Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

with a guy named Tony Lomahguahu. He’s one of the old-timers but he’s still got all his marbles. Anyway, we called the rez and Mr. Lomahguahu is willing to meet you around nine o’clock tomorrow at the Purity Cemetery. You know where that is?”
    “Yeah, it’s not too far from where I used to camp while waiting to grab Rebecca.”
    “Mr. Lomahguahu seemed real interested when we told him about you. He’s no fan of the Purity crowd.”
    “Tell him I’ll be there. Now, anything more?”
    “Murder, fraud, animal dismemberment, child molest. Nah, that’s all.”
    Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, or some such damned thing. That’s what my Baptist foster parents used to tell me, anyway. We chatted some more, then just before I hung up, I asked about Miles Alder and learned that yet another fire had broken out at the tire storage facility.
    “This may be the beginning of the end of Miles’ arson career, though,” Jimmy said. “They caught him at the scene with second degree burns on his hands, reeking of gasoline. The police booked him into the Madison Street Jail.”
    I smiled for the first time that day. “Being kept out of temptation’s way may save his life. It was just a matter of time before the kid went up in flames himself.”
    “Then I’m sorry to tell you his dad bonded him out.”
    When would parents learn? I hung up the phone, feeling sick for more reasons than one.
    “Bad news?” I hadn’t heard Virginia come back into the office, and now she stood over me, a concerned look on her face. How long had she been standing there?
    I made sure she’d closed the office door behind her. “Virginia, why didn’t you tell me that your daughter was one of Prophet Solomon’s wives? And that you were, too? Considering everything, I find that an interesting omission.”
    She paled, and sat down heavily on the sofa. I didn’t join her. Given what I now knew, I wanted as much distance between us as possible.
    “I’m dying to hear your side of the story,” I said, my voice sounding dangerous even to me.
    She sighed. Or was it a sob? “I was
raised
in Purity!”
    “That’s your excuse for sending an innocent fourteen-year-old into the bed of a convicted child molester?” My hands shook so badly I dropped the pencil I’d been clutching.
    Her lower lip quivered. “You don’t know what it’s like, livin’ the way I did, being raised up like that. Your life’s been too different from mine.”
    Right, just one party after another. “Then why don’t you explain it all to me.” I wanted to rip her eyeballs out and shoot pool with them.
    She winced, as if she could read my mind. “Life at Purity was normal life to me, so I didn’t think nothing about what was going on. Dale married me when I was thirteen and I had Alice the followin’ year. I thought it was what God wanted me to do.”
    “When did Solomon enter the picture?”
    “When a tractor rolled over on Dale and killed him. I was fifteen by then and Alice wasn’t quite one year old. The Circle of Elders gave me to Solomon because Dale owed him some money and I turned out to be part of the repayment package. I didn’t know about his problem with kids, I swear! When Alice turned thirteen and he told me he wanted to make us an even closer family, it just didn’t sound all that strange to me. Not then, anyway.”
    She paused a moment, then added, “Lena, when everybody’s told you all your life what’s right and what’s wrong, you never learn how to figure it out for yourself.”
    The office door opened and Leo came in, carrying a stack of papers. He took one look at our faces, and said, “Who died?”
    Virginia gave him a despairing look. “Lena found out about Alice.”
    Leo threw the papers down on the desk and joined his wife on the sofa, putting his arm around her. “So what? You were a different person then.” To me, he said, “You know what the Paiute say: walk a few miles in somebody’s moccasins before you judge them.”
    I snorted. “You don’t have to be a bull to know bullshit when it stinks.”
    He gave me a hard look. “When I met Virginia she’d been living in that hell hole all her life, hadn’t read much other than her schoolbooks and that lunatic Solomon’s ravings. She hardly knew up from down. But since then she’s done what she could to make up for her mistakes. You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Virginia.”
    Urged by her husband, Virginia told me the rest of the short,