Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

again. Dramatically. For the past five years, the number of dead children had escalated alarmingly, illustrating that Martha was far from the only woman who’d lost several babies.
    Or murdered them.
    I remembered Andrea Yates, the overwhelmed Texas mother who’d drowned her five children in the family bathtub. Were these rows and rows of dead children the desperate acts of women like her, whose bodies and minds had been pushed beyond their resources? Were the women all covering up for each other? And had Prophet Solomon, like myself, finally figured out what the women were doing?
    And had one of them killed him to keep him silent?
    Then I remembered Hanna, the battered-looking woman who’d barely been able to limp her way across Ermaline’s kitchen. She’d recently given birth to a baby everyone described as frail. Were the women merely setting the scene for another infanticide?
    I set out for Purity as quickly as my mud-encrusted feet would allow.
    When I arrived back at the compound the streets were almost deserted. Cautious, I went around to the clinic’s back door, which was almost hidden from sight behind a collection of outbuildings. Good. If I was right, my discovery would put me in grave danger, not from the compound’s men, but from its women.
    I opened the door only to be faced with a steep staircase. Ignoring that for now, I walked down a long hallway lined with narrow, unpainted doors, even though the rough wood provided a sticky playground for dozens of tiny fingerprints. In keeping with the compound’s cheapjack construction, none of the doors had locks. So much for privacy. No carpet, no tile, covered the clinic’s bare floorboards, either, and the odor of Lysol in the air did little to mask the sour smell of urine.
    I was surprised to hear the voices of so many babies and children. They didn’t sound especially sick, but what did I know? Then I remembered the great size of the clinic. The building didn’t function simply as a maternity ward, but as a hospital for all manner of ills. Perhaps these children suffered from something communicable, such as chicken pox or measles. The dead prophet hadn’t believed in modern medicine, just the power of prayer, so the compound’s children had probably not been inoculated against the diseases that ravaged their ancestors. Perhaps these were children who were being kept isolated until they were no longer infectious.
    Still, the fact that the Prophet and his followers would allow their children to risk the more serious side effects of measles—deafness, blindness, and the mental retardation that already existed in Purity—made me grind my teeth. Why couldn’t I hear God grinding His? However, uninoculated children weren’t my problem at the moment. My immediate task was to find Hanna and her baby. What if the baby appeared to be in danger?
    I had no choice. Even though my job here was to find out who murdered Prophet Solomon and not to rescue babies, I couldn’t let the little creature meet the same fate as had the others in the cemetery. If I had to figure out another way to help Rebecca, then so be it.
    As I crept along the hallway, my wet shoes making squishing noises on the bare boards, I wondered which of the many doors hid Hanna. Forcing myself to focus, I stopped and listened for an infant’s cries above the happy babble of older children. Nothing. Either I was too late, or the baby merely slept. I prayed it was only the latter.
    Then I heard it, coming from toward the front of the building.
There.
A thin wail. Weak, but proof Hanna’s baby was still alive.
    Vowing to keep it that way, I followed its cries.
    I had almost made it to the door behind which I’d guessed Hanna lay when I heard another baby in the room next to it. Then another baby from the room on the opposite side. Oh, hell. The place was crawling with infants. It made sense that, with all the pregnant women I’d seen walking around the compound, several had given birth more or less at the same time. The chances of my homing in on the right room had begun to lessen, but if I walked in on someone, I’d just tell them I was dying to see Hanna’s sweet little baby.
    My lie prepared, I opened the first door. The room contained little furniture except for a large chest and the row of high-sided bassinets lined up against one of the unpainted walls. The bassinets, some with pink ribbons attached to them, others with blue, appeared empty, and I had almost closed the door to