The Gates of Babylon (11 page)

Lucifer,
Father would have said.
He is always trying to destroy the church. Never forget it.

No, that was silly. Pure superstition.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Eliza woke when she heard the truck engine turn over in the driveway. She’d slept fitfully all night, waking any time the floorboards creaked or the wind rattled the windowpanes, any time she heard footsteps in the hall. Every time she thought it was Jacob, sneaking out. When the sound died, she would lie back down and drift into unsettled dreams.

But when she heard the engine, she was sure. She made her way to the window and looked down at the driveway where Jacob had parked the extended cab pickup. Three figures made their way from the house on the other side of the Christianson compound. Miriam and David, and she supposed the third must be Officer Trost. They climbed in, one up front, and two in the back. Jacob would be the one behind the wheel.

Why me? Why am I the one who has to stay behind?

Jacob had to go—she understood about the medical supplies—and Miriam and Steve were both former FBI agents. Of course they would go. What about David? Let him stay. He was Jacob’s counselor,
he
could keep the quorum in line. And Eliza could go instead. With Jacob, where she belonged. With Steve, to keep him safe.

It wasn’t fair.

Quit whining
, she told herself.
Suck it up and do your duty.

The truck crunched slowly over gravel as it backed into the street. From there it swung south, lights still off. Jacob meant to skirt the temple and the chapel on his way to meet Steve in the flatbed truck on the far edge of the valley. In a moment they had disappeared.

“Are they gone?” a voice asked from the other bed in the room.

Eliza turned, startled. A lamp came on and Lillian propped herself on her pillows. Her long, corn-silk braids draped over her slender bosoms and she looked so young in the light, almost like one of Eliza’s teenage sisters, even though she was only two years younger than Eliza herself. And if you added the abuse she’d suffered in the Kimball cult, forced to be the polygamist wife of one of Taylor Junior’s henchmen—dead now, and may he rot in hell—it was a wonder she still carried such a fresh, youthful look.

“Yes, they’re gone,” Eliza said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. Turn off the light, get some sleep.”

Lillian looked at the old windup clock on the nightstand, with its glowing hands. “Twenty to six. I need to get up in a few minutes anyway to gather eggs and feed the chickens. Milk the cows. And then I thought I’d practice shooting the M99.”

“Before breakfast? People will love that.”

“You okay?”

Eliza sighed. Lillian propped herself higher in the bed and studied her. After a moment, she patted the side of her bed.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know what you’re going through,” Lillian said.

“I don’t think you do. Anyway, if I talk, I’ll complain. I hate complaining. I’ll do what I have to.”

“You know I ran that place for six months?” Lillian said. “After my husband died and before Taylor Junior came back to that pit in the desert—the men left behind were worthless. Someone had to keep people alive.”

Eliza studied Lillian’s face. No, Lillian
hadn’t
faced the same thing. She’d faced worse. And not a bit of—what would you call it?—post-traumatic stress disorder. How did some people manage? Eliza still dreamed about the horrible things she’d seen: Taylor Junior with his skull bashed in, people covered in chemical burns. Women, children, suffocating in an underground bunker. Father’s glassy stare as they dressed him in his temple robes for burial. And worse, the fear that she would lose the other people she loved.

Yet here was Lillian, an innocent, almost naïve look on her face that belied the horrors she had suffered. Eliza didn’t resent it so much as feel an aching envy that she couldn’t do the same.

Reluctantly, she came and sat next to Lillian on the bed. The younger woman took her hand and squeezed it. “You can do it.”

“I know. But I don’t want to.”

“We should both be with them,” Lillian said.

“You wanted to go too?”

“I’m not following Miriam around the desert for the fresh air. She works me like a dog. The only thing that makes it tolerable is that she works herself like a dog, too.”

“Assuming dogs carried grenades and M99 sniper rifles, yes.”

“I was so tired last week and so sick of reading that stupid explosives manual that I almost packed it up, quit, and moved back in with my father.”

Eliza raised an eyebrow. “Now that sounds like true desperation.”

Lillian’s father was Elder Smoot in the Quorum of the Twelve, Father’s cousin, and made of the same material too. Smoot had pushed his daughter into a first, disastrous marriage and would no doubt attempt more of the same if she moved back home. At the least, Eliza thought Lillian would find it intolerable to get a taste of freedom, only to fall beneath the patriarchal thumb again.

“I’d decided to quit,” Lillian continued, “when Miriam congratulated me on my shooting. She said I was a better shot than Krantz.”

“That’s quite a compliment. Steve could trim a coyote’s whiskers at twelve hundred yards.”

“I didn’t say it,” Lillian said.

“If Miriam said it, it meant something. She doesn’t dish out compliments very often.”

“She said she was sorry for riding me so hard.”

“Or apologies,” Eliza said.

“She said she was pushing me because I’m a lot like her a few years ago and she wants me to reach my potential. Hearing that felt pretty good. Next day, we went on a ten-mile run around the edge of Witch’s Warts. In pouring rain. That
didn’t
feel so great.”

“That’s what you get with Miriam,” Eliza said. “One step back, two whip cracks forward.”

“So she’s always been like this?”

“More or less. Worse now that she’s convinced the end is here.”

“Are you sure it’s not?”

“You have to admit they’ve been telling us that all our lives,” Eliza said.

“Yeah, but this is different. This time it seems real. Don’t you think?”

“Things do seem to be falling apart,” she admitted.

“Or coming together,” Lillian said. “Depending on your point of view. Wars and rumors of wars. Strange weather, famine.”

“What about signs in the heavens?” Eliza asked. “I haven’t seen any stars falling from the sky.”

“Have you seen the sunset? Last night, the moon looked like blood. How do you explain that?”

“Volcanic ash.”

Lillian raised an eyebrow then glanced toward the window. “Do you think they’re safe out there?”

“I do,” Eliza said. “Jacob knows what he’s doing. Steve and Miriam have the FBI background, and Trost is a police officer, and David… well, there’s always room for comic relief.”

Lillian laughed.

“David is growing up,” Eliza said, more seriously. “If he’s not ready yet, he will be soon. Jacob managed with me, and I’m sure he can do the same for David.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“I am,” Eliza said, a little surprised. “Thanks.”

She started to rise, thinking she would get an early start and shower before every toilet in the house flushed at the same time and killed water pressure to a trickle. But Lillian didn’t let go of her hand.

“One second,” the younger woman said. “Can I ask you something before you go?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think your brother would make a good husband?”

Eliza gave Lillian a sharp look. “I wouldn’t get any ideas if I were you.”

“I’m not going to throw myself on him,” Lillian protested. “But I’m wondering if his wife would accept me.”

Other women had come to Eliza with similar comments. Jacob was young, handsome, kind, and the leader of the church. Of course a man like that needed more wives. And his first wife was crippled by the car accident and might not be able to have more children. How else would Jacob grow his posterity?

“His wife is not the problem,” Eliza said. “She’s made it abundantly clear that she’d welcome a sister wife. But my brother isn’t at all interested in plural marriage. He’s made
that
abundantly clear.”

“Really? But when I talked to him, he said he’d think about it.”

“What happened to not throwing yourself on him?” Eliza pulled her hand away, irritated.

“I didn’t!”

“You’ve been here three months and you haven’t picked up yet that Jacob doesn’t want another wife?”

Lillian looked bewildered. “Jacob? Whoever said anything about Jacob? I’m talking about David.”

“Oh, gosh. I’m sorry.”

Well, of course. That’s what all that business was about Miriam; it was Lillian wondering how difficult it might be to live as the junior wife in that family. Eliza had no idea if either David or Miriam would be interested in Lillian, but they’d built an extra wing onto their house, with far more space than a couple with one child and another on the way would require. They had been giving the subject plenty of thought, she was sure.

“I shouldn’t have reacted like that,” Eliza said. “But you know what Fernie means to me. She’s my sister. I get protective, especially since her accident.”

Jacob, Eliza, and Fernie shared a strange family bond, unique even in Blister Creek. Eliza and Jacob had the same father, while Eliza and Fernie shared the same mother. She was half sister to both of them, even though Jacob and Fernie were not related to each other and had not grown up in the same household.

Lillian was still frowning, clearly offended in spite of the apology. “You could have started by not assuming the worst.”

“I am truly sorry.”

Lillian’s expression gradually softened. “You know Fernie doesn’t need protecting, right? Not even by Jacob. Not even because of the wheelchair.”

“I know.” Eliza felt doubly chastened now.

“What about David?”

Yes, what about David?

Eliza loved him, too, but she remembered the sick feeling when she tracked him down at the strip club in Nevada, and later in Las Vegas, strung out on crystal meth. He’d turned his life around in the last year and a half and now seemed to be growing
every day. He was lucky, in that he had Jacob to lead him and Miriam to push him.

“I don’t know,” Eliza said. “He’s… more than I thought he was.”

“My father is against it,” Lillian said. “He says David is a no-good drug addict. A Lost Boy.”

“After what happened with your first marriage, you’re probably better off doing the opposite of what your father says.”

“I know. But I’m a Smoot, too, and what Father says goes in that house. My mother didn’t want me to marry Aaron Young. My older sisters, either. Even the sister wives, and my brothers. Didn’t matter. Father said to marry him, so I did.”

Eliza had enough trouble managing the personalities in the Women’s Council, some of them as stubborn and immovable as the Ghost Cliffs, that she didn’t have time to study the machinations of Jacob’s quorum. But she knew about Elder Smoot. It was politics, no doubt. David’s influence as the son of the former leader and the brother of the current one was weakened by his youth and his status as a former Lost Boy.

“A second wife would boost David’s credibility,” Eliza said. “And Jacob’s, too. That’s what your father doesn’t like.”

She found herself thinking that David and Miriam should accept Lillian for that reason alone, to strengthen the Christiansons in the quorum. But then she recoiled. That was Father’s way of thinking. The very logic he had used when trying to manipulate Eliza into a polygamist marriage.

“Did you know two of my father’s cousins are bringing their families down from Idaho?” Lillian asked.

“I heard rumors. They split from the church about twenty years ago over some dispute about land.”

“It wasn’t a dispute with the Christiansons, though. With the Kimballs. Now that they’re out of the way, Father’s cousins want to come back.”

“Now that they need the safety of Blister Creek, you mean,” Eliza said. “So your father is getting new allies, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes, but the part that affects me is that I’ve got some male second cousins moving into the valley. And they’re looking for wives.”

“Wonderful.”

“I’d rather make my own choice, if you know what I mean.”

“Or you could choose not to get married at all. That’s also a valid choice.”

“You don’t think I should marry David, do you?”

“I don’t know, Lillian. I see more trouble than I see benefit.”

“Okay, that’s fine. But if it’s a choice, it’s still
my
choice. I don’t want you to decide who I will or won’t marry any more than I want my father to.”

“Fair enough,” Eliza said.

Lillian threw back the comforter and reached beneath the bed for her slippers and put them on. With the gray of early dawn slowly brightening the room, the two women set about making the beds.

“Father hasn’t given up on the stolen grain, you know,” Lillian said.

“Neither has anyone else.”

“Yes, but Father is doing things to stop it from moving out of the valley.”

“What kind of things?” Eliza said with a frown.

Footsteps creaked across the floor from the attic above them, and the bathroom door down the hall opened and shut. The entire house was shifting, rousing itself awake. Women waking children, boys and girls off to feed animals, scramble eggs, or mix pancake batter. Every meal in the Christianson house was a feast for a small army.

“Don’t worry,” Lillian said. “Father says he won’t move until the quorum approves. But I think he knows people. He’s moving poultry without a government permit, and he’s hooked into some kind of smuggler. If we can’t get our grain back for ourselves, he’s got a scheme to sell it at black market prices.”

“So wait, he’s telling people the government is sitting on a bunch of food down here?”

“I didn’t think it was any kind of secret,” Lillian said.

“That doesn’t mean we need to advertise it to some smuggling ring,” Eliza said. “It’s like telling people you have gold in your basement. It may be hidden, it may be locked in a safe. But someone is going to try to get it.”