Over more drinks, his face lit up by barlight and beer, Pettibone explained. Blood atonement was an old Mormon belief the Church had backed away from in its search for mainstream acceptance. It decreed that some sins were so awful, so unforgivable, that the atonement of Christ was not enough to provide salvation, and that the sinner could only atone by the act of spilling blood on to the soil in death. Murder was one such sin.
Heather expressed surprise about the Church's violent beginnings. Pettibone merely raised a sardonic eyebrow.
'Blood is woven into the warp and weft of Mormon history,' he said dryly.
'But the Church no longer believes it?' Heather asked.
'No longer believes it,' Donna said with incredulity.
'They claim it has never been practised by the Church at any time.'
'Bullshit, of course,' Pettibone said, wiping his mouth.
'And where I come from, it still goes on.'
Where do you come from?' Heather asked.
He smiled. 'A little place a few hundred miles due northwest of here, named Liberty City. Don't let the name fool you.'
Donna almost gasped. 'You're a member of the TCF?'
Was a member,' Pettibone corrected. 'Ain't been anywhere near for twenty-three years or more, and I ain't planning on ever going back.'
'Just who exactly are the TCF?' Heather asked.
Pettibone looked at Donna. 'You go first, sweet cheeks,'
he said. 'I wanna hear this.'
Donna smiled a half-smile. 'The True Church of Freedom. It's a Mormon fundamentalist group. One of many that has split away from the Church because of a disagreement over core beliefs. Not one of the bigger ones. But one of the most secretive. That's about all I know. Over to you.'
Pettibone cleared his throat. 'It was founded in 1891 by Orson Walker junior. He claimed Orson to be the prophet, and legitimacy for the Church, on the basis that Orson senior -- who died shortly after the fire, too -- had received the Gospel directly from the Lord, that the mainstream Church were apostates, and that he and his kin should form a Church according to the revelations and teachings of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor and no one else.'
'So every Church President up until Woodruff, who brought in the manifesto banning plural marriage?' Donna said wryly.
'You got it. My folks are fond of plural marriage.' He took a hit of beer. 'Orson junior blamed the fire on God, said it was His wrath at his father's failure to break away and form his own Church. So the Walker clan, or what was left of it, the Pettibones, and a few families headed for the hills and the Utah--Idaho border, away from the prying eyes of the Church and the state, where they've lived ever since.
'They practise polygamy?' Nigel asked.
'Hell, yeah,' he said. 'It's old school up there.'
'But why haven't they been arrested or broken up?'
Pettibone shook his head. 'Little matter of Waco put paid to that kind of stuff. You go in there all guns blazing and people will do some crazy things. I think the authorities don't really care. The community up there is a thousand or so strong, pretty self-sufficient, they don't bother folks outside much. Not till now, anyway. It was the people unfortunate enough to be born and raised there who faced all the trouble.'
"You left?' Donna asked.
'You could say that,' he said with a chuckle. 'Or you could say I was asked to leave. I'm what you might call a "lost boy".'
What do you mean?' Heather reached for her notebook and began taking down some of what Pettibone said.
Well, you were a teenager once. Let me ask you: if you had a choice between being with someone around your own age, or being the sixth wife of a fifty-seven-year-old man, which would you choose?'
'Are you kidding me?' Heather spluttered.
'Exactly. Unfortunately, the views of fifty-seven-year old men hold greater sway than those of fifteen-year-old boys and girls. My crime was listening to rock music' His fingers painted quote marks in the air as he said the word 'crime'. 'But the real reason was that I took a walk with a fourteenyear-old girl who was earmarked to be the bride of someone older and more powerful than me. They don't want you getting your hands on what is rightfully theirs. I was told to pack my bags and get out of town as quickly as possible. Or else.'
'Or else what?' Nigel asked.
'I didn't stay to find out. To be honest, I couldn't get out of that fucking place soon enough. Sure I miss my family, even though some of them were crazy as hell.
That's what happens when the gene pool is kinda limited.
But I don't miss much else.'
'It must have been difficult to adjust to life here after being in such a close-knit community,' Nigel said.
He shrugged. 'Llewellyn is hardly New York City There were some pretty hard times. But I found my niche. This bar, a job, a few friends, and no God of any kind. If your Mormon friend here will forgive me, I think religion ain't worth shit.'
Donna shrugged. 'Go right ahead. Don't mind me.'
'You said a fourteenyear-old girl was earmarked to be a bride,' Heather said.
'I did. That's when the menfolk of Liberty deem them ripe for picking and marrying.'
We're looking for a girl who was kidnapped on her fourteenth birthday, and her mother murdered. She was killed inside but her body dragged out the back of the house and her throat cut.'
'Sounds like blood atonement to me. You gonna tell me they're both descendants of Sarah Walker and Horton Taylor?'
We are.'
He went silent. 'Jesus,' he said.
You've heard of them?' Heather asked.
'Heard of them. In Liberty, those two are just about on a par with the Devil. Their heinous sin was drummed into the hearts and minds of every living person in Liberty.
The first revelation Orson junior received from God, so the story goes, was to turn the oath of vengeance from part of the temple endowment ceremony into a piece of scripture, calling for the deaths of his father and family to be avenged and for this to be passed down the generations.'
He stopped, as if suppressing a belch. 'In other words, kill the fuckers that did this, amen.'
You've got to take us there,' Heather said.
'Sorry, ma'am, but all the money in the world wouldn't get me back to Liberty'
'A fourteenyear-old girl is missing. You are the only person we know who can go into that town and work out where we might find her.'
He shook his head. 'They'd shoot me down for the apostate I am. Mormonism, and fundamentalism in particular, are pretty Old Testament in their oudook. Dissent isn't tolerated. Dissenters even less so.' He finished another beer. And what do you think I'd find out anyway? I doubt very much this has anything to do with anyone in Liberty.
Few of them venture more than ten kilometres from their home. How the hell do you think they got to London and did what you think they did?'
'Sarah and Horton made it.'
He nodded as if to say, touche. 'I just don't see it. I'm sorry. I'd like to help. Any other help you want that I can give, I'll do my best. But as for walking back into Liberty, that'd be signing my own death warrant.'
Heather appeared to relent. The four of them fell silent.
Heather shook her head. Well, I'll be going up there first thing tomorrow.'
'Good luck,' Pettibone said. 'Take your sunglasses.'
Nigel gave him a bewildered look. 'You'll see what I mean,'
he said cryptically and laughed quietly to himself again.
If the residents rarely left their town, Nigel wondered if they had access to any material that would allow them to research genealogy, to trace the ancestral path cut by Sarah and Horton, though he wasn't sure how, given how difficult he had found it with all the tools at his disposal -- though, crucially, he had not known where to start.
'Do you know whether the TCF have any access to computers, reference books, that sort of thing?' he asked.
'They didn't even allow televisions when I was there.
Maybe they do now. They do have a website -- I've seen it.'
He shook his head sadly but with the same wry bewilderment that characterized most of his actions and words.
'They have a website?' Nigel was astonished.
Pettibone nodded, eyes dancing with amusement in reaction to Nigel's disbelief. 'I know. Fucking crazy, huh?'
'Nearly all these groups have websites,' Donna drawled in agreement. 'Go and search and you'll see. They're competing.
You ban TV and everyone else having a PC because you don't want your believers to be led astray, but you need to let people know what you believe so the cult down the road doesn't snatch your recruit - if you don't grow, you can stagnate and die. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; the Kingston Clan; all of them bar the smallest and most backward have a website. The TCF might only have started with a few people but it's estimated to have around two thousand members now and, like Mormonism as a whole, it's growing.'
'I just thought these groups were a bit incestuous,' Nigel explained. 'That you had to be born into them.'
'No, your friend here is right,' Pettibone said. 'They want new blood. Usually female - or it's OK if you're already married and you don't mind sharing your wife. Or your daughter, for that matter. You just have to move to the ass-end of nowhere to sign up.'
'One thing I don't understand,' Heather interjected.
'The fire, yes it loomed large in the minds of the people of the TCF. It led directly to them setting up their Church.
But I don't see why the mainstream Church has withdrawn all reference to it. Why airbrush history when the history doesn't reflect that badly on you.'
'That's my Church,' Donna interjected. 'Think of these splinter groups as very embarrassing, ultra-embarrassing kid brothers. You don't even want to pretend you know them when they get into trouble or do something to shame you. You like to pretend they don't even exist. The Church is trying to distance itself as much as possible, act like they never were even Mormons in the first place -- get rid of the information, then you stop people following the trail. But one thing you can't do is stop living, breathing people passing it on by word of mouth.'