“No, not yet. Not until I get permission from Rebecca for the exhumation.”
And Dr. Benallie had leverage over Rebecca—she had falsified the death certificate, and that had bound us all to her. But hadn’t it also bound her to us?
I steeled myself to play as ruthlessly as Dr. Benallie was playing. “Do you think this means Carolyn is probably the one who killed Stephen?” I asked.
She stared at me. “What?”
“If Carolyn had somehow found out about what Stephen had done to her daughter, it means she has the strongest motive to kill him of any of the wives. I thought at first she was too physically weak, with the pregnancy, but they say that a mother’s anger can give a woman amazing physical capacity. That knife that was in Stephen’s chest could have been put there by Carolyn.” Bluff, pure bluff.
“I sincerely doubt it,” said Dr. Benallie, glancing toward Carolyn’s house again.
I made sure my voice didn’t waiver. “But if Rebecca decides Carolyn murdered Stephen, she may be angry enough to call the police, after all. And then what will happen to you and that falsified death certificate you wrote up?”
Dr. Benallie’s face went very still, though a slight touch of wind picked up her hair and danced it around her face.
I went on, “You might lose your license to practice forever. Just to put a woman in jail who killed a man who stole her baby and gave it to someone else. Is that really what you want to do?”
She put her arms over her chest. “You’ll say almost anything to get me to stop, won’t you?”
She was right on that point. “If I have to choose between you and the vulnerable women and children here, I will choose them. You got out. They didn’t.” She was stronger than they were, even if she had stayed in Stephen’s circle for reasons I didn’t understand.
Dr. Benallie stared at me for a long moment and I didn’t like the twisted expression. Finally, she said, “I’m beginning to wonder if you had a hand in Stephen’s death yourself. You should think about that before you call the police. Why shouldn’t they see you as a suspect, along with all the rest of us? You hated him, too.”
What? I had hated him, but I hadn’t killed him. No one could think that I had, surely. Except that Kurt hadn’t been in that bunk room with me to give me an alibi. I had been right by Stephen’s bedroom. I could have snuck two doors down and . . .
No, I wasn’t going to let her shake me. I wasn’t doing any of this for myself. And I was doing the right thing.
“These women have suffered enough,” I said, trying to put steel into my voice. “You should leave them be.”
“Fine.” Dr. Benallie shouldered her purse, her annoyance clear. “I’ll be leaving now, then.”
“No,” I said. “Carolyn still needs to see a doctor to make sure everything is all right physically, just as you said was the reason you were coming in the first place.”
So we both walked up to the house, passing Carolyn’s children in the yard. The oldest of Carolyn’s children, Elizabeth, was climbing one of the trees. Jonathan and Noah were wrestling in the shade beneath Elizabeth. Judith was trying to read a book. I looked into the heavens and asked God for some advice about what to do about Carolyn’s missing and supposedly dead daughter.
Was I really supposed to destroy another family to bring another child to this polygamous compound where everything was so disastrous? I just couldn’t stomach it. And I felt no dark cloud over my mind, and assumed that meant God was agreeing with my choice. These children were Carolyn’s without dispute. They would have to be enough for her.
Without any conversation, Dr. Benallie moved past me as we entered the house, and went up to the bedroom, where she got out her equipment. She sent me and Rebecca away so Carolyn could have privacy, but I listened at the door to make sure that was all she was doing.
“Everything all right?” Rebecca asked curiously.
“I’m sure it is,” I said. The conversation sounded perfectly normal.
I looked at Rebecca’s eager expression and wondered if she listened in regularly to the other wives. That was the atmosphere of suspicion here. I hated it. I thought again of Joanna’s warning that I should leave. Maybe it wasn’t physical danger she had been warning me of, but this contamination of suspicion.
When Dr. Benallie invited Rebecca and me back in, she was finishing up her final instructions. “You need to take care of yourself just as you would after any birth, Carolyn. No heavy lifting, no significant physical exercise for six weeks, and plenty of fluids and food. Do you want me to show you how to bind your breasts? The milk should dry up in a week or so.”
I thought I could hear a little compassion in Dr. Benallie’s tone at this and thanked her for that in my heart.
Carolyn said a few words, but I had the sense she wasn’t taking in much. In the end, Rebecca stayed to help with some laundry and dishes while I walked with Dr. Benallie back to the gravel road and her car, to make sure she was truly gone.