Righteous02 - Mighty and Strong (4 page)

In Blister Creek, the headquarters of his family’s church, they had built a smaller-scale temple, with an interior layout that was midway between that of the Salt Lake and Manti Temples. It also had a Holy of Holies, where the Lord himself might appear to speak with his prophet. So far as Jacob knew, Salt Lake was the only mainstream temple to share this feature.

Jacob doubted the LDS prophet spent much time in the Holy of Holies chatting it up with either Heavenly Father or Jesus. He seemed a nice old man, but just a bureaucrat.

But when has Father ever talked to the Lord, either?

He found Eliza with her companion in the North visitor’s center, chatting in Spanish with a pair of tourists. They stood next to the Christus, a white marble statue, eleven, maybe twelve feet high with outstretched hands to show where he’d been nailed to the cross. Jacob thought Jesus looked a little too Nordic, but the statue attracted attention.

He watched his sister, not the statue. Eliza wore a dress, a touch of makeup, and her hair was cut shoulder-length, not the waist-length braids she used to wear. She wore a name tag that read ‘Sister Christianson, Cardston, Alberta.” She’d blossomed since leaving the church for the mainstream Mormons. If she’d followed Father’s command, she’d be some guy’s n
^th
wife, probably nursing one child and pregnant with another.

When the couple left, Eliza turned, spotted him, and came to give him a hug.

“Wow, your Spanish was great,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

“You should hear my French.” She rattled something in French that he couldn’t follow.

“Show off.”

She laughed. “I get it from my big brother.”

Eliza’s companion watched with a sour expression. “It’s just my brother, don’t worry.” She turned to Jacob and shrugged. They walked across the open room, beyond the other girl’s range of hearing.

“Your companion looks like she’s been sucking on lemons.”

“Temple Square is too close to home for some of the sister missionaries,” Eliza explained. “Their boyfriends stop by to chat or whatever. Probably what she was thinking. Thanks so much for the money. You don’t have to, you know, but it came in handy. What’s in the paper bag?”

He handed over the bag from the patisserie. “A little something.”

She glanced inside. “Raspberry tart? Yum.”

“And one for your companion, too. She could use something to sweeten her up.”

“Sister Sanchez is okay. She just takes this all too seriously.”

“How about you, are you taking it seriously?”

“I don’t know, Jacob, sometimes. Other times, not so much.”

“I don’t want to see you escape from the church, only to find yourself sucked into another flavor of Mormonism.”

“It might be a stage, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll end up believing none of it, but there’s no rush to get there. For now, I’m okay with not knowing.”

“Doesn’t your day consist of telling tourists what they should believe about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon? How do you do that, if you don’t know yourself?”

“I’m not thinking about it that hard,” Eliza said. “Maybe later, but for now a little mystery is okay. Thing is, I’m not usually pressed about my beliefs, but if I am, I admit it. I don’t know. But look at you, you’re one to talk.”

Jacob shrugged. “The church is a mess. Half the members left, the others struggling. Some stopped paying their tithing. Then the prophet died, and Father is trying to pick up the pieces. He’s only one man.”

“Shouldn’t you be there, then? You’re a member of the Quorum of the Twelve.”

“Shh,” he said with a glance at Sister Sanchez, still watching with her brow furrowed. “The Quorum of the Twelve doesn’t mean the same thing here as back home.”

“What I mean is that you’re one of the church leaders, so shouldn’t you be helping Father?”

“I will, once I figure some things out.”

Eliza took a step back and studied him. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there? You didn’t come here to give me raspberry tarts.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then what is it? Everything okay with Fernie?”

“She’s wonderful. I’m happier than I could’ve imagined. Not perfect, nothing ever is. We’ve got plural marriage hanging over our heads, you know, normal stuff.”

“Fernie wants you to take a second wife?”

“Not explicitly, but it’s understood. I told her I’m not ready. She said—well, never mind. We can talk about that later. Your missionary companion is getting antsy.” He hesitated. “Has anyone come looking for you?”

“From Blister Creek?”

“No, Eliza. From the FBI.”

Her eyes widened. “What? I thought we were done with them.”

“Yeah, so did I. Does this mean no, they haven’t?”

“No,” she said. “No FBI. At least not that I know.”

“Good. I don’t know what this is about, but they asked about me at the hospital. I’ve got to renew my residency and it doesn’t help to have the FBI sniffing around. The hospital administrator found out where I came from, and that didn’t help either.” He thought about telling her about Emma, but a young girl about to be forced into marriage would hit Eliza too close to home. “I don’t want you to worry, but I thought I’d give you a heads up, see if you had any ideas.”

“No, I wish I did, but I can’t think of anything. Is Father flying straight?”

“So far as I know.”

Abraham Christianson had never believed in ‘bleeding the beast’, that practice of welfare fraud so tempting for polygamists. Since polygamy was illegal, all but the first wife were legally single mothers on welfare, no matter how much money their husbands made. And given the closed nature of the communities, it was easy to do business under the table, cheat on taxes. Easy, that is, until the IRS or the FBI investigated. And then it wasn’t.

If Father was tempted to go that route, all he had to do was visit his former friends and relatives in prison, ask their opinion.

“Keep your eyes open,” Jacob said. “You see anyone suspicious or talk to anyone, give me a call.”

“I would have done that anyway. There’s no one else I trust. You’re the reason I’m here.”

“I’m the reason you’re a missionary?” he said with a half-smile. “Glad to hear it.”

“The reason I’m a woman with a chance to figure out who she is,” Eliza said firmly. “And not just another wife with her whole life mapped out. I love you, I’d do anything for you.”

“With any luck, you won’t have to.”

#

Jacob called his wife as soon as he left Temple Square, to let her know he’d be home in a few minutes.

“Oh, good,” she said. “Daniel has been asking about you every ten minutes.”

He could hear the boy clamoring in the background, asking when Daddy was coming home. “Five minutes, honey,” Fernie said to the side. “Go wait at the window, you can watch for him. Leah, Daddy’s coming.”

Jacob was thinking his advice to Eliza to keep her eyes open was good, and not just for his sister. A black SUV swung in behind him as he pulled out of his parking space. He took South Temple toward home. The SUV seemed to be following, so he made a loop around the University of Utah area and then through the Harvard Yale neighborhood to the south. The SUV didn’t follow.

Jacob and Fernie rented a small house in the Avenues, a cozy urban neighborhood of gridded streets that stretched up the hill from the capitol building toward the Salt Lake City Cemetery, north of the University. The Avenues were a walkable oasis in the wasteland of strip malls and subdivisions that sprawled along the Wasatch Front. You could walk downtown or to the U, or even to a corner bakery.

But the best thing was the neighborhood’s diversity. The east side of Salt Lake was the least Mormon part of the state. There were a few chapels, but also non-Mormon churches, and his neighbors included university students, ex-Mormons, minorities, gay couples, and visiting professors. A good place to blend in.

He pulled into the driveway and then spotted the SUV parked in front of his house. It hadn’t followed because the driver had already known where he lived. Jacob stopped the car and waited behind the wheel. His engine ticked as it cooled.

Impossible to see through the SUV’s tinted windows, but Jacob imagined them watching, waiting for him to get out. Who was it, and why had they parked in plain view? To intimidate him?

Time to deal with this now, before Fernie or the kids saw he was home. He got out of the car and approached the SUV. Jacob kept his gait smooth, confident. But he kept his right hand in his pocket, clenched his keys in his fist. With his left, he knocked on the window. No answer.

He rapped the window again, harder, then tried the door handle. It was locked. “Open the door.”

Jacob was so caught up imagining who might be watching from inside that it took a second before the obvious occurred to him. He leaned down to the window and cupped his hands against his face to block the glare. There was nobody inside.

Jacob shot a glance to the house. It was quiet. No Daniel and Leah looking out the window, waving furiously. Whoever had driven the SUV was now inside his house.

He broke into a run, his mouth dry, heart pounding.

Chapter Five:

There was nothing Senator Jim McKay hated more than kissing the asses of born-again Christians. Back stabbers and self-righteous pricks, the lot of them.

He and his brother, the Attorney General of the State of Utah, Parley McKay, walked the convention center’s vast open space with glued-on smiles, shaking hands as they purported to look at the Christian crap: t-shirts, religious videos, Christian action figures, and textbooks for Christian homeschoolers.

Jim had thumbed through one of the books earlier. It showed a picture of Noah trying to coax a dinosaur onto the ark. Another page “proved” mathematically that the sun had only been burning for six thousand years, since the Creation. Hah, and they said Mormons believed crazy stuff.

Jim was delivering the opening speech tonight to the annual convention of the Traditional Families Coalition, after which he had three days to mingle, build contacts to help him in the Iowa primaries.

Nationally, the TFC was an awkward conglomeration of Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mormons that disagreed on almost every theological detail, but shared a common concern about stopping the gay rights agenda, and standing up to the media elites who insisted on forcing an immoral lifestyle on mainstream, family-values America.

This particular convention left Jim feeling like the ugly cousin at the family reunion. No doubt his speech would garner polite applause, even spur a few donations. But he knew what they said behind his back.

Some Mormon politicians—Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch came to mind—were hurt by the evangelicals’ insistence that Mormonism was a pseudo-Christian cult. Didn’t LDS volunteers and money spearhead the movement to pass Proposition 8 against gay marriage in California? A great victory, until the activist courts stuck their noses in. And can’t you always count on the LDS Congressional delegation to deliver a socially conservative vote?

The TFC convention was in Denver this year, and the evangelical contingent emerged in full force. They witnessed on the local radio, in the megachurches, even passed out pamphlets on street corners with titles like, “Are you saved?” and “How to Pledge Your Life to Lord Jesus.” Oh, and Jim’s favorite: “How to Recognize a Counterfeit Church.” Onward Christian soldiers, and all of that.

He hoped the local mission president had the good sense to tell the LDS missionaries to stay off the streets for a couple of days.

“Your smile is wilting,” his brother Parley said after he finished shaking hands with yet another televangelist huckster.

Jim studied a knot of people about twenty yards distant, near a booth selling videos of the Left Behind series. “That’s because I spotted Mitt Romney.”

Romney emerged from the group and gave them a wave and the trademark Romney smile. His presidential hair looked perfect, as always. Jim caught himself trying to adjust his own mop.

Jim McKay had stood by Mitt’s side during the last round of presidential primaries. The same people over there now shaking Mitt’s hand had happily stabbed him in the back to support Huckabee, and then stabbed John McCain in the back during the general. Or rather, sat on the sidelines, which was the same thing.

You reap what you sow,
Jim thought. Because now it was almost certain the EVs would be forced to swallow their pride if they wanted any chance of getting back in the White House. The evangelical candidates were a joke, the governor from New England was a RINO—Republican in Name Only. Not to mention too cozy with the media; when the New York Times spoke glowingly of your candidacy, you almost wondered if it was intentional sabotage. That left the conservative movement one of two choices, and both were Mormons.

With all due respect to Mitt Romney, Senator McKay meant to be the last man standing.

“Did I see you talking to Chip Smith earlier?” Parley asked.

“Yeah, what a chucklehead,” Jim said. He refreshed his smile, shook the hand of some guy with a bad suit and worse haircut, then turned to his brother. “Why do you ask?”

“Because one of his assistant ministers—is that what they call them?—phoned me, asking about polygamy.”

Jim couldn’t keep the frown off his face. “Polygamy?”

Chip Smith was the head of a mega-church in Oklahoma. Not quite miracle spring water, or faith healing, but it was all about the charisma of the head minister. Personally, Jim couldn’t see the man’s appeal. Maybe his BS detector was too finely honed, but Chip Smith was five percent man of God, ninety-five percent used car salesman. Point was, the pastor and his minions could raise a million bucks and a thousand rabid volunteers faster than you could say “culture wars.”

Which made his the sweetest, most kissable evangelical ass at the convention.

“Yeah, polygamy,” Parley said.

“What does he care if a man has more than one wife? From what I hear, he’s got a little something on the side. What was it, a love child with the former treasurer at his church?”

“Whoever said these guys have to be consistent?” Another pause to shake hands. “That’s why Chip flipped out over Mitt last time around,” Parley continued when they were alone again. “Not the Mormon stuff, so much as Mitt’s polygamist grandfather.”