Deadly Vows Read online

  Rino was a junior; Joy was a freshman. But immediately, the group gelled around the self-confident jokester who always seemed to know what she wanted out of life and if other people were okay with that, fine, but if they weren’t, Joy didn’t seem to care.

  “She was never off,” Rino said. “She was always smiling, cracking jokes, being happy. I never saw her stressed out. I mean, when I was a freshman, I was real nervous about high school, but Joy wasn’t. She was just there, in the moment.”

  The Joy he knew wasn’t particularly religious, Rino said, though she did attend church at the time with her mother. But religion didn’t dominate her entire life. In fact, Joy would join with all of her and Rino’s other friends, going to raves and parties, enjoying herself just like everyone else.

  “She believed in God and things like that,” Rino said. “But she wasn’t like married to a certain type of religion.”

  Joy was open about the fact that she was a Christian, he said, but she wasn’t really attached to any particular sect of Christianity at the time, and she certainly wasn’t what folks would call “religious.”

  All Joy’s friends knew was that she was fun to be around, the kind of person who makes you want to be involved in whatever she’s doing. If she was serving God in high school, she wasn’t putting that in her friends’ faces, and she certainly wasn’t trying to push her religion on anyone. Just the opposite; it seemed Joy was all about being in the moment, not waiting for some far-off heaven.

  “Joy...man, that name probably fits her dead-on,” Rino said. “She was always so fucking happy. People wear different masks all the time, and I know with us, Joy never did. She was always the same person...until she got together with him.”

  Rino’s Joy, the high school Joy, was always the center of her own universe, unconcerned with outward appearances. She dressed in a bohemian style, listened to a wide variety of musical genres, from the soul of the 1970s that her mother so loved to the grunge and candy pop of the 1990s that she identified with. Joy was who she was, and that person was happy, friendly and always ready to poke good-natured fun at someone.

  “I’ll give you an example,” Rino said. “My name is Rino and I’m just not the friendliest person all the time. I’m not an asshole or anything, but I don’t just reach out and say hi either. Joy would make fun of me and go, ‘you’re such a dick.’ And after a while, she’d be like, in a situation where she couldn’t say ‘dick’ and she’d say, ‘you’re a penis.’ And then she combined my name and ‘penis’ to ‘Renis.’ And that was my name from then on. ‘Oh, hi, Renis!’”

  Jokes weren’t all Joy had up her sleeve, he said. She was up for just about anything, and whenever she did something, it didn’t matter what everyone else was doing; Joy did her own thing, and more often than not, everyone else ended up joining in, because Joy made whatever she was doing become the thing to do. The entire group would go dancing from time to time, whether to private parties or wild raves, which were events that featured electronic and techno music—and lots of times psychedelic drugs, though no one seems to recall Joy partaking in the drugs. Joy just loved to dance at those parties, and she went as often as she could, Rino said.

  “She was one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I’m not just saying that. I know people like to talk good about people when they’re gone, but I’m not just being nice. Joy was an amazing dancer. She was real graceful. She was really into music. We’d all dance together in a big group, but Joy would always be at the center of that. She’d be in the middle, and everyone would dance around her. It was kind of like watching the sun.”

  That metaphor didn’t just apply to people orbiting her when she was dancing, either. When Joy talked to you, you knew for that moment you were the center of the solar system.

  “She really had a way to tunnel vision on you and focus on you,” Rino said. “Some people look through you; they don’t care what you say. If you were in a bar, she would lean in to make sure she could hear what you were saying. When you were talking to her, you were talking only to her. Everything else blurred. It’s really hard to find people who do that to you, make you feel like you’re the only one there. It’s really rare.”

  That ability to make people feel as if they were the only one important in a crowded room endeared Joy to those who knew her. The feel-good, happy-go-lucky, wonderful dancer and hilarious jokester was more than the surface woman those things described. When she was your friend, she was your true friend. You got the feeling that you could tell Joy anything and not only would your secret be safe with her, she would do whatever it took to help you solve whatever problem you were having.

  Maybe it stemmed from Joy having to be the one her single mother leaned on when she had troubles—and troubles abounded for Gwen Risker, raising a young daughter by herself in one of the most expensive places in the world to live. After Joy’s father, Charles Risker, left Gwen, she had to lean on Joy for moral support as much as Joy leaned on her to provide a roof over her head and food to eat. The two developed a symbiotic relationship, becoming something far more akin to best friends than mother and daughter. Joy knew she could tell Gwen anything, and Gwen knew Joy was a good girl who would tell her anything and everything.

  And Joy’s friends knew she was the real deal: someone they could count on, someone they could always turn to for both confidence and footloose fun.

  But when Joy was seventeen, coincidentally at the same time Rino was graduating from Grossmont, she met Sean Goff. Her core group of friends, the ten or fifteen people who circulated in and out of the motley group, stayed in close contact. Except for Joy.

  “She just kind of dropped out,” he said. “Looking back on it, it makes sense that she was with him.”

  That later Joy, he said, still had the core of the Joy he knew but she changed in subtle ways, ways that were hard to define yet noticeable. After she met Sean, Joy’s luster, still discernible, dimmed somewhat.

  “Something was a little bit off,” he said. “I remember that.”

  Her friends didn’t know it, but the handsome young preacher Joy had met whose piercing blue eyes and encyclopedic knowledge of the scriptures, combined with the powerful and authoritative delivery of his sermons, appealed to her on a level she hadn’t known she was missing: a father figure. Joy hadn’t known the absence of Charles in her life had left a gaping void until Sean came to fill it.

  Gwen and Joy collaborated on Joy’s development and their relationship grew closer because of that cooperation. Gwen didn’t boss Joy around; she instead involved her in all the decisions that affected her life. Joy never really got in any serious trouble and she leaned on Gwen with all the things that most teenagers try desperately to keep secret from their parents. She could, after all, tell Gwen anything. Sean burrowed himself into both Joy and Gwen’s lives like an Oklahoma deer tick, offering advice and assistance wherever Gwen felt it was necessary, giving Joy an anchor to guide her away from the influences that were slowly pulling her in directions Gwen didn’t approve of, including the club scene, which Gwen thought was probably riddled with drugs and crime.

  Without officially doing so, Sean became a counselor to Gwen on how to raise her daughter and on matters both practical and spiritual. Gwen was a single mom who worked for a school district in San Diego. She struggled daily with bills and trying to carve out enough time to meet all her responsibilities. In Sean, Gwen found a sympathetic ear, a man who would give her the information she had been so lacking since Charles had abandoned her and her daughter so many years ago.

  Sean was never romantically interested in Gwen but it would have been easy for an outsider to make that mistake, because Sean had a way of integrating himself into people’s lives so deeply that you couldn’t escape the impression that the involvement had to be more than just platonic. That’s just who Sean was, though. If he was interested in helping you, he was obsessed with it. He would do anything he could to make sure he was making a positive difference in your life. I
n the case of Gwen Risker, Sean had a double motive: he truly cared about what happened to Gwen but he was also starting to become interested in her daughter.

  Because Sean was so deeply and helpfully intertwined in Gwen’s own life, she had no reason to suspect that he was anything more to Joy than that—a mentor, a pastor, a helper. In fact, Joy and Gwen both knew that Joy told her mother everything, even when the things she told were hard to stomach. In the beginning at least, there was nothing to tell. Sean was just who he appeared to be in Joy’s life: a concerned and helpful pastor and friend.

  When I first met Joy, she was a member of the youth group with which Sean was helping the children’s pastor. Sean and the children’s pastor called me up to the stage to play guitar during one service, so I played a familiar tune that has only one word as its sole lyric. As I played the riff from the song a few times, the youth group began to smile and groove to the music, and when the music paused, Joy threw her hands up in the air and shouted “Tequila!”

  For a few seconds, the room was enveloped in silence and then the entire group burst out in laughter at the absurdity of shouting “Tequila!” during a church service. For the duration of our friendship, I periodically teased Joy by randomly shouting “Tequila!,” to which she always gave me a scornful look before breaking into a smile.

  But Joy’s friends had begun to notice that their friend was changing, though not significantly enough to be worried about it.

  Then, when Joy turned nineteen, her friends mostly lost all contact with her for several years.

  Chapter 9

  THE MORMONS

  Fundamentalist Pentecostals will deny that they believe that only Holy Ghost-filled believers will go to heaven, but my experience has been that most believe that very thing, not maliciously but simply from their inability to imagine how anyone could make it through life and into heaven without a “baptism in the Holy Ghost.”

  Their teaching and preaching is not mean-spirited; it’s more pity than self-congratulation. Pentecostals, especially fundamentalists, call themselves “full gospel,” implying that those who are not Pentecostals do not have the complete message that God intended for them to have. Specifically, they believe there are certain signs that accompany the Holy Spirit as he inhabits believers’ hearts. They believe that those who “have the Holy Ghost” will speak in tongues, pray for the sick and generally live holier lives than those who have not entered into the “full gospel.”

  Such exclusionist thought is not unique to Pentecostalism. Most fundamentalists have trouble seeing how anyone else can possibly make it to heaven. It’s a function of the conviction that what they’re hearing in their churches and Bible studies is absolutely inspired by God and therefore unassailable. How could others be correct when they disagree with what God himself revealed?

  Almost all of them, aspiring to being living examples of humility, would balk if the direct statement were made to them that they believe their group is going to heaven and that other groups are not, but that’s exactly what they preach in so many words.

  So a great deal of Sean’s and my discussions revolved around “false” religions, which counted as both the non-Christian religions such as Islam and Hinduism and what we saw as fringe Christian religions such as Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Sean relied on me for information, because I had read the other religions’ foundational documents, from the Quran to the Book of Mormon to the Bhagavad Gita and could thus converse with some level of proficiency with the adherents of those religions.

  In general, it’s frowned upon for those considered to be novices in the Pentecostal faith to read the foundational documents of other religions, because the fear is that the readers will be “deceived” and “fall away” from the true religion because of the “deception” they received while reading the “demonic” documents on which other religions were based. But because I was considered strong in Christianity, it was acceptable for me to have read those documents, especially because I could then use them to criticize the religions that had grown from them.

  It was in that context that I got a call from Sean in 1997, after he had moved from Chula Vista to Seaport Village and I had moved to downtown San Diego.

  “Leif, I have some Mormon missionaries coming over,” he said. “This is their second visit and now they’re bringing their bishop. I need you to bolster my knowledge. Can you come over?”

  The Mormon church—officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS—is an offshoot of Christianity that was founded in the 1820s by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York. Smith claimed he had been directed by an angel to find several golden plates that contained the account of Jesus Christ coming to America after he had ministered in Israel. Smith, using the assistance of mysterious stones he called the “urim and thummim,” translated the plates he had found, and the translation became known as The Book of Mormon, named after one of the main characters. Smith was as surprised as anybody when a religion sprung up around his book and he quickly scrambled to have more “revelations” from God, the bulk of which became two additional books called Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price. It was those extra books that contained most of the doctrines that outsiders find strange about Mormons, including polygamy, which Smith said God had revealed to him as being necessary for salvation:

  “For behold, I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.” (Doctrine and Covenants 132:4) “If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second...then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else. And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given unto him; therefore is he justified.” (Doctrine and Covenants 132:61-62)

  Sean and I hadn’t yet discussed the Mormons’ history of polygamy, but it represented a key plank in my plan to “win” the Mormon missionaries away from their religion.

  I drove over to Sean’s apartment, which was always meticulously clean, utilitarian and small. The couches were dainty, as was the kitchen table, chairs and even the computer Sean used. Everything looked as if it matched Sean, who had always been thin and understated, perfectly.

  Everything felt fragile. Even Sean’s guitar, an Ovation Adamas, felt like a display piece. It wasn’t that he didn’t play it; he did. But when he did, he used the flimsiest picks he could buy, and his strumming was almost ethereal. I always just beat my guitars, breaking strings almost every performance, so I was reticent even to pick up Sean’s guitar for fear of injuring it.

  Everything in his apartment was similarly fragile. His couch seemed like it might buckle under the weight of anyone weighing more than Sean, and I was always careful when I sat on it.

  The Mormon missionaries began their pitch almost immediately. According to their view, Jesus came to America after he rose from the dead but before he ascended into heaven, to preach to the lost tribe of Israel, which inhabited the Americas. Pray and ask if this testimony is true, they said, and the Holy Spirit will give you a burning sensation in your chest telling you that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.

  Sean took a dim view of such methods of discernment.

  “It’s demonic,” he had once told me. “Some of them get the burning so strongly that it’s painful. When you open yourself up to that kind of thing spiritually, you’re just asking a demon to come possess you.”

  Our religion at the time did not leave any room for acceptance of any others, so when the missionaries spoke of a confirmation of the truth of Mormonism coming by way of a burning in the bosom, I was not inclined to accommodate their assertion. They believed the very real burning they felt was the Holy Spirit. Since Sean and I believed such a thing could not possibly be the Holy Spirit, w
hich had revealed to us a completely divergent view of religion, it had to have some other source and psychosomatic wasn’t an option for us. It had to be demonic, which was the power to which we ascribed anything supernatural that we didn’t believe came from God.

  And when the Mormon missionaries pronounced Joseph Smith a prophet, that was my opening.

  “If he was a prophet, why don’t you do what he says?” I asked, setting a familiar trap. I had had the very same conversation with dozens of Mormon missionaries. They, predictably, were shocked—they were, after all, giving up two years of their lives to deliver the good news of another testament of Jesus Christ, and Mormons are renowned for their moral virtue. It was a particularly offensive affront to suggest that they weren’t following the teachings of Joseph Smith.

  “We do follow the teachings of Joseph Smith as well as the Bible,” the lead missionary said. “Of course, everybody falls short, but we never intentionally ignore his teachings.”

  I smiled.

  “What about polygamy?” I asked smugly, watching their faces as they started to mentally rehearse the ‘we don’t do that anymore’ answer they had been taught to give to that question. I headed them off at the pass. “Joseph Smith said salvation depended on polygamy, but the LDS church later rescinded that revelation from God, saying essentially that God had changed his mind. The Bible, which you claim to follow, says God is the same yesterday, today and forever. If he revealed to your prophet that polygamy was necessary for salvation, why did he change his mind when the American government said that Utah couldn’t become a state unless the church renounced polygamy? When has God ever bowed to pressure from men?”