were all daughters of God and sisters in His kingdom—was his first wife and had given him four boys and five girls. Sister Celia had followed Joceline, even though she was a few years older. Hope had once heard that Celia had difficulty conceiving. Or it was possible that after the initial newness of the marriage wore off, her father had simply refused to visit her bed. They’d never seemed particularly compatible, which made plural wives quite a convenience for a man. Jedidiah could simply go to the other side of the dilapidated duplex Celia lived in or to the trailer across the street and bed down with another of his wives. In any case, Celia only had two children, both girls. Sister Florence, her father’s third wife, had six boys and two girls. Marianne, Hope’s mother, had born five girls and, to her father’s tacit disappointment, no sons.
Sister Helena had four boys and one girl, and Raylynn, the sixth and final wife—at the time Hope left, anyway—just had Melanie. Although they were separated by only two years, Hope had never liked Raylynn. From the beginning, she’d been bossy and outspoken, and had all but taken over the running of Marianne’s household, at least when Jed wasn’t around. A woman rarely had an entire house—or even mobile home—to herself, so Raylynn had come to live with Marianne, which had given Hope plenty of opportunity to get to know her.
The composed, ethereal Helena, however, who’d lived down the block in an old brick house built when the town was first founded in the early 1900s, was different. Hope had loved her. Unfortunately, Helena had always been Jed’s favorite, too, which made her a pariah among his other wives and children. Hope and her mother had never been able to hold Jedidiah’s partiality to Helena against her. Helena was too sweet, too withdrawn, as though she’d rather not be noticed at all. Even now, Hope saw her standing off to the side, staring into the distance, and wondered, as she often had as a young teen, what was going on behind the serenity of Sister Helena’s face.
Hope forgot all about Sister Helena and the others the moment she spotted her own mother. Marianne was late joining the party and was trudging across the uneven ground in a dress so similar to one she’d owned eleven years ago Hope couldn’t be certain it wasn’t the exact same. Two girls, one about twelve and the other fourteen, tagged along behind her, bearing rolls and a ham, and Hope immediately realized they had to be her youngest sisters.
They’d grown so tall; she doubted she would have recognized them had they not been with her mother. Even Marianne had changed. Her clothes now hung on her like garments on an old wire hanger, and her hair was completely gray. She looked at least twenty years older, instead of only a decade.
Bitterness toward her father and guilt for abandoning her mother swelled inside Hope. She’d always been her mother’s right arm and her only confidante.
Of all the places in the world, her family had to be from here, Hope thought, watching her sisters deposit the ham and rolls on the table closest to them. By some counts, there were 60,000 practicing polygamists living in Utah, northern Arizona, Idaho, Montana and parts of Mexico and Canada. So Superior wasn’t the only place where people practiced plural marriage. Most polygamists existed in relatively small communities made of up several families that espoused the same doctrines. But those doctrines weren’t necessarily the same from group to group and had ventured far from the original Mormon beliefs that had spawned so many breakaway sects. The most conservative insisted sex was only for purposes of procreation. Others, like her family’s church, believed a man could have sex with a woman at any time as long as she “belonged” to him.
Still, there were 1,517 souls in Superior, and only half of those were members of the Everlasting Apostolic Church. The chances of being born here, in this small community, had to be a billion to one.
Unfortunately, the chances of getting out were about the same.
The weight of her purpose finally propelled Hope back to the car, where she retrieved the flowers she’d cut from her yard for her mother. She had to make her presence known as soon as possible. She’d have a much better chance of an honest conversation with her mother and sisters while her father wasn’t around. Considering the years that had passed since she’d last had contact and the way she’d left, it wasn’t going to be easy to reach them, even without her father’s interference. Her mother believed that God’s acceptance required her to submit to her husband’s will, which made it almost impossible to get her to listen to anything that didn’t come directly from him or the pulpit.
Taking a deep breath, Hope walked resolutely toward the picnic area.
Sister Raylynn, with her eagle eye, noticed her first and used her hand for shade so she could see better. Her jaw sagged, and, for an interminable moment, Hope felt the old fear and confusion return. The strictness of her upbringing, the emotional blackmail her parents and the leaders of the church had used to control her actions, the overwhelming competition she’d always felt for any crumb of her father’s attention and the sermons railing about the fiery fate of the wicked—all those feelings and memories closed in, threatening to suffocate her. She could almost feel the flames licking at her ankles….
But then she saw her closest sisters. Charity, five years younger than Hope at twenty-two, had a child propped on one hip and a toddler at her feet. Faith, now almost nineteen, was pregnant.
Raylynn said something and pointed. Her mother stopped wiping the mouth of the child Charity held and they all turned to look, their faces registering alarm or surprise, Hope couldn’t tell which.
Just as quickly, she felt her throat tighten and begin to burn. How she’d missed them. It had been forever since she’d last seen her family, but she’d carried them in her heart into a world that had little idea about who polygamists were or how they lived or—most especially—why they did the strange things they did.
Because of her background and her allegiance to these people, Hope had always stood apart. Alone. That aching loneliness had occasionally tempted her to return. But she could never rejoin them. If she couldn’t live the principle at sixteen, she could never live it now.
“Hope, is it you?” her mother said, her voice faltering when Hope drew near.
Hope stopped a few feet away and tentatively offered Marianne the flowers, along with a tremulous smile. “It’s me,” she said. “Happy Mother’s Day.”
Her mother pressed one shaking hand to her bony chest and reached out with the other, as though to accept the bouquet or cup Hope’s cheek. But Raylynn interrupted. “Good, here he comes,” she said. “It’s okay, Marianne. You don’t have to deal with this negativity. Jed’s here.”
Her mother’s hand dropped, and dread settled in the pit of Hope’s stomach as she looked up to see her father entering the park. A scowl generally served as his customary expression—anything less would have been frivolous—but his face darkened considerably when a little girl ran up to him and brightly announced, “Her name’s Hope, Daddy. I heard her say it. Ain’t she pretty? Ain’t that a pretty name, Daddy?”
Her father passed the child without acknowledging her. Tall and imposing in an Abraham Lincoln sort of way, he still wore his beard untrimmed. Two gray streaks broke the black of it at each corner of his mouth, accentuating his frown. He’d lost a good deal of his hair; his face, on the other hand, hadn’t aged a bit. Time couldn’t soften his granitelike features any more than it could soften his granitelike heart.
“What is this? What’s going on here?” he cried, his long legs churning up the distance between them. Next to him hurried her two uncles, Rulon, a taller version of her father, who had eight wives at last count, and Arvin, the runt of the family—and the man she’d refused to marry. Arvin was almost skeletal in appearance. The bones of his hips jutted out beneath a tightly cinched belt, and his chest appeared concave beneath his wrinkled white shirt. But at fifty-six, he still had his hair. Black and stringy, it fell almost to his shoulders. He was older than her father by a year, yet she would have been his tenth wife.
Hope’s grip on the flowers instinctively tightened. She wanted to leave, but her feet wouldn’t carry her. Not while Charity was standing in front of her looking so haggard and careworn at twenty-three. Who had her father arranged for Charity to marry?
“Hope’s