Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

her face. “He’s nasty.” Then she began playing patty-cake with a younger girl.
    “She sure got that right,” Cynthia said, recovering. “But Lena, if I leave, who’ll help the kids around here?”
    I shifted the little girl, who had grown heavy in my arms. She giggled, and leaned against me, which made me look more closely at her. Adorable, but with the same vacant eyes as Cora. I closed my eyes for a moment, waiting for the wave of rage to pass. When it did, I opened them again.
    “She’s retarded,” I said.
    Cynthia nodded. “But she’ll be fine. She’ll still be able to make a life. You know how things are around here.”
    I sure did. But I wondered about her. “Have you ever been upstairs at the clinic?”
    She looked baffled. “No. Why would I? That’s where the Circle of Elders meets.”
    Just what I’d suspected. The soundproofing was evidence that the male rulers of Purity wanted to keep the compound’s genetic problems secret, perhaps fearing that if the girls and young women knew the extent of the defects caused by inbreeding, they might start refusing to marry their relatives. As it stood, though, the females’ continued ignorance gave the males exactly what they needed—unlimited power.
    Well, I could do something about that. I told her the clinic’s ugly secret.
    “And it’ll only get worse,” I finished up. “Cora and this little girl here, who will they marry, Cynthia? Their cousins? Their
brothers?
And what kind of defects will
their
children have? Now that you know what you know, are you going to stick around and watch the show, just like everybody else?”
    Cynthia, who had grown ashen while I recounted what I’d seen on the second floor, looked as sick as I felt. “That’s why the Circle of Elders won’t let most of us go up there! Just some of the older women.”
    “And women like Hanna, women with such low self-esteem that they probably believe their children’s problems are
their
fault.”
    With that, I set the little girl down and left Cynthia to think about the future of the children she loved.
    I continued across Prophet’s Park to Saul’s house, where I found him knee-deep in boxes he’d picked up at the grocery store in Zion City. Thumping sounds from the bedroom told me that Ruby had started packing in there.
    “What a mess,” Saul grumbled, as he carefully stacked his old vinyl 78s into one of the boxes.
    I grunted as I headed for the shower once more. “It’s a mess, all right.”
    In the shower, I turned up the hot water as high as I could stand it. As I scrubbed, mud from my morning run created a dark whirlpool around the drain, vaguely resembling the dirty water in Paiute Canyon. I pushed that memory away, preferring not to dwell on the animals lost to the flood. Closing my eyes, I let the hot water needle my body. I’d seen so much sorrow centered around children lately. Esther. Virginia. Hanna. Even Miles and Dwayne Alder. Could there be anything more horrible than to lose a child, even when the child was a half-crazy criminal?
    I tilted my face toward the spray, hoping to wash my memories away. Minutes later, the memories remained, but at least my sore muscles stopped aching. As the tenderness and tension fell away so did my mind’s resistance. By the time I’d stepped out of the shower, I knew who’d killed Prophet Solomon.
    And why.
    Oh, it had all been so obvious. So obvious that I wondered how many people in Purity already knew the truth. But truth and law didn’t mean much to them, did it? For decades they’d covered up rapes, wife-beatings, and infanticide, so there was no reason to believe they would suddenly feel compelled to run to the authorities over a matter they’d consider private.
    No, Purity liked to solve its own problems in its own way. Even when the solution was simply to do nothing.
    Sheriff Benson shared their moral lethargy, too. Like the rest of the Arizona Strip’s polygamists, he cared more about keeping his illegal lifestyle intact than he did serving the law. Tony Lomahguahu had called it right; some people preferred walking in darkness instead of seeing the light.
    I dried quickly. After putting on a clean granny dress, I hurried down the hallway, pausing once to make certain Ruby was still busy packing in the bedroom.
    “Where’s your tape recorder?” I asked Saul.
    He looked up from a box filled with papers and gestured toward the desk. “Top drawer. What do you need it for?”
    “To tape a