Desert Wives (9781615952267)

by Webb, Betty

  The canyon was a separate eco-system from the compound’s arid expanse, and was vivid with red Indian paintbrush and yellow daisies. Set beside the sage green of the shrubs and backed by the soft red of sandstone walls, the blooms provided vibrant contrast to the pastel palette around them. I heard the musical trickle of water, the tiny click-click-click of lush buffalo grasses waving in the breeze. Almost paradise. But, reminding me that the law of nature was kill or be killed, a red-tailed hawk rode the thermal overhead, searching for prey.

  The tension fell away from me as I jogged past clumps of prickly pear cactus and gold-flecked creosote. Lizards scurried out of my way, prairie dogs popped back into their holes, and here and there, jackrabbits fled from me as if they feared Fricassé de Lapin topped my evening menu. I knew coyotes lived nearby, but since they were nocturnal, they were probably bedded down in one of the many caverns pock-marked into the canyon’s walls.

  Thanks to Davis’s appropriation of the compound’s rifles, I didn’t have to worry about dodging bullets, and I had the canyon to myself.

  I jogged for an hour, marveling at the length of the canyon. The Arizona Strip was laced with these long canyons, some leading south all the way to the Grand Canyon. Fortunately, they were broader and safer than the slot canyons found in the eastern part of the state, those steep, sheer-walled canyons which became death traps after a thunderstorm. I was in no danger now. It hadn’t rained for days and the walls of Paiute Canyon sloped gently. Well-worn paths led up its sides and onto the desert floor above.

  Finally winded, I slowed to a walk and turned around, lowering my skirts as I did so. Even the spectacular beauty of the canyon hadn’t chased away the memory of the grotesque lesson I’d heard in the classroom. Part of me wanted to go back and slap the teacher upside the head, while the other part counseled restraint. Restraint won. Even if Miss Teacher didn’t brainwash her charges, the job would still be accomplished by their fathers and mothers.

  Mothers.

  I touched the scar on my forehead, remembering the woman who looked like me, the woman who shot me at point blank range and left me for dead. Oh, yes, I knew that mothers could damage their children, too, not just fathers and prophets and teachers in crack-brained cults. In my career as a police officer, I had seen grisly injuries inflicted upon children by their mothers.

  One day, when I had harped too loud and long about my own mother’s sins, Jimmy had shut me up with an article he found in National Geographic. It described various tribes in Egypt, Kenya and Somalia, where mothers, in order to earn higher dowries for their little girls, cut off their daughters’ sexual organs. These “operations,” carried out by amateurs with no medical training using rusty tin can lids as knives, were not circumcisions. No, the article described the complete removal of all reachable sexual organs, clitoris and labia, performed without anesthesia. Many of the little girls bled to death during the procedures, but apparently their mothers believed death was a risk well worth taking. After all, a “cut wife” brought a higher dowry—even when the cut wife was numb from the waist down.

  So in a way it was almost unjust for me to confine my rage to the males of Purity. Yes, the men held all the cards, all the power, but they could not maintain their illegal lifestyle without the women’s collusion. So in the end, what kind of monsters wouldn’t protect their own daughters? I touched the scar on my forehead again. Sometimes monsters were called mothers.

  The singing of a cactus wren freed me from my dark visions. I could do little to help all of Purity’s children, but at least I could save Rebecca.

  Good investigators know that the solution to the crime of murder is to be found in studying the victim, so it was imperative that I begin interviewing Solomon’s widows and children, not to mention his friends and business associates. Unfortunately, secrecy reigned in Utah’s polygamy communities. There was a good chance, too, that many of my suspects might be moving soon. As I had learned in the community meeting at Prophet Davis’s house, Solomon’s wives and children would soon be parceled out to new homes, perhaps even to other compounds far from Purity. Somehow I would have to find a chance to talk to them before they dispersed.

  A sharp movement caught my eye and I looked up again to see the red-tailed hawk plummeting toward the ground, its wings folded close to its body. As it dove into the canyon, I lost sight of it for a second, but then I heard a shriek, followed by sounds of a struggle behind a creosote bush. The hawk rose again, a bleeding prairie dog struggling in its claws.

  My own quest felt as hopeless as the prairie dog’s struggles. Given the difficulty of my task, there was a good chance that I might fail for the first time since opening Desert Investigations. But then I remembered Esther, the good mother, sitting in her cell while her daughter was in danger of being returned to the compound. Prophet Solomon might be dead, but I had no doubt that Abel Corbett, in exchange for some favor or other, would eventually hand her over to another old man. No matter how bleak my chances looked here, I couldn’t give up. I had to save Rebecca, and if possible, do something to help the other little girls in the compound.

  I was so deep in thought that I almost walked into Meade Royal.

  “Sister Lena?”

  My shriek sounded like the prairie dog’s as I jumped back from the concerned-looking teenage boy in front of me.

  “Sister Lena, are you all right?” In close up, Meade Royal’s blue eyes were even more startling, the resemblance to his beautiful mother more stunning. He had a small rifle nestled in his arms, but since I’d heard no shots, I guessed he had just begun his hunt. Good. I’d already seen enough blood for one day.

  I checked my dress quickly to make certain my skirts were all the way down and my buttons buttoned. Meade may have been little more than a child, but as I had seen, they started early here.

  “Just daydreaming, Brother Meade. By the way, I thought Prophet Davis locked up all the guns.”

  He tried to form a look of disapproval on his angelic face, but it didn’t work. Try as he might, he still looked like a Renaissance angel, albeit a disapproving one.

  “I told him I wanted to hunt some rabbits so he let me have this. Regardless of what the other people think, my brother’s a reasonable man. But what are you doing in the canyon? Have you no duties at home?”

  The real Lena Jones would have smarted off to him, metaphorically spanking his uppity butt, but I reminded myself that the real Lena Jones was on hiatus. I forced a subservient smile.

  “I finished the cleaning and cooking,” I lied. “But the dust…I needed some fresh air. I, uh, suffer from asthma.”

  The disapproval vanished from his sweet face, and the concern returned. “I’ll tell the Circle of Elders to pray for you. But the canyon’s a dangerous place for a woman to be alone in, and I don’t want you walking around down here by yourself. Come, let me take you home.”

  Before I could protest, he shifted his rifle onto his left arm, hooked my arm with his other, and began marching me back to the compound. Bemused, I allowed myself to be led. After all, this presented another interview opportunity. “Meade, why should it be dangerous now? Isn’t your father’s killer in custody?”

  He gripped my arm even tighter. “You’re not safe. There are, ah, other people about.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Did he mean whoever was gunning for Davis? “Oh?”

  I was wrong.

  “Indians,” he said.

  Purity’s casual racism had been apparent from the beginning. Many of the Arizona Strip’s polygamy compounds received an surge in population when the official Mormon Church changed its policy to admit African-American males to the priesthood, and Purity had been no exception. I wondered how Meade would feel if he knew that my partner and closest friend in the world was a full-blooded Pima Indian.

  “What Indians?” I asked.

  “Paiute. They’re not friendly.”

  I tried not to laugh. Most Native Americans were friendly enough once you t
ook the trouble to know them, but they were very protective of children. I doubted they bore any more love for the polygamists than the polygamists did them.

  I gave Meade a grateful smile. “Thank you for the warning. I feel so safe with you! Perhaps you could tell me exactly where they live so I’ll be extra careful not to go near them?”

  He eased the pressure on my arm and slowed his step. “If you take the road northeast past the graveyard, and follow it for another four miles, you’ll eventually see their village. They’re in the canyon a lot.”

  “Hiking?”

  He looked baffled. “Hiking? No, they hunt, just like I was doing when I ran into you. Other times they come down here to practice those pagan rituals of theirs. They went to court once to get the canyon taken away from us, saying that it was part of their holy ground, or some such nonsense.”

  I forwent the comment that Indians’ holy ground always seemed nonsensical to certain Anglos. The proximity of the Paiute village to the compound sounded promising. Maybe one of them had seen something. For now, I pretended to be guided by a boy so innocent of the world that he didn’t realize how many Indians wore Nikes, carried cell phones, and went to Christian churches on Sundays.

  “Thank you for warning me about their pagan ways, Brother Meade. I certainly wouldn’t want to fall into the hands of the ungodly.”

  As we walked back to the compound, I peppered him with questions, and for a while he even answered them. Yes, his sister Cynthia was unhappy, but conforming to God’s wishes brought the only true happiness, not chasing after individual dreams. No, he wasn’t aware of any major falling out between Prophet Davis and the Circle of Elders. At least not until this morning’s announcement.

  “Prophet Davis is a godly man,” he assured me.

  Then I remembered that Meade and Davis shared the same father. I asked him about that.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m the youngest son and he’s the eldest, but we had different mothers.”

  “Was Prophet Davis’s mother at the meeting?”

  “Sister Lucy died many years ago. I never knew her.”

  “Did she get sick? Or was it an accident of some sort?”

  “From what I hear, she died a few days after he was born, so our sister mothers raised him.”

  “Sister mothers?”

  “Father prophet’s other wives.”

  That was one good point about polygamy, at least. Their children seldom wound up in foster homes; they were just sent on down the line to new mothers. But I wanted more details about what medical care, if any, Sister Lucy had received. As we climbed the path out of the canyon and started through the mesquite grove that led past Davis’s house, I asked a question I already knew the answer to. “Did she go to the hospital?”

  “Of course not,” Meade answered. “The Circle of Elders prayed over her, but God called her home…”

  “To the Highest Heaven,” I finished for him.

  He shook his head. “Oh, no, not to the Highest. Davis was only her first child so she didn’t have time to bear more children. Only Great Mothers achieve Highest Heaven.”

  Which the old crone in the classroom had made so clear. Before I could censor my words, I blurted, “That doesn’t sound right, Meade. It’s not fair that the poor woman didn’t get her proper heavenly reward just because she died before she could throw a whole litter.”

  Meade gasped. “That’s a wicked thing to say, Sister Lena! A good woman is an obedient woman. She doesn’t question God’s ways.”

  And a good woman should be slightly south of smart, I wanted to respond, but by then, I’d gained control over my mouth.

  As we crossed Prophet’s Park, a woman emerged from the clinic. In another environment, I’d have put her at thirty, but I’d learned the constant pregnancies the women endured made them appear older than they were. The woman’s dishwater-blond hair, pulled tightly into a bun, did little to flatter her blunt features, but her rounded belly was proof that her husband, at least, found her desirable. As she hurried away from the clinic, I noticed something else. One of her legs was noticeably shorter than the other, making her gait resemble a series of ungainly hops.

  My own hip, the one that had taken a drug-dealer’s bullet and ended my police career a year before, twinged in sympathy.

  When the woman neared us I saw tears. Concerned, I started toward her but found myself yanked back by Meade.

  “Leave her alone,” he said.

  “But she…”

  “That’s just Sister Hanna, Brother Noah’s sister. She’s always crying.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Somebody told me she’s had a lot of sadness in her life, but I don’t know anything about it. People don’t talk much about her.”

  I wondered if it had anything to do with her limp. An accident of some sort which had gone untreated? I tried once more to go to her, but Meade, proving surprisingly strong, pulled me along with him toward Saul’s house as if I were little more than a recalcitrant puppy on a leash.

  “But I want to help her,” I complained.

  “Sister Hanna’s problems are none of your business!” he yelled at me. When this outburst attracted the disapproval of a knot of men standing on a nearby porch, he lowered his voice. “A curious mind is the Devil’s mind, Sister Lena.”

  With that, he half-shoved me up the steps where Saul, just back from his grocery run in Zion City, had come out to watch our progress across the dirt circle.

  “Your wife is sadly in need of instruction,” Meade said, as he handed me over.

  “I’ve noticed that,” Saul said, hooking his arm around mine, much as Meade had done. “Come inside, wife. It’s time for you to prepare supper.”

  Relieved to escape from Meade’s clutches, I did as I was told. Soon a nuked bowl of Ramen noodles sat before each of us. After we’d slurped the noodles down I handed around some bananas and apples for dessert.

  “This is it?” Ruby asked. Her face couldn’t have been more aghast if Brigham Young himself had crawled out of his tomb and pinched her scrawny ass.

  “Healthier than those chicken-fat sandwiches you made for us earlier,” I shot back, my reserve of meekness depleted.

  She flushed, whether in rage or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell. Shifting in her chair, she turned to Saul and whined, “Husband, my dear sister wife must learn to cook or we will all starve.” As if she did not have her own shortcomings in that department.

  To my horror, Saul nodded. “I’ve been worried about that very thing, Sister Ruby, and I believe I’ve found a solution.”

  Not liking the direction in which we were headed, I said, “Hey, wait a minute…”

  Saul raised his hand. “Silence, woman!”

  It’s a good thing no flies inhabited the room because one of them would have flown into my open mouth. While I gaped at him, Saul shoved his chair back and stood.

  “Ruby, you see to the dishes, such as they are, and Sister Lena, you follow me.”

  That’ll be a clean day on a pig’s behind, I wanted to snap, but didn’t. Leaving Ruby behind to her smirks, I followed him out onto the porch. Once we were out of earshot of curious ears, I let fly.

  “Listen here, husband. Speak to me like that again and I’ll shove a firecracker up your ass and light it with a blowtorch.”

  He winced, then gestured to the porch swing, which swayed slightly to a breeze drifting down from the canyon. “Have a seat, Miss Big Mouth, and let me tell you the arrangements I’ve made.”

  “I don’t care what arrangements you’ve made,” I huffed. Settling myself next to him on the porch swing, I added, “I didn’t come to Purity to learn to how to cook.”

  His face assumed that smug look I’d seen on so many men in the compound, and it unsettled me even more. But with his next words my apprehension disappeared.

  “You came here hoping to get Esther out of jail, and to do that, you’ll have to do more than
spend your time annoying Ruby and Meade. You need to talk to people.”

  His criticism stung because it was so on target. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do, but it’s harder than I thought it would be. These people are pretty tight-lipped, even with each other.” In my ignorance, I had believed I could overcome the polygamists’ reticence, and given enough time I might still be able to get some to open up. But that was the problem. I didn’t have enough time. In a few days, Esther would be extradited to Utah.

  Saul leaned toward me, a grin on his face. “So now, little Miss Sass, are you ready to hear what I’ve fixed up for you?”

  “Lay it on me, brother.” My voice sounded glum.

  When he told me, I startled one elderly gentleman crossing Prophet’s Park by jumping up and crowing in delight.

  Chapter 11

  Saul had arranged for me to be apprenticed to Sister Ermaline, one of Solomon Royal’s widows, and reputedly the best cook in Purity.

  “There’s still a pile of women and something like fifty or sixty kids in that house, so if you pay attention, I’m sure you’ll hear something that can help Esther.”

  I nodded and leaned back into the swing, my spirits rising for the first time since I’d arrived in Purity.

  Saul’s mouth assumed the grump position but his eyes smiled. “Play dumb. Watch your mouth.”

  I smiled back. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. They expect you there an hour before each meal.”

  “How’d you manage that? I thought everyone hated you around here.”

  “Correction, Lena. Solomon hated me and the Circle of Elders still hates me because I stopped turning over my Social Security checks to the Purity Fellowship Foundation. But a lot of the women here think I’m just fine. In fact, just before you got back, a couple of Solomon’s widows came over, hinting that they wouldn’t mind marrying me. So what do you think of that, Miss Priss?”