Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

was close to Father Prophet, closer than I was, ’cause I’m just a girl.”
    Just a girl
. Just a girl who had E. L. Doctorow smuggled into a polygamy compound. I wondered how many other bright young women were leading lives of quiet desperation. But there was nothing I could do about that now.
    “Ah, I heard that your father was found in the canyon,” I said. “Do you think it was a hunting accident?”
    She murmured a few words to the toddler, then set him down. “They say it was murder, that a woman killed him, but I don’t know. He liked to hunt for rabbits and stuff, so when he didn’t come home for dinner, most of us thought that was what he was doing. But the men say he’d already started back home when that woman, when she…”
    “When she killed him?” I finished for her. “But why…”
    Before I could finish, a nearby child screamed and we both turned around. A little girl had tripped over an abandoned tire and lay struggling in the dirt. Cynthia ran forward and picked her up.
    “Hush, sweetie,” she murmured, as she tended to her scraped knee. “I’ll kiss it and make it well.”
    The girl sobbed into Cynthia’s apron for a few minutes, then finally ran off to rejoin her playmates, giving the tire she’d tripped over a wide berth.
    “You’d think the men would haul this junk away,” I said, gesturing to the tire, the junked cars, the other litter. “It’s not safe.”
    “You’d think.” For the first time her voice sounded bitter. “Last week one of the little boys slashed his leg on that old car over there.” She pointed to a rusting sedan which looked ancient enough to have been driven by Henry Ford himself. “I carried him over to the clinic and it took fifteen stitches to close the wound.”
    “The clinic has a doctor?”
    “No, but Sister Lovey and Sister Judith can both sew up cuts. They’re teaching me, too. I’d really like to be a doctor, but only boys get to go to college, and they study law. You know, to help out with Purity’s legal stuff. I wish…” Her voice trailed off.
    I would have followed up, but my job here was to find out who killed Prophet Solomon, not investigate the level of Purity’s medical care. Changing the subject, I said, “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about the prophet, so why would that woman want to kill such a great man?”
    Her pretty face, which had momentarily lightened as she tended to the child, darkened again. “From what I heard, he wanted to marry Esther’s daughter. Esther’s the woman they think killed him. Anyway, she didn’t want that. She’d moved to Phoenix and they say she grew away from the church.”
    I played dumb. “If Esther didn’t live here, why was her daughter here?”
    “Abel, Esther’s husband, returned to the church. Leaving Purity, coming back, it’s not that unusual for the young men. They have trouble finding wives, so they try other places. Father Prophet did the same thing when he was younger, but he came back, too. His parents called him the Prodigal Son, just like in the Bible.”
    I tried to hurry her along. “If Abel returned, why didn’t his wife come back, too?”
    “She divorced him. She’d been infected by the Outside. That made him pretty mad so he drove to Scottsdale, that’s somewhere near Phoenix, and got his daughter.”
    “You mean he kidnapped her?”
    She blinked at my question. “Oh, no! You can’t kidnap your own child.”
    I could have disabused her of that idea, but decided instead to take the conversation as far as possible. Unlike most teenagers I’d known back in Scottsdale, she was amazingly pliable. A sign of innocence? Or had she been taught to respect her elders no matter what goofy things they said or did?
    “You know, Cynthia, I think I remember reading something about this in the papers! That girl your father wanted to marry, wasn’t she only thirteen?”
    She looked at the Vermillion Cliffs, so red this morning they appeared to be on fire. “When a girl is old enough to have babies, she’s supposed to get married. I’ll have to get married soon, too. My mother’s been nagging me about it for a long time now.”
    So no medical school. “How old are you?”
    “I’ll be sixteen in a couple of months. That’s pretty late to get married around here.”
    “Sure seems young to me.”
    When she faced me, her face was as troubled as her voice. “Solomon’s Gospel says women must be fruitful if they want to attain Highest Heaven.” But she