by Betty Webb
Then there was Juliana. With the election only one day away, she would be wide-awake, too, but just in case she wasn’t…
Deciding there was no one I could decently call at this time of night, I picked up Grafton’s Y Is for Yesterday and began to read. Since it was Grafton’s final book, I’d been putting off the pleasure, hardly able to say farewell to Kinsey Millhone, but as the time to see my mother grew nearer, nothing short of that sad goodbye would suffice.
I tried to slow down my reading pace for Kinsey’s last stand, but with three hours and eight minutes still to go, I turned the final page.
Then I showered again, put on the same tee-shirt and jeans, and sat by the window, waiting for the sun to lift over the hills.
It took forever.
Chapter Thirty-four
“I didn’t sleep, either,” was the first thing my mother said to me when I walked into the private visiting room.
“I…I…”
I began to sob.
She stood up and enfolded me in her arms. “There, there, baby. There, there.”
Chapter Thirty-five
After you get through bawling your head off, what do you say to a woman you thought was dead? What do you tell her about your life? About the foster homes you’d endured for fourteen years, the beatings, the rapes?
You don’t even bring it up, that’s what. You pretend your life in foster care was easy because you don’t want to break her heart all over again.
She wanted to know, though, so instead of telling all of the truth, I told her about Reverend Giblin, the foster father who taught me how to tell the difference between hope and delusion. I told her about the couple from the Philippines who taught me how to dance. I told her about Madeline, who showed me that all the beauty of the world can be contained in one small canvas.
Then my mother told me about her life, the life that had stopped after she’d shot me.
“After that, what else was there to live for?” She pulled another tissue from the box Matt had left for us. “Liam was dead, little Jamie was dead, and with you dead, too, what was the point? It was all my fault anyway.” She blew her nose again, this time drawing a spot of blood.
As for me, I was all cried out. “How could it be your fault? You had no way of knowing what was going to happen.”
“Liam kept telling me something was wrong with Abraham, with the whole setup, but I wouldn’t listen. Abraham had promised us an egalitarian society, a place where we’d raise our own food, and cause no harm to any living being. We would create a world where there was no hunger and no sorrow. I bought into the whole thing. Every time Liam wanted us to leave, to go back home and make up with our folks—they’d been against our getting married so young—I talked him out of it. I was afraid that if we went back there, they’d get our marriage annulled. What happened later, it was all on me.”
Annulled? “How old were you when you and my dad married?”
“Not quite seventeen. Liam was only a month older than me, but we’d known each other all our lives. I was pregnant with you, so we lied to the preacher about our ages. He was half-blind and couldn’t see our forged marriage license.”
She’d been a year and a half older than my goddaughter.
As she told her story, I took heart in the fact that although her eyes were red from weeping, she looked healthier than yesterday. Her hair was brushed to highlight more blond than gray, and her skin, although sallow from so many years behind bars, was now tinged pink. Pink was also the color of the private meeting room walls, where prints of baby animals, fawns and bunnies warmed it even further. But the chairs and table were standard prison fare: metal, and bolted to the floor.
I wanted to ask her so much, why she hadn’t spoken for more than twenty years, where her mind had been during that time, but she was so eager to learn about me that I held the rest of my questions back. After completing my heavily censored biography of Lena Jones, Private Eye, I finished with, “So I’m presently living on the Pima Reservation with Jimmy, two cats—Snowball and Mama Snowball—and two horses, Big Boy and Adila.”
I showed her the pictures the corrections officer had allowed me to keep this morning while going through processing.
“That horse. White with black spots?”
“Adila’s what’s called a leopard Appaloosa.”
“And such a kind face she has! I’ll bet she’s sweet.”
“Not exactly.”
Those blue eyes met mine. “‘Sweet’ would be too easy for you, wouldn’t it?”
I thought back over my life, at the few things I’d actually revealed. “You may be right.”
She stubbed a short-nailed finger at another picture. “Him. The Indian. You say he’s Pima. What’s he like?” She gave me another sharp look, then said, “Never mind. I can already tell from the expression on your face.”
“What expression?”
“The kind that makes you look even more beautiful than you already are. He’s good to you, isn’t he?”
Heat rose to my face. “Yes.”
“Your father was good to me, too. We Stockard women know how to pick our men.”
“In my case there were, ah, some missteps along the way.”
“There usually are.” It was the first time I’d heard her laugh. “But you’re okay, right?”
I took her hand. “Yes, I am. Now.”
When the corrections officer—this time it was redheaded Matt Hill, came in and said our time was up—I looked at my watch, certain he was wrong.
I’d been talking to my mother for four hours.
It felt like five minutes.
The faxes I’d asked Jimmy to send had already arrived at the motel when I returned, freeing me to start calling. It took seventeen different conversations before hitting pay dirt in the guise of Theo Morrison, Attorney at Law. Then I called U.S. Senator-elect Juliana Thorsson, who against all odds—and the wishes of my goddaughter—had won the election by a wide margin. Arizonans love their gun-toting broads.
“I need your help,” I told her.
“You’ve got it.”
Four months later, Danielle Devlin, the governor of California, commuted my mother’s life sentence to time served.
That same afternoon, as I was putting on my boots to join Jimmy in a celebratory ride across the Rez, my cell phone rang out the first notes of John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen.” It was Burt Eisweirth, the sheriff of Coconino County. An old friend from our Scottsdale PD days, said he was calling to alert me that two cavers exploring an abandoned mine near the Humphrey’s Peak area had discovered human remains in one of its shafts.
“The remains aren’t much more than bones, and there looks to be twenty-something, ah, skulls, most of them small. Since you’re on record as reporting…”
Twenty-something. “Were they shot?”
“Looks like it.”
“Children?”
Since he was having trouble with his throat, he couldn’t answer right away, but when he did, he gave me the answer I’d long been expecting. “Yeah, except for one, an adult male.”
It was my turn to have throat trouble. Damned desert pollen. “Any identifying features on the adult? Billfold, belt buckle, whatever?”
“Nothing like that, but he, ah, he had red hair. Just like you wrote down on your report.”
I closed my eyes. Remembered my father’s bright red hair gleaming in a sunlit meadow, remembered him strumming his guitar and singing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” with a group of children.
“When can I come up there?” I finally managed to ask.
“As soon as you want, Lena. You’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
I cleared my throat. “I’ll call you back in a couple of days. I need to go somewhere else first.”
Then I put the phone down very, very carefully, and went
out to the corral to tell Jimmy that the lost were now found.
Chapter Thirty-six
Helen
As the prison gate closes behind me, I can see my daughter. She is standing next to a man with long black hair.
Jimmy.
He is even handsomer than she said he was, and his smile is genuine.
I take a moment to inhale the clean March air. Although Chino is many miles inland, it still holds a hint of the Pacific, which I have never seen. Christina—I haven’t yet gotten used to calling her Lena—has promised to take me to it before we leave for Arizona.
“I’m ready,” I tell her, although the day is so bright it hurts my eyes.
My baby takes me by one hand, her man by the other.
“Let’s go home, Mother.”
The End
Acknowledgments
Twenty years ago, Lena Jones came to me in a dream, asking me to tell her story. At the time, I was a reporter for the Scottsdale Tribune, covering events that ranged from politicians’ preachments to the escape of two girls from one of Arizona’s many polygamy compounds. Those girls’ mindsets—they believed their self-described “prophet” Warren Jeffs had a direct pipeline to God—reminded me of Guyana’s Jim Jones, who convinced more than nine hundred followers to drink his deadly Kool-Aid. When I researched polygamy cults for Lena’s adventures in Desert Wives, I also looked into David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco (from seventy-six to seventy-eight dead), Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo (thirteen dead, thousands injured), Switzerland’s Ordre du Temple Solaire (seventy-four dead), and Marshall Applewhite’s San Diego-based Heaven’s Gate (thirty-nine dead).
While Desert Redemption and its characters are fictional, the emergence of apocalyptic cults is unfortunately real. Too many gullible followers continue to believe madmen’s ravings and drink the Kool-Aid.
Desert Redemption—as with all the Lena Jones novels—could not have been written without the input of the Sheridan Street Irregulars; blessings to those brothers- and sisters-in-arms. Blessings, too, to Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald of Poisoned Pen Press, who ushered Lena into the world. On the civilian side, Judy Par, Marge Purcell, and Debra McCarthy gave, and gave, and gave.
Any mistakes in these pages are my fault, not theirs.
More from this Author
For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:
www.poisonedpenpress.com/Betty-Webb
