Desert Lost (9781615952229) (23 page)

Darnelle's ecstasy at being with her son triggered more memories from my past: my own mother—the biological one—sitting beside me on the white bus, whispering those last words before her gun ended my childhood.

“Oh, my baby, my baby, always remember how much I love you.”

Mothers. Lost children. In a perfect world there would be no such goodbyes.

But we don't live in a perfect world. We live in this one.

I turned away from my past and listened to the words of a different mother. “And then I'll get an apartment, Clayton, and a job. You'll come live with me, and you'll go to college, and someday you'll get married to a girl
you
choose and you'll have children no one can ever take away from you.”

I could hardly stand to hear so much joy, underpinned as it was by a lifetime of farewells. So I stared at the wall and pretended I was back in my small apartment, back where Madeline waited for me and a newer, happier, life was about to unfold. Pretended that I couldn't hear Darnelle's promises.

When the meeting reached the half-hour mark, Bernie cleared his throat and tapped meaningfully at his watch. “Clayton has a big day ahead of him.”

So would everyone involved with Celeste's case, but he didn't need to know that. As gently as possible, I said to Darnelle, “Time to go.”

Some of the joy slipped from her face. “So soon?”

“It's almost two, and growing boys need their sleep.” Now I was talking about Clayton as if he was still a child. In a sense, he was.

Darnelle gave her son one final kiss. “Mama will see you again just as soon as she's set up, all right?” He didn't reply, just gave her a perfunctory peck, and shuffled back to bed. Tears glistened in Darnelle's eyes, but the glow remained.

Bernie's scowl followed us to the door. “Six to eight p.m., those're the standard visiting hours. Anything else, call at least several hours in advance. And
never
in the middle of the night like this again, okay?”

I didn't foresee a repeat of tonight's visit, but I readily agreed. Before he opened the door, I asked as an afterthought, “How's Jonah?”

“In rehab. If you're a praying woman, offer up a couple for him.”

The last time I'd prayed had been a couple of years ago, when I'd been stranded in the desert, near death from heat and dehydration. Perhaps my prayers had helped, since I was still alive. Then again…“I'll give it a try, Bernie.”

He nodded, then locked the door behind us.

The wind had pushed a cloud across the moon, inking the sky. As Darnelle and I walked to the Jeep, the temperature felt like it had dropped several more degrees. My turn to shiver.

“Oh, I'm so happy,” Darnelle said, as we drove down the dark street. “You'll never know how much this all means to me, Miss Jones. I can't thank you enough.”

During her conversation with Clayton, I'd made the required phone call and set things in motion. Before I dropped Darnelle off, I still needed to question her, but since the wind hadn't subsided—it roared past us stronger and louder than ever—I decided to wait until we exited the freeway. What I hadn't counted on was the time.

Bars in Arizona close at two a.m., and as soon as we entered the same freeway that had been nearly empty an hour earlier, the Jeep became sandwiched between three drivers who hadn't received the memo about designated drivers. To my left, a blue Mazda filled with teen girls proved that contrary to popular belief, girls are no more cautious than boys. On the right, a middle-aged man in an aged Buick held a cell phone in one hand, a beer can in the other, and steered with his knees. Ahead of us a Chevy pickup drifted from one lane to another, keeping me from speeding up to leave this gaggle of fools far behind.

Disgusted, I pulled my cell phone out of my vest and alerted DPS while I slowed the Jeep to a barely-legal snail's pace and let the drunks pull ahead.

“Will the police stop them?” Darnelle shouted into the wind.

“Before they kill themselves, I hope,” I shouted back. “You still cold?”

She shook her head, but pulled the flannel jacket tighter.

The rest of drive was uneventful. When we took the off ramp onto Indian School Road, the wind quieted enough for me to ask my questions. “When we talked last time you were unhappy, but you didn't say anything about wanting to leave the compound for good. What changed?”

Darnelle didn't answer, just stared out at the buildings we were passing. Due to the hour most of the condominiums were dark, but a few lights remained on in a large apartment complex popular with the under-thirty crowd. Strains of music drifted to us through the thin night air. Rehashed Dylan or Nickleback? The sound was so distorted I couldn't tell.

“Darnelle, what changed?” I repeated.

She wiped at her eyes. Tears, or the wind? “At dinner tonight, Ezra told me that Prophet Shupe's reassigned me to a man up in Second Zion, and that he was sending a van down tomorrow to pick me up.”

This explained some of her urgency, but not all. “At least at Second Zion you'd be able to see your other children.”

The sound she made could have been either a laugh or a sob. “After Clayton ran off, Prophet Shupe decided to punish me for not keeping him in line, so he had them all reassigned to that compound in Canada. I'm not even sure exactly where it is, just up in the mountains somewhere, so I'll never see them again, anyway.” She uttered another half-laugh-half-sob, and added, “My new husband is Brother Gorman. The flames of Hell would be more merciful.”

“Gorman Green?” I hoped there was another polygamist Gorman, not the one Rosella had once told me about.

“Yeah, him.”

Green, an eighth-generation polygamist, was a man so given to violence against his twenty-two wives that even Ezra seemed gentle in comparison. Darnelle was right. She was definitely being punished, and yes, Hell would be easier to bear. The loss of her children, her reassignment to an even more vicious man, they all explained her sudden desperation. I felt for her—what woman wouldn't?—but if I wanted my curiosity satisfied, now was the time.

“Did Ezra know Celeste was pregnant?” I asked.

As Darnelle stared at the condos slipping by, her face grew puzzled. “I don't think so. If he had, he'd of killed her.” Realizing what she'd just said, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I didn't mean that!”

The effects of compound brain-washing ran deep. With all the reasons Darnelle had to hate Ezra, she still felt it necessary to protect him. “How about Opal? You told me she slapped Celeste when she said she was craving potato chips, so she must have known about the pregnancy.”

“Of course she did. One morning Opal caught her throwing up in the bathroom, and there was a big scene. I was walking past on my way to the kitchen and heard everything.”

A woman could hide pregnancy from a man for a while but not from another woman, especially when that woman was as alert as Opal. “What did she plan to do about it?”

“Tell Ezra, I guess. She'd have to.”

Hiram Shupe had reassigned Darnelle to Gorman Green because she hadn't controlled her soon-to-be-throwaway son, a boy no longer necessary to the compound's financial well-being. Although Ezra took care of the compound's business interests, it was Opal's job to keep the compound's women in line, and Celeste's pregnancy would have been proof that she'd failed at her job. What fresh hell would Hiram and Ezra Shupe have dreamed up for Opal then? Would she, too, be reassigned to Brother Gorman? Or just shot in the head and buried in the desert?

“Had Opal told Ezra about the pregnancy yet?”

Darnelle started to shake her head, then, with fresh excitement on her face, said, “Maybe she killed Celeste so she wouldn't have to tell him! Oh, Miss Jones, that's it!”

As we approached the notoriously accident-prone raised intersection at Indian School and Hayden roads, I eased off on the Jeep's accelerator. Running under the intersection was the southern end of Indian Bend Wash, Scottsdale's miles-long green belt, where egrets, blue herons, coyotes, and other wildlife served as witnesses to car-crumpling wrecks. I slowed even more as I considered my passenger's words. Her proposed solution to the murder may have sounded reasonable, but I knew it wasn't true.

I turned to her and said, “Opal didn't kill Celeste. You did.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

The streetlights illuminated Darnelle's shocked face. “What do you mean,
I killed Celeste
?”

I'd already switched on the tape recorder I'd stashed in a vest pocket. But before I could coax Darnelle to say anything else, two cars—a burgundy Infiniti wobbling through a left turn and a blue Geo speeding from the opposite direction—slammed into each other in the middle of the intersection. To avoid the tangled mess, I hit the brakes and held my breath as the Jeep slid across the asphalt, stopping mere inches from the Infiniti's rear bumper. The drivers climbed out of their cars and began cursing drunkenly at each other. Within seconds, their curses evolved into a fist fight.

As I pulled out my cell phone, Darnelle took advantage of the confusion by bailing from the Jeep. Blue dress whipping in the wind, she fled past the brawling drivers and onto the winding path that descended into Indian Bend Wash below. Within seconds, she had vanished into the darkness.

I couldn't leave the Jeep to block the only clear spot in the intersection. Nerves twitching from frustration, I pulled around the crumpled cars and to the curb, stopping under the NO PARKING sign. Although my feet itched to follow Darnelle, my police training made me do the right thing: alert the authorities. But before I finished dialing 9-1-1, another car swerved around the wreck and came to a stop several feet from me. His own cell was already in his hand and, over the still-brawling drivers, I heard him report the incident.

I repocketed my cell and sprang from the Jeep. Darnelle might be a killer, but no woman, especially a woman wearing a movement-hampering long dress, should be left alone at this hour in the Wash, where predators—both animal and human—could lie in wait.

By now, she had a good head start on me, though, so rather than take the meandering pathway she'd followed, I made up time by sliding on my butt straight down the steep grass verge to the Wash twenty feet below. The maneuver saved me only seconds, and by the time I'd clambered to my feet, I couldn't even hear her. Had she run north, toward the lagoon? Or through the dank tunnel that passed under Indian School Road and opened onto the southern end of the Wash.

As much as I hoped she'd turned north—it would be so much easier to catch her by the small lagoon—the alarmed squawk of a heron on the other side of the tunnel convinced me she'd fled south. Perhaps some sort of homing instinct was leading her into south Scottsdale and the compound that had served as her home. Did she expect help from Ezra, the “husband” who was handing her over to another man? The chances of that were doubtful since the only woman he'd ever shown the least bit of loyalty to had been Opal, a woman as heartless as he. If by some miracle Darnelle did managed to reach the compound, it was more than likely that he would shoot her himself, then dispose of her in the desert.

“Darnelle, stop!”

The echo of my voice bounced through the tunnel, but no one answered. I only heard the drivers on the street above, the Good Samaritan attempting to calm them, and the wind as it rushed through a stand of reeds. That meant she'd probably left the path and was headed out across the lake-studded Continental Golf Course. Fortunately, I was a good runner, and unlike Darnelle, I was wearing jeans and Reeboks. Without another thought, I darted into the tunnel.

Golf course or no, the Indian Bend Wash was a big piece of wild in the middle of the city. A quarter-mile wide and twelve miles long, it had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers to redirect the flash floods that plagued Scottsdale during our infrequent but often heavy rains, and the Wash did its job well. During the last monsoon, the area had lain underwater for a week, and even now the tunnel stank of wet, decaying things. As I pounded through the pitch black with my arms outstretched to keep me from hitting the walls, ground squirrels—or, worse, rats—squeaked in alarm as they scurried down the tunnel ahead of me. When I finally emerged into the clean night air, my sightline improved somewhat, but not enough to spot Darnelle.

Miles of lakes and green belt stretched before me, dark from the cloud-covered moon. But at the top of the Wash's eastern edge, the grass was eerily lit by the ambient glow of an all-night McDonald's drive-thru.

The light was too far away to help me. Down here, tall oleander and bougainvillea thickets hugged the shores of a large lake, adding even deeper shadows to the night. As I pressed forward, though, my eyes began to accustom themselves to the darkness, and eventually I could make out the cement culverts designed to feed excess water into the lake. Wondering if Darnelle had taken shelter, I walked over to the nearest one.

“Darnelle! No one's going to hurt you! The police just want to talk, to find out what really happened.”

Other than the annoyed quacks of waterfowl, I heard nothing. I plucked my Mag-Lite from my vest and clicked it on, but discovered that the only thing staring back at me was a startled mallard. Clicking the light off to save the battery, and I began to circle the lake, repeating the same routine at each culvert. By the time I reached the last one, I'd pretty much given up. Darnelle was frightened, and frightened women tend to flee—not hide. As I straightened up after yet another fruitless search, a siren cleaved the night, signaling the arrival of a squad car. I thought for a moment of running up to the street to hail them, then decided against it. The wreck would necessarily be the cops' first priority, not chasing after some lost woman. I abandoned the lake and headed at an angle across the golf course, and the smell of fishy water evolved into the tang of mown grass.

The soft green cushioned my feet. Aided by the crisp air, my breath came without a hitch. So did my long stride, shortened only when I had to detour around a gopher hole. For the next few minutes I ran easily, flushing panicked wildlife from their hidey-holes, until the cloud that had earlier covered the moon finally parted, and revealed the silvery shimmer of a blue heron gliding straight across the green. The scene would have been peaceful if not for a nearby coyote, which was dragging a still-alive Canada goose along the ground. As I circled him, the coyote growled a threat, but he kept his jaws clamped around the thrashing bird's neck. I didn't interfere. For all its beauty, nature is seldom gentle. Death for the goose meant survival for the coyote.

Unwilling to witness the goose's final agony, I turned my eyes away, and in that moment saw another pale flicker as the heron changed course and flew into a stand of mesquite.

No. Not a heron.

It was Darnelle, the flutter of her pale blue skirts mimicking the outstretched wings of a large bird.

“Darnelle! Stop running! It's over!”

She didn't answer, not that I expected her to. Her blue skirt danced back and forth between the trees until she'd disappeared. Had she run through the thicket and come out the other side, or was she lying in wait, a hastily caught-up weapon in hand? A limb, maybe, or a rock. Under normal circumstances she was probably no more violent than the average woman, but another obstacle to her reunion with Clayton might turn her vicious again. Now, instead of me being the savior who'd saved her son, I was the devil about to part them.

I stopped at the edge of the mesquite thicket and made certain my pocket recorder was still running. The light glowed red.

“Give it up, Darnelle,” I shouted, pointing the mike toward her. “I've already told the police, and they're waiting to talk to you. There's nothing to be afraid of. They know you didn't plan to kill Celeste, and that'll make a big difference in court. You just lashed out at her with whatever was at hand.” I didn't mention the part about her continuing to hit the woman. “That kind of thing is called a crime of passion, and judges treat them much more leniently than they do cold-blooded murder. Why, you might even get off on probation.” This was a stretch, but she didn't know it.

“What…What's probation?” Her voice, breathless from her run, drifted from a mesquite so old its branches drooped to the ground.

“Probation means you just report to a social worker instead of going to prison.”

“Are you sure?”

I hated to keep lying, but even more, I wanted to deliver her safely into the arms of Scottsdale PD, where detectives Sylvie Perrins and Bob Grossman waited, having been alerted by my earlier phone call from the halfway house. If she kept running around the Wash in the dark, something bad could happen. Javelina, with their bad tempers and sharp tusks, had been known to travel up the Wash.

“Why don't you tell me everything? It had something to do with Clayton, didn't it?”

“Y-yes.”

Honing in on her voice, I edged closer to the thicket. Once I had her talking, I planned to make a dive for her, handcuff her, and take her back to the Jeep.

“Darnelle, I understand the extremes a mother will go to for her child.” Three women had taught me all about that; Rosella, Madeline, and my biological mother—whoever and wherever she was.

The genuine sympathy in my voice must have made an impact, because after she'd taken a deep breath, she said, “You don't blame me?”

“No.” It was almost the truth, but even a woman like Celeste had a right to live.

“I didn't mean to kill her, Miss Jones.”

“Of course you didn't. But what happened? What made you…do what you did?”

Once she'd hitched her breath again, she began to talk so intently that she didn't notice me moving closer, the handcuffs out and ready to snap around her wrists.

“Celeste and me, we was out in the yard looking at the stars. Opal wasn't feeling good that night so she'd turned in early. Clayton, I think he had the same bug Opal did, he was asleep, too. Ezra was in bed with Josie. Celeste started talking about this guy Little Rick, bragging that he was in love with her and had found her an apartment, a job, and was even buying her a blue car to match her eyes! I begged her to take me and Clayton with her, that we'd both of us get jobs, but she looked at me like I was crazy. She said no, that she wasn't about to let me and Clayton mess up her new life.”

“That's when you hit her?”

“I hit her after she told me I needed to toughen up, that she'd let Ezra get rid of Jonah and good riddance to him, so what made me think my puny little punk—that's what she called him—was any more special? Then she
laughed
, Miss Jones! I was crying so hard and she laughed. Laughed at me, laughed over Clayton being so scared! That's when something ugly happened to me inside, like I became a different person, or some kind of animal. We was standing right next to this stack of two-by-fours left over from a construction job so I grabbed one and I hit her, then hit her again. All I wanted was make her stop laughing.”

By now, I'd almost reached the thicket. Her blue dress was visible again, almost within reach. As she talked, I kept moving.

“I'm not a killer, Miss Jones. I…”

The moon glinted along the handcuffs.

“Wait a minute! What's that in your…?”

With a shriek, Darnelle charged out of the other side of the mesquite thicket and across the green. At first I thought she was making for the compound again, but moonlight soon revealed that she was headed straight for the largest and deepest of the green belt lakes. I didn't waste my breath trying to call her back; I started running.

By the time I reached the rocks at the edge of the lake, she'd already made it off the shore and was sloshing her way through a morass of lily pads. Her long dress was already weighted down with water. Was she trying for the other side? Or…Afraid that I knew the answer, I shrugged off my heavy vest and waded in after her, but almost immediately thick mud sucked at my running shoes, slowing me down.

“Don't be an idiot, Darnelle!” I yelled, as she widened the distance between us. I pulled my feet away, leaving my Reeboks behind in the mire. “Suicide won't solve anything!”

“I don't want to live without my baby!” With that, she ducked her head under the water, but came up gasping. Seconds later, she ducked under the water again and this time she didn't resurface.

Barefoot now, I leaped forward and swam with strong strokes to the area where I thought she'd gone under. I took a deep breath and dove. Even though I kept my eyes open, the water was too murky for moonlight to penetrate but I stayed under, grasping at reeds, at anything that signaled movement until my burning lungs forced me to the surface. Then I took another breath and dove again. And again.

On my third try my outstretched hands bumped into something soft and warm. I felt my way along Darnelle's arm, grabbed a fist full of dress, and pulled upward with all my strength. While we rose into the moonlight she didn't struggle. Her body remained limp even after I'd hooked my left arm around her neck and towed her toward the shore.

As soon as my feet touched mud, I shifted my neck hold and grasped her around the waist. Then I pulled her through the reeds to dry land.

“Darnelle!” I screamed.

Nothing.

When I felt her neck, her pulse was still. I started to begin CPR, then remembered what I'd recently been told by an experienced EMT, a man who'd brought three toddlers back from the brink of death after near-drownings.
“A for airway, B for Breathing, C for circulation—but get that water out of the victim's lungs FIRST.”
So I hauled her upright, bent her over, and positioned my fists under her diaphragm. Then I performed the Heimlich maneuver. With a great rush, water spewed from her mouth.

The second time I received only a trickle. Now that her lungs were as clear as I could get them, I lowered her to the ground and began CPR to the beat of the BeeGee's “Stayin' Alive,” an aptly-titled song that perfectly mimicked the downbeat of a healthy human heart. When I made it to the second verse, Darnelle gave a big hiccup, then began to breathe on her own.