The house grew quiet.
Thirty-Two
I divided the secret files by year. Ten stacks. I leaned over the table and opened the first file and found a photo of a woman with a cut cheek and an eye so black it was rimmed in purple. “Damn,” I whispered. The notes said it was a five-month-old unsolved sexual assault. The woman was forty-six years old. I felt my anger rising, thought of my own history, the physical and emotional scars. But as horrific as the case looked, this wasn’t the time.
The guy I was looking for liked teenage girls.
I set that file to the side. As I combed through the others, I found photos of men, women and children who’d been sexually abused, assaulted, raped and murdered. Not a lot perhaps by outside standards, but for a town of 4,346 souls, a substantial number. What stood out? It appeared from the files, a few scarce sheets of paper that mainly served as witness statements, that none of the cases had been investigated before being filed away.
One by one, I browsed through.
I thought about my father. Being a polygamist took planning. To keep track of which of my four mothers he slept with each night, Father had a calendar posted in the kitchen rotating their names. With so many children, he set aside one day each month for an hour alone with each of us. On my days, we hiked through the woods and talked.
“What’s the outside world like?” I’d asked him once.
“Not like it is here, Clara,” he’d told me. “There are bad people in the Gentiles’ world. Every morning in the newspapers, every evening on the television, reporters recount horrible crimes. Here we don’t hear about such things, because here we stand unified as children of God.”
In my hands I held the reports that disproved his words. I looked at the victims’ photos, their bloody faces, and I wondered if my father had known the truth.
We didn’t live on a mountain of righteousness. Far from immune, our little town apparently had its full share of violence. The only difference: In Alber, a conspiracy of silence hid it behind a virtuous veneer. Alber took such pains to deny the truth, that I fled believing I was the only battered woman in our town. I felt responsible, believed that I’d brought the horror on myself. Looking through the files at photos of other faces like mine, bruised and bleeding, I recognized some of the victims. Others were strangers.
According to the files, none of them had gotten justice. I saw no record of anyone ever being charged with a crime.
I kept searching. In one file I found the three-year-old case of a mother who claimed a man harassed her thirteen-year-old daughter. The woman revealed the man’s name. On the report, someone had used a thick marker to black it out. I held it up to the light. I couldn’t see a first name, but over the second the marker thinned, enough so I could read: BARSTOW.
Evan Barstow? I wondered. I started a pile of possibly related cases. This would be the first.
Anything that didn’t involve girls, teenagers, young women in their early twenties, I set aside. Many of the cases were appalling, but I couldn’t consider them. I had a dead girl. Others missing. I had to find Delilah.
Then, in the files that dated nine years back, I found something of particular interest.
Fifteen-year-old Christina Bradshaw’s family lived on the outskirts of the town. According to the file, she watched the younger children in the yard that afternoon. The little ones went inside for a snack, while Christina waited outside. When they returned, she’d vanished. In the week before she went missing, Christina complained repeatedly that a particular man stalked her. “This man had been warned before to stay away from Christina,” the report read. “Christina’s mother believes that this man has taken her daughter. An officer contacted the suspect. He denied it.”
The paperwork didn’t reveal the man’s identity.
Bradshaw? Why did it sound so familiar? Then I remembered. Evan Barstow’s second wife was Jessica Bradshaw. I picked up my cell phone. “Hannah, it’s Clara,” I said. “Does Jessica Bradshaw have a younger sister named Christina?”
“Let me think,” she said. “It’s a big family. I’m not sure. Is it important?”
“It could be,” I said.
“I heard about the body. I hoped you’d call. I got worried. Is it Delilah?”
I felt a catch in my throat. “No.”
“Do we know who it is?”
“Not yet,” I answered. Max walked in and waited in the doorway. I needed to get off the phone. “Hannah, I’m in a hurry. I need to know about Christina.”
“I don’t know the girl, but hold on and I’ll ask. I have a Bradshaw here at the shelter. She’ll know.”
I put the phone on mute and concentrated on Max. “You got the missing persons reports out?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Jayme and Eliza are both on NCIC, and I notified the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The sheriff’s secretary is sending out notices to the media in St. George, Salt Lake, and some of the smaller cities in the area. It should all be on the news tonight.”
“Great,” I said.
“Clara, I got one ready to go on Delilah, too. What details we know. When we get back from talking to your family, we can add a photo and get out an Amber Alert. I listed her as ‘endangered missing.’”
“Good work,” I said. “Just a minute, and I’ll be with you.”
Hannah came back on the phone. “Christina is one of Jessica’s younger sisters. They’re both from the same mother, their father’s third wife.”
“Okay. That helps.”
“But there’s something strange.”
“Go on.”
“The woman I spoke to is a cousin. She says that Christina hasn’t been seen in years. They were told that she’d run off with a boy when
