I sat down and waited until Joanna was finished. I felt guilty for not offering to help, but wasn’t sure she would want my interference. I was also trying to figure out exactly how to put into words my accusation about the will being changed and the argument with Stephen that had followed.
When Joanna finally came and sat next to me, she was silent, and closed her eyes for long enough that I wondered if she had fallen asleep sitting up. Then she let out a long breath and opened her eyes to look at me.
“My gift warned me you would come today and why,” she said. “You don’t have to beat around the bush with me.” Her eyes seemed very intense. “You want to know if I killed Stephen.”
Well, that was blunt. “Did you?” I said, trying to stare into her eyes and discern her motives—as I’d come to believe that was my spiritual gift.
“No, I did not,” Joanna said. The words were clear and steady. “But even if I didn’t hold the knife, I can see how the others might feel I am to blame.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She was such a strange woman, never going quite where I expected her to go in conversation.
She clasped her hands in a prayer pose. “I should have made him listen to me about the danger. Why else did God give me those visions except to share the information with others? To prevent Satan’s evil from blossoming into fruit in this world.”
She had such colorful turns of phrase, but they were ominous, as well. I reached across the table and patted her shoulder. “I’m sure God won’t hold you accountable for that mistake.” I hoped that was the right thing to say to her. “Maybe you saw the vision to prepare yourself and your children for what would happen afterward.”
But her expression was closed and unforgiving as she shook her head. “The burden of not getting Stephen to listen to me will always be mine to carry. So if you need to tell the other wives whose fault it was, you can tell them it was me.”
“I won’t do that, Joanna.” I wanted to take her home with me and mother her, the same impulse I’d felt with Talitha. She was not much older than my own Samuel. She could be my own daughter, if I’d had another one after Georgia’s death.
“Thank you for saying that. You don’t know how much it means to me.” She sounded choked up and ready to cry.
“I remember that you had a vision about Sarah, too?” I said. “The night before Stephen died, you said you saw her in a shadow of black and red.” I wasn’t sure I had it right.
She nodded. “Yes. That shadow is still over her. I see it every time we meet.” She shuddered.
“Oh. I thought that maybe—it was about her paintings being torn to pieces.” I watched Joanna closely to see if she showed any foreknowledge of the situation. Did she know that Sarah was Rebecca’s daughter? Was there any way she could have guessed that Rebecca would do what she had done? Or precipitated it by returning to talk to Rebecca about Sarah’s paintings?
“Her paintings? No, the shadow is far more than that. She is filled with darkness because she has no purpose in life. The black and red I saw in her were the cracks in her soul. She is bleeding out her very heart in her anger at the world itself. She cannot see any of the good in her life, and she will throw it all away because of that.”
This was rather more perceptive about Sarah than I’d have expected from Joanna. There was a sound at the kitchen door and we both turned to see Grace.
“You’re supposed to be playing with the little girls,” said Joanna, but there was no anger in her tone.
“I had a vision, Mama, just like you,” Grace said, her expression alight, her eyes wide and her hands splayed dramatically. “You were in danger and I had to help you.”
“Well, it’s not true right now.” Joanna pulled her chair away from the table and patted her lap. “Where are the others?”
“They’re in the playpens, taking their naps,” said Grace.
“All right. Come here and I’ll hold you for a little while,” said Joanna
“Did your mother have visions, as well?” I asked Joanna, wondering if the gift ran in the family.
“What? Oh, no. Never.” Joanna was stroking Grace’s hair as the little girl sprawled across her mother’s lap.
In this awkward position, I could see what Grace was wearing underneath her dress and leggings, and it seemed to be long, white underwear of some kind. But that made no sense. I guessed that Joanna might have worn long underwear as an FLDS woman, and now I wondered if she was still wearing them herself. But why would she make smaller garments for her daughter and force her to wear them every day, even in the summer?
Joanna drew my attention back to her by saying, “My mother spent most of her time in bed every day. She’d been put out to pasture by then, because I was the youngest. She said she was ill, but I knew she was just lazy.”
“Put out to pasture” was a cruel way of saying what Joanna had mentioned before, about Rebecca being too old to have children. There was surely more to her mother’s story, but I still had to ask her about the changes to the will she’d heard about from Jennifer.