Cage of Stars

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Twelve-year-old Veronica Swan's idyllic life in a close-knit Mormon community is shattered when her two younger sisters are brutally murdered. Although her parents find the strength to forgive the deranged killer, Veronica is unable to do the same. Years later, she sets out alone to avenge her sisters' deaths, dropping her identity and severing ties in the process. As she closes in on the murderer, Veronica will discover the true meaning of sin and compassion, before she makes a decision that will change her and her family's lives forever.

Release date: May 1, 2006

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

Prologue

When I set out to find the killer Scott Early, I didn’t realize I was a foolish kid trying to stand in the great shoes of God.

After it was all over, everyone asked why had I done such a thing? I didn’t know how to explain. Everything had gotten all turned around and confused in my mind. It had once been so clear to me that there was a way, and that I must walk in it.

It seemed so obvious. Then, not so obvious. And then, it was too late.

I opened the door that last morning, and there were the reporters, buzzing like a hatch of mosquitoes. They asked me, Did you plan this all those years, Ronnie? How did you hold on to that anger for so long, Ronnie? And I thought, How could anyone think that four years was a long time to “hold on to anger,” given what had happened to us? Four years was a moment. People stay angry longer than that over someone stealing their boyfriend! With a few vivid exceptions, those four years, basically my whole life as a teenager, passed like a movie with the sound turned off. If those reporters had lived the way I lived, every day looking at that shed between the house and the barn, the shed Papa had been meaning to fix up for years before Becky and Ruthie died, to give Mama a better studio for her work, that sturdy old building with its gray paint beaten into powder by the punishment of the sun and the dusty wind, and the thick purple weeds bunched tight up against its walls, how would they have felt? What would they have done? Nothing ever changed the sight of that shed. It never looked different. I saw it every day, whether the pink ice plants and the rock roses were blooming in Mama’s garden or the Christmas lights were up. It never went away. And it was just desolate. Like our lives were, for the longest time. No one else had been through it. So they could ask stupid questions with all the tactfulness of a big bulldozer. Another guy yelled out to me, Did you plan in advance to kill Scott Early? He said—and he was serious—Because maybe you felt it was blood atonement. Mormons believe in blood atonement . . . don’t you?

I was so tired. I was so hungry and alone. Like a fool, I answered, “I bet you think my father has five wives, too.”

The guy’s eyes widened and he flipped over to a new page in his notebook. “Does he?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “He has sixty-five wives, just like in ‘The King and I.’”

The reporter’s face got all pouty then. He knew I was messing with him. I sat down on the curb and put my head on my knees, and I didn’t say a word until my father came with my uncle Andrew, who told me to say nothing at all. Blood atonement? I kept thinking. My word! It was one thing to believe that the price Scott Early paid was too small for the evil he did. I still believe that. And yes, I didn’t agree with my parents that forgiving Scott Early would stop the shuddering of my heart that woke me from all those frightful dreams, my T-shirt in sweat that smelled metallic and dirty, like old pocket change. But to think I was after Scott Early’s blood? Just because I was a Mormon? That was purely ignorant. Half the time, even good people think all Mormons are nuts in a cult where the church leader marries you off at the age of thirteen! Maybe some of that stuff used to go on a hundred years ago; but a few hundred years ago in Europe, Catholics went around stretching people on the rack, too. They’re not doing that anymore, either!

All “blood atonement” means to regular Mormons is just that shedding someone else’s blood is the most terrible thing, and “atonement” is making up for your sin. It’s a metaphor, like the kind you learn in English class. Mormons think you have to do good to make up for your sins, not just say you’re sorry. When I set off for California, I didn’t think that Scott Early had atoned for his sins. But I didn’t really know what I would do about that; I thought it would be revealed to me. I never thought about violence.

What happened . . . happened . . . just because of the tiniest mistake.

I had that to live with.

And I would always know how much I’d let my family down. My parents trusted me completely. And I betrayed their trust. I lied, and I’d never lied before. I told them only part of the truth. I told them I needed to be away from Utah. To be away from the shed. I was going to San Diego, a sunny city of young people and young dreams, to go to a good community college, where I could train to be an EMT—the work I planned to do to pay for my college. Yes, I saw the looks my parents exchanged. I knew those looks meant that they knew Scott Early was in California but didn’t think that I knew. I played innocent. They believed me. But under all that innocence was a wayward heart. I might have felt very mature, even old, because of everything our family had been through. I learned something, though. Suffering and finishing high school early doesn’t mean you’re mature. It takes a lot more than that.

Papa told me once, right after my sisters died, that atonement wasn’t something a regular person on earth can bring on someone else. He said it was between the sinner and God. He was right. But I couldn’t hear it. I was pretty sure of myself. Veronica Bonham Swan, an eager girl with long twisty auburn hair that was my vanity, who loved horses and science and hated laundry and term papers. I thought one person could do what a whole system had not. Everything had come easy to me in my life.

Everything except the one and most important thing.

Which became the only thing that mattered.

And so I believed that I had survived the beautiful late fall day when Scott Early drenched our lives in blood for a purpose. I thought that if I didn’t walk in the path of that purpose, when my time came to die—whether I lived to be twenty or ninety—I would pass over knowing that I’d failed Becky and Ruthie in the life hereafter as I’d failed them on earth. And I would not be able to face my baby sisters when they came running to me in heaven.

Chapter One

At the moment when Scott Early killed Becky and Ruthie, I was hiding in the shed.

It wasn’t because I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid to die then, and I’m not afraid now. It was because we were playing hide-and-seek. My little sisters always started begging me the minute my parents left me to baby-sit. “Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie!” they would tease me, pulling on my shirt while I tried to straighten up the kitchen. “Betcha we can find you this time. Betcha on our chores!” And I would always give in, warning them that if they didn’t find me, they were going to spend two hours, until Mama got back, picking up every crayon and every sticker book in their room.

“This time I’m not kidding, Thing One and Thing Two,” I told them that day. “I’m not going in there right before Mama gets home and pull all your clean clothes and markers out from under your bed.”

“I promise, slalomly,” Becky said. I had to laugh. Her teeth were purple from the berries she’d eaten for breakfast. Becky was as thin and fast as a minnow in a creek and seemed to live practically on air. Ruthie was as round and “slalom” as a little koala bear. Her favorite thing was to eat cookie dough right from the bowl.

They wanted to play outside, because it was a really warm, sunny day for November, not that it’s ever too cold at the edge of what’s practically the Mojave Desert. The purples and yellows and reds of the changing trees that day were as flashy as a marching band.

And so, an hour later, I was crouched down in the shed, behind a big sack of potting soil and a crate of clay, hoping a spider didn’t pick that time to crawl up my back. I couldn’t see my little sisters. But I imagined that they were leaning against the picnic table, where we ate our supper almost every summer night when the bugs weren’t bad—our own tomatoes and sweet corn, sometimes with tacos and black beans—listening to the birds making their go-to-sleep sounds. Becky and Ruthie most likely had their little hands over their eyes, counting fast so that they could yell out, “Ready or not, here I come!” Ruthie would call first, I knew. She always did, and Becky always shushed her, saying there was no way she could have gotten to a hundred yet because she, Becky, was older and she hadn’t got up to fifty. I know they didn’t peek, because I’d told them peeking wasn’t fair and that I wouldn’t play unless they played fair.

That day, though, they never made a sound.

I figured they were counting to a hundred silently, because whenever we played hide-and-seek, Becky would count straight up as fast as she could, and Ruthie, who was only four, would say out loud, “One, two, three, four, eight, fourteen, fifteen, ten.” Becky would get so confused, she’d have to start all over again.

But five minutes went by, and still, they never made a sound. When it got to be a long time, I opened the door.

And I saw my sisters, lying there like little white dolls in great dark pools of paint. I saw Scott Early, a young man with short blond hair, sitting on the picnic table, wearing only his boxers and a dirty T-shirt, sobbing as if they were his little sisters, as if a terrible monster had come along and done this. Which was sort of what he did think, though I didn’t know that then.

It was a good thing, a doctor later said to my mother, that Becky and Ruthie didn’t cry out. It meant that they died quickly. They barely felt a thing. They must never have heard Scott Early come walking barefoot across our lawn. The merciful Father shielded them from fear. Being cut across the carotid artery is a very quick way to die. I knew that, even then, from biology. But it’s not over in an instant, and I prayed for months that Becky and Ruthie never had time to wonder why I wasn’t there to help them.

For I was always there to help them.

Though I was only twelve-almost-thirteen, Mama could trust me to look after the little girls alone, even if she had to be out in the part of the shed that was her “studio” or at the galleries, as far away as St. George, for hours at a time.

“You are as responsible as any mother, Ronnie,” Mama told me quietly one night, after the time Becky’s hand got burned. Becky had been impatient that morning for her “cheesy eggs” and reached up to see if they were finished while I was cooking. She burned her hand on the pan. Mama said I had “presence of mind” because I didn’t start to cry or panic when Becky screamed. I didn’t try to put butter on the burn, which my own grandma would have done, because that would have made it worse. From the first-aid section of health class Mama taught me, I remembered that a burn had to be cooled down with water right away or the heat inside would keep right on burning the skin and the damage would go deeper. I put Becky’s hand under the cold-water tap for five minutes and wrapped ice in a thick towel and taped it down around her hand. Then I ran, pulling Becky and Ruthie in the wooden wagon, down to our nearest neighbor, Mrs. Emory, who drove us to Pine Mountains Clinic ten miles away, between our house and Cedar City. At the clinic, the doctor, a young woman, placed a net shield and gauze under a bandage on Becky’s palm. The doctor spoke so gently to Becky that I suppose it was then that I first thought I would become a doctor one day myself. I wondered if the incident meant I was called to it.

Becky had just a tiny scar on one finger after her hand healed. Our pediatrician, Dr. Pratt, said he wouldn’t have done one thing different himself, except to drive her to a hospital. But there wasn’t a real hospital within fifty miles of where we lived at the foot of a pine-covered ridge. Where we lived wasn’t even really a town. It was a sort of settlement for people like my father, who always said he liked his “elbow room.”

And so, on the day they died—unless paramedics could have arrived at our house within minutes, and everyone knew that was impossible; or unless there was a doctor already at our house, but Dr. Sissinelli, our neighbor, was at his hospital—no one could have saved my sisters.

I must not feel guilty, Mama and Papa told me over and over in the days afterward, although I could see in their eyes and hear in their voices that they felt exactly that way themselves. I was not to feel guilty for being unable to call for help until it was too late or for being unable to get Papa’s gun because he was out hunting for quail, they said. By the time I opened the door on the sight that would change me for the rest of my life, it was already too late. When the police asked questions about why we weren’t supervised, my parents spoke up. They defended me and their choice of leaving me to watch my sisters, telling the officers what a responsible girl I was. I had done just what I should have done. I had been brave. They said that not even a parent could have suspected that Scott Early would even find such a remote place, much less grab the weeding scythe Papa had left leaning against the barn and use it like the sword of an avenging angel, striking a death blow in seconds.

I listened and I nodded, but I didn’t really believe them.

I didn’t want to cause Papa, and especially Mama, any more pain, but no one could say I wasn’t guilty. My cousins, and my best friends, Clare and Emma, and even goofy boys like Finn and Miko, said the same thing. But it didn’t matter. Even after the panic was gone, and the worst of the agony, the guilt was always there. It could never be turned off. The guilt was like using a plain magnifying glass to focus a beam of sunlight, bringing all that heat together, turning something soft and bright into something that could hurt. Even love couldn’t dim it. It was the guilt that made my anger like a burn that no one ever ran under cold water; and so it kept burning and burning down to my bones. And as time went by, and other people’s cooled down, mine did not. It got hotter and became a part of me, and it didn’t heal until long after. Even now, I think the scars must still be there.

Chapter Two

You can start a story anywhere you want.

And so I don’t want to start with what the police found that afternoon when they finally got to our house, and not because it’s too sad. There is no way that this can’t be sad. I mean, even though now I’m happy in the world, there’s no way a part of me won’t always belong to sadness. It’s my own, like the color of my eyes. My sisters’ deaths are in my genetics. I only have to think of them, of the littlest thing, of putting them up in front of me on my old Percheron mare, Ruby—which was safe, by the way, because Ruby had three gaits: standing still, walking slow, and walking a little faster—and I can still start to cry so hard, just for a moment, that I can’t see my charts in front of me. I just don’t want to start with “the tragedy,” the whomping of the helicopters overhead, people leaning out trying to take pictures of our log house, the site of the Grim Reaper murders, the interviews about us that people gave to reporters who bought sandwiches at the general store. (“They were quiet,” Jackie and Barney said of us. “They were polite. Always. Friendly, but not the kind to bother you.” I’ve wondered since, in situations like that, whether anyone ever says anything else.) All that press stuff was such a . . . mockery, though Jackie and Barney were kind and didn’t mean to bring anything unwelcome on us. I ended up having my own experiences with the compulsion to explain yourself when a reporter asks you a question, so by and by, I understood.

But none of that time would tell you about the real us. That’s why I also don’t want to start by telling about how I flipped out, after the story was on CNN and on the front page of the Arizona Republic, in letters a mile high; and people drove from all over Utah and even Arizona and Colorado to our yard. They came and stood in front of our house with lighted candles, singing “Amazing Grace.” About how I kept screaming that Ruthie and Becky were ours, and why did other people get to feel good about themselves, singing and crying over my sisters they never knew?

I’d like it if you could see us, just for a minute, the way we were before then. Otherwise, we’ll just be set down forever as what I kept screaming that night, while my parents tried to make me stop and come inside—just another story under a newspaper headline. A tragedy that used to be the Swans.

We were an ordinary family, a little bit more Birkenstock-y than some (my mother knitting a sweater for everyone but the horse), a little more National Geographica than some (my father tromping around applauding at sunsets and making teas from rose hips and his own special root beer from scratch). They were semi-hippies. Sort of cute. Not obnoxious. And they were parents who were in love. When I was little, I thought everyone’s parents kissed each other every time they said good morning and hello.

What a surprise I had when I got out in the world! Most people who say they’re in love are just putting up with each other because they’re lonely. When I saw how most marriages were, I began to hope that I’d fall in love fast and young and forever like my folks. And it’s not because I wanted to be Molly Mormon (that’s what some people call it, because you’re sort of supposed to fall in love young and get married young and have kids right away if you’re LDS. You know that means Latter-day Saints—which is the real name of all Mormons; it’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), but because I really wanted to. It makes a whole lot of things in your life easier if you have another self right by your side, for all time, for all strife, someone who remembers you as well as you remember yourself.

I never wanted to get married as young as my parents, though. They were only nineteen, but they were pretty amazing. They did everything on their own, without help, with scholarships and working right through college. They met in high school and went through their missions without anything but letters between them; but my father said he never looked at another woman after he saw Cressie Bonham, the tall girl with her long brown hair blowing every which way in the wind. The day he came home to Cedar City, he proposed. They went to Brigham Young University in Provo together and were perfect students. They tried right away to have me, but it took ten years. And that’s how Mama got so passionate about art. I think she made ceramic babies from her sadness. Here she had the perfect mate, and no soul seemed to want to come to them. I think waiting for having kids might have made them closer to each other than other parents I knew who had families right away, though. They sometimes didn’t have to even speak to be able to say, I know just what you mean.

They weren’t perfect, though. I think sometimes my father thought he was the smarter one. And sometimes my mother thought the same thing. Although my father was definitely the captain of the ship, which is how it has to be, my mother got her two cents in. They had their moments.

Once, when I was really little, I heard my father say in his big radio announcer voice, “What do you expect from this conversation, Cressida?”

She said, in a voice that was a perfect imitation of him, “To have it with a person who has an informed opinion on the subject.”

And then, as usual when she imitated him, it would crack my father up. And then they would forget to fight.

My papa says no family is normal. And we had our share of unusual people, for sure. He was one of eleven brothers, for starters. Imagine thinking up all those names. That’s how my father came to be called London, because he was close to the end, and my grandparents were getting creative. They started out with Kevin and Andrew and William and wound it up with Jackson, Dante, and Bryce (like the canyon). My grandma Swan went to college and got started having babies after; but she’s still alive and living in Tampa. (There are more Mormons in Florida than Utah; did you know that?) She’s . . . smaller and more irritable than she used to be. Since what happened. But I still go to see her. We watch old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies. All her sons are still alive, too, which has almost driven her crazy, to obsession, not because she wants her sons to die, but because Ruthie and Becky died first. She has a total of sixty-eight grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and she sends every one a ten-dollar bill on their birthday and a book at Christmas. Every one.

The other way we were unusual was that Papa was “known” as a liberal, at least for a Mormon, in our little community. When I say “community,” I’m exaggerating. I’m talking little. Just these few houses sprinkled around Dragon Creek, which people said ran all the way down from the mountains to St. George. (Get it? St. George and the Dragon?) For about half the summer, the creek was a dry bed that hikers could jump right over. But long ago, someone had dammed a little part; and it made a swimming hole that stayed fresh, though shallow, a little longer if there’d been a lot of snow the previous winter. We considered it ours. We built a fort next to it by bending down scrubby willows and chinked up the outside with mud. It hardened like an actual building. That was our changing room in the summer. The boys just swam in their underwear when we weren’t around. It was understood that we didn’t swim together except suited up or at the Sissinellis’ pool parties. Where we lived, it wasn’t rare that it would get to a hundred degrees, and they can tell you what they want about “dry heat,” it was still hot.

Cedar City, nearer by us, was not as big as St. George, but big enough to have a college and a temple as beautiful as a Russian castle. We didn’t go there often. There was our little church a mile or so up to the road (I used to run as hard as I could down the road, touch the railing on the porch, and jog back home to build my wind for basketball), a post office, a place that did hiking tours, and a general store where Jackie and Barney sold everything from cappuccino to Wonder bread, from rag dolls and quilts to ice skates and gasoline. And candy. They had, like, half the store given up to candy shelves, from the fancy gold-foil kind rolled in cocoa to the forty-pack of Pixie Stix. Papa used to say Methodism was born in song and Mormonism was bred in sugar. People in Utah probably eat more sugar per person than anywhere else in the United States. They can’t have anything else, so it’s their addiction, you could say. There was also an old house someone converted into an antiques and rug store, open only during the fall. And that would be it.

But even in a teeny place, there were enough people around to gossip, though they wouldn’t have called it that.

What people said about Papa was that he was always questioning everything, telling people that the LDS church had so much power in Utah, it was almost unconstitutional; how the church took long enough respecting black people; how he was against capital punishment—even the “humane” kind; that he would half like to move his family to New York or Michigan, where being a Mormon would be unusual and would mean something bigger to his children than living where everyone was LDS. The talk was partly because Papa’s. . .