Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

exclamation she might utter, I left the house, forcing myself to look as if I were merely taking another of my canyon strolls. I ambled several yards behind the children until they reached a large open space between the houses, then quickened my pace until I caught up with Rebecca.
    “Rebecca, please don’t react or say anything,” I said quietly, coming alongside her. “I don’t want anyone to realize we know each other.”
    For a moment, I thought I’d blown it, because Rebecca stopped dead in her tracks, her face lit with joy. But then my words sank in and she smiled at her friends and started walking toward the playground again. Intent upon their own fun, they hadn’t noticed the exchange.
    “I’m going to continue on to the mesquite grove at the edge of the canyon. Play with your friends for a while, then come find me.”
    Her lips hardly moved as she whispered, “Don’t go in the canyon, though, okay? It floods pretty bad when it rains.”
    Her concern renewed my confidence in her. “Don’t worry. I know all about it.”
    About twenty minutes later, Rebecca joined me under a dripping mesquite, her face flushed and happy. She gave me a big hug. “Oh, Lena! It’s so great to see you again! I missed you!”
    “I’ve missed you too, but I can’t say I’m happy to see you here. Don’t you realize the dangerous position you’ve put me in? Your mother in?”
    Her smile faded. “Yes, I know the position I’ve put my mother
and
Jimmy’s cousins in. That’s why I’m here. I heard the CPS people talking to them, saying they had to give me up. But Lena, they refused to! They said CPS could haul them all off to jail before they gave me back to my dad.”
    “Rebecca, CPS couldn’t…”
    She didn’t let me finish. “My mom’s already in jail and I didn’t want the same thing to happen to them. Or you, either. I can’t keep letting people get in trouble over me.”
    I shook my head. “The last thing your mother wants is for you to move back to Purity.”
    “But that’s the whole point, don’t you see? Everyone believes my mother killed Prophet Solomon to keep me out of Purity, but I figured that if I made everyone think I’m not afraid of this place at all, they’d realize Mom had no reason to kill him.”
    I digested this. “You really think that’ll fly in court?”
    She nodded. “It was the least I could do for her. So I called Dad at his hotel and told him to meet me at the old Circle K on the reservation, then I snuck away.”
    “Oh, Rebecca. Weren’t you worried your dad might try to marry you off again?”
    Rebecca assumed that look of teenage intellectual superiority that maddens parents as well as private investigators. “You just don’t understand, Lena. All I had to do was talk to Dad and let him know my feelings. I didn’t have time to do that before, you know. I thought the marriage stuff was all a joke, some silly thing these old people just talked about but didn’t really do. By the time I realized Dad really did plan to make me marry that old man, you showed up. Anyway, I made Dad promise he’d drop the marriage routine.”
    I groaned inwardly at the folly of youth. What point would there be in telling her I didn’t share her trust in Abel Corbett’s ability to listen to reason? Any man so morally corrupted that he’d trade his thirteen-year-old daughter to an elderly man for a couple of sixteen-year-olds had moved far beyond wisdom
or
trust. So I said nothing. But I couldn’t stop thinking of those two young girls Abel Corbett had been promised in exchange for Rebecca. Solomon might be dead, but the girls were still alive and available for trade. Abel wanted them. How far would he go to get them?
    Then again, Purity had a new prophet. Davis had clamped down on forced marriages to little girls. Maybe…
    I pushed that hope aside. “Listen to me, Rebecca. I know you think you’re doing the right thing for your mother and Jimmy’s cousins, and maybe it’ll even work out the way you want it to, but you need to be very, very careful.”
    “Believe me, I’ll stay away from the Circle of Elders. I don’t want them to get any weird ideas. And I’ll make sure nobody figures out we know each other.”
    She still didn’t get it. “Rebecca, it’s dangerous here! Somebody on this compound murdered Prophet Solomon. If your mother didn’t do it, then who did?”
    A little of that naive confidence faded from her face. “I guess…I guess…A passing tramp,