Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

than ever.
    “Wait a minute!” he shouted. “You can’t just start overhauling everything to suit yourself! The Circle of Elders will have something to say about that.”
    Davis pasted his smile back on. “We’ll talk in a couple of weeks, at the next regularly scheduled Circle meeting.”
    Graff refused to be put off. “All these problems you’re talking about, the media and everything, they’ll all go away once they get that…that…
woman
back up here in jail where she belongs.” The way he said “woman” made the word sound like an expletive.
    Davis didn’t address himself to Earl’s overt misogyny. “I don’t think we can relax until she’s been tried and found guilty. In fact, the trial might be the worst part of all this. Her lawyer will have to come up with some kind of a defense, Brother Earl, which means there’ll no doubt be some finger-pointing this way. Like I said earlier, everyone needs to be on their toes. Remember, my father was preparing to marry her thirteen-year-old daughter, and that might not play well in the media no matter what our friends do to hush it up.”
    With that, he looked in my direction. “You newcomers, I advise you to be especially careful. Keep modesty in your words and deeds at all times.”
    Modesty in my words and deeds. Too bad my partner Jimmy wasn’t here. He’d fall out of his chair laughing.
    But Saul and I dutifully nodded as Davis went on to recap what everyone already knew: that Esther was awaiting extradition to Utah; that her trial for murder would follow shortly; that her conviction was pretty much a done deal.
    “There are two witnesses who saw her arguing with Prophet Solomon the evening he was killed,” Davis continued. “And we all know that when she still lived here, there were times that she…”
    A familiar voice interrupted him. I looked over and saw that old Jacob Waldman had risen to his feet, his eyes glinting with a mean, hard light. “The Lord will judge me harshly because I have raised up the Whore of Babylon.”
    Davis looked startled, then quickly recovered. “Now, now, Brother Jacob. We know you did your best to raise Sister Esther in the ways of the Lord, but sometimes, no matter how hard we try, our children disappoint us. Remember that she left the compound and lived Outside for many years. We shouldn’t be surprised that she succumbed to Satan’s wiles.”
    “She ate from the tree of Satan,” Jacob Waldman agreed. “Perhaps with blood atonement…?”
    Davis’s eyes widened, and around the room, a dozen throats cleared at once. “Brother Jacob, there will be no more talk of blood atonement in Purity,” he said firmly. “That manner of thinking belongs to the past.”
    “But God demands blood atonement for sins like hers! He’s demanded blood atonement before, and on each occasion, we’ve complied.”
    Davis slammed the gavel against the lectern hard enough to make some nearby ferns wobble. “I said there will be no more talk of blood atonement, Brother Jacob!
Do you understand?
”
    I was vaguely familiar with the old Mormon philosophy of blood atonement, which meant that a sin against God could only be erased by the shedding of the sinner’s blood. Unless I had totally misinterpreted Brother Jacob’s words, this philosophy, supposedly discarded when the official LDS church relinquished polygamy, was still being practiced in Purity. If so, whom had they killed? And why?
    As I stared at the old man, his hard eyes began to lose their focus again. “God says…God says…”
    With that, an elderly woman sitting nearby took him by the hand and, with the help of two burly men, hustled him away.
    The room heaved a collective sigh of relief, not the least of which came from Davis Royal.
    “We must pray for Brother Jacob.” Davis’s voice sounded shaky. Then, recovering, he said, “Now let’s get this meeting back on track. Does anyone else have information that they might share about our recent tragedy? Anything we can tell the police in order to expedite the investigation and trial?”
    So that we can get the cops and the media off our backs as quickly as possible,
went the unspoken message.
    “As much as it pains me to say this about a woman, Esther did always have a temper,” Martha Royal offered, her Valkyrie face serene in its condemnation. “She was never a Godly child. Why, once I even saw her strike one of her brothers.”
    Davis lifted his eyebrows, aghast, no doubt, at such an unwomanly act.