Desert Lost (9781615952229) (12 page)

“John Lee played all over the place, in the North, the South, the Midwest, on both coasts. Many of his gigs were spontaneous and never appeared on his official tour schedule. He's dead now, along with most of his original musicians.”

“If it was a one-time deal, why do you keep calling him ‘John Lee'? Not ‘Hooker'? That sounds pretty familiar.”

I shrugged. “I've got everything John Lee ever recorded, even copies of some unfinished demo tapes. So sure, I feel like I knew him, no surprise there. Jimmy's still trying to chase my father down through him, but he hasn't come up with anything so far.”

A smile broke across her face. “Jimmy would do anything for you.”

I smiled back. “And I would for him.”

“Lena, did you know…” She stopped.

“Did I know what?”

“Nothing.” She took another sip of decaf. “Is there anything else you've remembered that you haven't told me about yet?”

Plenty, but my sorrows weren't for her ears, she didn't need the burden, so I shook my head. “Just that the white bus we traveled on was driven by some big guy with dark hair. Mountain, they called him, but that probably wasn't his real name. And the same man, a handsome man, always sat right behind him. Most of my memories about him have to do with singing a particular song he'd written to the tune of that old children's song, “Jesus Loves Me.” I guess it wasn't very original because the words weren't all that different.”

Without thinking, I began to sing…

“Abraham loves me, this I know

All his writings tell me so,

Little ones to him belong,

We are weak, Abraham is strong…”

Madeline stiffened. “
Abraham
!”

Puzzled by her reaction, I asked, “What?”

“You don't remember that time in Sunday School?”

If it hadn't been for the expression on her face, I would have laughed. “You actually took me to
church
?”

A weak smile. “Just the once. It didn't turn out well because of the song about Abraham. The teacher came and got me, saying that when the class began to sing the damned thing, you grew hysterical. You really don't remember?”

Suddenly I was tired of this trip down memory lane. “No. I don't. Now quit pushing me, okay?”

Before I could apologize for my harsh tone, Madeline reached across the table and took my hand. “My poor, lost Lena.”

***

At nine-thirty, I donned a mouse-brown wig and left for Frugal Foods.

The women arrived right on time, dressed in similar dowdy outfits, the only major differences being Darnelle's swollen nose and a bruise beneath her right eye. A more careful study revealed a satisfied smirk on Opal's face, fear in young Josie's eyes. Not looking forward to the next few minutes, I exited the truck.

Frugal Foods' bright lights revealed an angry scab on the tip of Darnelle's nose that looked like it was about to bleed at any moment. Someone had really worked her over, but who? Opal was big and strong enough, and certainly had malice enough, but I put my money on Ezra. The leader of the God Squad was known to be fast with his fists, especially where women were concerned. He demanded that his wives “keep sweet,” which in polygamist-speak meant that they humbly submit to whatever bizarre request—sexual or otherwise—he made. What had Darnelle refused to do?

The store's tinny sound system was playing a violin-heavy version of the Beatles' “Let It Be” when I entered. An overhead fluorescent light flickered and hummed in accompaniment. After consulting a list, Opal headed toward the meat counter, directing Josie to the canned vegetables aisle, Darnelle to the baking products. I grabbed a cart and followed her. It wasn't easy to pretend that I was interested in the various brands of baking soda when I didn't even know the difference between baking powder and baking soda. All the while, I kept closing the gap between us, thinking that I might start a conversation by asking her advice about the two different products. My plan was interrupted when Darnelle sneezed, and out of reflex, dabbed her nose, inadvertently tearing off the scab. Her nose began to bleed.

Seeing her blood-smeared hand, she made a sound of distress, then rushed up the aisle toward the back of the store. I followed her into the store's restroom.

It was as frugal as the store's name. Lit only by one bare overhead light bulb, the restroom consisted of two stalls, plain white walls, a paper towel dispenser, and, above the wobbly sink, a black-framed sign exhorting employees to wash their hands. Drifting from one of the stalls, cherry-scented air freshener wrestled with a worse odor. As Opal leaned over the bare-bones sink, I ripped a paper towel from the container and handed it to her. “Here, Ma'am. For your nose. Wow, that's some shiner you have.”

She said nothing, just took the towel, dampened it, and began to pat the blood away.

“I know it's none of my business, but who beat you up?”

No answer.

“You ought to report him to the police, get him jailed.” Give the cops a reason to look more closely at the compound.

But at my suggestion, she headed for the door. To exit, she'd have to go through me, and I wasn't moving.

“Darnelle, let me help.”

Her dark eyes opened wide at my use of her name. The whites were reddened from tears. “What makes you think I need help?”

“Your face. It's my guess that whoever's been beating you has done it more than once.”

Her hand, chapped and reddened by hard work, flew to her face. “I don't know what you're talking about. I…I just fell down.” As an actress, she wouldn't have convinced a child.

“Are you going to stay with Ezra until you're beaten to death like Celeste?”

She gasped. “What do you know about Celeste? Have you been following us?”

I pulled a business card from a vest pocket and shoved it into her hand. “Call me any time, day or night. I'll help you find a better life. Other women in your situation have escaped. Women like Rosella Borden.”

At my mention of Rosella, Darnelle paled, making the torn scab on her nose stand out in stark relief. Before I could explain further, how Rosella had gone to college, started her own business, and bought her own house—I was going to leave out the part about the house being torched—the restroom door opened behind us and Opal strode though, her face taut with suspicion.

“What's going on?” she demanded.

“Nothing.” Darnelle clenched her fingers around my card so that it couldn't be seen. “My nose was bleeding and this lady just helping.”

Opal shouldered me aside so quickly I didn't have time to react and grabbed Darnelle by the arm. “Get out of here. Now.” Wordlessly, Darnelle complied. Then the big woman turned to me. “As for you…” She raised her fist.

I narrowed my eyes. “Don't even think about it.”

Faced with an aggression equal to her own, she backed down. But as she left the restroom, she said, “Even with that stupid wig on your head, I know who you are.”

Then she smiled.

Chapter Seventeen

The unease I'd begun feeling after my run-in with Opal intensified to the point that the following morning I almost asked Madeline to cancel her gallery appointments and stay in the office with Jimmy and me. Guessing that she might resent my over-protectiveness, I didn't, so I just sat at my desk and worried as she left with her slides. Jimmy seemed oblivious to my discomfort.

Warren hadn't called me yet, either, which served to intensify my grim mood. Deciding to take the bull by the horns, I called his cell. He answered, but in a clipped voice told me he didn't have time to talk.

“Look, Lena, now that the girls are here, I'm going to be pretty busy for the next few days, so let's put off what ever kind of conversation we need to have until then.”

He was withdrawing, but hadn't I been doing exactly the same thing myself? “Next week, maybe?”

“Oh, hell. I guess I might as well tell you. Because of the Nevitt thing, I've called my attorneys and we're going to petition for full custody. The twins will be safer with me.”

I felt torn. In the year I'd been working as script consultant on
Desert Eagle
, I'd never doubted Angel's parenting skills. If Warren was successful, losing her children would break her heart. Maybe even the twins'.

***

“Are you sure, Warren? She's a wonderful mother, very dedicated. Maybe you need to rethink this. For the twins' sakes.”

“Now you're giving me parenting advice?”

He broke off the call.

***

Just before lunchtime my glum mood vanished when Rosella called me from a pay phone to assure me that she and KariAnn were safe, and on the road to a new location.

“Don't tell me where you're headed, okay?” I cautioned her. “Not even the state.”

“Because who knows who's tappin' your phone these days, right? Big Brother never sleeps.” She had to shout into the phone, because wherever she was calling from, traffic sounded heavy. Engines roared, horns blared. Behind all this, children's voices shrieked happily over the din, meaning that she was near a park or school. “What's happening back there, Lena? Are you any closer to findin' out what happened to Celeste? Talk fast because I've got less than five dollars worth of quarters.”

I told her Jonah was about to be charged in Celeste's murder.

“No way,” she huffed. “Granted, the kid was only about three when I escaped, but that was one sweet little boy.”

“Most murderers were once sweet little boys.”

“Yeah, and it snows in Phoenix every August. Jonah would never do anything to hurt anyone, especially not his mother.”

“Jonah admitted that he shoved her.”

“For God's sake, the kid's heart was breaking!”

I wasn't about to argue for Jonah's guilt, especially since I didn't believe in it myself, so I changed the subject and caught her up to date. Finishing, I said, “As far as I can tell, the authorities aren't doing anything, even though I gave them videotaped proof of various misdemeanors and possible felonies.” I left out the part about Ezra's accusations of trespass.

“Arizona authorities talk big but never act,” she responded. “Pretty soon they'll learn the error of their ways. Second Zion's so overpopulated that they're runnin' out of room. They got to spread somewhere, but some of the states, like Texas, are startin' to keep a close eye on them. Not Arizona, though. Hell, polygamists can get by with anything in Arizona.”

The best estimates put the population of Second Zion population at almost five thousand and rising fast, with more than a hundred live births every year. That's what happened when a girl started her breeding life at thirteen and was ordered to continue having babies nonstop until she hit menopause. But since Rosella's supply of quarters was limited, I didn't let myself get sucked into a lengthy conversation about the resulting space problems when households averaged thirty to fifty children per.

Returning to the problem at hand, I said, “Here are some names. Judging from a conversation I overheard, they appear to be Ezra's wives. Opal. Josie. Darnelle. What do you know about them?”

“Opal? She's been handed over to Ezra? Ha! Serves the bitch right. That woman's a real piece of work, used to lord it over everyone else because she was the Prophet's first wife. She used to beat the crap out of any sister-wife she thought disrespected her or didn't do a more-than-equal share of work. You think Ezra's the enforcer? Hah! Ezra ain't nothing compared to her.” Her voice became less outraged, more sad. “But that makes me think. Maybe Celeste washed dishes too slow one day, and Opal got carried away with the punishment and killed her. Opal's crazy enough to do anything, always has been. If she found out that Celeste helped me escape…”

I herded her off the Guilt Trip Trail. “That would have happened at the time, not years later, so don't beat up on yourself. Do you consider Opal capable of murder?”

“Damn right I do. She's strong enough to drag a body around, too. I've seen her lift a fifty-pound sack of cornmeal over her shoulder like it was nothing.” A truck backfired somewhere near Rosella. Or maybe someone got shot. Probably the former, because when the noise level returned to loud normal, Rosella continued unfazed. “Like I said, Opal was always beating up on people. Well, women and kids, anyway. But when either Prophet Shupe or Ezra was around, she was the very picture of the ‘still sweet' sister-wife. And they bought it. Then again, maybe they just didn't care what she did to anyone else, as long as she obeyed the men. Whatever you do, Lena, don't cross Opal. Not
ever
.”

Too late for that bit of advice. “How about Josie? Blond, blue eyed, very petite. Pretty, although maybe a little low on the I.Q. scale. She looks like she could be around twenty, which would make her, what, five when you escaped from Second Zion?”

“Sounds like one of old Shiplee's granddaughters. He was Prophet Shupe's uncle. A few years before I took off with KariAnn, the Prophet gave Shiplee a batch of women, some of them real young, most of them a little slow, if you know what I'm sayin'. Their children tended to be the same way, not that anyone cared as long as the girls were good breeders. And they kept sweet, every last one of them. Never argued with a man, always did what they were told. If Josie's one of those girls, you can cross her off your list of suspects. I can't see any of Shiplee's grandkids killin' anyone. They wouldn't have either the spirit or the intelligence to cover it up.”

“Wait a minute. If Shiplee was Hiram Shupe's uncle, wouldn't that make Josie his cousin or something like that?”

“We're talking polygamy, remember. Cousins is nothing. The Prophet had a revelation once that told him inbreeding kept the bloodline pure.”

Ugh. “What about this guy Shiplee, then? Would he have any reason to kill Celeste?”

She vented her first true laugh of the conversation. “Now, that would be difficult, seeing how old Shiplee's been dead for years. Hell, he was already in his eighties when Prophet Shupe gave him those gals.”

I shuddered. “How about Darnelle? She's around thirty…”

Rosella cut me off. “Darnelle Rumbaugh. Along with Celeste, she was one of my sister-wives when I was still with the Prophet. Nice woman, good mother. So she's Ezra's woman now? What a piece of crap compound life is, reassignin' her to that bastard. Anyway, she's only a couple years older than me, but when my daddy gave me to the Prophet—I was fourteen at the time—she'd already had three kids with him, all boys. By the time I escaped, she'd had a couple more. Boys again. The youngest was maybe around two, and if I remember correctly, seemed kinda sickly, but not sickly enough to collect SSI payments. He just caught whatever kinda bug was goin' around. Darnelle was always worried he'd be like so many of them other boys and die real early.”

While working underground in another polygamy settlement, I'd noticed that boys seemed to have a higher death rate than girls. Genetic problems? I thought back to the boys I'd videotaped as they'd walked over to the construction yard. One of them, the straggler at the end, stood out in my mind because of his pale and weedy appearance. The man leading them had called him something. What was it?

I described him to Rosella, finishing with, “I think he was called Clay.”

“Clayton, I'll bet. Clayton Rumbaugh, that boy of Darnelle's I was tellin' you about. Glad to hear he's still alive. I used to worry about him, but then she always took great care of her kids, made sure they got seconds at the table if they needed it. Especially that poor little guy.”

“If Darnelle was one of your sister-wives, wouldn't Clayton be Prophet Shupe's son, then?”

The bitter laugh came back. “One of about seventy or eighty. The Prophet is still doing his godly duty, I hear, knockin' up little girls as fast as he can. Wonder if Darnelle had any more kids after he turned her over to Brother Ezra? ‘Course, my sources don't tell me much about babies, just the gals who want to escape. Unless a kid's the Prophet's own child, another compound baby coming down the pike wouldn't blip their radar. Listen, I'm running out of quarters. Anything else?”

Hastily, I filled Rosella in on the scene in Frugal Foods' bathroom, and how rough Opal had been with Darnelle.

“What'd I tell you? Woman's a psychopath. Frankly, I'm surprised that Darnelle had the guts to stand up to her in the first place.”

“It was only over cooking oil, nothing big.”

“No rebellion is too minor for Opal's fists.”

A mechanical voice intruded, demanding more quarters. This set off a round of cussing from Rosella, who by that time had run out. “Gotta go, I'll call in a couple more days. In the meantime, you help Jonah in any way you can, hear? And take care. Especially around Opal.”

***

As it turned out, Rosella's wouldn't be the only payphone call I received that morning. I was walking out the door to grab some lunch at Malee's Thai on Main, the restaurant across the street, when the phone rang and Jimmy motioned me back. Covering the phone's receiver with his hand, he whispered, “It's someone named Darnelle. Isn't that…?”

“Sure is.” My longing for Thai cuisine temporarily derailed, I hurried back to my desk and picked up the extension. “Lena Jones here. What can I do to help you, Darnelle?”

In a hurried voice, she explained she was calling from outside a discount yardage store where she'd been shopping with Opal. “When we got outside, she checked the receipt and said we'd been overcharged, so she left me to watch Sister Josie and went back to argue with the clerk. I saw this payphone outside and I had that card you gave me so I…”

I cut her off. “Is something wrong?”

“My son…he…” She began to cry.

“Are you talking about Clayton?”

She didn't sound surprised that I knew his name. “He's almost eighteen, and Sister Opal says they're going to…” She gasped. “Oh, no. I can see her leaving the checkout counter.”

Before she could slam down the receiver, I told her to meet me that night by the compound fence, where it bordered the back of the self-storage yard. “I'll wait all night if that's what it takes. Darnelle?”

She'd hung up.

As I stood staring at the receiver, Jimmy's voice interrupted the dial tone. “Isn't Darnelle the name of one of those polygamist women?”

I replaced the receiver. “She wants to meet me at the compound fence tonight.”

He frowned. “Could be a trap. You're not taking the bait, I hope.”

“I don't have a choice.” Not if I wanted justice for Celeste. And Jonah.

“Then I'm going with you.”

The last thing I needed was Jimmy trailing me around Kachina 24-Hour Storage, but I decided to put off the inevitable showdown until after lunch, when I felt less edgy. “I'll pick you up something at the Thai.”

“Didn't you hear me?”

“I'm having the lettuce wraps myself. As for you, how about that Spicy Basil Tofu thingy you're always ordering? With a large Diet Coke. Want some dessert, say, coconut ice cream? I might have some myself to cool off my mouth.”

For once, usually mild-mannered Jimmy looked actually confrontational. “You're taking me with you whether you like it or not.”

“I need a bodyguard to walk across the street to Malee's?”

He scowled. “Lena, sometimes I could…”

“Sometimes you could what?” Not waiting for his reply, I headed out the door. To my dismay, I heard the lock turn behind me, then the pitter-patter of not-so-little feet as Jimmy caught up with me.

“You're not walking away from me this time, Lena.”

“
This
time? Since when have I made a habit of it?”

“Since always.”

It was a perfect Scottsdale day. Still cool for March, but not uncomfortably so. Fleecy clouds lazed across an azure sky. As we jaywalked across the street, tourists flowed around us, hardly noticing we were there, although one woman stared at Jimmy as if she'd never seen an Indian before. Thirty or thereabouts, she looked very Midwestern, with pale, clear skin, sleek frosted hair, and tailored casuals that wouldn't have been out of place on a golf course. Her glossed smile, when she turned it on Jimmy, was singles-bar-ready, and for some reason that irritated me. My irritation increased when Jimmy smiled back. He was such a sucker where women were concerned.

“Pretty, isn't she?” he murmured.

“If you like the type.”

“What type?”

The woman halted at the opposite curb, sending come-and-get-me messages to Jimmy from across the street.

“Which do you want, lunch or a date? Make up your mind, 'cause I'm starving.” Leaving him to his fate, I walked into Malee's and fumbled my way through the relative darkness to a table by the window, where I had a clear view of the office. By the time my eyes adjusted to the gloom, Jimmy had rejoined me.