I stayed as the children, including Talitha, were dismissed and led outside by the two oldest girls, Leah and Esther. Once the house was quiet again, the wives, along with Naomi, drew closer to discuss adult concerns.
Jennifer glanced at me, as if about to ask me to leave, when Rebecca said pre-emptively, “I’d like her to stay.”
“Why? She has nothing to do with any of this,” said Jennifer.
“I think it’s wise for us to have someone here who can see things from another perspective. She may see things that none of the rest of us would think of.”
I wasn’t sure if this was Rebecca trying to help me learn the truth or if she was starting to be nervous about the fact that I knew about Stephen’s murder and could call the police. I might get myself in trouble, too, but she would be much worse off than I would. They all would.
Kenneth returned from cleaning himself up and stood at Naomi’s side. Jennifer hesitated, looking from me to him. After a moment, she started going through a step-by-step plan for the financial future, including tax payments for the property and houses, children’s college funds, medical insurance payments and emergency funds, car and house repairs, and on and on. The assumption seemed to be that everyone would stay here, which was surely what Stephen would have wanted.
Sarah looked as angry as ever, holding herself apart from the others by the stairs to the upper floors. Would she stay on? If so, Rebecca was in for years more of accusations and recriminations from her younger sister. I couldn’t envy her that.
Joanna, on the other hand, seemed at peace. She listened politely and without asking questions.
Carolyn looked a wreck. Her face was tear streaked, splotched with red, and her lower lip had been chewed to bleeding. She was seated on the couch with a hand on her pregnant belly, wincing every time the baby kicked, which was clearly visible under the thin knit shirt she wore. Her hair hadn’t been done this morning, neither washed nor combed, and it stuck out on one side of her head.
Jennifer asked if there were any immediate financial needs she was unaware of. When no one raised a hand, she suggested that they speak to Rebecca if they wanted more than their usual allowances deposited in their accounts each month.
I listened for a while, but eventually remembered Stephen mentioning that basement office. There seemed less to be learned from watching the wives here than I’d originally thought, and this was an ideal chance for me to look into his private files, while the wives were busy.
So I stood up and headed downstairs quietly, closing the door to the basement behind me. I paused for a moment, just in case someone noticed me, but no one seemed to. I suppose they were all too focused on one another.
I descended into a great room filled with huge beanbags and scattered with pillows and blankets. Probably the result of my taking the bunk room last night, I thought without too much guilt, since it looked from the general disarray like the boys had had a good time down here. I continued on past a bathroom, a couple of unfinished bedrooms, a furnace room, and at the other end of the hall, a locked door.
After a short search, I found a key on top of the door jamb and let myself in. The office had a utilitarian folding table in the center, as well as a rolling, well-worn fake leather chair next to it. Along the wall, there were four metal filing cabinets in various colors, most of them dented badly with overuse. The table itself was covered in papers stacked to either side, with pens and pencils in the middle.
On the bookshelf under the small high window, I found copies of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. They both looked well-read, and when I flipped through I found what had to be Stephen’s writing in the margins. Mostly his comments were refutations, but it was interesting he had read the controversial anti-Mormon books.
I opened the drawers of the first filing cabinet and found mostly family photos from the years when Stephen and Rebecca were still monogamous, photos of the new family when Naomi was a baby and a toddler, then portraits adding another baby, and then another—Joseph and Aaron, I guessed.
At the bottom of the cabinet, under some old newspapers, I found a half-empty bottle of whiskey and an open pack of cigarettes. Both were against the Word of Wisdom, the Mormon health code. Once you’re excommunicated, I suppose there’s less reason to follow the Word of Wisdom so strictly since you can’t go to the temple anyway. But I’d have thought Stephen was the kind of person who followed every law to a T in any case, just because he wanted to prove he was better than anyone else.