Chapter 29
Back in my room, cold autumn air seeped in through a crack in the window. My curtains were drawn, but streaks of moonlight trickled in. The mattress creaked beneath my weight as I shifted in another failed attempt to get comfortable. It had to have been near midnight and I couldn’t sleep.
Every worry and fear I’d tried to suppress paraded through my mind in a sickening cycle.
In the darkness of my unhallowed room, each one rattled through me.
Abby’s specter. What did she want from me that no others could give her?
The blood. Did my nightmares mean that death was coming for Abby? For us?
Elijah. If I heard his pleadings, would the frail pieces of my resolve against him and my treacherous longings finally collapse?
Jacob. Was he truly so vicious and would follow through on his threats to destroy my standing and salvation?
I rolled over, gripping the blanket around my head.
If only I knew where Jacob was now and how close he was to Elder Crowther.
What if Abby’s flippant words weeks ago in the kitchen held more truth than they seemed to at first? Jacob could be hidden up somewhere with another wife—a new wife. Perhaps the thought of his shifting attention should’ve brought me relief, but it only drowned me in more misery.
This was the dark underbelly of plural marriage—women abandoned and left destitute by the men eternally yoked to them.
Mothers forced to learn how to survive alone and feed their children, never knowing when their husband might return.
Women left in far-flung towns with little more than what they could carry, and a promise he’d return.
And then the vicious cycle turned over again.
Men had the right to find a new wife while their other women languished alone.
The sour taste of bile scorched the back of my throat.
Just as I thought I’d succumb to this eternal wretchedness, a door slammed down the hall. I sat up. A chain of rattling windows moved down the length of the house, each one louder as it approached. My own window shook with such a fury I thought it’d shatter into a million shards.
The sinister movements of the house seemed to press down on me, suffocating me.
I couldn’t be here a moment longer tonight.
My feet caught on the blanket in my hurry to get out of this strange room, and I fell to the floor.
I pushed up from the floorboards onto my knees, looking around the darkness. This room held too many secrets.
I grabbed the lamp from the table as I flew to the door. I slipped into the hallway, my heart crashing against the walls of my chest as I tore down the stairs. Every step pounded with growing fear that the house tried to swallow me into its depths.
Once in the parlor, I stumbled across the threshold, catching myself with my palm against the doorway.
I leaned over, bent in the middle, until my dizziness settled.
The piano loomed before me. I pitched myself toward the instrument as if grabbing a rescue line and collapsed onto the bench.
I hadn’t found the strength to play in months.
I placed the light onto the top of the piano.
Menacing shadows coated the walls, leering over me.
This house—this cursed house—with its secrets and its perpetual veil of silence.
No home should feel like it has rejected its occupants.
This mansion was built to display its owner’s opulent wealth—a beacon of fortitude and riches in the vast desert that only the Mormons were desperate enough to try to tame.
But like the vines climbing the house and cracking its foundation, this place sought to be reclaimed by its wilderness and bury us along with it.
Come, come, ye Saints …
I startled as music rose from the piano. My fingers didn’t move at all and neither did the keys, but the sound was unmistakable. An otherworldly hymn played for a piece of hell on earth. Even my music betrayed me.
I steadied in my seat, allowing the mysterious chords to wrap their tentacles around me. I closed my eyes.
No toil nor labor fear …
Beneath my breath, I sang the next line to the invisible chorus: “‘But with joy wend your way.’” Joy. What joy was there in this place?
Though hard to you this journey may appear …
“‘Grace shall be as your day,’” I sang.
’Tis better far for us to strive …
“‘Our useless cares from us to drive.’”
Do this, and joy your hearts will swell …
“‘All is well!’” I sang along with the unseen musician. “‘All is well!’”
I didn’t move as the music dripped away. The walls were shrinking in closer. This house was my home and my marriage bed—and it would be my grave.
“Sister Hazel?”
I flinched at Abby’s intrusion but didn’t move from the piano. My fingers shook and plucked the keys one by one.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Abby said as she approached. I noticed she hadn’t yet undressed from the day. In her arm, she carried more of Jacob’s journals. Her own lamp sparred with the light from mine.
“Up late studying?” I asked, watching the twin flames dance.
“Not that I need to explain myself to you, but yes. I feel I’m getting closer to answers and relief.”
I stopped playing and shifted toward her, taking her in as if it were the first time. Abby had always done and said whatever she wanted. It was her right as the first wife, I’d supposed. But perhaps it was simply her. Abby in all her magnetic strangeness.
“What relief are you searching for?”
Abby had everything—charm, beauty, power, and the ability to not care about anything. I couldn’t imagine there was much she needed succor for.
She dropped the journals onto the nearest table. Beneath her breath, she hummed the same haunting hymn.
“You know, I used to be quite the dancer before I married,” Abby said. “Jacob would take me every Saturday night to the social hall and we’d dance until our feet hurt. His hands always wandered to places they shouldn’t have on the ride home.
“Then the next morning he’d come to drive me to church, and he’d chide me for the entire ride about my sins.
Abby, you ensnared me with your beauty. Abby, you shouldn’t have made me touch you.
Abby, your sins are a stain on me.” She let out a hollow laugh.
“The horror I would feel! I’d lay prostrate on my floor begging for God’s forgiveness for such wickedness.
For daring to have a body. Only to find myself kneeling before Jacob the next Saturday night. Abby, oh Abby, just trust me.”
I sat paralyzed on the piano bench, listening to Abby’s confessions.
“Again and again, week after week. Oh, I loved him. And his wicked fingers. It’s your fault, Abby, he always reminded me. My sins. Never his. But it never is for men, is it?”
No, perhaps it wasn’t, I was learning.
“He was the first to call me Abby, you know. I liked being his little pet, someone special to a godly man, even if I hated the butchering of my mother’s namesake.
” She paused, probably remembering her lost mother whose name she apparently carried.
“But Jacob insisted on keeping the nickname, said it endeared me to him. Now it grates on my ears.”
“So you’re seeking relief from Jacob?” I said. “Surely, he has enough wives now to divide his attentions.”
“Oh, little Hazel.” Abby collapsed onto the chair closest to the piano. “If only you knew the stories we carry.”
“I suppose you could tell me.” Part of me screamed for her to keep them to herself, though, unable to bear any more burdens in my fragile mind.
Abby yawned and stretched out as if settling in for a long night. “Come, Hazel, let’s lighten the mood. Play another duet for me.”
“I wouldn’t want to wake the house …” My words faded away.
Duet.
“You can hear it too, can’t you, Abby?”
She pressed her lips together tight.
“The music, Abby. You said ‘duet.’ I know you hear it too.”
I struck my fingers into the keyboard, creating a dissonant chord.
“Tell me the truth, please.” I spun to face her. My desperation for my own solace was a heat, smoldering as an engine. “What do you know about the music?”
For one fleeting moment, the entire room disappeared. Only Abby and I remained. We stood as if at opposite ends of a tunnel, studying each other. The light around us focused into a pinprick, illuminating only her distant face. Whispers swaddled us.
Her face hardened. “It’s nothing but a reminder of the things I cannot change.”
“What is it you wish to change?”
Judging by the grief shattering across her expression, it seemed something too heavy to speak of. Part of me cried for retreat, feeling shame over dragging up things that only brought my sister wife torture. But another part needed and begged for more. For answers.
Abby’s words came out jagged. “Do you know who this piano belonged to?”
“Sister Flora said the previous owner.”
“If only. There used to be another.”
Another? Another what?
Fifth, Elijah had said. I swallowed.
“Another … wife?” My voice was only a squeak.
She held unnaturally still except for the quiver of her chin.
“Yes. Her name was Sariah. She was his second wife.”
Was. My pulse skipped. “What happened to her?”
“She disappeared many years ago. No one has seen her since.”
“Disappeared? How could she simply disappear?” I asked. Panic clung to me with sharpened claws.
Abby stared off into the distance as if she saw something I could not. Pain etched into the lines on her face, grooves too deep to be forgotten.
“As I said, you know nothing of what we carry,” she replied.
But now I carried this knowledge too, and it was heavier than I imagined.
Another wife. I was the fifth wife. But no one had told me. No whispers, no photographs, no mentions. Elder Crowther had told me Jacob had three wives. But Elijah knew. Did that mean Elder Crowther had known?
Pieces of a puzzle fit together in my mind.
The evidence of the other wife had been here all along, unnoticed or unsaid.
Fragments of clues scattered throughout the house: my room with its heavy furniture, chosen and painted with care by someone else, and the piano tucked away in the attic to be forgotten.
“Do Flora and Prudence know? Was I the only one?” A slap of betrayal hit me. They all could’ve been conspiring, holding this vital piece of information away from me.
Abby blinked hard. “No, they’ve been kept from it as well. Though I doubt they don’t suspect something amiss in this abnormal house.”
At least I wasn’t alone in the darkness I’d been kept in. The thought brought only a measure of relief too small to cover my swelling pain.
I opened my mouth to say something, anything in response, but my throat was too tight with oncoming tears. Abby shot up from her chair, collecting her books and light. A sudden desperation to hold her here, to hear more, loosened my tongue.
“Do you mean we should be afraid?” I asked.
Once more, her face was as stone. She rounded over me and I gasped from the sudden coldness overtaking her.
“You should always be wary in this house. Hasn’t that been made abundantly clear? Don’t think that what happened here won’t happen again, little Hazel.”
The curtains billowed angrily and our lamplight flickered, almost extinguishing.
“This house is a cage for Jacob’s prizes. We are nothing more than goods to be collected and discarded at his whim.”
Jacob’s angry words as he pinned me against the wall seared in my memory. I tried to take in more air and fight off the piercing panic still holding fast.
“This strange house, and its hauntings. This house that won’t let us live,” Abby continued, lifting her eyes to the ceiling as though addressing the manor itself. “But with my help, these wrongs will be righted and we will have peace.”
“Whose wrongs?” I said, though my lungs clenched tighter, fearing the answer. If this place was a prison, then Jacob was its jailer.
Abby only shook her head without confirming my unease. “Heed my words, little mouse.”
Before I could respond or plead for more understanding, she walked into the darkness with purpose. Only her cautionary words lingered, carved into me as if with a knife. But as she disappeared, she softly sung the words to the final verse of the hymn:
“‘And should we die before our journey’s through, Happy day! All is well!’”