“Because she hated him the most. I think she’s always hated him.”
“But why would she marry him if she hated him?” I asked. I wasn’t sure that Joanna really understood all the relationship dynamics here. She was the newest wife, and very young. Jennifer seemed coldest to me, the least likely to stab someone with a kitchen knife.
“I don’t know why, but it’s the truth. And she has a murderer’s heart.” She shivered dramatically.
“Well, I’ll think about it.” Joanna’s testimony wasn’t exactly the final clue to present to the police, was it?
“Are you going to find out who killed Stephen?” she asked.
“I’m going to try,” I said. “To make sure the rest of you are all safe.”
Joanna’s eyes shifted for a moment and then I had a weird feeling that made the hair on my arms rise up. I’m not sure I would call it a spiritual feeling because that was usually calm and peaceful to me, filled with love, and this seemed more alien and even eerie.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” she said in a low, deadened voice.
“Joanna?” I said.
She didn’t respond until I snapped fingers in front of her face. Then she pulled away, blinked several times. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”
“You quoted that Robert Frost poem. About the world ending in fire or ice. What did you mean?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember saying that. Who is Robert Frost?”
With the lack of education among the FLDS, I found I could actually believe she didn’t know who Robert Frost was, so I let her go. As strange and unpredictable as she was, she had the least reason to want Stephen dead. She was fragile, young, adoring of Stephen, without worldly skills that would let her survive elsewhere, completely dependent on him financially, though perhaps not as emotionally dependent as Carolyn. But what she’d said about Jennifer was interesting.
Before I went back down to the cemetery, I checked the door to Sarah’s painting shed, but it was locked and I couldn’t see in very well with the light at this angle. I sighed. I’d just have to make an excuse to see inside later. I also needed a chance to talk to Sarah about last night and about who she thought was the most likely to have wanted Stephen dead.
I stumbled my way down the trail again to check on Kenneth, who was sitting on the side of a knee-deep hole long enough to fit a full-grown man lying outstretched.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” He held up his hands, which were blistered despite the gardening gloves he’d been wearing. “Just taking a break. Are you finished with your detecting?”
“Not by a long shot,” I said, but I needed time to think for a bit. Did I really think Jennifer was a more likely suspect than Sarah? And what was it about Joanna that made me believe her gift was real?
Since he looked to be so close to done, I stayed with Kenneth as he went back to work and finished digging about forty minutes later. I reached down and helped him out of the hole, only narrowly avoiding being pulled back in myself. Maybe it wasn’t exactly six feet deep, but it was pretty close.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now we go back and wait until they’re ready for the body to be buried,” I said.
Kenneth wiped at his forehead and then stared at me. “You, wait? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do that.”
I made a face at him. I could wait. If I had to. And in this case, it wasn’t going to be just waiting. There’d be plenty of poking around mixed in there, too.
Chapter 18
Kenneth used his shirt to dry off the sweat, then pulled it back on as we walked back to the house.
Rebecca and the other wives, including Joanna, were in the front room now, talking to the gathered and silent children, none of whom seemed to have been crying or in shock over their father’s sudden death.
After what Joanna had said, I took a chance to observe Jennifer, who looked cool and collected. “Stephen’s will made provisions for the families,” she was saying to Rebecca, who had just asked her a question I hadn’t caught. “You’ll all be staying in the homes here. There’s no worry about that.”
So she had seen Stephen’s will, apparently, and knew what was in it. Did it benefit Jennifer herself? Could that be a motive for murder? I needed to see the will somehow. I wondered how I could manage that.
I stayed as the children, including Talitha, were dismissed and led outside by the two oldest girls, Leah and Esther. Once the house was quiet again, the wives, along with Naomi, drew closer to discuss adult concerns.
Jennifer glanced at me, as if about to ask me to leave, when Rebecca said pre-emptively, “I’d like her to stay.”
“Why? She has nothing to do with any of this,” said Jennifer.
“I think it’s wise for us to have someone here who can see things from another perspective. She may see things that none of the rest of us would think of.”
I wasn’t sure if this was Rebecca trying to help me learn the truth or if she was starting to be nervous about the fact that I knew about Stephen’s murder and could call the police. I might get myself in trouble, too, but she would be much worse off than I would. They all would.
Kenneth returned from cleaning himself up and stood at Naomi’s side. Jennifer hesitated, looking from me to him. After a moment, she started going through a step-by-step plan for the financial future, including tax payments for the property and houses, children’s college funds, medical insurance payments and emergency funds, car and house repairs, and on and on. The assumption seemed to be that everyone would stay here, which was surely what Stephen would have wanted.
Sarah looked as angry as ever, holding herself apart from the others by the stairs to the upper floors. Would she stay on? If so, Rebecca was in for years more of accusations and recriminations from her younger sister. I couldn’t envy her that.
Joanna, on the other hand, seemed at peace. She listened politely and without asking questions.
Carolyn looked a wreck. Her face was tear streaked, splotched with red, and her lower lip had been chewed to bleeding. She was seated on the couch with a hand on her pregnant belly, wincing every time the baby kicked, which was clearly visible under the thin knit shirt she wore. Her hair hadn’t been done this morning, neither washed nor combed, and it stuck out on one side of her head.
Jennifer asked if there were any immediate financial needs she was unaware of. When no one raised a hand, she suggested that they speak to Rebecca if they wanted more than their usual allowances deposited in their accounts each month.
I listened for a while, but eventually remembered Stephen mentioning that basement office. There seemed less to be learned from watching the wives here than I’d originally thought, and this was an ideal chance for me to look into his private files, while the wives were busy.
So I stood up and headed downstairs quietly, closing the door to the basement behind me. I paused for a moment, just in case someone noticed me, but no one seemed to. I suppose they were all too focused on one another.
I descended into a great room filled with huge beanbags and scattered with pillows and blankets. Probably the result of my taking the bunk room last night, I thought without too much guilt, since it looked from the general disarray like the boys had had a good time down here. I continued on past a bathroom, a couple of unfinished bedrooms, a furnace room, and at the other end of the hall, a locked door.
After a short search, I found a key on top of the door jamb and let myself in. The office had a utilitarian folding table in the center, as well as a rolling, well-worn fake leather chair next to it. Along the wall, there were four metal filing cabinets in various colors, most of them dented badly with overuse. The table itself was covered in papers stacked to either side, with pens and pencils in the middle.
On the bookshelf under the small
high window, I found copies of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. They both looked well-read, and when I flipped through I found what had to be Stephen’s writing in the margins. Mostly his comments were refutations, but it was interesting he had read the controversial anti-Mormon books.
I opened the drawers of the first filing cabinet and found mostly family photos from the years when Stephen and Rebecca were still monogamous, photos of the new family when Naomi was a baby and a toddler, then portraits adding another baby, and then another—Joseph and Aaron, I guessed.
At the bottom of the cabinet, under some old newspapers, I found a half-empty bottle of whiskey and an open pack of cigarettes. Both were against the Word of Wisdom, the Mormon health code. Once you’re excommunicated, I suppose there’s less reason to follow the Word of Wisdom so strictly since you can’t go to the temple anyway. But I’d have thought Stephen was the kind of person who followed every law to a T in any case, just because he wanted to prove he was better than anyone else.
Then again, the Word of Wisdom had been considered just that—advice, not a law, until the 1900s. Maybe Stephen was just going back to the old days of Mormonism, when you could smoke and drink all week, go to the temple for your endowments on Saturday, and then be at church on Sunday, repenting of your wrongs.
I left the cigarettes and whiskey where they were, then moved onto the next cabinet. I went to the bottom drawer first this time, and found several large manila envelopes with cardboard protectors. I opened them and saw a letter addressed to Stephen Carter by a previous president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I read through it, then stared at the name and the signature for a long time.
The letter hadn’t been printed. It was on official letterhead, but handwritten. If the police wanted to, they could probably get a handwriting analyst to say if it was authentic or not. Not that it seemed to have anything to do with the murder. This president was dead now, so maybe it shouldn’t matter to me, but it did. I did not want to believe the letter was real.
It began with a personal note of thanks to Stephen for continuing to live “the celestial law of marriage,” “the true Principle of heaven,” despite the “arrows of the adversary” that were slung against him, and “the fear of the law.” I was shocked and nauseated at this. Could this prophet, whom I’d admired as a child, really have approved of Stephen’s way of life?
What a scandal, if this was released to the press! Of course, the church would disavow the letter. And they might be right to do so. I let go of my anger as I acknowledged I had no reason to trust Stephen Carter; this was just the sort of thing he might have invented to convince his wives—or people like me and Kurt—that he was doing what was righteous.
I looked in the other envelope and found a priesthood line of authority, which for Mormon men is kind of like a divine right of kings. Since we believe that John the Baptist and the apostle Peter came down from heaven—literally as resurrected beings—to put their hands on the heads of Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery and restore the proper priesthood power that had been lost to all other Christian churches, a priesthood line of authority was an important document for many Mormon men. Kurt had a priesthood line of authority in his office at the church building, going back to his father, and his grandfather, and from there, to Heber J. Grant, who eventually went back to Joseph Smith, the apostle Peter, and then Jesus Christ.
But for Stephen Carter’s line of authority, only two names were listed: Stephen Carter’s and Jesus Christ’s. Somehow, it was actually a relief to me to see this ridiculously self-aggrandizing document in the same file as that letter. This must be the reason he believed he had authority above the leaders of the church. But who would believe it was real? How hard could it be to fake a priesthood line of authority? You could probably fill in a template online and print them off in the thousands if you wanted.
I looked in the upper drawers of the same cabinet and found a marriage certificate—an official, legal one to Rebecca. Since there were no others, it seemed Stephen hadn’t bothered with extralegal ones for the other “spiritual” wives, despite the ceremony he’d said he’d had Rebecca officiate. I wondered why, briefly, until I found a copy of a will that had been signed and dated on January 2, 2016. Just a few months ago, but maybe it was something that Stephen did regularly.
As I read the will, I wished desperately that Kurt were there to decipher it for me, or someone else who knew legalese better than I did. But as far as I could tell, it left the compound, the main house, and all the other houses, to Rebecca alone. It also left all his investment accounts, his retirement benefits, and any money in his current savings or checking accounts to Rebecca, with some language about sharing fairly with all other remaining dependents, presumably meaning wives as well as children.
In one sense, this will seemed only fair to Rebecca. She was the one who had borne so much with him. She was his legal wife, and if Stephen had tried to leave something to any of his other wives, the will could have been challenged in court for all I knew. Stephen must have thought he could rely on Rebecca to be fair when it came to keeping the wives in their houses and helping with funds to raise the children.
Actually, now that I thought about it, this was the obvious choice. If Stephen had bequeathed money or houses to each wife separately, they would have had the freedom to sell and move away. This way, Stephen maintained control of the whole family through Rebecca, beyond the grave.
In the back of my mind, I admitted that this also gave Rebecca a strong financial motive to kill Stephen. If the police were here, this document surely would have clinched their case against her. I put it back where I’d found it.
I looked through the remaining drawers in the final cabinet, and found a file with Naomi’s name on it. I pulled it out, aware that I might well be invading the privacy of my future daughter-in-law, but I felt the circumstances demanded the breach. I had expected to find childish pictures she’d drawn or letters she’d written to her father. I wasn’t prepared to see a careful accounting of the money she’d been receiving from him since her second year of college. Nearly a hundred thousand dollars in total, and the last payment had been made only last month. I saw a list of hours spent at home during the weekends which seemed to offset her debt in a small amount. Was that really why Naomi kept coming home? She’d have to keep doing it until her nineties at this rate to pay Stephen back.
From the way she spoke of her father, I’d assumed that Naomi had severed ties, especially financial ones. I hadn’t thought much about where she got the money for med school. Loans or scholarships, I’d assumed. But no. Despite the fact that she had resigned from the Mormon church and that she had told me that she had also rejected her father’s lifestyle, she was still taking money from him. Did Kenneth know about this? Was it my place to tell him? I didn’t know.
The one worry of mine it eased was that Naomi might have had something to do with her father’s death. This file seemed to make it clear that she had no motive. Financially, she would be much worse off without Stephen around.
After that, I looked through some more files and found one labeled investments. I took it out and tried to make sense of it. It looked to me like there was something like two million dollars scattered through various stocks, including tobacco companies, companies known for selling alcohol and spirits, several large media corporations that were known for pornography, and a number of oil companies.
On one level, it bothered me that any Mormon would invest in such things, but it seemed just another layer of Stephen’s hypocrisy. And they had certainly brought Stephen significant returns over the years. His return was more than ten times his investment. Was that Jennifer’s work? Did it mean she had the least reason of any of them to want Stephen dead? All those investments would be under Rebecca’s purview now. She might be able to talk Rebecca into letting her have the same control as before, or she might no
t.
I poked around on the desk and in one of the envelopes on the top, I found a letter to a lawyer that was dated Sunday, the day before we’d come over. It was a request for a change of will, “as they had discussed,” and it was signed. But I had no idea what the requested change had been and I felt a burning frustration over that. All my snooping, and it had only led to more questions than ever.
Had Rebecca been about to be disinherited in favor of one of the other wives? If so, why? Or perhaps Stephen had simply decided to leave the other wives their own houses. But that didn’t seem to jibe with what I had known of him. He would have wanted to manipulate them somehow. But then who would get control? Perhaps Jennifer, since she was the one who knew the most about money.
I remembered then the hushed conversation Stephen and Jennifer had had when he took me and Kurt over to meet her at her house. The argument with Joanna she’d mentioned. It had happened the same day as this letter was dated, but it wasn’t necessarily related. I definitely needed to talk to Jennifer alone.
As I went back upstairs, I realized the afternoon was wearing away. I thought about texting Kurt, at least, to tell him I wouldn’t be home tonight. Was he expecting me? Would he be worried about me if I didn’t show up? Would he come back here to help me? I wished he would, but I couldn’t find it in myself to beg him for anything. My pride wouldn’t permit me to accept blame for everything just to make peace.
Chapter 19
The other wives were gone by the time I went back upstairs to the living room, but Rebecca was still on the couch, alone. I sat down beside her. She seemed older and sadder than she had been before, though not as helpless and lost as when she’d first found Stephen’s body.
After a long period of silence, I said, “I saw the will. You inherit everything.” I watched for her reaction.
She didn’t flinch. “I didn’t kill him,” she said, staring at her hands.
For Time and All Eternities Page 16