The Remnant (8 page)

"Whose toes?" said Trace. "I repeated in
numerous places that I could find no irrefutable evidence that the
Church of the Latter Day Saints was directly linked to the
Angels."

"But you implied that they were, and you did
more than imply that the
New
Church of the Latter Day Saints
was."

"So we remove the implications. Readers will
still get the picture. No big deal. What’s the real problem,
Charlie? Why the sudden brouhaha?"

"I think you just really pissed off the wrong
people this time, Trace."

He made it sound as though there were no
recourse. Of course Charlie only represented the one imprint, but
in the day of the mega-conglomerates, publishers had become an even
tighter-knit, good old boy network. If one dumped you getting
another to take you on could be a major undertaking if not
completely impossible. And if he was forced into a legal battle to
retain what little was left of the advance the attorneys might end
up costing him more than he’d received.

"Let’s sit down and talk about this," said
Trace, reassuringly. "I’ll even buy. How’s that."

"No," said Charlie.

If Trace hadn’t known better he’d have sworn
the man was scared. Was it possible there was someone in the office
with him? That sounded paranoid, but after last night, what was
paranoid?

"Meeting isn’t going to fix anything," said
Charlie. "I’m sorry. This is a done deal. The book isn’t going to
press, and there’s honest to God nothing I can do about it."

Ever since Mexachuli the Angels had haunted
Trace’s dreams, and in the end he had written the book,
Dangerous Angels
, based on a library’s worth of historical
data on Mormon history, on interviews with locals in Mexico, police
and militia there, with family and former friends of the members of
the offshoot group that had lived there. If there were no longer
any Avenging Angels-as both the LDS and its radical cousin, the
NLDS, adamantly claimed-there was certainly
someone
who
hadn’t wanted any survivors of the heretical sect. And there was
some dark force that worked behind the scenes to see that no one
asked questions later. More than once Trace had run into a stone
wall during his research, and several times either he or his
interviewees had been threatened, always anonymously. Someone had a
lot of pull, but until this moment he had never considered the idea
that they might have enough to blackmail a large publisher. Until
last night he had never thought that Rendt was crazy enough to try
to murder a nationally recognized journalist, either.

"I can’t talk about it, anymore," said
Charlie, sadly.

"They’re burying the truth, and you know it.
Everything I wrote about the Prophet in California City forcing
fourteen-year-old girls into sexual relationships with
sixty-year-old men is fact, and I can prove it. They murdered the
Brethren in Mexachuli because in their eyes they were apostates and
because of statements the Brethren made about the NLDS. And killing
to protect their
faith
has been a tenet since the very
beginning, way before the NLDS broke away from the Latter Day
Saints in Salt Lake City fifty years ago."

"You can’t prove that."

"It’s nothing new!" Trace screamed into the
phone. "The Mormons murdered one-hundred-and-twenty men women and
children in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1858 at the orders of
Brigham Young. They promised the group that if they gave up their
guns they would be spared. Then they marched them away from camp
and shot every one of them in the head at close range. Children
under four were spared because the Mormons didn’t believe the kids
were old enough to remember what happened."

"Ancient History," said Charlie."

"Horrific history, maybe. When the US
Government came to claim the children the Mormon killers had the
audacity to ask the government for payment for child support.
There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to prove that some of
those same Mormons murdered three of the Powell Party who chose to
leave the river expedition half way through the Grand Canyon. They
blamed the murders on the Indians just as they tried to do at
Mountain Meadows."

"I don’t dispute your facts, but the LDS has
made a clean slate of Mountain Meadows long ago. And the story in
Mexico... that wasn’t the LDS. If anything it was a few radical
fundamentalists-"

"There are somewhere between thirty-thousand
and one-hundred-thousand of those radical fundamentalist Mormons in
the country today. One of the reasons the numbers are so hard to
pin down is that we have no idea of how many they’re claiming as
celestial
brides right now, and many refuse to file census
forms, pay income tax or state or local tax, or have Social
Security cards. But it’s not a
few.
And every one of them
believes that God speaks to him personally. I say him because God
doesn’t speak to women, or blacks for that matter."

"We’re wasting each other’s time. This is a
done deal."

"This story is important, Charlie, and you
know it. People see Mormons in their midst every day and they
think,
hey, they’re just like me, they’re just a different
Christian sect.
They have no idea what the church is all about
or what its true beliefs are because half of them are kept secret
even from the mainstream members."

"That doesn’t make them all a bunch of
killers. You’ve lost focus, Trace. You’re not separating the
mainstream LDS from a few fundamentalist nuts."

"Three of those nuts tried to kill me last
night."

"Are you serious? What happened?"

Trace gave him an abbreviated version of the
story.

"Can you prove that?" asked Charlie.

Trace sighed. Even if he could convince
Charlie or the police that
something
had happened, what did
he have for evidence? He could show them the tunnels, but so what?
That there was a maze under New York was no great secret. He had to
admit that he couldn’t prove a damned thing.

"Even so," said Charlie, "I suggest you keep
a low profile for a while. If you really do have nutcases on your
tail you need to protect yourself."

"They’re all crazy, Charlie. Don’t you think
it’s a little odd to believe that you can baptize people who have
been dead for centuries by proxy? How about believing that when you
die you become a god or that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri? Not
to mention the fact that every devout Mormon is taught from
childhood that the word of the current Prophet, the head of the
church, is the word of God. When God talks to so many is it any
wonder that he will anoint a half dozen or so Prophets a year out
in the wilderness? Is it any wonder that some of them will see it
as divine necessity that their enemies fall before them? Brigham
Young called it Blood Atonement."

"I can’t talk about that any more, Trace. I’m
sorry."

"Charlie, Jesus Christ, man," said Trace. "We
can work this out."

"We can’t, Trace. Our attorneys will be in
touch. Take care of yourself. I mean that."

The line went dead.

Trace stalked over to the table and lifted
the frayed map, flipping it onto the bed so that he could read the
one word scrawled upon the backside in what looked like blood.

Nauvoo.

That was the Hebrew name Joseph Smith had
used for the first Mormon settlement in Illinois. According to
Smith it meant
beautiful plantation,
but later scholars had
translated it simply as beautiful. Was the reference to the town
which now hosted only a minimal Mormon presence? Or was it
referring to something else? Certainly not the tunnels. Trace had
several descriptive adjectives for that subterranean nightmare but
nauvoo wasn’t one of them.

He lifted the phone and dialed a number from
memory. A warm male voice with a touch of Irish brogue
answered.

"Hi, Bernie, it’s me, Trace."

"Trace, me boy? How the hell are you?"

"I’ve been better. I need a favor."

"You usually do."

"How do I go about finding out what hotel
someone is staying at?"

The warm voice emitted an equally warm
laugh.

"Lose a pretty girl did you? She give you a
wrong number?"

"Something like that."

But Trace’s voice gave him away, and Bernie
sounded serious when he replied.

"Is this a favor, or am I on the clock?"

"You choose. But I’ll have to give you an
IOU."

"Good enough. The name?"

"Frederick Rendt."

Trace spelled it for him.

"Frederick?" mused Bernie. "You having gender
issues?"

"How long?"

"If he’s in the city and staying under his
real name give me an hour. Any additional detecting will take
longer and most definitely be on the clock."

"That’s fast work."

"I’m a fast worker."

When the garden was weedless and as rich and
pure as a virgin’s heart Ashley rested the hoe in the
loamy-smelling black earth of the furrow and leaned on the
sweat-slickened handle watching the sun setting over the mountains.
It was always at this time of day that she felt saddest, the last
dying of the light symbolizing the light that had died within her,
recalling losses she didn’t want to remember but could never deny.
So many losses, so many lives destroyed.

Those people she saw run out of California
City, her own final departure from her home and family. Then Trace
walking into and out of her life. So many dying in
Mexachuli-including Paulie’s wife and children and Marie’s
family
.
Then the huddling, hiding life they had built here
that had seemed almost as much a death as a life. She had run away
from home at twelve, deserting the faith of her fathers. Then she
had found a new faith in Mexico, a faith of love instead of lust,
and of gentle beauty instead of blood and revenge. She had been
taken in by Paulie and Clara-had taken their name, in fact-and
those had been some of the happiest years of her life. Then Trace
came along and stirred up a torrent of emotions that she had not
known how to handle.

Trace had been the hardest test her devotion
had ever faced. But finally she had given him up for her God, and
then she had been forced to give her God up for reason. She still
had that, but it seemed so little to cling to, so little to trade
for so much. She wanted desperately to drop to her knees in the
damp, rich smelling earth, close her eyes and lock her hands in
prayer, but that would be an empty gesture to an empty universe,
and what would she pray for? Forgiveness? She couldn’t forgive
herself. How was God going to?

Maxie huffed to let her know it was time to
go inside, and she patted his head, realizing by the stars
appearing just how long she had been woolgathering.

"No second thoughts for you, eh, Maxie?"

She called to Marie who was brushing Sparkie
in his paddock. The girl waved back to let Ashley know she’d heard,
and for the millionth time Ashley wondered if Marie blamed her for
the massacre. Paulie and most of the other survivors had all tried
at one time or another to allay Ashley’s feelings of guilt, but she
and Marie had never spoken of it.

"If not for you we wouldn’t likely be alive
today. None of us," Paulie had told Ashley more than once. "The
Angels didn’t come that night on account of you. It was already
long planned."

A part of Ashley knew that was true, but
another part continued to wonder if her actions hadn’t precipitated
or even worsened the violence.

Maxie barked again, then trotted happily
along toward the porch. Ashley placed the hoe in the shed then
turned once more to watch the sunset. Most of the darkening sky was
clear, but the high thin cirrus clouds that lingered just over the
mountains now glowed blood red. She watched as they changed slowly
to purple and then faded away, the stars beginning to twinkle
overhead. When she realized she had to have been standing there for
almost half an hour she shook her head in wonder.

Marie sat on the stoop, Maxie lying on the
grass beside her, his head resting on crossed paws. A light
breeze stirred the trees, but Ashley had no idea how long it had
been blowing or whether it might have been the stimulus that had
raised her from the dead. A whirring sound caused her to spin, and
Maxie glanced up at the same time. Suddenly the air seemed alive
around her, and she realized that she was surrounded by a roiling
swarm of bees. Instead of racing toward the house and certainly
drawing their attention, she froze. Even Maxie lay oddly still,
following the flying insects’ rapid darts and dashes with dancing
eyes, but he never barked, never even growled.

Bees-both wild and domestic-weren’t uncommon
in the valley. Paulie kept hives that produced a wonderful honey,
but she didn’t think the insects were nocturnal, and there seemed
no reason for them to be swarming here or now. And she had her own
species’ intuitive distrust for the little creatures, so the weird
sense of calm that held her in place was doubly strange, and as the
bees continued to cavort Ashley noticed that they weren’t really
swarming at all. There seemed to be a strange pattern to their
flight, an intricate aerial dance against the backdrop of starlit
sky that reminded her of a synchronized swimming exhibition.

"No way," she muttered, as squadrons of the
little buzzbombs dipped and dove in perfect formation, whirling
sinuously between other flights and missing midair collisions by
millimeters.

In the faint light the tiny fliers looked
like dark weights slung on invisible strings. As the moon rose
slowly over the mountains the shadowy movements of the bees became
easier to see against its backdrop and the synchronization even
more evident. The longer Ashley watched the display the more she
came to believe that the strange exhibition had some hidden secret
to convey if she could but understand the slipping, swirling
patterns. Bees danced within the hive, and she thought she had read
somewhere that their flight patterns might sometimes be messages to
other bees as well. But the idea that they might try to make
contact with a human being seemed illogical to say the least.