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He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and five children. He is currently working on the next novel in his new series, which begins with The Locket.
Please send correspondence to Richard Paul Evans at: P.O. Box 1416 Salt Lake city, Utah 84110
Or visit his Web site at: www.richardpaulevans.com
Richard Paul Evans is a nationally acclaimed speaker. To request Mr. Evans for speaking engagements, please fax your request to: (801) 532-63 58 or contact the above address or Web site.
Contents
Prologue
one Betheltown
two The Arcadia
three Henri
four La Caille
five Faye's Acceptance
six Thanksgiving
Seven The Committee
eight The Christmas Social
nine The Doctor's Threat
ten The Dilemma
eleven Christmas Eve
twelve Paradise Lost
thirteen A Drawer of Letters
fourteen Thomas
fifteen Forgiveness
sixteen The Departure
seventeen Auld Lang Syne
eighteen Second Chances
nineteen Winter in Arcadia
twenty Ogden's Finest
twenty-one The Nightmare
twenty-two The Aftermath
twenty-three A Second Visit
twenty-four The Womb
twenty-five The Plea
twenty-six The Trial
twenty-seven A Last Good-Bye
twenty-eight Father's Letter
twenty-nine Closing Arguments
thirty The Verdict
thirty-one Esther's Room
thirty-two The Locket
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There are those who maintain that it is a shameful thing for a man to speak of sentiment, and the recounting of a love story must certainly qualify as such. But if there is virtue in stoicism, I do not see it, and if I haven't the strength to protest, neither have I the will to conform, so I simply share my story as it is. Perhaps time has thinned my walls of propriety as it has my hair.
If my narrative is, in fact, a love story, I suspect that the world will not likely recognize it -- for pulp romances do not often push aluminum walkers or smell of peppermint oil. Still, there are stories that refuse to be interred in silent graves like the lives who gave them breath. The story of Esther Huish is such -- commenced and concluded in a town born of gold, a mining camp cradled in the lap of the Oquirrh Mountains in the remote, windswept ranges of western Utah: the town of Bethel.
Bethel is now a dead town, and its history is not one story but two, as towns may live more than once. In 1857 a tramp miner and sometime evangelist named Hunter Bell, expelled for card cheating from the nearby Goldstrike mining camp, was wandering in exile amongst the bulrushes of the Oquirrh foothills when he chanced upon a rich deposit of placer gold. Bell staked his claim and within a month was joined by more than sixteen hundred miners. Learned in the vernacular of the gospel, if not the spirit, Bell bequeathed the town the biblical name of Bethel -- the House of God.
Though Goldstrike and Bethel were sister cities, they proved as different as siblings in character as in appearance. Bethel was staid and industrious. Her greatest structure was the local chapel, which, when resting off the sabbath, doubled as the town hall and a one-room schoolhouse. Conversely, Goldstrike's most resplendent structure was a honky-tonk piano saloon and brothel. It was a raucous haven of prostitution, gambling, and murder, aptly nicknamed by the Salt Lake City newspapers as Sodom West. As the larger and more accessible of the two cities, Goldstrike became the center of commerce on which Bethel relied for its train station, milling, and trade.
A year after the turn of the century, as gold production in both cities started to decline, tragedy struck Goldstrike. A fire, started in a saloon's kitchen, ravaged the mining town. It was followed by an ill-timed flash flood that collapsed most of the mines and all but washed away what remained of the once thriving township -- a baptism of fire and water the area ministries claimed was apocalyptic, having prophesied that a great scourge was sure to befall the decadent town. Bethel, though spared heaven's wrath, was no longer accessible by railroad and died as well, leaving behind only those too old or too broken -- like slag tossed aside after being purged of its wealth.
For nearly thirty years, Bethel (or Betheltown, as Esther and those indigenous to the small town called it) lay dormant, until 1930, when in the wake of the Great Depression, there was a resurgence of interest in the town's boarded-up shafts and Bethel was reborn as a Depression baby.
It was just prior to these days that Esther Huish arrived in Bethel -- the young, beautiful daughter and sole companion of an elderly man seeking fortune as a miner. Prosperity eluded the man and time proved that his greatest wealth was his daughter, who, as he grew infirm, provided for him as the caretaker of the Bethel Boarding House and Inn. Esther was an elderly woman when I met her, in the last months of her life. She had become a recluse -- preferring to our world an era that existed only in her memory and the diaries in which she chronicled those days. An era evidenced by a petite golden locket. It was an encounter that was to leave me forever changed.
I believe it a great irony that I learned of life from one dying, and of love from one so lonely.
To everything there is a season, said the Preacher, to every purpose under heaven -- a time to get and a time to lose, a time to love and a time to hate, a time to dance and time to mourn, a time to be born and a time to die. Those months with Esther were a season of all these things -- and most important, the season I learned of faith, forgiveness, and second chances. One winter in a rest home called the Arcadia.
Copyright © 1998 by Richard Paul Evans
Chapter One: Betheltown
Bethel, Utah. April 2, 1989
As the desert blurred past in the luminous hues impressionist's palette, Faye huddled tightly against the car door, her eyes closed and her coffee hair spilling over her face. The last of the music, frayed tones from a hayseed country station, had miles back degenerated into a storm of static, and now the only noises were the car's undulations over the primitive road and the occasional sigh of my sleeping companion. We had already traveled fifty miles past the last evidence of humanity, a rancher's lodgepole-pine fence, into the desert's blanched, stubbled plain, and Faye had not yet asked where it was that I was taking her. Her faith in our journey was not unlike her faith in our courtship, attributable only to some godlike quality of the female mystique -- an unwavering virtue of hope and patience -- that, if unable to predict ourdestination, found merit at least in the journey.
I had never been to this corner of the earth -- only eight months previously, I hadn't even known of its existence -- but the stories I had heard of the dead town had given it meaning, and I confess anxiety at its approach. I was toldthat the town, steeped in the foothills of the Oquirrh range, was constantly assailed by mountain winds. But there was no wind that day, and the spray of red dust in the car's wake hung in the placid air, liberated from a roadway not trespassed for a year's time.
I was glad for this day, for its blanched, cloudless skies, for though I embraced the land's immense solitude -- felt akin to it -- it would be foolhardy to venture so far from civilization with the possibility of becoming stranded on washed-out roads. Flash floods were common in these regions, and most of the ghost town's abandoned mines had decades earlier collapsed under their turbulent runoff. The wash of such cataclysm was a souvenir hunter's ecstasy of relics and coins and an occasional grain of gold. It had always been such with the town, as men came to take from the land or to take from those who had come to take from it, and even in death it was so.
Only, today, I had not come to take but to impart.
Before us the coarse road crested, then dipped into a barren creek bed surrounded by the pink clusters of spring beauties and the scattered stalks of bulrush that proved the creek still possessed occasional life. At the creek's shallow bank I left the car idling and walked to the rill and placed a hand to its stony bed. There was no trace of moisture. I examined our intended route, rolled back a single stone of possible hazard, then returned to the car and traversed the bed. A half mile forward, the timber skeleton of a gold mine's stamp mill rose from a mesquite-covered knoll -- a wood-tarred contrivance of rusted wheels and cogs and corroded steel tracks over which ore cars had once rolled and men and horses had sweat. I glanced down to a crudely drawn map, astonished that after all these years, and with a dying memory, Esther had remembered such landmarks so distinctly. I wondered if she had just never left.
At the mill's passing I turned west and coaxed my Datsun up the hill, where the road vanished into a buckwheat-dotted plain that spread infinitely to the north and south and climbed the foothills of the mountain into the town itself. As we neared the decrepit structures of the once-flourishing township, Faye's eyes opened and she slid up in her seat.
"Where are we?"
"Esther's hometown."
Faye gazed on in apparent fascination. "...what's left of it."
We passed the ornamental iron fence of a cemetery "Welcome to Bethel -- the House of God."
"This is where Esther was born?"
"She came here as a young woman." I looked out at the desolate terrain. "Makes you wonder why anyone would come here."
Faye turned to me. "Why are we here?"
"To fulfill a promise."
Faye leaned back in her seat, momentarily content with my ambiguity.
I parked the car under the gnarled limbs of a black locust tree near the center of the deceased town and shut off the engine.
The morning's drive had taken nearly two hours, but it was the conclusion of a much greater journey, one that had taken nearly half a year. A journey that began the day my mother died.
Copyright © 1998 by Richard Paul Evans
Excerpted from The Locket by Richard Paul Evans
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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