Destroying Angel by Michael Wallace Page A

will put you in your place. Do you hear?”
    For the next hour, he made his demands. We tended his horse. We cleaned his saddle. We did his mending and his wash. We set up his canvas tent and swept it clean. We fixed him supper, and he ate our last piece of beef. When he finished, he pulled out a flask of whiskey. My stomach turned in circles. Sober, van Slooten was a brute of a man. Drunk, what would he do?
    But he took two sips, and then he was turning the flask upside down in his mouth. He spent the next few minutes rummaging through his saddlebags, cursing and blaspheming. At last he returned to the center of the camp, where he sank down to stare morosely at the fire. “D—Mormons.” He rubbed the scar on his face.
    The rest of us continued about our work. The women were shivering and distracted, their children, fed on stories of polygamist hunters and other nasty gentile types, even more terrified. I did my best to focus their attention on their tasks, not only for their own sake but because I couldn’t waste a single evening.
    For the next three days it appeared that van Slooten would let us be. We fixed his meals and cared for his horse, and he sat in the shade of his tent, watching us work. Occasionally he saddled his horse and rode around the valley, searching for the men’s hideout he was certain must exist.
    Sister Annabelle turned into a simpering, overly helpful servant. She brought van Slooten corn bread with honey butter and offeredto resole his worn boots. The rest of us called him Mr. van Slooten, but she called him Frederick. At first, this behavior seemed treasonous, but then I noticed van Slooten softening. He stopped yelling at her, and then stopped insulting Annabelle’s sister wives, and at length stopped sneering at the rest of us. Except for one incident where he threw a rock at a child who failed to bring his horse quickly enough, van Slooten became more an irritant than an enemy.
    But on the third day van Slooten discovered Annabelle’s medicinal liquor, and we saw the monster.

    Fernie stopped reading. She thumbed through the pages with a frown.
    “You’re not skipping ahead, are you?” Jacob asked.
    “No, that’s all there is.”
    “Can’t be all. What happens next?” He reached for the book.
    “Nothing happens. Look.”
    It was true, he saw. There were more pages, but they didn’t continue the story. Instead, Grandma Cowley had sketched a map of the valley on two pages—remarkably accurate, from the look of it, even though she must have done so without a level, measuring tape, or theodolite. The next two pages were notes about her construction of a flour mill and how she dug a millrace to power the waterwheel. Several pages had sketches of desert flowers or animals—a gopher snake, a desert spiny lizard, a Mormon cricket, a jackrabbit so detailed you could see the veins in its ears. Another page had a profile of a young Indian—perhaps the Paiute she’d seen the first day.
    On the last page she’d written the quote later inscribed on her tombstone:
Lay Me Up One Thousand Bushels of Wheat.
And then nothing.
    “Why did she do that?” he said.
    “Who, Grandma Cowley?”
    “No, Rebecca. She gave me the diary, told me it explained what she was doing at Grandma Cowley’s cabin. It doesn’t say anything of the sort. Doesn’t even finish telling what happened with the federal marshal.”
    “There has to be more.” She took back the diary. “Look at it. It starts three months after they arrived, like she needed to get it all down.”
    “Maybe their husbands showed up the next day. Maybe that’s why she never finished.”
    “I don’t think so,” Fernie said. “She wrote all this stuff in the back and then started back at the beginning with the journal. Look at the dates. She ran out of room, that’s all. There’s got to be another diary. Maybe Rebecca doesn’t have it and she’s hoping you do.”
    “Or maybe she does. And she wants me to ask.”
    Daniel moaned in