Desert Redemption

by Betty Webb

  Reservation Woman and I had something else in common: I had never been identified, either. Thirty-five years after I’d been found comatose on a Phoenix street, I still didn’t know my real name. I didn’t want that to happen to her. I wanted to give Reservation Woman a name and a decent place to rest, even if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket.

  Picking up my cell, I punched in Rudy Foreman’s number at GESKO.

  “Put a rush on those tests,” I told him.

  “There’s a double sci-fi feature tonight at Harkins Valley Art, and I’ve planned to…”

  “I’ll pay double.”

  “Make it triple.”

  “Rudy.”

  A brief silence, then, “Hell, I’ve already seen them both dozens of times.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jimmy and I had long ago noticed that Mondays were always Desert Investigations’ busiest days because of the weekend’s general lack of structure. Friday nights, Saturdays, and Sundays, drunks indulged in barroom brawls; ex-husbands hung around their former wives’ homes, making threats; and teens shoplifted from Target. The bill for all this mischief came due every Monday, when some people rethought their messy lives and simply vanished.

  After fielding a host of calls about missing mothers, fathers, and teens, I took a break by turning on the office TV to watch U.S. Senatorial Candidate Juliana Thorsson deliver a rousing speech at the Scottsdale City Council’s annual prayer breakfast. Ignoring Jimmy’s cynical laughter, I listened to her promise prosperity for all, an end to sexual trafficking, and a return to the religion of your choice—as long as it was Christianity, I thought. Juliana lied even better than I did.

  To the uninformed viewer, Juliana looked great, with her sleek blond hair and skillfully made-up face. But when the camera zoomed in on her, I could see shadows underneath her blue eyes and deep lines bracketing her mouth. She and I had spent half of Sunday night searching more of Ali’s and Kyle’s former hangouts, always coming up empty. The kids had even had the good sense to leave their cell phones behind so they couldn’t be tracked. There being nothing I could do about them for the present, I listened to Juliana’s speech all the way through, turning the TV off only when the council members rose as one in loud applause.

  People can be so gullible.

  “I don’t see how you can listen to that,” Jimmy said, a scowl on his normally pleasant face. Like most Indians, he disliked politicians, regardless of which side of the political fence they were on. Politicians had never served his people well.

  “I used to be a cop,” I reminded him, “and thus have a high tolerance for bullshit.”

  “At least you’re not as bad as your pal Sylvie.”

  “Cynics like her are just brokenhearted idealists.”

  The phone rang. Juliana’s private number.

  “Everybody done praying?” I asked.

  “Damned if I know. I’m calling from a ladies’ room stall. You hear anything about the kids?”

  “Nope.”

  “No update from the cops?”

  “Nope.”

  She made a noise that sounded somewhere between a cough and a sob. “At noon I’ll be over in Phoenix speaking at Victims of Violence, and after that maybe we could drive around some more. We might get lucky and spot them.”

  I looked at the clock—it was eight forty-five a.m.—and did some quick math. “It’s only been ten hours since we cased the neighborhood for them.”

  “Nothing wrong with double-checking.”

  Remembering those receipts for camping gear, I knew that sticking close to their old stamping ground would not be fruitful, but worry makes even the smartest among us lose our minds. I could have parroted the standard platitudes—the authorities are on it, the kids are smart enough to keep safe, they’d eventually come home on their own—but I didn’t. Regardless of our differences, Juliana was a friend, and you don’t desert your friends just because they’ve gone crazy.

  “See you when you get here,” I sighed, hanging up.

  From across the room, Jimmy called, “Sucker!”

  “You heard that conversation?”

  “They could probably hear her in Tucson. Guess this means you’ll be late for dinner again.”

  I gave him a don’t-judge-me-just-pity-me look. “Guess so.”

  He grunted, whether from irritation or sympathy, I couldn’t tell.

  At ten, Rudy Foreman called with the results on EarthWay’s produce and water.

  “Haven’t seen so much coliform bacteria since 2010, when I was a volunteer in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew,” he said before rolling out of list of the creepy-crawlies he’d found in the samples. “The well water wasn’t too bad, if you discount its high arsenic levels and a scattering of cryptosporidium parvum, but the creek water is a veritable nightmare of giardia lamblia. Some animal’s been shitting in that creek.” He paused. “Or died in it.”

  “Translate what you just told me into English.”

  “Arsenic and cryptosporidium, bad. Giardia lamblia, worse. The giardia might not kill you unless you’re very old or very young or have a compromised immune system, but it’ll give you the runs, maybe even Hep A. Talk about a sure-fire diet aid. One more thing. Judging from the amount of giardia I found floating around in the veggies you brought in, those ‘raw water’ idiots must have been using the creek water to irrigate their gardens, and since they practice ‘raw food,’ too...”

  “The giardia wouldn’t be boiled away.” I remembered Sunflower’s red-headed baby and the too-thin children I’d seen at EarthWay. “Can tainted water be transferable by nursing?”

  “If Mommy has bugs, baby will, too. Look, Lena, this needs to be reported to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, and if kids are involved, as you say they are, probably to the Department of Child Safety, too.”

  He promised to email the results to me within the next few minutes, and was as good as his word. An hour later I was finally off the phone with ADEQ and DCS. Environmental Quality promised to send a team out to test the water, and Child Safety mumbled something about getting a social worker up as soon as possible. Like all government agencies, the resources of both were stretched ridiculously thin. Child Safety, for instance, received upwards of a thousand reported cases of child abuse per week, and because of budget cuts, didn’t have enough caseworkers available to investigate them all. It was my guess that on the child abuse scale—yes, there was one—giardia poisoning didn’t rate as highly as broken bones.

  With growing concern, I placed a call to Pete Ventarro at the Medical Examiner’s office.

  “Make it quick,” he said. “We just received two more unidentifieds.”

  “Megan Unruh and that other underweight unidentified female from last week. Were either of them afflicted with giardia lamblia or its friends?”

  “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

  “Quit screwing around, Pete.”

  “You’re no fun. Okay, since you asked so sweetly, the answer’s no and yes. The Unruh woman, no giardi. Barring the effects of a little decomp, her blood was clean as the proverbial whistle. But that unidentified from the Rez, different story. She was crawling with giardia and a whole bunch of other microscopic creepy-crawlies. The woman must have been drinking from a sewer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you asked me for the cause of death, that’s why. Cause of death was a coronary…”

  I cut him off. “Caused by malnutrition.”

  “Exactly. What’s this all about?”

  “Don’t know yet. But thanks.”

  After hanging up, I sat there for a few minutes, staring out the window, trying to put things together. Both Megan Unruh and Reservation Woman had died from malnutrition-related coronaries, but only one of them bore the signs of a possible visit to EarthWay or another place like it. Whil
e I was watching several tote bag-laden tourists exit Gilbert Ortega’s Indian jewelry store, I noticed Sharona Gavalan walk by on the way to her art gallery.

  Time to be the bearer of bad tidings.

  When Juliana showed up at Desert Investigations a few minutes after eleven, I was still shaken over the way Sharona had taken the news about Megan. She’d become so pale that one of her customers, a lean whippet of a man with a New Jersey accent, asked if he should call 9-1-1. Hearing that, Sharona recovered enough to shoo out the customers before shutting down the gallery for the day.

  “What’s wrong!?” Juliana shrieked, the minute she saw me. “You hear something bad about the kids!?”

  I shook my head. “Calm yourself. I just came back from delivering bad news to somebody. As it turns out, she and another person might have had a closer relationship than I’d believed, so I’m not feeling super-confident about my judgment right now.”

  “Join the club,” she said, bitterly.

  This time Juliana insisted we ignore Ali’s and Kyle’s regular haunts and hit the parking lots of local wilderness areas: South Mountain, McDowell Mountain Regional Park, McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and all entrances to the Superstitions. It turned out to be a waste of time because we found no eight-year-old white Hyundais with the right license plates. Of course, license plates can be changed, so when we were at the Superstitions’ Peralta Trailhead lot and I spotted a car resembling the Etheridges’ beat-up sedan, I peered through the window, only to see the passenger’s seat filled with textbooks on urban design. Then I noticed a dust-covered ASU sticker on the window.

  A little after four, we gave up, and joined the rush hour traffic on Highway 60.

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Juliana said.

  “Hmmm.”

  “They could have been camping out in any one of those places.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”

  “I never said that.”

  “You know what I found out Ali’s friends call me?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “They call me the ‘egg mom.’”

  I winced, only partially because a chromed-up Chevy Silverado swerved in front of me, causing me to slam on the Jeep’s brakes. “I thought you didn’t know.”

  “Ali was angry with me when I cut her TV time down to an hour, so in retaliation she told me that’s what the kids were saying. How do you think it makes me feel?”

  “Not great, I imagine.”

  “But they call the other one her birth mother.”

  “Technically, that’s correct. And at least it isn’t ‘Vagina Mother.’”

  But my attempt at a joke failed.

  “I can’t seem to do anything right,” Juliana mourned.

  I wasn’t about to let that pass. “This, from the Honorable Juliana Thorsson, rising political star with two terms as a U.S. Congresswoman, currently the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate?”

  “Probably failed Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate,” she muttered, looking out at the traffic.

  “Your kid runs away so now everything in your life is a failure, even your career? C’mon, you know better than that, Juliana. You’ve accomplished amazing things. Medaled in the Olympics, won…” I rolled out a long list of her achievements over the years, but she was too mired in her full-on guilt trip to pay attention.

  “I should have been nicer to her,” she moaned. “Let her invite her friends over more often. Let her watch all the TV she wanted. I was so strict I drove her away.”

  “If you hadn’t been strict, she would still have run off with Kyle, maybe even sooner. Teenagers…”

  “I probably shouldn’t have gotten involved in the IVF program to begin with.”

  I wasn’t about to let that one go by. Steering my way through traffic over to the freeway’s emergency lane, I stopped the Jeep and faced her. “If you hadn’t donated your eggs, there wouldn’t be any Ali at all. Is that the kind of world you’d prefer?”

  Juliana stared back at me in shock. “Of course not!”

  “Well, then?”

  She looked out the window again, where a jackrabbit was hopping along the cement berm, a death wish, if there ever was one. “Am I ever going to stop feeling guilty about everything I do or don’t do?”

  “No. You’re a mother.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jimmy was still in the office when I made it back to Desert Investigations. Because of the afternoon sun streaming through the plate-glass window, his black hair was streaked with gold. God, he looked good. He smelled good, too, having taken time out for a visit to the gym, and a quick shower afterwards.

  “From the expression on your face I take it you didn’t find the kids.”

  “No, and I didn’t expect to.” I sat down and plopped my tote on the floor by my desk, savoring the comforting clunk of my .38. “They have more sense than to pitch their tent anywhere near Scottsdale, but Juliana wouldn’t listen.”

  “Better be careful with her. Politicians have a way of using you, then dropping you.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. However, Ali’s my goddaughter, so I’m stuck.”

  “Myself, I think they’re headed for the border.”

  “I’ve heard rumors to that effect, and have been in touch with officials on both sides. No sightings.”

  “Kids can be sneaky, so don’t rule it out. Onto other matters…I spent much of the afternoon researching those people at EarthWay, like you wanted, and I came up with some troubling stuff.”

  “More troubling than contaminated water?”

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that.” He gestured toward my computer. “We were low on toner so I emailed you the files.”

  It seemed to take forever for my computer to warm up, time enough to remember that we were overdue for a new system. What with everything that had been going on—the new house, Ali, Chelsea, Megan Unruh, and the other emaciated body—we just hadn’t gotten around to updating yet. When the computer finally came alive, I saw that Jimmy’s handiwork took up more than twelve hundred KBs of info.

  “What is this, War and Peace?”

  “You wanted everything I could find, so there it is. Turns out EarthWay has been around for a while, operating in different places under different names, but always with the same…ah, leader.”

  “Mother Eve.”

  “You mean Priscilla Marie Heywood Stahl, oldest of the twelve Heywood children of White Bear, Minnesota; also known as Mother Priscilla in Madison, Wisconsin; inmate number 4768329 at Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Mother Marie in Deer Lick, Kentucky; Mother Priscilla in Marengo, Indiana; Mother Elaine in Sparks, Nevada...”

  My eyes wanted to bug out, but I don’t like Jimmy to see me surprised by human villainy, so I shut them and took a deep breath.

  Not noticing, he continued, “And most recently, Mother Eve of Orange Valley, Arizona.”

  A dull throb began above my right eye. “Just hit me with the highlights.”

  “Then here goes. Priscilla Heywood comes came from a long line of grifters, and when her parents died in a trailer fire—that’s what all fourteen of them were living in—she took up the reins. One of the family’s scams, taking ‘advance money’ to build new roofs that were never built, landed her a three-year stretch in Taycheedah. Upon release, she cut ties with her family and married Robert Stahl, who’d become one of her pen pals while she was serving time. For five years she stayed out of trouble, but then, oops, she allegedly tried to kill her husband via rat poison. She claimed it was an accident, and thanks to a lone jury holdout, a male overwhelmed by her sincerity and then-beauty, she emerged from court with a Not Guilty verdict. She vanishes off the radar for a while, then reappears in Deer Lick, Kentucky, as Mother Marie, beloved organizer of People of the E
arth, a small commune back in the piney woods. The commune went bust, as they so often do, and she next emerges in Marengo, Indiana, as Mother Priscilla, leader of yet another commune. This one developed serious problems when she forced stringent ‘health practices’ upon her followers, such as no meds of any kind for any illness, no ER or other hospital visits, home births for all, etcetera, etcetera. The commune shut down after a fatal breech birth, followed by a man dying of sepsis from untreated cuts and abrasions received while attempting to work a rocky field with a wooden plowshare.”

  “Any arrests out of that one?”

  “Just lawsuits by the dead folks’ parents. After the dust settled, she took off to Sparks, Nevada, where she changed her name to Mother Elaine and ran another failed commune. Now here she is, in the great state of Arizona, shepherding yet another flock, and preaching the fabuloso health benefits of raw food and raw water. Oh. One other thing I should have mentioned. ‘Mother Eve’ has no medical training. She lasted a year and a half at community college, and that’s it. But…” He raised a forefinger and smiled. “…she does have a high six-figure bank account in her own legal name, mostly in long-term CDs. And where did she get the money? From the usual sources. Before being accepted as members of her communes, her followers must turn over any property they happened to have—inheritance, houses, cars, trailers, whatever—and she immediately liquidates it. Some of her followers have jobs, and they obediently turn their earnings over to her, too. Don’t ask how I found that out, ’cause then you’ll be an accomplice.”

  It would be easy to say that Mother Eve’s gullible followers deserved to be fleeced, but I kept picturing sweet Sunflower and her red-headed baby. They didn’t deserve to be the victims of a scam artist, but my head hurt too much to worry about that now. Question: What’s the difference between a commune led by a grifter, and a cult? Answer: Damned if I know. The Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, had started out as a peaceful, back-to-the-land religious commune, but ten years later they’d earned the cult designation with the fiery deaths of almost eighty men, women, and children who died proclaiming Koresh the Son of God.