Desert Redemption

by Betty Webb

  “I tended a cosmetics counter at Nordstrom. Made other women beautiful while I was dying inside.” A brief shadow of sadness crossed her face. “You ever feel like that?”

  I had a brief flashback to some of the more abusive foster homes I’d lived in as a child. “Not lately.”

  “Same here. Since moving to EarthWay, I’ve been able to lead a more peaceful and creative life.” Still holding Little Red to her bared breast, she hauled the water bucket back up. “Well, I gotta get back to the kitchen and help prepare lunch. It’s a special celebration. Sister Claire delivered her baby last night and it’s a healthy little girl, so we’re having one of our rare cooked meals. Brown rice with mushrooms, sautéed veggies, spiced pumpkin custard for dessert with real whipped cream. We’re serving homemade wine, too, legal, as long as we don’t sell it. Say, as a valued customer…” here a laugh, “…you’re welcome to eat with us today if you want. No charge, although small love offerings are always appreciated. Oh, and when you pick up your quilt, don’t forget to check out my dinnerware. And my hand-milled soaps.”

  With that, she walked away, Little Red still sucking mightily.

  The artisan well was shaded by a large stand of pine trees abuzz with birdsong. As the morning sun filtered through the branches, I poured sparkling clear water into the Coke bottle Jeremiah Blue Sky had given me. Snapping the cap back on, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. Private investigators were trained to see the worst in people, but everyone I had met so far at EarthWay had been friendly, yet here I was, looking for evidence that might ruin their Eden-esque lifestyle.

  Well water collected, I followed a dirt trail through the pines until I came to the stream. Although clear, the water appeared less than a foot deep, which meant that it probably ran dry during Arizona’s long, hot summers. Today the stream burbled merrily along, washing around granite boulders and leaching away at its bank. I hadn’t needed the Coke bottle Jeremiah Blue Sky had given me because I had brought several glass vials I’d pulled from Desert Investigations’ supply closet, but the more the merrier, right? Satisfied no one was watching, I took out two vials and filled them with stream water. Firmly stoppering them, I tucked them into my tote.

  As I turned to go back, I found myself facing a tall, stern-faced woman with flowing, waist-length silver hair. At five-foot-eight I’m not short, but this woman had at least four inches on me. Her sunburnt skin was furrowed with deep creases, and her gray eyes missed nothing.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice a deep alto. Her biceps, revealed by the shirtless bib overalls she wore, looked as toned as a gymnast’s. No Skinny Minnie, she.

  She was blocking the pathway to my Jeep.

  “Just, ah, getting some water.” I tried to sidle around her, but she sidled with me.

  “Why?”

  “I want it tested for purity.”

  “Why?”

  Since I couldn’t think up a believable lie at the moment, I fell back on the truth. Well, partial truth. “There’ve been rumors that the water around here is unsafe, and since this stream crosses some land I’m, ah, thinking of buying…” I shrugged. “Since I was already doing some vegetable shopping here, I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone.” Oops. Probably not the wisest metaphor to use in a vegetarian commune.

  Now she looked even less friendly. “Are you with some government agency?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re doing this on your own.” She moved closer. Put her hand in her pocket. Grasped something there.

  Just because these people were vegetarians didn’t mean they couldn’t be dangerous, so the motion alarmed me. But considering that I’d already been caught with the vials, there was no further point in lying.

  “A friend of mine, a government chemist, knows where I am today,” I said, “and he’ll worry if I’m late getting back. So if you don’t mind, move aside so I can pick up the quilt I bought at your lovely general store and head on back to town. As I’m sure you realize, vegetables are best eaten freshly picked.”

  She didn’t move. “What’s your name?”

  More irritated than alarmed, I asked a question of my own. “What’s yours? As they say, with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

  Another hard look. “I’m known as Mother Eve.”

  “And I’m known as Lena.”

  “Lena who?”

  “Eve who?”

  “Think you’re smart, don’t you, Lena?”

  “If you’d be so kind as to let me pass…”

  She finally moved aside, but she kept her hand in her pocket. Knife? Glock?

  Mother Eve followed me all the way back to the general store, and from there, to my Jeep.

  “Don’t come back, Lena.”

  I gave her my best smile. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

  35 years earlier

  Because of his broken jaw, delivered the day before when he tried to keep Abraham from taking Helen, Liam can barely speak.

  But Helen has found her voice.

  “Abraham has gone crazy, and so have the rest of them,” she whispers, as the others dance in the firelight, still celebrating Abraham’s supreme sacrifice. “We can’t let this go on. And…and Christina is our firstborn. He’ll kill her, too. He’s already killed his own son!”

  The look in Liam’s eyes shows he understands.

  Helen looks down at baby Jamie, nursing at her breast. “It’s starting with firstborn sons, so Jamie’s in danger. And later it could even be firstborn daughters, and we’d lose Christina, too. Abraham has changed, Liam! Did all those drugs he’s been taking do this to him, or has he always been like this, just better at hiding it?”

  Liam shrugs, then turns his hands palm-up in a hopeless gesture. He has no answer for her, not even if he could speak.

  “We have to help the other children, too,” Helen tells her husband. “I’ve been counting the kids who’re left, and I’ve come up with seven babies, nine toddlers, and fourteen children old enough to run on their own. We could…”

  Liam grunts, shakes his head furiously. His injuries garble his words, but she can make them out. “Uhnee too ands.” Only two hands.

  “Four,” she corrects, holding up her own.

  His eyes are anguished. “Ow do choose hu lih?” How do we choose who lives?

  “We can’t. We can only grab the babies we can reach and put them in our backpacks. I’ll put Jamie in yours, and I’ll put Oriana’s new baby in mine. I can carry at least one more, maybe two, if they’re really small. The older kids can help, so I’ll get extra backpacks for them.” Helen’s bruised face turns bitter. “At least now I know where Abraham stashed everyone’s stuff.”

  She looks down at her daughter. At only four, Christina is too young to carry a baby, but she can run, oh, can she run. Helen has never seen a child so swift. Christina can help lead the toddlers to safety.

  “In?” Liam asks. When?

  “Tonight, after everyone is in bed. They’re drugged out of their minds now and they’ll be sleeping it off.

  “Un air?” Run where?

  “Remember that logging road we saw just before we pulled in here? I’m pretty sure it ends at the ranger station, and they’ll have guns and radios and stuff.”

  They wait until the bonfire burns down before beginning to round up the children, but it doesn’t go the way they hoped. Snatching the infants is easy since their parents are more unconscious than sleeping, but several of the toddlers resist when they try to pull them away from the drugged adults. So Helen and Liam leave them. Most of the other children are old enough to be afraid of the dark; they refuse, too.

  By Helen’s new count, they have twenty-one children, including Christina and Jamie, to usher through the woods to the ranger station. Twenty-one lives to save.

  They set off into the dark.

 
But less than ten minutes away from camp a toddler trips over something and begins to wail. Up until then the night has been silent, broken only by nature sounds: wind whispering through the pines, coyotes’ yips, owls flapping toward their prey. With the toddler’s fall—her name is Louisa, and she is five months short of four—the silence is broken. As if Louisa’s pain is contagious, the other children join in, and the soft night comes alive with wails.

  Chapter Eleven

  The drive from EarthWay to Scottsdale took longer than planned because DPS had shut down the Beeline seven miles north of Shea Boulevard. Probably another wreck. The Beeline was notorious for pileups on hard-drinking weekends. Whatever the cause, I found myself in a line of cars detoured onto a barely there gravel road.

  I was still muttering in frustration when I dropped off the produce and water samples at Rudy Foreman’s lab. An old friend of mine from my days at Arizona State University, Rudy headed up GESKO, a company that provided testing for everything from DNA to HIV. Nearsighted and rotund, Rudy was a workaholic who thought days off were for chumps. His only exercise was playing video games, so although the rest of him was at least seventy-five pounds overweight, his fingers and thumbs were in great shape.

  “You looking for anything in particular?” he asked, taking the bag of veggies from me. “Oooh, pretty tote!”

  “Look for anything that could make people sick. I picked this stuff up at one of those retro-hippie communes north of here.”

  He eyed the Coke bottle and vials. “Raw water?”

  “The bottle’s from an artisan well, the vials from a nearby creek.”

  “The veggies?”

  “Watered from the well. Or the creek. Maybe both.”

  His round face split into a grin. “Oh, this is gonna be fun!”

  Jimmy loved his new quilt, and took it into the Airstream while I checked to see how the building was coming along. Wolf and the teens had already finished installing two bathroom sinks and two commodes. In keeping with the times, the kitchen, which they were currently working on, was a galley-type overlooking the living room/dining room combination. The space was large enough that we could even invite the horses over for dinner.

  “The cats love the quilt, too,” Jimmy said, returning from remaking the bed. “Come to think of it, in two weeks, three at most, we can start moving the rest of your stuff over to the new house.”

  “That’s, um, great.” A dull ache throbbed behind my eyes.

  The headaches had begun when Jimmy asked me to move in with him, saying there was no point in all this driving back and forth from the Rez to Scottsdale, from Scottsdale to the Rez. Ever budget-conscious, he’d pointed out that given current rental rates, renting out my apartment above Desert Investigations could bring me a tidy profit. A couple of Excedrin had made that first headache disappear, but since then, every time the subject of me moving everything came up, another headache rolled in.

  “My apartment’s a disaster area. Snowball ripped the living room drapes and shower curtains to shreds, and…” Tsk-tsking, I shook my head. “I can’t see anyone renting such a shambles.”

  “All fixable.”

  “It’ll take weeks.”

  “Two days at the most, you pessimist. I’ll help.” He flexed his impressive biceps. “Get some use out of these things.”

  My headache, worsened by all the banging and clanging, intensified. “Do we have any Excedrin left?”

  “You took the last one yesterday.”

  I inwardly cursed myself for forgetting to restock, but that’s what happens when you have too much to do, and too little time to do it in. “Tell you what. I’ll run down to the Walgreen’s on McDowell, and once I’ve dosed myself, I’ll stop by the apartment and make a list of whatever needs to be fixed or replaced for possible renters. It won’t take long, so I should be back in time for dinner.”

  I headed for my Jeep, pretending not to see the disappointment on Jimmy’s face.

  I’d planned on talking to Sharona, but when I drove by, I saw that her art gallery hadn’t opened. No matter, I could catch her tomorrow. In a way I was relieved the gallery was closed, because now I could concentrate on packing. My headache went away the minute I entered my apartment above Desert Investigations. It could have been due to the efficacy of Excedrin or my relief at returning to the three small rooms that had served as my home for the past decade. Like most former foster kids, I didn’t handle change well, even when the change was for the better.

  Snowball had left his imprint on the place, however.

  As I’d explained to Jimmy, the beige living room drapes hung in shreds, and the sunlight poured through painted piebald splashes of gold on the off-white walls. Shaking my head, I took the ruined drapes down and stuffed them into a black garbage bag. Across the Navajo-print sofa, white stuffing oozed out of several throw pillows, spilling onto the beige carpet, making it look like a cotton crop ready for harvest. The cotton crop joined the drapes.

  By some miracle, Snowball had spared the black satin pillow embroidered with the words, WELCOME TO THE PHILIPPINES. I’d stolen it from one of my nicer foster families so I could have something to remember them by. Smiling, I picked up the pillow, gave it a brief hug, then gently put it back on the sofa.

  The bedroom appeared untouched. My Roy Rogers and Trigger bedspread remained pristine, as did the spare Lone Ranger and Tonto coverlet. Snowball hadn’t knocked over my chartreuse ceramic horsehead lamp, either, and when I flipped the wall switch, creamy light illuminated the room. But on the floor I found another of the cat’s victims: a Hopi clown Kachina doll he’d drug in from the living room windowsill. Snowball had chewed off its head.

  Sighing, I picked up the doll and threw it into a black garbage bag. Then, remembering that Wolf Ramirez knew how to fix damaged Kachinas, I hauled it back out, wrapped it in a clean tee-shirt, and stuffed it into my tote. Returning to the living room I decided that the damage wasn’t all that bad. An otherwise neat little kitty, Snowball had faithfully used the kitty litter boxes, as had his mother and siblings. And since I, just as faithfully, had cleaned out the boxes as soon as they were used, the apartment didn’t smell too gamey.

  Still, I opened the windows and let the cool October air rush in. To the west I saw a bank of storm clouds rolling in from California. Realizing that it might rain by sundown and that I had left my Jeep uncovered, I hurried up my inventory, and within minutes, a job I’d thought would take at least an hour was finished. All I needed to do now was replace some curtains, then pack up my clothes and other personal items. Once that was finished, I would hire Merry Maids for a deep clean, but my part was done.

  As was my life here.

  I was ready to head for my Jeep when I noticed the cardboard banker’s box of childhood memories I’d temporarily shoved under the coffee table.

  Oh.

  Sitting down on the sofa, I took a deep breath. It would be wiser to throw the damned thing away, but fueled by the magnetism of the forbidden, I opened the box with none-too-steady hands. When I moved the packing tissues aside I could see that everything was still there. The police photo of my bloodied blue dress, a child’s size four, and the age-yellowed newspapers with the horrific headlines.

  CHILD SHOT IN HEAD REMAINS UNIDENTIFIED

  SHOT CHILD AWAKENS FROM COMA

  SHOT CHILD RELEASED TO CPS

  Five years afterwards, another headline:

  CHILD STABS FOSTER FATHER WITH KITCHEN KNIFE

  The week after that:

  FOSTER FATHER CHARGED WITH SERIAL CHILD ABUSE

  I’d also saved the newspapers that covered every day of the trial, until midway through, Brian Wykoff, the foster father from Hell, had suddenly pled guilty to multiple child rapes. I had been his last victim until I’d stopped him with the now-famous kitchen knife.

  I didn’t bother looking at the more recent newspaper clippings
announcing Papa Brian’s grisly murder earlier this year. The less I thought about that, the better off I’d be.

  In the midst of repacking the box, my cell phone rang. Detective Sylvie Perrins, Scottsdale Police. “You watching the six o’clock news?” she asked, puffing like she’d been running.

  “No. Why?”

  “Yamaguchi’s covering something you might find interesting. By the way, you were right about that dead artist’s mother. When we delivered the news, she didn’t bat an eye. Talk about a stone cold bitch.”

  Empty air.

  Turning on the TV, I saw a swooping helicopter shot of a miles-long traffic jam on the Beeline Highway, the same one I’d been caught in while returning from EarthWay. Since Sylvie wasn’t given to casual TV programming advice, I kept watching until the helicopter veered away from the highway and followed along a low ridge to a spot where at least a dozen DPS cruisers and a crime scene van were parked near a crime scene tent. The feed then switched to a close-up of newswoman Polly Yamaguchi. A fierce wind blew her long black hair around while she stood in front of a DPS vehicle.

  “I’m here at the scene of yet another mysterious death,” she yelled into her mike. “A couple hours ago, a trooper from the Department of Public Safety discovered a body lying a few yards off the Beeline Highway. One of my sources claims that the condition of the body is similar to the bodies of the two women found earlier this week. Caucasian, emaciated, no immediate signs of violence. The only difference is that this victim—if ‘victim’ is what we’re talking about here—is a male in his late twenties or early thirties. This is Polly Yamaguchi, with ‘Eye on the Valley,’ reporting to you live from the Beeline Highway, just a few miles north of the Pima Indian Reservation. We will have updates at ten, so stay tuned.”

  That made three emaciated bodies in one week, each found near or in the northern end of the Rez. Artist Megan Unruh, found under a tree near a business park, and the still-unidentified Reservation Woman I’d discovered during my morning ride. I looked over at the banker’s box, which held the photo of a dress the same color as hers.