I was still shaking with emotion as I walked away from Carolyn’s house. I wanted to go home to my normal life, to a husband who didn’t need to be in control of my every action and thought, and who genuinely cared for and grieved with me. Whatever my disagreements with Kurt about the policy, he was a good husband and father. He loved Samuel and Kenneth and he was going to figure out a way to stretch his faith around them both. Maybe he was taking a different path than I was, but I had to respect that.
I had promised to solve Stephen’s murder before I left, and now I desperately wanted to go home. So I pushed myself to focus. I’d been asking everyone about the changes to the will except the one person I should have: Jennifer. She was the investment broker. She was far more likely to have known about Stephen’s financial situation than anyone else. So I headed toward her house. It occurred to me that maybe I had been avoiding talking to her just because I disliked her so much.
Jennifer was standing on the porch, staring at the rising rose of sun in the eastern mountains.
“How is Carolyn?” was the first thing she said to me.
They say news flies in a small town. In a compound like this, it must get around so fast it was practically time travel. “The baby was stillborn,” I said.
Jennifer nodded. “Yes, I’d heard.”
“It must be particularly painful to you when one of the other wives loses a child,” I said, watching her carefully. “Especially when you couldn’t have children of your own.” I was needling her—I could tell she clearly disliked children and probably never wanted any.
She frowned and then recovered. “It just wasn’t to be, I suppose. Stephen always said that we had to look to God for answers to such difficult questions.”
I was curious about why she had married Stephen when he, from what I had heard, must have expected her to give him more children. What had Jennifer really wanted from this marriage, this lifestyle? And had Stephen at some point discovered he had been duped when she gave him no children to be his in heaven?
“It bothered Stephen, though, didn’t it?” I pressed. The wooden floor of the porch, I noticed, looked like it had been replaced recently. Stephen didn’t stint Jennifer for anything, though Joanna’s house was still unfinished.
“Of course it bothered him. Being a god means having posterity for eternity. Filling the universe with your offspring.” Her voice sounded distant and she had a hand on the door to the house.
I couldn’t make her stay and talk to me, but I was hoping she wouldn’t escape into the house too soon. I spoke bluntly. “You disappointed him as a wife, then. Not giving him children.” This would have been cruel if Jennifer were the woman that Stephen had thought she was, but she showed no reaction at all.
“I’m sure I disappointed Stephen in more than just that one way,” Jennifer said, smiling as if it were a joke.
There was something very strange about their relationship, about the fact that she had been the first woman to agree to enter into a polygamous marriage with Stephen and Rebecca. She just wasn’t the same type as the others who had joined. She wasn’t needy at all, nor did she seem to be cowed by Stephen.
“You made sure you didn’t have children?” I guessed.
“That was the simplest part. A little pill each morning,” said Jennifer with a faint smile. “Stephen never found out, at least not until a few weeks ago. And by then, what did it matter? I’m too old to have children now.”
A few weeks ago? Was this what had precipitated the murder? “Then why did you marry him in the first place?”
Jennifer was quiet for a long moment. “Why do you think?” she asked.
“Money,” I guessed out loud.
“Well, if that was so, it wasn’t as if he had anything to complain about in the deal,” she said, grimacing. Was she another wife who had denied Stephen her bed eventually?
“But surely you could have made money on your own,” I said.
She looked at the door jamb, pressed her finger into a bit of wood hanging out of it, and then held it out to me to see the splinter there. “Of course. But I’m not like other people. I learned that early on in life. I didn’t want friends or relationships. I never cared about feelings or security, whatever it is that makes other people do what they do.”
She studied the splinter, but didn’t take it out. It must hurt, and it was strange to see her so curious about her own physical pain, without ever reacting to it. “Stephen’s proposition of marriage gave me a chance to live here.” She gestured widely to take in the expanse of the compound. “I’ve been able to have quiet almost all the time. And in addition to that, no one bothers me to go on dates or to spend time doing things I’m not interested in.”
I stared at her and wondered if she was what a psychologist would call a sociopath. I’d read about them in books and I’d always felt sick at their lack of sympathy for others. But I’d met Jennifer several times now and never guessed this about her. She really seemed to feel nothing, at least not in any normal sense.
“It went much better with Stephen than I ever imagined. Once I understood him, he was easy to manage. He had his ego, but if I stroked it with a few words, or let him stroke me a few times a month”—she glanced sideways at me at this, but showed no embarrassment—“that was all it took. And he didn’t ask twice about all the money I was investing for him, never looked carefully at my yearly reports. He trusted me, if you can believe it. Me.” She shrugged and smiled again, that cold, wide smile. It reminded me of what Joanna had said about Jennifer having a murderer’s heart.
My stomach clenched and I wondered if I was in danger. I could see no real reason for Jennifer to want to kill Stephen, since she had so clearly thought she was getting the better end of the bargain between them. But if there was any person on this compound I was truly afraid of now, it was Jennifer. Was it possible she had just decided to kill Stephen to see how it would feel?
“You knew Stephen was thinking of changing his will,” I said, sure she had. She knew everything. Rebecca might be the mother of the compound, but Jennifer was the queen.
She shrugged, unashamed. “He was old friends with a lawyer from college. He asked me to make an appointment with him to change the will. As if I was his secretary.”
The appointment with an old friend that she’d messaged him about, I thought. It was with a lawyer about the will. “Why did he want to change it?”
“He said he’d decided that he was going to put Aaron in charge of distributing funds if he died, and that each of the children who was verified to be his would get an equal portion.”
I thought for a moment. “But what about Talitha? What about Grace?”
“What about me?” She met my eyes and I thought again of how cold she was. She didn’t seem to care about the children’s welfare at all, only her own.
“Was this to punish Sarah?” I asked. Cutting Talitha out of the will would have been a blow to Sarah, surely.
“Well, Stephen had discovered the truth about Sarah and Rebecca.” She spoke so casually, though she watched me to see my reaction.
“What truth?” I asked, trying to hide the lurch in my stomach. Rebecca and Sarah. There had always been something wrong in their relationship, something too fraught, too emotional, and I’d known it. Rebecca had admitted as much to me last night when she’d told me about destroying Sarah’s paintings.
“You never thought about how they look so much alike?” she asked.
“They’re sisters. A lot of sisters look alike,” I said, still pushing away what Jennifer was hinting at. It was too much. I’d liked Rebecca and I had done so much to help her cover up Stephen’s murder because I connected to her as a mother, but what kind of mother could allow what Jennifer was suggesting?
“Did you never think about the age difference between Sarah and Rebecca? Fifteen years,” Jennifer went on.
“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.