The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4)

by Michael Wallace

  “Or maybe it was over already,” Kimball said. “Maybe Fernie was dead in the accident and there was no point.”

  Aaron pushed aside Eric and Stanley and shoved his face into Kimball’s. “I saw her moving. She was alive.” Aaron glared, as if daring the old man to contradict him.

  Kimball took a step back, and his feet slipped on the loose dirt and stone. He sensed the ledge on his left and realized that if Aaron gave him a push, he’d tumble to his death. And nobody here would stop these two men. He licked his lips.

  “If you’re right,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “then we need to confront him to make sure. We covenanted to follow him.”

  “We covenanted to follow him only so long as he obeyed the Lord,” Aaron said.

  “Right, so long as he did that. But at the least he deserves the chance to explain. Maybe this is part of some larger plan.”

  “That seems reasonable,” Stanley offered.

  Aaron turned on the older man, as if getting ready to threaten him again, but the others were nodding, even Eric Froud. What’s more, they didn’t look angry so much as worried. They’d tried to kill Fernie Christianson and failed. It wasn’t the push they needed—Jacob would be his usual, controlled self, but now he’d be awake. What would he do? Call on the FBI? Ally himself with his father and Stephen Paul Young? Aaron would have to be worrying about his older brother, and Brother Stanley would be thinking about how Abraham had beaten him and driven him from Blister Creek. Dangerous enemies. They needed leadership, and Taylor Junior was nowhere to be found.

  Aaron said, “We’re wasting our time, let’s get out of here.” He gave Elder Kimball and Brother Stanley a sharp look. “And keep your legs moving. I’m tired of waiting for some of you to catch up.”

  As they set off, Kimball watched Aaron and Eric and didn’t like what he saw. Eric wore a deer rifle on a holster slung next to his pack. His hand kept dropping to the stock. Once, Kimball came around the corner, puffing, to find Eric and Aaron separated from the others, talking in low voices. They looked up as Kimball rounded the corner, then continued on their way without another word.

  Brother Stanley caught up a few minutes later, sweat pouring down his face. “I’m not cut out for this. I can’t catch my breath.”

  “We’re at eight thousand feet,” Elder Kimball said.

  “I’m wondering if I should stop, try to catch up later.”

  Kimball turned to watch Eric and Aaron, then said to Stanley, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. This is not the sort of place you want to be caught alone.”

  * * *

  Sister Miriam was watching through the binoculars when the man approached the slot canyon below her. She was so high above him that she could only see the top of his head and not his face. The sandstone came together like swirls of red and white taffy, eroded down the center by millennia of wind and water, opening wide enough for a man to pass, but closing to a slit over the man’s head. David had warned her never to enter a slot canyon if the sky was overcast. A light rain upstream could funnel the water through the narrow channel until it was a raging, deadly torrent. With few places to escape the slot canyon, and the sandstone shielding the hiker from rain, the victim might not even realize she was in danger until the water came roaring around the corner. The sky was clear at the moment.

  The man lifted his face to scan the walls of the larger, encompassing canyon, and she caught a glimpse of his face. She let out a small gasp of recognition. Taylor Junior.

  He hesitated for a moment, then disappeared into the fissure. She turned the binoculars up the canyon to where the sandstone fissure opened as it entered the larger box canyon. A mesa wrapped around the larger canyon, rising to roughly the height of the mountain on which Miriam and David had camped. They’d been lucky to choose this spot. The other choice—around the other side of the ridge with a slightly better overlook of the enemy’s main encampment—would have blocked the view down to the slot canyon. As this occurred to her, she realized that Taylor Junior’s entrance into the sandstone mouth would also be invisible to the other people in his sect. Was that a coincidence?

  “David!” she said in a sharp voice as she lowered the binoculars.

  David crunched across the gravel behind her. She turned and flushed. He was bare-chested, his hair wet. Steam rose from his body. He’d been washing in the stream that flowed by the camp where they’d spent the previous two nights.

  “Keep down,” she said.

  He squatted next to her. “What is it?”

  “He just entered the slot canyon,” she said.

  “Who did, our main guy?”

  He reached for the binoculars, but Miriam held them back. “You’re freezing. Put on your shirt and I’ll show you.”

  She watched while he patted himself dry with his shirt. She studied his chest muscles, his strong shoulders, his lean stomach. A flutter of what could only be described as lust warmed her body. No, not lust. Or at least, not just lust.

  I love this man, she thought. It wasn’t just David, of course. She loved them all—Eliza, Fernie, Jacob. The old women in the church, the children, fresh and trusting. Even the cranky old polygamists and the stern patriarchs like Abraham and Stephen Paul. It was one community, wrestling, certainly not always in perfect harmony, but all trying to pull in the same direction, trying to build Zion. And what had Miriam been before? Nothing. Nobody.

  But her love for David transcended all of that. For all his flaws, his weakness, his fear that he was nothing but a shadow of his brother, she loved him with a fierce, all-consuming passion. There was something about the vulnerability mixed with strength that made her want to take care of him, to nurture his body and his faith.

  A few days after the fire in the Las Vegas dump, Miriam and David had accompanied Agent Krantz to turn over Diego, the boy they’d rescued from the cult, to foster care. In the building Diego cried and clung to David’s leg, looking and acting like a younger child. Miriam, heart breaking, helped pry him off and turn him over to the social workers.

  Diego had no identifiable family—couldn’t say anything about his background before his mother had joined Caleb’s cult—but Krantz had pulled a few strings to get the child declared a resident of Utah rather than Nevada. But they’d still need to follow the state’s predetermined dance steps to get Diego turned into their care.

  The social worker wasn’t unsympathetic. Diego’s distress must have helped with that. Get licensed, the woman said. Submit an application. It would only take a few weeks. Meanwhile, if they really were engaged, it would help their case to go through with the marriage. Nothing came up about polygamy.

  Later, while Krantz was driving them home, David said in a bitter tone, “The hell with the rules. We should have kept him.”

  Miriam said, “That would work great until sometime, a year from now, a cousin or an aunt shows up and claims the boy.”

  “So what, we just toss him into the system? That’s great.”

  “She’s right,” Krantz said. “Follow the rules and eventually you’ll be able to adopt him. It will all be on the up-and-up. And irreversible.”

  She had wondered if David saw some of himself in the boy. Or maybe that was her own prejudice coming through. A man and a boy, both lost, both needing someone—Miriam, to be exact—to take care of them.

  As for her desire, Sister Miriam was no blushing virgin—her pre-Mormon past contained enough glittering examples of lust and passion that her imagination was more than enough to fill her in as she slept next to David in the tent hidden in the copse of juniper trees. Last night it had been so cold and windy on the mountain that they’d zipped their sleeping bags together to share warmth. The night had started innocently enough, aided by several layers of clothing, but sometime in the night she’d awakened to find her hand resting under his shirt, next to his belly, and her legs wrapped around his.

  David was breathing softly. She meant to withdraw her hand, disentangle her legs from his, but couldn’t br
ing herself to break the intimate contact. Since joining the Zarahemla-based Church of the Last Days the previous summer, Miriam had kept a tight lid on her sexuality. She hadn’t so much as touched her own body in a sexual way. She wasn’t afraid of sex or passion like some women in the church, but had determined to obey all the rules. But now her arousal swelled until her heart pounded and her breaths came in shallow gasps. She had pulled away only when it grew too much to bear.

  And hadn’t felt guilty in the morning.

  “Are you okay?” David asked, studying her face as he finished buttoning his shirt and took the binoculars from her hands. “You look flushed.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “How about you?”

  “You know what? I think I’m a little better this morning. My headache isn’t so bad, and I didn’t feel dizzy when I got up.”

  “The elevation can’t be helping with the headaches,” she said. “What, do you think we’re at 7,500 feet?”

  “At least.” He raised the binoculars and peered into the canyon where she gestured. “I don’t see—wait, there’s something. Yeah, someone is in there. Crap, he’s disappeared again.” He scanned the surface of the slot canyon. “We’d have a devil of a time following him up that ravine. It’s too enclosed.”

  “But if he’s going up the canyon, he’ll have to come out of the ravine sooner or later.”

  “But why? What’s the point?” He handed back the binoculars. “Is he leaving? There might be a trail on the near side of the box canyon, back toward the end. What do you think?”

  “Maybe. Could be his secret way in and out of camp and that’s why he’s sneaking out through the slot canyon.”

  Miriam studied the larger canyon, which boxed off at the end, surrounded by sheer cliffs two or three hundred feet high. A lot of trees and brush up there, and a couple of spots eroded in the sandstone cliffs that might turn into natural arches in another ten thousand years. No water that she could see.

  In the other direction, the Kimball encampment was still quiet. No campfires and no people in sight. There were lean-tos visible beneath the trees if you knew where to look, and occasionally a woman or a child would emerge to visit the stream, but nobody at the moment.

  Whatever the reason, Taylor Junior had slipped away alone.

  She tried to control her excitement. “What if we go down there?”

  “What for?”

  “Look, if we climb down this trail, we’ll come out into the box canyon right before the slot canyon opens up again. He’ll have to go past us to get back into the slot canyon.”

  “I suppose it would be possible.” David didn’t sound excited. He took back the binoculars. “But Jacob would want us to stay here.”

  “What Jacob wants is to take care of Taylor Junior.”

  “He told us to find the camp and leave clues so he can locate us. Then, when he comes back, we can decide what to do.”

  “Come on, this is our chance,” Miriam said. “And besides, when has Jacob ever wanted blind obedience? Your brother would tell us to use our brains and rely on the Spirit.” David lowered the binoculars and gave her a look, so she added, “Okay, maybe just the brains part.”

  “What do you mean by ‘take care of Taylor Junior’? I don’t want to go down and start blasting away.”

  “Of course not. We’ll arrest him.”

  “We can’t arrest anyone. You’re not FBI anymore, and I’m not anything.”

  “We can’t legally arrest him. But we absolutely can take him prisoner. We’ll come out of the box canyon the same way we got down, then bring him out of Dark Canyon. None of the others will know a thing.”

  “And what? Hitchhike into Blanding with our illegal prisoner? Start walking down the road until the highway patrol screeches up with guns drawn?”

  “Come on, David. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. Hurry, we don’t have much time.”

  David made a few more sputters of protest, but moments later they’d gathered canteens, firearms, and a length of rope for tying up their prisoner. The deer trail followed the ridge curving away from their objective, and what had looked like a gentle incline down toward the canyon was, on closer inspection, a steep slope of scree. They scrambled over the loose stone before emerging among the boulders and trees. They lost the trail, and David navigated by compass when the trees grew thick. When they found the trail again, it seemed to be carrying them back up, but then it wrapped around one of the foothills and descended back toward the box canyon.

  David stopped and leaned against a boulder, breathing hard. “We’ll have a harder time getting out than in.” He took a pull from his canteen. “Especially with a prisoner.”

  Miriam glanced at the mountain behind them. They’d probably descended eight hundred feet already. “We’ll manage. Come on.”

  The sun climbed in the sky, and the air, frigid earlier that morning, grew hot and still. Lizards with blue throats and bellies did territorial pushups and then fled for crevices in the rock when David and Miriam got too close. A hawk soared above them in a blue sky bisected by a single contrail from horizon to horizon.

  They entered the box canyon at the point where the fissured sandstone of the slot canyon ended, exactly as planned. They positioned themselves behind a natural stone wall of boulders that had fallen from the cliffs. Miriam wiped her face against her sleeve, then reached for her gun.

  “See anything?” David asked in a low voice.

  “No,” she admitted. “Too many trees and boulders.”

  “Keep your voice down,” he said in a near whisper. “These canyons have weird acoustics. We don’t want the echo to give us away.”

  She thought she had been quiet already. “Right, sorry.” She leaned in to speak directly in his ear. “Anyway, the canyon is too steep, and there’s no other way out.” It was obvious now that they were down in it. “There’s no way he’ll be expecting us. We’ll end it quickly.”

  “Yeah, if he’s still here,” David said. “Took longer to get down than we thought.”

  That was a flaw, admittedly. She backtracked to where the slot canyon ended. From above it had looked like a crack in the surface of the earth, but close up it was almost cave-like except for the slice of daylight that penetrated the weirdly sculpted sandstone fissure.

  Even though the air was almost still, what breeze there was funneled into the fissure and let out a low, moaning whistle as it passed through, drawn by differences in air pressure and temperature. A bowl of sand lay at the top of the slot canyon, the surface sculpted into ripples like waves across a pond on a windy day. She imagined what would happen when it rained, with the box canyon funneling water to this spot where it would drain into and fill the slot canyon.

  “Don’t step there,” she warned David as he approached the sandy bowl. Instead, she bent on the slickrock just above it. She pointed at the single set of boot prints crossing the sand to emerge on the bare rock where they stood. Already the breeze was eroding the edges of the prints. In another hour they’d be gone. She drew the Glock from her shoulder holster, then looked back up the box canyon. “The prints continue to climb into the box canyon, and they don’t come out. He’s in there. Draw your gun—we’re going to take him down.”

  David nodded and pulled out his pistol. His gun hand, relatively steady at the shooting range, wobbled. He licked his lips.

  Miriam switched the gun to her left hand and pointed it at the ground while she positioned herself behind him. She used her right hand to steady his wrist. “Two things,” she said in a soft voice. “First, think about what Jacob would say.”

  “Go back to our blind and wait for him to tell us what to do?”

  “No, silly. He’d say that acting is the same as doing. Imagine that we’re two FBI agents. I’m the senior agent and so I’ll give you instructions, but you’re trained, ready, and confident and you’ll show it. That’s what Jacob would tell you to do.”

  “It’s easy for Jacob to say ‘just be confident.’ Because he�
�s already, you know, confident. What’s the other thing?”

  She squeezed his wrist. “The other thing is that it’s not an act. You really are trained. That’s what all that time at the shooting range is about. Muscle memory, automatic reactions. Remember that drill we did in the hills above Zarahemla?”

  “I thought that was just paranoid end-of-the-world crap.”

  “It isn’t paranoid,” Miriam said, “it’s how we cover our partners during an encounter with an armed suspect. That’s exactly what we’ve got here.” She held his wrist and pressed her body against his until he stopped trembling and his breathing slowed. “Steady? Good, let’s take out that son of a…take out that spawn of Satan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Taylor Junior had never believed in the angel until it visited him on the salt flats in the desolate western desert. He was no fool—he’d seen his brother Gideon drugging the wine in the temple to induce visions in the other men, mentally weakened by thirty-six hours of fasting. The angel was a fraud. What’s more, anyone could see that insanity infected the Kimball line. Caleb was a pyromaniac who whispered arguments with himself and burned his followers alive. Another brother—Jonathan, with his wide, trusting eyes—threw himself over the Ghost Cliffs on his fourteenth birthday. His suicide note said that an evil spirit had been possessing him.

  And then there was Gideon, who took pleasure in tormenting Taylor Junior as they grew up, a calculated, never-ending parade of humiliations designed to turn his younger brother into a servile, cowardly follower. If Eliza hadn’t crushed Gideon’s skull it might have worked. But Gideon was no kind of believer. Or so Taylor Junior had thought.

  But once, as children, Gideon’s mask slipped. He’d abandoned Taylor Junior in the labyrinthine passageways of Witch’s Warts. It took two hours before the younger brother staggered out, crying and sunburned. Gideon was sitting cross-legged on a boulder, scraping letters into the sandstone with a butter knife. He looked up with a mixture of relief and disappointment when Taylor Junior came out of the maze of fins and hoodoos.