Desert Wives (9781615952267) (16 page)

Ruby snatched the plate from me as soon as I entered the house. “It's about time,” she snapped. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep, reminding me of my noisy performance the previous night. “It's a disgrace to make your husband wait so long for his breakfast.”

Amused, I trailed after her. As I entered the kitchen, which now seemed tiny compared to Ermaline's, I saw Saul, freshly shaved, sitting at the table wolfing down a big bowl of Cheerios. An apple core and banana skin lay beside the bowl. I allowed myself a moment of housewifely pride. Maybe I couldn't cook, but I could sure write a mean shopping list.

“I actually helped make a couple of those biscuits,” I said, as Ruby set the plate in front of him.

“The flat ones, probably,” she grumped.

“Ladies, ladies, don't fight,” Saul said, shoving aside his Cheerios and popping a butter-drenched biscuit into his mouth. “Sister Lena, this flat little biscuit tastes like heaven on earth. I can't wait to see what pleasures your lunch lesson will bring us.”

Ruby said nothing, but I noticed that she ate as many biscuits as Saul.

After breakfast was over, Saul and I left an infuriated Ruby to the washing up and strolled onto the porch and out of earshot.

“Do you think it's going to work?” he said, as we sat down together in the porch swing.

“Learning how to cook or finding out more about Prophet Solomon's death?”

“Lena.”

I grimaced. “Sorry. The stress of slaving over a hot stove must be getting to me. But in answer to your question, it's too early to tell.” I gave him a brief rundown of the morning's activities, going into detail about the book incident. “By the way, I didn't know you were Purity's official book-smuggler.”

“Oh, that. I've been doing it for years,” he said. “Once Cynthia gets through reading them, she gives them back to me and I take them to the Salvation Army in Zion City so nobody'll spot things like
War and Peace
lying around on the dump. That Cynthia, she's a real bright girl and I'd like to see her make something of herself. She was talking about being a doctor there for a while, and I think she could manage it, too.”

“She won't if Ermaline has anything to do with it.”

He made a face. “Ermaline's got an attitude, but she makes a fine biscuit.” He smacked his lips at the memory.

“Jean seems to look out for Cynthia.”

“Poor Jean. She's never been happy up at that house. I think she used to be sweet on Davis Royal but then she had to marry his daddy.”

“Had to?” I raised my eyebrows.

He chuckled. “Get your mind out of the gutter, girl. Jean didn't get pregnant out of wedlock or anything like that. That sort of thing doesn't happen much in Purity because the girls are usually married off as soon as they start their monthlies. No, what I meant was that some kind of deal went down having to do with a tractor her father wanted but didn't have the money to buy. But he got the tractor anyway and right after it was delivered, Solomon got Jean.”

“That's terrible!”

“It was a nice tractor.”

I gave him a look.

“The point is, Jean never could stand Solomon, so I don't think she was all that broken up over his death.”

“Interesting.”

“Don't go getting ideas about Jean. She's not the violent type.”

“Lizzie Borden's neighbors used to say that about her, too.”

“Lena.”

“Sorry again.” I sat there in silence for a few minutes, listening to the compound's children as they played on their way to school. They sounded like children anywhere.

“At least the kids seem happy,” I finally said.

“Sure. Purity is great for kids, one big summer camp with hundreds of playmates to choose from. And don't forget, most of them have more or less intact families, weird as those families are. But when the kids grow up, things change.”

I watched a little blond girl about ten years old cross the dirt circle from the Utah side to the Arizona side, her long, patched dress no match for her budding beauty. I understood what he was saying. “And when the little girls grow up, those changes can get tough.”

“Yeah, somebody always needs a new tractor.”

At eleven I headed to Ermaline's, first crossing over to the Utah side and the clinic. I'd planned to ask one of the midwives how Rosalinda was doing, but the groans I heard as I opened the door told me all I needed to know. I hurried to Ermaline's house.

Within no time I found myself grating heads of cabbage the size and density of bowling balls, all grown in the compound's massive kitchen garden, while Ermaline hovered over me, criticizing my every move. I worked until my hands cramped as I turned the stuff into coleslaw to be served with the luncheon menu's main dish: Sloppy Joe sandwiches. As Ermaline told me exactly how much vinegar, pepper, and mayo to add to the slaw's unholy mess, I edged toward my questioning.

“My heart was broken when I heard about Prophet Solomon's death,” I lied. “I heard him speak at a library in Salt Lake City and he really turned my life around. It made me determined to come here, and so when I met Brother Saul, it was as if God himself had led me here.”

The harsh expression on Sister Ermaline's face didn't lighten. “Our Great Father is living in the highest level of Heaven, waiting for all of us there. As first wife, I'll sit at his right hand, too.”

Personally, I doubted that the dirty old man's waiting room was as comfortable as she believed, but I kept my cynicism to myself. Pulling a long face, I said, “Still, Sister Ermaline, it must be a great sorrow having someone you love so much taken away from you before his time.”

“Don't be silly. In Purity we accept the blows life deals us. Add more vinegar to that. I don't hold with sweet slaw.”

Our activities were interrupted once by a visit from Sister Hanna, who limped into the kitchen, eyes downcast, her pregnant belly looking almost painful.

“Sister Ermaline, I run out of flour.”

“Poor plannin'!” Ermaline snapped, but directed Jean to fetch some from the pantry. “You need to start making lists and keeping them updated. God hates a woman who don't tend to business.”

“I know, Sister Ermaline,” Hanna said, almost cowering. “I'm trying. I just can't seem to…”

“Try harder!”

With a gentle smile, Jean handed Hanna a bag of flour. Before I'd come to Purity, I would have thought it was enough to feed an army; now I knew it wouldn't last beyond one meal.

“Thank you, Sister Jean,” Hanna said, then limped out the door.

Ermaline stared after her, contempt in her eyes. And, strangely, fear.

Why?

As the morning wore on, I decided that Ermaline's entire interest in life began and ended with the kitchen. Unless she was a greater actress than I believed, she didn't appear to miss her husband. All she cared about was her coleslaw.

It intrigued me enough to try something. “Sister Ermaline,” I began, “my sister died last year and even though I was a thousand miles away from her, I swear I knew the exact moment of her death. I was mopping the floor and suddenly I knew she was gone, just as surely as if I had been at her bedside. You'd been married to the Prophet for almost forty years and must have been close, so did you have a moment like that? A moment when you knew the Lord had taken him?”

Ermaline's busy hands stilled, and for a second I thought I saw a glimmer of sadness in her eyes. “I never noticed a thing. Not even the next morning. The prophet wasn't at the table, but I thought maybe he was still with one of my sister wives. Then after breakfast, when some of us was still in the kitchen cannin' raspberry preserves, Brother Earl came in and he said…he said…”

Was that a tear on her cheek? Or perspiration?

“But the afternoon before, Sister Ermaline, when it must have happened? Maybe one of the other wives felt something?”

She sniffed and her hands busied themselves again. “Sister Jean was in here awhile, but then she ran off to do something else. Sister Martha, she was here, too, but she didn't say anything about omens. Wait. I remember now. Martha wasn't feeling good, she had one of them migraines of hers. Somebody made her a potato poultice and she went off to her room to lie down.”

Martha Royal, Meade's mother, now married to the old goat in that tin trailer. I'd wondered why the Circle of Elders had been so quick to find her another husband, and obviously such an unsuitable one. Now I wondered even more.

So Jean had been out of the kitchen on an errand, Martha had been lying down in a dark room, and Ermaline had remained alone in the kitchen. The section of the canyon where Rebecca and I had stumbled across Prophet Solomon's body was close enough to the compound that given enough time, a determined woman could have run down there, grabbed his shotgun and blasted both barrels at him, then get back to the kitchen before her absence was noticed.

As far as I was concerned, Ermaline was mean enough to kill anyone, but even mean people needed motives. No problem there. Ermaline had been effectively discarded in favor of younger wives, and although the wives of Purity professed to suffer no jealousy, I thought they all protested too much. But had Ermaline been alone long enough to actually do the deed?

“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.”