Blood Oath, Blood River (The Downwinders Book 1) Page 14

  “Half the people can’t get out of the parking lot fast enough,” Winn observed. “The other half are standing around shaking each other’s hands like they have nowhere to go.”

  “That’s what they do,” Deem said.

  “Is it working?” Winn asked, trying to see the screen Deem was holding.

  “Seems to,” Deem said. “It looks like he’s headed home.”

  “Let’s find out,” Winn said. There were fewer people walking in the lot now, and he carefully backed out of his parking spot. They exited the lot and drove back to Dayton’s home, Winn asking Deem for directions a couple of times once they entered the subdivision. As they neared the house, they both observed the BMW in the driveway.

  “Yay, it works,” Deem said. “Thank you, Awan!”

  “What now?” Winn asked.

  “We wait,” Deem said. “I have no idea what time the meeting will be.”

  “Are you hungry?” Winn asked. “I could use something.”

  “7-11 first,” Deem said. “I’m dry.”

  As Winn turned the Jeep around and left the subdivision, Deem kept her eyes on the blue dot. For the first time she began to think she might actually be able to locate her father’s journals. It seemed within reach. Until now, it had just been an idea. This little blue dot is going to lead me to them, she thought. I might have them today. Tonight.

  She watched the blue dot remain stationary at Dayton’s home as they moved throughout the town, picking up her Big Gulp and then going through a fast-food drive thru.

  “He’s still there?” Winn asked.

  “Yup,” Deem said. “Hasn’t moved.”

  “Want to double check it?” Winn asked.

  “Yeah,” Deem said. “Why not.”

  Winn drove back to the subdivision and past Dayton’s house. The BMW was still there in the driveway.

  “Can’t be too sure,” Deem said.

  “It’s not like we have anything else to do,” Winn said.

  “Let’s find a place to park in the shade,” Deem said. “And we’ll wait him out.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  “Where is he now?” Winn asked, speeding his Jeep through Snow Canyon. The red rock on either side of the road would occasionally break open into wide spaces where small communities of homes were being developed, then enclose again.

  “Ahead a couple of turns,” Deem said.

  “This road twists enough that he won’t notice us if we stay back. But I don’t want to lose him, so let me know if the distance increases.”

  “I wonder who that was he picked up in St. George?” Deem asked. Dayton had stopped at a house in the older part of St. George, near the college. An older gentleman in a suit and tie had come out of an extremely well maintained home and jumped into the passenger seat of Dayton’s BMW.

  “Probably another member of their secret council,” Winn said. “Carpooling. I wonder how far away this meeting will be.”

  Deem kept her eyes glued to the blue dot pulsing on the screen. It slowly progressed up Highway 18, winding its way over hills and through small canyons. Soon they passed the turn off to the Mountain Meadows monument.

  “How appropriate,” Winn said as they sped past it. “Some things never change.”

  “We don’t know that this secret council was as bad as the people who committed that massacre,” Deem said.

  “Giving them the benefit of the doubt?”

  “My father was one of them, so yes, I’m trying to.”

  “But what if they were, Deem? What if they operate on the wrong side of the fence? Claude sure made it sound like they were formidable.”

  “Formidable doesn’t mean evil,” Deem said, watching as the blue dot on her screen moved slowly toward Enterprise. “There’s every possibility that they use their gifts for good. They’re leaders in the church, for god’s sake.”

  “Then why all the secrecy?” Winn asked. “And don’t you start defending the church all of a sudden. You’re usually much harder on it than I am.”

  Deem sighed. “I guess I’m dreading what we might find. I don’t want to discover that these people I’ve respected all my life are not what I thought they were.”

  “Your father included?” Winn asked.

  “Yes,” Deem said, “him too.”

  The significance of this seemed to soften Winn a little. “I hope you’re right. I really do.”

  “But be prepared for the worst, right?” Deem asked.

  “I’ve always found that to be a wise approach.”

  They slowed down through Enterprise and soon found themselves at the junction of Highway 56. The locals called it Beryl Junction.

  “Take a left,” Deem said. “He’s headed back into Nevada.”

  “Not much out there,” Winn said. “I wonder if they meet in a cave or a mine.”

  “In suits and ties?” Deem asked. “Not a chance.”

  A train mirrored their progress, travelling along the side of the road as they approached the Nevada border. After they crossed, the train split off southward.

  “That line leads to Caliente, doesn’t it?” Deem asked.

  “Yeah, it does,” Winn said. “Wouldn’t it be funny if that’s where they’re meeting?”

  “Why funny?” Deem asked.

  “Just the whole fundamentalist thing,” Winn said. “You know, the Warren Jeffs marriages.”

  “No, I don’t know,” Deem said.

  “When they were trying Jeffs for marrying off underaged girls to fundamentalist Mormons, it came out that they held a lot of the secret marriages at a motel in Caliente.”

  “Ugh,” Deem said. “Creepy.”

  “So, wouldn’t it be interesting if this secret council meets in Caliente?”

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” Deem said.

  “Who was it said ‘there are no coincidences’?”

  “I don’t see how they can be connected,” Deem said.

  “Maybe the secret council includes some fundamentalists?” Winn said. “Why not?”

  “Because the regular LDS despise polygamists,” Deem said. “They think they give the church a bad image. They root them out and excommunicate them, when they find them.”

  “You don’t seriously consider this secret council to be regular LDS, do you? They’re rogue.”

  Deem watched the blue dot speeding along on the screen. What Winn was saying was right, but she wasn’t fully prepared to accept it. Being raised Mormon, it was hard to kick the patterns of thinking that had been drilled into her from a young age. And she didn’t like thinking about what it meant so far as her father was concerned.

  She remembered a time when she was fifteen, and she learned that friends of hers who she’d grown up with, the Halworth family, neighbors just down the street, kids she’d played with for years, were discovered to be polygamists. Her first reaction was that it didn’t matter, but as she watched the family become ostracized from the rest of the community, she began to feel betrayed. How could the Halworths have lied to her all these years? She had sleepovers at their house when she was younger. She babysat for them on occasion. All the while, they’d been secretly practicing polygamy. Deem’s mother was insistent that she cut off all communication with them, and her father, as stake president, was involved with excommunicating the family.

  Then she began to feel annoyed, that the reaction to the discovery was overkill, and the public shunning was unjustified. She knew the family to be good people. They were the same kids she’d played with last year. They hadn’t changed. But the community’s reaction to their outing had been decisive and swift. They were ignored, no longer invited to functions. They were not welcome in other people’s homes. The kids were teased endlessly at school. Deem remembered her mother making a point of purging all of the Halworth family contacts from her email lists. Deem felt it was wrong, and it began to feed her sense of rebellion against the way she’d been raised. Soon she was finding ways to skip church, and backing out of invitations she used to accept.
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  She knew her father sensed the rebellion when it began. He’d always been careful not to throw gasoline on the fire – he’d never confronted Deem directly about her growing disinterest in the normal religious routines of the community. He’d always seemed supportive, regardless of how active Deem had been in the church. But Deem knew her father had played a role in excommunicating the Halworths. He was part of an organization that was the reason they were being treated like trash. She resented it. She thought it was cruel.

  Then again, what she learned about the fundamentalists bothered her too, especially the forced underage marriages. She didn’t have a problem with adults practicing their religion the way they wanted, and she didn’t have a problem with people having more than one wife, if that’s what they wanted. Live and let live. But she abhorred the idea of a fourteen year old girl being forced to marry a sixty year old man, just because some self-proclaimed “prophet” somewhere decreed it.

  Which was worse? she wondered. My father’s church, which would cruelly ostracize and shun an entire family, making their life hell? Or a prophet who would marry off underage kids?

  The latter, she thought. Definitely the latter. But it didn’t make what her father had done any more palatable to her. She knew that if her father hadn’t excommunicated the Halworths, higher-ups in Salt Lake would have forced the issue, so he had no choice.

  That just means he was willing to do awful things in the name of religion, Deem thought. Am I sure I want these journals? I may not like what I find.

  She suddenly felt incredibly sad as she watched the blue dot moving further into Nevada and turning south toward Caliente. Part of her wanted to give up and just abandon the whole attempt.

  Then another part of her emerged, the part she knew well – the rebellious part. No, she thought. No burying heads in the sand. No caving in to these religious nuts. I want the truth, whatever it is. My father’s journals are mine, not theirs.

  She focused down on the blue dot, pushing out all feeling of doubt and sadness. The dot was the goal, it was going to be dealt with. She was not one to start something and not finish it.

  “You may be right,” she said to Winn. “A secret council might be capable of anything.”

  Winn knew something was going on with Deem. He decided to let her comment sit, and they rode on in silence.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  “How long has it been?” Winn asked.

  Deem checked her watch. “Just over an hour and a half.”

  Winn adjusted himself and tried to stretch out in the driver’s seat of his Jeep. They were parked half a block from an old, abandoned church in Caliente.

  Earlier, they had followed Dayton to a side street where he’d parked his car and walked two blocks to the church. The others who had met him there had followed the same procedure – there were no cars parked in front of or around the building. It still looked as silent and vacant as it had before Winn and Deem had seen half a dozen men enter the back of the church.

  “Why way the fuck out here?” Winn asked, looking around.

  “Based on what Claude indicated,” Deem said, “I’m guessing the group is spread out. Caliente might be central for all of them.”

  Earlier, after they’d watched the men entering the building, Deem had asked Winn to drive around the streets surrounding the old church, two blocks in each direction. She’d taken pictures of every parked car, and noted license plate numbers. She had about twenty cars on her list. She knew some of them probably didn’t belong to council members, but she figured a good number of them did.

  “They’re coming out,” Winn said. “Well, at least one guy.”

  Deem raised her camera as discreetly as she could and began taking pictures. She was using the zoom, and because it was dark, she wasn’t sure the pictures would turn out to be useful, but she took them anyway. The first man left the back exit of the church and walked away into the night. It was a couple of minutes before the next man emerged.

  “They don’t want to draw attention by leaving all at once,” Winn said. “They’ve got this down.”

  After twenty minutes it appeared they’d all left; no more men came out of the building.

  “Come on,” Deem said, grabbing a small duffel bag. “We’re going in.”

  Deem jumped out of the car and Winn followed her. They walked the half a block to the old church along a tree-lined street. There were no streetlights, and only the light coming from the moon made them able to see their way.

  The old church was small and well over a hundred years old, built by Mormons in the early 20th century. Needs of the local congregations had long ago exceeded the capabilities of the tiny building, and it was replaced by modern brick structures in other parts of town. Deem was surprised this old church hadn’t been torn down. Then it occurred to her that the church might have been serving the needs of the Mormon gifted for many generations. Although it appeared abandoned, it was still in use.

  As they approached the back door, the security system sticker reflected the moonlight.

  “That looks relatively new,” Winn said, observing the warning not to enter.

  “Hold on,” Deem said, leaving Winn and circling around the side of the building. She searched the sky for wires, and soon found the box where the phone lines entered the building. She pulled wire snips from her bag and cut every wire that emerged from the junction box, then she returned to Winn.

  “That’s done,” Deem said. She retrieved Winn’s lock picking tools from the duffel and handed them to him. “You can pick it?”

  Winn studied the lock. There were two, a deadbolt and a separate lock on the handle.

  “No problem,” he said, pulling the thin tools out of a sheath and inserting them into the keyholes. “Give me a minute.”

  Deem waited patiently while Winn worked. She looked around, hoping they’d avoid any cars or passersby. The back of the church faced a row of short trees and shrubs that separated the property from the next street, which contained a couple of industrial structures. She could see why the council members used this entrance – it was quiet and private.

  “Yes!” Winn said as the door opened, and he let Deem take the lead. She pulled a flashlight from her duffel and entered the building. Winn followed and pulled the door closed behind him.

  They were in a short hallway, with small rooms branching from each side. “Classrooms,” Deem said, shining her light in each and quickly moving on. “For Sunday School.”

  After a bend in the hallway she came upon a locked door. “We’ll come back to this,” she said, continuing on.

  After another turn, they emerged into the chapel. The pews were still in place, and a raised podium made of wood was still at the end of the room. Deem walked down the aisle, amazed that the elements of the chapel were still intact. She had expected that something this old might have been vandalized. When she reached the podium she walked up the dais and looked out over the small room. There were fifteen rows of pews, divided into a left and right side. There was nothing on the walls, but she didn’t expect there to be – Mormon churches were strictly utilitarian with no ornamentation.

  “Do you think they met in here?” Winn asked.

  “Probably,” Deem said, searching around the podium for any signs of use. There were none.

  “There’s nothing here,” Winn said. “Or back in those rooms.”

  “Except for that locked door,” Deem said. She walked down from the dais and back through the pews. “Let’s get it open.”

  Winn followed her back to the locked door and he knelt, examining the lock. “Alright,” he said. “This should only take a second.”

  Winn had the door open quickly, and Deem stepped inside. It was a sizeable room. The walls were lined with open, free-standing metal shelves that contained cardboard boxes.

  “Hmm,” Deem said. “Remind you of anything?”

  “Yeah,” Winn said. “The skinrunner’s room.”

  Deem pulled one of the boxes off the shelf. It
was heavy. She opened the lid and looked inside. It was filled with green hanging file folders, each stuffed with multiple manila folders. She pulled one out and looked at it – she recognized the church logo in the upper right corner. It was filled with handwriting. As she read it, she realized it was the notes from a church service long ago. She looked at the top right and saw a date: September 17, 1972.

  “These are just old church records,” Deem said. “Nothing as interesting as the skinrunner’s.”

  She replaced the folders and put the box back on the shelf. They scanned the room. There didn’t appear to be anything unusual or out of place, just a room full of boxes.

  She examined the writings on the face of each box. They all seemed to be minutes from various church meetings.

  “Do you think they kept minutes of their secret council?” Winn asked, joining Deem as she searched.

  “Maybe,” Deem said. “Mormons love to take notes. But these all appear to be minutes from old sacrament and priesthood meetings.”

  Winn could tell from Deem’s tone that she was beginning to feel disappointed.

  “Your dad’s journals might be in here somewhere,” Winn said. “These boxes might be mislabeled, might have been re-used.”

  Deem pulled another box at random. She inspected the documents inside and compared them to the notes on the box. They were the same. Even the handwriting was the same, from box to box.

  “Damn,” she said. “I was really hoping they’d be here.”

  She tried a succession of boxes. Each time the papers inside were merely meeting minutes, syncing with the dates that had been noted on the exterior of the box. Winn assisted her, checking several boxes. When he replaced the box he had just checked, he noticed that the box met with resistance as he pushed it back. He assumed the box had hit the wall behind the shelving, but something didn’t seem right. He removed the box and shined his flashlight into the empty space.

  “Deem,” he said. “Come here.”

  Deem replaced the box she had been looking through and joined Winn.