The Blessed and the Damned (Righteous Series #4) Read online

  Eliza didn’t care. She wanted to get inside and make a cup of herbal tea to help calm down. And she was comforted by the presence of the neighbors, going about their business. Nothing wrong here.

  But a fresh shock jolted her when she stepped into her front room. Lamps lay broken on the floor, couch cushions tossed about, her books knocked off the shelves, some with covers torn off. Heart pounding, she backed out of the apartment, then stopped herself. With a flick of the wrist, she extended the steel baton.

  And once it was in her hand, smooth and hard and heavy, the fury started to boil.

  Eliza stepped all the way inside. It was quiet. She made her way through the apartment, room by room. When she saw the kitchen, she trembled in rage. They’d emptied her cupboards, smashed glasses and plates on the floor. A carton of milk lay emptied in a puddle on the floor. They’d smeared butter on the walls and spread a trail of Cheerios down the hall.

  In the bathroom, a broken mirror, the toilet clogged with a roll of toilet paper and overflowing. More vandalism in her bedroom. They’d knocked over a Monet print and a framed picture of Eliza with her mother, and they’d found her stash of money—about two hundred bucks in fives and tens tucked into her sock drawer—and scattered it on the bed and floor. She’d sewn the curtains herself, and they’d cut them into shreds. The window was open, the screen knocked out, and there was a dirty footprint on her white duvet where they’d stepped through the window and climbed onto her bed. She shut the window and latched it this time.

  Eliza twisted her hands on the metal baton and realized, with surprise, that she was disappointed that the vandals had left her apartment. She’d imagined herself surprising them from behind and hitting them in the face as they turned around. They’d fight back. She thought about the men she’d killed, Gideon and Caleb Kimball, and the satisfying crunch of rock smashing the bones of the face and head. Did she want to kill someone? Really?

  What’s wrong with me?

  She collapsed the baton, then stood with her eyes closed while she fought down the horrible mixture of fear and rage.

  Eliza double-checked every room and closet, even behind the shower curtain, then called Jacob on his cell phone. Voice mail. No surprise. He’d be hiking into Dark Canyon by now. She thought about calling her father, and had little doubt that he’d take action. But what kind of action? Something violent, and that was the last thing she needed.

  She carried the cordless phone into the bathroom and set to work cleaning up while she tried Fernie instead. Her sister picked up on the second ring. “It’s me, Eliza. Where are you now? Blister Creek?”

  “I haven’t left yet,” Fernie said. “Just finished loading the car. Sister Andra is going to drive me down. What’s that sound?”

  “The plunger. I’m trying to unclog the toilet.” She shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “Think you can hold out until morning? You’re not expecting to go into labor tonight or anything?”

  “No, I think this one is going the distance. Why?”

  “Soon as I clean up this messy apartment I’m driving down to Zarahemla.”

  “Liz? Is something wrong? You sound…strange. And since when is your apartment a mess?”

  “It’s messy today. Look, I’ve got to get out of here before I go crazy. Can you wait until I get there? We’ll drive down together.”

  “But you just got home,” Fernie said. “What about your job? Don’t they care?”

  “They’ll be fine. Some stuff is happening, and I—well, I’d rather be with you when you have the baby.”

  “You want to go to Blister Creek? Your father will be there, you know.”

  “I know. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

  Eliza hung up, looked over the mess a second time, and grew angry all over again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Taylor Junior was praying in his hidden sanctuary when he heard his father enter the canyon. The older man dislodged stones, which clattered down the hillside. Halfway up, he started to shout.

  “TJ! Are you up there?”

  Taylor Junior kept his eyes shut. Pebbles dug into his kneecaps as he continued to pray.

  “Helloooo?” The voice echoed off the canyon walls. A crow squawked its irritation, voice trailing away as it flew off from the unwelcome disturbance.

  Concentration shot, Taylor Junior opened his eyes and waited for his father to go away. It was dark but for a single shaft of light that penetrated a gap in the stones and inched across the wall, tracing the movement of the sun. The light hit the wooden casket in the corner.

  Its simple, faded appearance belied the deadly contents. At the top of the casket, someone had painted A.E.F. – LWST-178A in orange, stenciled letters. Below that, someone had written “Dew on Geraniums” in black paint, displaying the confident penmanship common a hundred years ago but rare in an age of computers and text messages. And finally, a huge skull and crossbones, branded at a later date.

  Taylor Kimball had brought it into the camp strapped to the back of a horse, kept it covered with an army blanket, then hauled the contents up the box canyon in stages, and then finally the empty box itself, which he had reloaded and nailed shut again. He had told nobody about the box or its contents.

  Five years ago Gideon Kimball and Israel Young had lain dead. The FBI had arrested Taylor Junior’s father, two other members of the Quorum of the Twelve, and a dozen Lost Boys. They almost got Taylor Junior, too. Stanley Clawson hid Taylor Junior in a chamber behind a false wall in his attic, built in the late nineteenth century to hide men from federal anti-polygamy raids. But nobody hid Brother Stanley, and the FBI arrested him, too. One of Abraham Christianson’s wives spotted Taylor Junior looting abandoned houses one evening. He stole a horse and fled into the Ghost Cliffs before Abraham and his men could hunt him down like a diseased coyote.

  For a time Taylor Junior continued his father’s plan to bribe fertility clinics along the west coast. And waited for instruction. His father would find a way to escape from prison. The angel would appear. Someone would tell him what to do with his father’s stash of money—roughly seventeen hundred thousand dollars in bank accounts under fake names.

  While waiting, he gained weight. He started to drink.

  Late one night, driving a pickup truck across a desolate stretch west of Blanding, with two empty forty-ounce bottles of Natty Light in the passenger seat, and eighty ounces of Natty Light in his belly, police lights flared in his rearview mirror. He pushed the pedal to the floor. The road seemed to buckle and sway in front of him. He roared down the highway.

  The chase lasted a minute, maybe two, and then he took a curve too fast. The truck leaned, then flipped. No seat belt. He flew around the cabin as the truck kept rolling and rolling, then found himself flying through the air. He landed in sand. The truck continued to crash and roll down the hillside for several more seconds, headlights spinning crazy circles, before it landed with a final, screeching crash. Apart from a twisted ankle, Taylor Kimball was uninjured.

  An hour or two later, when dawn came, he saw how lucky he’d been. He’d landed in the only sandy spot on a slope of rock and boulders. He was fifty feet from the road, but the truck itself lay another hundred feet farther down the hillside, crushed and shredded into a piece of industrial art.

  What had happened to the highway patrol? The officer must have realized that he’d gone over the edge, but not seen exactly where.

  Unless there had been no lights. Unless it had been someone or something else that had driven him over the edge. He looked up and down the hill again, at the rocks, the ledges, the wreckage of the truck, and marveled that he was still alive. Where were the cops?

  There’s a reason. Nothing happens without purpose.

  He took no chances. If they caught him, fingerprinted him, he’d go to prison.

  An hour later, he crouched between two boulders, in the shade of a cottonwood by the side of a small creek, as a helicopter thumped overhead. Had the
highway patrol finally investigated the accident and were now looking for him? Or was it one of the helicopter tours for tourists they ran out of Blanding? Taylor Junior waited until night before following the creek into the hills. He saw no roads or trails that day or the next, when his hunger grew until it became an all-consuming thing in his gut. He worked his way into the mountains.

  Taylor Junior didn’t know it at the time, but he had entered the Dark Canyon Primitive Area. He stayed for forty days.

  He entered the wilderness overweight, living a sinful life, afraid and tormented by his past. Weak and timid, afraid of the abuse and insanity that ran in his family. Afraid of becoming like his father, or one of his brothers. Angry at Abraham Christianson. Thinking about the man’s daughter, imagining himself taking Eliza as his wife, breaking her like a spirited horse.

  And Jacob Christianson. He was the problem. The Lord had called Jacob, handed him the keys to the kingdom. He’d been born with privilege, intelligence, charisma. Men wanted to be like him. Women wanted to bear his children.

  Why didn’t the Lord choose me?

  Hunger purged those thoughts, one by one. He ate juniper berries. They were bitter, but they eased the gnawing in his belly. Later, he found bird eggs and fat, wingless Mormon crickets which he mashed into a paste and cooked in little sausages over a laboriously built fire. When the creek dried, he found potholes in the mountains and filtered the water through his shirt and into an empty milk jug. A residue of sand and squirming mosquito larvae remained on his shirt after the water had passed through.

  Four weeks into his ordeal, he suffered a bout of dysentery, and later, when he’d recovered, a baby rattlesnake took refuge in his boot during the night and bit him when he stuck his foot in without looking first. He spent three days in a fever, wrestling with an evil spirit in his nightmares as he lay beneath a scavenged tarp that he had stretched between a pair of boulders. His water ran dry. He couldn’t walk or crawl to get more.

  Satan had sent a snake, but the Lord sent rain. One night, he woke to hear thunder and moments later, rain hammering down on the tarp. He grabbed one edge and channeled the rainwater into his mouth, then into his empty jug. Later the next day, he climbed to his feet and limped into the open. Pus drained from his foot, and he gathered leaves from a creosote bush, which he chewed for their medicinal value. The infection passed. He recovered.

  Taylor Junior came out of the wilderness weeks later with his belly fat gone, his ribs and cheekbones sharp against his skin. He’d lost first his fear, then the anger at Jacob and Abraham Christianson, and finally the lust for Eliza. He reclaimed these things one by one, but as possessions, not as things that owned him.

  Waiting in his sanctuary, Taylor Junior watched the light move across the casket. When it fell on the far wall, he rose to his feet. He hadn’t heard his father in twenty minutes. He expected to meet the older man down at the main camp, but instead he caught up as his father was about to enter the slot canyon that ate into the sandstone at the bottom of the box canyon. The older man leaned against a boulder, eyes closed, huffing for air.

  “Is it time?” Taylor Junior asked.

  Kimball’s eyes flew open. “Oh, it’s you.” His body relaxed, but then he looked up the box canyon with its steep sides and narrow base, and a frown crept across his face. “I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. Where were you?”

  “Conversing with the Lord.”

  * * *

  Late that night, a hundred miles to the west, Taylor Junior watched the other men sleeping around the campfire. He’d never spent a night in Witch’s Warts, and he felt uneasy, even though he knew the fire wouldn’t be visible from anywhere in Blister Creek. Two men, arms outstretched, could have spanned the sandy expanse between the pair of sandstone fins that rose fifty feet high on either side. A wedge of stars filled the gap, so thick they looked like shards of glittering quartz draining from the sky.

  Taylor Junior and the other six men had arrived on the edge of the Blister Creek Valley after dark, hid the trucks off the road, and then hiked a mile in, where they set up camp. They cooked their dinner over coals, then tossed on twigs and dried brush every time the fire began to die. Taylor Junior had studied the men as firelight reflected off their faces. They’d been jittery entering the valley, but here, in the maze of sandstone fins, columns, and ridges that cut through the center of the valley, Taylor Junior felt them calming. One by one, they’d climbed into sleeping bags and drifted off to sleep, and still he sat by the fire, thinking. Once, his father woke and asked if he wanted to trade off the watch, but Taylor Junior told him to go back to bed.

  It must have been 4:00 a.m. when the eighth man arrived behind a flashlight beam. The newcomer turned the light on the sleeping men, one by one, then squatted next to Taylor Junior. He flicked off the light.

  Taylor Junior added a couple of branches to the fire. “You’re late. Did you get lost?”

  “Not at all,” Aaron said. “Your instructions were clear enough. I left Salt Lake later than planned. Eliza didn’t get off work until nine.”

  “So she’s alive.”

  “She’s alive. Some old guy was with her. He knew nothing and was too weak to help. Not one of us—a Salt Lake Mormon, I think.”

  “And?” Taylor Junior asked.

  “It went well enough. She fought back, of course.” Aaron explained about the steel baton, how Phillip Cobb would be favoring his left arm. And then he added, “Good news from Zarahemla. Jacob’s wife is on her way to Blister Creek to deliver her baby.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The other men began to stir. Elder Kimball sat up in his sleeping bag and rubbed his eyes. Taylor Junior fed another branch into the fire.

  “Our man on the inside was confident enough,” Aaron said. “Fernie made an announcement at dinner. They don’t keep secrets, do they?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Well?” Taylor Junior’s father asked. He stifled a yawn. “What now?”

  “How does one typically deal with apostates?” Taylor Junior said. He didn’t mean it as an opening for debate, but the men suddenly looked thoughtful.

  His father opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head and looked into the fire. Taylor Junior looked around the circle. Stanley Clawson was up and warming his hands. Eric Froud was awake, too, sitting up in his sleeping bag. The other three men slept, undisturbed by the conversation.

  At last, Aaron Young spoke up. “I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “And what is that, Brother Aaron?”

  “There are eight of us here,” Aaron said. “That’s more than enough to go in and take what we need. How many men will be in the Christianson house, anyway?”

  “We have no way of knowing,” Elder Kimball said. “Abraham might have called a meeting of the entire Quorum of the Twelve.”

  “What Quorum?” Stanley said with a sneer. “What’s left? His son and some old men?”

  “You seem anxious to fight Brother Abraham again,” Taylor Junior said to Stanley.

  The man fell silent and rubbed his good hand along the cast on his left arm. His first day in Dark Canyon he’d sworn to drink Abraham Christianson’s blood. But it had been a hollow, frightened boast, like a child at the zoo, jeering at a lion that is safely behind bars.

  The other men looked to Taylor Junior for answers, but instead of speaking he poked a stick at the fire, watched the end catch, then took it out, blew out the flame, and studied the wisp of smoke that curled upward. The others stared at him, expressions wary. Elder Kimball caught Taylor Junior’s eye with a questioning look, but the younger man shook his head. Not yet. Let them come around to the problem first.

  “Don’t underestimate Jacob Christianson,” Elder Kimball said at last. “And what about Stephen Paul Young? He’s more than a match for any of you.”

  “But they won’t be meeting at the man’s house,” Aaron said. “If they’re meeting it will be at the temple. And we’ll come in like a
thief in the night. We’ll kill Abraham. Jacob too, if he’s dumb enough to be there. Any other sons over the age of fifteen. We’ll take the women and children as spoils. That’s the way to deal with apostates and fallen prophets.”

  The last three men had awakened as the conversation grew louder. They sat up, bleary-eyed, in their sleeping bags. Taylor Junior added more wood to the fire. It was crackling now, casting off enough light to see everyone clearly and illuminating the burnt red sandstone walls.

  “That’s what your brother did,” Taylor Junior said. “My brother, too. Israel and Gideon stormed in and took what they wanted. They killed a man in the temple, drowned another man—not far from here, in fact—and tried to kidnap Eliza and carry her off into the desert. Both men suffered violent deaths.”

  “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” Elder Kimball said with a nod.

  Taylor Junior turned to his father. “Sometimes violence is necessary. But our enemies are strong, so we can’t attack them directly. Jacob has a brother, David, who will do whatever he says. There’s a woman—some sort of former FBI agent—and she carries a gun. Stephen Paul beat Brother Stanley, and lets his wives carry rifles. Abraham would murder any of us with as much thought as he’d put down a diseased sheep. Eliza has killed two of my brothers already.”

  “We could have taken Eliza,” Aaron said, tone grudging.

  “No, the timing was wrong.”

  “Why? I don’t understand. Stuff her in the trunk and carry her into the wilderness. Make her do what we want.”

  “You think it’s that easy?” Taylor Junior asked. “Caleb threw her in a pit and starved her and she still didn’t break. How about Phillip Cobb? How is his arm doing? He’s lucky she didn’t cave in his head.”

  “It’s Abraham’s fault,” Aaron said. “He gave that girl too much lead, and she took advantage. And if he can’t control his own daughter, he has no authority to lead the church.”