Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

afternoon before, Sister Ermaline, when it must have happened? Maybe one of the other wives felt something?”
    She sniffed and her hands busied themselves again. “Sister Jean was in here awhile, but then she ran off to do something else. Sister Martha, she was here, too, but she didn’t say anything about omens. Wait. I remember now. Martha wasn’t feeling good, she had one of them migraines of hers. Somebody made her a potato poultice and she went off to her room to lie down.”
    Martha Royal, Meade’s mother, now married to the old goat in that tin trailer. I’d wondered why the Circle of Elders had been so quick to find her another husband, and obviously such an unsuitable one. Now I wondered even more.
    So Jean had been out of the kitchen on an errand, Martha had been lying down in a dark room, and Ermaline had remained alone in the kitchen. The section of the canyon where Rebecca and I had stumbled across Prophet Solomon’s body was close enough to the compound that given enough time, a determined woman could have run down there, grabbed his shotgun and blasted both barrels at him, then get back to the kitchen before her absence was noticed.
    As far as I was concerned, Ermaline was mean enough to kill anyone, but even mean people needed motives. No problem there. Ermaline had been effectively discarded in favor of younger wives, and although the wives of Purity professed to suffer no jealousy, I thought they all protested too much. But had Ermaline been alone long enough to actually do the deed?
    “Sister Ermaline, it seems like you had a terrible amount of work to do all by yourself that day. Didn’t anyone else come in to help you?”
    When she shook her head, the bright kitchen light glinted on her granny glasses, shielding her eyes from me. The air in the kitchen was close and still. I wished someone would open a window.
    “Me need help?” she finally said. “I don’t need help. I never did.”
    “How’d it go, wife?” Saul asked me as I bustled into the kitchen, where he sat drinking a glass of orange juice. Ruby was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lurking about somewhere. After all, this was a woman who’d listened at Saul’s bedroom door to check on the action.
    “Fine.” I put the plate Sister Jean had given me down in front of him. “Coleslaw. Sloppy Joes.”
    A big grin spread across his face. “And did my beloved wife cook all this for me?”
    “You don’t cook coleslaw,” I answered primly. “You mix it. And yes, I mixed it with my own two hands. The Sloppy Joes come to you courtesy of Sister Jean. They’re her specialty.”
    “Ah, Sister Jean.” He smiled. As he ate with every indication of pleasure, for which I felt inordinately proud, he leaned toward me and asked in a low voice, “Find out anything interesting?”
    “Only that Jean, Martha, and Ermaline all had the opportunity to kill the prophet.”
    He looked appalled. “Come on, now.”
    I leaned close enough to him to smell Sloppy Joes on his breath. “Prophet Solomon was shot, remember, and most women can use a shotgun if they have to. By the way, how much do you know about Ermaline? Was her marriage to Solomon happy? Or at least as happy as it could be, considering the situation here.”
    He chewed quietly for a while, thinking. Then, “Well, I’ve heard stories but you’ve got to understand that they’re just stories. I don’t know how accurate they are.”
    “Let me worry about that.”
    He sighed and put his fork down. “Ermaline might be crabby, but she’s a good woman underneath.”
    Why was it that whenever someone started telling you what a good person someone was “underneath” you prepared to hear something nasty about them?
    “Ermaline started having trouble with Martha a few years back over some little something, and Solomon took Martha’s side. They say that Solomon stopped sleeping with Ermaline then and she took it pretty hard. I guess she wanted another baby, but at her age, that was pretty much impossible. Have you noticed that the women here compete over how many kids they have?”
    I nodded. “It’s kind of hard to miss.”
    “Anyway, people say Ermaline never used to be such a good cook, that she started studying all those cookbooks and stuff just to please Solomon, sort of like she was trying to lure him back to her bed with tuna noodle casseroles.”
    “You don’t know what caused the original trouble between Ermaline and Martha?” I, for one,