“Yes,” I said.
A gust of wind mussed Jennifer’s hair and she smoothed it back carefully. She was so calm, even amused. “I’ve seen the genealogy. One of the perks of that Mormon obsession with records. They were easy to find. Rebecca’s mother was born in 1930. Rebecca was born in 1970, a surprise child at the end of what looked like a childless marriage. Sarah was born in 1985.” Jennifer looked at me meaningfully.
I did the math in my head as Jennifer watched me, clearly giving me extra time in case I was very slow. So Rebecca’s mother would have been fifty-five when Sarah was born. That made it pretty much impossible for her to conceive without intervention that would probably not have existed at the time.
Rebecca was not Sarah’s sister, but her mother. I was rocked to my core. Everything I had thought about the two of them, about Stephen, about Talitha: it was all wrong. Her own daughter had married her husband? Why wasn’t Rebecca disgusted by that? It was practically incest.
“You told Stephen,” I said, sure she had done it for some reason of her own.
“I was trying to get him to change the will to my benefit. He came up with the idea about the children and the will on Saturday night, after he had that argument with Joanna. I tried to convince the other wives to talk him out of it, but they wouldn’t listen to me. I tried to talk him out of it on Monday, too, when he came to visit me here with you and your oh-so-righteous husband in tow.”
I felt a twinge of pain at this reference to Kurt, but it did explain something else I’d been meaning to ask Jennifer. Had I at last caught the tail of the right dog here? This had to have all led to Stephen’s death.
“You told all the other wives that Stephen was going to change his will?” This was finally the last thing I was looking for, the timeline that made sense for the murder.
“No. Only Carolyn and Joanna. I didn’t want Rebecca or Sarah to know about it. Sarah doesn’t know the truth yet about Rebecca, and I thought it would upset her and make her unmanageable. She can be very annoying when she is like that.”
For some reason Stephen had decided to change his will in favor of his own biological children, which certainly would not have benefited Jennifer since she hadn’t given him any. So she had told Stephen about Rebecca and Sarah’s being mother and daughter, hoping to get him to change the will in her favor instead. Why would she kill him before she’d been able to convince him to make the changes she wanted?
She’d have waited until she succeeded, and she certainly would have believed she could eventually wear him down. Carolyn and Joanna knew about the change to the will, and Joanna had argued with Stephen over it, presumably because her daughter Grace would be cut out. But what about Sarah? Could she have found out that Talitha was going to be cut out? Was her threat to take Talitha away just that, a threat, when really she was planning to stay because that was the only way she could get some of Stephen’s money?
I still didn’t have the full picture here, but I was close. I just had to poke at a few more things, and I was sure this would break wide open. What would happen after that, I didn’t know, but I would be done with it and could go home to Kurt. I could shake the dust off my feet, as they say in the scriptures, from this evil place.
Jennifer tugged at the splinter in her finger, licking at the blood that came out. Then she went inside, leaving me outside with what felt like as many questions as she’d given me answers.
Chapter 28
I wanted to go back to the main house and get some more sleep to make up for what I’d missed during the night. What I did instead was go directly from Jennifer’s house to Joanna’s. It was only 10 a.m., but it felt much later. I walked inside without knocking, and found Joanna in the kitchen, finishing up dishes by hand.
“Still no dishwasher?” I spoke softly, trying to avoid startling her.
She looked over her shoulder at me and did not seem surprised at my presence. Maybe she’d had a premonition I was coming? “Stephen kept saying he would buy me one, but he never got around to it. Now I’ll probably never get one.”
She put down the dishrag and braced a hand again her lower back to support it. I felt instant sympathy. When my children were small and I picked them up and carried them around all day long, I had done the same thing. I’d always been in pain, and there had always been more to do after the children were in bed. It’s very physical labor, mothering.