If Rebecca was gone, I could just imagine what would happen with the rest of the wives, and it wasn’t good. Jennifer wouldn’t care; she’d stay locked up in her house working on her computer. I couldn’t see Joanna, so young and volatile, making the situation any better; she would convince herself she had foreseen divine wrath and would either cause havoc for the other wives or leave entirely. Carolyn would weep and cower some more. And Sarah? Bitter, angry Sarah, trapped caring for all the children, would just tell them the worst stories about their father that she could remember.
This family needed Rebecca to fill the void Stephen’s death would create. Rebecca was the one who would think of their needs first and not her own, who would fight to keep them together here. She was the wife I thought was strongest. And maybe that was because she was also the one who was most like me.
Rebecca let go of the knife with a gasp and stared at her now bloodstained hands. “Oh God,” she said as if in prayer.
Maybe I was the answer to her prayer. I felt a burning need to help her, even if it meant postponing calling the police. I took a breath and waited for the Holy Spirit to tell me I was wrong, that I had to follow the proper procedure, as Kurt would have done, as he had done when he and I had found a dead body together in the church. He’d coached me through calling the police, not touching the body, dealing with notifying the loved ones.
He wasn’t here now and I knew someone should call the police soon, but a little time to figure out what had really happened wouldn’t change that much, would it? If I was here to steer the police in the right direction, then Rebecca wouldn’t be taken away from the children who needed her so much. And surely if God wanted me to call the police immediately, I’d have felt or heard something. But there was nothing, no spiritual feeling except the need to help Rebecca.
Now Naomi was pulling her mother away from the body, trying to get her to accept a knitted wrap because she was shaking so badly, asking her if she wanted to go downstairs to the kitchen and “wash up.” Kenneth had moved to block her view of her husband, good man that he was.
Rebecca wouldn’t let herself be moved away, however. “It’s all my fault. I did this to him. I failed him,” she was saying.
It wasn’t really a confession, I was sure. When someone dies, you always feel guilty. When Georgia had died, I blamed myself in every conceivable way, for not going to the hospital sooner, for not eating all the spinach I should have, for the medicine I’d taken for a cold before I knew I was pregnant.
“It should be me dead,” Rebecca was moaning. She slapped her own chest and her voice sounded hoarse and raw.
“Mom, maybe you should drink some water,” said Naomi. She waved at Kenneth to go get some. He moved around the body and went into the bathroom, but came out with his hands empty. No water cup there, apparently. He hustled downstairs.
My top priority at the moment was to figure out a way to keep Rebecca from being wrongly arrested. On the other hand, I needed to make sure that whoever had committed this crime wasn’t still a danger to the rest of the family. So I tried to think about when the murder had to have happened. After Rebecca went down to start breakfast, or she’d have seen the body when she got up, but before Naomi arrived. That had to be a short time window, maybe an hour or less. What else did I know?
Someone had known where to find Stephen, and that he would be alone. There’d been no noise of an argument. Could it be anyone outside the compound? How many people had keys to that gate? I didn’t think one of the boys would have been up with a key to the gate so early in the day. So that meant it was most likely someone from the inside, a member of the family.
I heard Kenneth’s heavy, hurried footsteps on the stairs and then he reappeared with the promised glass of water.
Rebecca took one sip and then put a hand to her mouth and shook her head adamantly. No more. We didn’t want her to throw up on the body.
“Oh, God,” she said again. “He deserved better than this. He deserved so much better.”
Naomi sighed and patted Rebecca’s back, as though the mother had become the child.
I had to figure this out, and quickly. The kitchen knife meant something. It had to have been brought up to the bedroom deliberately, so this wasn’t a crime of passion. A knife had been chosen for a reason. It was very personal.
I took a tentative step around Naomi and Rebecca, leaned down and touched Stephen’s hand, hoping that I wasn’t destroying too much evidence as I did it.
I checked my watch. It was 7:24 now. I remembered reading in one of my mystery books that a body cools about one degree per hour. Stephen felt cool, but not cold. There was no rigor mortis, either. Both of those observations confirmed my guess that this had happened in the early morning.