Desert Wives (9781615952267) (9 page)

“Yeah, first session.” I returned to my walk, leaving him with his goats. The warming day made me long for Paiute Canyon's deep shade. Purity's flat terrain, bordered by the glaring Vermillion Cliffs, served as little more than a heat sink for the sun's rays, and by the time I wandered back to the central dirt circle, sweat stained the underarms of my long-sleeved dress.

Apparently the day wasn't too hot for the few tow-headed toddlers who began filtering from their hotel-sized homes to play with the battered toys littering the grounds.

Threading my way through them, I noticed that the least rundown houses were situated on the Utah side of the border, the poorest houses in Arizona. Also in Utah stood the large schoolhouse and next to it, a two-story, warehouse-sized building whose wooden sign bragged “Purity Health Clinic.” Fifty miles was too far to drive when a child needed immediate care, so this made sense. Still, what kind of medical care could the clinic really offer? I doubted the compound had its own doctor.

While I stared at the clinic, which was really no more elegant than the usual Purity Garbage Dump Modern, a man exited and walked briskly toward a gabled house that peeked through a stand of cottonwood and mesquite on the edge of the canyon. What I could see of the house looked almost elegant, but then so did the man. In his prime, the man stood well over six feet tall and had the broad shoulders of a movie idol. His pale blond hair, glossy as corn silk, revealed the same Nordic ancestors as the Valkyrie's, as did his eyes, which were the color of sky-reflecting fjords. His blue eyes perfectly matched his bright, high-neck shirt, making me suspect there might be a touch of vanity there. If so, he came by it honestly, because I'd never seen such a good-looking man, and I'd seen plenty in my time.

“That's Prophet Davis,” a girl's voice said. “Handsome, isn't he?”

I turned to see a girl of around fifteen, her own considerable looks undiminished by her red-rimmed eyes and stained apron. Like other teenaged girls who'd drifted into Prophet's Park, she held a struggling toddler by the hand.

“He's a hunk!” I blurted, then slapped my hand over my mouth. Busted again.

The girl just smiled. “We're not supposed to notice a man's appearance. The body is just the physical casing for the soul. That's what the Gospel According to Solomon says, anyway. But the girls still stare.” As she bent to pick up the toddler, a book fell out of her apron.

Since her arms were full of wriggling two-year-old, I reached down and retrieved it. A new paperback copy of E. L. Doctorow's
Ragtime
.

“You're studying this in school?” I asked, surprised. Wait a minute. She wasn't
in
school. Neither were any of the other teenagers in the park. Then I remembered Saul telling me the compound's girls weren't expected to attend school after the age of fourteen because they were needed as babysitters or wives. Sometimes they received their G.E.D., but usually not.

She grabbed the book and stuffed it back into her apron pocket. “Please don't tell anyone you saw this, okay? Brother Saul picks these up when he's in town, but we have to keep it a secret. Mom would have a fit if she knew I read such nasty books.”

Nasty books?
Doctorow?
Well, of course. A community which didn't let its women and children watch television certainly wouldn't allow free access to literature. But I simply said, “Doctorow's not that all that racy.”

Her eyes lit up. “You've actually read Doctorow?”

“Sure. We studied him in my American Lit class. My favorite was
The Book of Daniel
, but I liked
Ragtime
, too, even though the lack of dialogue just about drove me crazy. By the way, I'm Lena…uh, Sister Lena. And you are…?”

Her face, rapt while listening to my discussion of Doctorow, flushed. “Oh, gosh, I'm sorry. I'm Sister Cynthia. Brother Davis is my brother, my blood brother. Half-brother, anyway. We have the same father.”

That explained her red eyes. “Then you're Prophet Solomon's daughter.”

More gunfire, followed by a shout. Some poor bunny rabbit just bought the farm. But this time I was ready for the noise and hardly reacted.

“One of his daughters,” Cynthia said. “I have forty-eight sisters and fifty-four brothers.”

Somehow I kept my eyes from popping out of my head. The dead Prophet had been a randy old sod, but judging from the three offspring I'd seen, he'd either been a good-looking man himself or married the most beautiful women in the compound. Probably the latter, I decided. Like rock stars, prophets attracted the prettiest groupies.

“I'm very sorry about your father.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“I met your other brother a few minutes ago, and he's taking it pretty rough.” Then I remembered her dozens of brothers. “I'm talking about Meade.”

Her eyes looked away from mine, and she plucked at the plastic buttons on the bodice of her pale pink granny dress. “We have different mothers. Meade was close to Father Prophet, closer than I was, 'cause I'm just a girl.”

Just a girl
. Just a girl who had E. L. Doctorow smuggled into a polygamy compound. I wondered how many other bright young women were leading lives of quiet desperation. But there was nothing I could do about that now.

“Ah, I heard that your father was found in the canyon,” I said. “Do you think it was a hunting accident?”

She murmured a few words to the toddler, then set him down. “They say it was murder, that a woman killed him, but I don't know. He liked to hunt for rabbits and stuff, so when he didn't come home for dinner, most of us thought that was what he was doing. But the men say he'd already started back home when that woman, when she…”

“When she killed him?” I finished for her. “But why…”

Before I could finish, a nearby child screamed and we both turned around. A little girl had tripped over an abandoned tire and lay struggling in the dirt. Cynthia ran forward and picked her up.

“Hush, sweetie,” she murmured, as she tended to her scraped knee. “I'll kiss it and make it well.”

The girl sobbed into Cynthia's apron for a few minutes, then finally ran off to rejoin her playmates, giving the tire she'd tripped over a wide berth.

“You'd think the men would haul this junk away,” I said, gesturing to the tire, the junked cars, the other litter. “It's not safe.”

“You'd think.” For the first time her voice sounded bitter. “Last week one of the little boys slashed his leg on that old car over there.” She pointed to a rusting sedan which looked ancient enough to have been driven by Henry Ford himself. “I carried him over to the clinic and it took fifteen stitches to close the wound.”

“The clinic has a doctor?”

“No, but Sister Lovey and Sister Judith can both sew up cuts. They're teaching me, too. I'd really like to be a doctor, but only boys get to go to college, and they study law. You know, to help out with Purity's legal stuff. I wish…” Her voice trailed off.

I would have followed up, but my job here was to find out who killed Prophet Solomon, not investigate the level of Purity's medical care. Changing the subject, I said, “I've heard so many wonderful things about the prophet, so why would that woman want to kill such a great man?”

Her pretty face, which had momentarily lightened as she tended to the child, darkened again. “From what I heard, he wanted to marry Esther's daughter. Esther's the woman they think killed him. Anyway, she didn't want that. She'd moved to Phoenix and they say she grew away from the church.”

I played dumb. “If Esther didn't live here, why was her daughter here?”

“Abel, Esther's husband, returned to the church. Leaving Purity, coming back, it's not that unusual for the young men. They have trouble finding wives, so they try other places. Father Prophet did the same thing when he was younger, but he came back, too. His parents called him the Prodigal Son, just like in the Bible.”

I tried to hurry her along. “If Abel returned, why didn't his wife come back, too?”

“She divorced him. She'd been infected by the Outside. That made him pretty mad so he drove to Scottsdale, that's somewhere near Phoenix, and got his daughter.”

“You mean he kidnapped her?”

She blinked at my question. “Oh, no! You can't kidnap your own child.”

I could have disabused her of that idea, but decided instead to take the conversation as far as possible. Unlike most teenagers I'd known back in Scottsdale, she was amazingly pliable. A sign of innocence? Or had she been taught to respect her elders no matter what goofy things they said or did?

“You know, Cynthia, I think I remember reading something about this in the papers! That girl your father wanted to marry, wasn't she only thirteen?”

She looked at the Vermillion Cliffs, so red this morning they appeared to be on fire. “When a girl is old enough to have babies, she's supposed to get married. I'll have to get married soon, too. My mother's been nagging me about it for a long time now.”

So no medical school. “How old are you?”

“I'll be sixteen in a couple of months. That's pretty late to get married around here.”

“Sure seems young to me.”

When she faced me, her face was as troubled as her voice. “Solomon's Gospel says women must be fruitful if they want to attain Highest Heaven.” But she didn't sound convinced. Maybe she'd discovered other interpretations of life's purpose in all those nasty Doctorow novels.

“Sister Cynthia, don't you think…”

A woman screamed. Both Cynthia and I looked toward the mesquite grove where the sound seemed to have originated.

The woman screamed again. Then a man shouted, “It's Prophet Davis! He's been shot!”

After a quick glance toward the toddlers, who had already fled for the safety of closer girls, Cynthia, as pale as her apron, picked up her skirts and ran toward the canyon. I followed, soon passing her, even though my hip had stiffened through lack of exercise. When we reached the mesquite grove, we found a crowd gathered around an irate Prophet Davis, who, as it turned out, was fine. But his bright blue shirt hadn't been so lucky.

“This is inexcusable!” he snapped, fingering a bullet hole in his shirt sleeve. “I could have been killed! Who's responsible for this?”

No one came forward to admit culpability.

“Come on, out with it! Which one of you was stupid enough to shoot
up
from the canyon, rather than along it?”

The women stopped their twittering, the men their grumbling. Some, relieved that no blood had spilled, drifted away. I heard one hunter say to his companion, “Well, you gotta expect a bullet hole or two when you build your house so close to the brush. He's the stupid one, if you ask me.”

One of the women, yet another pretty blond, pulled at him. “Let me get you inside, make sure you're okay.”

He brushed her hand away, though not unkindly. “I'm fine, Sissy, but I'd better change my shirt. No point in showing up at the meeting looking like something left over from target practice.”

Giving one last furious glance at the remaining crowd, he called out, “If I catch whoever did this, I'll make sure his gun privileges are revoked for a month!”

Cynthia shook her head. “He's fine, so let's get back to the park. I've already been away from those kids too long. Who knows what they've managed to do to themselves by now.”

When we arrived back at Prophet's Park, the other teenagers, less curious about Prophet Davis's narrow escape, had taken up the slack. None of the children had sustained any more bumps or cuts.

“Seems to me you should be able to build your house anywhere you want without getting shot at,” I said, as Cynthia picked up another toddler.

“You'd sure think so, but this has happened before,” she answered, her face still pale.

“Are you talking about your father?”

She shook her head. “No, Brother Davis. Somebody just missed him the other day, too.”

I stared at her. “You're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding. You know what I think?” Her eyes looked scared, and she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think somebody's trying to kill him.”

When I returned to Saul's, I found him sitting in the green recliner, hunched turtle-like into his shirt, tape recorder in hand. Someone, guess who, banged pots and pans in the kitchen.

“Ruby want to know why you went out for a walk instead of making the beds,” Saul said. He wouldn't meet my eyes.

“I'm supposed to make beds?”

“She wanted you to do the dishes, too. She even reminded me that one of the benefits of having sister wives was getting help with the housework.”

I looked around. The house appeared perfectly clean to me, and I said so.

He flicked a quick, guilty look at me. “Beds aren't made, floors aren't swept, toilets aren't scrubbed…”

I held up my hand. “Somebody just tried to shoot Prophet Davis.”

The tape recorder fell to the floor.
“Again?”

I nodded. “Again. What the hell's going on around here? Why didn't you tell me somebody's trying to take out
all
the prophets?”

Saul leaned over and picked up the recorder. He turned it on for a second, testing it, and I heard someone talking about life onboard ship in the Persian Gulf. Satisfied, he turned it off.

“I never connected Solomon's death with what happened to Davis, but maybe you're right. Both men are, were, whatever, prophets of Purity. Hell and blazes.”

“Please tell me someone's talked to the authorities about this?”

Saul gave a short, hard laugh. “You're kidding, right? Lena, if there hadn't been some poor woman handy to pin Prophet Solomon's death on, nobody would have cooperated with the authorities over that, either. They settle their own scores around here in their own way. They only drag in the cops if there's an Outsider around to take the blame.”