Someone had to have made this gate between the Perezes and this property. Did Stephen know about it? Had he made it? And if so, why? I couldn’t tell how old it was, but it might have been from when he was “dating” Joanna. The fact that he hadn’t had it repaired since then could have meant nothing more than that had forgotten about it.
I trudged back up the hill, continuing to check the fence perimeter, but I found no other places where it had been breached. After that, dripping wet with sweat, I sat down on a boulder for a moment and tried to decide what to do next. Rebecca had called for the wives to meet at the house to tell them about Stephen’s death and I’d wished I’d been part of that, though my presence might have made the kinds of reactions I was looking for impossible. Could I nose around in the other houses in the meantime?
In my head, I made a list of possibilities. Frankly, Jennifer’s house seemed the most likely to hold secrets. If I could find her financial files, and if I could understand them, there might be a lot there.
And then I remembered Joanna’s warning about Stephen in the middle of the night. She was such a strange character. What would I find if I went into her house while she was gone?
I stood up and made my way to the yard by the unfinished house. Before I got there, I saw Joanna herself, herding her children along the stretch of open field toward the main house.
I debated for a moment and decided that talking to her in person, alone, might be more valuable than anything I could find at her house without her. I jogged to catch up to her and touched her arm as they were cresting the hill to the big house’s back door.
She turned, her eyes wide, startled. “What is it? I need to go to the house. Rebecca called me for some emergency,” she said.
After all her talk about dark shadows, she seemed to have no inkling of why the meeting had been called.
The children in their long dresses were already running ahead toward the back door, which had been left open. For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to be a woman and raise children in a group like this. On the one hand, it would be such a relief to know that there was a babysitter always a moment away, to share the unending responsibilities and maybe find some respite of alone time.
And yet, it would also be difficult to know that your children saw other women as their mothers nearly as much as you, that they could go to someone else and be comforted when they cried.
Being a mother is sometimes a lonely job, but it is always satisfying. Seeing your children eat happily, seeing them sleep peacefully, knowing that they need you and love you desperately. Letting go of the difficulties also seemed to me to be letting go of the treasures.
The back door closed, leaving me and Joanna alone in the yard. “Rebecca is calling all the wives to tell them that Stephen is dead,” I said bluntly.
“Oh, my poor Stephen,” she said, shaking her head. “How will we go on without him?” She didn’t seem distraught, merely concerned.
“You tried to warn him about danger,” I said. Standing near her I noticed how small she was—no more than five foot two, and only barely a hundred pounds by my guess.
“Yes.” She let out a long breath and began to chew at her fingernail.
“I saw you last night when you came to the house and tried to warn him again.” I stared at her, trying to gauge every blink of the eyes. I wanted her to be innocent nearly as much as I wanted Rebecca to be. She was just a child.
“Then you know. I came to tell him about my second vision, nearly the same as the first. If only he had listened to me. He did not believe my gift was a true one. He thought that I was a frightened little girl who wanted to make herself more important.” Her hands fluttered in a gesture that seemed very little-girlish.
“Did you go home directly after Sarah sent you home?” I asked.
“Of course.” She met my eyes and held my gaze. “I would never leave my children alone in the house for long.”
I believed that. Joanna was an odd combination of weakness and strength. She’d left the FLDS and made a new life for herself here. She’d fought to keep Grace, even though it would have been much easier to leave the FLDS if she’d left her daughter behind. She’d married into a difficult situation and she’d had two more children in close succession, and in my book, having children demanded strength of all kinds.
“What about Sarah? Do you think she might have killed Stephen? She seemed very angry with him when I saw her earlier in the day,” I said, though she hadn’t seemed particularly angry last night. Joanna had said something about seeing a darkness around Sarah, too, something about red and black, but I couldn’t remember. What did it mean? That Sarah had blood on her hands?