Desert Redemption

by Betty Webb

  I had never seen her look so unhappy. “Wish I could tell you, Lena, but the Feds and the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office aren’t telling me everything. Thankfully, I arrived at Kanati while the big roundup was still going on, and overheard a couple of deputies talking about two French nationals locked in the cell next to yours. You know anything about their backgrounds?”

  “Just heard them moaning, that’s all. But what about Gabrielle? Did she know how bad things were?”

  She shook her head. “Never got a chance to talk to her. But those French guys, the youngest was only sixteen, for Christ’s sake. Word is, he might not make it.”

  We stared at each other for a moment, both of us feeling like hell. Teenagers were so easily led. While lying in my hospital bed I’d done some math. My parents had probably been teenagers themselves when they first became involved with The Children of Abraham, way too young to understand what they were signing up for.

  “Do you know where Abraham is now?” I could hardly bring myself to say the old demon’s name.

  “Not specifically, just that everybody in Kanati is being held pending further investigation. In the Arneaults’ and their bodyguards’ cases, that means a jail cell, but I don’t know about the others, like your friend Chelsea. Hell, the whole county’s crawling with lawyers.”

  “Chelsea’s not my friend.”

  “Yeah, yeah, tell me another one.”

  “Forget her. What I need…”

  Before I could finish, Jimmy came through the door carrying a can of Coke Zero. I couldn’t understand why he looked so unhappy until I saw what was following him.

  Two men in black suits.

  Chapter Thirty

  Being interviewed by the Feds is never fun, especially when they’ve already done their homework and know who and what you are. In my case, the “what” meant being one of only three known survivors of The Children of Abraham; the other two were Maurice Abraham Arneault and his skeletal son Adam.

  Since I’d been only four years old when the slaughter happened, there wasn’t a lot I could tell the Feds about those last days—just that Maurice Abraham Arneault, mimicking the deranged behavior of his biblical namesake, had called for the sacrifice of all firstborns. My mother and father attempted to rescue some of the children, but failed. As a result, my father and baby brother had been shot and killed by Adam Arneault, whom I had known only as Golden Boy. I remembered seeing the bodies of Abraham’s oldest son and all the other murdered children, tossed into a mine shaft, but its exact location was a mystery to me. As for my mother, the last time I saw her was when she shot me in a failed attempt to help me escape.

  The only thing Adam had been able to tell me about her was her first name: Helen.

  After a few frustrating hours, the black-suited men left, even more tight-lipped than they’d been upon their arrival. I couldn’t tell if the look on their faces was anger or sorrow.

  But the Feds weren’t my only visitors that day. The other two were more surprising, and considerably more welcome.

  I had been dozing when I heard someone enter my room. Expecting a nurse, I opened my eyes to see Ali and Kyle leaning over my bed. Considering the fact that the two had been hiding out in the Arizona wilderness for almost two weeks, they looked pretty good. Maybe that was because I was looking at them through a godmother’s nonjudgmental eyes.

  “This morning we found a newspaper in the waste bin near where we’d been camping and read what happened.” Ali.

  “So we drove up to see if you were alright.” Kyle.

  “I’m fine and dandy, but you two won’t be once your parents get hold of you.” I hated the wobble in my voice, but at least they had the decency not to call me on it.

  Instead, Ali leaned over and patted me on the shoulder. “They’ve promised not to kill us.”

  “So you’ve already been in touch.”

  “Pay phone in the hospital lobby,” Ali said. “Mom’s driving down to get us.”

  “You realize your stunt probably cost her the election.”

  Ali shrugged. “Eggs and omelets.”

  “What?” My eyes felt hot. Probably something in there.

  “You know, to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”

  “People aren’t eggs, you brat.”

  “Sticks and stones.”

  By sundown the kids were back with their parents and I was sitting in front of the firepit on the Pima Rez, delivered there by Sylvie while Jimmy followed in my Jeep. Given my bandaged arms, I wouldn’t be driving for a while. As I watched the flames flickering, I tried to forget the gaunt faces of the three starving women in the cell, and the indignation of Kanati’s true believers while being herded into police vans. The authorities hadn’t even made an exception for Ernie the gateman, just herded him in with the rest of the others. Chelsea, whose flightiness began my interest in the group, had been one of the first to be arrested. She’d become so enraged at not being allowed to undergo her own starvation ritual that she head-butted a deputy.

  “I’m never speaking to you again,” she’d spat at me, as an officer zip-tied her hands behind her back.

  “I’ll hold you to that promise,” I’d replied, wondering who or what she would glom onto next? Whatever, I was well out of her life.

  Sylvie, although not officially part of the case, promised to keep me updated on the rumor mill, especially where it concerned Gabrielle. While Gabrielle must have known that some Kanatians didn’t make it through the starvation ritual alive, I saw her as another victim of the Arneaults. I remembered the tenderness with which she’d touched the scar on my forehead, the long scars on her own arms.

  “Thinking deep thoughts?” Jimmy asked, over the crackle of the fire.

  “People don’t ever seem to learn, do they?”

  “Sometimes they do. Here. Thought you might like some barbeque after all that bland hospital food.” He handed me a plate of spareribs.

  I managed to gnaw my way through a few of them. When I finally put the plate aside, I said, “Adam Arneault didn’t know much more about my mother than I already did.”

  “Maybe he knew enough.”

  “Those bastard murderers left my mother at a rest stop. She’d have been just another hitchhiker back in the day when highways all across the U.S. were cluttered with them.”

  “He remembered her first name was Helen.”

  “How many Helens are there in the U.S.? Tens of thousands? Millions?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, have another rib. It’ll make you feel better.”

  I did, but it didn’t.

  “There’s something else we need to discuss.” Jimmy’s voice sounded grim.

  When someone delivers a statement like that, in a tone like that, bad news is certain to follow. “I’m not ready for anything heavy,” I told him.

  “Whether you’re ready or not, here goes. That was a nice note you left me before driving down to Kanati to get yourself maybe killed, but it wasn’t enough. I’m through being an adjunct to your life.”

  “Adjunct?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. If you’re not involved in one cause, you’re involved in another, then another. And whatever’s going on, I’m always the last to know. Sometimes living with you feels like living with a ghost.”

  I felt a surge of panic. Was he breaking up with me? Jimmy had been my rock for years, the one person I could count on, no matter what. We’d been through hell together, and it had only made our partnership stronger. Then I had a moment of insight. I had been thinking about our working partnership, not our personal one. He was right.

  “Oh, Jimmy, I…”

  He held up his hand. “Let me finish.”

  I bit back what I wanted to say, that I loved him, that I couldn’t imagine life without him.

  “Th
at kind of behavior has to end, Lena. From now on, I want you to include me in everything you do, whether it be the office billing or the hunt for your mother.”

  “But she…I’ll never…”

  The hand came up again. “I’m not finished.”

  This time I noticed his calluses. He’d been working harder on the house than I had. Same with our relationship.

  “I’m going to find your mother for you, but when I do, you have to realize something.”

  “What?” My voice was no more than a whisper. Here it came. The end of us.

  “You have your way of looking at the world, and I have mine. I may have been raised by a white family, but I’m one hundred percent Pima, with everything that entails. This means something you’re probably going to find scary.”

  I steeled myself, prepared ready to hear the Pima version of goodbye.

  “Your mother will be my mother, too.”

  With that, he handed me another barbequed rib. “You don’t have to say anything now, just start thinking about how our relationship needs to change, no matter what we find out about her. I’m through being left behind. From now on, you’re going to have to include me in every aspect of your life, even when it goes against your instincts.”

  I stared at the fire, red and gold against the indigo sky. Sparks from the burning embers rose toward the Milky Way, which astronomers estimated was comprised of a billion stars. Maybe even more.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Two weeks later my left arm was still stiff, but my Appaloosa mare reined in her fiery heart as if she understood and ambled across the desert with the mildness of a child’s first pony. This was our first solo outing since I’d been injured, and it felt freeing to leave the ever-hovering Jimmy and Big Boy behind for once.

  “Just us gals, right, Adila?”

  She flicked her ears in acknowledgment.

  The air was crisp, no more than sixty degrees, and the desert smelled fresh after the night’s thunderstorm. Ahead of us stood the old ironwood tree I’d given up for dead, but it was hanging in there as if hoping to survive through another season. We’d lost one of the great saguaros, though. It had been split apart by lightning, its skeleton scattered along the desert floor. A reminder that nature could be cruel as well as kind.

  As could people.

  Maurice Abraham Arneault and Adam Arneault, along with their strong-armed cronies, had been charged with multiple counts each of aggravated homicide, and were now awaiting trial. Abraham, too old and feeble to care what happened to him anymore, had admitted to a long-ago massacre in a nameless forest, but he could no longer remember the exact spot it had taken place. Whether New Mexico or northern Arizona, trees all looked the same to him, he told the authorities. More charges against the old demon were pending. As for Gabrielle Halberd, who had given an interview to the Arizona Republic claiming she knew nothing about people dying during Kanati’s trial-by-starvation, she had been charged with three counts of negligent homicide. Her future appeared as bleak as our one-time friendship, but once the dust cleared, I might be able to bring myself to visit her in whatever prison she wound up in. Not much would happen to the rest of the Kanati folk. Freedom of religion, and all that.

  I tamped down my anger and concentrated on Adila’s steady hoofbeats. We kept our slow pace for another half hour until we reached the necklace-draped white cross. Today the memorial for Reservation Woman had a family of Gambel’s quail for company. The mother stood guard as the adolescents pecked around the brush for insects. I waited until they moved on before dismounting and paying my respects with a Pima prayer Jimmy had taught me.

  Do you hear me?

  Do you hear me?

  Away off the wind runs

  Away off your travels

  Through the sweetly flowered fields

  To the home of your mothers.

  Oh, desert woman, do you hear me?

  Finished, I remounted just in time to see a horseman galloping toward me, his long black hair streaming out behind him.

  I tensed, expecting bad news. Jimmy wasn’t the hurrying kind.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, as he reined in Big Boy next to Adila.

  His deep brown eyes squinted against the rising sun. “I found her.”

  I glanced down at Reservation Woman’s memorial. Surely there was some mistake. “But Alene’s mother already took her body back to Wyoming. Don’t tell me it was the wrong one!”

  Jimmy flicked a look at the cross, noted a new rope of beads, nodded in appreciation. “I’m not talking about Alene Laumenthal.”

  “Who, then?”

  He took a deep breath. “Remember that new search app of mine?”

  I frowned. “Not really. You’ve always got a new….”

  Suddenly Big Boy danced away from my horse as she tried to bite him. Then a small breeze came up, rattling the new beads on the white cross, which made Big Boy shy again.

  “Better control your horse,” I warned Jimmy. “He’s about to back into a cactus.”

  “Woman, you are so…” He gave a sigh of exasperation as he brushed his long hair out of his face. “Can I talk now?”

  Big Boy flinched. Yep, the cactus had stung him. Horses. Never a dull moment. “What did you want to tell me, Jimmy?”

  “I found your mother.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  It took more than an hour to drive from LAX to Chino, California, and the California Institution for Women, where my mother—Helen Stocker Grant—was serving a life sentence for multiple homicides. She had been transferred there thirteen years earlier, after spending twenty-two years at Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

  I had talked to the warden, Dr. Wanda Bosham, over the phone last week. Before speaking with me, she’d done considerable homework, but for once the past had been on my side. A graduate of Arizona State University, the warden and I turned out to have an acquaintance in common: Detective Sylvie Perrins, whose mother had been in the same sorority as Dr. Bosham. The warden wasn’t optimistic about a face-to-face meeting with my mother, though.

  “For the past ten years your mother hasn’t allowed any visitors, not even the standard church-affiliated kind,” she’d said when we’d first talked on the phone. “Several people had turned up claiming to be relations, but who were in actuality reporters or true crime writers in search of a story, so…”

  “I’m coming anyway.”

  “It’s your funer…” Although gruff-sounding, Dr. Bosham wasn’t without compassion, and had stopped herself before completing funeral. “Well, you might be in for a big disappointment, is all I’m saying. I’d like to spare you that.”

  “I’ve handled worse.”

  A long silence. Then, “Yes, I guess you have, Ms. Jones.”

  Chino was a small city with a curious past. One of the original Spanish land grants, its ranching and cropland remained largely intact. The oddity had crept in during the twentieth century, when it acquired three prisons—the California Institution for Men, the California Institution for Women, and the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility. Most of the guards at these institutions lived in the area, rubbing elbows with dairy farmers and ranchers, not to mention the gun enthusiasts who began flocking to the place once the city’s Prado Olympic Shooting Park hosted the shooting events at the 1984 Summer Olympics.

  I was fine with the city itself, and even finer once I’d driven through it and entered the farmland on the other side. But when the first guard tower of the California Institution for Women appeared on the horizon, my heart beat faster. At least Jimmy wasn’t along to witness my onslaught of nerves. After a long conversation, he’d agreed his presence might complicate the world of prison bureaucracy, and so he stayed in Scottsdale to mind the store. But there was another reason I was relieved he hadn’t accompanied me: I’d always preferred to do my falling-apart in private.

/>   From a distance, the one hundred and twenty acres of the California Institution for Women complex looked like a particularly ugly community college enduring financial difficulties, but as I grew closer and began to ignore the surrounding farmland, its true purpose became obvious: keeping the guilty away from the innocent. Assuming, of course, that every woman found guilty in a court of law had actually committed the crime she’d been charged with. Given the high cost of good criminal defense attorneys these days and the zero bank balances of most female defendants, that assumption was iffy.

  No old-fashioned, high-walled complex at CIW, just a sprawling collection of low-rise buildings and cottages surrounded by razor wire, some of it electrified. A few severely trimmed trees set far back from the main fence softened its utilitarian appearance somewhat, but razor wire was razor wire. Just looking at it sliced your skin.

  This was where California’s high-profile female killers were housed. In the past, the inmate list had included Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Susan Atkins, all members of Charles Manson’s demented “family.” But the prison had also housed more upscale killers, such as San Diego socialite Betty Broderick, who’d murdered her ex-husband and his new wife, thus gaining a best-selling book about her exploits, as well as a TV series. In such cases, the razor wire was well-earned.

  Not wanting anything to go wrong at the last minute, I had taken care to read the lengthy dress restrictions for prison visitors. No clothing that resembled the clothing prisoners wear, such as blue denim and chambray, orange jumpsuits, muumuus (not that I would ever have worn such a garment), or anything the custodial staff might wear, so no forest green pants, tan shirts, or camouflage. And no halters, bare midriffs, sheer or transparent clothing. No skirts, dresses, or shorts that exposed more than two inches above the knee. No wigs, hairpieces, extensions, or hats. No clothing that exposed the breast, genitalia, or buttocks area.