by Webb, Betty
“Sister Ermaline, it seems like you had a terrible amount of work to do all by yourself that day. Didn’t anyone else come in to help you?”
When she shook her head, the bright kitchen light glinted on her granny glasses, shielding her eyes from me. The air in the kitchen was close and still. I wished someone would open a window.
“Me need help?” she finally said. “I don’t need help. I never did.”
“How’d it go, wife?” Saul asked me as I bustled into the kitchen, where he sat drinking a glass of orange juice. Ruby was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lurking about somewhere. After all, this was a woman who’d listened at Saul’s bedroom door to check on the action.
“Fine.” I put the plate Sister Jean had given me down in front of him. “Coleslaw. Sloppy Joes.”
A big grin spread across his face. “And did my beloved wife cook all this for me?”
“You don’t cook coleslaw,” I answered primly. “You mix it. And yes, I mixed it with my own two hands. The Sloppy Joes come to you courtesy of Sister Jean. They’re her specialty.”
“Ah, Sister Jean.” He smiled. As he ate with every indication of pleasure, for which I felt inordinately proud, he leaned toward me and asked in a low voice, “Find out anything interesting?”
“Only that Jean, Martha, and Ermaline all had the opportunity to kill the prophet.”
He looked appalled. “Come on, now.”
I leaned close enough to him to smell Sloppy Joes on his breath. “Prophet Solomon was shot, remember, and most women can use a shotgun if they have to. By the way, how much do you know about Ermaline? Was her marriage to Solomon happy? Or at least as happy as it could be, considering the situation here.”
He chewed quietly for a while, thinking. Then, “Well, I’ve heard stories but you’ve got to understand that they’re just stories. I don’t know how accurate they are.”
“Let me worry about that.”
He sighed and put his fork down. “Ermaline might be crabby, but she’s a good woman underneath.”
Why was it that whenever someone started telling you what a good person someone was “underneath” you prepared to hear something nasty about them?
“Ermaline started having trouble with Martha a few years back over some little something, and Solomon took Martha’s side. They say that Solomon stopped sleeping with Ermaline then and she took it pretty hard. I guess she wanted another baby, but at her age, that was pretty much impossible. Have you noticed that the women here compete over how many kids they have?”
I nodded. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”
“Anyway, people say Ermaline never used to be such a good cook, that she started studying all those cookbooks and stuff just to please Solomon, sort of like she was trying to lure him back to her bed with tuna noodle casseroles.”
“You don’t know what caused the original trouble between Ermaline and Martha?” I, for one, would hate to be on the wrong side of either Ermaline or the Valkyrie, who wouldn’t have looked out of place strapped into armor and brandishing a sword.
Saul shook his head. “Maybe they had a falling out over a recipe or something, but so what? Prophet Solomon got murdered, not Martha or Ermaline.”
And the beautiful Martha was handed over to a particularly unattractive man. Orchestrated by Sister Ermaline? Perhaps I needed to reassess my belief that women had no power in Purity.
Chapter 12
By the end of the week, thanks to Sister Ermaline’s instruction, my biscuits weren’t quite as lopsided and I’d even begun to master the basics of tuna noodle casseroles. I’d heard some gritty gossip, too, although I wasn’t certain it would lead to Solomon’s murderer.
Jean, for instance, described in grisly detail Rosalinda’s bloody delivery of a healthy son, conveyed via a friend who worked at the clinic.
“You’d think Brother Earl would have a nice word for her after all that but all he did was count the baby’s fingers and toes,” Jean said. “The next day, while she was still lying there at the clinic, he told her she had five weeks to recover and then she’d have to resume her wifely duties.”
I didn’t have to feign my shock. “That’s pretty creepy.”
“He’s a creepy guy,” Jean said, her green eyes dark with concern. Like most of Solomon’s widows, she obsessed over who her next husband would be, and both Earl Graff and Noah Heaton topped her list of dreads.
As she spoke, she stood by the stove, flipping sausage patties while Cynthia—who had been transfixed by Jean’s detailed description of the birth process—transferred the cooked patties to a huge platter. Sister Ermaline was elsewhere in the house, probably torturing kittens.
“If I wind up with Brother Earl, I don’t know what I’ll do,” Jean said.
“You don’t really think the Circle of Elders will give you to him, do you?” I asked.
Jean smoothed away a stray wisp of her glorious red hair. Today she was dressed in a bright green dress almost the same color as her eyes. “Sister Ermaline has been talking to them, giving suggestions about who should go where. My name came up in connection with his.”
Shades of Martha Royal. “I know it’s none of my business, but why doesn’t Ermaline like you?”
One of the other women vented a short, bitter laugh. “Sister Ermaline doesn’t like anybody!”
Jean threw her a glance. “Especially not me. When I married the prophet, I was young and stupid, and I bragged about how many times he asked me to visit his bed. He even wanted me after I became pregnant.”
“Lucky you,” the other wife muttered sarcastically.
Another thing I’d learned in the week since I’d arrived at the compound was that sex after pregnancy wasn’t considered necessary, although it was not unknown. The men kept charts of their wives’ menstrual cycles and concentrated their sexual activities around fertile times. Once the wives became pregnant, the men usually moved on to the next unpregnant female. Ideally, by the time the last woman in the household had been fertilized, the first woman would have delivered her baby and be ready for action again. But it didn’t always work that way.
I looked around to make sure Ermaline was still out of the room. “Why, Sister Ermaline was jealous!”
This time, all the women in the kitchen laughed.
Then Cynthia spoke up. I’d noticed earlier that her face seemed paler than usual, but at the time I didn’t give it much importance—something I regretted later. “Father Prophet was still having sex with Mother when Sister Jean married him, but soon after that, he stopped asking Mother to visit.”
Because reproduction was women’s major function at Purity, I’d become used to their matter-of-fact discussions of sexual behavior. Still, I was shocked at this bald piece of information coming from the man’s own daughter. “Your father stopped sleeping with your mother?”
Cynthia nodded. “She was unlikely to have any more babies, so what would be the point?”
Love, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I had already learned that love had very little to do with sex in Purity. The women were brood mares, nothing more. And once a brood mare outlived her usefulness…
At least the men didn’t take their aging wives to the slaughterhouse.
Later that day Saul told me he had another appointment with his attorney in Zion City, and asked if I needed to ride along. I jumped at the chance to return to West Wind Ranch to make some phone calls. I hadn’t talked to Jimmy in over a week, and I was eager to find out what he’d learned about the list of names I’d given him.
When we arrived at West Wind, the ranch was full up with Swedish tourists, but as Virginia chatted with a man who looked like a professional skier, she motioned me to the office. First I phoned the ranch where Dusty worked, but after much hemming and hawing, Slim Papadopolous told me Dusty had phoned from Las Vegas and asked for another week off.
“He’s not alone, is he?” I asked Slim, already knowing the answer.
“I’m sorry, Lena.”
Well, this wouldn’t be the first time Dusty had disappointed me. Not that either of us had taken any vows of faithfulness or anything old-fashioned like that, but a girl can still hope, can’t she?
I forced a laugh. “It’s no big deal, Slim. Dusty and I have an understanding not to have an understanding.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
I replaced the receiver as gently as possible, surprised at the steadiness of my hand. But my old cop attitude stood me in good stead. When you weren’t certain you’d return from your shift alive, a flamed-out relationship was no big deal. That was the theory, anyway. Besides, I didn’t really love Dusty. Never had, never would. Repeating that like a mantra, I called Desert Investigations.
Jimmy’s first words shocked me. “Lena, I want you out of Purity right now.” The fiber optic line allowed me to hear the quaver in his voice.
“I can’t leave until I’ve found Prophet Solomon’s killer, Jimmy. Tell me what you found out.”
As he related the result of his Internet searches, his anxiety to pull me out of the compound began to make sense.
“Some of those guys are convicted felons, Lena. They moved away from Purity when they hit eighteen and tried to make it elsewhere, but most never fit in. I uncovered several child molestation and lewd acts with minors convictions on a number of them, but right now I’m a little more concerned with one guy who might turn into a physical threat to you personally.”
“Who?”
“Earl Graff, one of the witnesses against Rebecca. He left Purity and came down to Phoenix when he was twenty and wound up doing one to five in Perryville Prison for almost killing his first wife when she tried to leave him. When the next wife dumped him, too, he repeated his pattern and went to visit the Perryville boys again. That’s when he saw the light and went back to Purity, where the women have to put up with that kind of stuff. He’s dangerous, Lena. Really dangerous.”
I waved it away. Graff’s violent past didn’t surprise me in the least. “What else do you have?”
“Oh, I’m just getting started. Have you run into some guy named Noah Heaton yet? His name came up in connection with Graff a couple of times, so I checked him out, too.”
“I’ve met him. I can’t say that he impressed me much.”
“Prepare to be impressed. Up until five years ago, the compound’s kids used to be bussed to the public schools in Zion City, which is why I was able to get the info on him that I did. It turns out that Heaton had a bad reputation in school. A very bad reputation.”
“So did I, Jimmy. My teachers didn’t know what to do with me. They called me uncontrollable and tried to get several of my foster parents to give me Ritalin.”
“You’ve told me. But were you ever caught in the science lab dismembering frogs? Before they were dead?”
I winced. “Jesus, nothing like that.” As a child, the only creature I’d ever hurt was myself.
He continued. “Heaton came to the attention of school officials several times, actually. He was always getting into fights and for a while wasn’t allowed to even sit on the same side of the room with the girls. He was eventually expelled when the class’s pet hamster turned up dismembered and one of its feet was discovered in his desk. After that, Heaton’s mother had to homeschool him because no other school up there would take him on. About a year later, the compound withdrew all its kids from the public school system—afraid they’d get tainted by modern ideas, I guess—and Noah never came to the attention of the authorities again. I doubt if his animal-torturing career ended there.”
I digested this. “How did you find out? Noah was a minor then, and even if he was in public school, his records should have been sealed.”
“Not if your mother knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who taught at the school.”
I found the information about Noah Heaton more disturbing than that about Earl Graff’s imprisonment for battering. Graff was a thug, to be sure, but he was an obvious thug. But Noah? Even given the dog-shooting incident I’d been told about, I had considered him more whiney than vicious. More fool me. Anyone in law enforcement knew that serial killers began their careers by torturing animals, eventually moving to human prey unless they received intensive psychiatric treatment. Somehow I doubted that the good people of Purity had driven Noah into Zion City on a regular basis to have his head shrunk by an expert. These people were more interested in hiding problems than they were fixing them.
Struck by the futility of the situation, all I could say was, “What a mess.”
“You’re telling me. But there’s more, much more. Prophet Solomon, for instance, certainly wasn’t without his sins. He’s not on record for dismembering hamsters or beating women, but he was one of those convicted child molesters I was telling you about. Back in the late Fifties, after he’d left the compound for a while, he did two years in Idaho for indecent acts with a minor. Even worse, I checked it out and apparently the case was pled down from statutory rape. He was twenty-five, the little girl was eight.”
I felt a sharp pain in my palm. When I looked down, I saw that I’d clenched my fist so hard the nails had dug into it. Four crescent-shaped cuts sprouted tiny drops of blood.
“He also has a fraud conviction to his credit.”
“A fraud conviction?” Not in the same league as child rape, but still…
“Yeah, seems that after he got out of prison he took off for Oregon, where he defrauded a group of Portland businessmen out of something close to six million dollars in a fictitious land development deal. He served four years in a federal country club, paid some of the money back, then vanished for awhile. Next time we hear from him he’s back in Purity as God’s very own prophet. Oh, and by that time, he’d already accrued five wives of record, one at a time, all legal.”
“You think any of the people in Purity know about his adventures outside the compound?”
“Hard to tell, and even harder to tell if they’d mind if they did. They don’t play by the same rules the rest of us do.”
A thought struck me. “Did you get the names of the businessmen he defrauded? He only paid back some of the money, right?”
“Yes on both counts.” He reeled off several names and I wrote them down. Warming to his theme, he continued, “Royal’s victims recovered about two million and change, but the other four mill never turned up. It’s my guess some of that money wound up in offshore accounts.”
Who had the money now? Davis Royal? Or somebody else? “A lot of people would kill their grandmothers for four million dollars,” I mused.
“Grandmothers? Try their mothers. And pet dog.”
“Jimmy, you’re starting to sound as cynical as me,” I laughed.
“Maybe that’s because I’m beginning to realize the number of crimes hidden in Purity. I hate to say it, even our client’s own family may have blood on its hands. Jacob Waldman, Esther’s father? My sources tell me it’s rumored that one of his daughters went missing after she refused to marry his buddy Solomon.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean, went missing?”
“Exactly what I said. One day Jacob had a teenage daughter, the next day he didn’t. No one knows what happened to her.”
“Maybe she just ran off.”
“Doubtful. She’d just turned thirteen.”
I remembered Waldman’s venomous display at the community meeting and his insistence on blood atonement. There was no telling how much of his raving was due to the dementia of Alzheimer’s and how much to fact, but I made a mental note to watch the old man more carefully.
“Another thing, Lena.”
“Yes?”
“That guy you’re staying with, Saul Berkhauser? Well, about twenty years ago his business partner Micah Browning was found murdered up in Salt Lake. The case was never solved, but there were some pretty nasty things being said there for a
while about Mr. Berkhauser.”
I groaned. “Why didn’t your mother know about all this?”
“I thought of that, too, so I called and asked her. Apparently, when it all went down, she was over in Bangkok with Dad trying to facilitate some adoptions. She said to tell you she’s sorry she let you down, and that she feels awful for putting you into this kind of position.”
I waved the problem away, then remembered he couldn’t see me over the phone. “Tell her I’m a big girl and can take care of myself. But you said there were rumors about Saul. What kind of rumors?”
“Saul’s wife Karen was fooling around with Micah Browning. I ran a search on her and found out that just before the guy turned up dead, she moved in with him and took out an order of protection against Saul.”
It was hard to square the man who smuggled good books to knowledge-desperate girls with a man whose behavior merited an order of protection. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. The copy of the complaint I was able to get my hands on states that Saul threatened to kill both her and Browning. When Browning was murdered, shot in the head, by the way, Saul became the number one suspect for a while. The case was eventually dropped for lack of evidence, and Saul’s wife went back to him.”
“If Saul’s wife went back to him it probably means she didn’t seriously think he murdered Browning. Maybe she decided she was just overreacting.”
“That, coming from you? Come on, Lena. You of all people should know that women can be battered half to death and still go back to their abusers. Have you forgotten the Clarice Kobe case already? But whatever was going on in Karen Berkhauser’s mind, whatever she suspected, it became irrelevant pretty soon. She was dead within the year.”
My stomach started doing the herkey-jerkey. “What did she die from?”
“Death certificate says heart attack. At home. Saul was the only one there when it happened.”
People die from heart attacks all the time, nothing suspicious in that. What made me uncomfortable, though, was that many different modes of death—not all of them natural—could mimic a heart attack. Poisoning, for instance. Smothering.