Chapter 38
Abby ushered me out of the study. “Clever of you to finally figure it out, little Hazel. Though I suppose it’s unsurprising. Sariah’s been louder than ever since you arrived. She tried befriending Flora once, but I’m sure you can guess how that went.”
I shrank away from her. Though she wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, Abby had still ended Sariah’s life, and part of me wanted to keep my distance.
“I know what happened to Sariah,” I said.
Abby straightened up. Closer now, I noticed her eyes were rimmed with red as if she’d been crying.
“I see.” Her words were only a whisper.
“You pushed her down the stairs and she died. It may have been an accident, but it was still a murder.”
Abby’s expression diminished until it faded from her ashen face. “I know.”
She stepped back into the dining room and I trailed behind her, anxious to see what she would confess.
“Then you cursed her in a profane act,” I continued. “You cursed this whole house.”
Abby bumped against the edge of the dining table. Placing her hands back on the tabletop, she hung her head. The house and I waited; I was barely breathing.
She gripped the table edge tighter. “Did Jacob tell you all this?”
“He didn’t have to,” I said. “Sariah showed me herself.”
Abby whimpered.
“You don’t understand, Hazel. You can’t understand. Everything was taken from me. Everything.”
“Then for once, tell me the truth, all of it.”
“You must believe me, I never intended to harm her.” Her shoulders curled in to ball herself up. “She was my sister—my twin sister. Our whole lives we only had each other.”
The entire house shivered with me, walls and windows rattling.
“I was so angry at her in the moment, but I—I’ve done a lot of things, Hazel, but I never would’ve killed her on purpose.”
I believed her but still felt disgust for her actions, so I said nothing.
She went on, her eyes glazed over as if she didn’t even see me standing there anymore.
“I was so in love with Jacob. We were going to have a beautiful life together. And then on the day of our marriage we came to the Endowment House ready to be sealed, so proud that Brigham Young himself would conduct the ceremony. But do you know what he said?” Her eyes searched mine now, tears streaking down her freckled cheeks.
“He refused to marry us. He said he knew that I had a sister and he wouldn’t seal us unless we left and came back with her so Jacob could marry us both. ”
I saw it almost as if I were there myself—a devasted Abby being told they could only be united if another came along.
Sariah watching them return from the porch, forced to acquiesce to the prophet’s sudden demands or to squash forever the happiness of her sister.
Abby fighting back tears as the love of her heart swore himself to another over the altar on what should’ve been her own—only her own—joyous wedding day.
My heart sagged heavy with a misery that wasn’t my own. How many heartaches and sorrows were required for the church to flourish? Perhaps at final judgment day God would weigh our exaltation in tears.
“Of course, I begged Sariah to agree to it. I couldn’t lose Jacob,” Abby continued, her voice rasping. “I didn’t know—I couldn’t have imagined what it would feel like—how we would live. I lost everything as I watched him fall in love with her too. But it was already too late to change anything.”
“You could have insisted on your own household,” I said, trying to fit these final pieces of their story together.
More tears splashed down her face. “No, he said he wanted something special for us by keeping only one house. It didn’t take long for Jacob to start believing himself entitled to quite a lot.”
Entitled to Flora, to Prudence, to me. Did he ever once worry for our safety? That the sins she had committed, that lived on in the house, could do more than simply haunt us—that they could harm us?
“And now, neither of us will ever find peace. Sariah’s everywhere in this house, her and that godforsaken hymn.
She plays it to remind me, I think, that I’ll never find solace after what I did.
That she’ll never be at rest either. She uses the house to swallow all sounds, to continually berate me for silencing her in death.
I’ve tried everything to ignore her, but I’ve known for a long time there’s something she needs me to do and she won’t stop until it’s finished. ”
Abby stood lost in her thoughts for what seemed an eternity.
The grandfather clock ticked louder in my ears. I was running out of time. Jacob could return any moment. Elijah could be hurt or worse. Dread for his possible fate hummed loudly, and I continued my unspoken prayer that he wouldn’t try to return tonight. But questions continued to pile in my mind.
“Why did you never harm us?” I asked. “We too took your husband.”
Abby wiped her tears on her sleeve, though it did nothing to hide the bright splotches on her cheeks.
“Any last remains of love I had for Jacob were destroyed the minute he carried in a shovel to dig a hole for her grave. I just kept wondering why—why hadn’t he said anything when Brigham told us to fetch Sariah?
Why didn’t he protest or even apologize for destroying my dreams?
Why did he find it a lark to let me catch them time and again in compromising positions, even as I birthed his children?
“It was like the scales dropped from my eyes and I finally saw him for who he truly was, how he’d really treated me.
When he’d blamed his lust on me and demanded I take the brunt of repentance, or when he took Sariah to wife without hesitation or sadness.
The little games he would play to make us compete with one another.
He’d been torturing us for his own amusement for years.
And my God, the guilt of bringing my sister right into his arms was almost as devastating as having killed her.
“And then he simply carted Sariah outside and buried her body without even saying a prayer over her grave. I realized I was nothing to him in the end. We were nothing to him.”
Was that all we were to our husband? A thing to be used and discarded? Tears slipped down my own cheeks, tasting salted and bitter.
“But you never left him, Abby. And you never warned us of all this,” I said, betrayal and devastation battling within my chest.
“How could I? He held my secret crime over me! I have children to protect that I couldn’t leave to his sole care if he turned me in.
Jacob held all the cards! But I grew to love the thrill of hitting back at him where I could, rebelling only to hurt him.
I hoped that somehow one of you would see it and be wary of him.
But what else could I do when he married you all without so much as telling me first?
Once you were here, it was already too late. ”
Too late. Too late to dwell on what should’ve happened or what she could’ve done.
My hand warmed at my side as if someone had slipped their own into mine. I shifted slowly. No one stood there, but I felt her presence. Sariah strengthening me. Reminding me. I gave the ghostly sensation a squeeze, then turned back to Abby.
“It may be too late to change the past, but is there anything we can do to release Sariah now and try to right at least one wrong?” I asked.
Abby shook her head.
“I’ve tried everything. Why do you think I’ve been studying Brigham’s words in Jacob’s journals?” She let out a choked laugh. “I’m that desperate for answers.”
My heart sank. But we were running out of time, and perhaps I could at least save Abby.
I closed the final gap between us, standing inches from Abby’s face.
“Listen to me. We can’t stay here. We know Jacob’s a monster and it’ll never end if we do.”
She coiled her fingers around her own neck. “But my sister …”
“She can’t leave this house, but you can. We need to get Prudence and the children far away from here.”
“Oh, little Hazel. You think it’s so simple?
You think Jacob won’t find us, wherever we go?
” She dug her fingers into her skin. “You think he won’t lay claim on us in the next life?
This is our eternal burden. We can run and run, but men will always hold the invisible cords around us.
Even in death there is no freedom. We’ll always be tied to them—their wives, their daughters, their muses, their sacrifices—a woman they can look back on as part of their story, but never our own.
“To Jacob, we’re the silent queens of his eternal, Mormon kingdom, covenanting to him as our God. Nothing but a means for his own exaltation.”
Abby gripped me by the shoulders. Her tear-stroked expression was desperate, despairing. Squeezing against my shoulder bones as if she could wring redemption from my flesh, she wrenched me closer.
“This is a woman’s lot,” she said. “A poisonous salvation we’re fed over and over, never realizing we’re consuming our own destruction.”
A hatred I’d never before experienced devoured me. It was for all of them. For Jacob and the prison he’d locked us in. For the years of torment that ground Abby down. For the prophets of God and men of this world who fashioned the disease of patriarchy and called it exaltation.
I wanted to crumble beneath it all. Panic rose in my chest, ready to steal my next breaths. But I threw my arms out and fought. On command, the house ceased its trembling.
“Then we run as far as we can so our children won’t have to live what we’ve lived.”
Abby stared back in disbelief.
“Sister Hazel, I … I can’t. I can’t leave my sister. Not alone in this house with only him for company.”
Until the next wife.
My heart cracked open for her, blood spooling into my chest thick with sorrow and frustration that could never be overcome. But in the back of my head, the clock continued to tick. I was almost out of time.
“Very well, Abby,” I said, a plan slowly forming. “Then you’ll at least help us escape.”
Abby nodded but seemed uncertain. “How?”
“We need time to get away without him following behind.” I began to pace. “First, we need to draw him away from Elijah before he harms him. I knew him before he came to board here.”
She snorted.
“What?”
“Don’t think I never noticed your lovelorn face every time the boarder entered the room,” she said.
Heat warmed up my neck. “Yes, well, I’m going with him, far away from here.”
“Then I suppose we better hurry before your current husband finds your husband-to-be.”
I pushed down the mix of awkwardness and excitement, as well as the fear, her words brought me.
“We need to get Prudence to go along with this,” I said. “I can’t leave her behind.”
“No, I suppose not. …” Abby trailed off, her eyes searching around the dining room. “Sariah, I know you’re here somewhere!” she called.
The large windows that once had terrified me over dinner rattled in response. It was strange how normal all this madness had become to me.
Abby continued speaking to the house. “Go and wake Prudence and bring her down here, quickly.”
A faint light shot across the room and disappeared into the hallway.
She turned back to me. “Do you have a plan?”
“I think so.” I fidgeted with a button on the nightgown. “We’ll tie him up. Imprison him in his office for the night. If we catch the first train tomorrow, we’ll be long gone before he can make it back to the city.”
A scream cut through the anticipation brewing around us.
Prudence ran through the doorway, her unpinned hair wild around her face.
“Abby! Oh goodness, there you are! I saw—I thought I saw …” She trembled.
Carefully, I wrapped my arm around her shoulder. “I know and I’m sorry. Come, there’s something I have to show you.”
As I led her to the study, out of the corner of my eye I saw Abby speaking softly with a faint light lurking in the hallway.
“I think I finally know what you need me to do,” she whispered.