By the time I reached the third floor hallway, I could hear Rebecca’s loud weeping coming from one of the bedrooms, then Naomi’s voice rising over her cries, “Mom, Mom, you’ve got to—”
I had terrible visions of Talitha, gone cold and white in her bed, and me having to face another dead child’s funeral. How could I have left her alone last night? Why hadn’t I checked on her before I went to bed? Or when I’d been up and heard the conversation between Sarah and Joanna?
But when I followed Kenneth through the half-open door, where he came to a sudden stop, I saw it wasn’t Talitha at all. It wasn’t her room, which I’d seen last night. This was obviously the master bedroom. And it was Stephen who was causing the cries.
Rebecca was crouched over her husband, who was lying face up on the floor of the bedroom at the foot of the queen-size bed. Just above the bed was a photo of Stephen surrounded by his loving wives and children, which must have been taken fairly recently.
I smelled something strange, fetid, and the awareness settled in that I was looking at a dead body. Stephen Carter’s dead body.
Rebecca, her hands covered in shining red blood, was struggling with something that I realized was a butcher knife lodged in Stephen’s chest. She seemed to be trying to pull it out, but her hands kept slipping on it.
“Stephen, Stephen, come back to me,” she sobbed as she rocked back and forth.
She really shouldn’t have been touching the body, I thought, feeling distant and cold from the horror of the scene. My hands were tingling and I was dizzy and nauseated. I reached out and gripped the side of the door to make sure I didn’t fall down.
All of my conflicting feelings for Stephen Carter rose to the surface. He was charming, but also controlling and manipulative. He was a scholar of Mormon history, but had his own reasons for it. He was a father to twenty-one children, and a husband to five wives. He was a doctor, and a good one, from what I’d gathered. He was a child of God, and now he had gone home to God for whatever judgment was just.
Chapter 14
I stared at the bulk of the body on the floor. Stephen seemed very large in his death. His muscles were lax, but still, his limbs filled the small space of the room. His eyes were open, and it seemed to me that there was an expression of anger on his face.
I averted my eyes from his dead gaze, eager to look at anything else in the room. I noticed that the rug he was lying on was a handmade rope braid rug, a handicraft that I had never learned, but Rebecca must have. The yellow and green summer colors had been splattered with very dark red blood. That sight made me queasy, but it was less unpleasant than looking directly at Stephen’s face.
Naomi was standing in the middle of the room, one hand out, but still as a statue, staring down at her father. Kenneth was at her side.
“Naomi?” He got out.
She turned to him and said with a voice of steel, “Mom. We have to make sure she’s all right.”
Kenneth stared at his fiancée for one more moment, then moved around her to Rebecca. He crouched down and was about to put a hand to her back, then thought better of it, considering the fact that she had her hand on a knife. “Rebecca, are you all right?” he asked.
I was still trying to figure out what exactly had happened. Her hand was on the bloody knife. Was it possible she had killed Stephen? But surely there hadn’t been time between when she’d come up here and when she had shrieked, and I hadn’t seen her with a knife going up the stairs. Which meant what? Could she have killed him before she went down calmly to prepare breakfast? She seemed so sincere in her distress.
Still, I could imagine the police coming to take statements and immediately focusing on Rebecca as the prime suspect. It was a damning scene. Why had she put her hands on that knife if she hadn’t done it? Wouldn’t the natural instinct be away from the evidence of death, not toward it?
The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that Rebecca couldn’t kill the man she’d looked at with such admiration yesterday, the father of her children. And everyone here in this house, the children as well as the other wives, needed her here, not in jail somewhere. Even if she was eventually acquitted, if the police took Rebecca away for any period of time, what would happen to those left behind on the compound? The whole family would disintegrate; I was sure of it. None of the other wives would be able to take Rebecca’s place.