“You’re raising your voice again, Mr. Tower,” Sister Anselm admonished. “Now tell me, where exactly is this”—she hesitated—“ . . . birthing room?”
“Colorado City,” Tower growled. “On The Family’s private property outside Colorado City, a place we call The Encampment.”
“Mother’s maiden name?”
“Why on earth do you need to know that?”
“It’s part of the identification process,” Sister Anselm said, aiming a questioning look at Edith. “It’s part of the information we need to have.”
“Her mother’s name was Anne,” Edith said softly. “Anne Lowell. With an E.”
One of the people from the growing crowd by the elevator came over to raise an objection. “Is someone going to call about the elevator? People are stuck in it. I can hear them pounding.”
“One moment, sir,” Sister Anselm said. “There’s a problem here.”
“You’re damned right there’s a problem,” Tower agreed.
“Now then,” Sister Anselm said, turning to him with a beaming smile. “I’ll need your full name.”
“Why?’
“Assuming our patient turns out to be Enid, then I expect you’ll be the one responsible for all her charges. To that end, I need your name, your Social Security number, and the name and number of your insurance carrier.”
“Who said I’d be responsible? Who said I had insurance?”
“Don’t you?”
“Why would I need insurance? We don’t use hospitals.”
“You’re using one now,” Sister Anselm countered. “And if the patient upstairs turns out to be your wife, she’s already had two rounds of lifesaving surgery with more in the offing. Surgery costs money, Mr. Tower. Surgeons cost money.”
“And you expect me to pay for all of it? Why should I? I didn’t ask to have her brought here. I don’t want her to be here. You can’t make me pay for treatment I don’t believe in and never wanted.”
“Just because someone is brought here by ambulance doesn’t mean their family is allowed to skate on their obligation to pay the bill. Once we determine who the responsible party is, we expect him or her to do just that—to take responsibility and pay the expenses.”
“I am not paying!” Tower declared. Anger distorted his face as he shook his finger in Sister Anselm’s face. “What I am going to do is go upstairs, one damned stairwell at a time if I have to. I’m going to find my wife and my daughter, bring them back downstairs with me, and take them home. Is that clear?”
Instead of backing off, Sister Anselm stepped into his space. “What is clear, Mr. Tower,” she said quietly, “is that you are a bully and an ass!”
Goaded into unreasoning fury, Gordon Tower’s reaction was as instinctive as it was predictable. The powerful slap that landed on Sister Anselm’s cheek crackled through the room. She swayed briefly and then stepped away from her attacker. Ali was about to weigh into the fray when she realized that Sister Anselm was smiling.
“Officers,” she said, “I believe that constitutes an assault. Considering the circumstances, I’m under no obligation to turn the other cheek.”
The two uniformed cops stepped up as if shot out of cannons. Within a matter of seconds, Tower’s arms were handcuffed behind his back and he was being led away while someone read him his rights.
In the meantime, Sister Anselm turned to Edith, who had backed away from the confrontation, sinking down onto the nearest chair. “Are you all right?” the nun asked.
Edith nodded numbly. “When will he get out?”
Sister Anselm looked at her watch and shrugged. “The courthouse is closed now, so probably not until tomorrow morning. Will you be able to get home?”
“He took the car key.”
Sister Anselm dispatched the still hovering security guard to retrieve the car key before Tower could be hustled into a waiting patrol car.
“When is your baby due.”
“Two months.”
“It’s a long trip from here back to Colorado City,” Sister Anselm observed. “You might be better off staying in town. If you don’t have enough money for a room . . .”
“We’re not allowed to stay Outside,” Edith said. “We might fall into evil ways.”
The security guard returned with the car keys followed by a burly man in a sheepskin jacket very much like the one Gordon Tower had worn. He hustled straight over to Edith.
“Are you all right?” he demanded. “What’s going on? Is Gordon really under arrest?”
Edith nodded wearily and handed the car keys to the new arrival. “I’m going to need you to drive me home,” she told him.
Without another word being exchanged, the man took her arm and led her away.
Ali walked up to Sister Anselm and saw that the vivid imprint of Gordon Tower’s hand still marred the skin on the nun’s pale cheek.
“Are you all right?” Ali asked. “He hurt you.”
“I’m fine. He certainly didn’t hurt me nearly as badly as he’s hurt Enid,” Sister Anselm replied. “And he’ll hurt her a lot worse if he gets his hands on her again. We may have won this battle, Ali. Now we need to win the war.”
16
Back on the maternity floor, things were getting back to normal. The metal shutters on the nursery windows had been raised. The doors were no longer locked. Nurses buzzed around the ward, reassuring both anxious patients and visitors that the crisis had passed. While Sister Anselm, ice pack on hand, hurried off to check on her charges, Ali took a seat in the waiting room and turned to her iPad.
A few moments after putting the words “Colorado City” into her browser, Ali found herself reading about the “Short Creek Raid.” Seeing those words in print, she remembered that was what Evangeline Begay, the Indian woman Ali had talked to earlier on the phone, had called the place—Short Creek.
In the summer of 1953, Howard Pyle, then governor of Arizona, had called out the National Guard and ordered a raid on the polygamous group of fundamentalist Mormons who lived there. In the course of the raid, the entire community had been taken into custody. Of the 400 arrested, 263 were minor children, some of whom were put into foster care and never returned to their biological parents.
The resulting political fallout was disastrous, especially for Governor Pyle. The Short Creek debacle was thought to be, in large measure, responsible for his failure to win his bid for reelection the following year.
With Pyle’s unfortunate history as an example, succeeding governors had simply turned a blind eye on the people who lived in the area and had ignored whatever it was those folks were doing or not doing. Short Creek, now renamed Colorado City, had continued to benefit from this seemingly deliberate lack of governmental oversight.
Once that original group was reconstituted, its members went about formally establishing the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FLDS church, as it was now called, remained the largest denomination in the area, although a number of groups with similar belief systems had settled nearby as well. Colorado City had again burst on the national scene a few years earlier when one of the FLDS leaders, Warren Jeffs, had been arrested and imprisoned on charges of sexually assaulting underage girls.
And now it’s happening again, Ali thought, because it’s easier for officialdom to ignore the problem than it is for them to fix it.
She remembered that Gordon Tower had said something about an entity he called “The Family” and Edith had mentioned “Outside,” but Ali’s browser located no applicable references. If The Family was a real group of some kind, it was operating under the radar of the people running Wikipedia.