows. Anyway, I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it. Isn’t that what you were just telling us?”
“We’re not supposed to touch them,” Ezekiel said. “But it’s not like our tongues will fall out if we talk about them. And if we looked at them, our eyes wouldn’t burn.”
“What are you saying?” Smoot said.
“I’m saying we should find out if they’re in the temple. If our greatest weapons are at hand to face the enemy. Would it hurt us to open the box and have a look?”
There was a moment of dumbfounded silence at this.
“You’re not even on the Quorum,” his father said at last. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near the Holy of Holies.”
“But you and Elder Young here could do it. Then tell us what you see.”
“I don’t know,” Smoot said. He turned to Stephen Paul. “Well?”
“I’d only consider it if everyone else agrees,” Stephen Paul said. “Even then, I’d need to pray about it. But . . . maybe.”
“Let’s be clear,” Rebecca said. “You want the elders to look, only? Not touch?”
“That’s right,” Ezekiel said.
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to find out,” Rebecca said. “What do you think, Miriam?”
What she thought was that it was beginning to seem like a conspiracy. Maybe a well-meaning conspiracy, with people who thought they were acting in the best interests of the community. They were people who loved their prophet, but thought he needed to be harder, to make difficult decisions. But it was still a conspiracy.
And already she could see errors in judgment. Stephen Paul should have ridden off with his wife and Peter Potts. Instead, he’d told Elder Smoot and his son about the missing food from their silos. If Jacob had wanted them to know, he wouldn’t have gone sneaking onto Smoot’s property in the first place. So that was a betrayal of trust. Miriam was disappointed in Stephen Paul.
You came too. You prayed about it and decided to obey the summons.
Maybe so, but not so she could betray Jacob. She would never do that. A misguided conspiracy had destroyed the Zarahemla church that had first drawn her to the saints. Why would she tread that same wicked path?
Unless you can do more good on the inside than the outside.
Yes, that was it. If she’d stomped out with Carol Young and Peter Potts, she’d be blissfully riding down the highway with no knowledge of the sto
len food, no idea that these others meant to sneak into the Holy of Holies to see if the sword and breastplate were still there.
“I think,” Miriam began slowly, “that the two elders should enter the Holy of Holies together. Open the chest and see what they find.”
“Then it’s settled,” Ezekiel said.
“Not yet,” Rebecca said.
Everyone looked to Elder Smoot. He was wavering. Miriam could almost read his thoughts. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to look, he was thinking. Not to touch, no. But only to look.
“It . . . worries me,” Smoot said at last. “I’ve never touched that chest, never been tempted to sneak a peek. It’s like looking into the face of the Lord. If you are not prepared, you will be destroyed.”
“You’re only destroyed if you touch the contents,” Ezekiel said. “Not if you look inside.”
“Will you stop talking like you know something?” his father said. “You don’t.”
“But, Father—”
Smoot’s face hardened. “No, I won’t be a party to it.”
“Wait, are you saying no?” Stephen Paul asked.
“That’s right. I won’t open the chest, and I won’t agree to any plan that has someone else doing it either.”
And that proved the end of it. Ezekiel tried a few more times to change his father’s mind, but Stephen Paul’s interest seemed to fade once his companion on the Quorum had decided. Then Rebecca said she’d go along with Stephen Paul. As for Miriam, she was curious, and since she’d never heard explicitly that opening the chest in the Holy of Holies would lead to certain death, she dismissed this as superstition.
But to her mind this business with the breastplate and the sword was tangential to the real discovery of the night: someone was stealing their food. While Ezekiel fought a losing battle to convince his father that something was wrong at the top of the church hierarchy, she turned her thoughts to tracking down the thief. It shouldn’t be too difficult. She was a former FBI agent, after all.
And when she found the thief, she vowed, she would see him brought to a swift and brutal justice.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Despite his understanding with Whit McQueen, Jacob approached the reservoir Monday morning prepared for trouble. He was relieved to discover that the squatters were still willing to cooperate. They’d pulled aside the log gate, dragged away the dead cars, and hauled off the rocks. Nothing but open pavement stretched north from the camp.
Two armed men stood on either side of McQueen in the middle of the highway, but it turned out they were only there waiting to be paid.
Jacob and his brother unloaded the supplies: twenty pounds of jerky, a hundred pounds of powdered milk, ten wool blankets, and a pair of boots. McQueen inspected them, grunted his approval, and waved them on. Soon, they were rumbling north on Highway 89.
“Once you pay the Danegeld,” Miriam said when the reservoir had disappeared behind them, “you never get rid of the Dane.”
Jacob didn’t want to get in another argument about the same thing, so he let it slide. And he refused to let it spoil his good mood, which rose with every mile north along the abandoned highway.
The sky was blue, the sun overhead. Spring flowers bloomed across the desert, and the high country meadows were thick with green grass. Grazing conditions were better than he could ever remember. But there were no herds to graze them. Not a deer or elk to be seen either; the squatters must have eaten or frightened them all away.
Jacob, Eliza, and David were joined by the three former FBI agents in their midst. Eliza’s husband, Steve, and Agent Chambers were ex-military as well as ex-FBI. And Miriam could handle a weapon as well as either of them. At the moment, Chambers and Steve were up at the .50-cal, one to shoot, the other to load. Jacob hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
An hour later the Humvee eased into the outskirts of Panguitch and Jacob’s hopes collapsed. Even before he saw the abandoned houses, some burned, some with roofs caved in by heavy winter snows, the huge drifts of tumbleweeds disabused him of any hopes. They filled driveways and piled against houses. An elementary school lay almost buried in the spiny bundles.
“If it gets dry this summer,” Eliza said, “those tumbleweeds will burn down what’s left.”
She sat up front with Jacob and had been looking intently out the window during their drive. Like the rest of them, Jacob’s sister hadn’t left Blister Creek in the past year, and her last experience outside the valley had been an ugly one. No doubt the horrors she’d seen in Las Vegas accounted for her pinched, worried look.
Jacob drove down Main Street. The windows had been broken out of the nineteenth-century brick buildings. Several abandoned trucks sat in parking stalls, their tires removed. No sign of humans or other life. Not even a stray dog wandering the sidewalks.
He pulled to a stop, and everyone got out and stood in front of the Humvee to discuss. Miriam held an assault rifle and studied their surroundings, but nobody else seemed concerned. It was hard to imagine snipers waiting for them up here.
Chambers yawned. He’d been dozing in the back of the Humvee and looked reluctant to have been dragged out. “Well, this sucks,” he said, looking around. “I was hoping for something better than this. It’s like Nevada all over.”
“What were you expecting?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know. Fayer was always going on about Mormons and food storage and all that shit. I expected Utah to get its act together.”
“So what now?” David asked. “Swing by the hospital and see if there’s anything before we head home?”
“We scavenged it pretty hard a couple of years ago,” Jacob said. “You really think new stuff has materialized?”
“This sucks,” Chambers said again.
“Let’s keep going,” Jacob said.
“Was that your plan all along?” David asked.
“Richfield is another hour, more or less. It’s more of a farming community. Big enough, surrounded by ranches and farms, that they might still be hanging on. If not, we’ve got enough gas to make it all the way to Salt Lake and back.”
“Salt Lake!” Eliza said.
“Sure, why not make a go of it?” Jacob said. “If there’s any Utah government left at all, it has to be up there or nowhere.”
“But if there is, they’ll take our truck,” Steve said. “How will we get home again?”
Jacob kept pushing. “We don’t have to go all the way. We’ll keep going until things look dicey, then turn around. How would they stop us? Whoever we meet won’t have enough gas to give chase.”
“I don’t know,” Eliza said, dubiously.
“Let’s take a vote,” Jacob said. “Miriam?”
Miriam had wandered several yards away and was still scanning the buildings, her gun at the ready. Now she turned with a disgusted expression.
“This isn’t a democracy. You’re the prophet, you make the call.”
“You don’t want a say?”
“No, I want you to decide. That’s what being prophet means.”
“Miriam,” David said, with a frown.
“Well, doesn’t it? We’re on a mission that Jacob chose. Either he’s following the spirit, or he’s not. If he’s following the spirit, then he already knows the answer. If he’s not, then we never should have left Blister Creek in the first place.”
“One vote for home,” Jacob said.
“That’s not what I said.”
“Close enough.” He was irritated with her attitude. “I say we keep going. That makes it one vote for Richfield, one for home. Who else has an opinion?”
“Keep going,” Chambers said. “Anyone tries to stop us, we kick their ass.”
“One for home, two to keep going,” Jacob said. “Steve?”
“Keep going.”
“That leaves you guys,” Jacob said to his brother and sister.
David looked at his wife, then at his hands when Miriam returned a stern look. “Keep going. This is our best chance.”
That made four votes for going and one against, but Jacob wanted to hear what Eliza had to say. She had kept quiet earlier, but now she didn’t hesitate.
“I trust you, Jacob. Let’s go.”
Eliza asked if she could take a turn up top with Steve at the machine gun in place of Chambers. Jacob said that was fine, so the FBI agent took Eliza’s place up front next to Jacob when everyone returned to the vehicle.
“It’s not a question of trust,” Miriam said, climbing in the backseat next to her husband. “I trust Jacob too. So long as he’s speaking as a prophet.”
“A prophet is still a man,” David said. “He uses the tools he’s got.”
“You do realize I can hear you, don’t you?” Jacob asked.
“That’s some kind of blunt tool,” Miriam said, ignoring him. “Come on, Jacob can muster a more forceful opinion than that. I’ve heard him do it before. This wasn’t the time for a vote. We’re out in the Lone and Dreary World. Satan is abroad in the land.”
Chambers made a scoffing sound.
But Miriam continued as if she hadn’t heard. “The devil will destroy us in a second if we’re not careful. What we need is some real leadership, and Jacob isn’t giving it.”
Again Jacob considered asking if they’d forgotten he was there, or had just stopped caring, but he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“We’re going north, aren’t we?” David asked. “Isn’t that what Jacob wanted? So why was it necessary to lift his hand and say, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord’?”
“He doesn’t need to do it all the time. But once in a while would be nice.”
Jacob sighed and started the truck. He rolled through the streets until he found Highway 89 again and took it north, out of town. This was high desert plain: grass and sagebrush, with wide, expansive views toward distant, snow-capped mountains.
“There’s a simpler explanation,” Chambers said with a smirk. He pulled out a deck of cards and shuffled them on his lap. “This guy is no prophet. He’s the leader of a crazy desert cult.”
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