Change of plans. Going out. Will bring you up to date later. I may be back when you get here with the Heaton and Coombs families, but if not, wait.
On the way to the Daniels family farm, I pulled up memories of Karyn. Coming from such a large family, one father but four mothers, I was one of dozens of siblings, the fifth oldest and the second of the girls. With so many to feed and care for, we all had to work. From the age of eight, I carried babies around on my hip and functioned as our mothers’ helper. Guided by my oldest sister, Sylvia, I sewed, cleaned, cooked, fed and diapered babies.
Karyn was Mother Constance’s second daughter, my father’s tenth child.
The girl I remembered wore jeans with holes in the knees under her dresses. She caught catfish in the river and gutted them while our mothers lit the campfire. Karyn could outride the rest of us by nine, bareback. Never much for studying or reading, she regularly wandered into the back shed, where our father kept his tools. She foraged for leftover wood she whittled into bears, insects and birds. One winter she carved an entire chess set, the male figures on horses or holding pitchforks and the women in long prairie dresses.
The girl I knew would rather spend the day pretending to be a pirate high in the backyard oak tree, a rolled-up sheet of paper for her telescope, than play baby dolls.
Mother Constance complained about her constantly. “Will Karyn ever comb that matted mess of hair? Her crowning glory is full of sawdust and straw!”
The tin-roofed, two-story house I pulled up to was modest, and stood on a tract of land bordered by a split-rail fence painted white. A woman sat on the porch shucking peas, while a smattering of children jumped rope and played basketball.
As at every other house I’d driven up to since returning to Alber, as soon as she saw me the woman gathered the children. By the time I parked, the yard and porch gaped empty except for a five-foot-tall statue of a grizzly carved out of a tree trunk. It had the unmistakable look of Karyn’s work.
I punched the bell but didn’t hear it ring. I knocked. Hard. Through the door’s oval window, I saw a man walk toward me.
The door opened. Jim Daniels stared down at me through his thick, black-rimmed glasses. Well over six feet with dull brown hair, his face tanned to match his hair, he looked like Karyn’s grizzly. I would have guessed him decades older than the birthdate on his driver’s license, which made him thirty-three.
“You looking for someone?” he asked.
“Yes, you,” I said. “I’m—”
“I know who you are. Clara Jefferies. I saw you yesterday and today at the cornfield. I heard you were here, but I would have recognized you anywhere.”
“How?”
“Come in.” Not showing any concern, he followed me into the house, compact and crowded with furniture. Karyn’s creations were scattered around us—small, intricate carvings on tabletops and whittled birds in flight hanging on a wall. I wondered if she made the log furniture in the den.
An upright piano sat in one corner, and around it hung framed family portraits of Karyn, a woman I assumed was her sister-wife, Daniels, and a pack of children. Mixed in I saw photos of our family growing up, our parents and brothers and sisters. The photos a ritual, of sorts—we took one every year. For a month or more before, we prepared, the girls sewing matching dresses out of yard goods Mother ordered from the general store.
“That’s you right there, I’d guess.” Daniels said, pointing at me, one of the oldest in the lineup of young smiling faces.
“You’d be right,” I said.
“Karyn loves those photos.”
“So, where is she?”
“Not here.” I thought about what felt so odd about Daniels. He had a flat affect, a voice that could have put an insomniac to sleep, and a face that didn’t register emotion. “Karyn’s at your ma’s trailer. They’re having a family meeting.”
“What about?”
“You,” Daniels said. “Ardeth’s upset that you’re nosing around.”
“Jim, I’m here because I’m helping the sheriff’s office with a case. The body found in the field. I saw you there today.”
“It’s not illegal to watch, is it?” he asked. “It’s not every day in Alber that someone finds a dead body.”
“I was curious about you, and—” I started.
“And you ran a check on me. Found out that I’m registered as a sex offender,” he said, his voice as unconcerned as if he’d just said that I heard he raised hogs.
“Yes.”
Daniels walked over to the kitchen and shouted. “Rebecca, come here, please. This detective lady, Clara, needs to talk to you.”
“Rebecca?”
“My first wife,” Daniels said. “I grew up on a farm in Iowa surrounded by Gentiles. Not many of our neighbors knew we were fundamentalists, that we had what they’d think were peculiar ways. My parents hid it.”
“Ah, I see,” I said. “So you were nineteen and—”
“Rebecca was sixteen,” he explained. “The prophet called my dad and said he had a vision, and I was to marry her. We were sealed in a meeting house in Cedar Rapids. We rented an apartment and moved in together.”
“Someone found out—”
“Jim made the mistake of insisting that I finish high school,” the woman walking into the room said. She had a hesitant manner, which I understood. I wasn’t an invited guest. Despite that, she gave me a half-smile and said, “Problem was, I got pregnant right away. My physical education teacher asked me who the father was, and in my sixteen-year-old wisdom, I told him my husband.”
A round woman with soft, light brown hair, Rebecca Daniels had chambray-blue eyes and thin lips that curled up at the corners. “Dad thought I was too young to marry and refused to sign the paperwork that would have allowed me to marry Jim legally. So Jim and I were only sealed in the church. We tried to get the charges
