Desert Wives (9781615952267) (7 page)

Leo rescued me. “Lena, posing as Saul's new wife is the perfect way to smuggle you into the compound. You can't find out who murdered Prophet Solomon if you don't talk to the people involved. And the only way to do that is to go to Purity.”

Now that I'd recovered from my initial shock, I realized the plan made sense. Yes, Saul might have his own reason for wanting Solomon dead, but that didn't matter to me. Pretend-marrying him would certainly bring me up close and personal with all the other people who had motives, too. I did see one weakness in the plan, however.

“Let's say, just for argument's sake, that I do this. How would you explain me to the others? Would you tell them I was some sort of mail-order bride? Frankly, I can't imagine anyone with half a brain believing that.”

Saul rose from his knees and returned to his chair. After taking a couple of more bites of peach cobbler, he told me he'd already figured that out.

He had been away from the compound for several days, supposedly on a trip to Salt Lake to visit one of his daughters, but in actuality, he'd been conferring with his attorney in Zion City. When he returned to Purity with a new wife, he would simply explain we'd been introduced by an acquaintance who ran a shelter for battered women, and that I'd leapt at the chance to have a permanent roof over my head while at the same time getting far, far away from the crackhead boyfriend who'd threatened to kill me.

“And I'll tell them that I took care of all the legal work through an attorney cousin of mine. I think they'll swallow it. After all, that's exactly the kind of stuff polygamists pull all the time.”

Virginia's voice revealed her enthusiasm for the idea. “You'll need to act a little different, Lena. Kind of quiet. And obedient. Oh, absolutely more obedient!”

Quiet. Obedient. Two words seldom used to describe Lena Jones.

Noticing the doubtful expression on my face, she said, “Hey, it won't be that hard. Just pretend you've had a real bad life and it's left you all messed up.”

Who had to pretend? I merely said, “I think I can manage that.”

I mulled it over. Living in the compound would certainly be the best way to investigate Prophet Solomon's murder, but at considerable risk to myself. Although the Lawlers obviously trusted Saul, I knew nothing about him. Come to think of it, I didn't know anything about the Lawlers, either, just that Jimmy's mother liked them.

A little voice inside, a voice I'd heard a hundred times, warned, If you do this, you're
nuts
. The voice had never been wrong.

Then I remembered Esther's terrified face. Rebecca's.

“I'll do it,” I said.

When we finished eating, Virginia took me upstairs to loan me one of the dresses discarded a few months back by a runaway polygamist wife. I studied myself in the mirror, aghast at what I saw. The long-sleeved, high-necked, ankle- length calico made me look like a refugee from the
Little House on the Prairie
television series. And underneath all that clothing? More clothing. The wool Temple underwear favored by Mormons in the nineteenth century and polygamists in the twenty-first made me itch in crevices I hadn't even known were there.

Those ridiculous layers of clothing did have one benefit, though. Even the most careful observer wouldn't be able to spot the .38 holstered at my thigh.

Pulling my hair tightly behind my head, I bobby-pinned it into a sloppy bun, exposing my scar even more than usual. I looked like a half-skinned rabbit, but apparently the men of Purity had a thing for half-skinned rabbits.

I stepped back, studied myself again, and nodded in satisfaction.

After Virginia went downstairs to help with the clearing up, I picked up the phone, hoping Jimmy remained at the office. Luck, and his workaholism, were with me and he answered on the first ring. When I told him my plans, though, he made his displeasure plain.

“You've done some crazy things in your life, but this is probably the craziest,” he said. “There's no way you'll be able to pass yourself off as some meek plural wife.”

“But there's too much at stake for me
not
to try it.”

After he finished lamenting my changed plans, I gave him a list of names I wanted run through the Lexis-Nexis Internet search. And if that didn't work, to hack into whatever he had to hack into. When it came to unearthing information, Jimmy wasn't always legal.

“Saul Berkhauser might be a perfectly nice man, but I want to make sure,” I told him. “Same with Virginia and Leo. Yes, I know your mother likes them, but maybe they're just a little too good to be true. Virginia worries me a lot. She's down one minute, up the next. Maybe she's just bi-polar or something, but I need to know what I'm dealing with. Saul mentioned she had a child who died, and the way he put it made it sound like the kid might not have been Leo's. So see how many times she's been married, okay? Maybe your mom knows her maiden name.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I heard the click of computer keys. He'd already begun searching the Internet. Then, “Lena?”

“What?”

“I'm begging you. Please don't do this.”

“It's the only way to help Esther and Rebecca.” I sounded braver than I felt.

He grunted. “Well, at least there's one polygamist you don't have to worry about up there. Captain Kryzinski brought Abel Corbett back in here this morning, demanding that we turn Rebecca over. That guy is really steamed at you.”

“Which guy? Kryzinski or Abel?”

“Both, I guess.” He sounded glum.

“I don't care how steamed they are just as long as Rebecca's safe. And she is safe, right?”

“Of course. And she's going to stay that way, too.” He paused for a second, then added, “I went down to the jail this afternoon to see Esther. She's doing about as well as can be expected. I tried to cheer her up but I don't think it worked.”

I thought for a moment. “How many trips to the jail does this make for you? Six? Seven?”

He mumbled something I didn't quite catch and my worries increased. Jimmy had a bad track record when it came to his love life. He always seemed to fall for felons. The very fact that he'd obviously taken a shine to Esther did not bode well for her innocence.

I opened my mouth to lecture him, then thought better of it. Telling someone whom they should or should not love was about as profitable as telling the sun not to rise.

“Watch yourself,” I just said, and left it at that.

Mutual warning session duly accomplished, Jimmy filled me in on the day's events. There had been another fire at South Mountain Tire Storage.

“It was just a shed this time. The tires didn't go up, but I hear the folks from ATF are real antsy. They might be ready to make an arrest.”

I wasn't hopeful. Even if the feds arrested Miles Alder, his dad would probably bond him out. In Arizona even people suspected of mass murder were set free to walk the streets if they had enough money.

“Stay on it,” I said. “Firebugs always lose control at some point. Maybe we'll catch this one before anybody gets hurt.”

I started to ask if Dusty had called the office, but changed my mind. I had more important things to do than worry about my own love life.

Chapter 7

“Remember, keep your eyes on the ground and never contradict a male,” my new “husband” warned me as his '86 Chevy pickup trundled southeast along the private dirt road straddling the Utah/Arizona state line. The evening's lengthening shadows made the creosote bushes sprinkled along the flat desert floor appear twice their size, almost monstrous.

“I've been practicing,” I said, breathing deeply, trying to quell my panic.

Since leaving West Wind Guest Ranch, we'd dropped enough in altitude to make all the difference between tree-bordered streams and an arid no-man's land. The terrain alone helped explain why so few women escaped from Purity. Nothing other than miles of sand, rock, and creosote bushes stretched to the south. True, the blazing reds and oranges of the Vermillion Cliffs rising steep-sided on the north furnished some visual drama, but otherwise, the landscape resembled the surface of the moon. And it functioned little more hospitably. The Arizona Strip was an alien landscape governed by men who recognized no laws but their own. The polygamists had chosen their paradise carefully. Because of the area's remote bleakness, tourists, whose curiosity might have proven problematic, never did more than pass quickly through.

Now I had willingly entered this desolation again, but this time “married” to a man I had just met. What if Saul's helpful demeanor had baser motives? After all, he'd told me the polygamists routinely used lies and manipulation to entice prospective brides. Had he followed suit with me? And would he, frustrated from years of an unhappy marriage, creep into my room tonight? I closed my eyes and counted backward from one hundred. It didn't help.

“Lena, can you cook?” Saul's voice halted the countdown somewhere around thirty.

I opened my eyes. “You must be kidding. My culinary skills run to ramen noodles and Michelina's TV dinners.”

His expectant look faded.

We rounded the final turn in the road and Purity came into view. I'd seen the place before, of course, but I'd been too distracted by Rebecca's situation to pay much attention to the architecture. Now I noticed how dismal the place looked. With the exception of the sturdy brick church and one other brick building, Purity could have modeled the Before of a civic Before-and-After project.

Like most of the polygamy compounds on the Arizona Strip, half its buildings sat on the Utah side of the border, the other half in Arizona. This way, if the Utah authorities raided the compound, the polygamists would amble across the road to Arizona, only ten feet away. If Arizona raided, everyone would shuffle off to Utah. However, this simple but effective plan had never been tested due to both states' continued assertion that polygamy was a victimless crime.

The town's layout was simple, if drear. Two curved rows of houses, bisected by the dirt road, faced each other across the state line, with Prophet's Park, the bare circular area between, doubling as a children's playground and a graveyard for junked pickup trucks. Approximately thirty ramshackle houses the size of small hotels sat at odd angles on litter-strewn dirt lots, their roofs covered in an untidy mélange of tin and unmatched shingles. None were painted. Instead, tar paper siding fluttered in the evening breeze, making the shiny satellite dishes attached to each house look wildly out of place.

At the far end of the compound, just to the side of the square-steepled church, I counted four Quonset huts and a dozen battered trailers, probably used as overflow homes for Purity's extra wives. Behind these rusting hulks ran a series of chicken-wire paddocks containing chickens, pigs, goats, and a few cows.

The brick church, which normally would have provided some semblance of construction competence, hunkered under rickety-looking scaffolding and flapping canvas. It looked like some huge mythical beast about to pounce.

“The Church of the Prophet Fundamental,” Saul said, pointing. “Someone got the bright idea of having a stained glass window made documenting Prophet Solomon's holy works, so they're spiffing up the joint first. Paint on the inside, sandblasting on the outside.”

“Too bad they don't do the same for everything else around here,” I observed. “But where do they hold Sunday services now?”

“Prophet's Park on nice days, the new prophet's house on bad days. In shifts, though. Davis's house is big, but not that big. Once family matters are settled, he'll probably move into his daddy's old house.” Here he pointed to the only brick home in the compound, a structure so large I'd assumed it was an apartment building.

To the north of the compound lay gardens and orchards, offering the only swatches of green to relieve Purity's browns and blacks. Although almost dusk, a few granny-garbed women still toiled in the gardens gathering last-minute dinner vegetables.

Beyond the gardens, Paiute Canyon, my old hiding place, zigzagged along the base of the gaudy Vermillion Cliffs. I flinched as a shot rang from its depths, then reminded myself of the canyon's omnipresent hunters.

Ragged, unsupervised children ran everywhere. They climbed on the rusting cars, poked sticks through the fence at the chickens and goats, and skipped along the unpaved paths between the huge houses. Some scuffled in the dirt like wild things. One little boy of about four threw rocks at a skinny dog. No one came to its aid.

“Where are their mothers?” I asked Saul. “These kids look like they're on their own.”

“If you had ten children do you think you'd be able to keep an eye on all of them?” He swerved to avoid a child's Big Wheel hunkered down in the middle of the road, its owner nowhere in sight.

“Probably not.” Frankly I doubted I could mother even one child.

As we rolled by the gigantic but decrepit houses, we stirred up a dust cloud that made children scatter in all directions. Watching them, I was struck once more by their ragtag appearance.

“Saul, this place looks pretty slummy for a financial organization that's supposed to control millions of dollars. Are you sure that's not an urban myth?”

“It's no myth. I know at least twenty men here who work for some of the businesses managed by the Purity Fellowship Foundation. But you're right, very little money goes toward upkeep around here, other than for the church. At best, the Foundation dribbles out a few bucks here and there to add a room when some family starts outgrowing its house or trailers or whatever.”

He waved toward a building on the Utah side of the compound which resembled a warehouse that had seen better days. “That house belongs to Jacob Waldman, Esther's father. He started building it fifty years ago. I think it had three, maybe four bedrooms then, one for each wife. They say it has twenty-two bedrooms now.”

“For twenty-two wives?” I couldn't keep the shock out of my voice.

“Old Jacob's only got about ten wives at this point and considering the state of his health, isn't likely to get more. The rest of the rooms are dormitories for his kids. I think there's around seventy or eighty, I'm not sure, cause the older ones are all married off. That's kind of an average family size for most of the guys around here.”

As I craned my neck to stare at the house where Esther grew up, something else began to bother me.

“Saul, the house doesn't have any windows! Almost
none
of these houses do.”

Saul braked for a child chasing a ball. “Windows cost money. Prophet Solomon didn't believe in mortgages, except for the ones he held on other folks' property in Salt Lake, so everything built here is paid for in cash. The money gets deducted from each family's monthly allowance, which has always been doled out by Solomon. When folks are that strapped, windows are a luxury. Besides, most of the men work at their piddly little jobs all day, and at night, well, it's too dark to see anything anyway.”

“Don't the women feel cooped up?” The thought of a windowless house horrified me. Since a murderer left me for dead in a car trunk, I suffered from bouts of claustrophobia.

Saul laughed at my question. “You think Purity's women have time to enjoy the view? According to ‘The Gospel of Solomon,' and it's an actual book he printed himself a few years back, anything that gives pleasure is considered mere vanity. That includes looking out windows.”

My feeling of horror intensified. “Saul, please tell me your house has windows. If I can't look outside…”

“Don't worry, before I handed over my money to Solomon, I made sure I kept enough for windows. I was a contractor, remember. None of this cheap-jack construction for me.”

I relaxed as we drove up to a small wood-shingled house on the Arizona side of the compound which, unlike the other buildings, bore a semblance of style. Bright red flowers bloomed from window boxes painted the same blue as the trim on the large windows and front door. While not elegant, the little house and its tidy yard shamed its hulking neighbors.

As Saul helped me unload the garbage bags meant to pass for a desperate woman's luggage, I caught sight of a group of men leaning against a rusting Chevy Impala. The fading light didn't hide their frank stares.

“Show time,” Saul grunted, then turned to face them. “You guys in the Circle of Elders wouldn't help me, so I went out and found me another wife in Salt Lake.”

A portly red-headed man of about fifty, wearing a long-sleeved shirt, bib overalls and metal-rimmed glasses, approached, his face stern. He addressed Saul without greeting me.

“Brother Saul, you didn't get approval from the Circle to take another wife. Until you do, we can't sanctify the marriage.” He narrowed his already too-small eyes at me, his expression a scarifying mixture of lust and loathing.

“Well, then, Brother Earl, you can sanctify my ass!” Saul snapped. “What's the matter with you people? Prophet Solomon said that no man can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he has more than one wife, so I'm merely following his instructions. You boys got a problem with that, you can take it up with me after I get my woman in the house.”

My woman
. Almost choking from outrage, I lowered my eyes modestly and stared at the ground. But not before I wondered if Brother Earl was the same Earl Graff who'd witnessed the argument between Esther and Prophet Solomon.

“Brother Saul, we'll deal with you at the next Circle of Elders meeting,” Brother Earl said in a soft voice that almost, but not quite, masked his anger.

As Earl rejoined the others, Saul put his hand on my back and gave me a push that almost made me stumble. “Get yourself in the house, Sister Lena, and head straight for the kitchen. I'm hungry.” His voice could have carried to the farthest building in the compound.

Although his performance was obviously for the polygamists' benefit, my gorge still rose and I almost slapped his hand away. But then I remembered Rebecca's terrified face, and hurried up the steps, garbage bag luggage in my hands and my new “husband” hot on my heels. Keeping my own voice low, I warned, “Do that to me again, Brother Saul, and you'll be whistling ‘Dixie' out of a gap in your front teeth.”

He snickered. “A Godly woman is an obedient woman, Sister Lena. She wouldn't dream of decking her jackass of a husband.”

My dread increasing, I entered the house. Once inside, though, I was pleasantly surprised.

The house, as Saul had described earlier, had been furnished with bits and pieces left over from the big yard sale he'd held in Salt Lake before moving to the compound. Nothing matched, but the long, brown leather sofa coexisted comfortably with the green and blue armchairs. A multi-colored rag rug lent an air of gaiety to the room that, in my present glum state, filled me with gratitude.

I walked around slowly, staring at the amateurish snapshots covering one of the pine-paneled walls. Children. Dozens of them. The girls wore Purity's nineteenth-century-style dresses; the boys, plain slacks and high-necked, long-sleeved shirts.

“Ruby's kids and grandkids,” Saul explained. “Only a few still live here. The others married into other polygamy compounds, such as Colorado City and Hildale. Out here, one compound feeds the other.”

Remembering the vast empty stretches we had traveled to get here, I asked, “Are those other compounds close by?”

“Hildale's the closest, and it's almost forty miles east, so she doesn't get to see her kids much. I think missing them is part of her problem. Hell, missing kids was sure part of my problem. If the stinkers had visited me more, I might not have wound up in this polygamist Sodom and Gomorrah in the first place.”

The photographs on the opposite wall provided startling contrast to the bargain basement snapshots. Studio portraits of three attractive women with their spouses, surrounded by gaggles of kids, proclaimed that Saul spared no expense in documenting his family. A separate photograph portrayed a dignified man in a Naval uniform.

“The women are your daughters, right?”

“And the sailor's my son. Sarabeth's a nurse, Alexandra's an engineer, Toni teaches American Lit at BYU, and Gordon is chief petty officer on the
U.S.S. Enterprise
. Gordon's out in the Persian Gulf right now, but we still manage to keep in touch.” He motioned to a small tape recorder that sat on a side table. “We make recordings and send them back and forth to each other. I never got the hang of email, but the tape recorder still beats letters. Uh, before you ask, my kids only have one spouse apiece, but I'm happy to report that between them, they've given me fifteen grandchildren and six great-grandchildren!” His elation vanished as quickly as it had arrived. “Sure wish they lived closer.”

Besides the modern tape recorder, I noticed several other items that conflicted with Virginia's description of Purity's homes.

“Saul, you have a telephone, a big-screen TV, and a stereo! Right out here in the living room! I thought those accouterments of Satan were supposed to be locked away from us dumb, impressionable women.”