watch and see,” a third woman answered. “You know, even before this happened, Naomi was interested in Jacob. I saw them whispering together at worship services a couple of weeks ago, and Naomi wasn’t looking at him like a neighbor, more like a woman intent on becoming his third wife.”
“Well, now she’d be his first, since Anna and Laurel are out of the way,” the woman on the couch said. “How convenient is that?”
“Very convenient,” someone answered with a short laugh.
“Oh, you don’t think—” yet another woman said.
“All I know is that I’m sure Naomi wouldn’t mind being first wife to a man with property and status,” the woman on the couch insisted. “If Jacob survives, that is. I hear he’s in bad shape. If she’s got marriage on her mind, Naomi might be wasting her time courting the Johansson family. He might not live long enough for a wedding.”
I considered walking into the parlor and defending Naomi, telling the women that she was only concerned with his welfare. But I thought about her at the hospital, twice on this one day, and that moment when I thought Jacob was awake and talking to her. I wondered yet again what was going on inside Naomi. And I considered what the one woman had said, that even before the murders, Naomi might have been interested in Jacob. As a child, I’d seen Naomi through the eyes of a daughter; she’d always appeared virtuous in the extreme. But she was also a woman, and since Father’s death one without a husband. Could it be true that even before the killings Naomi had her cap set for Jacob Johansson?
“I’m getting pretty sick of this,” the woman on the couch complained. The others murmured, and she said, “There’s a lot of violence in this town, bad things that happen that no one talks about.”
“That’s true,” someone said. “Way too much that gets swept under the rug.”
“Lots of the women here have had bad stuff happen,” the first woman continued. “Now Laurel and Anna, those two little kids are dead. You think that police chief, that woman from Dallas, cares? You think she’s going to find the killer? She left here. She’s an apostate. A lot of the people in town shun her, won’t even talk to her, like the prophet decreed.”
“She’s not one of us,” someone hissed.
“That’s true,” another agreed. “I’ve heard people say they don’t want her here, and I’ve heard some of them say that they’d like to force her out.”
“You know Ardeth Jefferies is her mother,” someone said. “I hear she told this Clara woman to leave. Even her own family doesn’t want anything to do with her.”
At that, one of the women shushed the others. “She’s a friend of Hannah’s. She lives here, you know.”
“I don’t care,” the woman who’d made the charge said. “I’m thinking some woman shows up from Dallas, someone who ran off and deserted her family, and suddenly she’s in charge. And then two of us get murdered, two little children, and what’s she doing? Out digging for bodies this morning, I heard, like some kind of a loon. All the while a maniac is running around killing folks.”
In my room, I thought about what was said, how I was an outsider, not to be trusted, and one who hadn’t proven herself. They were right. I was rejected by many in town, even my own family. Why should they trust me?
I took a deep breath, a few more, while I tried to calm down. Yes, I’d run away, but I’d had no choice. No one cared about what had pushed me to leave. Instead, they blindly followed the prophet’s orders and turned their backs on me. As much as that hurt, and it did, I reminded myself that none of what they’d said mattered. They might never want me here. But all that truly counted was that four people were dead, murdered, one gravely injured. Again, I thought about the two survivors. For all I knew, while I wasted time nursing my bruised feelings, little Jeremy and Jacob were in danger.
I pulled on a pair of old gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt, then sat on the bed and took out the copies of the letters Mueller’s men found at the log cabin. I’d noticed when Mueller showed me the envelopes that they weren’t addressed and had no postmarks. They’d been hand-delivered, somehow. I wondered if Laurel had an intermediary who passed the letters to Myles.