Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

now.”
    “Didn’t you ever feel jealous?”
    She shook her head. “Maybe if I’d ever loved Solomon, but we girls in Purity aren’t raised to fall in love. We’re raised to obey.”
    “How does it work? Do you come in to breakfast one morning and see a new face in the kitchen?”
    She laughed again. “Oh, no! The wives get plenty of warning. When Prophet Solomon decided to marry Rebecca, he sat us all down together and told us what he was planning. He read from all the places in Scripture where it talks about the old prophets’ many wives. Not that he needed to. All us women have heard those Scriptures so often that we know them by heart.”
    Then her face took on a shamed expression. “Lately, though, just before Solomon was killed, he told us he’d decided to take two wives at once. Rebecca and one other girl. He reminded us he was growing old and wanted to make certain he had enough children to insure him the highest level of Heaven. And, uh, he began reading other things to us.”
    I sat up straight. “Like what? His ‘Gospel’? Or pornography?” I meant it as a half-joke, but from her expression, I wondered if I might have been right.
    She shook her head, but the embarrassment didn’t go away. “No, no. He read from the Book of Genesis, about Adam and Eve and their children. He read the same passages every night for a month, right up until the night he died.”
    The Book of Genesis. “That’s the bit about the Garden of Eden, isn’t it? So what was he leading up to? Did he want you to throw away your granny dresses and run around naked?”
    My attempt at humor fell flat again, because she got up and walked to the window. She stood there for a few moments, and when she finally turned back to me, I saw tears in her eyes.
    “You’ve seen Cora, right? She used to help us in the kitchen. She looks a lot like Cynthia.”
    “The little platinum blond girl? Gorgeous little thing, but a bit, ah…”
    “A bit slow. Yeah, her. She’s Ermaline’s daughter. Cynthia’s full sister.”
    I hadn’t known that. Of course, the Byzantine family structures in Purity constantly amazed me.
    “Anyway, Solomon read the Garden of Eden story over and over to us, and then started quizzing us on it.” She stared at me as if expecting me to go, “Aha!”
    But I didn’t go “Aha!” Despite the efforts of one of my more decent foster fathers, a Baptist minister, my knowledge of Scripture remained weak. I shrugged in bafflement.
    Jean sighed. “One of the questions Solomon asked us was, ‘Who did Adam and Eve’s children marry?’”
    “Beats me. Maybe God made more people.”
    She shook her head. “My husband’s answer was that Adam and Eve’s children married each other.”
    “Wait a minute, you mean…”
    “Sister married brother. Not only that, but Solomon said Adam mated with his own daughters.”
    At this stage in the game, nothing surprised me very much, but to see incest trumpeted as a religious tenet appalled me. Somehow managing to keep the disgust out of my voice, I said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Jean, but are you telling me that Solomon planned to marry Cora, his own daughter? His
retarded
daughter?” I was even too shocked to be P.C. about it.
    “I’m afraid so. He told us that if it was good enough for the Old Testament, it was good enough for him. Ermaline wasn’t happy and tried to talk him out of it, but she finally had to back down. What else could she do?”
    I knew what else she could do. She could have killed the disgusting old pervert.
    But I didn’t say that. “What about the other people in the compound? What would they think of such an incestuous marriage?”
    Jean sighed. “It’s been done before. Martha Royal was herself the granddaughter of such a marriage. And if you want to know the truth, my own father was Prophet Solomon’s brother. My husband was my uncle.”
    When I left the house a few minutes later, my mouth tasted sour and not from the unsweetened orange juice. Not for the first time did I rejoice that someone killed the perverted old prophet. I just needed to prove the killer wasn’t my client.
    All I wanted to do when I got back to Saul’s was take a bath and wash the sins of Purity away from me, but such comfort wasn’t to be. Davis Royal had dropped by and told Saul to send me over to the school. He wanted me to sit in on a couple of seventh grade classes, see where the curriculum stood, and suggest improvement.
    “Davis came here