Destroying Angel

by Michael Wallace

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Michael Wallace

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612182223

  ISBN-10: 1612182224

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012948145

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the personal journal of Henrietta Rebecca Cowley, born Independence Rock, Wyoming, 1872. Died Blister Creek, Utah, 1969.

  October 19, 1890

  I killed a man in cold blood. I provided him with strong drink, took his gun, pressed the barrel to his skull, and sent his miserable soul to hell.

  When the federal marshals arrest me—unless the elders condemn me first and cut my throat—I will admit everything. I will show them where I dumped the body into a sinkhole and explain how we covered it with buckets of sand. If justice demands that I swing for my crime, I shall go to the gallows like a lamb to the slaughter. I answer only to God.

  Three months now since we came into this valley: seven women, twenty-two children, and our wagons and livestock. We found a land of desolation, a desert valley covered in thorns and infested with venomous snakes and stinging creatures. If civilized man had ever entered this land, he had not tarried but had fled to greener pastures.

  Three months, yet I remember every detail, every word, even—or close enough to swear their veracity, with God and His angels as my witnesses. It is as if the very finger of the Lord has written these things in my mind, and I record them now to seal my testimony before man, even unto the seventh generation.

  On the day we arrived, Sister Annabelle was laid up in bed with a vexation of the bowels, and she didn’t see the valley until the following morning when she climbed down to make water. Her eyes widened as she looked across the desolate expanse, and then she turned to me with her jaw set and insisted we drive our oxen out of this wretched place.

  “This is the place, as Brigham Young said.”

  Her face flushed with fever and the furnace created by the August sun. “My husband said we would find a land flowing with milk and honey.”

  “It will flow,” I said. “In the Lord’s time.”

  “Keep going. Load those wagons. Maude, Nannie, yoke the oxen. We’re leaving right now.” She snapped her fingers at Nannie as if she were a child receiving chores, instead of Annabelle’s sister wife. The young woman obeyed.

  “Nannie!” I said. She drew short. “You heard my order. I want that stockade up before the Paiutes discover that we’re here. Maude!”

  The other women stopped, torn between my nominal control and Sister Annabelle’s force of will. Annabelle’s father was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, answerable only to the prophet, and her husband had six wives already, three of them here.

  Annabelle turned to me with a look of mixed frustration and anger. “We can do better than this. Take us east, closer to the Colorado. There’s another valley there. Fertile and green. Plenty of water.”

  “We’re not looking for fertile and green, we’re looking for isolated.”

  “Listen to me. You haven’t seen the place.”

  “I know the spot. It’s too close to Lee’s Ferry, and the marshals will be looking for us there. This is good enough. There’s running water, flat land, forage enough for cattle. We’ll make our own milk and honey.”

  “You’re not in charge here.”

  “Yes, she is,” Sister Laura answered in her clipped English accent. I turned to see my sister wife standing behind my right shoulder with a bundle of sticks for firewood. “You heard what Elder Cowley said.”

  Annabelle’s grip tightened on the brake-beam shelf of the wagon. Sweat poured down her cheeks from the effort of standing. “I heard what your husband said, self-serving as it may be. But if you think I’m going to let some girl—” She broke off suddenly. Her knees wobbled, and if Nannie hadn’t dropped the clothing she’d been hanging on a line when Annabelle barked at her, the older woman would have fallen. Nannie grabbed her and helped her sit in the back of the wagon.

  “If you are done venting your gall,” I said, “you should lie down and gather your strength. We’ll discuss it later.”

  Laura leaned close to my ear. “That fever was sent by the Lord, but Annabelle is recovering quickly. Don’t waste time.”

  Two mornings later a man appeared in camp, riding bareback on a pinto. He was a handsome young Lamanite, with his black hair pulled into a ponytail and a string of beads across his bare chest. He wore only a loincloth, and the sun had burnt his skin bronze. Paiute. I was with Sister Laura at the creek when he appeared on the opposite stream bank.

  I stiffened and grabbed Laura’s arm. “Get the girls.”

  She looked up and gave a start, and then her eyes darted to her daughters, who were bathing naked in the pool between us and the man on the horse. The girls splashed each other, laughing, not yet noticing the man. Laura grabbed the girls and dragged them away.

  The man watched Laura hustle them off, and his gaze trailed up the hillside toward our encampment. We’d built a crude stockade of crisscrossed branches collected from the banks of the creek and had started digging root cellars where I’d laid out the first three cabins in a defensive triangle. There could be no doubt of our intentions. It was a permanent encampment.

  The man turned back to me with narrowed eyes and said something in a hard voice. I warrant it was something like, “This is my hunting ground. Go away.” But for all I knew, he was asking how long it would take until we opened the trading post, or if we’d seen a certain good-for-nothing horse that had run off.

  “We’re peaceable,” I said. “We mean you no harm.”

  He nudged his horse toward me. It kicked up mud as it crossed the creek. I froze.

  And suddenly I was only a girl. Eighteen and alone in the wilderness. Unarmed. This man might hate white men. Maybe soldiers had killed his family and driven him into the wilderness, and this was his chance for revenge.

  Dear Lord, where are they? I prayed. Where are my sisters?

  Women’s voices rose on the hillside. Sister Laura’s climbed above the others, shrill and angry.

  The horse pulled next to me while I stood perfectly still, trembling in terror. I could smell the man and his horse. He carried a bow over his shoulder and a knife at his waist, i
ts leather sheath decorated with green and yellow glass beads that reflected the sun. The man ran his fingers through my hair. He said something else. It sounded curious rather than hostile, but I’d squeezed my eyes shut and couldn’t see his expression.

  A gunshot cracked the sky. The horse shied away with a toss of the head and a whinny of fear. The rider gripped its mane and struggled to regain control.

  Laura came running, waving the rifle over her head. “Leave her alone, you brute! I’ll shoot you dead this time!”

  The man’s eyes flashed and he reached for his bow. But when Laura lowered her gun, he jerked on the horse’s mane and rode off. He picked his way through a dry wash and then disappeared into the labyrinth of sandstone fins and columns that runs through the center of the valley.

  Fury rose in my breast as I stormed back into camp with Laura at my heel. “You cowards! Where were you? He was one man with a bow. Why didn’t you defend me?” Most of them wouldn’t meet my eye. “That man might have killed me. Why didn’t you come?”

  “Because Sister Annabelle told them not to,” Laura said in an angry voice. “That’s why.”

  “A savage,” Annabelle said. She sat on the edge of her wagon with her legs dangling over the edge. Her fever had passed. A rifle lay across her lap, but her hands busied themselves stitching up a hole in a child’s shirt. “If we’d gone down waving guns around like this one”—she jabbed her needle in Laura’s direction—“he’d have seen that we’re all women. And then a dozen of the beasts would show up in the night to make an attempt on our virtue.”

  “We are alone,” I said. “And if the Lamanites come back, they’ll figure that out soon enough. We need to prove it doesn’t matter. We won’t be intimidated. The Lord is on our side, and with His help, with a well-fortified camp, and with our rifles, they’ll see we’re not to be bothered. We can defend ourselves. Next time—”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Annabelle interrupted. “Because we’re not staying here. We’re going east to Lee’s Ferry. We’ll leave tomorrow morning.”

  “No, we won’t. My instructions are to settle this valley.”

  “Those were the old instructions,” she said. “We have a new commandment. We’ve been ordered to settle on the north side of the Colorado. There’s a place called Blossom Meadows. It’s high in the mountains, cool, with water and timber.”

  “A new commandment?” I asked. “Did the pony express ride in with a message from the prophet? Did they build a telegraph line while I was at the creek?” It was a mistake to lose my temper, but I was still shaken from my encounter with the Lamanite.

  And so much work done already. An acre measured, with an irrigation channel dug from the creek. In the next week I’d hoped to dig a well, retrieve timber from the cliffs, and put down the foundation for two houses. Backbreaking, exhausting work, all of it. A dozen men couldn’t do as much in so little time, and I’d be d—ed if I was going to abandon our efforts to start fresh somewhere else.

  But Annabelle had one final trick. She smiled sagely, set down her mending—but not the gun, I noticed—and walked to face me, her rifle tucked under her arm. “You’ve done your best, sister. But look around—it’s not enough. I thought it was a mistake to stop here, but I doubted myself. I didn’t trust my own judgment enough to tell you this was the wrong place.”

  The devil you say, I thought. You’ve been undermining me since we arrived.

  Annabelle turned to face the other women. “While you were sleeping last night, I was talking with an angel.”

  “A blessing from the Lord,” Maude said in a hushed voice. Laura gasped and Sister Lila put a hand to her mouth.

  I was taken aback and didn’t respond quickly enough. By the time I recovered, the other women were chattering and talking about the signs and wonders that would precede the Second Coming.

  Of course I didn’t believe it. Why would I? It sounded so clearly self-serving. Annabelle had tried to turn the other women against me, but apart from Nannie, only fourteen years old and barely fluent in English, they had accepted my role, had worked from dawn to dusk with little complaint. There would be time enough to rest later. The men had given us a task, and we would move heaven and earth until it was done.

  There was no angel. Nobody had come to Annabelle in the night. It wasn’t even a dream, it was a lie of the most cynical, corrupt sort. And truth would out. They would see her story as a manipulative attempt to turn their desires down an easier path. And then she would be finished. Or so I told myself.

  But a few days later I saw the angel myself. Only it wasn’t a being of light. It was an evil spirit.

  Jacob Christianson shut the diary with a groan. “Not you too.”

  A child whimpered somewhere in the slumbering house, but he didn’t give it much thought at first, still caught up in Grandma Cowley’s story and noticing again the sleet pinging against the window. He’d picked up the diary in part to distract himself from the unseasonable weather—the dread of any farming community. Jacob sank into the bed next to Fernie, who was breathing heavily in her sleep. A hard day of physical therapy had sent her to bed early.

  He fingered the diary. When he’d opened it the first time, a distant, musty smell had reached his nose—dirt and dry rot and yellowed paper—a smell that jerked him backward to that day in his childhood when he’d discovered Grandma Cowley’s cellar. The pages were thick, rough beneath his fingers. Insects had tunneled through the heart of the book, riddling the pages with pinpricks. He wrapped the diary in a dry cloth and tucked it into the nightstand, where it had slumbered, unread, for almost a year.

  The problem wasn’t Great-Great-Grandma Cowley’s story. That had drawn his interest at once. Who was this man she had killed? The Paiute on the horse? Would the government have cared enough to make Grandma Cowley afraid of hanging? No, at the slightest hint their virtue might be at stake, the women would have been given carte blanche to shoot any number of Indians.

  He wanted to know why the founders of Blister Creek sent their wives into the wilderness alone. And who was Sister Annabelle? The daughter of a member of the Quorum of the Twelve from the Salt Lake–based church? Brigham Young Junior’s daughter, maybe?

  But then there was the part about the dark angel. More religious superstition. He’d always thought Grandma Cowley was different. Maybe that’s why he’d waited for a year to read what she had to say—he was afraid to discover she was like everyone else in Blister Creek, with their talk of angels and evil spirits.

  The whimper turned into a cry. His ears strained. His daughter, Leah, shared a room with two of his young half sisters across the hall, and at first he thought it came from there. But then he was sure it came from the attic. Daniel and Nephi’s room.

  Jacob slipped from bed and pushed past Fernie’s wheelchair and into the hall. Fernie stirred but didn’t wake. He felt his way to the foot of the attic stairs and listened, hoping that whoever it was would settle down.

  The crying stopped, and then Daniel spoke in a high, terrified voice. “Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”

  Jacob’s mouth went dry. He took the stairs two at a time and threw opened the attic door. There was something palpably wrong in the room, and a shudder crawled up his spine. Moonlight filtered through the blinds to cast stripes of gray and black across the room. A man’s shadow lay across Daniel, struggling to subdue the boy, who cried out and writhed to free himself. Jacob flipped the light switch and rushed toward the bed with fury rising in his chest.

  There was no one else there. He drew short, confused. What he’d taken for a man was a twist of blankets coiled around the boy like a gopher snake squeezing a rat. Daniel thrashed and bucked, and the veins in his neck bulged. His eyes were open, but he had the glazed look of a child under sedation.

  “Daniel! Wake up!” He shook the boy, but his son kept struggling. Jacob fought with both blankets and child until he had Daniel free. His son trembled in his arms. “Shh, it’s me, it’s Daddy. You’re okay, I’m he
re.”

  “I can’t get away!”

  “You’re okay, I’m here. You’re safe.”

  “Daddy, make the man go away.”

  Jacob held the boy to his chest and rocked him back and forth. “Shh. There’s nobody there. It was a nightmare, you’re okay now. It’s just me.”

  He repeated this again and again. Gradually Daniel’s struggles eased, and soon he was only trembling. And then, like a light flicking off, the fit passed. The boy’s breathing slowed, he closed his eyes, and with a final whimper his body relaxed. Jacob laid him back on the pillow, stroked his sweaty forehead, and then covered Daniel with the blankets.

  He sat on the edge of his son’s bed, his own heart still pounding. Was this how it started? Did it run in the family? Had Daniel’s biological brothers—Gideon, Caleb, Taylor Junior, Jonathan—suffered night terrors as boys? Had they already heard voices when they were ten?

  Meanwhile, Jacob’s younger son, Nephi, lay quiet on his bed in the corner, the blankets pulled up around his head. Jacob had a sudden fear about him too, even though he was biologically a Christianson and not a Kimball. He was too still. But no, Nephi was just asleep, oblivious to the light and the cries of his older brother.

  Get a grip on yourself.

  Daniel had had a bad dream. They happened. And that dark sensation that had flooded over Jacob when he opened the attic door had been nothing more than the superstition of Grandma Cowley’s diary falling from his imagination like dust knocked from the rafters of an abandoned barn.

  He creaked his way back down the stairs to find Fernie waiting at the bottom in her wheelchair. “Was that Daniel?”

  “A nightmare. No big deal.”

  “Really?” A twinge of worry touched her voice. “Are you sure it was a nightmare?”

  “Night terror, I guess. Half-awake but incoherent.” He looked at her more closely. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just—well, never mind. I thought it might be something else.”

  He wheeled her back into the bedroom and helped her into bed. Her left arm was stronger, but she still couldn’t put weight on her paralyzed legs. After a year of therapy, there was little chance she ever would.