Desert Lost (9781615952229) (14 page)

She gave me an incredulous look. “Why would I do a crazy thing like that? Celeste woulda gone and tattled to Brother Ezra faster than you could say spit.”

That didn't sound like the compassionate woman Rosella had described. “It's odd you would say that, because I was told that her sister-wives were always confiding to her.”

“Where did you hear that? Look, Miss, maybe a long time ago, when Sister Celeste was still Prophet Shupe's wife, you could tell her stuff, but that ain't been true for years. After the Prophet reassigned her to Ezra, she changed. She looked out only for herself. She didn't say much to anybody and nobody said much to her, because what little they did say got carried straight back to him.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She was luckier than me and gave birth mainly to girls, but she's still got a fourteen-year-old son up there in Second Zion. She didn't want him dumped like her precious Jonah, so I'm guessin' she thought that if she made Brother Ezra happy, he'd ask the Prophet to keep the boy on once he turned eighteen, maybe even give him a couple of wives. That way she wouldn't lose him like I lost all my boys.” With that, the floodgates opened again and her voice rose. “Oh, Miss, you gotta help Clayton, he's…”

A light snapped on in the house. I heard a man's angry voice.

Darnelle cast a frightened glace behind her. “I gotta go back. I'll…I'll tell him I was crying so loud I didn't want to wake him up.” Her voice turned bitter. “And it'll be the truth. You wake up any man, you get real sorry real fast.”

With that, she walked away from the fence.

“Did you catch all that?” I asked Jimmy, after I reached the storage unit.

He motioned to the monitor. “It's not over yet.”

I leaned over to look. A tall man, half-undressed, had exited the house and was walking toward Darnelle. He had to be at least six-foot-six, and even through the night's shadows I could see his jutting brow and prognathous jaw: Prophet Hiram Shupe, AKA The Living Presence of God on Earth.

Darnelle bowed before him. “I'm sorry, Prophet. I…I was just…”

The Living Presence of God on Earth backhanded her across the face. “How dare you leave my bed before I'm done with you.” With that, he dragged the weeping woman into the house.

As Jimmy took his earphones off, the monitor's glow revealed that his dark face had turned even darker with anger. “And they call this a free country.”

I said nothing.

I didn't need to.

***

True to my promise, the rising sun found me in Jimmy's pickup truck, idling a hundred yards down the street from Ten Spot Construction. A little before eight, the van carrying the work crew left. I let it turn the corner before following. They didn't travel far, just a mere ten minutes' drive north to Indian Bend Wash, where the City of Scottsdale was dredging a large lake. As the van pulled into the parking lot at the southernmost edge of the lake, several blue herons flapped away in annoyance. But some wildlife welcomed their arrival. When the noisy work crew piled out of the van, a flock of Canadian geese taking a breakfast break from their migratory route, waddled over for a handout. They had no luck, so with empty beaks, the geese flew off in the same direction as the other birds.

The park was the perfect setting for a pickup. Dense vegetation, from Aleppo pines to olive trees and thickets of pampas grass furnished cover for whatever I needed to do to catch Clayton's attention. The work area around the lake was also shielded with the opaque, six-foot-high plastic sheeting required by Scottsdale City Ordinance to keep construction dust down. No one working the lake bed itself would be able to see beyond the barrier. Even better, four portable toilets sat partially hidden behind a clump of pampas grass. Boys have to tinkle and I doubted if they'd be escorted to the toilets.

The last boy finally clambered out of the van. In contrast to everyone else, his hair was dark—almost as dark as Darnelle's. He looked nervously around until he spotted Jimmy's pickup. He was less than a hundred yards from me, midway between the porta-potties and the truck.

Couldn't be better.

As the other boys trudged off after their leader, a brawny middle-aged man, I stepped out of the truck so Clayton could see my red wig. Then I motioned toward the porta-potties. He took a step toward them, but Brawny, who hadn't yet seen me, called out harshly. “Hold it, Clayton! We gotta report in first!”

I jumped back into the pickup before Brawny could see me.

“But I…” I heard the boy begin.

Brawny didn't let him finish. “Don't. Argue. With. Me.”

“Sorry, Brother Steven.”

A harsh grumble from Brawny warned against the public usage of “Brother,” their standard form of address. Then I heard footsteps disappearing across the parking lot toward the lake.

I waited for a few more minutes, then raised my head again. No Clayton. He was probably signing in at the work site; hopefully, he was also reminding Brawny of his I-gotta-go condition. In order to facilitate a quick getaway, I started the ignition and turned the truck around to face the parking lot's exit, all the while keeping an eye on the fence's opening. In anticipation, I opened the passenger side door.

The wait wasn't long. Less than five minutes later Clayton exited the fenced area and trotted toward the porta-potties while Brawny watched from the gate. Once Clayton was almost to the porta-potties, he veered sharply toward the truck and sped up.

I kicked the passenger door open.

Clayton dashed across the parking lot with Brawny following. Putting on a burst of speed surprising in so slight a boy, Clayton closed the distance between us and jumped in the truck, locking the door behind him. But Brawny had shortened his lead, and was now so near that I could hear his labored breaths.

“Buckle up!” I yelled to Clayton, peeling rubber out of the lot with the door wide open.

“Yes, ma'am!” As he followed my instructions, I hooked a sharp left up Seventy-Seventh, then another sharp left around the northern end of the lake. Once out of the park and onto Thomas Road, I drove just over the speed limit—thankfully the lights were with me—until I reached the Pima Freeway, a mile east. Only when I'd merged onto the so-called high speed lane with rush-hour traffic did I chance a look in the rearview mirror to see if Brawny followed us in the work van. He hadn't, perhaps because then he'd have to leave the other boys alone without supervision, and God only knew what they'd tell the City of Scottsdale foreman about their illegal employment situation.

Attempting to relax the ashen-faced boy, I said, “Wasn't that fun?”

“I g…guess.” His teeth were chattering.

“Are you okay?” This was the first time I'd taken a close look at him, and could now see clearly why his mother had been so concerned on his behalf. Clayton was at least an inch shorter than my five-eight, possibly more, and his pinched features hinted at a less-than-sturdy metabolism.

Still, he attempted to look brave. “Can't you go faster?”

“Not in this traffic.” We were completely boxed in, not that I cared. The semis to my rear and right perfectly hid the Toyota from the view of anyone who might be following us. As long as I didn't make any stupid moves, we'd encounter no trouble with DPS, either.

Clayton didn't say anything else for the next few minutes, then, as I began cursing at a tail-gating Nissan, he asked, “Will I ever see my mother again?”

“As soon as she leaves the compound.” A bit of a hedge, there. Once Darnelle had been driven to the isolated compound at Second Zion and assigned to a new “husband,” her escape would prove much more difficult than Clayton's. Rosella being on the run would ratchet up the problem even further, with the anti-polygamists version of the Underground Railroad now minus one volunteer.

The desolate look in Clayton's eyes, as large and dark as his mother's, revealed that although he was relatively uneducated he wasn't dumb. “That'll probably be never. And Prophet Shupe doesn't let outcasts visit their families.”

Outcasts
. So that's what the lost boys and runaways were being called these days.

While we drove up the Pima Freeway toward the safe house I'd called the night before, Clayton loosened up enough to tell me about his two older brothers, twins Meshach and Laban, whom he hadn't seen in more than a year. When they'd reached eighteen, they'd been driven away from Second Zion and dumped in Phoenix, probably in the same run-down neighborhood where Jonah had been found. Clayton told me how hard his mother had cried over them, how he'd tried to be brave for her, assuring her she'd see them again in Heaven. From his wavery voice, I suspected he still cried over them, too.

“If I can't see Mother again, maybe I can find my brothers, like after I get settled. I've got it all figured out. I'll get me a good job, one where I don't have to carry so many heavy things. I can do math, too.” His narrow chest swelled a bit with pride. “I can add and subtract and I know my multipliers all the way up to twelve. Mother used to drill me on them when nobody was paying attention. I can read good, too, so I'll be able to earn enough money to find my brothers, like she wants me to. When I find them, maybe we'll all go get her. If Prophet Shupe tries to stop us, we'll…” He trailed off, unclear as to what this small band of brothers would do then. His eyes blinked back tears, belying his courageous words.

“Sounds like a plan,” I told him, heartsick over his naiveté. Maybe he was almost eighteen, but as far as his physical and intellectual level went, he was little more than a child, a woefully unsophisticated child, at that. “Don't worry, Clayton. There's a chance you can find them. And see your mother again. If you want…” I paused, well aware of the problems I might be letting myself in for. But what the hell. In for a penny, in for a pound. “If you want, I'll help.”

“Really?”

“When you're ready, just let me know.” I pulled a Desert Investigations card out of my vest pocket.

“What's this?” He didn't appear to know what a business card was. “My office phone number. All you have to do is call it. There's plenty of pay phones still around, mainly in front of Circle K's.” Did he know what those were?

“The stores. Yeah, I've seen those.” He glanced at the card again, then put it in his shirt pocket with the gentle care of a child protecting a valued baseball card. “What time of day can I call you?”

“Any time. If I don't answer, voice mail will…” Damn. He wouldn't know about voice mail, either. When I explained the function to him, his dark eyes grew wide with wonder.

“I got a lot to learn, don't I, Miss?”

For starters, the everyday aspects of twenty-first century life. But I gave him an encouraging smile. “You're smart. You'll get it down.”

He fell silent until we'd exited the freeway and entered a residential area. As I pulled into the driveway of the large but anonymous-looking residence that served as a halfway house for lost boys, he touched me softly on the shoulder.

“Miss Jones, you don't even know me, so why you helping Mother and me like this?”

I had to swallow the lump in my throat before I could answer. “Because everyone deserves a chance at a decent life.”

Even outcasts and discards.

Chapter Eighteen

“Thank God you're all right,” Madeline said as I walked through the door to Desert Investigations. She and Jimmy were perusing a newspaper, and although neatly dressed in her more business-like uniform of pants suit and rabbit necklace, she'd either flubbed her eye makeup or wasn't wearing any. Her eyes looked swollen.

“Why wouldn't I be?” I hung up my heavy vest and lowered myself into a chair. “I just picked up Clayton and took him over to the safe house, no biggie.” No point in telling her about Mr. Brawny and the outside chance he might have followed me. He didn't, so that was that. “Wait a minute. Have you been
crying
?”

Sniff. “You're pretty casual about risking your life.”

“It's my job.”

Madeline looked at Jimmy, who merely shrugged. “Forget it, Maddy. You can't tell her anything.”

Maddy?
I had never seen Jimmy take to anyone so quickly.

Before I could crack wise about the new nickname, Madeline thrust the newspaper toward me; it was open to the real estate section. “Changing the subject to something less worrying, did you know that houses in Arizona cost about one-half of what they do in New York?”

“Only for now. This downturn in our economy…” Then her comment sank in. “Wait a minute. Don't tell me you're thinking about moving here.”

She tried for a smile. “Would you mind? I might turn out to be a terrible pest, always dropping by to borrow turpentine.”

My face almost split from the wide grin it rearranged itself into. “When's the soonest you can move? Next week? Next month? Hell, I'll help! I'll fly back with you right now and help you pack, I'll…”

She held up her hand to stem my babbling. “I'm still at the thinking stage. There are a lot of loose ends I'd have to tie up, such as selling my house. Otherwise, I couldn't buy a dog house in a trailer park.”

Then I remembered her family ties. “But your sister lives back there. You'd be willing to leave her?”

“Stella and her husband are moving to Sun City this fall. They want me to buy something near them.”

“You? Living in a senior community that's enacted more rules and regulations than the U.S. Congress?” I had to laugh at the thought.

So did she. When we'd both settled down, she said, “Nah, those folks would ride me and my smelly turpentine rags out of town on a rail. Actually, I'm looking at the area outside Apache Junction. Jimmy says development begins to peter out beyond Gold Canyon Ranch, so I might be able to pick up some old handyman's special southeast of there, maybe with a large enough lot that I could build a separate studio. Before Brian got sick, he taught me some basic carpentry skills.”

With Jimmy providing a sounding board, we talked property values and sweat equity for about an hour, while comparison shopping through the newspaper. By the time Madeline left for her gallery appointment, I was so excited I had to take a few breaths to collect myself. Little by little, it seemed I was accumulating a family—however unorthodox—and this realization led swiftly to another: I'd been lonely for a long, long time.

My relationship with Warren hadn't done anything to fix that, either. It wasn't his fault—God knows the man had tried—but like Madeline had reminded me earlier, foster children like myself often grew up with relationship issues.

Maybe foster children who
didn't
have relationship trouble were the exceptions. When you spent your childhood being transferred from one family to the next, you learned to wall off your heart. Attachment was the enemy when love and pain too-frequently marched hand in hand. I'd been funneled through, what, ten foster homes? Eleven? Twelve? I couldn't remember much about the first few, just a blur of welcoming faces that over time grew less welcoming. Yes, the bullet that had almost killed me had rendered me a problem child, and yes, those early foster mothers and fathers had tried their best to help, but until Madeline came along, every attempt failed. Which begged another question: why had I felt so safe with Madeline?

Again, easy answer.

Like most artists, Madeline was a societal outlaw, a person didn't follow the rules in either her work or her attitudes. Tell her to do something, she'd do the opposite. Tell her what to think and she'd laugh in your face. Even at the tender age of seven, I'd been able to recognize her as a kindred spirit, one untamed soul recognizing another.

Jimmy's voice brought me back to the present. “It's nice to see you happy for a change.”

“I'm always happy.”

“And I'm Eric the Red.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You've never been able to fool me.”

Discomfited, I fussed around my desk looking for something to do. The phone rescued me.

“Lena, Nevitt's in the hospital! He's been there since last Friday, but we just found out early this morning.” Angel. Calling about her stalker.

This was turning out to be a very, very good day. “Now that he's back in state custody, your troubles are over.” Or at least until some idiot psychiatrist declared him well enough for release and he started his whole stalking routine all over again.

“You don't understand. He's unconscious and has been for days. Somebody beat the hell out of him, gave him a fractured skull and three broken ribs, plus a split lip and a broken nose. He lost a few teeth, too.”

I winced. As problematic as Nevitt was, he didn't deserve that kind of treatment. “What happened?”

Her words held an undercurrent of panic. “Some skaters found him in Arroyo Seco Park Friday morning and called 9-1-1. He'd been lying there overnight and he'd lost some blood, but not enough to kill him. Anyway, he didn't have any I.D., which is why it took so long to notify me. But here's the thing. I got another one of those letters this morning!”

“Calm down, Angel. If you received another letter this morning, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. There's a reason it's called snail mail.”

“I'm calm enough to know that even the U.S. Post Office isn't that slow. Don't you get it? The letter was postmarked in
Beverly Hills
late Friday afternoon, when Nevitt was already in the hospital. Sure, it took a ridiculously long time to get to my house—it might as well have been glued to a snail—but just because there was a screw-up at the post office doesn't change the fact that Nevitt couldn't have sent it.”

If she was right, whoever had sent that letter had goofed big time. I offered one more possible explanation. “Maybe you've picked up another stalker.”

“What a cheery thought. All the Nevitt-isms are there, the recent ones, anyway. Crappy spelling. A drawing of a hanged puppy. And a bonus present of a dead butterfly.”

I wasn't yet ready to buy it. Perhaps the letter had slid behind something and not been postmarked until a day
after
it had been dropped in the mail box. If there had been a screw-up on the delivery, then why not in the sorting bins, also? Because, my suspicious nature told me, two mistakes with the same letter were unlikely.

“Read the letter to me,” I told Angel.

Despite her fears, she read in a voice that revealed the disciplined actress. “ ‘Angel, since you don't listen I guess I'll have to send you stronger message. Look for a ticking package in the next few days. Better hope your little girls aren't home cause it's going to get real messy.' ”

“Either he's accelerating or someone wants you to think he's accelerating.”

“Exactly.”

I made up my mind. “Get out of the house. Check into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel or some other security-conscious place, and don't tell anyone—I repeat
anyone
—where you're going. Not even Warren, do you understand? Call me as soon as you check in because I'm heading for the airport right now.”

At her agreement, I slammed down the phone, and with a hurried explanation to Jimmy, rushed out the door. I didn't even bother to pack, but what the hell. Last time I checked, Beverly Hills had stores.

***

It was raining hard when the plane landed at LAX, so I bought a rain slicker, basic toiletries, and a tee shirt at an airport shop before heading to the Hertz counter. Still, when I arrived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, I looked so ragged that the valet smirked as he took my Ford Focus off my hands.

Angel was holed up in a suite that she immediately began apologizing for. “It's all I could get at such short notice.”

Hollywood stars are different than us. The suite that so distressed her could have housed a Saudi prince and several of his wives. The elegant pearl-gray-on-charcoal living room/dining room combination was accented by two facing, down-filled silk sofas, the better from which to watch the fifty-inch plasma TV above the fireplace. But why bother to even turn the TV on, when from the every bit as elegantly furnished balcony, you could see all the way from Century City to the Hollywood Hills? In the rain, the vista had the blurry green and blue beauty of a Monet.

Fighting back a serious case of view envy—from my apartment over Desert Investigations you could see a Dumpster-filled alley—I sank into the sofa across from Angel. “Where's the Black Monk? Shouldn't he be hovering around somewhere?”

Shaking her golden waterfall of hair, she attempted her million-dollar smile, but her bitten nails gave her away. “He's setting up shop in the small bedroom. This thing with Nevitt, it's all screwed up, isn't it?”

“Sure sounds like it. One other thing. I did some thinking on the flight out here and I have to ask. Has Warren returned the twins yet?”

Her face hardened. “I don't want to talk about that.”

In other words, the twins were still in Arizona and Angel had probably already been alerted that he planned to sue for full custody. Whose side should I be on? My lover's, or my friend's? For now, keeping Angel safe was my first priority. “We need to talk about the twins' situation, but first, did you copy the letter before you turned it over to the cops?”

She picked up a copy of
The Hollywood Reporter
from the coffee table, thumbed it to the centerfold, and drew out a smeary Xerox. I saw the same block printing, the same atrocious spelling as on the last letters.

ANGEEL, SINZE U DON'T LIZZEN, I GESS I'LL HAVE TO SEND U A STRONGER MEZZAGE. LOOK FOR A TIKKING PACKAGE IN THE NEXT FUE DAZ. BETTER HOPE YUR LITLE GIRZ AREN'T HOME CAUZ IT'S GOING TO GET REEL MEZZY.

It was all wrong, I realized. With a sigh, I said, “This didn't come from Nevitt, Angel. Neither did the others.”

“What do you mean?”

We should have figured it out earlier. When Nevitt had begun writing Angel three years earlier, his letters had been poorly spelled; after all, he was dyslexic. But this wasn't the dyslexic spelling of a well-educated—albeit disturbed—young man, with letters and words reversed; it was the spelling of someone who wanted to
look
dyslexic but didn't really understand the condition. Before Nevitt had been hospitalized the first time, one of the tabloids had managed to get hold of one of his more rambling, illustrated letters and subsequently printed it, thus providing a template for a forger. But the forger had gone too far. Even in his wildest dyslexia-isms, Nevitt never wrote this badly, and he certainly never misspelled his beloved's name. And he had never threatened her or her children with harm; he wasn't that kind of stalker.

After explaining this to Angel, I asked, “Who's got it in for you?”

“No one!” She sounded shocked, as well she should. Considered one of the most dependable, least temperamental actresses in the business, she usually left a trail of adoration in her wake, not death threats.

“Everyone makes enemies. That's just the way life is.”

“Not mine.”

Time to address the elephant in the room. “We need to talk about Warren, Angel.”

Her face closed down. “No, I told you. Now leave it alone.”

I ignored her. “He's suing for custody, isn't he? Using Nevitt's so-called threats as the reason.”

“So what if he has? It's no business of yours.”

“Actually, it is.” I felt sick over what I was about to suggest, but for now I was Angel's hired gun, so I put my Judas face on. “Warren misses the twins enough that he's even kept his house out here, so you need to open your mind to the possibility that he might go to other extremes to obtain full custody.”

“Such as faking threatening letters? You're forgetting the fact that every one of them had a Beverly Hills postmark, even those that arrived when he was in Arizona.”

“He could have hired someone to drop them in a mailbox here.”

“What the hell's wrong with you, Lena?”

Plenty, but my shortcomings weren't the issue. “Just think about it. Moving on, Warren was your second husband, right? Or third?”

Heat came out of her eyes. “Third.”

Hooray for Hollywood. “How are your relations with your other exes?”

“We parted as friends. And before you cross-examine me about them, Carl's been in an Idaho rehab facility for two months, and Rudy's filming in South Korea. Neither could have sent me those letters. Or had any reason to.”

“Maybe not, but it won't hurt to check.”

Outside, lightening streaked across the sky, followed by an almost immediate clash of thunder. The blue-white light made Angel's beautiful face appear ghostly. I hoped it wasn't an omen.

“Lena, I told you…”

She was interrupted by the thudding of heavy feet as the Black Monk hurried into the room. With his unshaven cheeks and just-as-stubbly pate, he looked more dangerous than usual. “We're all set up. Hi, Lena.”

I waved a hello, but Angel beamed her gorgeous smile. “Give us a few more minutes alone.”

“But she can't…”

Her face hardened. “Otto. Do as I say.”